I was at the theatre watching Enemy of the People when the bombing of Rafah started today. One of the last lines of the play was, "It will matter that we told the truth."
#Rafah
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."
I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie🤗
I sat in a room with Vivienne Westwood and people from NASA. They told us this would happen. We have been screaming about it ever since, demonised and called radical. She spent the rest of her life warning everyone. Now it is here.
I am done screaming. I will leave that to the skeptics for the day their mountain homes and their villas in the south of France go up in flames. I have watched two fires in a few weeks. One in Edinburgh, one in the south of France. This is the future arriving early and it is reaching everyone.
Last week I was at a party with some of the richest people in the world. Ash was falling on their dinners and in their perfectly styled hair. The sun was orange above us. The moon came up orange too. Like something out of a film. Many of them have worked out they could be next.
There is hope but not for long. NASA’s projection, the one Vivienne turned into a map, showed that if the planet warms by four degrees everywhere below a line level with Paris becomes uninhabitable. Around the time she died the news said we had warmed by 1.1 degrees. We are now around 1.3 to 1.4. Once we pass 1.5 and stay there, turning it back slips out of our hands. After that comes mass extinction, mass displacement, and war over what is left. Water becomes the most valuable thing you can own.
They are the weakest amongst all of human kind. Or the most corrupt.
@AaronBastani Amazing places to live, and without needing much to live well. However, both made their wealth through colonial practices and owe French-speaking Africa and all of Latin America some debts.
42 years ago, Mary Manning — a 21-year-old Dublin cashier — refused to ring up South African grapefruit. She was suspended. Ten colleagues walked out with her, and their strike lasted almost three years, until Ireland became the first Western country to ban apartheid goods.
Growing up in Peru we faced a cholera epidemic. You could not eat lettuce in restaurants and needed chlorine pills. Of course, Peru was bankrupt, facing internal conflict and under dictatorship. The US is the “leader of the free world, richest country on earth”
🚨 BOMBSHELL: Colombian 🇨🇴President Gustavo Petro has exposed a terrifying, dystopian escalation in how whistleblowers are silenced.
According to President Petro, after a whistleblower took evidence of massive electoral fraud at the Colombian consulate in Los Angeles directly to the U.S. justice system, she became a target. In a shocking retaliatory move, her electric vehicle's software was remotely sabotaged in an attempt to force a fatal crash.
This is a massive violation of sovereignty and a chilling warning to anyone who speaks truth to power. If state or corporate actors can remotely hack a whistleblower’s car to eliminate them, then no one is safe.
Unsurprisingly, the legacy corporate media networks are keeping completely silent, hoping this story disappears. We cannot let them bury this.
@GeopolWonk But why? Even El Pais recognised him to be right about it. What would silence achieve? Things are getting worse here by the day and the handover hasn't even happened yet.
We've had unprecedented high temps for weeks, even wild fires. But Ed Miliband can't be Chancellor because of his commitment to net zero? Absolute madness from our political-media class as usual.
New PM Andy Burnham says Labour “got it wrong” by supporting the genocide in Gaza
OK. Then free all the Palestine Action prisoners who got it right and acted to stop the genocide
@BarbaraBleiman@EngMediaCentre Some really good recommendations here. Patrick Radden Keefe has so much range as a non-fiction writer. Don't know how he manages it.
What I don't get about climate change deniers is why they're opposed the green transition.
Say they're right and its a hoax. We still end up with a high-tech industrial revolution, more trees in urban centres, cooling systems, public transport, more EVs!
Why is that bad?