Stealing Minds and Destroying Morale: LibGen, Meta, and AI

Last week I learned that all four of the books for which I am sole author, or co-author, were illegally pirated by Library Genesis (LibGen). The LibGen database was in turn scraped illegally by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, for the purpose of training the company’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) program in use of the English language. How many literary works were compromised? What recourse do authors have? Why is this a problem? Go make the popcorn and brace yourself.

I am not alone in having my works taken illegally, without notification, without my consent, and certainly without compensation. An estimated 7.5 million books, articles, and scientific papers are on the LibGen website. Nearly all of my writer and science friends, and even their parents, are victims of this intellectual property theft. If you have ever had anything published, you need to search LibGen.

Thankfully, The Atlantic magazine provides a search tool, for free, in the top left corner of the page in this hyperlink. Use it. Search for the names of people you know, and notify them if their works appear.

If you are not already a member of the Authors Guild, I strongly recommend becoming one. This particular case is high profile, but only the tip of the iceberg. There are many other piracy platforms that provide free access to literature without compensating the author or the publisher. Authors Guild has a strong legal team that fights for the rights of authors against copyright violations, against book bans, against publishing scams aimed at newbie authors, and many other issues including slow payment and non-payment by publishers.

You may hear from various sources that LibGen is actually the “good guy,” and it is only Meta that is at fault in this case. Publishing is a complicated industry, its landscape changing almost daily. One argument I saw praising LibGen involves the fact it “archives” ebooks, which became even more important after February 26, 2025. On that date, Amazon made it impossible to download ebooks from Kindle to your computer, or any device over which you have control of the files. The fact that you can fetch them from LibGen does not let that pirating company off the hook, it simply punishes Amazon and the authors of those ebooks.

Most publishers of scientific journals truly are evil, though. First, the author pays page fees to have their work published. Then, the publisher puts those papers behind a paywall that essentially shuts off access to the general public. I confess that without the “services” provided by the kin of LibGen, I would have extraordinary difficulty in conducting research for my own books. I simply do not have the time to contact the author of a given paper, provided they are still alive, with a public email address, and ask them if they can provide me with a PDF of the paper I am seeking. God forbid that capitalism could keep its dirty fingers out of the pie of collective knowledge we should all be able to access, and that authors should not have to pay to publish.

Back to the current issue for a moment. What can authors do? Class action lawsuits against Meta are in the works, and I will likely let Authors Guild and the law firms do the heavy lifting on the behalf of us authors. AG also has a ”What Authors Need to Know” page listing additional courses of action, including a template for a letter you can send to Z-man, the CEO of Meta, to express your outrage, and/or concern. If your life can function without Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, you may want to consider alternative social media like Bluesky.

Why is all of this a problem? Authors and writers are already compensated precious little for what we produce. Many of us never see royalties, and “advances” ahead of publishing are becoming more of a rarity all the time. This devaluation of our skill set, imagination, and creativity is something we already suffer, without the added attacks of piracy and plagiarism, and the indignity of being replaced by AI tools.

I came across a YouTube video above, by Del Stone, Jr., that captures perfectly my own sentiments. The view that intellectual property is not worthy of respect, but instead something to be “harvested” and used against creative people in the future is demoralizing AF, as the kids these days would say. What these corporations are doing is robbing people like me of the desire to continue creating content, and stimulating critical thinking by our readers.

You wonder why I rail against capitalism on this blog? Now you have some idea. I can no longer promise new posts here, or over at my Bug Eric blog. What is the point? Why should I continue to provide free fodder for AI machines? I’m open to persuasion, but for now I may stick to putting out a book every so often, and doing the odd article for the few editors I treasure. Thank you, and good luck.

No Wrong Way to Resist

There is one wrong thing you can do, and that is to criticize and dismiss an effort to do something positive simply because, in your opinion, it "is not enough." This is a chronic problem currently, and it fails to acknowledge anything other than statistically measurable effects, publicity, visibility, and savvy organization. Critics ignore the impacts on individual participants, the importance of collective purpose and strengthened solidarity, and habituation to action.

A small group of us protesting on Presidents' Day outside the courthouse of our small town.

The recent spending boycott on February 28, organized by the People's Union USA, was roundly attacked for requiring so little from participants, but considering that we have, as a broad citizenry, become complacent and perhaps lazy over the previous four years of relative calm, not demanding an intensive, personally risky act was probably the right call.

One important aspect of a boycott on purchases is anonymity. When there is the perception of risk to personal safety, the promise of invisibility is a helpful recruitment tactic. The same goes for the gathering of data by corporations and bad actors elsewhere. When you don't spend, you don't leave a digital or paper trail. Perceived vulnerability, real or not, is an enormous disincentive for engaging in protests that demand public spectacle with its potential for confrontation with counter-demonstrators and/or police violence.

The most profound impact of a buying boycott is personal. It causes you to pause your spending, and creates a window of opportunity to reflect on what you need and prioritize, and where you go to fulfull those needs and wants. It gets you to explore local alternatives to the global corporate marketplace, for example. Maybe, like sobriety, you take that one day boycott up a notch and make a habit of it, one day at a time. Extricating ourselves from the matrix of capitalism, at the scale it has become, is going to be a marathon, not a sprint, but it is something we can choose to do. What can I live without, you might ask yourself. What might I indulge in with less frequency?

One social media comment I saw claimed that not all locally-owned businesses are any better in their politics, hiring practices, responsiveness to customers, and impacts in other areas. That is definitely true, but a small business can survive only so long if word spreads that it exercises biases, tolerates or encourages bigotry, or fails to support the local community. It always pays to do your homework, ask your neighbors, and use other resources to inform your decisions on what enterprises to patronize.

Boycotts do affect the financial bottom line of the corporations targeted, but that usually takes time. There is definitely a sense of urgency now, and the critics of the one-day boycott are impatient. What we don't hear from those people are alternatives or complements to consumer boycotts. Well, one vocal critic, on a social media post, claimed that only a widespread labor strike will have any measurable effect. That exposes an awful lot of people to retaliation from their employers, at a time when unemployment benefits are no longer guaranteed. Too many are living paycheck to paycheck. Yes, a prolonged work stoppage would be very effective, but would require near total participation.

What gives me great satisfaction, even if I hear about it after the fact, are spontaneous efforts at disruption, such as overwhelming I.C.E. tip lines with bogus referrals for undocumented immigrants to target for deportation, or emailing human resources at the Office of Personnel Management to frustrate the DOGE request to supply it with five bullet points describing your job accomplishments the prior week. Such little acts also generate a great deal of much needed humor when people post their responses on social media. We need more of this kind of creative monkeywrenching.

Ideally, we need to reach the enablers of the oppressors and anti-democratic players. That means engaging or shaming CEOs and majority shareholders of the companies running the show. Call them out. Demand that shareholders dump their stock. Give these powerful people no peace. After all, they are not giving you any. Call your congresspeople, sure. Go to their town halls, if they bother holding such events. We need to up the pressure, though, maybe as a continued presence at all of their offices, all their public appearances.

I saw a photo, or perhaps a generative AI image, on social media recently that depicted a woman holding a cardboard sign. It read "I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." This is a quote by Angela Davis, an esteemed leader in the Black Panther Party of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This resonates on many levels. I wonder if we need a twelve-step program with that mantra. I would go to the meetings, learning what actions others are taking, and trying them myself.

Metaplexities

The landscape of social media has become more complex recently, or perhaps more unstable, restricted, biased, and otherwise uninviting. Maybe it is me, and my experiences that have colored my opinion of the “Metaverse” and other platforms. In any event, I am forced to reevaluate my use of these ways of interacting. This is painful, because in real life, in my small town where I am a socio-political minority, I have no friends at all, even after three years.

My history of adopting social media has been one of reluctance, but Facebook has been an almost daily ritual since I joined back in 2009. Friends had to twist my arm to register, but I quickly found it to be a useful tool. I set up an Instagram account on December 14, 2021, and even made a handful of posts from my computer. When I logged in on January 20, 2022, I found my account had been permanently disabled for “violating community standards,” with no more specific information. I have not, and will never, set up another Insta account.

I cannot pinpoint when I joined Twitter, but it was apparently prior to June of 2014. I mostly neglected it initially, but gradually it became more of a habit. In July of 2019 I noticed the format had changed, and I didn’t like it. By late November of that year I was complaining that fifty percent of my Twitter feed was advertising. It was all downhill from there, and I left “X” for good on November 7, 2024.

Fortunately, Bluesky became a much more friendly alternative to X, and I made an account there (@bugeric) along with a legion of ex-X users. We shall see how long this honeymoon lasts. While I am also on LinkedIn, and have an account on YouTube, that is the extent of my online communities.

Lately, Facebook has become more of a hassle than a comfort. It has become nearly impossible for me to use it easily on any device other than my phone. On desktop, and now laptop, it requires two-factor authentication, and never recognizes either of them even when I ask it to “trust” the device. Messenger, the chat function of Facebook, now encrypts messages, and I can never see messages sent, just the notification that they were delivered. I do not recall ever getting an option to create a PIN for accessing encrypted messages. Consequently, I have largely given up using Messenger.

Other factors complicating my relationship with Facebook include the Meta corporate decision to abandon fact-checking of public posts; and Meta is now more tolerant of hate speech, especially when it is directed at the LGBTQ+ community. Lastly, the dedication of Meta to scraping images and other user content for use in training generative AI (Artificial Intelligence), and announcement that it fully intends to create artificial user accounts to boost its algorithms, has many of us questioning whether we want to be a party to all of this.

I consider myself average, if not slightly above average, in my ability to curate my newsfeeds, so that I usually get to see most of what I want to see. What has become a supreme frustration now, on Facebook, is criticism from ”friends”, whenever I post almost anything.

The other day I posted that I was proud of my partner for deciding to do more of our grocery shopping at Aldi, instead of Walmart. About two comments in, people started saying “Well, Aldi isn’t that great [socially responsible], either.” Wow. We live in a small town with limited options, we are doing the best that we can! We also utilize a farm store farther out in the county, and the downtown farmers market when it is in season.

I mentioned these exchanges over on Bluesky, and got 152 “likes” so far. One person commented that “Moral choices are hard and imperfect. Snarking from the sidelines is easy.” Another said “Tell them they sound like shame bots. These people really have lost themselves to a mind virus that just looks to discourage. We call these detractors.” Another reply: “I think we need to take a stand against people who believe in ‘purity tests’ like you describe. That kind of behavior is NOT helpful.” I especially liked the “shame bots.”

My strategy from this point forward will be to post little from my Facebook private page, with few, if any, images or videos, so I am not feeding the machine of AI (I have also changed the settings on my “off-Facebook activities”). I will post almost exclusively from my business page, Eric R. Eaton – Writer. I’ll use my private account to keep up with friends and colleagues, and share posts I find useful.

I hope that I can be better at regularly putting content on my blogs, Flickr photostream, and iNaturalist account. I will perhaps investigate other social media outlets and services as I learn of them, and adopt those with a user interface compatible with us old people. Now, if the local townspeople would all wear something (I rarely see MAGA attired) that identifies them as an ally or an adversary, that’d be great.

Postscript: I get a lot of “don’t take things so personally” advice. Well, I do take things personally. I am an only child who was never properly socialized. I think it is a minor miracle that I get along with anybody. Maybe stop assuming I am normal?