Тег: Books

A bonfire of books for the sake of copyism: a dystopia in which we are already living

Imagine this scene: trucks pull up, unloading millions of printed books, after which they are ruthlessly unstitched, passed through scanners, and then sent to the shredder, to the knife, and to the paper mill.
 
Do you think this is a grim dystopian scenario? No, this is the harsh reality of 2026. Anthropic, the creators of the Claude neural network, turned millions of physical books into confetti to train their AI model. You might immediately think about how they are techno-fascists who have completely lost their minds. But the wildest thing about this situation is that they didn’t resort to this vandalism out of spite, not by choice, and certainly not out of hatred for literature.
 
Under the idiotic “intellectual property” laws in the US, if you buy a book and scan it, but keep the physical original on your shelf, you instantly become a pirate who has created an “illegal copy.” It is precisely because of this legal absurdity that authorities constantly persecute free network libraries like Zlib or Anna’s Archive.
 
To avoid being crushed by multi-billion dollar lawsuits from holders of copyright privileges, corporate bean counters found a loophole: if the paper original is physically destroyed during the digitization process, then everything is legally fine. One copy existed—and one copy remains, it has simply changed format. Therefore, Anthropic literally had to shred millions of books just so that the digital copies would be recognized as “legal.”
 
Ray Bradbury, in his novel “Fahrenheit 451,” warned us about firefighters burning books. But he, a naive romantic, thought this would happen because of direct state censorship. Bradbury held politicians in too high regard. In our reality, government authorities are destroying millions of valuable books through their moronic laws simply to protect copyright privileges.
 
And the scale of the tragedy is colossal. It’s not just worn-out pulp fiction going to the knife. Entire second-hand bookstores and warehouses where the rarest works gather dust are being bought up, many of which are only available in one or a few copies. What can never be printed again is being destroyed.
 
There is one important nuance to this book genocide. Do you know why AI corporations are hunting so fiercely for old paper literature? Because texts published until approximately 2022 are pure, one hundred percent, organic human products. No neural network hallucinations. In the future, the value of such printed books will constantly increase—it is a rock-solid guarantee that the text was written by humans, not by AI. And this unique heritage is now being irrevocably ground into dust.
 
But let’s look at this situation from the perspective of human survival. The destruction of paper books is playing with fire in the most literal sense. We live in an extremely fragile world. Imagine any global natural or man-made disaster: a massive solar flare, a large-scale EMP strike, a meteorite impact, or a total blackout. Data centers will go up in smoke. The much-vaunted “clouds” will dissipate. Servers will turn into useless scrap metal overnight.
 
Where will the survivors get basic knowledge about engineering, first aid, water purification, or agronomy? From the Internet? But it’s gone. From libraries? But they were sent to the shredder so as not to upset the copyright holders.
 
The destruction of physical information carriers leaves civilization absolutely naked and defenseless against any global crisis. A paper book does not ask for electricity; it doesn’t need servers, updates, or a paid subscription. It simply silently holds knowledge, waiting for you to open it.
 
What conclusion does this lead to? When laws force us to destroy basic knowledge to please a stationary bandit, it is no longer about protecting authors’ rights. It is a real, direct existential threat to the survival of our entire civilization!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Libertarianism and the Left Agenda. The Process Has Begun.

I have put together an outline of the book’s plan, which will gradually turn into its table of contents, and I have also published the foreword. Of course, for now, I’m thinking through all of this with some effort, but I expect to gradually find my rhythm.

If any of the readers feel they are not strangers to leftist ideas, please share your thoughts in the comments. The main thing I am interested in right now is: in your view, what does it primarily consist of? I will, of course, try to formulate this for myself without falling into caricatures, but verifying my vision with a bouquet of outside opinions would be much more reliable.

How I was scammed

A post by Bitarch and Voluntarist about how taxes are unfair robbery, which seemed a bit boring to me, nonetheless sparked a lively discussion, since the comment section of the Telegram channel includes Alex Rozov, a lively and sane leftist. The main point of the post was that taxes are advertised as a means of taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, but the rich have a multitude of tools for tax evasion, and therefore the middle class suffers the most from taxes. To this, Alex inquired whether the authors of the post would support the introduction of a tax specifically on the rich (2% per year of the market value of assets worth over $10M) as fair? Bitarch chose not to answer this because he was caught in an obvious logical trap; in reality, libertarians condemn taxes not for the unfairness of the distribution of the tax burden, and therefore they cannot approve a legislative patch that increases the burden on a category that had previously successfully avoided taxation without contradicting their own ideology.

One could have ended the discussion there, but the conversation steered into a slightly different direction. In response to Alex’s question about whether it is moral that a significant percentage of people live in poverty, and an even larger percentage balance on the brink of poverty, I—balancing on the brink of poverty because I spend a disproportionate amount of effort on activities that bring only modest donations—replied that any distribution of wealth obtained through purely voluntary transactions is moral. However, in conditions of total systemic robbery, it is practically impossible to determine what the distribution of wealth would be through purely voluntary transactions.

To this, Alex rightly replied that it is impossible to fix a real situation if you treat it as if it were ideal. The reality is that the disproportion in the distribution of wealth and power is a self-sustaining and exacerbating cycle.

I agreed with this thesis, but noted that since we consider robbery immoral, then complaining that we receive too little from the robbery is simply irrelevant, and the task of restoring justice consists precisely in the abolition of the mechanisms of robbery. And in the case of success, one can completely ignore what this unfair machine of forced redistribution managed to grind out; the main thing is that we broke it, and now all that remains is to slap the hands of anyone who attempts to repair it.

After this, Alex reasonably wondered who would be doing the slapping and what would stop him from repairing the machine himself. I replied that such vigilantism must be strictly decentralized—specifically to prevent the obvious danger of a monopoly on the restoration of justice. Systemic decentralized efforts, however, require moral pressure from society.

And here Alex played his trump card, asking how I plan to ensure moral pressure in this direction if it is currently operating in the opposite direction: the broad masses enthusiastically welcome fiscal measures against the super-rich. However, since we had already moved to discussing moral positions, I could afford an ethical rather than a logical thrust, suggesting that he at least refrain from increasing moral pressure in the current vein himself, thereby shifting the general equilibrium slightly toward justice.

And, of course, after that, Alex had only one way to finish me off: by suggesting that since I expect to change the moral vector in society by persuading influencers from the left and adjacent areas of the political spectrum, why not try to persuade him as a test. Well, it means I will get to it; it is a worthy and interesting task.

So, I am announcing a new book with the working title “Charting a Libertarian Course in Leftist Discourse,” and considering how much time I spend on such large-scale works, I fear that the results will now have to be awaited for a year or two.

Let’s forgive the neural network its inattention to card design: if it drew flawlessly, we would feel even more inferior

Finished the book about ancap. Hurrah.

The final chapter, summarizing the third part of the book, is finished. Now, everyone who dislikes ongoing works can finally download the book in its entirety and devour it in one evening. Those who postponed their donation until the completion of the work, not wanting to spend money on something that might not be finished, can also relax and open their wallets. By starting to write a book and continuing to do so, you eventually finish it. By starting to achieve ancap and moving in the right direction, you eventually achieve it. That is the way things work.

Next, the book will undergo editing (please send in your valuable comments), and after that, I will handle its distribution, and I, of course, urge you to do the same. Prepare your publishing capacities for the distribution of hard copies, consider which resources to spread links to the text on, write reviews—everything helps.

It was a great pleasure working on this project. I believe it allowed me to seriously systematize my own views. I hope it allows you to do the same.

Book about ancap: finished the chapter on agorism

Finished polishing the subject. In the course of the narrative, I often had to bite my tongue, because there was much that could be told about how we practice agorism in our Montellibero, but I promised to make the book as concise as possible, which means there is no room for lyrical digressions.

Each chapter about one approach or another to building ancap ended with a list of that approach’s shortcomings and a pointer to the fact that it is unable to lead to ancap. Now all that’s left for me is to summarize everything written, and after that, I can move on to editing while the trail is still hot.

Finished writing the chapter on bit-coins in the ancap manual

The matter is gradually nearing completion. The book is almost ready in rough draft; later, I will polish it, adapting the text so that even a non-professional narrator can read it aloud without getting tripped up by tongue-twisting phrasing (I want to make an audiobook). For now, I present to you a freshly written chapter on the instrumental approach to building ancap. There are no historical studies on cypherpunks and such—just a very brief overview of why all this is needed, how it works, and why it doesn’t work very well.

Ancap handbook: the chapter on secessionism is ready

My book about ancap has been supplemented with a new chapter on secessionism. This is the term I’ve conventionally used for a family of approaches to building Ancapistan—a territorial libertarian community populated almost entirely by libertarians from the start, in contrast to the minarchist approach discussed earlier, where the state as a whole, with all its hereditary ailments, idiotic practices, and dominant statist majority, undergoes libertarian transformation.

Book about ancap: wrote a chapter on minarchism

The external background today is not very conducive to writing monumental works, so new chapters of the book on ancap are coming out infrequently. Nevertheless, last night another one was born: about minarchism. For those who have forgotten the context, let me clarify that I do not view minarchism as a branch of libertarianism asserting that the state must be preserved while being limited by certain boundaries. No, for me, minarchism is simply a method of implementing libertarian principles into society: through political reforms from above. This is the method, with its obvious advantages and inherent limitations, that I discuss in this new short chapter.

The epub version of the book has not been updated yet, sorry, I’ll polish it up when I get the chance.

Book about ancap – fresh chapter

I’m not sure if I chose the most suitable chapter structure, but the one that I finished writing today relates to the resolution of the problems outlined in the chapter before last. The chapter was quite difficult to write because I don’t like all these quasi-psychological matters, but there was no way to avoid this topic. As usual, I hope that it didn’t turn out too banal, is concise enough, and perhaps even convincing.

A book about ancap: problems around us

I held back for a very long time, and now, finally, as late as the third part of the book, I mention that there is, you know, such a thing as the state.

If last time I analyzed the main problem within us hindering the transition to ancap, then now it has come down to the primary problem around us.

Next, the plan is to cover the main approaches to overcoming these problems. Libertarian Band has a video series on this, created based on my script, but let’s see if these topics can be presented more clearly in the book.

I still want more feedback.