On Book Burning, AI, and What We Choose to Forget
In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury envisioned a world where books were outlawed and burned — not just to silence dissent, but to erase memory itself. It wasn’t the flames that terrified Bradbury most. It was the willing forgetting. The slow fade of thought, reflection, and resistance.
“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.
Just get people to stop reading them.”
— Ray Bradbury
Today, we don’t burn books in public squares. We scan them, extract their data, and discard them behind closed doors.
According to a recent Ars Technica report, AI company Anthropic allegedly dismantled millions of physical books — tearing them from their bindings, digitizing their contents, and disposing of the remains — all in service of building a better language model.
It’s a quieter kind of destruction. One that doesn’t leave ash, but leaves absence.
What happens when we treat knowledge not as something to carry or protect, but as something to extract, exploit, and forget?
What is lost when the physical is consumed for the digital — with no care for the original form, context, or permission?
At Kynismos AI, we believe there’s another way.
The rush to scale artificial intelligence has made it easy to forget that data isn’t neutral — it’s authored. As data scholar Rachel Thomas once said, “Data is not neutral. Data will always bear the marks of its history”.
Behind every paragraph scraped, every prompt retained, every dataset absorbed, there are real people: writers, thinkers, readers, creators. When machines are trained on what was never offered, and when the physical is discarded in favor of the extractable, we risk losing not just materials, but meaning. The question isn't just what AI can learn — but what we’re willing to sacrifice for it to learn faster.
There is no progress without ethics. No intelligence worth celebrating if it forgets the dignity of its sources.
That’s why we built Kynismos to protect what matters — your thoughts, your rights, and your agency.