librarypunk - 062 - Library Tech Labor feat. John and Tim

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

This week we’re techin' it up about library labor.  https://twitter.com/adr - John’s Twitter https://twitter.com/elibtronic - Tim’s Twitter https://LISgrievances.com  Libraries as Dysfunctional Organizations and Workplaces - 1st Edition  Media Mentioned https://themaintainers.org The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man The Fragment On Machines - Karl Marx : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Building Sustainable Digital Humanities Projects Update: Librarians Embroiled in Lawsuit Alleging Sexual Harassment | Library Journal Nixon in China - Wikipedia  The Leader - Karl Marx Anime (English Subs) - YouTube    Epilogue After the episode ended we started looking at the Karl Marx animated series The Leader Wikipedia page and found the truth: that Karl Marx was into vore. We also made sure to thank the brave truth teller who made the edit from their phone and decided to edit nothing else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leader_(web_series)

Yeah, if anyone's married to like a famous novelist, you should bring it up at the beginning of the podcast instead of the end, like last week. So you don't just like blow Sadie's mind like an hour in? Oh my God. We just do that up top. Our guest last week, Kevin, who's my friend who I met in that like building a second brain, note taking personal knowledge management thing. He's Ursula Vernon's husband. Oh my gosh. I don't know who that is, but I assume it's famous.

And like, I knew that. But then he just like dropped that and Sadie was like, because their wife had read some of her horror novels under her, another pen name of hers or something. Yeah, they're cool. They live in North Carolina. He's got a productivity podcast. They raise chickens.

Like they seem cool. Like they raise chickens or race chickens? They raise them. Oh, raise them all. Okay. Well, that's all right. Yeah. That's all right.

I can get for racing chickens, yeah. Can you race bunnies? Yes, you can't. Sure. Why not? They do like, not dressage.

What's the thing the horses do where they have to jump the sticks? Oh, steeple, steeple chase? No, no, no, steeple chase, I think. That was a road. It is dressage.

It is somewhere. Maybe dressage is just prancing around. No, just the... Dressage is the, like, really gay, horsey walk stuff. It's no longer Olympic event, though, unfortunately. I think it's been dropped.

Was it ever? Yeah, yeah, it sure was. Apparently, tug of war was an Olympic event in like the early 1900s or something. A lot of cheating, though. Yeah, and poetry. Oh, in a pigeon shooting where they would actually like throw pigeons in the air. And then marksmen would need to shoot them with rifles. Yeah, they had some weird stuff in the Olympics.

Whoa, I guess that's why. We should go back to being all naked. Go back to our roots. No. Oh, they're being naked. People with oil on them. I do think they should go back to holding them on Mount Olympus just every year. It doesn't go anywhere.

It doesn't destroy anyone's city. They can't like ruin L.A. for the third time. They should just have a permanent place where they just do it all the time. And it should be out in the middle of the ocean. Yeah. They won't bother anyone. International waters. Anything goes.

Yeah. Just a bunch of like athletically hot people wrestling. Like like the Turkish mud oil wrestling. That's a that's up in life. Church mud oil wrestling? What church? Turkish. And they just, there's like covered in oil and they like are wearing clothes, but they just like stick their hands in each other's pants constantly.

Okay. I've seen this on a documentary. Yeah, it's part of the grappling process. They are like really get under the level. They just got to get in there. It's very sportsman like. Church wrestling is sumo. That's where you go to church and people wrestle.

I mean, I know I haven't been to church in a while, and when I did go to church, it was Lutheran, Elka Lutheran, and we may have been in a little cash, but I've never heard of church wrestling. Actually, if you do like independent wrestling venues, I think those are mostly in church basements around the country, so probably. There's probably lots of church. Church basements, the country would fall apart with that church basements, to be honest. Yeah, I went to, when I did boxing training, it was in the basement of a church, Catholic church. It's free land. I guess so. It's free real estate.

Didn't somewhere in Canada just start staying? There was a town in Canada that has like no income. And so they started like saying if you're a church, you have to actually apply for tax. Yeah, that's a colloet. Not that they have no income, but that's, yeah, it's up north and they're a little really up north. Yeah, that just happened recently. So, yeah, they have to apply. I don't automatically get tax exemption.

Yeah, it was right before the Pope came and visited. Did the Pope go to a Collewitt? I didn't know that. Yeah, to apologize for the residential schools. I'm Justin. I'm a Scalcom Library. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library. My pronouns are they them? I'm Jay. I'm a music library director. And my pronouns are he, him. And we have guests. Would you like to introduce yourselves?

Sure. I'm John. I'm a digital scholarship librarian in Canada, and my pronouns are he, they. And hello, my name is Tim. I'm also a digital scholarship librarian just down the road from John. And my pronouns are he, him. Our sound effects have gotten better since last time you're on, John. Yeah, I have a whole soundboard now. I've like, probably like, we've refined this show. Big time. Yeah.

We've been doing this for over a year now. That Casper mattress money. We don't even have a Patreon. We just do this for funsies, for shits and giggles. John, you were talking about wanting to go on podcast. So I said, come on our podcast. again. Yes.

And you've got things you want to say, and I understand that. I do. That impulse because this whole podcast started because a podcast I listened to thought I could come on, and I think the other hosts didn't like the idea. So I was like, all right, fine, I'm just starting my own. I'm going to do the episode. And it's a good way to make friends. Yeah, it's very nice.

I really had a really wonderful time the last time, so I'm stoked. And I had a podcast of my own with another person that I think was four episodes long because that person left academia and could no longer. or talk as freely as she could. I remember listening to that podcast. Yeah, that was a good one. We do one out of our lab while our lab is gone now. That's another.

Maybe we'll get into that story. But yeah, the whole point of it was to launch a pun on the world. And it's called Steering the Digital Scholarship. The Scholarship, I remember. Yeah. Then the enthusiasm instantly deflated out of it. I think one of my colleagues in the library started a podcast with his wife. who's one of our music faculty.

And I don't know how many episodes that lasted, but I don't think they're still doing it. That's the hardest part about doing a podcast. You all have figured it out, though, is that you have to do the podcast. You can't just, you know, it's not just an idea. You've got to work on it. Yeah.

Yeah, it is a lot less work than other things, though, like writing papers, I find. And Justin, it seems like you like editing and stuff. I don't know. Yeah. Maybe you hate it. Yeah. I don't mind it.

The weird thing about editing audio, though, is because for any other process, I have music playing or I'm listening to a podcast, I can't do that while auditing, any audio. I can kind of do some stuff by sight of the waveforms. But, like, you know, like if there's certain, if I don't know someone's voice or something, I don't know what their ums and errs and sniffs look like. So then I have to like listen to it until I get used to it. It's so intimate that you like know what my sniffs look like probably.

Yeah. You know things about my voice that I don't know. Yeah. It is very strange. I had someone from University of Toronto Press reach out about because they are starting a new subscribe to open journal and they kind of wanted to know how to sell it to libraries. Well, they were also like selling it to me. And I was like, look, we have no subscription money right now. But they also said, oh, we want to do like podcast. And so I might get to consult with them for podcasts if they reach back on. That'd be cool. Oh, that's neat.

Like every other media platform suddenly just went podcast all in on podcasts. We'll switch to podcast only soon enough. Yeah, like pivot to video. Yeah, yeah, pivot to pod. Pivot to TikTok. Pivot to podcast. Well, that's the thing, though, is that no one can follow through on podcasts. What was the royal motherfuckers?

They got like $30 million to start a podcast. Oh, yeah, to Harry and Megan or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And they're the good ones. That was really hilarious because when they first left the UK, They, like, moved to Vancouver for all of, like, two months. And everybody here was jizzing themselves. Like, oh, they're going to live here forever.

No, they're not going to live here forever. And they fucked off to Los Angeles right after that, if I recall correctly. But, Megan's Canadian, right? No, no, she's not. But she lived in Toronto for a while because they filmed their TV show here. The TV show. She lived here. But I don't think she's a citizen.

No, she's American because I remember someone making a joke about, because they were saying, like, is she going to run for office? And someone was like, we need to pass that amendment to the Constitution from like the 8th, from like 1800 that was like, if you have a royal title, you cannot serve in the U.S. government. Yeah, like I don't want them in power in charge of anything. But I like, they were like, y'all are racist assholes. We're going to go fuck off to Canada. And also they're hot.

And that's all I want them to be in this world. Yeah. I don't want them to do anything else. like hairy parties and they and they're the only royals where I'm like they fuck I can tell the other ones I'm like I think they just like looked at each other and then something happened and the fact they were like y'all suck we're fucking off so but then I don't want them in power over anything and I don't want them getting more money from people yeah Canada needs to pull apart Badoes where we officially you know disown the royal family as our head of state and just

get on with life at least you never had to swear in front of a judge that you love the queen I had to do that. My laugh scared, Arthur. Yeah, I had a job with the federal government for a few months, so I had to perform an oath to the queen to, like, you know, ensure I wouldn't perform treason, I guess, at the auditor general's office. All right. God save the queen.

I think I had to do something like that when I go to passport. You have to take some kind of oath when you get your passport for the first time. I don't. I remember. Maybe. When I worked in California, I had to sign a loyalty oath. to the U.S. government. Yeah, those are fun.

My wife also worked there, and she said, I can't sign this because she's a Canadian citizen. I'm not going to sign this. They're like, uh, okay. And so I guess it was. One of my friends from my gaming group, he is Australian, and he recently just got, I think, U.S. citizenship or something, because his wife is a professor at UNH where I used to work. And he was, like, telling us, like, the ridiculous questions on some of the tests. And he's like, you know, we're all fucking commies.

right. So he's like, no, I'm not a communist. For whatever stupid fucking questions. That's absolutely a question on the citizenship is, have you ever been a communist sympathizer as far as I know? Definitely not. That's a thing. Yep. Nope. No, no commies here.

No, I'm not a pinko commie. What are you talking about? So, we're going to talk about library tech labor. Oh, boy. Here we call. And I'm going to stop for a second because there's, uh, we're going to speak. I think we're trying, at least I will try not to speak from a Canadian context exclusively, but there's a lot of difference in the labor situation between Canada and the United States

that probably Tim can absolutely correct me because he's way more up on this than I am. That can kind of be interesting to point out. And that is we like nowhere in Canada is there, for instance, right to work to my knowledge. There's no right to work. Even in Alberta, there's no right to work. And indeed there's in the U.S., like if you're in a union, my understanding is, You can opt out of the union and not pay dues, but somehow still be covered by certain negotiations. In Canada, that was, is it, might be a state-to-state thing. In Canada, there was a 19- Because of Janus.

Yeah, there was a 1946 decision in Canada called the Rand. Rand formula is what it end up being. And Rand formula says that if you're in a labor group and you're covered by the labor group, you have to pay into it. There's no opting out, which is good, in my opinion. I don't know how labor unions in the U.S. survive with that kind of scheme, but that's probably why. It depends on what your state you're in.

And then even I know it at UNH specifically, and when I was there, like the faculty were a AUP. And you could, you weren't in the union by default because it's New Hampshire, you know, the don't tell me what you do. You're not my dad's. Yeah. And you could join the union, full dues. Or there was like between being a full,

and not being in the bargaining unit at all, where it's like you could pay a smaller amount of dues and technically not be a member, but you were still like, you like getting raises. Like, I don't know, like, where it was like you're kind of ideologically opposed to unions, but you wanted to give the union money to bargain on your behalf or something.

I don't know. But you could, there was like a, yeah. I was going to say, is the AAPE in actual union? I thought it was like an overarching representative body of, like,

count is for us. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it's the, you know, American Association of University Professors, and there are advocacy chapters, and there are collective bargaining chapters. So like New Caltech versus Coward, I guess. Yeah, so some chapters are union and some are just advocacy. And they recently just voted to, not merge, but affiliate with AFL-CIO. Oh, oh. Because there's like the higher ed branch of that. I forget. what it's called. But therefore, all AUP members are going to automatically also be AFL-CIO members. Now, AFT, I think, is what the higher, the higher-ed branch of AFL-C-I-O is called.

Hey, John, we should all sign up with Uniform and just make one Uber Union. That would be sweet. I would love to be in Uniform. One giant union. What if we just had one big union? Yeah, exactly. One big union. And Arthur can be the mascot because he's a black cat.

Well, he's a tuxedo, but he's a fancy black cat. But he's not a fat cat, and that's important. He was when I first got him. He was a big boy. He's reformed. He's lost his decadence of his former bourgeois lifestyle. You hear that, Arthur. So, John, where did you want to start?

Did you want to start with maintainers, or do you want to start with just like opening notes about Canada and the U.S. differences, because that's kind of interesting, because I know a lot of Canadian librarians somehow. They're very chatty on Twitter. And yeah, in Canada, it's at least in Ontario, and I believe this holds pretty much nationwide, it's unusual to have an academic library that isn't unionized. And the Ontario is only two large ones. Am I right about that, Tim, it's U of T and Waterloo? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. When I was working as a librarian in the States, my library was absolutely

not unionized and I was not labor aware in any sense really. And right, very interestingly enough, my university, which is that university I worked at, which is very, very conservative generally, at least as conservative as a public school can be, is in a union drive right now. I don't know if they vote. I'm not sure how that vote when I should look it up, but at least as of a couple months ago, they were librarians and faculty were getting ready to unionize. So I should follow up and see.

Now, the winds of, of labor change in the states have been really blowing. Like there's a lot of private sector unionization going on or what seems like a lot of private sector unionization. But when I worked in California, there was a union push. I was not a librarian. I was a system administrator, or what they called a programmer analyst.

And there was a union push there that failed. And I wonder if they ran it now, whether it would still fail or whether it would continue on. Because tech people as a general group, and I'm not speaking specifically academic. I'm just talking about technologists. tend to view themselves as special little snowflakes and not needing to do labor solidarity kinds of things. And even in librarianship in academia, there is absolutely what I would call a virulent strain of,

I am not a trade unionist. I am my own special snowflake. And I'm frankly a little bit surprised that unionization is as high as it is in this country because it's kind of an endemic attitude. And in my own institutions unionization push that succeeded, the one that I was involved in, there was a, it was not 100%. It was a sizable contingent that even though our circumstances were terrible, just awful, there was still a sizable number of people that didn't want to be unionized. So, yeah. But, yeah, the maintainer's thing was something Tim dropped in.

So I don't know, Tim, if you want to speak to that. Yeah, I mean, the reason why I glom to that is this idea that, well, I have many problems and thoughts about library tech labor, but we don't do anything on the back end in terms of longevity and planning for long-term things. And that's why the maintainer's initiative to me is really interesting because it specifically draws attention to that. So it says, you know, you don't just stand up a web page and walk away from it. You've got to maintain it. And, you know, for collectively a group of or a profession, let's say, that doesn't really emphasize technology. You know, you got to do the whole shabang, snout to tail, right? So,

I don't know what more to go beyond that, unfortunately. I've got a few sort of theses about why library labor is not, or library tech labor, pardon me, is not going anywhere because, you know, our leadership doesn't understand it. And, you know, we as a profession don't seem to prioritize technology stuff, right? I think, you know, and John, I giggle with you about this all the time. You know, we're still using Mark and Z-3950, you know, that were decades. before the modern TCP IP network was created and those are still like back home. I'm so happy you say Zed. Yeah.

Yeah. I switch back and forth. My wife thinks I'm a trader sometimes if I don't say it correctly. So, but yeah, yeah. So the idea is that we rely on these protocols. We externalize our technology and that's going to sneak up on us and it already has in a lot of respects.

And, you know, to shout out to the maintainers is, you know, Let's not do this half-assed, right? And Tim and I have talked about this an awful lot, and I've certainly obloviated enough about it on Twitter, but just for, just for a minder's sake, my own institution where I work out in Ontario, as far as I know, is the most self-sufficient IT institution of any place, maybe in the country and certainly in the province, in that we have, we control our own IT destiny fairly thoroughly. there are points of contact that we have that work really well with central IT and other and other places, but we do not, we do not yield our infrastructural decisions to outside of our house. And unfortunately, that happens all over the place everywhere else, as far as I can tell,

at Tim's place and other places, where there's just like, okay, we're not, we don't want to, we don't want you to have your own machine to play with because I don't know, you'll do something bad. I don't know. And so therefore, we're going to centralize it all with IT. And if you want to install an SSH client, sign this 10-page form in triplicate and wait a year for us to do it. And at my place, if we want to put up a service and it doesn't cost anything, and it's Unix-based, for me anyway, then I can do it. And I don't even have to ask my boss. I just do it. As long as it's inside the firewall, if we want to make it like a production service, then we go through a little more orthodoxy. but as far as test bedding stuff, you got an idea?

Okay, here it is. Go nuts. And it's something which doesn't happen. I don't know how often happens in the States. It probably happens more often just because there's way more stuff. But in Canada, it is so rare. It's just heartbreaking. And sorry, do go on, Tim.

No, don't let me interrupt you if you're on to something. No, no, no, no. Okay. I was going to say, like, I've enrolled in a PhD program to study this specific question. So I'm referring to it as my spite PhD because my dissertation is going to focus on acceptable use policies that are stopping faculty members from doing research that they want to do. And, you know, I could tell you a story about my place where someone needed remote access to a bunch of hardware that they had on a grant. And, you know, the IT department said, no, it's not going to happen. And then the professor responded by saying, how can you not do this?

It's technically feasible. larger schools in the province can do this. Why can't you do this for us? And then it was once the union got involved, suddenly things started working out. So I think, you know, one of the things I've experienced anyways, I spent some time doing governance on a committee at my place of work where we do the IT and infrastructure stuff and that there is a hokey way to say, but it's a battleground because you have administrators just seeking to protect the school from security and liability. And then you have faculty members desperately trying to get stuff done. Like John's workplace is a dream environment.

I wish I could have something as malleable and fun and engaging as that. Like I had to get a grant last year to do a project to stand up a little. It was just a, I don't want to get too technical, but it's just like a search engine based on the top of some data, which was maybe 80 gigs. Like I had to go to the cloud. There was no way I could have done it in cloud, like in shop because there was no method. There was no mechanism for me. And now the grant is coming up done, you know, I got to I got to shut it off.

And that'll be the end of it, right? Yeah, I mean, I have my weekly complaints about my IT department at work because I'm the only person in the library who could actually ever get them to do anything. And now I've given up on that role because I don't fucking care anymore. I can't deal with them. It's just not my responsibility at this point. But even doing stuff in the cloud has been really hard. Like, we can't control our own AWS instance. And so I had to shut off an AWS backup a couple weeks back that was letting us, in theory, control our data.

But IT had locked it down so much that I couldn't even download stuff out of it. So it wasn't even functional. And I was like, okay, well, I'm done with this. I don't care anymore. And, yeah, I had to jump out. But acceptable use policies, I want to circle back to that after Stacey Chimson. Yeah, I just wanted to say that that's like the true tragedy. to me of especially when I took the library

Freedom Projects crash course is everybody's talking about all the things they'd like to change and then I'm like well have you talk to your IT about it and they're like oh no like we don't have IT or it's you know the university because a lot of the people were academic and it's like now it's the university so they don't they won't listen to us they won't do anything and all of the libraries I've worked at have had their own IT departments they've been like county based and not had to depend on like a city or anything else. And yeah, it sounds more like what's John Scott, which is just like, I can propose something and

actually start like playing around with something. And the thing that always gets me about that is to me there is a, how do I say this, a parallel between a lot of IT work and a lot of library work in the sense that, you know, IT has the CIA cybersecurity thing, which is like a very basic concept for cybersecurity. You know, you have confidentiality, integrity, and availability. And then libraries are all about the same thing, you know, how you give people access to something without, you know, violating copyright or all of these things. And that parallel, I feel like, is something that I.C. could really, really work on.

just because like we're so paranoid in so many ways, you know, and there's grounds to that, but I feel like a lot of IT people just completely disregard the availability part of their role. So, and that's that's really the tragedy to me because like why are you even working in this line of work? Like we do technology so people can use it. And if you're making it unusable, you're completely. like backwashing your own purpose. I mean, it's been a long time so I've been an actual de facto system, but my own, I mean, I am, I am a de facto system and I mean a de jure system and an actual named system.

But the one thing, Sadie, that you've hit on that I think is very important is that system administration is a service profession more than anything else. And my own feeling is that the more an IT department says no, the more that people find these workarounds and the less necessary IT becomes. Now, if you're in a straight up, solid, unionized position, maybe you don't care. Like, oh, I'm going to retire. I'm going to fuck off and it's not going to matter. And maybe that's your justification. But I think every time you say no, and sometimes it's good to say no. I don't want to say yes to everything. Every time you say no and you just shut someone off, that avenue is shut off and they become less likely to want to

work with you in the future. And it's a lesson that not very many IT. people internalize is the fact that you can know yourself out of, not literally out of a job, but you can know other people out of a career. Yeah. And the thing that gets me about that is if you say no to your users and they find a way around it, that's an avenue that you don't know that you don't have control over. Like how many times have we heard people using Google Drive to upload and download documents onto networks and stuff? And it's like, how do you even know what your users are doing? So it's not just, it's not just like not user friendly. It's, it could actually be a cyber security risk.

The parable of lib guides, I think, fits in beautifully here, right? John knows my thoughts on this and various other people. But here's a platform that just lets you make a web page. We couldn't do that. You know what I mean? We had to outsource that. And now it's a cloud, you know, based thing that everyone throws money at all year round. If you had a little bit of chops, you can have a WordPress put together.

with, you know, some support and emulate the same dang thing. But no, here, here's a cottage industry. Oh, it's not a cottage industry anymore. It's a monolith, right? And, you know, maybe someone ate our lunch is how I like to think of it anyways. And librarians love lib guides because it takes, you know, IT can't say no to it. It's something that they fully control. And it reminds me, I'm going to go off a week.

And we're really bad at them too. Oh, gosh. It reminds me. Like, I remember reading an article about ketchup. This is related. And I want to say it was a Malcolm Gladwell article, and it was really good. And in it, like they're talking to marketing people like ketchup, and they say, yes, when children use ketchup, it's the first thing they can use that they can control the portion and how it's, you know, how much ketchup you put on a thing and how you arrange it on a thing. It's the first item of control that they have over their own food.

And I do not mean to liken non-I.T. librarians to literal children. that's a bad metaphor, and I'm already sorry that I made it, but it is something that they can control apart from IT. And if you are a non-technological, non-I.T. Librarian, I don't want to say non-technological savvy, because that's not very fair, but non-I.T. Librarian, and you're just, you're just sick of having to, you know, ask, get under your hands and ease and supplicate yourself to IT to do a minor thing. This rush of power you have is very addictive. And that's why I think that as IT person, you cannot be a dick to people because they just, they'll start installing lib guides. I mean, they probably will anyway, but you know.

What a fucking concept. Don't be a dick to your users, huh? I know. Shocking. Just, I don't know. It seems novel. I don't know. Maybe we should try it.

Going back to like the maintainers, there was something I saw that was interesting because I was going through the information maintainers community on them. And they talked about something that I find really important. that I don't think anyone in academia knows how to do, which is lazy consensus, which is when you're in a meeting, you run decisions on consensus, which is unless someone objects, it doesn't need to go to a vote or doesn't really need to go even to a discussion. If you're just like, I'm going to do this. Or in the original sense, I think it was you just start doing it.

And then if anyone objects within like 72 hours or five days or something, you just say, oh, okay, then we can put it up to a vote if we have to then. And I run all my meetings like this simply because, because I've just been around a lot of anarchists in my life. And I just, that's how they run meetings most of the time. Because it works and you like have to do it because otherwise people are going to fight forever. So you put up all these barriers by like running things past people. And it slows things down a lot.

And it really, when you build that into your processes, the machine gets away from you. And now you're working for the machine, which is something. I was reading the fragments on machines from marks that you put in the notes. And so now I'm thinking about. working to machines timetables rather than our own. I think we build that into our systems where we have to do all the IT prep again and again and again for things that, you know, I'm just sneaking stuff under the wire at this point. Like we have services I'm technically supposed to be submitting paperwork for and I'm just like, nah, they don't really care. They don't give a shit as long as like I don't get us ransomware.

Yeah, that is essentially how my, our departmental meetings operate at my place is that there's no, yeah, there's a lazy consensus going on. Notably, that is absolutely not how union stuff goes because we hue very, very, very thoroughly to Robert's Rules of Order and the Collective Agreement and all that. But in my own non-union, well, when I'm in my department and not talking union stuff, then yeah, like, we're going to do a thing, then we just do a thing. And most time, people don't object. But people like to be kept in the loop, and that's good. But, yeah, I was just like, okay, let's do it. And it's done. All right, I'm going to take responsibility because it's my idea.

Okay, Tim. Yeah, at my place, like I, as I mentioned, I was chair of this committee and it's very baroque in the way it operates. You know, you need to, you know, you know, clench the mace before you're allowed to speak and all sorts of things, right? So I think that that barrier discourages people because they don't want to sort of learn the dance moves for even communicating in a group, let alone, like, you know, making affecting change within it, right? So for an example, like I had to meet, you know, we changed the faculty handbook, which is like the not, it's not, it's the parallel to the collective agreement, but on the administrative side. So like everything that happens in the university needs to be in the, you know, the faculty handbook. And we needed that change just to be more reflective of the way things happen because there was, you know, super old language in there. It was never used, whatever.

And, you know, let's update it. We're all on the same page. And that was a process that took six months because I needed to get a hold of the provost. and get a meeting with the provost and the provost chiefs of staff, the other people on the subcommittee, we needed to debate the language, bring it back to the group, have that go through.

And then from that point, it had to go to the Senate of the whole. So the whole Senate of the university where it was debated and talked about. So this is like, you know, best case scenario, it's 60 days from like when you identify something in one of these meetings to the point where you get it sort of back,

but that never happens. And the only, you know, thing we accomplished in that process that took so long was to like get rid of embarrassingly old. text that was in the faculty handbook, you know, like, gosh, if I wanted something more agile and quicker and on a softer turnaround, you know, not like six months just to get an idea that we should be doing something differently. Like I have an idea for a platform, which is really neat.

I saw some other school do. Yeah, there's no way people are going to do it. They're just going to, you know, open up a new browser tab and find something else to work on, right? So, yeah, it's from inside of the apparatus of the bureaucracy in the university. Yeah, there's no incentive to fight that. You know, just get a grant and do it on your own time, right? To defend bureaucracy, and this is a difficult assertion to make, I think that's true of any group.

The larger you get, the more there is obstacles and obstructions. So you have a small departmental meeting like in my department. We have, you know, seven or eight people in a meeting. That's a lot different than having a union meeting with 25 people. or in Tim, your case, a thousand people, wherever many people in your union. And then, well, Brock's not that big. But anyway, and then you talk about Senate. That's another level on top of that.

So that's really not, like, that's just the nature of large groups, I think. Or that is a big contributing factor, I'll say. Yeah. I mean, there's no room for tech exceptionalism in the university environment, right? Because there's no one that, I think another big problem with this is the vocabulary. People don't have ways to understand and communicate this stuff. So you can talk about lazy consensus. switch is great. And I tried to, when I had a brief stint in management, I tried to do it that way.

Well, it just all pop along and then if something happens, then we'll reconvene. But, you know, there are environments, you know, and we work with people that are very knowledgeable about one particular thing. I like to think, like, faculty members are like laser beams. You know, they spend their whole life really focusing in on a really narrow, narrow, piece of vision. Maybe that's like two, three microns wide. And they, you know, focus that at something. Everything else is peripheral. So they don't have the vocabulary, the knowledge that the time they've spent developing platforms or using them to be able even to describe what it is they need because they're just focused on what they're trying to do.

It makes sense because you pay them a lot of money so you don't want them to sort of waste their time on externalities. But yeah, it's not doing us any favors because I'm sure there's another parallel to lib guides swooping in maybe at the university level, if not in the library level. there's some capitalist rubbing their hands together saying, oh, I've got a, you know, I've got a gap here. I can exploit and charge money for it. And then I think one of the appeals that administration has is they can cut a check, pay the thing, have it covered off, and then they're okay for a year. And then if the 3% inflation bump for the contract in the following year is too much, you know, you just, you know, you stop selling it or you stop using it. And then it goes away or whatever, right? So he has a lot of systemic problems. Yeah, I think someone was talking about, like, the problem with Blackboard is it's so. ingrained, even though it's just

demonstrably bad, but it does everything that both administrators and faculty kind of want, especially if faculty don't really want to learn how to teach online, which was my university until two years ago, where they suddenly had to learn how to teach online. Which has actually been great for me,

because people know how to use Zoom rooms now. People know how to answer their fucking email. Like, it's really great. Like, no one just keeps knocking on my door, you know, every 10 minutes to tell me something that could have in an email or just not being told to me. I know John's got something, but Tim, I do want to hear about what happened at your work that you mentioned earlier with something breaking down.

I think it was a digital humanities lab or something you mentioned earlier. Go ahead, John. Okay, I was just going to briefly say that when Tim was talking about, about lib guide equipment from faculty, it occurred to me, this already happened. And that was MOOCs. And remember for a while, a MOOCs are putting the fear into faculty, like the real fear that they're like, oh, well, well, I have a job if they can just sign up for an edX or something, MOOC. And that seemed to have largely fallen. I mean, we still have MOOCs of a sort,

but there don't seem to be the sort of world-threatening thing they were in, you know, 2014 or what have you. Well, I mean, John, you were more participating in it more than I was, but sort of in the middle aughts. There was like a real optimism about like moving or embracing open source library platforms. Remember in Ontario universities? with Okoa and evergreen, and there was like stuff popping. It was really neat.

And then like that enthusiasm just evaporated. And, you know, we're all on X Libras now. And we made a big show of and marketing material of everyone banding together, you know, pouring our money into one, you know, access point. As I hate to bring this up, but I assume Laurentian also ditched. Like, I don't know. For the folks who don't know, Laurentian is university in the north of Ontario that quite famously, in the last year went bankrupt, largely because their admin, who have not been punished, by the way, were using money that was supposed to be for buildings that donors gave to specific

purpose. They were just spending on willy-nilly and then eventually caught up with them and they literally did financial exigency, which is absolutely the nuclear options that some people thought it could never, ever happen. Anyway, those folks were for a while. They had a wonderful systems librarian who's still there named Dan. Scott, who did implement. Great guy.

Evergreen. And we were supposed to at my place, but my, the U.L. at the time, if I can put it kindly, he's very mercurial and he lost interest. And so we ditch that. And I think Laurentian is probably on collaborative futures now, right? They must be. I would imagine so, yeah. But my own conception about that is that ILSs or LSPs or whatever we're calling them now, whatever,

like HR systems and like, you know, Blackboard are inherently terrible. There is no way to make an ILS, LSP, palatable, or fun to work with. Everyone is nodding. It's like, there's just, there's something about them that just doesn't lend itself to joy in a way that most other open source software I've dealt with can. They do not spark joy, so we should get rid of them. God bless them, Evergreen, and they must have gotten better for now. And I hate to even slightly denigrate them because the people I knew that worked on the project were just wonderful people.

But it had one of the messiest setups I've ever done in my entire IT existence, just incredibly baroque and bad. And it must be much better now. But this is like in 2007, 2008. and it was really, it was pretty grotty. And I've yet to see an ILS other than in a pack, RIP, that I consider joy to use. Oh, geez. Yeah. I have so many feels about this whole trajectory.

And, you know, there was a brief shining moment. I felt so optimistic there. And then it just disappeared. It evaporated. And now, you know, there's 15 out of, like Ontario probably has, what, 20-something university, right, John? Yeah, I think so. And like 16 of them now at this point are all in in one sort of cloud-based solution.

So you tell me when like contract renewal season rolls around, you know, they're not going to have like negotiating power to say, oh, you know, we'll take up and leave. This thing took years and years and, you know, stress from so many quarters. There's no way we're leaving this thing in the future. So like they have us over a barrel and we're just going to keep paying the cash and they'll keep doling out tiny little enhancements as the years roll on. And we sold it out because we didn't. It's a sunk cost fallacy.

Yeah. Yeah. But whenever I feel bad about library purchasing, I always listen to stories about military purchasing. And like if you think we're over a barrel, like, we've got nothing on any military in the world. Like they're just stuck buying shit they don't even want. They can't warehouse.

You know, it's way worse. So I don't feel as bad. Plus, most of the, time stuff in libraries doesn't kill people until we start doing kick jousting, which was John's new idea for competitive sport hosted in libraries where we use kickstools and joust with them. I guess rolling. I'm not sure exactly how it works. I do like the idea.

You have to break them so they don't, they don't, if you stand, you know, you stand on them, they're supposed to stop. You've got to somehow figure out how to break those. Tim, what you said about Alma reminded me, like when I worked in Ohio, that was the situation in Ohio in the 90s and maybe even the late 80s is that every academic institution was on a triple I. and there was a union catalog essentially called Ohio Link, which is still there, and you could do patron-initiated interlibrary loan with no interaction or needing to bother an ILL department if it was within the state system.

And so I could borrow books from like anywhere within the whole state, and it was amazing. But at the same time, it had to be triple I. Everybody had to be in triple I. So I do not know how the negotiations or fish over a barrel stuff went in the 90s other than to say that it's quite possible that, library software companies were not as rapaciously awful in the 90s as they are today. And maybe it wasn't really a factor. But yeah, it was a one, from an end user perspective, it was really, really wonderful. And I'm not sure if our union catalog, the Alma thing here is, is similar in that they'll be a, you know, you can borrow from another institution greaselessly or not without

filling out a racer request or whatever. I think they're tilting towards that, yeah. Yeah, that would be wonderful if possible. I hope that that's, I hope they're doing that. So we'll see. We just hired an ILS librarian here, so I imagine it'll get thick into it. You have a whole librarian just devoted to ILS. That's great. Yeah, we used to not have, not just, she was wonderful. I used to have a staff member, and now we graduated to having a library and do it. I'm not exactly sure why, but I wasn't on the committee for it.

I was going to say, John, use the term rapacious library vendors. I think back then there used to be some skin in the game. There was multiple choices they could go to, right? Like, what are we down to two now, maybe? I'm sure you all have seen the Marshall Breedings graph, right? Where in the 70s, there's a bunch of different spaghetti and multiple fingers, and then the fingers just sort of conglomerate until there's only. Any industry, you think about, like, I come from a long line of car people, unfortunately.

I don't particularly like cars, but my father and my grandfather were all thickened automotive. And if you look at in the early 1900s, there was 100 million car companies, you know, just a billion, and then they just all collapsed down and out and out. And that's pretty much everything. Like, it's the nature of technology to consolidate. Think about the history of Unix and think about previous to Linux. How many X-86 Unisys there were a jillion. Microsoft made an X-86 Unix.

Nuts. Like, we had it in my library even. It was somehow it was involved in bookbinding. I don't know why. And, you know, and then Linux got invented. And now, basically, on the X-86 space, there is Linux. And then the free BSD, NetBSD, Open BSD stuff. but mostly just Linux.

And so I just think that's how organizations tend to go unless there are forces like anti-monopoly to break like breaking up Bell and anti-trust stuff, yeah. Antitrust stuff, yeah, which happened in the States and didn't happen here, which is why we have a terrible, well, one of the reasons why I have a terrible telecommunications situation. Oh gosh, that's a whole episode right there complaining about the CRDC. Excellent to talk about this would be Ruth Kitchen Tillman,

who has done a ginormous amount of research into early automation and libraries and stuff. And she would know all about this upwards and forward. So if you do a show specifically on old cataloging systems and culture surrounding it, she would be excellent to have on because she's really done a whole bunch and it's really fascinating stuff. Yeah. We've definitely talked about, aside from like these big systems like ILSs and things that like we are really stuck in, my library is kind of weird because I feel like our tech services is actually outside. compared to our public services for whatever reason.

So I feel like, you know, we've got a cataloger and a metadata person and they have library assistance. I feel like we're doing pretty good. But when it comes to preservation and digital humanities projects and support for the things that faculty want to do, it's kind of the situation city was talking about with everyone was doing their own thing. People were setting up their own servers left and right. People were getting their own subscriptions to a mecca even, which was just very strange. for a non-librarian to do. And so we've talked with other digital humanities before about preservation.

And I do want to touch on keeping projects going and maintenance work. Because what I read from endings, which is building sustainable digital humanities projects, the average assumption is about a 10-year lifespan. But having worked with a lot of people on grants, the grant cycle is only about three years. And I think it's pretty optimistic to imagine something that loses funding will keep running after two years after that. You see, yeah, I'm in a, my tale of woe doesn't even get to the point where I'm in a maintaining situation and I've got too many lemons. John, fortunately, is there. Like, we are not at the sophistication where we've completed a project and have it sort of on the burner, right?

So, John, yeah, over to you for sure. Yeah, the real problem is, and this is a whole can of worms that, relates to the library's position in the university generally. But the real temptation, because we love to say yes, especially to faculty, is to say yes when they say, oh, make this thing and then you will have it forever. And we at my digital scholarship center decided early on that we would strenuously try to avoid doing what we call commodity work, like hosting someone's straight up WordPress and stuff like that. There is a WordPress host at the library, like a multi-host, but we're like, okay, we're not going to do one-offs. And the reason behind that is maintenance. Because, yes,

a faculty member has a grant for a year, two years, three years, or they get bored or whatever, and then you're stuck with this thing that needs PHP 5 or whatever the hell. And it becomes, you know, even a smaller and smaller ice flow that you were out on the ocean on and eventually will melt and drown you. And it's a real, real, real problem because libraries want to be archival in that sense, because it's work that we've traditionally done, but archiving IT projects is very different than archiving, you know, communications of the Office of the President or books or random books or what have you, because of this shifting support for whatever it depends on. And there's ways to ameliorate that that I don't think at my place we've fully looked into,

like, okay, we'll have your interactive site, but when the grant is over, we scrape it and make it's flat HTML. So there's no searching, but all the content is there. Or if you could somehow make a container, like a Docker container, an LXC or something, that is stuck on a specific version and therefore is independent of the host version of things. And maybe that would work as well. But it's just, yeah, it's just, it can be a real, real, real mess. See, I smell another live guide parallel, or, you know, I was talking about, you know, potential, what happens next. But I'm sure you all have heard of reclaim, right? They're an ISP that does, you know, Omika and other stuff.

You know, they have like a cloud-based thing now that functions like AWS. If we purposefully make ourselves obsolete, you're going to have like professors go directly to these companies pay for product. And then, you know, when the grant runs out, the site gets shut off and then la-di-da disappears down the memory hole forever. And I think, you know, this ties into our conversation about saying yes to things. we're going to be we're going to hit this apocalypse i think soonish right where people are like nuts to you guys you're not helping us you're not playing ball and to take our you know game

elsewhere pay for the cloud thing when the cloud thing runs up the thing disappears and it's gone forever right they they got their citation or whatever they wanted out of it and you know and it's lost for forever right so yeah i don't know how that gets sorted maybe internet archive has you know Docker, you know, full-blown-ass operating system environments. They're doing video game terminals and maim and websites. Why not a whole Linux container virtualized in an Internet archive interface? I don't know. I've been told because I wrote a chapter about cloud computing and libraries,

I've been told by the person who runs the way back machine that it does, in fact, capture everything, even if it doesn't play it back. I assume he's right. He works there. but I have never been able to figure out how to actually get all the data that the Internet Archive pulls out. And I never really had any incentive to keep working with the Internet Archive. So a big thing we've been doing it, my work is consolidating because people were using Reclaim hosting. And that was like where we found people posting their shit.

And we were like, okay, we actually have like a reclaim hosting that we were doing. We finally have locally hosted Omeca. But we went with Classic because we thought some of the plugins were better. And I think that was probably a mistake. We should have gone with the multi-site, but we've got it at least, and we can use it and we can point things to it. But with the old hosting, all those redirects couldn't work because we weren't paying for the hosting anymore. So links got broken, a couple of faculty were like, where'd my shit go? I was like, oh, sorry, it's here now.

I'm sorry. I know you do the citation. You were needing it. It's sorry. But, you know, you don't want that to happen. The thing I'm most nervous about right now is we have an externally hosted press books for open education resources. And it's not super expensive, but it's expensive enough where I worry like, who might discontinue the service and then where do all these projects go if people are really using them?

Because it's basically WordPress. It's a multi-site WordPress. You can build anything in it. It's really useful for education. If we could host it locally, we would have. But, you know, Omeca, I know John knows the whole saga because I was complaining to them the whole time I was dealing with my IT for Rebecca. It took like months. So a big multi-site WordPress was never going to fucking.

happen. But I do worry about the sustainability in terms of, you know, does admin lose their interest? Even though admin was the one who pushed me over the edge to say yes to it, I was kind of like, well, if we can't commit forever, or, you know, 10 years maybe, you shouldn't really go ahead. But he was like, we'll commit, we'll do it. Okay. We'll do it. Yeah. And this goes back to, you know, John, I'll give it to you in a second here, like administration, not knowing the terminology or the lingo or the ramifications of any of this stuff, right? They're just interested in putting a smile on a faculty members face. They don't know what they're signing their staff up for, right?

For sure. It's weird that you say that because in my experience, WordPress MU is about a million times easier to set up than Omica S or Amica Classic. We're not a million, but it's easier to set up. So why would you turn up your nose at WP? Actually, there's no WPMU anymore. It's a single code base, which is something Omica should consider. They will not touch WordPress.

Yeah, fair enough. It is a popular target, and we have had hacked WordPress, before. But mentioning, did not OCLC have a persistent URL program? They're like, your URLs will live forever on OCLC with Pearl. And no matter what happens, there'll be a URL. And then they just decided to fuck off with it. Is that, am I remembering that correctly? Wow. I don't, I don't have any recall of that. But I could be, I could be mistaken. It sounds like something that's true. It does. So I'm inclined to believe it. I mean, you can, you can, you're a URI thing. Yeah. We got to do DOIs for everything.

Yeah, okay, yeah, D.O exactly. But it was some, I want to say there was some service they had. They're like, yeah, it's going to be there forever. And then they decided not to be there anymore. I can't believe you're telling me OCLC would not do something in the best interest of libraries in general, John. I don't agree with you that that actually happened. So I remember going to OCLC headquarters in 1996 and thinking, this is the gussiest, fanciest, non-profit place I've ever been to.

that was 96. They're probably gussier and fancier now. They're spending all that sweet, sweet, easy proxy licensing money. Woo. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. If you go to OCLC research page, it says that Internet Archive now maintains Pearl and redirects and stuff as of 2016. So they introduced 95 and they managed it and then they decided, eh, all right.

Well, so they didn't completely abandon it, but they made the IA deal with it, which, okay. I feel like Handel is supposed to allow for this. Oh, yeah. But I've never figured out how to get a handle to redirect. Because we did have to migrate from D-space to B-press early when I started this job. And there was not a ton of stuff, but I was like, how do we get these handles to redirect? Could not figure it out for the life of me. And also, the original stuff was gone.

So, like, I don't know how to get these handles to move and point to B-press. It's just like these are broken now. I kind of feel when it comes to Skalk-com stuff at this point, it's just locks. It's just lots of copies keep stuff safe. It's just, it doesn't matter if there's five versions of your scholarly article. One's on Archive.org, one's on B Press, one's on the publisher site. It doesn't matter because like two of those might go away. So I just feel like, fuck it.

Let's just have like five copies of every research article that comes out from now on fine. We should just plop it all on the IPFS, you know, hopefully survive a nuke. And somehow a Google search will find what you need. And, you know, let's get on with life. I don't know. if you tie that with NFTs, you can make a serious library proposal, conference proposal, man. I was going to make an NFT joke, yeah, for sure.

How do we keep track of all of these different terms? I hate that because it's like there's so legitimate tech in there, but then it's just dude bros being assholes about it. Don't like, I'm like, NFT dude, stop ruining IPFS. We need to spend a lot of carbon figuring out how we can link to a PDF of like a 10-page journal article that 10 people in the world will need, yeah. It is an application in search of a use case, which is the most insane thing about how long people have been looking for a way to properly use blockchain to do anything. And it's like, well, if you don't need it to do it, why are you making it complicated?

Yeah. Man, some people are just in love with scarcity. I mean, you have something which is designed to defeat scarcity. And you're trying to, exactly. And you're trying to shoehorn scarcity onto it for your own bullshit purposes. Monetization of everything. I mean, even if you wanted to use it for like tracking provenance or something, which is the only thing I think it would be useful for.

It would still like, there's other ways to track in provenance that you just put it in the provenance field. We have talked before about a CLVAL machine. Put it in the field and mark that's for provenance. I don't know. 969, whatever the provenance field is. 4269. Yeah, 4269 field. The nice field.

Nice field. I wonder actually what is Mark 069? Hang on. We're getting deep. This is a 1% or a, this is for the fans, this. Other system control number. Boo. So National Library of Medicine unique ID,

National Library of Medicine serial control number. So you could have a sex thing in the 69 field if you have a sexual study. This could work. We can make this happen. And what's 1420? It's time to write the grant. Spirit bomb hands. Everyone put them up.

Okay, I'm excited for that. I hope all of our catalogers. This is why we should keep Mark around. But the thing is, it's not just a technical debt of Mark. You know, I know people have been talking about bib frames kind of failure. And I think that was also why I wrote lazy consensus right underneath it because I feel like bib frame was meeting to death, was consensus to death. Even then, the ownership of the cataloging records and everything with OCLC that we've recently seen in the lawsuit has been, there's money in the game, too, a lot of, and a lot of it.

Wait, there's a recent lawsuit? Like a recent one, like unrelated to Sky River from a million years ago? No, we didn't have a set on this, man. Oh, yeah. Got to check the archive, John. Yeah. Oh, Christ. It was a few weeks ago.

We did an episode on Clarivate. It has a new product that they were trying to get marketing. records from libraries to start populating. And OCLC went after Clarivate for enticing libraries to breach contract. Didn't go after the libraries for actually breaching contract for sharing the records, which was kind of strange because other libraries like Harvard have made their catalog records open source. So it is strange to both allow some customers to do that and others to not.

But yeah, it's basically Sky River, too, the rivening. Electric Boogaloo. Yeah. Whenever I think of Biddlew. frame, I think of the Obi-1 Canobi meme where he's, you were supposed to be the chosen one, and he's just screaming. Right, because it's like I like

the idea of it a lot. Then it's just all those annoying conference presentations of, look, we're going to Google a book, and your library shows up, and the Google results. I'm like, that's not what this is for. Yeah. Link data. You're my brother, Anakin.

You were supposed to link the data, not confine it. Oh, gosh. Exactly. Let's get this to work with AACR2. That'll be fine. They still use that, eh? No, they use RDF, RDA.

But it's the same thing. And RDA is a closed standard. Because what's sad is I'm the one catalogu- oops, my phone fell off the charger, the one cataloger in the history of the world who likes RDA except for the fact that it's a closed standard. but it's closed standard. You have to pay to be able to even like read how you're supposed to fucking use it. Well, I mean,

Dewey Decimal, DDC is closed, right? LCSH, right? Yeah, do we also suck? Sorry, Violet. They're all like licensed in summer. Someone's making money off of them for sure, right? L.C.

is open. Oh, is it? Okay. I mean, there's still like the catalogers desktop, but you don't have to have that to know how to read LC. I mean, L.C. still also sucks. They all suck. But at least L.C. is like free and marks free. One thing that I, there are three things I miss about the United States of American living there. And one is food. And the other is highway rest areas. And the third thing is no crown copyright. So we have a thing here where things that the government makes are still copyrighted. And in the U.S. where things are at least at the federal level, public domain by default is one of the most wonderful things.

about the United States. Does the queen fucking have copyright over? Yeah. It's got her name on everything. The queen,

here's an interesting thing. The queen owns every piece of land in Canada. Parasite and chief and her idiot. So like the queen owns so much stuff

including I guess copyrights, I don't know. I don't know. Fuck that old bitch. I can't say that because I had to tell a judge that I loved her so I have to be on record

that I love the queen. This is a dish bullshit like libel laws? Yes. Do they count Canada? So we'll say, fuck you. Yeah. On your behalf.

Yeah. We're published in the United States. We don't have to. Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't matter because even if it's published in the States, the fact that Tim and I are Canadian means that we would be behest to libel laws. And in fact, there was a very famous case.

If you remember that, not that long ago with Team Harpy, if you remember Team Harpy, where there was a libel case that was done. in Canada because Canada is much closer to the UK in libel situation than the U.S. And then that was ultimately they lost that case. But we can say fuck that old bitch because we're in the United States. Yep. Even if you're on the pod, like you can't say it, but we can say it twice as much. It's to be very unlikely for Queen Elizabeth II ruler of Canada in the UK to particularly sue me for saying something about her.

But yes. Yeah, especially because she's dead. Oh, what? So she can't sue anyone. Oh my God. No, that's Joe Biden. Yeah, she's been a weekend at Bernie's for like the past like six months, I'm pretty sure. I'll just, uh, I'll just use an incantation that John, I know he loves, just play the academic freedom card.

I can be seditious about the queen because, you know, academic freedom bitches. Yeah. D-l-lid-lid-l-l-d-a. Okay, I had two music drops made because I didn't get to the maintainers. And when we, well, I didn't, when I, when I mentioned the maintainers, I didn't use the, at the beginning. I was about to say, I had it in my head,

and I was like, what's their best song? And then we also read a little bit about angles. So I just had the... I did walk a lot today. I didn't quite walk 500 miles. Yeah.

I did walk a lot. So, just to prepare. I saw them headline at Lollapalooza. It was great. The maintainer. Proclaimers or Pearl Jam? Oh, I see.

Is there anything? Is there anything we missed? there anything we wanted to circle back on before we close out? I think we should talk about Marks more since there were two marks. Yeah. Well, that was because I had a whip round and Sam, because Sam is Sam, Sam Poppovich, said, yes, put this Mark stuff in here. And I read the Fragnon Machines, to be honest with you, I found it difficult to follow.

Well, that's, that's Mark's generally. And the Engels thing was funny because Engels lost interest at the end of it, if you'll notice. He's just like, yeah, yeah, and, unfinished, dot, dot, dot. And I'm like, damn, Engels. ADHD much, but Sam said, well, he was pretty busy because his friend had died and he was doing other stuff. But the Grundris, which is where, I don't know if pronouncing that correctly, which is where the fragment comes from, I always think of it's like the Silmarillion of Marx. It's just like this big massive, massive bunch of shit that wasn't finished.

It's impenetrable, yeah. Dubious. But my understanding about the fragment on machines, it is very unlike anything else he's ever written in that it's sort of directly, not maybe not directly, but alludes to the the invalidation of labor as the source of all productivity, and all the source of all wealth, rather. And so that is interesting in and of itself. But I'm not Marxist enough to really comment on it. I've been learning Marx mainly through going through the backlogs of the horror vanguard,

like Patreon subscriber feed with their book clubs, and where they were going through some Gothic Marxist. text. Gothic Marxist text. It's actually a whole field of Gothic Marxism. Dang. Because Marx talks about like vampires and shit and did body horror with tables talking about commodity fetishism and all sorts of shit. Yeah, Marx is like a goth. It's kind of awesome. But that's how I've been learning, getting more into Marx and other Marxian theory. It's just goth shit. The problem with this fragment is you need to be familiar with at least like, capital volume one to understand because some of the terms are defined in capital.

So, like, you know what you need to know what use value is. You need to know what he's talking about capital as capital and stuff. But it's really interesting because I found it pretty interesting because the usual formulation is like raw material plus labor equals product. And he's saying, actually, since we've made this distinction between circulating goods, circulating capital, which is the raw materials and the product and the fix capital, which is the labor. We can separate those two things,

and then the whole labor process becomes part of every single thing. It kind of is cyclical over on top of it. But then he goes into machines becoming this, what was the word? Objectified labor. It becomes objectified labor in which once things become autonomous,

Marx imagines that the only thing that humans really do is they work to the machine's schedule rather than their own schedule, and they exist just to maintain the machine that maintains itself only for profit. And they're this sort of conscious goo that keeps the machine running. This is why Donna Harroway is a Marxist.

But they don't use machines like instruments, like a hacksaw or a hammer. It's not an instrument anymore. It is now an embodiment. He says it has a soul. Some cyborg shit. Yeah. So coincidentally.

Donna Harroway was a Marxist. That spite PhD I was telling you about earlier, I'm trying to pull in the Marxist angle to describe. The Marxist angle. I see what you did there. I got to stop. I can't, I can't, you know, that's it.

It's going out on a high note. I can't say anything else after that one, right? Got your ass. Yeah. I'm trying to enrich my sort of dumping on accessible use policies by bringing in a Marxist angle. So the more I can say Marxist in this, the more I can convince my supervisor that I know what I'm doing. So I'm going to send him a link to this episode. sort of the podcast and say, look, I'm engaging in, you know, scholarly debate with others about

this thing I'm going to write a dissertation on. And then he'll give me a task. Yeah. Justin, how much of Marxian stuff? Have you actually read capital? I haven't finished Capital simply because I never have had like a group to work through it with. I've mostly focused on Marxist historian kind of stuff. So where he's talking about stages of history and historical materialism and actually how to do history. Because once you start getting into capital, it really gets into where, like, we are defining terms and we're going to do that for a long time. And Marks does this really annoying thing. Here's a tip that if you're ever going to read Marks, whenever Mark says it appeared or apparently, he's about to lie to you.

It's a really annoying thing he does. Whenever he says apparently, he's about to tell you a thing that is not true because he's going to say it's not that. It appeared to be that, but it's not that. So every time he says apparently, I just have to highlight it. be like, okay, the next sentence is a lie. It's something he doesn't believe. But you have to get to the end of the paragraph or the next paragraph to figure out what he actually thinks, because he's going to explain, like, why this doesn't work. Isn't that what they call the dialectic?

I mean, it's, I call it annoying. I think I put on a tweet earlier today that if I met Marx, I think I might find him kind of annoying if we were to hang out. I imagine myself talking to historical figures a lot since I spent a lot time reading in primary sources when I was younger. It's just a weird habit I picked up. So I imagine I would find him really annoying. Who is the best historical figure you would like to speak with or hang out with of your

primary sources? Who you wouldn't find annoying? Yes. Or like dream blois rotation. I don't know. I feel like Marcus Aurelius would be fun to actually talk to about stuff. Because he has like untreated depression and that's what stoicism is. Is a philosophy justifying depression.

It's a bunch of like, we hate fun. It's like, it's like, you're also depressed for us. It's like proto Jordan Peterson, but good. Like you should wake up early in the morning and you should not focus on death too much. And you should only eat meat, constant eating of meat. And you should go into a coma. Me coma. You shouldn't be one of those like fruity Greeks.

Yeah, who eat, who eat meat. I spent a lot of time having conversations in my head with John Adams because I wrote my undergraduate thesis on his work so I read a lot of his letters and so I know way too much about that dude The only thing I know about John Adams is from the incredible movie

Adaptation Musical of 1776 Like fuck Hamilton 1776 is where it's at Maybe got some solid William and Mary Dunking on Harvard content in there But then also there is an opera composer contemporary named John Adams. He's the one who did Nixon and China as well as Dr. Atomic. He's a 20th century, 21st century opera dude. Nixon and China is...

He didn't do Einstein on the beach, did he? No. That's Philip Glass. Right, right, right, right, right. Philip Glass has done Einstein on the beach, Ocknott, which is my favorite opera. One about Gandhi, and I forget what it's called. All right. Satra Gaia or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, that's Philip Glass. But yeah, Nixon and China is really fun. People should go watch Nixon and China. And Dr. Atomic. They're both great. And people should also go watch the Chinese anime of the life of Karl Marx, which is animated six

episode series where Marx is a very pretty man. He's like a tall, slender man. Did they make him a twink? Yeah, he's a twink. Yes. I could probably watch that for credit. Yeah, I got to write this down, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, like we should do like a double feature, like a double feature of Nixon and China and the leader. Let's do that. The leader's so fucking good. It's the most insane show. So is Nixon and China, bitches. It's produced by the Chinese government. So it's just like doesn't mention any of like the downsides of his personality, like any of his affairs or anything like that. Nixon in China has got an incredible aria of I am the wife of Mao Zey Chong, like however you say his name, where it's like her doing an aria.

Yeah, it's really good. Man, I've just seen the cover of the leader, and that is a handsome marks. It does not, I would not guess that's him. There's no beer for one thing. Dang. Twink marks. Yeah, no beard, no alcohol face, no curly hair. Yeah, what the hell, man?

Very not him. Bruno Bauer also in it for a large amount. I don't really know why, but I didn't even know they knew each other. I only knew Bruno Bauer from his religious writing. Fun, fun time. The last time people took scholarship in the Bible seriously before all the non-religious people got out of it. Okay. I think we've covered everything.

Is there anything you, either of you want to plug in terms of work that's coming out or your Twitter handles or anything else or where people find you? You go first, John. You got some book chapters out, don't you, Tim? Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm happy we didn't discuss it because, well, I'm whatever. I'm the CAD that came up with list grievances. Oh, yeah.

So list grievances.com, check it out, and then hate me for it. I took a five-year, I got the first five years of tweets submitted to it, and I've done a text analysis of them all on a bunch of other dimensions and stuff. So there's this book coming out in the fall. It's called Libraries is Dysfunctional Organizations and Workplaces, edited by a gentleman named Spencer Acadia, really great guy. There's a book chapter there about the shit talking, and I get a swear word in my CV because I use a swear word. in the title of the chapter. So please check it out. You know,

I'll post the chapter for free so you don't have to pay for anything. But that will be in November anyways. And then, yeah, I'm elyptronic on Twitter. And, you know, I'm like flavor flav to John's Chuck D. You know, he'll say a lot of stuff.

And I just like echo what he says. Yeah, John, go for it. You're great. Yeah, I'm at ADR on Twitter. And yeah, that's pretty much it. I don't have any book chapters because I, I hate writing. I can't stand it. I have a writing degree and I never, I've never used it. I'm barely literate. But, yeah, nothing to plug.

Well, whenever you do your next podcast, you can plug this one and be like I was on Library Punk. I will do that. Yeah. Good night.