At an industrial facility on Nicco Way, on the northeast edge of the Las Vegas Valley, workers manually feed books into machines that slice off their bindings. A worker inserts a book, presses a button and watches as a blade removes the spine. They repeat this process throughout their shift.

While Nevada has spent 15 years positioning itself as a purported destination of the future — from entertainment to transportation — this scene represents a Black Mirror inversion of the future.

The details of this operation emerged after a tracker hidden in a shipment of 1,000 rare books led journalists to an Amazon warehouse. At this facility, a unit called VGT3 removes the bindings from books to scan the pages for artificial intelligence (AI) training before discarding them. The unit even has a logo featuring a dinosaur with bared teeth holding a book.

This seems to be the perfect symbol of the AI boom: breathtaking technology resting on remarkably dumb physical work, cultural material treated like industrial feed — and a legal system allowing it. It's the man behind the curtain, except instead of offering people a heart or courage, it's just a warehouse crew slicing up literature.

Inside the warehouse, pallets arrive from the University of London, titles in Japanese and German and Russian, British government documents once laid before Parliament, all of it unboxed, sorted and fed to the cutting stations. And sure, a lot of what arrives is obscure, it's out of print, regional, decades old, the stock nobody was lining up to read. 

I might be less critical if this process truly preserved these books for future access. However, true preservation requires that the information remains available to the public, whereas the content scanned by VGT3 is never read by anything other than a machine. Instead, the pages are simply discarded in massive bins, leaving the books permanently destroyed and impossible to reconstruct.

The workers were told at first that the scanning supported Kindle development. One of them didn't believe it, figuring copyright wouldn't allow that.

The worker's skepticism was sharp, but the law, unfortunately, was not on their side. A federal judge held last year, in Bartz v. Anthropic, that buying print books and destructively scanning them is fair use, because the digital copy replaces the one you destroyed instead of multiplying it. 

It's not that Amazon has a specific agenda against books. The online retail giant's fortune was built on selling them. It's just moved on to strip mining.

One federal ruling made destructive scanning a low-risk, efficient and defensible business practice. Directing anger at the warehouse workers is misplaced. 

Instead, responsibility partially rests with the state of Nevada, whose economic policies and incentives were designed to attract this kind of corporate activity.

After the 2008 housing crisis, the state aggressively pursued economic diversification at any cost. This strategy involved offering billions in tax incentives to various corporations such as luring Tesla and data centers with tax breaks that promised job creation but yielded mixed results. This persistent drive to attract any major employer, regardless of the industry or social impact, is ultimately what created the environment where Amazon could establish its book-destroying facility.

And the flagship tenant isn't cheap to keep. Amazon has been the top employer of Nevada Medicaid recipients every year since 2020. The jobs showed up exactly as promised, and you're paying for the healthcare anyway.

Public resentment toward these economic deals is growing, and Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford (D) has acknowledged this shift. Now running for governor, Ford recently promised to halt new tax breaks for data centers until they demonstrate their value, a move notable since he co-sponsored the 2015 law that established these incentives. 

While this effort feels like early-stage political posturing, it reflects genuine voter frustration. However, current political criticism is largely focused on the high resource consumption — such as electricity and water — required by data centers. Since the facility with the T. rex logo doesn't strain these resources to the same degree, it has largely escaped the attention of Nevada's elected officials, who haven't publicly commented on the warehouse despite recent revelations about its operations.

Just miles from the neon artifice of the Las Vegas Strip — a destination built on the promise of infinite entertainment — lies an industrial purgatory where books go to die. While tourists indulge in distraction, this facility is systematically erasing our cultural history, shredding physical volumes to fuel the bottom line of AI giants. 

It's a bleak irony we're witnessing. In the shadow of a city that lives for the next act, we are burning the books that wrote the last one.

Rebecca Colbert, collection and bibliographic services director for the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, has been a rare, sharp voice of dissent. She represents the radical idea that culture belongs to everyone, to be passed down and discovered. VGT3 represents the opposite, the belief that a book's value is only what can be mined for profit before it is destroyed.

This is capitalism at its most extractive. It's a system designed to harvest the collective public commons, funneling every ounce of our shared intellectual history into the vaults of a few global conglomerates. They take the value and discard the remains, leaving the public with nothing but shredded waste and tax bills. 

We are told this is progress. To me, it looks a lot like liquidation. When the last page is shredded and the algorithm has taken all it can, what will we actually have left to read?

Bryan Driscoll is a Las Vegas-based human resources consultant who advises employers on workforce compliance and legal risk.