they are destroying books after all

today i feel like a witness to two radically different approaches to the same goal - dumbing down a society.

the crude one: books get banned, confiscated, rewritten, and the people who read the wrong things get put on a list.
the clever one: nothing gets banned at all.

rereading Brave New World, i got stuck on the situation Huxley describes, where taking away freedom is handled by a more refined method. picture it - books aren’t forbidden, people simply stop wanting to consume them. that society isn’t crushed. it’s content.

Neil Postman later put it well: “Orwell feared what we would come to hate; Huxley feared what we would come to love.”

and there’s no way to check the second version. when you’re restricted, you feel the restriction. you literally become a witness. but when you’re offered something more pleasant instead, all you feel is that things got more pleasant - and the focus of your attention slides away, seemingly by your own decision.

how it works, technically

the device that keeps you from finishing a page is built like a slot machine. you pull the feed - sometimes something worthwhile comes up, sometimes not. it can’t be predicted, so your hand reaches for it again. that’s the whole trick: if the reward came every time, interest would die fast. random, and it doesn’t die. but a slot machine sits in a casino, you have to travel to it - this one is in your pocket and never runs out. next to it, a book loses not on content but on sensation, by a factor of a thousand. no ban is required for any of this.

what goes missing

reading is usually treated as a way to get information. if that were all it did, the loss would be small - information has never been easier to get.

but reading does three things at once:

it holds attention on one object longer than is comfortable
it walks you through someone else’s thought across time - a hundred pages, three hours, a week
and at the end it leaves you alone with a task: to decide what you think about all of it

(think about how much that route builds you as a person)

reading is hard not because you’re weak. i found out it’s also hard because reading is fundamentally unnatural for humans. the brain is built for speech; for letters it isn’t - they showed up far too recently. so the brain takes the region that handled the recognition of shapes and faces and retrains it. every literate person is a visual system rewired for a job it wasn’t meant for. this isn’t a metaphor: Stanislas Dehaene and his group scanned illiterate adults alongside people who learned to read as adults - in literate brains, the region occupied by shape and face recognition is partly reassigned to letters. he covers it in detail in Reading in the Brain; the original study is Science, 2010

(this doesn’t hold up on its own. without load, without training, it rolls back)

how it’s taken, piece by piece

(the interesting part - it isn’t taken all at once)

first to go: attention. information is served as a sixty-second clip, a headline, a short takeaway. nothing has to be held in your head for longer than a minute.

next to go: interpretation. the feed doesn’t just select facts, it hands you a ready-made frame in which those facts already mean something. you receive someone else’s conclusion, labelled as information. and formally you’re informed - right up until you try to defend a position you never assembled yourself.

and now the third one is going, the last one. through all the previous trimming, the final decision stayed yours: what this means for me personally and what i should do about it. now AI delivers that too. here’s what it means, here’s what to do next. polite, coherent, usually plausible.

and i use it every day. a day later i can’t remember whose conclusion it was.

what this turns a person into

Iain McGilchrist says something that sounds like science fiction at first and like a description of a tuesday on second thought.

he isn’t afraid that machines will become like people. he’s afraid that people will become like machines. and it’s already happening - not because anyone is forcing it, but because we fit our way of living to the instruments we spend almost all our time next to.

he also has a good explanation of what exactly gets lost. a person can look at the world in two ways. one is narrow and grasping: isolate the object, simplify it to a scheme, use it. the other is wide: hold the object together with everything around it, alive and connected. both are needed. but the first is faster, more convenient and spreads better - which means the environment rewards precisely that one. and gradually the world starts to look like a blueprint of the world: flat, black and white, rigid.

the first step toward becoming a machine is believing that you are, in essence, a mechanism.

for the people building these devices, time is money. for you, time is simply life, and there isn’t another one. you aren’t spending money - you’re spending the only thing you have, at an exchange rate you didn’t set.

so we end up with two ways to get the same result:

one leaves a witness - a person who knows what was taken from him and can say so. he may stay silent, emigrate, go to prison - but he’s a witness, and he passes it on.
the other leaves no witness. nobody felt anything, so there’s nobody to say that anything happened. i live inside the second one, and i can’t even name the day something changed.

nobody is burning books. at some point everything just goes flat - and that’s the only trace you can notice.

*ps:
for several years, Anthropic bought up books by the millions, used a hydraulic cutter to take off the spines, scanned the pages and discarded what was left. internally it was called "Project Panama" - the unsealed planning document says they didn't want it known they were working on it. a court found this was fair use: once you've bought a physical copy, first-sale doctrine lets you do what you like with it.