librarypunk - 136 - The New Flesh feat. Adam Jones

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

We’re joined by Adam Jones from Acid Horizon to talk about cybernetics and systems of control. We talk about how systems of control impact libraries, and how cybernetics can help us see the connections between different systems.  Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zzEpV9QEAG  Media Mentioned Acid Horizon podcast: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/  Anti-Oculus https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/734147/anti-oculus-by-acid-horizon/  "Queer Animality", Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Mel Y. Chen. https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/1652/chapter-abstract/178668/Queer-Animality?redirectedFrom=fulltext Trap Door: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544894/trap-door/  That Particular Flavor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distrust_That_Particular_Flavor Resisting AI https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/resisting-ai Work Without the Worker https://www.versobooks.com/products/2518-work-without-the-worker Heike Bauer, ‘Burning Sexual Subjects: Books, Homophobia and the Nazi Destruction of the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin’, in Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary, eds. Partington and Smyth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 17–33. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137367662_2 Transcript: https://pastecode.io/s/y926mbqh

a while back, Justin mentioned cybernetics in an episode but in the cyborg way and I was like, actually, cybernetics is about

systems of feedback, blah, and he was like, whatever. And now he's all like on his cybernetics kick. I'm like,

uh-huh. I don't remember this conversation. Purpose of a podcast is what it does. That's good. Exactly. Yeah. because I'm really into, like, Nicholas Luman and, like, systems theory. That way I'm into, like, Zetelcast, and, like, networks of information and stuff like that.

And so I was getting briefly into cybernetics a little bit of a while back. I ended up sort of getting into it through. I don't know how I actually got into it. I think I ended up finding a bunch of, like, management textbooks. That's really sort of cool paperbacks. I always saw Delaus and Guatera was into it. But so many of, like, the old Cybernetics textbooks are so cheap now, especially ones

so the cybernetuses I learned from was a guy called Fred Honeywell George and it's not because he's like a brilliant innovative cyberneticist but he was one of the best guys explaining the absolute basics of it and so in that way he was always and he was also NATO's

computing consultant I mean you can't learn cybernetics about knowing some proper spooky shit I mean it's a military industrial complex science in a way I mean not necessarily the Lumen Systems Theory stuff I mean that's they usually sort of end up identifying alongside that, especially also as well some of the early AI people to try and

put some distance between that that idea of cybernetics systems. Yeah, but I remember it blew my head, like, blew my mind when I learned that cybernetics wasn't the same thing as like cyborg shit. Like that those are like completely different things that then

just relate in some ways, but like cybernetics is not about ghost in the shell nonsense. I was like, oh, okay. I remember trying to explain cybernics to my mum. And I thought, okay, how do I do this? Well, she's type 1 diabetic and she has an insulin monitor.

And I'm like, you are basically a cybernetic system. This is easy. You know, there's a, you know, positive feedback as if, you know, you just eat way too much sugar. You eat a whole, you eat a whole fucking bar of cabri or something. Negative feedback is that, you know, that regulatory thing of just getting the, I find that there's so many everyday examples that I think that's kind of the scary thing. we find these systems everywhere, or as soon as we let cybernetic thinking out of the box, it's hard to see what isn't.

I mean, far because the concepts are so, they are so general, I guess, you know. Yeah, like, the first time I heard about it as, like, the feedback loop kind of thing. I was like, oh, that's just the reference interview and library science. It's like you ask people questions and then based on, like, what they say, then you adjust, then what you give back to them, and it goes back and forth, back and forth until you get to, like, actual what they were asking. I was like, oh, that's a thing in my line of word. Yeah, or it could be something like applied to Malthusian logic, which is like positive

feedback is the overreproduction of unwanted peoples and then the negative feedback is famine because they won't have enough food. And so that's, I think if you apply that logic to like why people have so much fear of immigration, it probably has the same sort of cybernetic logic somewhere in their mind where they've gone. this is a positive feedback that will lead to a negative one. Therefore, we have to do something to stop it. Or something along that line, but that kind of logic can be applied, even if it has absolutely no bearing on reality.

It's like a model of the world is something I'm starting to get. These are models that can be flawed when people use them as like metaphors. Yeah. Also, I apologize for sounding so stuffy. I've been working with books from the mid to late 19th, century all week, and I tend to have like a mustiness allergy. So I've been on the struggle parts. Funny, actually, the first talk I ever gave on this sort of subject, particularly this book, was actually to the British libraries, one of their document preservation

teams. Oh, okay. So actually, there's always been a kind of a through line where, because the archival stuff only really comes in towards the end of book, but it's interesting how much, how central the aspect of library science is to a lot of this cybernetic's work. And stuff like Antiochlus, we just didn't, we didn't really know how to get into it sort of thing, you know. Yeah. All right. Let's go. I'm Justin.

I'm a Skalkan Library. My pronouns are he and they? I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian, and my pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest. Would you like to enter yourself?

Yeah, I'm Adam. I'm from the podcast, Acid Horizon. I also don't know when to come in on podcast intro sadly, but my pronouns, but my pronouns all he and him. Everybody does it. You're fine. No, one day I'll figure out a better way to segue way into that. It doesn't catch so many people off, but I haven't figured it out yet. Thanks for coming on.

We got talking on Twitter, and I had just been in the middle of reading Antiochulus, and I had also heard the live episode where you talked about Antiochus, and you had talked about having a book coming out, and I was like, oh, that sounds really interesting. I can't wait for it to come out. And then you sent me an early copy, which I really appreciate. So I'm really excited to get into it. So first, why don't you just tell us about your work in general with Asset Horizon, Antioculus, and your book, The New Flesh?

No worries. So I mean, Atter Horizon has been like a post I've got for maybe four years now, a podcast that covers many of the kind of, particularly the canonical names in continental philosophy and various kinds of weird attempts applying philosophy to what we call in Antiochalus. as our kind of cyberpunk present, mostly thinking about control society, critiques of control and domination, from Marxists and general leftist perfectives, but not always necessarily Marxist, Marxist, anarchist, anarchist, anarchist, anarchist, anarchist, we have a little size show called Inner Experience, where we occasionally have people on to do sort of live psychoanalysis or talk about their UFO experiences, actually from quite a cybernetic perspective. But yeah, we put out a couple of books. We put out our first book,

anti-Oculus of philosophy of escape almost a year ago, which is essentially try and summarize all the stuff we've been reading and sort of summarize all the stuff we've been working on to present it to a wider audience as kind of a philosophical toolkit, gives you introductions to things like cybernetics, control theory, and essentially how to escape them. It's not just about control system, it's also about means of escape or concepts of escape.

So we draw particularly a lot on sort of post-psychonalysis, anti-psychiatry, the philosophy of disability, queer studies, and central figures. On top of that would be people like Patai de Lars and Guattari, Hegel, but very, very critically, people like Catherine Malibu, stuff like that. And yeah, this is this upcoming book, which is out in late November, I believe, and it's called The New Flesh, where life and death in the data economy, that's just a solo effort for myself. And it's about basically how posting drives you kind of mad, but not generally how posting drives

mad, but not, but with a one very critical eye to the notion of madness, but two, looking mostly into the production of data and how the production of data shapes increasingly more spears of everyday life, from just basic things to shopping, such as the ways of social media is infrastructurally designed to amplify us or create new forms of behavior, and indeed trying to look into concepts of what we use and we talk about the digital world, particularly things like virality and feedback in terms of how we start behaving more like the things we see online in order to understand contemporary forms of not only fascism, but also the kinds of the imperialist structure of data production today. So what I'm talking about particularly

is things such as micro work, basically the moderation of data sets and how this can work in terms of not only basically capturing dispossessed peoples and paying them pennies on the dollar to essentially do captures and find faces that look like theirs, which will eventually be used to hunt them down in the imperial core and through other technologies, as we're seeing with the genocide in Palestine and their so-called AI machines, but generally the ways that data is a hidden form of labor that's essential to the postmodern sort of capitalist economy. Yeah, and I also like the discussion of how there was a part in Antiochulus where it was talking about how we are, I always forget if I have the right word, but like we are de-amalgamated, we are de-identified and put into series of lines, not de-identified, but we are put into a series of lines of things. You are this piece of data and this piece of data.

You're a series of descriptions about yourself. You're depersonalized. Dividuated. the dividuality. Dividuality. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I really like playing with that idea, especially as we were just talking about link data

and how it's kind of important to have the full record because link data is not very good at pulling individual pieces of data like a cert from those what are essentially documents, like our mark records are essentially full documents. And so my head was starting to connect a lot of those things with the way that we control and classify data and how when we want something useful, we kind of pull the full document. But that also has to do with other things that are not related to what we're talking about.

But thank you for the overview. Could you tell me a little bit more about the new flesh and the parts that did end up overlapping with like library science? Yes. So this is predominantly in the chapter on the virality, which is the biggest chapter. actually takes the work of someone like William S. Burroughs and takes the idea of a certain virality to language and then runs with it. But it tries to do a few things that Burroughs doesn't do. For one, it tries to actually define quite rigidly what we're talking about and also

avoids his weirdly anthropological. And sometimes, he racializes the theory of the virus more than people would like to admit. But what I was trying to do with that part is to look at viruses, look at virality in terms of writing, essentially because the model by which we used to define a virus, we go by the famous scientist Koch, who discovered the tuberculosis bacterium, and the previous manner, it was almost like what in philosophy we call the transcendental argument,

we would work backwards from the experience of disease to find the thing that's causing it, and therefore viruses are always seen in terms of disease, but now using sort of basically virology text, books, sort of the most recent ones I can get my hands on, looking at viruses in terms of what's called bioinformatics, which is as writing, as codes, as chemically coded beings, really, and they can write, they can encode. And here I want to talk about the ways in which writing can sort of mutate, can code, can flow in a way like a virus, and not even like as a

virus, I want to say, because we can, whilst we can get rid of various metaphors about intention, direction with viruses, what I found to be interesting is from all of my research into these virology textbooks is they can't get rid of the idea of viruses as writing and coding machines. This is, for example,

retroviruses are a good example of this. So retroviruses, these viruses, which, rather than replacing the entire code of a cell's DNA, they replace a little bit, they add a bit more. And we use these things

in what's called, I guess, gene therapies, where we have a retrovirus that corrects well, depending on what once changes the code of a cell, as to remove something which the person or the person writing the virus doesn't want to be there. You can do that, you can rewrite cells, and those cells can replicate each other, and then replace gradually the rest of those cells.

But retroviruses don't have what they call proofreading ability, and so there's a inherent mutatability to this. I wanted to talk about the dissemination of codes, dissemination of writing, in the way that the function of communication in a viral manner, to essentially also to undermine one of the real points of fascism I see today, which is, I mean, it's, I wouldn't say turfism, because the R and the F don't usually come into it, but the transphobic discourse of social contagion by completely undermining any ontological or philosophical basis for thinking about virality and communication in those terms.

And this is why it moves from bioinformatics and virality and biological science to the burning of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin as a kind of, of looking at the politics of immunology. And this is when I get to these concepts of the archive. And I mean, there isn't an anarchist bent to this which can be taken too far, but I use the concept from the Trans-Sulli scholar Mel Weirchen called the Viral Archive, which is essentially to present archives of transformation as Moses' transformation, as opposed to archives of fixed form, which are trying to preempt anything else coming out of it.

So the example that Chen gives is particularly YouTube transition timelines, particularly for the TransMax people, and I thought, I just found this concept. And I thought, I just ran with it in terms of how do we have archives allow us to, in a way, go viral in a sense of subtracting codes and giving us new possibilities, rather than viralities which add codes and sort of delimit possibilities in advance, which I think is the way that racism works. coding. I mean, if you want to give an example of what I'd call a fascist semi-ovirus, decoding

that makes the equivalent of Haitian person, and basically anyone, anyone, anyone, any person of color in the United States, particularly black people with Pet Eater being spread by Trump and Vance and Chris Rufo and his mates, that is an example of a fascist virus that adds codes in order to render you sort of something to be taken out by what they've described as a social immune system. and this library of forms and so potentials what delimits it I think it's a real thing that that goes of course there is a way

one can take us a bit too far into any categorization is fascist but oh my God we can't know anything but rather I'm just trying to provide points of resistance to that and sort of find recodings to it rather than blow it up entirely I know before we started proper I mentioned the first talk I gave on this

was to the British Library like I wasn't saying that you know well we should we should burn you all down You're fascists. You have, you know, you've categorized books into genres. What is this? No, no, it's just about trying to find ways of undermining fascist applications thereof. I'm sorry, I went on too long, but.

No, that was perfect. And I love that paper of like, like, the trans masculine, like YouTube thing as, like an archive and like the trans body as an archive of every step of transition. And so preserving the archive, not as something fixed, but is something that does change. thing. Yeah, I've used that paper when, like, doing talks before. It's absolutely brilliant. It's so good. It's so good. The whole book is, yeah, trapdoor, it's called if anyone wants to look it up. Yeah, there's like a specific paper that I've seen that talks about the like transmasculine YouTube timelines as an archive. It's so cool. I'll have to read that book, though. That sounds great. It's a huge collection. Fred Moten's in it as well,

which is always a joy. And we do talk about like classification because classification is sort of sort of like the imposing of borders. And of course, borders imply the violence needed to maintain those borders. So classification does have like its own risks in itself. And I did have a question like later on about that. But yeah, the archive and an archive kind of reminded me of a very early episode we did with someone who was doing what was called Human Trash Dump. And that was their performance art archive that was also done online.

So it was an online archive and it was performance art and the performance art was the archive. And it had to do with, you know, they would give like talks and like a full like latex suit and things like that. It was very fun. I want to revisit it because I haven't listened to it in a while. But I did want to give people an idea of like what cybernetics is. And I know we covered this little in the cold open. But how would you define cybernetics for people listening? So cybernetics really is a project, some would say a science, of trying to map out the world.

It's a system of systems. It's a way of creating models of systems that basically draws diagrams of them in terms of the relations between various functions, and its main concepts are all to do with what feeds into a system. So we've got information, which is defined as difference that makes a difference, because if then difference makes no difference, and it's not informative. Otherwise, you're just checking, okay, what's the status now? Same as before. That does inform you, but it's not really information in the sense of making any practical difference to a system.

A system itself is a very vague term, because these terms to cybernics are generally quite vague. A system could be anything. I mean, we are forming a system collectively with everything here. One forms a system with, I mean, Gregory Patterson gives an example of cutting down the tree. there is the components of arm, axe, tree, gravity, for example. It's just a general tone of mapping. But the main concepts people will be most familiar with are concepts of feedback, both positive and negative, and feed forward.

So feed forward actually is the one that people lose sight of the most, but I'll start with feedback. Feedback, for example, could be positive in the sense of a vicious circle, so if you leave two rabbits alone for a certain amount of time, suddenly you have 40 of. Or, for example, viruses spread. Pandemics are positive feedback loops. They spread one person spreads it to three, spreads to four. Negative feedback is the essence of the first kind of wave of cybernetics that we know,

which is essentially it's something that moves against the direction of a system. But what do I mean by that? The classic example is thermostats. Cybernetics as a paradigm, it's a kind of engineering that moves past one of the original problems, which is power. So power engineering talks about, for example, how do we heat up a house? What fuel do we use? What generated do we use? What does generate have to look like? For cybernetics, the problem isn't so much power. It's not so much the means of achieving an end directly, but rather it's a problem of information as to how and when and to what extent to enact

that mechanism. So, for example, we know how to heat houses, we have fuel, we have electricity, we have radiators, but how to maintain a decent temperature is a matter of information, when to turn off the generation of heat and when to keep it on. And this sort of idea of negative feedback, for example, will be when you want, say you want 20 degrees and you don't want the generator to keep burning, basically you want to burn the place down, the negative feedback would be you have a periodic generation of heat, such that every so often the heat is turned off. Something moves against the direction of that system.

That is the direction being the generation of heat, and then it stays at a regular level thermostat, so the typical example. Also just driving. Cybernetics comes from Kubernetes, which is steering. If you want to go to one direction, you're only going to go simply too far to the right with the steering wheel that you're just going in circles.

You need to move right and a bit left. that negative feedback is you pushing against direction the already moving in to maintain a stable course. And we get cybernetics from the same sort of term as governance. That's positive and negative feedback. Feed forward is more interesting for me because it's about preemption. Whereas negative feedback requires something to go a little bit wrong in order to correct it. That's what correction is, you know. But feed forward tries to preempt any error in advance, which means, of course, it can't, you know, it can't learn. It can't. can't do negative feedback, but it has to have an additional layer of systems on top of it.

I think that's sort of the basic concepts of cybernetics here, and they're sort of everywhere now. They've diffused into business studies, management studies. And that's because on top of cybernetics, there is also a fuck ton of differential calculus, which no one has time for. I mean, I've got an old book of servo control systems. No, no choice. I'm not going to process that. Vina's, you know what Vina Ligar who founded cybernetics, has loads of differential equations

about how feedback loops work. But for general cybernetic theory, you just need feedback, feedforward, concept of modeling, and concepts of the system. I think that's of cybernetics in the actual, at least as far as I'm going to be using it, and most cybernetic theorists

generally reuse it. Yeah, I had listed down an example as academic writing as cybernetic. So I guess the feed-forward part would be when you're writing, you're anticipating the critiques that other people are going to give you, and then actually getting feedback, then getting peer review, then, you know, if there are any critiques after it's been published. And then, of course, the positive feedback of did you get well cited?

Did people ask you to write more? That sort of thing. So that's a small example. Or like the way that people have learned to post on social media as they are like predicting the way that people are going to cancel them based on what they say. and so you like every like you can tell like the way that people have talked online I know the way I talk online people over explain or they will say this and they won't say that because recall if I say this then people are going to come at me for this like that kind of thing exactly that I mean those are both the examples I give in the actual book I should have just come with them but yeah yeah that's one of

the things that actually drives me the most nuts is where you you see someone post and you realize that they've already had like a whole argument in their head before they've posted the first thing they've posted. And I go, like, I know it's Twitter and we're not all friends here, but I'm your friend. And you're probably talking to people like me. Like, you didn't need to. This is why just join a Discord with people that are cool. There you go.

Join our Discord. We've got a link to it. I never plug it. But yeah, it's because there's also the feedback that I think what drives me more nuts now is the way that people try to predict what will be de-boasted by an algorithm. So, of course, the new techno babble, which is like on a live or I've been watching a whole lot of corn, you know, like just saying, like making you talk like a five-year-old and it is really like, we just need to go somewhere else because this is not a place for adults anymore. Like, this is a playpen that we've been put in and it's making us worse people. spelling sex

S-E-G-G-S and all of the like captions I'm like stop Stop just don't go viral Don't try to go viral Don't try to have anyone see your posts Well and then you get the thing of like People who have posted something Specifically just for the very small audience of their friends

On their Twitter or whatever Which then goes viral and you get like the thousands of people Who are suddenly taking it out of like what Way out of context There's a word for that We've talked about it. A breaking containment, escaping containment or something. Yeah, well, I was thinking like, like, it was like contextless behavior or something like that.

Oh, okay. Yeah, so it's like, I meant this to hit 15 people who know specifically what I'm talking about because I've talked about it before. And instead, it's going to 15,000 people who have actually no idea what any of it means beyond this single sentence that I said. So, yeah. Yeah. The 4U page on Twitter. Oh, my God. It's just like people with like the weirdest, you're just like, why?

I wonder what I'm missing. And then you read it and you're like, oh, this is just a trans person who's also a fascist. Weird that I got suggested that, but there we are. That's who that was. And that's, I didn't misunderstand the context. This is just a creature of the internet who I should never have been exposed to. Well, I wonder how that kind of cycle of algorithmic feedback, too is going to start, you know, affecting people who, who anticipate it when it's not actually

present. Because I don't know if you guys have seen, like, on Tumblr, which is like the only social media I actually use anymore because I can actually control what I see is like people who are tagging things weirdly like they do on TikTok to try to get the most views when that's not actually how tagging on Tumblr works or people who use the unalive and and SEGs words to try to circumvent an algorithm that does not actually exist in that most user, well, it does exist, but most users just turn it off, right? So like, I think it's interesting to see how that starts to influence its people's behavior to become like a weird feedback cycle

that then becomes normalized and then nobody remembers the actual source of it anymore. So, yeah, that's what I think about in terms of social feedback. Yeah, so we've complained about our usual gripes, but why study cybernetics? Thank you for keeping us on track, Justin. Doing my best. Why study cybernetics and automation? What's the importance of it? Why does it keep coming up?

I'm not sure if I take us off track or not now, because those things that we've been talking about are chapters one and two of the book, so that's it. No, no, but I'll just start just by saying briefly about that, because So chapter two is called feedback addiction. And it's about the infrastructure of social media and how it's designed to actually give you a sense of self-fulfillment through the consummation production of data. But at the end of the day, one's account, especially on things like Twitter, Facebook and the like, one's account doesn't actually have any content other than that which passes through it.

You're just kind of a relatively empty space where content has to move in order to be to receive feedback, to receive likes. I put it in the same way as structured like academic writing trying to preempt that kind of feedback. That is, I use the notion of cybernetics of communications engineering versus power engineering to talk about how feedback can become a kind of sight of what the psychoanalyst, R.D. Lang would call

like ontological security. So there's an example of Weakle's engulfment from group therapy he brings up, and I use it to apply it to Twitter. And my co-hosts, what might be saying this, because I used all of us as case studies, basically, of posters, disease in this book to try and sort of write ourselves out of it.

But in this group therapy session, Lang notes that there's these two people in the therapy session you're arguing. And one of them eventually says to the other, look, please, we have to stop. And it says, why? If you win this argument, you win another argument. If you lose, so if I lose this argument, I cease to exist.

And it's this kind of way which the self becomes intertwined with the image of the account, and indeed the way that things can spiral, because social media encourages short-form content and therefore encourages categorical statements, which have to have the most appeal and most shareability, but it's also structured in the way also group chats, but a group chat where the borders are completely not here.

People can have what used to be internal community discussions, but that's the thing. It's not an echo chamber. It needed to be an echo chain, but an echo chain would have been good in the same way that your local bar is an echo chamber to that extent. But now any fascist can walk in on what would usually be essentially just any conversation about, say, any sort of philosophy in any pub, and then go, well, I'd disagree of that, and therefore you're all doing it, because it's decided for maximum shareability. And I think part of the reason why we should study cybernetic and automation is because it's coming for us and already has sort of come for us. I mean, cybernetics as a science, no but Vena's not coming for us,

but I think these systems, in so far as they are, understood cybernetically, do just generally just exist in terms of data production. I don't think that cybernetics exhausts what they are, but I think finding the limits of cybernetics is finding the limits of that kind of control. Everything I've written is not very pro-cyberetics. It's actually saying, look, these machines just exist that way

because that's how they're designed, but there are going to be, this is the classic map territory, distinction. Cybernetics wants to map the world and it imposes the violence and the things that it maps because it wants to make them match completely. We just need to make more data. And we see this with, I mean, the racial profiling of, indeed, the inter-gender profiling of facial recognition technologies. I think we should study these machines in, I think in cybernetic terms, because one, it's a very good basic toolkit. One can use to map these machines out. And also, but also one has to look to find the limits of them. Because at the

the day, cybernetics isn't just a science, it's also a sort of set of political images. We shouldn't study cybernics because it's correct. We should study cybernetics because in many ways it's wrong. And if we want to look at the way people are thinking cybernetically, I mean, the images of cybernetics, for example, mostly come from the imagination of cyberpunk. And William Gibson is a great guy to read, not just in terms of his fiction, but in terms of his essays. There's a book he has called Distrust That Particular Flavor,

and it's a collection of his essays, and he comments on them. And he says at one point, well, he says it before anyway, that I was writing about modem before I knew what the fuck a modem was. He's a poetics. He's a figure of the poetics of cybernetics.

And the image of cybernetic enhancements, of course, very much an evilist discourse, the image of cybernetic brilliance. This is the thing that's running for the minds of every tech pro-fascist today, and understanding the limits of their worldview is going to take something of an engagement with cybernetics to find out where it's leaking, where it can be attacked. Because these machines, they are mostly images. I mean, the cyberpunk present chapter of Antiochulus is mostly about how cyberpunk is real, but it's not about going to Mars.

It's not about cybernetic organs. It's about the fight for healthcare. Because most cybernetic stories are about the fight for healthcare, because the feedback loop isn't, you know, Nick Land and the AI guys making the new God, the feedback of Luke Central's lives now is going to be food, it's going to be heating, it's going to be endocrinological regulation. These are the real cyberpunk fronts here in terms of the unity of high tech and low life. And I think these are just very pertinent images which are good to sort of deconstruct

the imaginations of the Elon Musk's and the technophascists of the world. and it's also helps as well as it's also presented in a manner that's also somewhat enjoyable people enjoy cyberpunk but they in a way the transformations of their own body and the horror of it is something which is weirdly kind of enjoyable

in a horrorific sense I mean shout out to to John and the crew of a horror vanguard for this of course I did the cympunk episode with Kay and Kyle O'Frague but these images are quite good to use because they're quite enjoyable.

And it reminds me of something that Mark Fisher and Kojo-Eyeshan said about jungle music was that this idea of jungle music, you're being chased through a fucking field by the Terminator, it libidinalizes anxiety, and the free rave move where you're just doing this mass trespass, it libidinalize the anxiety of knowing

there's a machine against capitalist entity chasing you. And if we can libidilize that anxiety, then you also libidinalize the confrontation with it. And so I think the use of cyberpunk images is partially aesthetically very pleasing, and we don't want to do too much stetization of politics because Walter Benjamin warn us about that. But insofar as these machines are more imminent to our lives,

in terms of datification, I do think this is one of the best vectors to go for it through. Not so the only one, but definitely one, I think, is going to be quite helpful. You were just waiting. We haven't brought it Mark Fisher in a bet. No, because I was on a Mark Fisher kick for a little bit, and I was like reading through all of K. Pong, so I'd bring him up every episode or so. It's just a necessary button.

It do be like that sometimes. One thing I was thinking as I was going through Antiochulus in particular was all the applications of that work to libraries. And so I had all these notes I was writing down on my whiteboard as we were going. and it was also kind of like, could I turn this into a study of library punk? Is there a library punk critique I can play with that could kind of summarize what we've been doing for the past few years? Maybe that could be like a theme that we play with for the next few episodes. And so I was trying to think of all the ways in which libraries have like control, automation, a million nudges that keep you in place.

And then data collection, the amalgamation of views is part. parts of data. So you talk about your, our individual profile, which is sort of thinking quote here, for DeLew's individuality is characteristic of the control society, in which the paradigm of social control tends towards mobilizing flows of data to expand surveillance, motivate consumer habits, and optimize apparatuses geared toward generating forms of compliance. and libraries have unfortunately become part of, you know, data collection and usage. And also, I think what I've been thinking about more is the extremely large amount of AI boosters in higher education in particular. And that's making its way into academic libraries, which is kind of surprising to me because a lot of the boosterism that we saw around, for instance, blockchain, you would get a few people who would go, I'm going to go read about this.

It sounds interesting. I'm, you know, I've got to go find out what an NFT is and if it's going to be relevant to anything in libraries. Because libraries, I think, are pretty tech-forward people in many ways. You know, my university spent a couple hundred thousand dollars to make a second-life campus, which was one of the main ways that Second Life made money in a later part of its business, was selling digital land. And of course, that's probably why Meta was so interested in making the Metaverse is if you don't have any land to sell, you can create new land and sell that and extract rents from it.

But I think AI is one that has been interesting to me, in particular the ways in which it removes kind of the human aspect of library service. I was thinking in particular, like, why are library websites so bad? And one thing I noticed as like a sort of recurring theme is library websites do everything they can to invisibleize our labor. part of that is sort of the nature of the feminized nature of librarianship and library work. And there's a lot of like gender happening with that invisibilization. But a lot of it is so intentional.

We want it to look as smooth as possible and look like it just runs on its own. You look at a library website and you don't see people. You see, you know, maybe a nice picture of the building. You see search the catalog. Here are some events that are happening, which might have some pictures of people, but all the services and stuff and our library alone. the book just gets to you, the catalog, the e-resources, all that stuff is automated and comes straight to you.

And then, of course, we have Ask a Library in chats, which people don't want to use anymore because they assume it's a chatbot. And you have to tell people, it's not a chatbot. It's a person there. We generally don't use chatbots. But we've done so much of a removal of the human interaction that it's grubbed from it. Yeah, like in one of my previous job, more so than in my job now, but also now relevant to my job now as like a cataloging librarian.

And I used to in a previous job, like, maintain like the, I don't know if you've heard this term before, Adam, but a discovery layer. So instead of like the old school digital library catalog, now the thing that will bring in not only the books, but also it will also bring in the articles from databases at the same time. That's called the discovery layer. I maintained that for the university that I worked at. And I always used to say, like, it was really hard for me to self-advocate in my job

because if I was doing my job right, no one knew I existed, right? Like, if everything was that smooth, then my labor, like, I was invisible to people because the fruits of my labor were working so well. But it was only when things went wrong that it was obvious that I was the thing in the supply chain or whatever that had screwed up. Yeah, like this is a really huge thing for tech services librarians and like library workers like who like work in IT. Yes, yes.

The invisibilization aspect of this labor, there's definitely two, it seems at least that there's two extremes here in terms of one. You said the invisibilization of labor, which is goes all the way down to the data sets. I mean, especially with data moderators. I mean, I think it was about a year, almost a year ago now. Last May, I believe, that Kat GPT's moderators finally unionized in Kenya, and most of the work is micro-work, but for actually working in these library services, I mean, so the next Asset Horizon episode, which will be out by, I think, by time this is out, is with Professor called Dan McQuillan, who are a book called Resisting AI, an anti-fascist approach to artificial intelligence. And one of the things that he brings up, and I wonder if it's context to your experience as well, which is what AI does is invisibilizes, the everyday flow of work, but also, he includes what he calls microrests. So essentially, the only things that people in highly automated and highly, I say AI-Fi,

but it's not just, it's neither A nor I, really. It's so-called AI-enabled workplaces and highly digitized and automated workplaces. It seems like in some accounts, the work becomes more stressful in the way, because where the human intervenes, it's predominantly only in the hardest cases where a machine is simply unable to do it. So, for example, I mean, I'm explaining your experiences. I mean, I want if that's resonate with your own experiences. Because, I mean, McQuillen was using, example, like automated call centers, where if you can't be solved in a basic, press for button, you get the most stressed or the most unable to work with that tech callers. Do you think that

ends up eliminating part of the smaller almost semi-rest periods of work when you get automation coming into the library system? I mean, I feel like, It might depend because when I was in grad school, for example, and worked at a service desk, the majority of the questions I got were directional or non-researchal informational. Where is the bathroom? How late are we open? Stuff like that. Like stuff that is easily findable on a website if a website is like tagged and made well. That is like that's something actually reasonable for a chat bot, a non-AI chat bot to be able to like be programmably mad. poll or it was things like a freshman or anybody being like, hey, I can't access this journal article, like something in the electronic resources pipeline. It breaks down. And usually in that case, there's something wrong with them going through the authentication system. Like, they went through it through the publishers' websites or the library website or a URL somewhere changed without it being notified. And in some of those cases, it could be as easy as like going through

like a standard troubleshooting. Like, have you done this? Have you done this? Have you done this? So I could see for some instances how it could remove a lot of that, like, basic non-researchal and directional questions. That is a lot of what public service staff do get. But also sometimes those very quote, because I remember like the librarians never wanted

to sit at the reference staff. because they were tired of answering those questions. They thought it took away from their time to do the rest of their job. But what working with those types of questions lets you know is where problems in the system are and how people are looking for information. If people can't find this information on the website on their own, then there's a problem with the website. Or like the type of like basic questions that people were asking. If there was a bunch of, hey, I can't access this article.

did you go through the library website? Oh, no. Then why aren't we getting it across that people need to go through the library website first? So it would both take away, like, it would be kind of easy for a lot of those to be automated, I think, but also it would remove the point of having a person who also does the research questions, like, who can like put all of these things in context together. And I hear like AI can kind of do that, do that sort of like pattern matching, whatever like it does in healthcare, but still. Well, one thing it definitely can't do is be, is a basic reference interview because right. And that's always sort of tied up. You never know when a basic question is one that needs a follow-up question. So for example, if, like, AI would

interpret a lot of basic reference questions is directional questions. So a student will come up to you and say, I need a book on the Roman Empire. An inexperienced person or an AI will say it's under, you know, G or D or wherever, I don't remember where Roman history would be and they'll see. But the question is, if you're working at the academic library, the question is, is this for a class? And if, especially if it looks like a freshman, then they say yes. And you say, okay, is it for what's the assignment? And they said, well, my professor said, I need to have three sources for my, my discussion board this week.

And I'm like, I promise you, your professor doesn't want you to read three books this week. What you want is a reference article. You want probably another reference article and it may be a short research article. And that way you're only going to be reading, you know, you're saving the time of the user, which is one of the laws of library science, right? But also, you're helping them do the exact thing. And sometimes you need them to pull up, like, on their phone, what the assignment is so that they can read it to you. And, you know, when I was doing night reference at a community college, that was every question was, you know, is this for an assignment?

And I think only once in like the three or four months when I was working at that community college, did someone say, no, I'm just interested. And I said, cool, let's walk up there. And then I showed them how that, like, shelf read the section. But even then, like, it helps with a follow up. But no, I really don't think, like, I don't know anyone is really. put like a chat bot. The only thing I know is people have done the automated FAQs. So like if it's after hours, like an FAQ bot will show up and it'll be like, here's the top five was ask questions. Click on one. It'll take you the FAQ page about it.

But it's not really like a conversational bot that pretends it's a person. Right. And like the reference interview example that I was given like all the way back in grad school, my reference class is like what might be a simple question. is actually requires a lot of digging through is a patron company that is going, I want information about Coca-Cola, and you go, oh, like, well, there's like a vending machine down the hall, or, like, here's the keywords

for searching for Coca-Cola in the database, which is probably what, like, an AI would do, like, oh, here are the keywords you want to research this topic, right? When actually what that patron was curious about was why Coca-Cola bottles have the shape that they do, but people don't know how to ask the questions that they're actually wanting to know about. Every person does this, including librarians. But that's the purpose of the reference interview is to get at what a person is actually asking.

But there's like, I studied a lot of question formation from a master's thesis. And like there is like a lost in translation aspect that goes from the information need, like the question need to like verbalizing that either to another person or even to. a chat bot or even to just a search bar. Well, I think a lot of this is really relevant to IT work too, not even necessarily in libraries, but in general, because like you're talking about like call centers or kind of those escalating cases of like, you know, all the directional things have been taken out and all of that. So the P, when it actually ends up in a person, it's actually like a really complex case, which in some ways can be really interesting because then you're getting the more

interesting cases that you can take apart and figure out what's actually going on using reference interview skills, which are absolutely relevant to any sort of IT career. But like, I've kind of experienced it not necessarily in our own, like my own line of work, but trying to work with vendors to get more information being that sort of complex case, where it's like you'll throw a question at Microsoft and you get an engineer who's very clearly just going through a series of knowledge-based articles that they're not allowed to deviate from, which is important, that you've already done because you know how to look up the same exact knowledge-based article and apply it to your case and go, okay, this is not that. So you're looking for somebody to actually

ask you those sort of referencey questions so you can actually, you're like, I must be missing something here, right, and troubleshooting this. And then you get somebody who's just doing the same exact thing. And it takes a week or two to actually get escalated to an engineer who knows how to ask those questions and look at your very specific case, right? So, and then that translates into a delay for our users who are, you know, library staff, which then translates into a delay for the users who are the patrons at the library. Like, you know, so it's like something in our email breaks, and it's this chain of delay that ends up being, reflecting bad on us because our vendor that we have a contract with who we're paying has the support that is supposedly automated and streamlined

and it actually, you can't actually get past that automation part when you already know that you need to be escalated past that, right? So I'm not actually sure how relevant that is now that I've said it all out loud. But like, I can see where those sort of like cases of of human intervention like work actually like work against the automation flow that they're trying to create if that makes sense.

The thesis I'm sort of working on after all this which is thinking about why are we being sold more of these cybernetics automate machines to intervene in our jobs constantly all the time and why did none of them fucking work whatsoever because he said we were talking about here

the people that are selling these machines one are mostly startups to hoover up venture capital money and they're sort of, you know, as the interest rates went up and the free money stopped going around, they became more and more fascist because, you know, the system, these people were sort of the true believers of the cybernetic

image, which is the system just needs more data or the system works because it works. I mean, we see people like Musk and, you know, techno optimists like Mark Andresen, and they hate people, they hate all of us, they hate people actually work for information because they don't want to be informed.

because there's no democracy technologies, because people actually work with them can't actually be part of the feedback process, then it's left up to, well, I think it is a positive feedback system, mostly because, I mean, you know, CEOs are weird creatures, aren't they? I mean, they are definitely a separate,

not in a sense of biological or social essentialism, but in the sense of they're the weird new kind of human which the word no has disappeared from their earshot. They've not heard the word, there has been a pure positive feedback loop of, okay, the system is going to work because I've thrown money at it, and if it doesn't work, then I'm going to pay someone else who will tell me it can work.

And this is why we see, you know, open AI, just creating slop. We see stuff like, you know, the line in Saudi Arabia. People with so much money, you have hoarded so much money, and because they have this much money, because they've stolen it from the rest of us and destroyed the welfare state and impoverished the entire world. So then the only people that can say no to them are someone who doesn't need their money, which is not very many people if you're actually able to work with them in the first place.

And so they can just go in these cycles of impunity where they demand these systems work, because they work, because they work, because they work, you're fired. Okay, but someone else will come on to tell me they work. This links everything from, you know, the fact that Twitter magically won't start working if you fire all of the tech staff to, you know, any library not responding to one and saying, this system is shit. I mean, I don't know if it's real too much about the British Library, but it's a British institution, it's collapsing. That's what I'll say about it. I mean, even in terms of, let's be honest, the military industrial conflict, which is stuck in the

same loop of, and these systems work because they work, because they work because we spent money on them. No, they don't. That sort of impunity, that lack of negative feedback, which can only really come from democracy, which is what neoliberalism is so hostile to, is completely flat. I mean, this is why for all the money that, you know, all the money the IDF spend on stupid fucking machines, they don't work very well, because no one has ever told them no, you know,

no one tells Elon Musk and no, until they will just keep investing, investing to believe that what they call once the Elon Musk reality distortion field keeps working. So I really think we are stuck in this sort of positive feedback loop with these kind of machines, where they're being sold as for humanity, but only on a basis that they fucking hate humans.

They really do hate humans. I mean, in terms of, I mean, Twitter, for one, we're there mostly to fill the gaps between ads and Musk hates us to, because we're not, you know, telling how lovely ears. And even in terms of, so I work in publishing, AI does come in a few times and these machines are completely irresponsible for any negative feedback. It is genuinely a sort of crisis of techniques here, mostly because there is no way to say no to people that have so much power that you can't really reject these machines in the other way apart from the classic means of a machine. breaking or, you know, letting machines collapse. But again, it's not the CEO who feels that powers. You know, it's the privatization of gain, the socialization of losses. And as you know, the worker is the one at the head of it.

But sorry, I've been rambling but too long. No, no, no, not. You're fine. We usually go pretty late, too. I have all these notes that I'm, like, looking at because I took a photo of it of my whiteboard. And part of it was, like, the automation of control. but also the messiness of human interaction.

And I think this was part, the thing is when I was writing this note, and I didn't write what part of Antiochulus I was on. But I just have this part that says like the messiness of human interaction, which I tied into the race riots that recently happened in the UK, which was burning one of the libraries as well because it was seen as a threat of a benefit to outsiders and the way that libraries create insiders and outsiders. There's the residents and the non-resident who is outside of the library. There is the patron and sort of the non-patron where we have all these things, especially

in like university libraries. You know, there's the student, faculty, researchers. They can all have access. And then the public, we usually will begrudgingly give some access to. You get a shitty little computer in the corner you're allowed to play with, and that has your public access to it. You might be allowed to check out books, but usually it's kind of hostile. And, of course, university parking is usually pretty hostile to outsiders, too.

But I was, I also have a section on like the sort of liberal marketizing logic of, I guess, in general, the current moment that suppresses non-market life. And I was trying to get at like what the contradictions libraries are because they're both a threat to the logic of marketizing every part of our life and they operate within it as an assumption. So property relations, government ownership of materials, paying late fees, playing replacement fees. We call the cops on you if you don't bring the book back because the city library is part of the city government and it's city government property. Therefore, the police are going to go show up. It happens in some places where the library and the police are a little too closely related. But also libraries are expected to provide job skills, coding centers, internet access because you have to be plugged in. You have to be, you know, trackable.

you have to be able to go apply for your benefits on the internet and usually through a smartphone too, but that's a whole other issue. But libraries still give the promise of free time, free expression, free inquiry. So there's all these contradictions. And I think that's part, it's kind of part of why it drives us so crazy on the show, which is, you know, all of the lip service we do to libraries being important to democracy. And libraries are good. the libraries are also arms of the state and mechanisms of control. And there's this, there's this, you know, all these contradictions that I really want to hammer out and find out some way through and find out like what they start to mean.

And so, anyway, look, that's a long way of saying I really enjoyed reading all your work and listening to Asset Horizon because it's given me an outline of to start going down this rabbit hole. And then hopefully on the other side I'll come out with something succinct and meaningful that I can say instead of spending an hour and a half trying to poke at it and see what the outlines of it might be. I mean, this is unironically why the whole little free library project is so sinister, because it shows a neoliberal ideal of what a library is, and it's just a place where books are that librarians aren't where no labor is required.

And also, you can call the cops on people if you think you're stealing out of it, even if it's a free thing. Which, yeah, like this whole like... I love when people do that. I know, it's so dumb. But yeah, like, every, I'm always a buzzkill when I'm with people and they see a cute little free library in Boston. I'm like, those things are fascist, actually. Like, all librarians hate those things. They're real bad.

Weirdly enough, I think the, I think the machine of liberation is the vending machine because it's just the free Narcan vending machine. Instead of the free Narcan little free library, it's usually like, no, punch in the number and the Narcan falls out. I don't know. There's an article in a Guardian about a month ago or now which was about from the few libraries left in quite a regional town just Google it, I mean I'm not going to recommend the Guardian actually go to the archive, the org and find it there, don't give the fuck as your money because they don't deserve it

given what they've been up to over the past few years. But I don't, I'm not, I'm not from the right, I mean there's a transphobic rag in touch with the British State. But in terms of what libraries are like in Britain, I mean, some of them are called idea stores now. The idea store. I mean, luckily, I mean, there's a few near me that are far better. So one of them is named after CLR James, which is we love to see it.

But yeah, I mean, that's exactly the thing. Public services are in the UK. You know, they're hollowed out purely so they can be something to lure people in with the barement of resources and access to them. And then, yes, the reintroduction of the border, pure and simple. Benefits applications. any sort of help that you can't get from any else you end up going to a library. And rather than the introduction I have when I was a kid,

which was there's fucking loads of books here, there's computers and like, oh my, there's stuff to do here. You can come here and it'll be safe. Rather than you can come here if you have to, how dare you take up space, all British institutions treat you like a child, who is unworthy of anything, because, one, they're British and two, our ruling class.

I mean, have had such a smooth ride since 1066 that, you know, our royal members of royal family have forgotten that they can sweat because, you know, sweating is a negative feedback mechanism. Prince Andrew, you know,

hasn't seen negative feedback in quite, the Royals haven't seen feedback in quite some time, so they forget that they can even do sweating at this point. And there is this, I mean, genetically they may not be able to. Well, well, at this point, the inbreeding of the house of Taxcobo Gopher

might reach that point. I mean, who knows, we see what the current ones look like. But in terms of, I mean, there are some good experiments, and most of it does end up having to be outside of library systems. I mean, I'm thinking about, so there's a lot of it. There are a few info shops in London. So shout out to Phismore 56A, South London. Yeah, it's squat, squatted place.

I mean, freedom books, started by Kropokkin, still in East London, hasn't been firebombed in about 50. years and God damn it, they've lasted about 200, so we're never going away. Fuck, yeah. It is trying to find this way where essentially any kind of resource management ends up being a compromise with state power. And I think it's

also because it's a land issue. I mean, the UK, it's a land issue. We never had any kind of land reform rather than converting aristocrats into landlords. I mean, it's just probably definitely a UK problem. We never really got rid of aristocrats. We converted them into landlords. I do you know about the leasehold system where you can buy your own home,

but you're still paying rent because you don't own the ground the home is on. And that's usually owned by an aristocrat, a shirt, which is owned by the king, and now we have a king. I mean, some people, when they buy homes, they have to get insurance so that the church cannot invoke the ancient right to make you pay for the repairs. We didn't technically abolish feudalism. We debated capitalism and did it far, far better. But that is kind of the idea of libraries end up being a kind of annoyance to the state, essentially something that's we have to give you a little bit to tempt you in so we can measure your social skull, basically, and see what's going here.

And in terms of the attacks, and it was attack on the library as well, and specifically a Citizens Advice Bureau, which is kind of a lifeblood of any working class involvement if you don't have the money to keep up with all the tech and actually get advice on anything from tax to jobs to, even social, social, any sort of security, everything's been so hollowed out that attacking that, yes, I think

some, the fascists in the UK, would rather burn it than see it given to anyone else because they genuinely believe that there is nothing left for them other than wanton destruction. And this isn't, this isn't an idea that really comes organically from the working class, never has.

It's all been funneled to them by, essentially our media class. I mean, over in the States, folks are lucky, you've only got one Fox News, we have about 10. And, you know, it helps have Murdoch on Syed in the election year, but in the UK, what Rupert wants, Rupert gets, sadly. To wrap up, I guess my final thought is what I've been poking at the whole time, which is how do we create a succinct political critique to AI hype and systems to control, particularly because we're seeing so many people say, oh, AI will help us make questions sets that'll help us teach more effectively. it'll help us do all these things that actually remove intention from what you're doing.

And if there's no intention, then there's a problem of value. Maybe you could say it loses its aura because of its mechanical reproductive nature or something like that. I don't think we have one yet, but how would you think we could move towards creating one? So firstly, we need to start critiquing the idea of AI itself, I think. for one, I mean, so a book that everyone should read, and I'm not going to sell, I had the article's new flesh here, you just read a book called Work Without the Worker by a guy called Phil Jones, No Relation. And he is talking about all the ways in which micro-work data moderation becoming on the biggest fronts in the global economy, particularly amongst

refugees and people in the global south. And there's a quote in there from Jeff Bezos himself about mechanical Turk, one of the big data moderation platforms. And he says, I call it AAI, artificial artificial intelligence. Because it's the invisibleization. We need to start grappling with the idea that data is a kind of dead labor. That every time you walk through anything that's creating data, you are making a commodity for someone to sell on. And work about the work is a great book highlighting.

When we understand that ultimately this is all dead labor, and we're making it, and not just us, and it's also conditioned on various aspects of literally global imperatives. If you displace people, they do micro-work for you, and they're paid cents on the dollar, and if they escape your fucking concentration camps, they've trained the various face recognition algorithms through the work that you've put them in a place of doing.

But at the same time, we cannot simply regurgitate the images of these machines, because a lot of these machines are just images for generating investment, and they do not work, then they will never work. If we give up this sort of pep-based hope, some sort of use of hope and hype, but not really hope, you know, Recon, Greenways, work on block to figure the idea to work on the hope aspect there.

We will, because sometimes there's a risk here of critiquing these machines as if they really do what they say they're doing, and that ends up being sort of a negative marketing. The example I give of this, and I've given it in talks before, is the AI, so-called AI machine, that Israel are using to create, generate target list. Like fuck, are they using any...

They haven't got a supercomputer, no. They've got one that they want to sell because they have an incredibly booming AI industry and so-called AI, and it's marketing. They generate kill lists because they have data collection of things anyway, and also, since when did they ever give a shit about killing anyone else in collateral? It's marketing.

We need to make sure the machines we're talking about. We need to critique them, say they don't do what they say later. We have to undermine trust in these AI boosters and say that anything that these things can actually do are being done already by a human, so pay the human. And given how essential the humans are some machines, we also to realize as well that we can break them, and we can render data in the unusable. And to some extent, this is happening with these machines themselves. So I keep saying University of Chicago, I think it might be then, but they've generated this thing called Nightshade, which is a means of protecting copyrights against mapping your stuff

put into an AI dataset, which basically means put a bit of metadata in there, poisons the dataset. You can strangulate these machines technically, and literally technically, but also it has to be a politics of not saying that humans are so much better, but saying that we're being taken for a bribe these machines, and these machines rely on data captures, which affects all of us across the periphery and the imperial core. And if we don't tackle them now, they're going to be used against us. Yeah.

So I just need to do that, but about libraries, and then I'll have the next few episodes lined up. Cybernetics is great because it flattens everything into the same kind of functional relation. If you think into a data production, you can apply this model again and again. It's very translatable, I think. Yeah. And I think it gives us a lot of a lot to play with in terms of different, all the different ways libraries exist as sort of like a machine as a social institution, as a side of social reproductive labor.

It's got all these different faces out into the world. So you can do the application again and again to all this different systems that touches because they're so interrelated. But I think it's been helpful in making me think of I'm being annoying about, you know, the fact that we do. business with relics because that technology is being used to racially profile people in my neighborhood, right? It's the same company. It's the same, you know, data vendor. And I can show you exactly the mechanism through which that happens because of the way that the value is generated for that vendor, which, you know, means it can also, once those people have been arrested, they can sell software to their public defenders who would then use it to look up the law to defend them.

And then they will sell terminals to the prisons in which the prisoners can do their own legal research on those proprietary databases. The same, and it's because it's only two vendors. It's the same people, the same people who got you, who stole your privacy and your image in order to get you profiled and got you put in jail, or also giving you the means through which to research your own freedom. So, and we didn't even have to jump between two companies to get through that whole list of things. So, yeah, I think that's where we'll go.

Well, I mean, thank you so much for coming on, Adam. Is there anything else you want people to go to? Everything's going to, all the links are going to be in there, but anything in particular. Oh, no, thank you so much for having me. It's been fantastic. I mean, yeah, just the link for the new flash will be up at some point. Probably towards the end of September, but I don't exactly know when. Antiochlus is out already.

If anyone has a problem accessing it, contact myself or Acetorizing on Twitter, we'll make sure you'd be able to get a copy of it. And yeah, the podcast is pretty regularly. We have reading groups, check it out. All right. Thank you so much. It's really fun.

Thank you. Good night.