librarypunk - 039 - Public Library Work and Maintenance

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

https://twitter.com/megan_e_riley  Mattern, Shannon. “Maintenance and Care.” Places Journal, November 20, 2018. https://doi.org/10.22269/181120  Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3

Happy public radio broadcasting day. For those who celebrate, it's library punk. I'm Justin. I'm a Skalkan librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT in a public library, and my pronouns are they then?

I'm Jay. I am an academic metadata and discovery librarian, and my pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest. She likes to introduce yourself. Yeah, I'm Megan. I'm a doctoral student at UCLA in Information Studies, and I'm also a special collections library worker, and I use she they pronounce.

Yay! I'm stoked to be here. Yeah, I didn't know you're working in special collections, too. Yeah, well, I work at one of the special collections libraries at UCLA. It's technically off campus. It's all the way over in West Adams, so a lot of people don't even know that we exist, but it's fun. We have a huge Oscar Wild collection, which is really cool. and I just work in tech

tech services there so I help out with cataloging and things like that just a few hours a week but I've been doing it since I started my MLIS. Can I come live in the Oscar Wilde collection?

Yeah, it's a cool building. I mean, there actually used to be a house on, we have like a full city block and so there's gardens and stuff and there's the old gatehouse and there used to be an actual house there, but it's not there anymore. It's just the library

in the gatehouse now. Yeah. I don't have a segment so we can just jump straight in. So we've been talking back and forth about having you on the podcast. I know. You wanted to, well, first we were talking about some automation that was going on. Yeah, which is kind of something that, you know, maybe we'll touch on a little bit today.

But the Santa Monica Public Library got a grant. This was last year. Wow, I guess. Yeah. to turn one of the branches that closed during COVID into a self-service model using Bibliateca software. And there's a whole lot of... As we've been calling them. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah, there's just a whole lot of concern there among folks that I've talked to about accessibility issues or on-house folks, some surveillance issues. Yeah, just a number of questions that haven't really been answered. Wi-Fi-enabled doors. Yes, yeah. That kind of stuff that definitely will work. Yeah, because I hate that like, because self-service and like self-checkout is a good thing

because, you know, sometimes people, what they're checking out, they might, if they have to interact with another human being to check it out, they might not do it. So I hate that this whole like surveillance model and like this sort of like hostile model is how we get that. Because otherwise I'm like, yeah, I would love like a self-service library. That would be great for people. But they just got to go and ruin it. When I first heard about this, I wondered how much of the time an actual person would have to be there anyways. Because like with technology, you always have to have somebody maintaining it.

So you always have to have somebody to babysit it. So I bet that there's just going to actually be a person in that building most of the time anyways. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But I haven't been to check it out yet. So I don't know what stage of implementation they're in. I heard that a Santa Monica. I haven't really heard any news about it since.

Yeah. It first was announced. Yeah. I think my colleague Jeremy, who's in my PhD program, probably has a better idea since he used to work at Santa Monica Public Library and kind of has the inn there. Well, say, do you head on what we're going to talk about, which is maintenance. Well, maintenance is one of the things we're going to talk about. So we're going to talk about public library work and maintenance. If for those of you who don't read the titles of the episodes before we start, before we start,

playing them. So I was reading your papers. I read the, I read the second one first, which I was very confused. I'm like, I don't know how I'm going to make an episode out of this. And then I read the critical infrastructure studies. What I'm like, oh, okay, this is what we were talking about. I got it. Yes. Yeah. No, that's something that I am really kind of just starting to dive into. I hadn't ever heard of critical infrastructure studies until relatively recently. I was familiar with some folks in the field already, especially like Shannon Maddern's work, which I had kind of come to in my MLIA's program through sound studies and her work on libraries and sound. But critical infrastructure studies really kind of caught my eye with its

focus on maintenance work and repair work and the way that library work fits into that and the way that public libraries in particular fit into our infrastructure and how we approach examining that infrastructure. So yeah, it's been, it's been interesting. And I think especially in the context of the recent library Twitter dust up over Seattle Public Library, functioning as a warming center and being closed. I think looking at the infrastructural role of public libraries with a very critical eye. This is really important. Yeah.

So something, I'm not as familiar with CIS, so I'll let you explain it. But the one thing I took away was defining infrastructure as physical, informational, and social infrastructures, and then how library workers do all three of those roles. They do the physical infrastructure. They provide the information infrastructure. and they recreate the social infrastructure. But what is CIS more broadly, if you could give a quick definition for people who aren't familiar?

Yeah, so CIS looks at kind of the maintenance and reproduction of order through sociology of repair, I guess is the best way to put it. And it looks a lot at network infrastructures. And like you mentioned, the different types of infrastructure is physical, informational, social. And another really important concept in it is broken world thinking. So looking at where things break down and the importance of the repair that happens there and how often that's invisibilized. It's not a very concise definition, but it's also a pretty wide-ranging,

interdisciplinary field. So I feel like it's difficult to pin down sometimes. Yeah. I thought that was pretty concise. I actually looking at the notes, I didn't really write anything about broken world thinking. Could you expand on what that's referring to a little bit? Yeah, absolutely.

Let me pull up my notes. Because it's combined with the ethic of care, which is a feminist framework. Yeah. So I think that's part of what appealed to me about using this CIS framework for examining things is because of how interdisciplinary it is and pulling from, you know, feminist theory, Marxist theory. Yeah.

So the broken world thinking idea is relatively recent from the 2000s. I think 2013. And let me see. I'll quote from this essay by Jackson, who kind of came up with the idea of broken world thinking. So he writes that broken world thinking draws our attention around the sociality of objects forward into the ongoing forms of labor, power, and interest,

neither dead nor congealed that underpin the ongoing survival of things as objects in the world. So it's basically asking us to look at how material and social, you know, informational and physical infrastructures are both broken and repaired and who is doing the breaking and who is doing the repairing. And so the who is breaking and the who is repairing, that focuses on, I guess, social reproduction or is it talking like when someone breaks something, is it broken from the point of view of the established order? So saying like an unhoused person is breaking order and the library worker is the one restoring it or who is who's how is the how does it kind of

work out yeah i mean i think that well in the way that i am approaching it is is more of um i guess from a relational standpoint and looking more at the structural level rather than like person like personal interaction yeah obviously infrastructure studies that makes sense um But I think that the breaking that happens can encompass both negative and positive connotations of breaking. Jay, did you want to? Oh, no, we raise our, we do the little hand-raising when we will have something to say when you're done just to let you know. Yeah, that's what that's for. We all have ADHD, so we're like, I have a thought.

Oh, yeah, I do. So you get it. Like, I have notes, but I'm like, ah, it's not a other thing. But, yeah. So, you know, because I think of it in the sense of, for example, with the idea of, like, public libraries, like the broken social safety net and libraries having to fulfill that role. But at the same time, you know, library workers that are approaching things like punitive actions and, like, the carcoral system. in relationship to public libraries and working to break that relationship down, I guess, you know, there's the break, the breaking that's happening is not always a good thing,

but sometimes it can be. Just, and to, I guess, to follow that up, repair work is also not always a positive thing, because if it's in service of repairing things like white supremacy or the status quo, then obviously that's not necessarily positive thing. Yeah, talking about the sort of like broken framework, it's reminding me, we just did an episode with April Vendetta, and they have this project called the fragmented archive, and they talk about sort of like archives not as something that are necessarily like this rigid structured thing, but also, but more like allowing it to be. sort of, I'm terrible at explaining it, but they also sort of, um, also applied this like as like a fragmented body. And so it's just reminding me a lot of that, like where they're doing it as a way to go against, um, like breaking against a sort of established code, um, rather than breaking it in

the, in the bad way. So I thought that was just interesting that this is a framework that exists. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's most often taken in the context of things being broken in a bad way, but I like the idea of, or the potential within the idea of thinking of breaking things in a good way or in a liberatory way. Yeah, and I like bolded order when I, when I was reading it, because order, you know, you can have physical order and the informational order, the infrastructure. And so once you get the social order, then you're talking about reproduction of societal norms. So that's why I was asking, like, who's breaking it? But I think the whole idea is just to have a different way of thinking about infrastructure change.

That's not just innovation. It seems like kind of what Jackson's point was is stop talking about things as innovation and start talking about them as breaking and repairing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a large, I feel like a large portion of C. is pushing back against this idea of innovation as this inherently good thing or is the thing that, like, is what moves humanity forward or something? And looking, again, more at the sort of mundane repair and maintenance work that has to happen every day to actually keep our world functioning. Yeah. It's pretty poignant right now. Oh, sorry. It's pretty poignant right now with so many schools that didn't want to go remote. and now just breaking down and just we can't open this week because 55% of our workforce is out or whatever. I just seeing that again and again at different cities all week.

And this refusal to acknowledge the fact that it's because people are sick and instead, you know, people saying that people just don't want to work right now. I saw a really interesting thread and argument that a lot of those signs and a lot of the hiring, opening jobs was PPP loan fraud. Yes, I saw that too. I started digging into that and I was like, this sounds both like a conspiracy theory, but in the way that a thing the CIA actually did sounds like a conspiracy theory,

but they did it. But then you look at how much PPP loans happened, and then you're like, oh, this is all like fraud, like a huge amount of it must be. Yeah, you hear those stories of people like going to interviews. and turns out that the pay scale is, you know, half of what they actually posted to get people to come into interviews knowing that they'll turn them down and that kind of thing. And that's totally legal. It's bullshit.

But this also reminded me of Miriam Posner, who we had as a guest. She just tweeted. Miriam's wonderful. Yes, she's fantastic. She teaches in my department, so. Okay, yeah, that's right. Oh, I didn't know that. She recently had a tweet thread that was basically every person or like every time you hear like supply chain issue, it's actually just it's a sick person.

So, you know, thinking about it kind of that way as opposed to just this ubiquitous, oh, it's a supply chain problem. But no, that's it's physically sick people who cannot be where they're supposed to be. Yeah. No, I saw that the other day. And then I saw today that she apparently got weird backlash for that tweet. Somebody called her, I think, arrogant was the word that they used, which is baffling to me. But I saw someone I follow, like, trying to, well, actually them. And I was like, that's weird.

Yeah, especially since that's Miriam's, like, area of expertise. Yeah, that's clear for you. Right for mansplaining. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird. It was just a weird wheel actually, too. It was like, well, also circuit boards, not in trucks.

I was like, you're missing the point. Yeah. But still doesn't change the fact that there are people involved. The Tumblr.com reading comprehension. Yeah. It's really shining through. It's like she's trying to make a point. She's like, obviously there are other factors.

Yeah. Back to CIS with maintenance work reflecting social values. I was also starting to think of, because you've got the ethic of care framework. And you mentioned in part of the essay about the valorization of repair work. So I think we've seen that a lot. I think teachers are really, I really wish teachers knew about vocational awe because, like, it's really a library-centric concept. Like, it really hasn't bled out yet to teachers.

And I really wish they knew about this concept. And we're like, it's something you can use to fight against that. Yeah. I mean, I think it works very well for really any sort of gendered service profession, like nursing as well, too. My mom's a school nurse, and so it's definitely something. Double whammy. Yeah, yeah. No, definitely. She basically came out of retirement recently to work for the school district again because they have so few nurses, and they're so understaffed right now. So, yeah, it's definitely something that I wish would, yeah, get outside of just the library discourse. Yeah, I was reading about the school closures.

And one of the things, I don't remember where, I think I want to say it was Palo Alto, where they reached out and wanted volunteers to come in and run the school, sort of like they do in the UK for public libraries, the council libraries that they closed. So they have like a Christian nonprofit come in and like have seniors kind of do it. And I just always think about like what I would do in that situation. If I like had to teach this person who's going to be a nonprofit person, I would just be like, no, I'm not teaching you anything. I'm just going to sit here until like my last day.

Yeah. I mean, have fun running a library. Yeah. Like why would you want to train your replacement who's going to be unpaid? I don't know. It just, yeah. I mean, I think, but the school, oh, go ahead. But yeah, I was thinking vocational all would be a really good thing for those teachers to talk about. And, I mean, they can't do anything about it, probably with the calling for volunteers.

But, you know, just in case they have colleagues who kind of like are like, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. I just, no, no, it's not. Yeah. It's not a good idea. Yeah. No, it's great to see the examples being set by, like, strong teachers unions. obviously CTU has been great about that, even though the agreement that they reached, it sounds like, is not super popular.

They at least forced some time out of the classroom. And they won some concessions for safety protocols, which was really important. So it's still a victory. I mean, any kind of organized labor thing like that is that you can get done and get concessions. It's a victory. Yeah. And they drew a match. massive amount of attention to how horribly Laurie Lightfoot is dealing with all of this.

So I would consider that also a win. Yeah. And the maintenance work relying on underpaid and undervalued of non-white, non-Western, and non-male labor. There was another thing I was reading recently where someone was talking about unionized teachers and how, especially in cities, you're talking about underpaid, organized black female teachers who are constantly being undermined or, you know, by being replaced with these volunteers or teach for America was something someone brought up and where you're sending in mostly young white students to go in and teach to kind of, I didn't really think of it as a union busting strategy, but it really is.

And doing that as sort of a year of service kind of thing. I don't know. But it's jobs that they are better than was the way the person praised it for Teach for America. So yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's a good time to be talking about this because it's all being laid a little bit bare. Yeah. No, I think that the pandemic has definitely pulled the curtain back on a lot of stuff or is in the process of doing so.

So when we talk about infrastructures as relational, we're talking about, I guess, how are we talking mostly about the social aspect of infrastructure or are we talking about like how one place and and others all sort of create the safety net that was something I was kind of trying to work out yeah I mean I think at least in my own work so far I've been using relational in the sense that Bauker uses it they define relationship infrastructures as something that emerges for people in practice and they're connected to activities and structures. So I do think that relational element, a large portion of it is the social, but I think that it would be a mistake to exclude the material from that too, because the

spaces and places where those social relations happen are extremely important as well. I've got bullet points of some of the social infrastructure that libraries and library workers perpetuate. And so we've got the lack of diversity in the workforce, the undercompensated and uncompensated labor. So I think a lot of the free labor that we do, I'm always talking about it in academia, but I mean, it happens everywhere. It happens in public libraries of volunteers and things like that. Exclusionary policies against unhoused or marginalized people and then collaboration with the carcassural states. So we've done a couple episodes on, actually we haven't really talked about, we haven't really done an episode just on police and public libraries.

We've talked about prison librarianship. I don't know if we've actually really talked about, you know, I've been trying to get some people who don't want to come on the podcast, friends of mine. We're like, no, I don't want to come on. But talking about their local public libraries that put in like airport style screening and which seems wild, like putting in the same stuff you have at the courthouse, basically. So just a metal detector and a scanner.

Or like the tensions, differences, relationships between having police and that type of things in your library versus security guards. That's always a tension that I've had. When I used to be a lady person in grad school, they would often have us do like chat in the building after it had closed until like 2 a.m. during finals because there was a security guard, but then campus like slashed budget and got rid of the library security. And so they would not feel safe having mostly women, like younger women students, like in a building at 2 a.m. by themselves. Or like when I lived in Salt Lake City, they had security guards, especially up on the top because of the number of suicides that would happen. So that's like a relationship and a structure

that I have a lot of personal tension with. Like, are security guards cops? Like, what's going on there? It's, yeah, I would love if we could investigate that officially, too. Yeah, no, the security guard versus police distinction is interesting. I'm not sure about other library systems off the top of my head, but here in Los Angeles, LAPL was or has been contracting their security guards through L.A. APD, which is interesting because I imagine it actually costs a lot more to do it that way.

Like, just get cops at that point. Yeah, well, they're also, yeah, there are also cops, do it. And a lot of times security guards are off duty or retired police. So, yeah, the distinction can be kind of blurry sometimes depending on, on how the security guards are hired, you know, if they're contractors or if they're direct hires, things like that. Yeah. And I was actually, I think this was Poddim America. They have a series. called Thank You for Your Service.

They talked to service workers. They had one with Alex Keller, who works security. He's also, I think he does pro wrestling. But he was talking about doing security in bars. And I think he worked at a bar I went to when I was in Cleveland. Because he had a story about running someone through all the bar stools because they're online. I was like, oh, wait, I've been in that bar. Anyway, they have Vegeta on the wall.

Very cool. And it was, but he was saying that they would hire a cop to kind of stand outside. Because he's talking about what a bouncer does and everything. And they would hire a cop outside. But he said a lot of the times, you know, the whole job was to either bounce someone and let the cop, like, deal with them. But the cop would never come inside because, like, people were smoking pot inside. So it was also to make sure that you had a not very nosy cop. And it was also kind of like a bribe to just.

just keep the cops away by having a cop outside who you were paying a lot of money. But yeah, that's what we do at my university is for the 24-hour finals, we have the campus police come in. And I've decided we haven't done 24 hours in the past couple of years for reasons. But the last time I did the overnight shift, because we volunteer for it, they asked the librarians to volunteer. and the cop just tried to talk to me all night, and I was like, I'm not doing this again. I don't want to talk to a cop for seven hours. Yeah, but that doesn't sound fun.

I don't know. The whole university police thing is always interesting to me, too. When I was an undergrad at Berkeley, it was just interesting that UCPD would show up to stuff anywhere, not necessarily on campus before Berkeley PD a lot of the time. They seem to be better staffed in some ways. but also that was where when, you know, cops would get fired from other police departments.

They would end up as part of UCPD. So I haven't really had any interactions with the UCLA police, but there's definitely been a lot of discussion around the, their funding and things like that, obviously. Well, that was the, that was the mason cop was at Berkeley, right? That was at UC Davis. Oh, it was Davis. But that was when I was in school.

And that was during the, tuition hike protests. And I distinctly remember it because one of my friends was part of a group of people occupying Wheeler Hall on campus. And hundreds of us came out and formed like a human chain around the building. And the university not only had UCPD come out, but the Oakland Police Department come out. And they were just like laying into people with their batons. They broke some grad students wrist or something. And yeah, it didn't really help that much, unfortunately, because my tuition doubled in the time that I was an undergrad. So yeah. Yeah, it would, and they, and they spent a lot of money at UC Davis doing counter propaganda, I guess. But I do remember

this on, I was, I was in library school because I think, so this is, this would have been 2012 to 2014 sometime, is when that happened, I guess, maybe a little bit earlier. I think it was, yeah, maybe like 2010, or maybe I'm misremembering when it was. I'm misremembering when it was when it was when. was. I know it was, yeah, I was either in my senior year of college or just graduated. Okay. So, yeah, I just remember everyone was photoshopping him into everything. And I just remember, so I had a Tumblr then. So that must have been at least 2011. It was grad schoolish around times. So, yeah. And another thing I've learned being on the privacy and confidentiality task force that we're working on trying to just find out.

things about the data that we have on users is that all of our security cameras are managed by campus police. Same with, yeah, UCLA. That's actually came up very recently in that I think that they didn't have unfettered access before and now they're going to have it, something along those lines. Well, they choose the placement and everything at my university. So that was, I guess, kind of a thing between the building managers and in the library and the police. It was kind of like a back and forth about disagreeing about where they should be placed.

And then, of course, because we were just trying to find out how long do they keep records and stuff, just so we can tell our patrons, just so they know. Because there's a lot of things that I imagine we're not going to be able to do anything about, like certain records, like fee records we have to keep because if someone pays off their fee, they need, that has to go to the Bursorses office. So we have to keep it a certain amount of time. So, I mean, it would be easier. We could get rid of that if we got rid of fees, but that's a different discussion, I guess. No, and I mean, those are some of the same concerns that I've heard around the self-service model that San Monaco Public Library and other institutions have put in places.

Like, what information is being captured? What is going to the third-party vendor, Billyoteca, like how long do they store this information? When I last looked for it, it was nearly impossible to find any concrete information. about that. They did, the library did say that there was like an additional agreement that patrons would have to sign to use the self-service model. But I don't think it got into those kind of specifics. So if we wanted to tie this into CIS, how would it be go about it?

We would say something like, you know, the, the library is sort of trying to provide service during the middle of COVID because it's trying to act as like a social safety net of last resort, I think was something that you had in your paper. And so I was thinking it's a social safety net of last resort, but it's also a social safety net of last resort to get you back into the system to like make sure you have internet access to get a job to make sure you have the ability to go online and book your vaccine appointment to, you know, I saw someone mention, I think it was in that library piece that was going around that people were saying was actually pretty good. It was talking about like lawyers and clients using the study rooms

that they could lock to do mobile hearings and stuff like that. So yeah, I guess this is also something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the sort of changing roles that the public libraries are playing as infrastructure. and how it's not necessarily a bad thing in some ways for the library kind of not necessarily focus, but I guess purpose or something function to expand. I think the issue is that it's happening a lot of times because there are no alternatives and libraries are doing it with, you know, shoestring budgets. And it's become a matter of necessity rather than one that libraries,

and library workers feel empowered to support or facilitate. I don't know. I'm still kind of working through it in my head. I didn't phrase that super well. Yeah, like we're a stopgap measure instead of it being like a purposeful thought-out sort of approach to how it's actually addressing community needs. Instead, it's just completely reactionary, which is what the entire pandemic has just been. so it's exhausting. Yeah, absolutely.

Instead of, you know, being proactive in responding or, like, you know, shaping community need or being shaped by community need, it's all just very reactive and, like, last minute and piecemeal. Yeah. Yeah, I think about that kind of thing, too, talking about infrastructure is how much tech is kind of like that, too. Like, people talk about innovation when most of the time, a lot of that is just, just a reaction to something else that has happened, like, come down the line. And I think, too, like, there's a lot of people who don't understand the infrastructure needs of tech. So, especially when it comes to library stuff, too, it's, yeah, there's a lot of give and take there. And yeah, that's an interesting question.

Yeah, no, and I think that that's why CIS can be so helpful is, like, is really just bringing forward the just general maintenance work that has to go into any sort of infrastructure. I mean, like the internet, for example, you know, it's always like, oh, Web 3.0 is like the new thing, but Web 2.0 is still hardly working. I know. And like, you know, just the general physical infrastructure for a lot of this is either like actively killing the planet or falling apart. And it's like most like, open source software that like is the backbone of most things we use are maintained by like a dude in like a hut somewhere who's like really into Linux and like what if he gets a cold

the the log for j like vulnerability that recently came out was pretty much that it was being maintained by like three guys who did like this project for Apache and i'm pretty certain that it was all volunteer work but their project had been soaked up into so many other like other things that when it broke, it just caused this like domino effect. And yeah, it was like three dudes maintaining this, this library. And thinking of that with regards to like infrastructure, it's like what Miriam said about how like anytime you see a supply chain issue, like any time you go to a store right now and see something not there, that's not a supply chain issue. That's someone who is sick or not able to do their job.

And I feel like people think that tech just kind of exists and forget the human labor that goes into it. So it's the same thing. Like if there's something that is affecting the people who maintain this infrastructure or who do the labor for it or who create it or anything, then it's, yeah, just like you said, this awful domino effect that infects like the entire world, basically. Yeah, so. And then there were like sharks eating the internet

in the ocean or something at one point. So there's that too. Yeah, I just grabbed the XKCD comic. I'll make that the episode art. I love for dependency. Oh, yeah. Those sharks are comrades. I want them to succeed.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like people got a taste of that kind of when Facebook had that meltdown. And, you know, not so much. on our end here in the United States, it was more of just, like, funny. But the fact that it also took down WhatsApp, like, affected the entire world in just insane ways that I think people hadn't really thought about before in a lot of ways. So. Yeah, because, like, most people around the world, like, that's their primary way of messaging people. Like, they don't use, like, I message or texting. They use WhatsApp. So it's like the whole world just couldn't talk to each other for, like, a day.

Yeah, I've been learning some stuff about Web 3 because they have to say Web 3 because Web 3.0 is already a thing. So the crypto thing is Web 3 because they didn't get the NFT on Web 3.0 so they can't use it. But a lot of like the infrastructure behind it is is like more centralized because there's only so many platforms to actually use the decentralized part. and the decentralization is just decentralized ledgers, but it doesn't matter if it's decentralized ledger because you still have the exact same social relations. So it just is to do the exact same things that are done by smart contracts

that could be done by a PDF contract. And it has all the same stuff. Did you read the Moxie Marlins spike piece that was pretty much that? Yeah, talking about how open sea and cryptos. wallets and stuff, it just, it all comes to the same exact choke points. So how can you call it decentralized? Yeah. And those DAOs are also, they're not decentralized, they're not autonomous, and they're not organizations. So it's my new Holy Roman Empire joke. But yeah, I, I,

does sound really cool. Like, it sounds like a thing like anarchists would be really into, but they don't actually work because you can buy tokens. So then it's just people who are already millionaires come in and dominate any new platform. So I listen to a whole... Yeah, it's got the libertarianism, but then it forgets the libertarian socialism that is what anarchism is. I listened to an hour and a half about the bored apes today,

like specifically about... Yeah. I know, I think it's tech won't save us. That's a good one, yeah. A great podcast shout out to them. I would love to get them on. But they have a really good episode about, like, crypto and that whole, like, techno-utopianism,

like libertarian idea of crypto and just breaking down how it doesn't work like that at all. It's very good. Like as a like a digital tech infrastructure thing as well, thinking about how things are centralized or decentralized or decentralized or not and how that works and how that extends beyond just infrastructure but also policy and how things like move through the system and everything. It's quite good. And there's there's a connection to the book.

The Promise of Access, which I've been very slowly working my way through. I'm going to finish it, and I'm going to try and reach up to the author and have them on. But a lot of it is how, what I was saying earlier about libraries trying to get you back into the system again. So that's what the whole book, The Promise of Access is about. It's like, Learn to Code. It talks a lot about, like, this program in Washington, D.C. That was aimed at, like, getting people into a Learn to Code thing. And like, oh, if you just learned word, you could get a better job.

Yeah. And it didn't address like the housing market in D.C. The fact that, you know, D.C. is all kinds of fucked up because of like what goes on in D.C. So like housing and your government isn't really like a real government. Like it doesn't address any of that. It's just like learn to code. So the whole promise of access book is really good. And I really want to dive into it.

Even if we can't get the author on, we'll just do a book club episode or something. Yeah, that's one that's on my unending reading list to really dive into. Just because, yeah, I don't know, the idea of libraries functioning to sort of like recuperate and reintegrate like broken elements of a society or people that are deemed, you know, I guess outside the norm or unemployable or things like that. I've been thinking a lot about the role that libraries played in, like, citizenship and, like, creating, like, national identity and the Americanization process of immigrants. And that's something that, you know, I think is becoming much more of a conversation in the field. But, yeah, I don't know. It's a tricky one to kind of grapple with, both as, like, a scholar and a practitioner. you know, being complicit in these kinds of things.

But at the same time, like, people do need these services because we live under capitalism and we have, you know, got to make money and feed ourselves. And yeah. Yeah, I did want to pivot to talking about good things because you said there is a positive view of public libraries because of social maintenance and repair work. So it is a safety net.

of last resort. And it can also, you know, it can serve as a model for a better world. That's, you know, I want to do an episode on the concept of library socialism, which I think is kind of weird as someone who is a librarian. And it seems to be mostly talked about by people who aren't. But it is a really interesting thing because they're like, this is how you can take public goods and talk about them in ways that are different in terms of collective ownership and what do we need to own and how do we build community and stuff like that. But even as public libraries exist now, they do have space for creating community, have space for programming.

That physical space is really important. Plus, the informational infrastructure is really important. So, you know, we're not just dunking on our own field and saying it's pointless, because I think we would just leave if we thought it was all pointless. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, this, I think is these kinds of critiques are something that folks are doing out of love for the field, wanting it to be better, wanting our institutions and our infrastructures to be better, you know, having a vision of a, just a better future than what is currently being

offered to us. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think of the sort of difficulty of working in these institutions and, you know, having these impulses or opportunities to do good for communities and do programming that's needed, offering physical space for groups and things like that. But at the same time, it's hard to feel like it's actually changing anything if the kind of structural level issues are still there. But I don't know.

I just, it's still great to see things like, I don't know if you guys saw that Jeannie Austin and San Francisco Public Library got a Mellon Grant awarded today. It's like $2 million to, work more on their jail and reentry services and like incarcerated patrons work. So that's really exciting. And it just, it's great to,

to hear about that kind of stuff happening because that feels like a potentially really like transformative, like aspect of public libraries and library work in general. So. No, it's awesome. I didn't see that today. Yeah. Actually, well,

Jeannie was actually just doing a colloquium talk at, uh, or over Zoom for, my department a couple hours ago. So, yeah, it was fun. I kind of a busy afternoon, so I wasn't really online. So maybe that's it. Yeah. Friend of the pod, Gene Austen.

That's awesome when they came on. The other paper you sent me had to do with, like, liberal democracy's limitations and the idea of public things. And we've kind of been talking about this, the whole treating infrastructure as a relationship and a relation, which is kind of hard to think about because we think of infrastructure as a thing, the same way that we think about capital as a thing

when we know it's a relation. And it's really hard to not see capital as just things. So that's kind of why the whole field of economics is just like garbage most of the time because everyone who works in neoclassical economics just thinks of capitalist things. That's one reason I like Donna Haraway, her like a Thuleu seen stuff so much because it forces you to think about things as relationships

instead of it's like very like against the commodity like it forces you to not view things as like commodity fetishism it's yeah it's very similar yeah donna hair was great I love her work but yeah that I mean that paper was for actually this really wonderful seminar that I was in last quarter that was called being vulnerable and we talked to about sovereignty and vulnerability and read a lot like Black Panthers, Foucault, Bonnie Honig, obviously a lot of Judah the Fettler, things like that. And so that paper was really kind of just me taking issue with Bonnie Honig's, you know, liberal democracy is like the ideal and the way that she characterized public things as like discrete objects, which was

interesting to me because there were times when she would acknowledge the sort of like relational nature or like damaging social reproduction of certain elements of public infrastructure, but then just sort of skip right past it. Yeah. Yeah, she even used the example of, you know, public libraries and like white supremacy and stuff like that. And I was like, oh, yes, keep going. And then it just didn't really happen. So yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's kind of like when you get someone who like has read marks but hasn't sunk in kind of, but they've heard summaries of marks so they know to say something, but then it hasn't transformed every way that they're thinking about something or

it doesn't provide a new level of analysis. So you've got like, oh, there's commodity fetishism, but then not really going into like why that happens, what it means to have commodity fetishism, to imbue something with extra meaning that doesn't have. Yeah. Yeah. And I, also that also kind of led me down the path of thinking about, I guess, foundational violence. Joan Coxius is that term to refer to like physical and symbolic violence or obliteration of a people or culture or society. And just thinking about how public libraries can function

as an infrastructural element of foundational violence in the U.S. in terms of, terms of, I guess if you want to say like epistemic justice or knowledge organization and things like that. So that was something I hadn't really like brought those two things together before. And something I want to kind of keep working through and think about a little bit more. Yeah, definitely. I definitely don't miss being in grad school. But this is the second episode we based off a grad school paper. So I've like been reading it again and just being like, okay, yeah, I can see like,

I remember how this feels to write these. It was funny reading back through them because I was like, I don't remember writing this at all. You never did. Out of my head onto the computer screen, completely erased. But no, it's nice to kind of go back and reread old stuff, especially in the context of work that I have to do this quarter. And be like, oh, yeah, that was actually a really helpful framework or idea or thinker or

something like that. Oh. Yeah, there's a ton of stuff. I've blown through and just don't really remember it anymore. I guess we should be wrapping up. I need to figure out how to put a bill on this because I really didn't plan an ending, which is another problem I have with writing papers, is I never can do the conclusion until the very end.

I just do a bunch of rhetorical questions. Or saying what I would like to explore further in the future is. Or ending with something kind of saucy. It doesn't mean anything. That's my story. I feel like the specter that has been kind of haunting this conversation that we haven't really talked about in detail is neoliberalism in public libraries. But I think that that's just been like the, you know, I try and be explicit about it, but I think it's a hugely motivating factor in a lot of the research that I do as well as like organizing and things like that outside of academia. Yeah. Just want to acknowledge that.

Yeah. And that like neoliberalism, of course, is a systematic structure, but is also upheld and, like, reinforced by the people working in libraries as well. Like, again, the people are part of this infrastructure of oppression and neoliberalism. Yeah. When we had Sam on, we talked about it as a totalizing force where you can try and critique. it, but you're inside of it, and that's the dialectic. Yeah. Yeah, I remember what I was going to ask about earlier, which is, you know, talking about, like, we've got the concept of vocational law. We know, like, a lot of librarians have kind of learned about it.

If there's something that library workers could learn about how to think about infrastructure, if that would really be a benefit to them in terms of how they relate to the infrastructure that they're in. So thinking of infrastructure is relationships. Is that really something like we should make a priority of other library workers learning about? I think for me, at least what I would probably find the most helpful would be more to interrogate, like, our roles in social reproduction. And actually, no, I think thinking about infrastructure is helpful to in repair work in the context of always being mindful that, like, infrastructure can be a site of violence. violence, it tends to have more positive connotations, I think, a lot of the time, but that doesn't

mean that it's always a positive thing. So I guess just, yeah, having that awareness is helpful. Yeah. Are there any, like, particular papers or anything? You would say we're, are a good place to start? Yes. Well, yours. Yeah. I don't publish this anywhere.

I have not published it. I have thought about it, but I'm also just like in the middle of writing a conference paper right now and some other stuff. And so it's kind of back for her. But I would say that Shannon Maddern's piece, maintenance, and care that was in Places Journal in 2018 is like a really pretty straightforward and interesting read. And she cites a lot of the people that I also said in my paper. And I can, okay, yeah, cool. Find in the link. Yeah, so that was, I think that's probably the best introduction. And it's not like super academic jargony or anything like that. I don't know. I find Shannon's work really compelling and generally a pretty fun read. In terms of, I guess, sort of praxis and things that we can actually be doing,

My go-to answer is always going to be organizing because as we've, you know, talked about it a little bit earlier, having strong union and workplace protections is really, I think, one of the best ways that we can start to enact changes that we want to see. He's here. He's ever present. Yeah, I think that sounds good. And I've got the matter and paper because I had your paper open another screen. So I just went to the references and got.

it. So if there's nothing else left, I think we can wrap up. Yeah, I don't think I really really have anything else. I feel like we covered a lot. Yeah, this is great. I totally like, yeah, I love when we have guests on that change how I think about like life. Like not just librarianship, I'm like, whoa, okay. Yeah, no, finding out that CIS was an actual field was kind of like a light bulb moment. for me. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just really big into like networks and relations lately.

So this is like. Oh, yeah. Right up the alley. I was like, oh, hell yeah. Perfect. Yeah. Okay. Well, then.

Good night.