Conversation

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.
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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.
Replying to
Could not disagree more with this thread. There is no current or good substitute for the state of mind and mental processes that being immersed in a book gives. I recommend Proust and the Squid for a deeper appreciation of what a special thing reading (longform/books) can be.