The New Alexandria: Commercial Intelligence and the Privatisation of Human Memory

Send us Fan MailIn the seventh century BCE, Ashurbanipal, the King of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, articulated a vision of knowledge centralization that would echo through the subsequent three millennia of human history. Standing amidst the rising walls of Nineveh, he declared a mandate for his royal library: "I, Ashurbanipal, king of the universe, king of Assyria, have placed these tablets for the future in the library at Nineveh for my life and for the well-being of my soul, to sustain the foundations of my royal name". This was not a passive act of collecting literature for leisure; it was an aggressive, state-sponsored projection of power. His library was a "working tool of governance," a centralized repository of medical texts to heal the palace elite, astronomical observations to predict the will of the gods, and historical chronicles to justify his rule against the chaos of rebellion. Knowledge, in its earliest institutional form, was inextricable from the sovereign. It was the state’s memory, the state’s predictor, and the state’s justification.Today, humanity stands at the precipice of a new epistemological epoch, one that invites a profound and unsettling parallel. The user’s query posits a fundamental question: are the Large Language Models (LLMs) developed by entities like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic the modern incarnation of these ancient libraries? And if so, does the shift from "kings" to "commercial entities" fundamentally alter the nature of the knowledge they contain? The answer, as this podcast will demonstrate, is a resounding but complex affirmative. We are indeed witnessing the construction of a New Alexandria, but the architects have shifted from monarchs to CEOs, the substrate has shifted from papyrus and clay to probabilistic parameters and silicon, and the mandate has shifted from the stability of the empire to the maximisation of shareholder value.