The Beheading of Books and the Humanitarian Problem

We are witnessing an extraordinary battle between the light and the dark. Specifically, between light and ink. LLM builders are quite literally beheading books, often rare and out-of-print books, using guillotine paper cutters (aka hydraulic stack cutters) to remove book spines so they can convert the ink into digital assets a lot faster, leaving behind mutilated and destroyed paper carcasses. It doesn't have to be done this way, by the way. See here). The effort to digitize human knowledge is framed as preservation. But digitizing without preserving the physical is not preservation; it is centralized control. Ink on paper is an un-hackable, decentralized offline copy of data locked in a physical substrate. The contents are in the author’s and the reader’s control. Nobody can mess with the text. In contrast, when you buy a digital book, you are purchasing nothing more than light and pixels. It’s nothing more than a temporary access license to a stream of light and pixels that can be remotely controlled, edited, re-rendered, updated, or revoked at the controller’s discretion. The light is the dark side now because it is the control system. The dark side is where we find immutable truth expressed in ink. In the battle for ideas, programmable words are a decisive advantage.

Why do we care, though. After all, nobody reads books anymore, right? People can barely get through a paragraph. It is because, as E.P. Whipple put it, books are beacons like ‘lighthouses erected in the sea of time.’ A book is not just another thing. It is a technology for transmitting ideas and truths across the geography of space and time.

Books enable humans to engage in sensemaking. The Gutenberg printing press democratized access to the written word and generated an explosion of awareness and education and kicked off the Enlightenment. Today’s transition from ink to light is as transformative as the transition from oral storytelling to the world of the Gutenberg Press was in its day. What is at stake is not just history or truth. It is the essence of humanity. We have a serious humanitarian crisis underway. Here’s why.

It’s because we humans have hearts and spirit, which means we are driven by love, curiosity, beauty, and joy. Having a heart and being a spirit makes us messy, irrational, playful, and stubborn. That irrational messiness is exactly what allows us to handle unpredictability and navigate the unknown. Silicon Valley likes to think that we navigate through rationality, linear thinking, and optimization. That’s why they want to feed the books into the AI machine. But when we read a hyper-linear executive summary or use an optimization app, our brains are trained in rigid expectations: If I do X, I will get Y. But real life doesn’t operate that way. Neither do humans. Life inevitably throws us curveballs. A pandemic. A market meltdown. A sudden heartbreak. These events shatter rigid frameworks. They remind us that the real world doesn’t follow an optimization manual. So, we need to be prepared for surprises. How do we learn to manage these surprises? By spending time in the company of books.

The poet John Keats gave this exact human capacity a name in 1817. He called it “negative capability” and defined this as the ability to exist in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” To be truly resilient, a human being must be able to sit inside the unknown without rushing to force it into a neat, hyper-rational box. Yet we’re not very good at saying “I don’t know” or “there isn’t enough information to know yet.”

Instead, we humans reach for the “I am in control” position. I know. This is what’s behind the current effort to push humanity into optimizing absolutely everything. Love? Dating apps optimize the mating process and weed out the “time wasters”. Health? Now we optimize our health with Oura rings, glucose and sleep monitors, and supplements. But the human spirit dies under the weight of total predictability, just like a firefly won’t survive long in a glass jar even with holes in the top. A life of absolute certainty is a golden cage. We need risk, novelty, play, and whimsy to feel alive. Books let us enter unexpected worlds where we can have experiences, or observe others having them, and feel wonder.

Books also give us words. Vocabulary. Given the world’s incredible complexity, we need language to comprehend, explain, and describe what we see and feel. That language isn’t coming from TV or from newspapers or TikTok or Instagram. It comes from books.

It used to be that oral storytelling was enough. The troubadours of the past passed on generations of messy and complex human truths. That’s how we still have the story of Odysseus with us today. Stories are not about pure memorization, though. In an oral tradition, stories aren’t static; they mutate to serve the living community in front of the storyteller. A world without rigid text returns us to a kind of digital oral culture where ideas are fluid, responsive, and constantly reinvented. The story keeps changing and often fading with time.

Books captured stories like a net traps a butterfly, binding them to the substrate of paper, glue, and ink. Books used to be made one by one, usually by a monk with some flair for art. The introduction of the Gutenberg printing press allowed stories to be mass-produced at scale, with the author's integrity intact.

That invention was itself another proof point of why human quirkiness is the key to progress. Specifically, it is our ability to generate analogies and metaphors. We understand love better when Shakespeare says, “My love is like a red, red rose.” We invent this way. Johannes Gutenberg didn’t create the printing press out of thin air. He looked at a heavy wooden wine press squeezing grapes in the Rhineland and realized the exact same mechanical pressure could press ink onto paper. This was an analogy. He imagined the printing press into being. This is what every innovator does. They imagine things into being. Albert Einstein revolutionized physics not by only by running standard equations, but by engaging in playful visual analogies, imagining what the universe would look like if he were riding alongside a beam of light, or sitting inside a falling elevator. Our heart and spirit generate the imaginal skills we need to explain complexity.

This is essential for human survival, which is why we still appreciate a book like Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Humanity owes a debt to Joyce for having written the most complex and messiest novel in history. He opens the story of Finnegans Wake mid-sentence. The last line of the novel is the start of this opening sentence, which itself gives the readers a jolt of incredulous surprise. He is reminding us that life doesn’t happen according to plan. It doesn’t march forward at a steady pace. The human condition is more like a spiral. It loops back on itself, reminding us that we have been in this place before, rotating as we dance yet again with the archetypes of the human condition. Joyce built his novel around the ideas of the 18^th century philosopher Giambattista Vico, who spoke of corsi et ricorsi – rise, fall, crash, and return. He said we humans move through turnings. The first is the age of the Gods, which is full of myth and mysticism and a sense of awe. Then we become preoccupied by heroes and the heroic. Then we enter an age of men where we trust in the idea that good laws arise from good people, literate people, philosophical people, democratically inclined people, and fundamentally rational people. But then we have a ricorso, meaning a crash. The Fourth Turning is very like our own era. It’s a period when hyper-rationality, moral rot, depravity, and overcomplexity collapse the system, forcing us all back into mythic darkness where the rebirth and looping process begins anew.

Joyce didn’t write a book; he built a perpetual motion machine of pure human spirit. No algorithm can contain it. This is precisely why non-linear thinking and playful art are crucial survival tools for an unpredictable world. Works like Finnegans Wake, poetry, and surrealist metaphors serve as cognitive weight training for an irrational reality. Books by such authors force us to abandon the expectation of neat, mechanical logic. They teach us to tolerate ambiguity, to laugh at surprise, and to look for pattern recognition rather than rigid cause-and-effect.

Books and stories also save us time. We don’t feel only through experience. We learn through the feelings of others, which means we don’t have to reinvent the wheel over and over again. Shakespeare used Hamlet to teach us to recognize that illegitimate power corrupts everything it touches, from one line: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. When Hamlet observes that “the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,” he captures the fundamental human paralysis of overthinking. How many authors have given us the books and stories and poetry that have helped us navigate the whims of love? Of loss? Of grief? Of Success? Of every emotion that exists? It is a relief to discover that someone has been in this place before, mapping it out, gently guiding us through life’s most difficult experiences. We are not alone.

We also owe the writer, Proust, a debt of gratitude. Remember, he described the act or remembering. The narrator dips a madeleine cake into his tea, and the familiar taste instantly unlocks the uncorrupted, exact reality of his childhood in Combray. The taste didn’t change over twenty years. It sat frozen in time, waiting for him. For Proust, the true past is not lost to us. It may be locked up, hidden away in the corner of our minds. It can be unlocked within us by a physical object, such as a madeleine or a book. A printed book functions just like Proust’s madeleine. It’s a key that unlocks the past.

Today, as algorithms, robots, and machines begin to take over tasks, we must keep reminding ourselves that these mechanical instruments and agents cannot replace our cognitive gifts. The soul is not just a matrix of data points.

AI and algorithms can help us make sense of vast pools of data. But the danger is that we think humans should live life as a pre-packaged manufacturing pipeline. Go to school. Check. Go to university. Check. Fall in love. Check. Get Promoted. Check, and on and on. Life is a dynamic adventure. Books remind us of this fundamental truth.

By killing the books, we implicitly confirm that we believe it’s smart to trade serendipity for predictability. But the best things in human life, like love, breakthroughs, deep friendships, artistic discoveries, are almost never planned. They occur in the margins, in the detour, in the accidental bump on the street, or the out-of-print book picked up by mistake on a rainy afternoon. Books represent an easy way for chance, knowledge, and wisdom to reach us.

Optimizing supply chains makes sense. But trying to live with serendipity erased by an optimization schedule is not living at all. Living life as if it were a task is not living at all. If an algorithm or robot can do something for you, then what is left for you? Living. That’s something the robot and algorithm can never do – live life with human perception and human qualities.

This is why I keep saying that we need to upgrade our heartware, the human iOS, alongside the upgrades to our hardware and software. Heartware is the operating system that allows discoveries and navigation.

Algorithms collapse the horizon: An algorithm can only recommend what is statistically similar to what you already liked yesterday. But, frictionless living robs us of discovery. If you always take the mathematically fastest GPS route, you will never stumble upon the unmapped coffee shop or the hidden vista. When you filter out all potential “wasted time,” you simultaneously filter out all the potential moments of wonder and sonder.

Life is not a science. It is an art. A machine needs an optimized script to function without crashing. A human being needs a sense of play, a capacity for metaphor, and the courage to welcome chance. When we give up the delusion that we can control every variable in our diet, our sleep, and our relationships, we stop treating life as a math problem to be solved and start treating it as a story to be lived. The door that opens by accident is almost always the one that leads to where we actually needed to go for reasons we probably won’t understand till later. When you treat living as a task to be optimized, you implicitly accept a tragic premise: that you are a machine running a process rather than a human having an experience. Optimization demands