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Societies perpetuate their values through Symbols, and these are incumbent in a reverence for books and such, and this sort of thing can be considered acts of communication. A company that has reached mythological levels of performative and broadly recognized evil is now implicated in a new feat of symbolic desecration. If you recognize that SYMBOLS, COMMUNICATION, RITUAL, GESTURES, and so forth can matter in terms of a society coordinating itself, then it's rather dull to switch tracks and start talking about the utilitarian benefit of century old pulp novels.
Of course they do, which is why the mythological implications of the LLM are so extreme, they are symbol-generators.
The destruction of copies of books for training an LLM is not doing any meaningful damage to the transmission of values or knowledge to society.
What is performative is the Reddit-tier scandalization by the destruction of books. That, too, is downstream from the perpetuation of societal memes around Nazi book-burning. Of course none of the "banned book" subreddits or "banned book" stores carry the books I might have on my bookshelf, those are actually banned books and the Redditors who will cry about books being banned don't care- in their mind To Kill a Mockingbird is a banned book, and The Hoax of the Twentieth Century is the embodiment of evil that should be banned everywhere.
Amazon has long-engaged in book banning right-wing publishers and books, and nobody really cares about "symbolic desecration." It's performative anti-authoritarianism used as a guise for their own brand of authoritarianism.
Well, some people do.
My understanding is the practice has expanded lately so maybe it's causing more controversy. When it was Holocaust Revisionist books and books like Kevin McDonald's Culture of Critique, basically the first books targeted by Amazon book banning, it didn't generate any controversy.
The Revisionist publisher even had to switch publishers because of government pressure on the very printing shops. They had to finance their own printing shops and sell themselves. Have never seen anyone going on about the sacred nature of "banned books" be remotely interested in that actual struggle.
There was and still is a caliber of anarchist that has The Turner Diaries next to Lolita and The Science of Revolutionary Warfare in their library because they can.
I know some liberals thirsting for cheap radical chic setup this whole "banned books" meme where they pretend a handful of their favorite authors are subversive whilst not even knowing what Der Schelm is let alone that it's classified as a criminal organisation. But don't let that disabuse you that there is still a contingent of people who care about this in principle.
That contingent has proved itself utterly powerless to advance its aims. Attempts to actualize the principle will simply enable the cheap radical chic setup, while providing no perceptible advantage to the supposed principle. Given this inability, the cost/benefit for arguing in favor of protecting "bad" material should be reassessed; if toleration of things you consider bad observably does not secure toleration of things you consider good in turn, what is the point of extending such tolerance? Previous arguments assumed some sort of reciprocity, but that reciprocity observably does not exist, and so it is necessary to reassess those arguments in light of this new data.
Because it is morally righteous, insofar as knowledge is a common. Reciprocity isn't necessary for this to be the case.
A difficult sell in these chthonic times, I know. But do we not judge the previous people of the winter on what they managed to save?
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