Maarten van der Vleuten 🎧

🦔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🤗

Straks, live vanaf 21:00 uur, een nieuwe X-Rated @Concertzender met o.a. Andrey Sirotkin, Worg, Hunter Complex, Caterina Barbieri & Bendik Giske, Maarten van der Vleuten, Ende Shneafliet, Ard Bit, Kevin Tomkins, Uhushuhu feat. Prorok, Kryptogen Rundfunk, IUGA. #XRated

🦔 Young people are quitting social media and going analog. A Deloitte survey found nearly a third of Gen Zers deleted a social media app in the past year. Global social media use has declined almost 10% since its 2022 peak, with the drop most pronounced among teens and 20-somethings. They're buying vinyl records, switching to flip phones, taking up hobbies like knitting, and prioritizing in-person connections over online engagement. One social media manager called it a "quiet revolution" against content overload. My Take The reasons people give for leaving are consistent. AI slop dominating feeds. Constant advertising. Lifestyle comparison destroying mental health. Platforms that feel like commercials interrupted by content. Gen Z is the most advertised-to generation in history, and as platforms face pressure to monetize everything, it's only getting worse. There's something poetic about this happening as tech companies spend $600 billion on AI infrastructure. The assumption behind all that capex is that people want more algorithmic content, more engagement, more time in apps. But a growing number of users are concluding the opposite. They're not looking for better recommendations or smarter AI. They're looking for an exit. Being offline and unreachable is becoming a status symbol, which is a problem if your business model depends on capturing attention. Of course, fully disconnecting is a privilege most people can't afford when smartphones are required for banking, work authentication, and navigation. But the fact that opting out has become aspirational says something about what these platforms have become. They optimized so hard for engagement that they made engagement feel like a trap. Hedgie🤗