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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2026-181
Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Oligarchs:
AI:
China:
SoAm:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Iran) thread …
I’m getting 404 on the AI rare books link – we had an example in Ireland recently – [subscriber only]
Why are AI firms bulk buying and pulping books? Because it’s cheaper than paying writers
In an internal memo, an executive at AI firm Anthropic wrote that ‘Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world’
Liz Carolan
Fri Aug 14 2026 –
rish bookshop and online retailer Kenny’s told The Irish Times this week that they have been getting some unusual book orders, received via email in the middle of the night and requesting upwards of 5,000 often obscure titles. The pattern seen in Galway fits with a global story of AI firms buying paper books and feeding them into the models that underpin chatbots. This process, which the industry calls “destructive scanning”, sees the spines sliced off thousands of physical books at a time, the pages digitised, and then the whole lot destroyed. The image of pulped books unsettled many readers, but is just a glimpse into larger, more troubling shifts in the economics of literature and publishing.
[…]
It is also something companies wanted to keep quiet. In an internal memo, an executive at AI firm Anthropic wrote that “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world … we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this”. Most of what we do know about scan and pulp practices, including this memo, come from lawsuit disclosures, including a recent US suit against Anthropic, owner of chatbot Claude. In that case a group of authors accused that company of violating their ownership rights for their work by using their books without permission to train the models that underpin Claude.
Through these disclosures we learned Anthropic began its attempt to obtain “all the books in the world” by downloading seven million copies of books without authors’ consent from pirating websites, places that already undermine writers’ income. When that resource was exhausted and the company became, in its own words quoted in the judgment, “not so gung ho about” training on pirated books “for legal reasons”, it switched to scanning and destroying physical copies of books.
The initial judgment in the suit pointed out two harms these actions caused writers. First, the company had an option of negotiating with publishers and paying a fair price for the rights to these books, but chose not to. After all, the judgment remarks, “users and corporate clients pay to use Claude, generating over $1 billion in annual revenue”. Why are AI firms bulk buying and pulping books? Because it’s cheaper than paying writers – The Irish Times
Posted by: Don Firineach | Aug 23 2026 21:12 utc | 51
@15 too scents
Individual means ‘not divisible’ and so it is applicable as definition to any within a community setting, no matter how social the nature of that setting.
In terms of recognition of own individuality, that occurs when another does not act according to own wish. In other words we find that we are not actually ‘the center of creation’ per se, and recognise that others are apart from us.
That in certain societies this occurs within a setting of support, meaning tending to one another as a community minimalises this sense of seperation, is besides the point.
Clearly the individual is raised and cultured and nourished by own community and a sense of belonging and due remains present from that to whatever degree, that a social reality might be understood as the rule and inseperable from the individual is not in question. Yet the individual will still exist within that.
To ‘communalise’ further you would have to bring in philosophy, ideology, esoteric or religious, even scientific, theory.
Obviously certain societies tend to emphasise individual nature, and as mentioned in the video, economic theory then often gets built in reverse based on that concept, which would be to negate communal reality expecting each decision to be based on individual profit.
In theory, (voluntarily achieved) individual profit would also be communal profit, because whatever achievement that entailed would also be shared with, or disposable to, that community in some way.
So the difference occurs when the communal side or reality is lost, the result of which also creates an emphasised sense of individuality.
In some cases it is top down, in others the reverse.
When cultures and communities are conquered, a new alien system is forcefuly imposed for example.
When individualism does lead to divergent culture (figure that ancestraly it was one ape culture for everyone) then the evolution is gentler, but just as stark when placing two vastly different cultures into contact with one another.
What we have now, apart from communities that have remained somewhat isolated, is mixtures of various kinds, which does more suit the manner and description and manipulation, of and towards, individualism with state as communal ‘representative’ .
Even idealists often tend towards such a centralised reality now unfortunately, it is all they have left maybe, not realising that such a direction would be coercive and forceful, and also anti-natural.
When some talk of ‘capitalism’ the examples they give are of theft and fraud. This is not capitalism, capitalism involves free voluntary exchange, with respect for whatever form of individual ownership is in practice. This is very natural, an evolution that allows reward to go to endeavours that are appreciated.
Although traditionally this was simply part of a social fabric and no allocation was made, only say over, the difference is slight if at all, when in a respectful setting.
Equally, money very clearly originates from barter, where exchange of metals (or salt or other) was a unit of currency, the minting of coins being a paid service in metal even, and only later taken over as a state enterprise or civic obligation.
For a non monetary system we are looking at
communal labour and storage of goods for example, with equal repartition. That is a non complex society that does not favour divergent evolution but offers a form of stability. It is pretty much guaranteed that even that system would have a hierarchy and dues, i.e. own time or labour becomes the money.
Which is why the various independent traditional cultures are so much a marvel, because they have figured it all out into something that works, in their own ways.
From Wiki on Mises, a simple clip which explains how (individual) preference relates to economic choice. That intentional choice or preference might be willingly governed (or negated) by communal realities is besides the point; I don’t think Mises’ intention was to deconstruct social settings but to understand how more complex economic systems (which are common enough throughout history) actually work, to provide a sound basis for their working:
“Austrian economics in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises relies heavily on praxeology in the development of its economic theories. Mises considered economics to be a sub-discipline of praxeology. Austrian School economists, following Mises, use praxeology and deduction, rather than empirical studies, to determine economic principles. According to these theorists, with the action axiom as the starting point, it is possible to draw conclusions about human behavior that are both objective and universal. For example, the notion that humans engage in acts of choice implies that they have preferences, and this must be true for anyone who exhibits intentional behavior.
Advocates of praxeology also say that it provides insights for the field of ethics.”
…from where I am looking, anyway.
Posted by: Ornot | Aug 23 2026 23:18 utc | 70
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