myrmepropagandist
"He burned our libraries. Why did he do that? It's so destructive. Can you think of anything more evil?"
"I can, child. There is something worse than burning a library."
"How!"
"It happened long ago, this was a time when books were not rare as they are today. Everyone had hundereds of books."
"Hundreds! No!"
"Thousands."
"Oh!"
"So, the new kings realized they couldn't possibly destroy all of the books. They would always miss a few."
"What did they do?"
1/
myrmepropagandist
"But you still had the old books!"
"And hardly anyone could find them."
"No one could tell the old books from the new, and the new books were ... they were not written by people. They were created by a mechanical process that allowed one to feed a machine several thousand books, and then produce new one, endless variations. But none of them quite right, none of them... whole."
"I think I see now. That is awful."
"It was, child. It was."
3/3
myrmepropagandist
"They started publishing books of their own. The opened many printing presses and many paper mills and they made books even more common than they already were. They even gave most of these new books away for free."
"I don't understand. How could making even more books be worse than burning them?"
"Think about it."
"Were the books all propaganda?"
"Yes. Yes, many of them were, but some of them were not."
"Then how did it work?"
"The new books were made by coping scraps from the old."
2/
James Widman
@futurebird maybe we need advisories on publishing companies that ship fake literature?
It seems like something worth teaching in public schools: publishing companies in column A have put some effort into eliminating fake lit, while companies in column B (a much, much longer list) have been known to emit fake lit and are therefore deprecated.
maybe we could have a browser plugin that auto-checks whether a work was produced by a deprecated publisher...?
James Widman
@futurebird (i almost wrote "defederated" instead of "deprecated")
James Widman
@futurebird this made me think of google's mission statement ("to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and how, for about 15 years or so, they actually kinda lived up to that, and removed some of the need to depend on librarians.
Now that a.i. rot is spreading, we'll need librarians more than ever, but they might be overwhelmed by the deluge of automated fake literature production...
myrmepropagandist
I'm mostly happy with books people choose to make. With some exceptions, but their existence isn't a problem. The issue here is the sheer volume is beyond what any person could read or sort in a thousand lifetimes.
If you read a terrible book (or article, or post, or image) you waste a little time, but you also learn something about the person who made it. That is not the case with this pollution.
When you want to obliterate text you write over it with more text. #slopocalypse
gmeneses94
@futurebird Sounds like dystopia, but also historical fiction. At first it reminded me of how nazis viewed proliferation of degenerate books. However, we have to discern prejudices from this total chaos antagonism. I’m not afraid of anyone mixing Bibles or Qur’ans, because 1. Qur’an is traditionally orally transmitted, 2. From my perspective the 2 rules of guidance are to worship the Hidden One secretely and to follow Golden Rule. 3. I’ve already accepted they have flaws.
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