The Book Has Always Been Burned. Now It’s Being Pulped For Profit.
Last month in Ahmedabad, Bajrang Dal workers beat up citizens reading Malala Yousafzai and Anne Frank and tore their books. This month, in a warehouse in America, books with spines sliced off were scanned and pulped to train ChatGPT. Two images of book destruction, two ideologies, same outcome.
Radhika Santhanam’s essay draws the line perfectly. The Bajrang Dal-VHP logic is old: ideas are dangerous, so destroy the vessel. It’s censorship by spectacle - thrashing people to send a warning. The Silicon Valley logic is new: ideas are raw material, so destroy the vessel after mining it. Rare-book dealers reported bulk purchases by entities named Blue Finch Project, Green Parrot Project - shell buyers for LLMs. U.S. courts have ruled that Anthropic’s buying, scanning, and destroying copyrighted books is “fair use” because no new copy was shown outside.
That redefinition of “fair” is chilling. A book, as Santhanam writes, is not just paper and spine. It is a gift, a library loan, a collector’s precious object - a physical manifestation of what makes us human. In Bosnia in 1992, librarians formed a human chain under Serbian artillery. In Nazi Germany, the Paper Brigade hid books in clothes. The Soviet Samizdat copied banned texts by hand. Today, the destruction is bloodless, legal, and justified as progress.
Whether you ban Yousafzai for perceived anti-India views or shred her to build a model that will summarize her, you deny the book its fundamental function: to be read by a human, on its own terms.