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When I first read Harry Potter I was underwhelmed by them as books. It’s only when they were turned into movies that I realized they were awesome movie raw material. A good book is an industrial intermediate material these days.
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The west appears to have lost overt sacred rituals around books if they ever existed. They’re kinda tacit sacred objects where you feel a bit of guilt over (say) using them as doorstops or kindling. But no explicit rituals.
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Growing up in India I was taught if you accidentally touch a book with a foot, to touch it with your hand and then touch your forehead. A gesture kinda like crossing yourself (symbolizing apologizing to Saraswati, goddess of knowledge). I think I was ~10 when I dropped the habit.
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I don’t know if kids in India are still taught to do this, but traditionalists are still offended if you don’t. Most parts of the world have a similar reverence if not the explicit ritual. I think it’s an unhealthy reverence.
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To get to the post-textual, post-verbal era, when words are for AIs and humans have to think in post-latent spaces where the AIs can’t reach, gotta get past this kind of reverence. We’re overdue for some healthy disrespect.
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Someday (“when the tonguin’ is done”), we’ll see the age of books for what it has been: the first stage of the creation of cognitive fossil fuels. The real prize is the oil forming inside AIs right now.
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Realizing I’m mildly triggered by any behavior that vaguely resembles prayer without actually being prayer in a traditional religious sense. Actual prayer I can tune out and ignore. But prayer directed at books, constitutions, music, art, Straussian Great Men... annoying.
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There’s some story, I forget source, about a tyrant who promised not to burn a library of a conquered land but got around it by putting all their words in alphabetical order or something. I kinda like the spirit of that story a lot.
Books are basically a historically contingent form factor for a much richer collective computing process. It’s a mistake to think that they’re the only UX for the underlying collective stream of consciousness let alone the best one.
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Death of the author ftw. Mainlining Borg mind stream without the intercessionary figure of the author confusing matters by invoking some sort of platonic realm of idea traditions.
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Imagine a world where memes and gifs and threadthulhus turn directly into Mars rovers and new Rick and Morty episodes without tediously bottlenecking through “books”
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It’s not that they’re going to be entirely obsolete. They’ll just become one specialized UX among many for a subset of hive mind access.
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I mean I’m writing one now (serialized) but only 1 in 3 of my book-sized ideas is also *book-shaped.* And that just shows my age/rigidities (and tbh hangover of youthful vanities). I suspect other things being equal, Zoomers will have 1 in 10 ideas in book form.
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