librarypunk - 053 - Library Socialism feat. Srsly Wrong

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

We’re talking about library socialism and the basic ideas that go into it such as usufruct, irreducible minimum, and what sex toys are best for circulating collections.   https://twitter.com/SrslyWrong  Episodes https://srslywrong.com/podcast/189-library-socialism-usufruct/ https://srslywrong.com/podcast/196-library-socialism-the-irreducible-minimum/ https://srslywrong.com/podcast/200-complementarity/ https://srslywrong.com/podcast/236-talking-to-ironweeds-about-library-socialism-and-bein-sweetie-pie/  Means TV show: Papa and Boy, June-July 2022.  Media mentioned:  Library Socialism: a utopian vision of a sustaniable, luxuriant future of circulating abundance  Moral Rights Basics. 

This week's episode is brought to you by The Letter Thorn. Bring it back. I'm Justin. I'm a Skalcom librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they then. My name is Jay.

I am a metadata and discovery librarian at an academic library and my pronouns are he him. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yes, hello. My name is Sean Villiers from the Seriously Wrong podcast and my pronouns are he him. Welcome. That's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

We're very excited to have you on. Yeah. I'm very excited to be here. Yeah, I was reading through the notes last night and was like, this can't be just one episode, right? There's too much here to talk about. Someone engaged with the notes. It's awesome. Yeah, that is a first.

Someone's written and the notes. That much. Because sometimes people will engage with them or be like, oh, yeah, I looked it over or, like, put things in there. But, like, we had a dialogue, a conversation. We had a dialogue, a conversation. It was good. Right. Yeah, well, I find this stuff really fascinating and I've thought a lot about sort of stuff around the sphere of like what we call on our show Library Socialism and then being able to sort of engage in the critical radical librarian ideas around it. It's like it's exciting for me. So I couldn't resist writing a lot. Oh, yeah. No, I loved all of it because, yeah, it's like is the idea of Library socialism the idea of library that most people have? have that's kind of romanticized, right?

Even though I love the idea. I'm like, yeah. Yeah, but let's do plugs up front. So you already mentioned the Seriously Wrong podcast. What is it about? Seriously Wrong. It's a podcast we started like, oh, eight years ago now. And it's a research-based utopian comedy podcast.

We do a mixture between conversations, conversations with guests, and we also do sketch comedy that's mostly improvised. So we try to play off absurd, ironic explorations of the same ideas and try to make something that's bigger than the sum of its parts where you can have a conversation and then you can enter an ironic space with it and explore ideas from different angles. And so, yeah, it's a research-based utopian comedy podcast to single-line it. And it's my favorite thing to do. I love making the show. That is a hell of a sentence. Research-based utopian, say it again?

A research-based utopian comedy podcast. We could even, I could go further. It's revolutionary, scientific. It is improvisational. It is dynamic. I don't know. Yeah, I've been loving, listening to it to prepare for this episode. It's been really good.

I really like the way you'll build on your idea. including putting comedy. That's great. Everyone who's listening to our episode, go listen to their podcast. It's really nice. I can't believe those sketches are improv. Those are, do you like have to edit them down a lot? Are you guys just used to riffing off each other for eight years?

Yeah, we do a lot of editing. A sketch will usually be reduced in size by, say, 40 to 50% with the gaps and stuff. and often also going into a sketch, we'll sort of brainstorm ahead of time, like, what is the gag here? Like, what are we building out of here? What's our starting point? But often it will evolve through the process of going back and forth. And yeah, Aaron and I, Aaron's my co-host. We do have a good rapport. We've been doing this a really long time. And I've got a huge background in improv. I've been doing it since I was like 12. And Aaron started doing it for the show and really picked up on it. So, yeah, I'd say it's about maybe 80, 90% improv in terms of like the comedy. It's very rare that we have. a punchline in mind. It's more like we have the bit in mind. Like, we're going to argue about

X, Y, and Z and expose this irony about politics. I enjoyed the last one on drama, internet drama, and Mr. T. Spiller, the guidance counselor, who keeps telling all the student secrets. Oh, yeah, thanks. Yeah, that actually, yeah, that was, we were, there was a moment we were sort of struggling with, like, how we could explore this, this concept of drama, which is a really, like commonsensical idea. But it's really, in practice, there's a lot of like detail and contradictions within it. But yeah, I think one of us came up with the idea of like a guidance counselor that is not a good repository of children's secrets and because they really like gossip and drama.

And it was just too funny once we started playing around with it. That's awesome. In the first library socialism episode, I loved the like breakdown of Rangtopia. where the president or the leader or whatever totally like sells out and and everything. It's like, oh, no, by doing what they want us to do, we're actually winning because it's like 4D chess or something. I thought that was really funny. Yeah, that's sort of hypocrisy is just, I mean, it's helpful in radical left politics. It's really helpful that there's something inherently funny about like sort of liberal double

dealing and like rhetorical excuses for doing exactly which yeah we play with that stuff a lot. So did you want to do an introduction to library socialism at the base level and sort of introduce the groundwork concepts because I imagine we have one or two listeners who are probably screaming at their phones right now just at the idea of library socialism. Hi, Steve. Well, I mean, it does sound like if you work in libraries, And we've talked a lot about like liberal ideology in libraries and democratic discourse in libraries. And so we're always very critical of like romanticizing the idea of libraries.

It's kind of one of our major things is trying to undermine most of the liberal ideology in the field. And I think that also has made us little jaded to any kind of utopian thinking about libraries. But it's actually important to do. And that's why we always had. We used to have the fully automated luxury, gay-based communism. Gay-based communism. Yeah, and then Grimes ruined. Which we now just turned into our action-oriented question.

It's all boring now. Yeah, well, Grimes ruined the joke. So. She did. Fucking Elon Musk. It's for God. Yeah, so library socialism, it's something we first started sort of describing in 2018 or 2019. And basically what we're attempting to do with it is describe,

a counter-hegemony, a set of ideas, a utopian set of ideas that can be used to challenge neoliberalism, capitalist realism, and so on, to help people imagine a society that is radically different than our own, a society that people would actually want to live in. And we think that's an important thing to imagine the future that you want to be a part of as part of the process of creating it. And where it came from was, I was thinking about social ecologist Murray Bookchin talks about how the ecological crisis is a social crisis, that the ecological crisis that we face is a result of social relations. It's the sort of like brutal hierarchy of society that creates a situation where a small amount of people are making decisions that affect the entire

biosphere and so on. So I was sort of thinking about that. And so we have these like two big crises and both caused by that sort of, you know, neoliberal ideology, this sort of everything must be markets, private property is natural and so on. And it really clicked that the principle of usufruct, so a property relationship where you can use things and you can benefit from them, but you're not allowed to destroy it. It's not private property. It's a sort of commons property. It's something that can address both of those issues at once because under the current system, we have too many resource throughputs causing an ecological crisis and people don't get what they need at the same time. So we're overproducing and underproducing and under

delivering under the current system. So we were sort of thinking about post-scarcity and what it would mean to have a society where everyone was able to get what they need. And that circulating property of Eusefructian property relations really resonated with us. And the natural metaphor that we leaned into on that was libraries, because libraries already exist and they function on this same logic that we share books. Everyone gets a chance to read the book. No one's allowed to destroy the book. And, you know, we don't hoard books. We share them and so on. So that's the basic idea of library socialism is that we can address the ecological crisis and the social crisis through changing property relations to a usufructian one along the lines of the public library. And in practice, public libraries are very complex. They exist in the real world. They're not a perfectly democratic, utopian thing in every instance. Totally want to acknowledge that. But it is. it is a good intuition pump. I think for the majority of people, libraries are a very popular institution when you compare them to other institutions. In society, there's a lot of institutional

distrust, but libraries people still like. So without abridging our critique of libraries as they actually exist, I think they can be a useful intuition pump for creating that counter-hegemonic narrative for what are we actually searching for when we want to radically recreate society. May I ask a clarifying question? Absolutely. So I feel like this is something that I want to make sure I'm understanding correctly before we go on. And I'm sure that like, oh, if I'm having this question, I'm sure other people who might be listening are,

am I correct in thinking that the library sort of, it's both a metaphor for how we relate to each other and to information. and by information I also include objects in that but that it's a metaphor and like a guide for relation, but also physically like seed libraries or you can loan out a

like a fishing pole at a lot of public libraries now. Is it both like metaphorical and also actual plan for lending out objects or is it one or the other? Yeah, I'd say that there's

We use the library metaphor in a few different ways, but I think in a very literal sense, when we talk about stuff like seed libraries, tool libraries, and stuff like that, and whether that's through the public library system or not, these are things that we want to build on that we see ecological and social potential in, and that those sort of relationships, those sort of social relationships around property and information, are things that we want to spread to the whole of society. Instead of having a society governed by markets and private property, we want to have a society that is governed by commons and usufructian property relationships.

So the whole world of library, in a sense, but better. And so that the library metaphor could even happen between like two people and not necessarily all through a central kind of governing, or not governing, but like if I have something and another person has something, that sort of metaphorical thinking of the library, well, also there could be a literal example. Is that? Totally. Yeah. It applies well in that context. you can see how that sort of relationship generates a type of abundance that if you're if I'm hoarding something all the time when I'm not using it is not creating anything of value to anyone

but if we start to share something then it generates an abundance there's sort of an almost economic truth to that that there's more abundance as a result so that latent abundance exists within social property relations and I see it we see it as a means that if we can pull on that, we can create movement towards a better society that uses that beneficial relationship to do so. So it's got a material basis. Yeah, I think a thing I was falling into, and I think, Justin, I think what you were getting at when we were talking last night, is what I was falling into was thinking that all of this sort of would inherently go through like a library kind of system and not also between individuals or like outside of a traditional

structure. And I feel like maybe other people listening might have falling into the idea of like, oh, library socialism. So it'll just be like a big library and everything goes in and out through the library instead of it also sort of describing social relations. Well, and you, if you're having trouble getting from here to there, one thing I kept thinking about was like when you go to a park currently you can usually get like a canoe or a kayak or something and you don't really have to like check it out. You just like go up and pay the $10 or whatever and then you just go tell the dude, oh, I paid the $10. You can radio the guy and tell them that I paid it. Instead of paying the $10, you're just doing that.

So you go to the park, the kayaks are there and you just like take them out and, you know, if it gets destroyed, you report it to the parks department or whatever or the guy at the park. So you don't have to think of these in terms of like the way we think of libraries where it's like the public library has a tool shed now and it has a seed library and it has a cooking pan library and it has a ukulele library. These are all real things that I've seen in public libraries. There's probably some other ones. Board games are tough though because you lose pieces. I know in a music libraries they loan out iPads a lot and Bluetooth foot pedals for turning sheet music. Yeah, tech is always a huge.

one. Did you want to mention some of the other concepts in library socialism, like complementarity and the irreducible minimum? Yeah. So I think it's important when we're imagining a post-capitalist society that we try to define qualitatively, like what makes up capitalism. Because often capitalism is used as a sort of catch-all word where no matter what you're proposing is like, oh, capitalism always sort of finds a way to outsmart us. And I think that actually comes from not defining capitalism very well. So we wanted to pin down qualitative features of a post-capitalist

world, and so we did that. We took, again, a page from Murray Bookshin's book here. So I define the qualitative features that we need to pass in order to move beyond capitalism would be a property system based on abuses.

So it's a property system based on Roman slave law originally. It's an authoritarian property system, which gives people the right to hoard and definitely, and gives them the right to destroy the things that they own. There is also another feature would be sort of proletarianization, which is workers being forced to sell their labor in order to survive. And thirdly, hierarchical realism, this idea that there's commanders and there's commanded, there's bosshood, there's landlords, there's rulers, and so on. So library socialism

poses alternatives to all three of these things when imagining a post-capitalist society, the first of which is that post-capitalist property relations called Eusefruct, which is we circulate. I think the term Cory Docterow described it as circulating abundance, something like that. I love him. He's great. Yeah, he is. And he was someone who picked up on the library socialism thing like really early and wrote it in better words than we used. And I was like, oh, yeah, fuck yeah. Yeah, he's a huge library supporter. He's awesome.

So there's Eusefruct. Then there's the irreducible minimum, which is the opposition to that needing to sell your labor in order to survive. In an ideal utopian society, we don't want to exploit and coerce people into doing work by threatening to deprive them, threatening to starve them, make them homeless, and so on. So the irreducible minimum is just another way of saying, you know, it's been described as like basic income or basic outcome or universal basic services. Anything in that sphere is more or less the irreducible minimum, which is a basic amount that you can be guaranteed. to have access to whether or not you're working, whether or not you're meeting someone else's productivity demands and so on. So that's one of the principles of, again, a qualitative feature of a post-capitalist library socialist society. And the third is complementarity, which all these

things are kind of ideological and material. They're ideas that have material impacts in practice, like our idea of private property is an idea about what property is, but it affects the way that we relate to each other and the way that we act. But this third one, Complementarity is sort of the most, it's material, but it's very ideological in a sense. It's recognizing that rankings of deprivation, command and control rulership, disenfranchisement, these things are social constructions that are imaginary. And in reality, people, there's a social complementarity that everyone is different. Everyone knows something that other people don't.

Everyone's capable of things that other people aren't capable of. And we don't need to rank people and exclude people, disenfranchise people, make commanders and commanded. Instead, these differences are generative. There's not only compatible differences amongst people, but the differences amongst people are generative. They create good outcomes when we're able to sort of work together in ways that meet everyone's strengths. So what this means politically in practice is that we need to have an integrated, complex, layered, and directly democratic society that also recognizes specialization, expertise, and so on. That's a really complicated, open-ended thing.

But I think that is the same way that we, under the current system, we have commanded control, rulership, and bosshood. Instead, we should have a society where people are a directly democratic society where everyone can participate and everyone is valued. Yeah, so with that last bit, would you say that that would be a way of recognizing expertise and maybe even authority about something, but without hierarchy,

because that was something we talked about in the episode on, what was it, the library value assessment or whatever that we did with Donna and Dorothea, where they were sort of framing a library as sort of like a place with expertise. And so, like, recognizing that, yes, some people do know things that other people don't. but in a library socialist system, you could have that sort of expertise, but without it, like, creating hierarchical imbalances and stuff. Am I understanding that correctly? Yeah, totally.

So, yeah, like, I would conceptualize of hierarchy in this context as being a social relationship of command and control, especially with recourse the punishment. And expertise and hierarchy in that sense are not synonymous, although they're sometimes treated that way. just because I know more about something than you doesn't mean that I get to punish you and order you around and so on. And also, I would recognize that even if I know more about something than you, you probably know more about something than me. And if we're able to find ways to work together in a dynamic and complementary way, we'd both benefit from it or we'd all benefit from it. And Maria Tia O'Cardy talks about that in her book, Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction. It's very good. I imagine if you do the thing where you are removing all barriers to simple living so the irreducible minimum, that removes a lot of coercive ability in society because you can't take someone's job away and they're going to starve, which also means that the main cognitive shift that has to happen is sort of the thing that conservatives always talk about.

It's like, well, what if someone just wants to sit at home and smoke weed all day? you have to be okay with someone choosing to do that. There could be people who do that. You just have to understand people won't do that because most people would get bored and would want to contribute to their community. Yeah, like in the, was the irreducible minimum episode of the Library of Socialism Trilogy. I was leaving the grocery store today when I got to the part about you talking about how like every single thing a human being has ever done ever is.

them trying to meet some form of need where a need isn't just, if I don't get this, I will die. It's, you know, you might drink coffee because you have a need for energy in the morning. Or you might reach out to a friend because you have a need for like companionship, that kind of thing. Yeah, we actually, we've got a sketch and I think it's episode 100, which is called Full Utopia World Peace, where we really explore the guy who does drugs and masturbates all day in a utopian society. and what it would really mean. But yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, we can't want to control people that much. And I think people do have drives that are beyond just like pure sort of solipsistic pleasure-seeking.

People want to be esteemed. They want to be useful. They want to be part of something. And if anything, I think the coercive structures of society that don't meet people's basic needs prevent people from seeking that out because they're looking for escapism because they feel beat down by everything. I mean, that's my experience with working in the economy. Yeah. And it also creates a lot of disability, which means people are also less able to take part in society. So, you know, whenever people have a chance to rest now, they kind of do nothing because they're exhausted or they're injured

or they're tired in some way. So they can't actually do anything outside of their working hours. And we get mad about people wasting their time. It's like, well, because they're exhausted and they've Got mental illnesses and they've got, you know, post-traumatic stress. You know, there's tons of things that are disabilities brought on by the way we live. Yeah, and we miss out on so much from each other. Like there's so much, like there's that Stephen Jay Gould quote where he says, I don't care about the weight of Einstein's brain. I just care that there's equal brains and factories and sweatshops. And that's sort of a butchering of it. But the basic premise is like there's an incredible amount of untapped human potential, things that would enrich all of

lives that we miss out on because people are put into these coercive situations instead of being able to explore what they would want to be, what they could be if they were self-directed, if they had the time and energy and access to resources to attempt to do what they would really want to do if they were given the time and place to do so. So yeah, we all miss out as a result of this, even people who are advantaged under the current system. And that's another thing about library socialism in terms of vision is, I think that in a very real way, this utopian society proposes something that could make us all richer than rich. So the rich under our current society, they are still limited by living in a society where other people aren't achieving their

potential, where musicians aren't making their great works because they're too busy, you know, bagging groceries or whatever. And, you know, we talk about the pirate bay and information freedom and how there's access to music and culture and stuff is very valuable and missing out in this current system. Even if you're the richest person in the world, you do not have access to the total human library. But there is a real possibility in a library socialist society that every person can have total access to the full human library, including works that wouldn't otherwise be written

because people weren't free. Hell yeah. It's my response to that. I'm a big like champagne anarchist, so I'm like, yes, let me have all of the music of the books forever. That's also important in a utopian society. Yeah, not just bread, but roses as well. Yes, thank you. I wanted to have some fun with things that people might think of in terms of what works well

with collective usufructian relations and what might not. And I was trying to dig historically onto things that people historically do not share for whatever reason. and the one we always kind of joke about, and we've done it several times in the podcast, but it's like sex toy circulating collection. But historically people... Where I'm always like very pro it. Yeah, I mean, it's funny to advocate for

and I'm not going to stop advocating for it. But historically, people don't like pass them down. Like, they don't get passed down through families, even though other things we consider gross are. You don't have an heirloom. This is my grandfather's dildo. Right, but you would get your grandfather's like mercury pills or cadmium pills that he ate and shit and dug out of his shit and you would take it again.

Like things that we find really gross and like bodily. But for some reason, sex toys have just historically never been that sort of thing. Maybe because of taboo, I doubt it's because of taboo, especially in the Middle Ages. We should ask Bree. I would like to think maybe people get buried with them. Like warriors. Like in Egypt where they would like mummify their cats and shit, like mummify. like dildos in buttlach.

So you can use them in Vala. Yes. I don't remember, yes. I don't remember where I read this, but I remember reading something about like a sailor who was gone for months and months at a time having, I think it was whalebone or ivory, literally had a recreation of his erect dick carved and sent to his wife. And like, that's something that's very unique and special. And that's very romantic, actually. Yeah, no, I thought so.

I would want to be buried with that. Nobody else gets this dick but me. Yeah, like, if the library socialism can't be like for degenerate perverts, then I wouldn't know part of it, right? Yeah, I think technically you probably could circulate. I mean, I've got sort of this fledgling hot take. I almost wrote in the doc, but I was like, I don't know. So you tell us the fledgling hot take.

There's this, I mean, this ideological construct of virginity might be seeping into our idea of whether or not dildos can be shared over a long enough period. I mean, oh, I want this pure dildo right off the assembly line. I don't want it to be sullied by other people. Is that really the society we want to create? Oh, I love this take. Maybe. Because normally we put virginity onto things that are penetrated, not things that can penetrate.

So that's fun. Usually, yeah. If you can boil it, you can share it. Yeah. Just like, you know, boil. Yeah, put in the dishwasher. I imagine it's probably material limitations in terms of like porousness and growth of microbes. The leather archives people would know how to deal with that too.

Yeah. Well, and there are a lot of really shitty sex toys out there that wouldn't last a single person's lifetime, much less multiple. Yeah. Yeah, but we do find them in like people's, you know, and we find like medieval dildos and stuff. And it's just like they don't get shared. It's very strange. But who knows? But I thought in counterpoint, you probably could share.

kink tools like spreader bars harnesses the ceiling hang thingies a vacuum latex cube silk rope rope i feel like those things yeah like stuff for shabari would probably yeah like you know they're probably you could use the rope for other things well silk rope you wouldn't want to use for tying down your tractor or whatever but you could use for other things but i think those things would make sense in a utopian society a utopian library of socialist society there are probably some objects that someone might hold on to for the entirety of their lives. And there isn't an ecological reason. It's not that we have so little dildos. We need to figure out how to share them so everyone gets their dildo time. Like there's some things that we really could legitimately

keep for a lifetime, I think, and we could make in sustainable ways. Just technically speaking. And yeah, like they're with like a lending library, you might take something out for two or three weeks and then return it. But I think in a society that's governed by these sort of of Eusefructian relationships, legitimately, a person could take out a computer and have it be their personal computer for decades and stuff. And that's not taking from someone else in that sense. So I think the same would apply for those. Yeah, I think when people hear like destruction of private property, they're like, yeah, I can't own anything and I can't keep anything. And I I think that's misunderstanding what, like, we're talking about here.

Yeah. Well, especially for stuff you don't use that often, like power tools. Like, I've got all this stuff I'm buying because I've got to work on the house. And it's like, I'm not going to use any of this shit again. Like, I've got, like, a big paint roller. Like, it's just going to sit in a closet once I'm done painting. Yeah, and there's so much stuff in people's closets that they just keep out of, like, embarrassment, like, knowing that they.

knowing that they basically procured this thing into existence. And then it sits in their closet for years or decades, gathering dust. And every time they look at it, they have this like tinge of embarrassment, like, oh, I don't really need this, but I don't know what to do with it. So that unpleasant feeling would be completely abolished under Library of Socialism. Yeah. There's a ton of, like, like right now I'm trying to kill the lawn. So I'm trying to kill all the grass.

But it would really be easier if I had a weed whacker for one day so that I, I could cut everything low and then spray the grass killer first. But I don't know who has a weed whacker. You can rent those out from like Home Depot, right? Because you can do lawnmowers. I think there's like little shops somewhere. I'm going to have to find one or just hire a lawn service one day, has someone come by.

But, you know, because I've totally rented out lawnmowers before. Yeah. It's just something I wish I could just go to the library and grab a wheat whacker. For sure. It would be a lot easier. Instead of finding out where I have to go and like how much I have to pay and when I have to get it back to them. My library does the like the sun lamps in the winter.

The sad lamps? Yeah, the sad lamps so that the students don't, they get to press and stuff. But yeah, we, I mean, even like employees can can take those out too. Yeah, there's a lot of things that work well collectively that are like big things. I thought about like fridges, laundry machines. We have laundromats. Ice makers, the little tiny personal ones, they suck and they break and they're awful. But those big industrial ones, you can fix them.

Easy. They're really easy to fix. They last forever. When I was a kid and we had a lot of hurricanes, my grandfather worked at the REA, the rural electrification administration. And so that's like a New Deal era thing. And they had tons of these big ice makers and they would have to go and lock them so that people weren't going.

there to get the ice because it was like also next like all the power tools and stuff. They didn't want people like wandering around those buildings at a power station. But like. That's fair. Yeah. It was to basically keep people from coming on on the premises. But it was also like people do need ice and it is free ice. And the government paid for the ice.

That's our taxes paid for the ice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of things like that that work really well, I think, at like a community level where you can get a benefit for, like, rather than all 20 people on a city block having this crappy little breaking ice machine or whatever that you have one that you have to walk up the street to use, but it's more repairable, long term and so on. And there's a lot of things that work that way. Like we use the, on our show, we talk about the parable of the soup where you make, if everyone makes their own bowl of soup, it takes an hour.

but if one person makes soup for 20 people, it takes two hours, and it's like, where do those 18 hours come from? Well, those 18 hours come from the generative social potential of collaboration and community. And that generative social potential works on so many different levels that there's so many places where you find that when you start thinking about it. So it's a really good intuition pump, again, for thinking about what an alternative better society might look like that can replace all the hordes of capitalism in a pragmatic way. Again, it's not pure utopian dreaming. Like, there's a real mechanism here. For sure, yeah. And speaking of soup, the one thing I wrote in the notes that I thought of was communal kitchens because they seem to almost never work in practice

as a shared space when they, what they almost always turn into is sort of capitalist cafeterias, where the community will just sort of hire people. So this happened a lot in like Dutch enclaves, where they have those really tall wooden houses, and they were also brewing a lot of beer. And so people kept catching their houses on fire because everyone was brewing in their homes and cooking in their homes. And they finally outlawed kitchens and breweries

and private residences and said, you can't have a private kitchen, and you can't have a private brewery. And so they started these communal kitchens. Those were a mess. So they started cafeterias where you'd actually just go and purchase all of your meals. And also that's sort of like the rise of industrial brewing as well.

So like brewing starts getting scaled up and people aren't doing it locally anymore. But I was imagining there would be a way to do that without resorting to everyone's going out to a restaurant to eat. It's more of like this will be communal. This will be available. And there will just be people who will be assigned to do it because an anarchist concept I've been rolling around in my head a lot recently is someone was saying democracy is not an end in itself. It's what anarchists want to use. order to get their goals, right, which is like a more just society. It's a tool. Yeah. So if you make it the end of itself, you get into all these weird things like, you know, save our democracy, yada, yada.

But they said, you know, democracy is if you have someone call the meeting, they set the agenda of the meeting. If someone asks a question in a meeting, they set the terms of the answer. And people, you know, take a vote. They run a meeting. We all know this from when we run meetings. Like sometimes people just set the agenda and they go through it and people go, yeah, that sounds about right. And that sort of leadership happens, even if you have a vote on it or not. And so there's ways of sort of like assigning tasks to each other in a way that's equitable and fair and runs on consensus. That's also, you know, if no one is going to starve because they don't work in the cafeteria, you can also say it's not coercive. So I think it's where the irreducible minimum comes in.

Yeah, we've talked a little bit about restaurants on the show and how there's some really nice. nice stuff about going to a restaurant and being able to, like, sit with your friends and not worry about any of the technical stuff of making food. In any utopian society, we'd want to hold on to that, that aspect of it while getting rid of exploitative work conditions, getting rid of... It's the expertise thing again. Yeah, and there's people who, like, my dad just loves cooking. He'll cook for anyone who comes by. He's always talking about his new recipe that he figured out. And I think we can get away with quite a bit without using any sort of coercive mechanisms to start for these like cafeteria type things. There's a lot of people who would be

willing to make their vocation for a lot of the time and focus on that. And then the question is in a utopian context is like when there is hard to do work, when there is unpleasant work, when there is the, you know, the poo picker uppers and I don't know, garbage touchers or whatever, How do you distribute that work fairly in a way that people feel enfranchised in the process, and they're not coerced by the threat of deprivation to do it? And these are not easy, simple questions with really quick answers, but these are questions or frameworks that we can figure it out. I really believe we can figure this stuff out and have a much better society. I was going to say you can make any job into a job that you're proud of doing. It's just we usually tend to have classes assumptions that make people hate those jobs.

jobs even more. But like you watch a lot. That's pretty much what I was going to say. Yeah. Like I get a lot of like especially because I have ADD like doing just like boring data entry that's really repetitive. I love that shit because it's like. Yeah. So like there are people who like the boring crap jobs that other people don't like because it's stimulating to them somehow or the labor they put into it. They're proud of. Like I feel like people think that like people who envision utopian societies are ignoring the fact that there will have to be like waste management right it's always that like who's gonna be a janitor or whatnot it's like some people like

doing that or some people would be proud to do that it's not going to be like no one on earth is going to want to do that well yeah there are people who are proud to do it now exactly so you know like Like, my wife and I were actually just talking about this yesterday because we met working in a restaurant. And it was a shitty little burger joint that underpaid everybody. And they were saying, you know, like, I would have 100% stayed working there. Had I, you know, been paid decent, had the culture not been weirdly shitty, which I would argue, like, that's part of why people just bail on restaurants left and right is more the culture and the, oh, you're just a waiter, you're just a cook. Like, I've known plenty of people who would just like to put on headphones, listen to podcasts, and wash dishes all day. Like, that's not an unreasonable desire, I think.

So, yeah, you can be proud of anything if you do it well. Yeah. And give people, like, cool little uniforms, too. Just do, like, the Soviet thing. Everyone gets, like, a military-style uniform. Or the New York... I want a little hat. New York Public Sanitation Generals.

Have you seen the New York... city uniforms for the public sanitation officials. They have like generals stars on their epaulets and stuff. They look like Army generals. I want epaulets. I want epaulets. Maybe we could give them to me. We'd figure out each year, every couple of years, what are the least desirable jobs?

What people are not tending to want to do that we're having needing to figure out how we're going to get people to do it? Then those people get the general uniforms. And anytime they're nearby, you always salute them and stuff. Like they are the people that make our society work. They're doing the work that no one else wanted to do for this, you know, a three-year cycle or whatever. So, yeah, here come the maybe one year to be janitors,

but then a lot of people want to be janitors and then it's another year. It's something else. And we can get like, Ocature, like designers, like fashion houses to design the fun uniforms. Like, I want to be like a Versacee data entry person. Life dream right there right now. I'm saying it in library socialism. That's my job.

What's your job in the library socialist compound? Metadata for Versace. A podcaster. Garbage General. Yeah, I think little outfits are underrated. I think little outfits can really help make the world a better place if they're used right. Yeah, you've seen that like hemp badge, right, from the Soviet, like, hemp producers. So it's just a bunch of pot leaves and it's like hero of hemp production or whatever.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Give that to all the stoners. who grow their own. That'd be great. So let's jump into something Jay and I were talking about last night, which was a cross-cultural critique. So we were talking about closed knowledge systems, particularly like not all cultures have an all information available to all people philosophy. There are closed knowledge systems or semi-closed.

There are like intellectual property. And particularly we're talking about like indigenous materials or esoteric religious beliefs. and I was starting to think, well, the examples we're coming up with are all very world of the specific beliefs in cultures and specific places and times. It doesn't really cause a problem related to Eusefruct. So maybe it's just going down the wrong path, but I wanted to explore it anyway. Yeah, like, to me, I was thinking, like, in the metaphorical, like, this is still information that is shared. so it's not the literal physical or digital, like, lending library model, but it's still like in the metaphor of how we relate to other people and share information.

That was what I was going at in like, these are examples, but not like these are the exact things I would be concerned about, but just as like giving examples, if that makes sense. Yeah, I can imagine if we were setting up library of socialism as like a central, authoritarian rule by librarian system where all cultures are going to be subordinated to this librarian class that is going to take cultural. We all have fun outfits. Yeah. And whether you like it or not, in our fun outfits, we're going to grab everything.

I think there could be a real problem there. And I think that ultimately, you know, self-determination, cultural self-determination is a really important thing to deal with. Like, my general tendency is towards open information as a principle. I think that open information has a lot of benefits. But when thinking about, like, an integrated library socialist society where it's not centralized, it's confederated, overlapping, and so on, that, like, how a particular group wants to deal with their particular libraries is ultimately up to them to a great point.

But there would be diversity within that as well. And, like, people are going to have different positions. Right. Absolutely. So if we have this library socialist hegemony, then naturally within those spaces, there are going to be those debates happening where that openness is going to be one of the things on the table that's discussed. So I don't know, there are places where, like, library socialism isn't about ending secrets. It's not about ending privacy. It's not about making it so that anyone anywhere in the world can read the private messages of anyone else, anywhere else in the world. world, you know, like, that's, that's not the vision. And so I think there will be systems and

structures of information movement that isn't just fully open the doors to everyone. But as a general principle, I think moving in that direction has a lot of benefits, especially in places that are closed off today based on, you know, hierarchical capitalist culture and so on. Right. Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, no, that's it. Yeah, like, something I put in was like, sometimes systems are closed out of, like, defense or out of protection, and not because they wouldn't want to share those things, but because, like, oh, if I don't do this, then the harm will come to me because of police or something. And also speaking of, like, you know, communities, because it would be decentralized, could, you know, sort of decipher themselves. And obviously, a culture's not a

monolith and all that. And just one of my favorite things I've ever heard in my life. So I mention the notes and everyone who listens to podcast notes because I say it all the time, I'm Buddhist. And the copyright librarian at Harvard, Kyle Courtney, he and I are friends. He is also Buddhist. And one time at Harvard, they had a bunch of Tibetan Buddhist monks coming because Harvard has a huge library of Tibetan texts.

And one of the, and they were like scanning them and digitizing them. because like all of these people are dead who wrote them. But one of the monks got one of the texts and went, oh, I wrote this in a previous rebirth. Like that's not something that Buddhists spend much time on, but like if you were maybe a teacher or something, sometimes it's helpful to know like the lineage. And so this monk was like, oh, no, I wrote this.

And so how does copyright law in the way that we deal with it now handle cultures that have like rebirth and whatnot. Do we just say like, no, that's made up and fake. We're going to digitize it anyway. So it's like one of my favorite examples of this kind of thing ever. Because Kyle was just like, oh, well, do we have your permission to digitize it, put it online? And then they went about their merry way.

But I just love that so much. He and I want to write an article about it. Like, it's so good. Well, in the current copyright, it's not even very good at imagining that there is more than one author of a single work. Yeah, that's true, too. So it assumes sort of a single creator that is also a patriarch and is a legal person, because copyright's older than like the end of Coverture. So like, it's assuming that there's only one legal person per household, and that's the patriarch. So this would, copyright's even before Covature went away for servants in the household.

So the first people no longer covered by coverage were servants, then women, and we still have a form of it for children in our current system. And I know in the irreducible minimum episode, you're talking about copyright and intellectual property rights and royalties because of pirating music and whatnot. And I know something we kind of hold through in this podcast is that like pirating hurts corporations and not usually not individual artists. And you do speak to that a little bit with how most of the time the money's going straight to the corporation. But I really liked the conversation you'll have about untangling this idea of like, oh, everything should be free all the time and stuff. But what do like artists and musicians and stuff do in a society like that? I liked your discussion on that. Yeah.

And that, the irreducible minimum thing is really, it's an important. important answer to that question because, you know, I was involved in piracy activism, like, yeah, I love that. And, you know, I've spoken to other, we recently spoke to the lead singer of Hotelier, and they were saying that piracy allowed them to create the music that they did. That if it wasn't for piracy, they wouldn't have heard all the varieties of music that they did. They wouldn't have had the cultural context they required to do their art. And as a result, they were able to do their great works as a result of having that background in piracy.

And I thought that was such a beautiful idea. And an example of how these open systems make us all richer, richer than the richest could be without it. Yeah. And so we need to make sure that everyone is taken care of in society, that there's a basic level people don't fall below. And because often in the piracy activism sphere or the pro-copyright activism sphere, it's like, how do artists get paid? Well, how do artists get paid now? They don't get paid much. Most of them are, most of them get paid by doing dishes.

you know, like, so artists should actually get paid, I agree, but it requires a completely different reorganization of our society. Yeah, like the thing that you pointed out was that like normally, like the question when we ask, well, then how will artists get paid is what we're actually asking is how will that person like meet their basic needs in order to have food and a place to live and all that? Like we're not asking how do they make money, but we're asking how do we actually, how do they get the things that they need to live? But if we make sure that people are provided with that, then the concept of like, oh, well, how do they get paid is not as relevant anymore. Yeah.

And I think there's things about copyright that are worth thinking about in detail when it comes to like the lineages of creation and people getting credit for things or like, especially into the current system where you can have like firms taking people's ideas and then running away with them, profiting off of that, cutting them out and stuff. So I think copyright and intellectual property, there's some nuances and some interesting stuff to explore there in terms of how to do that stuff right to make sure that people get credit for their work, that people are treated as esteemed for what they contribute and they're not stolen from in that way. And I think those questions will continue to exist in a utopian society. But yeah, generally IP works for middlemen firms and not creators. and that's always been the case. And, yeah, the origins of this stuff are not utopian, not helping people stuff. It's a really weird system in practice.

I imagine you could probably get rid of copyright as such and replace it with other rights that kind of already exist, like moral rights for authors, those are things like the ability to control your work to some extent. So we don't really have this in the United States. But we do have it kind of in like public sculpture, if you do public sculpture. So I think like the Wall Street Bull, the, when they put the girl statue in front of it, like the person who creates the original statue has sort of the right of refusal for their work being changed in a public way. But it's really only for statues.

We don't have it for like any other areas, whereas other countries like Canada and the UK and Australia do have more robust moral rights. But I always use when I teach students about copyright is like, who owns the copyright on your tattoos? And in Europe, it would be, well, your bodily autonomy, your bodily rights override your any copyright issues. So if you wanted to have a photo taken of yourself and sell that photo, you can't be held liable for copyright because it's still your body, even if you never cleared the copyright transfer with the artists. But in the United States, that's kind of a problem with, like, you know, sports celebrities. So if you are on Madden, 2022, which is all high-deaf now, they can recreate your tattoos. And that's someone else's art. So it creates a problem.

But it's just, there are other rights that we could use. And I think copyright isn't one that we would need to keep. Yeah, like, how does Yusufract apply to ideas and not in the way of like, oh, have articles and information free for everyone, but in the sort of like, I'm the person who came up with this, like, kind of way. That's an interesting, like, train of thought to think about. I don't think I have an answer. I was kind of thinking about that because, like, that assumes that one person has that thought and not simultaneous people have that thought independently in various places or, you know, nothing in the sense that nothing is original. You know, we all, all of the stories recreate,

all of the ideas we have build off of ideas and stories we've already heard. So rise home, baby. Yeah. So, yeah. So like, so you say, well, this was my idea. It's like, okay, maybe you are the first person you got that idea recognized. Maybe you're the first person who got it published. Maybe you were the first person, like, you know, who, you know, got recognition for it.

But that doesn't mean that you're the first person to have that, like, idea or that thought. you're just the first person to execute it. It reminds me of a like a Twitter thread I saw too, which is like the opposite of this where some guy was saying that like, he came up with the idea of something at the same time as like a feminist thinker. And he was like, well, it's not my fault that we both came up with it independently. And the person who was like arguing with him was just like, you're such a dumbass.

Yeah. But so those questions would have to be addressed. as well. How do you define original? No copyright law in the universe is going to stop me. Yeah, it's like would we need the concept of original in a library socialist society? Getting big-brained over here. Yeah, just look at the absurdities in patent law. Just follow any intellectual property lawyer on Twitter and they'll show you insane shit

that happens all the time. So I think more or less it could be safely done away with. But I did want to bring up, I think we'll probably bring up licensing just enough time for that. Because I wrote a note about libraries being sort of inherently capitalist. They do predate capitalism in its modern form, but modern libraries more or less only exist in a modern capitalist situation. and the biggest problem is kind of one that the materials are all owned by the government, so the government can then punish you for losing it or breaking it. So you've got all the state control problems.

But the secondary problem is these unending licenses, these hyper-capitalists sort of you can buy and buy and buy, you will never own. The library will never own it. the public will never own it, the community will never own it. It's just endless licensing of music, audiobooks, e-books, journals, databases. And I think that was what I was getting at when I was saying libraries were sort of inherently stuck in a capitalist way of thinking,

is we're more or less piggy banks a lot of times of the larger institution. And I remember in 2020 when the Internet Archive did the National emergency library and that there was like a split kind of and this is an over generalization a split in the types of librarians who were defending that and then who were

very against it. Most authors were also against it because they don't understand copyright law even if they say they do and they also don't understand libraries even if they say they do. Anyway, a lot of academic librarians were supporting it and a lot of public librarians were very against it

because the types of, I imagine, it's because the types of licenses and vendors that we work with. Because in academic libraries, you can buy a book that has unlimited seats, like an unlimited number of people at a time can be using that e-book. Or often, like, through J-Store and stuff, you can download the whole fucking book and it doesn't have DRM on the PDF. And so you can just have that forever, right? Whereas most of the time in public libraries, you're just working through something like, overdrive where maybe you have a certain amount of checkouts on a book before you have to renew the license or something where they're very much enforcing the like one person at a time per copy even in electronic and it's not because the libraries themselves are thinking that way but because of the types of licenses that we work with all the time it shapes how we view electronic lending yeah finding out that at my local library I could there was only a like five copies of a digital book that could be taken out with something.

One of the things that like really wrinkled my brain about like what the hell is going on in society. Like it makes no sense. I know that I could copy and paste this 20 times if I had it. Like it just makes no sense. And I think like there's a few different ways that we could make a sort of like a pragmatic baby step in the right direction around this sort of thing. But I don't see any reason why public libraries shouldn't have the right to have unlimited

seats. It's called right of for sale. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Or like even if we wanted to protect profits and stuff like that in some way of like, oh, this new book came out, we don't want to have everyone taken out from the library all at once where people would otherwise buy it are going to do that or something because it's going to affect the author. Yada yada. We live under capitalism. Then you could even set up a system where like at first there's like one for one licensing or one for five licensing.

And then after a certain period of time, like what do they call it like the long tail where's like most profit is just. generated on IP in the first like five years. So after that, there's very little profit generated for like decades and decades. So you could set it up in a way where there's less seats at the beginning. And then after like a year or two, then it goes to unlimited seats. And you could give special rights to libraries because libraries are a special thing in society. Like that is the dominant discourse around libraries in our society. Despite being under capitalism and all that, everyone agrees the library is a sort of a special place,

even conservatives for fucked up reasons, but they agree. It's a special place. Yeah, and I know in England, I think maybe also in Canada, but I'm not sure. Authors actually earn royalties off of every single time their book is checked out in a library. That's not true in the United States, but I know that's true in England, and I think it might be true in Canada as well. It's in Canada, yeah. It's paid out of like a cultural fund, so it's basically to encourage the arts. in Canada, which is more or less just sort of a response to like American cultural

hegemony more or less. But I mean, they're not really doing it to pay their artists much better. But again, if you have the irreducible minimum, people are making their livelihoods. But yeah, again, like copyright just, it doesn't need to exist past like 14 years. And again, the other problem with copyright is now that it's automatic, you have to be extremely careful about everything, whereas there are a lot of people who create something. And like if I commission art from someone, I have to ask them, hey, are you cool with me using it? And they're like, oh, yeah, I didn't intend any copyright. I'm like, it doesn't matter.

You don't have to register copyright. You just have it. So I have to ask you so that I, you know, I have to make sure you're not going to like sue me if I put it on my Twitter bio or whatever. And there are a lot of people who would probably just never register copyright if they had to. They would just go, no, I don't want to. And like so much stuff would be in the public domain immediately. I mean, fan fiction exists. I think if anything, that's an excellent example of how the arts could flourish if, you know, you could remove the monetary aspect from it.

Like, there are people who write like whole ass like wheel of time size series and don't make a dime off of it. So, you know, why do we think that that's going to stop? People like to see hot boys kissing. Yeah. That is a thing that is true throughout human history. Yeah. That wasn't a very excited, yeah, Justin. No, I've just, I'm just jumping in the mic drop moment. Yeah, yeah, hang on.

That's my hot take, more hot boys kissing and library socialism. Yeah, we need to put, we need to get rid of these artificial restrictions. Yeah, the artificial scarcity of boy love. I was already like two steps ahead of like, I thought you'd said that like, like, 10 minutes ago. I was already trying to wrap up what the episode is going to sound like. I think we could close out on

because we've got tons more stuff and we should probably do another episode sometime. Yeah, I would love to have you back on again. Yeah. Anytime. Okay, either statutory right to library services or doing the labor of collective collection development.

I would love to talk about labor. Okay, let's do the labor of collection development and circulation. And also metadata. Yeah, so. I'm going to be a stickler about it. If we're going to have all these systems, you know, the parks department is renting out kayaks and the tool shed as running out tools and people are donating excess building materials and stuff. How do we sort of keep track of these things? So I know there was someone recently.

I can't remember what the context was, but someone was saying, hey, can you help us build like an open source circulation tool? we're like hiring someone to work on this for for some reason. I don't remember what. But like a lot of the open source circulation tools that exist now are like designed for libraries. But what would it be like if you had a very, very simple one that you could just run out of a booth in the woods and just be like, okay, like give me your name and phone number. And then like that'll be it. That's all I need to put into it. So they're very simple ones like in special collections like Aeon.

has a system like that. It's not really connected to any other data in the university. It's like you walk in, you tell me your name, I type your name in, oh, have you been here before? No, okay, I'll create a new account for you. And like that's how you do every single interaction. And there's really like no interconnected to data. So if there's no like privacy problems, really,

you just make sure you don't collect too much data on the person. So, you know, we would still need people to catalog materials to the data. develop standards of like with which to catalog kayaks and municipal goods and fridges and stuff like that. Yeah, I got all fired up about that one because metadata labor is invisible enough as it is. And often on purpose and then metadata and cataloging departments and librarians are usually the first to get cut in budget cuts because they don't see our labor and therefore they don't value us.

Right. Maintenance. maintenance work is made invisible by people choosing to ignore it until something breaks. And then you can hire someone part-time to fix it until it and then fire them and then wait until it breaks again. It's sort of up. Yeah, like I'm going to have like little like utopian dreams of what a metadata application profile would look like in a library of socialist society. That would be like, I want to make it right now. Yeah. Yeah, I guess one utopian thing is like how do you make it?

as how do you keep accountability and fidelity of information while making it as open and participatory as possible? How do you use people's natural passions to contribute to that while maintaining that expertise and specialization to prevent like, I'm thinking about, like, sometimes you're in a CRM and everyone's doing their own thing. So you have like five different tags for the same type of thing and stuff or like all these redundant. I'm having a stroke thinking about it. Yeah. So like how do you keep that, how do you keep that? How do you keep? that fidelity, that cleanliness in the system, the expertise and everything in its right place, while also using people's, I would assume people's instinct and desire to be part of maintaining

those systems if they value the fruits of those systems. I think there's a lot of potential for technological innovation in that space of like how do we run collective goods in an accountable technological way in a participatory way. In terms of what we've actually created with existing systems, I would bet we've only barely scratched the surface of what is possible to make those systems work. Yeah, and there have been a lot of discussions. So in the United States, at least, I am not as familiar with international library conventions beyond a very surface level, but in the United States at least,

We use for traditional like bibliographic cataloging, not necessarily digital libraries. We use mark machine readable cataloging. It was made in like the 60s and hasn't been updated much since. It was what made the cards and the card catalog and we're still using that system now. And it wasn't made to count for like DVDs or like board games or kits, which are very popular. public libraries or like charging cables at an academic library, right? And so there have been a bunch of like kind of initiatives of like, oh, okay, what do we use instead? And like there was bib frame. And this was a linked data kind of way of cataloging items where, oh, we'll do link data. And so

we make a semantic web. And then when you Google a book, your local public library, will show up in Google's little info card because linked data, but like that's sort of like linked data, I feel like there's naive utopian thinking around linked data and bib frame as an initiative, where it's just taking our standards we have now, but putting like semantic capabilities onto them instead of rethinking what knowledge organization looks like inherently. So probably no one who doesn't do metadata knows what the hell I just said.

It's the scale. I don't remember who was responding to me on Twitter the other day, but I said, I don't think this would scale well. Oh, we were talking about archive of our own. We were talking about archive of our own and fan tagging. And I said, it would be great to do that in a catalog, but there's just too much shit in the catalog for people to tag like that. And some guy who I don't think is in libraries was like, well, you could tag it. Like you could scale this up. And I think he meant technologically you could automate it in some way.

But I'm like, no, this is human curated stuff. There's tag wranglers who do that. Yeah, I have multiple friends who do. Yeah. And there's too much shit to do. So a lot of the actual work is just sort of repetitious. And so really thinking about like if you were to design a system for everyone to use simply, it would have to be extremely user-friendly.

So I would imagine something that could be done both on paper and on a computer and interchangeable. They would be as intuitive as each other. So like if the power goes out or you're in an area that doesn't have good internet or something like that, it would have to all be interchangeable. Punch cards would probably work better. Yeah. And what does it mean to organize and classify and taxonomize information and

materials in library socialism. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately because I'm really in a personal knowledge management. And there's this book called How to Take Smart Notes. And one of the things it says about when you assign keywords to a note that you make is do you think like an archivist or do you think like an author? An archivist would think about where is the proper place to put this? and an author would think about, like, in what context would I want to retrieve this? And I think about that a lot with how we do library classification now.

Is maybe that a better way to structure our classification systems is based on how we think people might find things based on where we think they should be stored? And then I had that, like, joke tweet of, like, vibes-based classification systems only. the other week because someone was complaining about an author coming in and moving their, like a local author coming in and moving their book from one section to another. And I was like, no, vibes only. I support this person. Kind of direct cataloging, community cataloging.

This is where this goes. I'm here for it. Yeah, I'm here for it. No one could ever find it if you looked for it because it should be in the D's and it's not the D's. It's fives based. Someone will find your book but only by accident. Serendipitous. Yeah, that's funny.

No one looking for your book will find it, but people not looking for your book have a chance of finding it. I don't think anyone explained it to the author in those terms. I want it to be that way. I'm going to write a paper about it. Yeah, I imagine copy cataloging would be really important to just sharing work as much as possible. And like batch loading and shit and data normalization and all that. If we were like to catalog a kayak, it would just be like, oh, yeah, let me just pull that in.

And then there's some controlled data fields for what type of material it's built out of just so you know. And, you know, but you would just pull it by like a product number. Easy. Yeah, like we would probably need like multiple forms of knowledge management. Because I feel like if you got one that could cover every single thing we could think of to catalog, it would be too general to actually be helpful. It's a criticism I have of doubling core. Yeah, it would be actual.

link data where you would say like this is a manifestation of yeah in a good way yeah yeah like this is a manifestation of building material type you know fiberglass uh and so okay i want to find only fiberglass things that you know just making everything is sort of like graph database yeah yeah yeah everything runs on like a json sort of metadata and it would it would work but um the reason doesn't work now is because people don't think like that when they can when they catalog their products that if you're a business. We can tell who the actual degree librarians in this conversation are.

Sorry. No, no, it's fine. I like listening to it. I just think it's funny because, like, I hear so much of this from so many of my librarian friends and I only know, like, half of it. Yeah, it's just been on my mind lately, and then I gave that spicy talk yesterday

where I said the, like, underrepresentation can be good, actually. So it's just been on my mind. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. I was just going to say, if you come up with any, as you're thinking about this, this is totally out of my field of knowledge.

But if you come to any really fascinating conclusions as you think about this, please do pass them on, because it is really interesting to think about some of the pragmatics of this when we're talking about scaling up to, you know, 8 billion people and beyond. And, you know, billions and billions of pieces of things that are being circulated. in a new way. How that is organized is a really, really deep and detailed question that I think your expertise and knowledge could probably figure out some interesting things on that I never would. I think we'd really have to just make everyone read DeLuse and guitar, like, and like just lean

into the whole, like, rhizomatic idea. I think that would be a way more helpful framework than like the sort of genealogy tree classification systems that we have. Yeah. But I'm just into that right now. Well, I think the real pragmatic thing would be just to look at the history of classification systems and be like, because it's too overly complicated now. It's too many bells and whistles.

It's too many tricks. And it really could be like punch cards. Like, that's a good technology. A codex, a book. Title, author. Like, how would. someone's search for this, not where do we think it should be put. Yeah, and paper is relatively cheap to produce and mass produce.

And so, like, if you wanted a punch card system for checking things out, that would work pretty well. Especially at, like, local community levels versus the sort of maybe, like, main hub or maybe a lot of the, like, more like ephemeral digital information is, but like at the local levels where more physical literal materials are. I know that gay city in Seattle, and this was like years and years ago, and they've much expanded since them, so I don't know how they run it now, but their little tiny library was basically, you hand us your ID, we write down your name, your birthday, and your address, and then we write down the numbers on the back of the books that we use. It was the all volunteer run library. So it was like, if you take anything out, like there was no governmental authority behind it. It was very, very much a niche community. library. A lot of gay libraries are like that. Yeah. But that is all you need. That's what we spend tens of thousands of dollars overcomplicating with library systems. But really. And I'm complicit. I love my metadata application profile. Well, we also have a lot more complicated resources, too, that require insane authentication and stuff like that. That scrapbooks are so hard. Wouldn't exist. Yeah. I just call everything a kit. If it's not, if I don't know what it is, it's a kit. And I just say it's a

kit. That's how I cataloged everything is a kit. Guitar, that's a kit. Vibes. Yeah, it's a kit. Vibes only. Sean, is there anything you want to like wrap up on? So we'll round out this episode and then hopefully we'll do another one and you can bring your co-host on if that will work in the future. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, I guess what could I say in summary? You know, people talk about how it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. I think that library socialism is an attempt to imagine the end of capitalism. We need more things like it. It's a counter-hegemonic strategy, so it starts in the realm of ideas, but it also has pragmatic applications when we think about how we could organize small-scale libraries in our communities and how we could use the generative

potential of social property to benefit our communities in a real way, because when we're doing political organizing, people feeling the benefit of what you're doing helps push them further into more action. So I see this as not only far away naive utopian vision, but a utopian vision with a pragmatic material core to it, and it's something that can be applied to our day-to-day political organizing, as well as something that, I don't know, I think there's a, I think there's a lot of potential with it. So I'm really excited that I got to share it on the show and talk to you all about it. And yeah, I don't, that's, maybe I'm repeating myself, but that that's what I'm all about. That's what we're all about. And I'd love to come back anytime to talk about some of our

untouched notes or anything else that comes up in the future, because this is a really fascinating, awesome conversation. And I love hearing the expertise, even if I don't have much to say on, I can't even make a reference to anything that you said. It just went in one ear and out of the other. Sorry. I'm such a jerk. No, no, it's, yeah, it's legit fascinating. Yeah, I'll have all the library socialism episodes linked in the notes. And then is there anything else you want to plug? Well, we at Seriously Wrong, have a show coming out on Means TV this summer that we spent a year and a half for two years writing and animating.

It's called Papa and Boy, and it'll be coming out probably in the next couple months. So June or July, probably July, it was a little passion project of ours, five-part series. So definitely check that out. If you've already got a subscription to me and Stevie, you know they make good stuff. And it's our little cartoon show. So that's another thing to plug. And then, yeah, our podcast is seriously wrong. It's S-R-S-L-Y-W-R-O-N-G.

And we're going to have more library socialism episodes coming out later this year. We were just starting the research process on them. So, yeah, that's my plugs. Great. How many means TV people have we had on? We've had Mitchell. Yeah, we are. I think, I think it's it.

No, Jake was in a skit. Oh, was it? Yeah, he played a Venezuelan rich person who. Oh, that's awesome. Who was living in Brooklyn. And was, like, Juan Guaido was his godfather or something. Oh, my God. I hope he's having fun with Eve Six right now.

He's never going back home. He's going to live on tour for the rest of his life. Just making shit posts with Eve's sex on Twitter. That is the life. I mean... It really is. Good night.