EPISODE 39: MATERIALITY MATTERS
Episode 39: Materiality Matters | 18 August 2026
Stephen and Trent debate whether digitizing artifacts (particularly in service of training large language models) justifies the loss of their physical forms. They weigh philosophical and practical concerns, sociocultural consequences, and the value of personal qualitative experience, including:
The rise in genAI companies purchasing and shredding rare, antique books;
McLuhan’s contention that the medium is the message;
Vinyl records, tactile imperfections, and the resurgence of analog media;
Bearing the cultural cost of destroying original works;
Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the potential for information loss through digital preservation;
How genAI companies circumvent intellectual property law through “transforming” texts;
Overwhelming volume, inadequate storage space, and the case for purging some forms of physical media;
Democratizing and regulating genAI as a public utility rather than a for-profit enterprise;
Similarities and differences between genAI development and the Human Genome Project;
Economics of hardware ownership versus permanent, rising subscription fees;
Understanding different media through the material and technological conditions of their respective eras;
Beanie Babies, baseball cards, and the subjective valuation of “antique” collectibles;
Colonialism, stolen antiquities, and the (un)ethics of Western decision-making about museum-worthiness;
Preserving physical media to maintain historically-, artistically-, and culturally-significant practices;
Trade-offs between archiving versus discarding obsolesced hardware; and
The perennial tug-of-war between technological, economic, governmental, and social forces.
Episode References:
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Landymore, F. (2026, July 25). AI companies are buying antique books, ingesting their contents to train models, and then destroying them at incredible scale, even if almost no copies remain. Futurism. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books
Maiberg, E. (2026, July 21). AI companies are buying tons of old books because they're free of AI slop. 404 Media. https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/
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Maiberg, E. (2026, August 17). We tracked a shipment of rare books. It ended at an Amazon AI training facility. 404 Media. https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility
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