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The post The Jason Arday vigil was everything psychologists warn against appeared first on spiked.
“In the current Russian leadership’s rather 19th — though increasingly 21st — century view of how the world works, lesser powers must defer to great ones or pay the price. The UK, a country in a category all of its own when it comes to Kremlin resentments, has just been warned that it’s inline for such a punishment and I’m not sure that’s being taken seriously enough.”
– Marc Champion, columnist at Bloomberg ($).
The final sentence is a classic of masterly understatement.
Reform’s lack of history is what its enemies most enjoy pointing at, and they’re half right. We have no Butskellite settlement to draw on, no Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlets from 1978 with our name on the cover, no forty-year archive of Fabian tracts to be mined and misremembered. We have a party that is, in policy terms, seven years old and in serious policy terms about two.
The page is blank, which is a double edged sword. A blank page has one great advantage. It owes nothing. There is no wing of the party that owns an economic orthodoxy and will sulk if it is departed from, no shadow of a previous government to be apologised for. Reform can walk down the corridor of every other party’s lockers and take whatever fits. Right to Buy was Margaret Thatcher’s. The two-child cap was George Osborne’s. The suitability test is older than either. A Conservative research department can’t do this. Every idea on its shelf has an owner objecting to its being moved. We have no shelf, so we have the run of everyone else’s, and the only question any idea has to answer is whether it will work, and whether it cleaves to our spine.
The other edge of the blade is that it has all had to be done at once, and at pace, with no institutional memory to fall back on. There is no cupboard of half-finished papers to raid. Every document has to be started from nothing, argued through, costed, tested and released, while the same people fight a by-election in Clacton, run a few dozen councils and answer the phone to the Times.
The issue here is that taxes upon employment income end up being paid by the workers, not the employer. It’s wholly standard analysis that this is so, that the incidence of things like national insurance, social security, is on wages, not upon corporate profits.
Thus that entire £3.5 billion is a rise in taxation upon the wages of the workers. That’s just the way it works out.
If our rulers knew this and decided to do it anyway then I’d at least admire their sneakiness. But what worries me rather more is that peeps like Our Ange will be believing that the £3 billion does in fact come from the employers. You know, that they’re simply ignorant.
But here is the point, and it is the point Kruger’s £200 million should open rather than close. It is not just the unions. The unions are the visible tithe. The larger sum flows outward, to the charities, the NGOs and the grant-fed campaign groups that the state funds to lobby the state, and on this the indispensable work has been done by Charlotte Gill (go subscribe), who has spent years doing alone, unpaid and frequently abused what an entire national press corps could not be bothered to do. Her Woke Waste files are a public service. By her count the government handed £1.73 billion in grants to the charities she has analysed over five years, and £222 million of it went to twenty organisations working on asylum and migration, with £153 million to Migrant Help alone. These are not food banks. Many of them campaign, litigate and brief against the elected government’s stated policy, and then invoice it. The Home Office funds the bodies that sue the Home Office. The taxpayer pays for both sets of lawyers and is then told the resulting paralysis proves the system needs more money.
Put Gill’s ledger beside Kruger’s and the shape of the throne becomes visible. A permanent, salaried, pensioned class of activists, some inside the departments with union lanyards, some outside with charity numbers, all funded by the people whose votes they exist to frustrate. £200 million is the entry in the accounts. The true cost is every policy smothered, every removal blocked, every reform “reviewed” into dust.
The Tories knew all of it. Fourteen years, and the grants rolled out and the facility time rolled on, because the truth is they preferred a subsidised opposition to a fight. Kruger sat among them and watched, steam gently raising from his ears, which is precisely why his defection mattered and why his papers read like a man emptying his notebooks at last.
Are AI companies acquiring books, scanning them for training data, and destroying the physical copies? Yes, but the reality is much less dire than popular coverage suggests.
Last week, the Demand Progress Education Fund sent a coalition letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the agency to investigate whether such bulk book digitization, "including [of] rare, out-of-print titles with few surviving copies," is anticompetitive behavior that illegally protects AI companies from competition. The focal point of the letter is Project Panama, Anthropic's self-described "effort to destructively scan all the books in the world."
A destructive scan, one in which a physical book is destroyed in the process of being digitized, sounds sinister, but this method is a highly efficient way to convert books from bits to bytes. It also helps ensure compliance with copyright law. As federal Judge William Alsup found in Bartz v. Anthropic (2025), destructive scanning to be fair use because the one-to-one transformation from one form (physical) to another (digital), while neither multiplying nor redistributing copies, "was even more clearly transformative than those [fair use cases] (where the number of copies went up by at least one)."
The coalition letter tries to sidestep this issue by noting that "a fair-use determination is…not a license to foreclose competition." That's true, but it does little to support their argument that AI companies are violating antitrust laws.
The coalition claims that "pre-AI human-authored text is a finite resource with an inelastic supply," but in many cases publishers are ready, willing, and able to publish more copies. In other words, supply is elastic. In cases concerning truly out-of-print works (inelastic supply), the existing supply is often abundant. For example, even though the Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th edition has been out of print for over a decade, a complete, 32-volume set can be readily found and purchased for a couple hundred dollars online.
In the case of materials for which there remains only one copy—that is, supply is low and inelastic—there's no reason to believe these inputs are so essential to AI model development that their digitization would result in "an insurmountable systemic moat around AI incumbents." The market for AI development remains wide open because other training data abounds. For instance, Project Gutenberg hosts and freely distributes over 75,000 digitized books. Moreover, data derived from physical books isn't the only kind used to train AI models; developers also use data from synthetic data, publicly available data, licensed data, and user-generated data, among other sources.
The coalition's theory of harm is unable to satisfy the legal standards of the sort of predatory overbuying claim it presents. Per the Supreme Court's opinion in Weyerhaeuser Co. v. Ross-Simmons Hardwood Lumber Co. (2007), such a claim involves "bidding up input prices through the exercise of monopsony power." But there's no evidence that prices in the out-of-print book market have been generally bid up to the point that only incumbent AI companies can afford them.
Furthermore, bulk book digitization is accompanied by substantial procompetitive effects, including benefits to consumers from improved AI models, many of which are available for free. Insofar as copyright law compels an AI company to unintentionally destroy the last copy of a 50-something-year-old book, the information contained within becomes far more useful and accessible to mankind by being incorporated into an AI model rather than remaining in its physical copy and in the possession of a single person.
Booksellers also benefit: One told 404Media that AI companies' bulk book purchases benefit him "financially…by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell." In fact, this seller also revealed that the bulk purchases "were of books [that] all had ISBNs," an identification system adopted in 1970. This implies that no antiquarian works are being targeted for digitization and destruction. (This should come as no surprise because such works, when not in the custody of a university or museum, are purchased at auctions, not as part of a bulk order. Moreover, there's no obvious reason for an AI company to train its model on an original Shakespeare folio, which costs millions of dollars, when the text can be accessed for free.)
AI companies digitizing one copy of the plenitude of out-of-print works does not threaten humanity's cultural inheritance. Moreover, the FTC should not waste its limited resources investigating a practice that evinces fierce, dynamic competition between AI developers, not market foreclosure.
The post AI Companies Are Destroying Books. That's Not Nearly as Scary as It Sounds. appeared first on Reason.com.
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