librarypunk - 170 - Carnegie, Gramsci, and Libraries feat. Dan Greene

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

We’re joined by Dan again to talk about Carnegie libraries, which expanded into a larger discussion of consensus, hegemony, and the future of philanthropy/public funding. We also introduce Maoist Dusty Rhodes. Media mentioned Stevenson, S. (2010). The Political Economy of Andrew Carnegie’s Library Philanthropy, with a Reflection on its Relevance to the Philanthropic Work of Bill Gates. Library & Information History, 26(4), 237–257. https://doi.org/10.1179/175834910X12816060984359  Giesbrecht, H. (2025). Sense and Social Control in Vancouver's Carnegie Free Library, 1901–1910. Urban History Review 53(2), 111-129. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970361 . Levine, M. (2016). Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates: Philanthropy and oligarchy, then and now. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 86(1), 1–9. https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fort0000150  WEB Du Bois anecdote about Carnegie: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/black/mcgillbh.htm (decades later, the Foundation refused to publish some Du Bois work on Reconstruction. Du Bois is an interesting foil to Carnegie, with his pitches for a People’s University—which Andrew Douglas and Shannon Mattern both write about).  Raber, D. (2003). Librarians as organic intellectuals: a Gramscian approach to blind spots and tunnel vision. The Library Quarterly, 73(1), 33-53. (More of a riff but provocative and the most explicit engagement with Gramsci on libraries theoretically).  Muskism https://www.harpercollins.com/products/muskism-quinn-slobodianben-tarnoff?variant=43838135402530  Other Dan Greene recommendations Black, A., & Pepper, S. (2012). From civic place to digital space: the design of public libraries in Britain from past to present. Library trends, 61(2), 440-470. Harvey, C., Maclean, M., Gordon, J., & Shaw, E. (2011). Andrew Carnegie and the foundations of contemporary entrepreneurial philanthropy. Business History, 53(3), 425-450. Oehlerts (1991) Books and Blueprints: Building America's Public Libraries. (More about architecture but some business stuff) Mattern (2018) “Fugitive libraries.” Places Journal. (Shannon has a bunch of good stuff) Transcript: https://pastecode.io/s/6p8i4fby  Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/qWPTurTnkT

I'm Justin. My husband got me a rock. And my pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie, and I have so many rocks at my desk. I couldn't even tell you what they all look like. And I use they them. I'm Jay. It's Cole. I got it at the city's archival center for free. It was in a bowl. Us. And I use Heem pronouns. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? I'm Dan Green. He, him. I'm here to rock. I am. as a professor in the College of Information at the University of Maryland, and proud to be vice president of the United Academics of Maryland,

the union for all faculty. I'm excited to be back with you guys. Hell yeah. We'll be the air horn. Let's fucking go. I don't think I have the air horn anymore. The end of an era. And then here's a damn ass fucking gay, damn ass rock.

Hey. I still have the rock. We still have that one. All right. So I've been. talking about this episode for a while. I originally wanted to talk about Carnegie. Like, kind of my thought was, you know, the new school year is starting and we have friends

going into library school and we always have lots of library school students in the Discord. Like, we've been doing the show for like five years, so we must be just like cycling them in and out because we're still like 50% grad students, I think. So I was like, you know, what do we learn about Carnegie libraries and like philanthropy? because I had a library admin class, which I found out not everyone has to take. And the whole, I wouldn't quite say the ethics of donations was mentioned other than he was for it. He didn't have a great professor for that class.

But, you know, he was like, oh, the geo group, you know, their money still spends good. So you should name your football stadium after a private prison company. It's like, sure, why not? I don't know. I beat him out for a job later. so that was kind of fun. So, weird. And so I started asking people, like, what did you learn about Carnegie at all?

Because some people probably made to read, like, I was made to read, like, how to make friends and influence people, which is a different dude. But it seems kind of along that line of, like, you have to read some, you know, progressive era, gilded age thoughts about libraries. But I found out almost no one learns anything about Carnegie libraries. other than, like, he, they exist, but not about, like, how they were made or why they're everywhere or how that relates to a lot of, like, Bill Gates now. And I just saw, like, Bill Gates as part of reading all this, it was like, what's the difference between, like, Carnegie's thoughts and Gates's thoughts. And Gates is always about, like, bridging the digital divide. I just saw a thing the Gates Foundation is like, we're going to bridge the AI divide. So he's got the same exact playbook as, like, 15 years ago, this article I was just reading about.

like, here's his playbook. So nothing's really changed. I thought kind of what I was thinking for this is like, the playbook has kind of changed. Like the billionaire class is kind of going all in on AI and privatization of things. There's not really this like civic aspect other than like fascism is their idea of the civil, the civic world. So that was kind of where I ended up with.

But then Dan jumped in on or had a had a threat. read, I think, talking about Gramsci and talking about, like, the reforms that were necessary to build consensus, which Gramsci is big on. So Dan gave me a lot to read. And I went through a bunch of that and some other things. And so now I've got, like, a ton to talk about more than I ever thought I would about Carnegie. But what did everyone else think? Go on over the notes, like first, first thoughts about talking about Carnegie. Jay, did you learn anything about Carnegie? I mean, like, before coming into this, it was sort of like, Carnegie's always held up as like, man, remember when billionaires used to like build libraries and stuff? Like that's the very popular rhetoric right now,

including among quote unquote, like progressive lives or even you might see like DSA folks like spout this sometimes. And it continues to remind me that like, it's like the socialist left hold like has just as much vocational awe or just like misgivings about librarianship as like anybody does it's it's a it's very naive and it is very annoying to me personally but like yeah I don't know

the sort of like way that philanthropy is like sort of framed as like this good thing like I mean I saw this even with like Dolly Parton you know she wasn't a billionaire out of choice because she gave away all of her money. She's still really fucking rich though. But like you can't become a philanthropist unless you're hoarding wealth. Just straight up. So like that's, I don't know if that answers your question, Justin, but just sort of like the idea of Carnegie as like the one good one and like how

that's not challenged often even among like leftists, I think just because he made libraries and libraries are a good thing. So I don't know. That's my thoughts. Yeah. The thing that I, really liked was actually the art they sort of off the cuff article about W.E.B. Du Bois. I was just about to bring that up, Sadie. The tiny, tiny antidote of there of him not being meek and like was a book or T. Washington leaving him out of the meeting because he wouldn't be meek enough for for Carnegie. And I'm like, yeah, that tracks. But that was that was the one that I like out of it. Would you guys mind terribly if I read it out loud? It's a little, it's pretty short.

Go for it. Yeah. So this is one of the reason, you know, I, on the record, saying I think DeBoise is the, you know, is the greatest American. He was one of our greatest writers, certainly the greatest social theorists. And, you know, one of the incredible things about his life is that he, you know, died pretty freaking old. And so he saw the both great depressions and the, all of the change in the economy and politics in and out of them. And, you know, Carnegie did build a bunch of libraries in the South.

He left them up to local control, which means they mostly remain segregated. Du Bois tried to get Atlanta to open the Carnegie Library to black folks and it didn't happen. But yeah, so there's this interview that Du Bois is giving to the Atlantic, like right before he dies. This is 1965. And he's talking about his relationship with Booker T. Washington in this is like the late 1890s. So pretty soon after the Homestead strike where Carnegie, you know, deploys both private and public goons to just crush his steelworkers in Homestead. So De Bois says Washington makes a compromise.

He says, we talked about it. You know, I went to see some of the Eastern philanthropists who were helping him his school. Washington would promise them happy and contented labor for their new enterprises. He reminded them that there would be no strikers. I remember once I went with him to call on Andrew Carnegie, with whom he had a warm and financially rewarding relationship. On the way there, Washington said to me, have you read Mr. Carnegie's book?

No, I replied. I haven't. You ought to, he said. Mr. Carnegie likes it. Du Bois chuckled softly. When we got to Mr. Carnegie's office, he said, he left me to wait downstairs. I never knew whether Mr. Carnegie had expressed an opinion about me, or whether Washington didn't trust me to be meek.

It was probably the latter. I never read. So always honest and ruthless till the very end, but I think he does capture something there about like, to your point, Jay, the, it's not just that Carnegie was wealthy on a scale that is difficult to understand now. He's, you know, was worth what is now probably $100 billion, but at a time when that was, you know, made him a god among men. And there was no one able to, you know, approach his control of industry. And in many ways, I think of philanthropy as a way to like turn your financial capital into other kinds.

of capital into, you know, to social status, into connections, into looking into culture. And that's not just about returns, but about expressing a vision of the world and what you want that world to be. And I think what Du Bois is saying in this anecdote that Sadie and I both loved so much is like, he knew. Like, he got it. He got it. And he's able to, as our greatest dearest, like, express it in a sentence. He's like, oh, yeah, he really wants me to read the book. and he knows there's not going to be any strikers at this Washington school. I'm not really on board with that. And so he doesn't get invited into the room.

He's literally not in the room that Carnegie was holding. And I think that's the whole story right there. Yeah, the back and forth between like Washington and Du Bois is very, there must be a good book that just puts him side by side. There must be a really good like, you know, fact, counterfact kind of thing because, you know, Du Bois is really interesting. And one of the sort of like central writers of America, American history that I just haven't gotten around to reading because I started doing it and was like,

then I was out of the life, like, then I was out of the history game by the time I was doing it. I was like, well, I don't really have an excuse now to just sit around reading history all day. Although when I did do my library degree, a lot of the papers, I was just doing library history. And so that's why it was still kind of weird to me that Carnegie never really came up in library school. And every time I had a chance, I was writing library history papers. Like, I did a lot of, like, feminist writing of, like, feminist theories of, like, why do we use the word library? Why are we replacing with information studies? Doey's approach to women, like, all these things?

So it was strange, kind of, like, how much the writing about Carnegie doesn't come up. But I think the first thing, the main thing that got me interested in talking about Carnegie was your discussion of him as sort of a politician because of these massive labor forces. that you have to, like, Elon Musk has multiple companies and probably employs overall a lot of people, but not anywhere near the same scale of an industrialized labor force that you would need to have steel production and railroads and company towns. You are ultimately a politician and, you know, from Carnegie's own writings about himself. Saw himself that way, I think. Definitely saw himself as like very pain to have to kill striking workers and like haunted him, which boo-hoo. you know, don't do it.

But, you know, he's, he was a complicated person like everyone is. His internal life was a combination of, you know, his upbringing and then his absolutely unimaginable wealth. And he's trying to navigate that by, you know, enforcing his will on the world in a way that really no one else can. But you brought up Gramshy. And so I want to like tie in Gramsci quick in terms of like, when we're talking about Carnegie as a politician, where does Gramsci fit into this too?

Yeah, so for those who may not know the man, the little dude from Sardinia, Grosci was a leader and eventual police president or chairman, something like that, of the Italian Communist Party during and immediately after World War I, in 1926, late 1920s, he's imprisoned by the Mussolini regime and he dies in prison. Gromshi became really popular in the kind of Anglophone world in the 60s and 70s. So, you know, we connect with him through Stuart Hall, through people like James Boggs and Gracely Boggs in the U.S., folks like that. The thing that Gromshy is trying to solve, especially after the war, is why does the Russian Revolution succeed, but the revolutions fail? We're going to go everywhere else.

And, you know, he, because, like, the formula was there, right? like their Marxism had become very formulic and it was like, all right, well, there's a big crisis caused by this war. All these, you know, these people pull it off. Why do they pull it off there or not here? And ultimate answer is that the kind of like civil society institutions in Russia were extremely undeveloped. Like it was a real, you know, Russia was a giant contradiction where it was on the one hand on the most advanced economies in the world and the major cities. And on the other hand, it was still basically in the whole country outside of the major cities, you know, full of the peasantry. In other countries, Germany, Italy, elsewhere, the church, the school system, the legal system, the cultural industry is the Frankfurt people would go on to call it, was more developed.

And it's there that, you know, Gramsci really finds the answer. It's like, you know, it's not just this kind of brute economic power that, you know, subjugates everybody, nor is it kind of a consent machine where like the radio controls our minds. but any particular kind of economic block like steel, you know, as powerful as it may be, is always going to be the minority of political power. It's always going to be the kind of minority and absolute quantity. So they need to make alliances elsewhere. They need to make alliances with the cultural industries. They need to make alliances with government. They need to make alliances with other industries. And eventually, this creates a process that you call

hegemony, where the interests of one class come to stand in for the interests of everybody else. He is very interested in America. It's another example of this. And a lot of his examples about hegemony are in this great chapter called like on Americanism. And, you know, he talks a lot about like the $5 wage where like so, you know, sometimes hegemony these days gets reduced to like, yeah, I think my Nikes will make me jump faster. But, you know, he gromshy correctly identified like, yeah, you know, to have this thing where Everybody's committed to working 12 hours a day to break next speed on the assembly line and getting their fingers chopped off.

We're going to pay them a higher wage. That will make them happy. But it'll also ensure that everyone can buy the Model T's that they're building. And thereby cements this kind of like wage productivity compact that'll stick around until the 70s when it falls apart. So for I think, you know, Gromshy is really interested in places like libraries as places. that are, you know, maybe not directly involved in producing primary goods, but are essential to kind of reproducing these social relationships that we have under capitalism. I think the best possible example of that is that this library historian named Shavon

Stevenson has this article where she compares the how the Knights of Labor, a big mass U.S. Union movement looks kind of like a secret society. before the 1900s with Carnegie, their arch nemesis, and they both talk about libraries kind of the same way. They're both like, yeah, you know, this is the place where you need to go to do your homework. It's a place where the lowly immigrant laborer can rise up to be a business person, which, you know, Carnegie kind of sees him himself. So they all kind of bought into that same system, and that's what hegemony is,

is where even our people who are nominally enemies have the same kind of terms of debate, the same way of understanding the conflict. Yeah, it seemed there was an overarching understanding that the, between sort of like the Knights of Labor and Capital, of that there was a need to prevent the working class from falling under like bad leadership and subversive literature. And the Stevenson mentions, I think it was Stevenson, was that librarians were kind of on the side of capital. in terms of saying, hey, we can help avoid a local strike. There's a library journal article at the time in the past written about situations

in which a local strike was averted because the workers have been brought to the library. So the library was acting as this sort of mediator between labor and capital in a way that relied on kind of the middle class nature of librarianship to be sensitive to the needs of capital. And like as far as like the social reproduction of libraries, like I remember like even back in grad school, like I remember like one of the very first things Emily Knox taught us and made sure to drill into our heads about the like, oh, libraries are for everybody and like I've always been that way. And it's like no, the librarians especially are like in the early 20th century like with the ways of like immigration coming in the United States. librarians played an active role in social reproduction and telling immigrants to avoid quote unquote shoddy and pernicious books and like telling them which books they should and shouldn't read in order to like assimilate and fit into society and not become more Italian or Irish.

You know, like like the way that librarians have been complicit in like capitalism like in this country. I feel like people don't quite realize, but it's like pretty baked into how libraries work. Yeah, I'm glad that you both mentioned libraries is a kind of like profession that is emerging around this. Like obviously we can see something called a librarian or something like a librarian, you know, thousands of years earlier. But as a as a profession associated with a public building, not just like some rich guys stuff, you know, it really is beginning to show up in that. late 1800s after the first Great Depression to, you know, after World War I, along with all these other professions, middle class stuff that we didn't necessarily have before this, you know, the things that the Aaron Ricks would go on to call the PMC. So, you know, that's that's

librarians, that's nurses, that's the public health department, journalism as a profession, you know, all of these things, all these like good middle class jobs that, you know, that, you Yeah, totally right. Turn into engines of Americanization in part because, you know, it's difficult to overstate the dual shocks of both this massive depression, which was, you know, a real surplus scenario. Like, there's just too much rail being built. The trains are literally running into each other. We have, like, major coordination problems for international capitalism. So, you know, the firm needs to professionalize and society needs to.

professionalize. And so we get all of these new things like social work or whatever that are dealing up the other major shock of the period, which is this mass immigration wave from southern and eastern, you're hoaring into our cities and staffing steel yards, staffing, you know, stockyards, tracking the railroads. And, you know, so I often think of that great American Henry Ford, who is also super interested in Americanization in the 20s. He would have some of his workers jump in a giant pot that said melting pot on the outside. They would walk in and, you know, their stereotypical, like, Italian clothes. He would, you know, buy stuff for them or tell them to wear this stuff.

And then they would be in the popper a little bit. And then they would come back out and they'd be wearing American clothes. They're suits and their tie shoes. And I think we can, you know, we think about these new professions, often highly gendered, still very white, as engines of Americanization. And they, you know, of course, they save people's lives, like the owners and the own of the nurses and public health workers, whatever, right? It's nice to not have cholera.

But it's, you know, fitting your life into a specific way of working and doing that is, of course, led by people like Carnegie and, you know, Morgan to whom he sells the company, and Ford, who uses that steel to build his cars. It's all part of one system of reproduction. Yeah. And it's also sort of the rise of kind of, I mean, modernism already exists. existed as like an intellectual current, but I guess this is almost where we're becoming postmodern, where our social life is becoming the factory identity, the, we are meant to use our free time

to go to the library and learn useful things and to think about our cities and our parenting and all these different things in the sort of same factory logic, where the logic of the factory is moving into the social sphere. And so you have humans acting more machine-like. What's the what's the Charlie Chaplin movie? Modern times. Modern times. I just aired it for my students last week. Great movie. Just the best. I mean, it's, you know, it's the moment when everyone's leaving the farm. You know, it's the moment when, you know, humanity in general, but the U.S. Western Europe especially goes from, like, the vast majority of people working on the farm to only a tiny minority of people working on the farm. And in that process, yeah, everything that you used to make for yourself, clothes, food, whatever, is commodified.

And it's, of course, not just these, like, things that we eat or wear, but it's also our entertainment, our music, our ideas. You know, we get live recording. You know, we start to get movies. And, you know, libraries, public libraries present a decommodified version of that most of the time. But that doesn't mean that they are somehow outside of capitalism, you know, just in the same way that, like, the cops are not outside of capitalism. just because they're not charging a fee doesn't mean they're not involved in reproducing the system. It was also

interesting. This is kind of an aside and I don't know where else to fit it in, but in Shannon Madern's paper which was talking about black libraries and segregation, I didn't really have a whole lot to pull in just to talk about Carnegie, but it is a really good article and it's going to be linked, so you should read it.

But also mentioned that there are notes on the erection of library buildings, but The, the, let's see, the local cities were allowed to make some decisions, but black branches were typically overseen by central library boards, along with banks and city officials, who were deeply involved in design and construction. So the, the designs were still centralized in white, like, white architectural and political firms, which just sort of, to me, speaks to the sort of stamping of culture across the country. of this is the right culture, this is the right design, this is the right feelings to feel when you go into a library. It also makes me think about like all of the, because there's a lot of like community libraries because I live in a city now.

Right. So I actually have community libraries like the puppet library and it's just like some old hippie who's still around who is doing community puppetry in the 70s. And he's just like, hey, you want to see the puppets man. And you know, you just can go set an appointment to go see the puppets, man. and then there's also like the history, what's it called, the History Project, I think, not History Project. Yeah, History Project, which is the Gay Archive here in Boston

that I'm going to be going to because I'm working on some local history about the Boston Public Library. So it, there is a lot to think about in terms of the distinction between what Carnegie's Project was doing to create these public libraries that are going to be administered in particular ways,

even if they are local. And the way that, you know, the puppet life, library exists or the gay library exists or a black community exists. These different definitions of public, right? Like, it's, you know, is a public agency supported by property taxes the same as a public space that's for everyone and the same as a public good. And one thing Shannon is really good to point out in that article is that like, it's not

like anyone was tricked at the moment. Like, obviously, you want the building if the rich guy is going to give you the building. And, you know, Du Bois is fighting very hard to ensure that black people can get. into the downtown Atlanta Carnegie Library. He loses. He doesn't convince the city fathers. But all throughout the cell, reconstruction, post-reconstruction,

and frankly, I never know how I pronounce this name, but Wygand, Wayne Wygand, shows that this happened in the north, too. People, black folks are building libraries in churches, in spaces that, you know, were the old white public library, but the collections are gone. Now this neighborhood needs to fun.

for the collection themselves, you know, what we would now call pop-ups showing up in rural areas happening all the time. And it's because people can see that like, oh, this isn't being built for us. You know, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not truly public, you know, it's that, you know, because this America is not truly democratic until maybe what, 1965, something like that. And people were totally aware. Yeah. Let's see. so we covered the social control. Let's see, discourse on the... Yeah, there's another article in here by Giesbrecht as well. There was a shift on the discourse of like who could use libraries and who should use them. But I kind of already mentioned that in terms of like there's this change of like what's the new civic ideal, what's progress, what type of new civilization should we have? Like who should these immigrants be turning into? And of course there's always this contradiction between like white immigrants coming in and then what do we do?

about black people in the United States, which is sort of like its own category in terms of things like the mainstream culture refuses to think about. And so that's why like segregation was such like a, was such an approach was like, let's just ignore this large chunk of the population so that we don't have to decide like how to integrate black people into white society because like that's,

that would destroy the racial category of white if you did such a thing. So that you can't really have this. self-identity around that and a lot of American identity is tied up with white identity. So you can't really have like an expansion of whiteness that would ever include black people, right? You can make it for almost anyone else, like East Asians, Eastern Europeans, you can get Arabs, but you can, you could have an expansion to whiteness to almost anyone else. But there's always going to be this other category that is just perpetually othered and not allowed into this new social dynamic.

except to be just kept separate. And it seems like which, yeah, it seems like Washington and his contemporaries and, and philanthropists that were in support of him, like, gosh, the guy that rent Sears, Rosenbaum were they tried

pitching people like Carnegie on the whitening effect of libraries for the Jim Crow South in saying like, you know, in the same way that the Knights of Labor and Carnegie generally agreed on what the terms of library engagement were. They're like, you know, there. This is, you know, an undeveloped area relative to the industrial north. We will inspire, you know, good Christian literate practices by building these spaces down here. And it certainly did happen. But it was still, like Jay said, really standardized. And at the end of the day, subject to local control and like every other thing that the federal government from Northern, did besides crushing the slavers, local control ends up being segregation. And so that vision

that they were selling got the building, but not a fully public library. Moving forward to like, so we have the construction of these Carnegie libraries. We have their handover to, because part of the deal that people aren't aware is that Carnegie said, I will fund the building. I will fund a certain amount of money for, I don't know, collections or managing it, but you have to put up this amount of money as well, and the city will have to maintain it as a public library. So it was really an extension of his idea that, you know, charity is harmful to people, that if you, he had some,

he had some awful quote that he got from like a stoic philosopher or something. He was like, if I let you be a beggar and give you money, then it's just going to encourage you to be a better beggar. something like that. I don't remember what it is. It's in one of his articles about wealth. Someone sent me and I was like, I don't have time to add this. But, you know, it was, it stuck in my mind in terms of, you know, Carnegie's way of thinking, which, you know, again is created by his condition of growing up in poverty, being very lucky again and again and again and again and then being obscenely wealthy. Like, of course you're going to have a crazy view of the world. Like, you're going to come to some weird idiosyncratic beliefs. But his was very much like you have to, you know, all you can do is create a society in which people are productive in helping themselves and maximizing their utility. So a lot of his philanthropy works to that extent. And I think a lot of of what we see later with like the way Stevenson talks about this is, and I got a quote here, during Carnegie's era, these problems were captured under the heading labor question. That's the

problem of the social problems of the changes and the means and relations of production. These problems were captured under the heading Labor question and the goal of his philanthropy was to lessen the wide and deplorable gulf between the rich and the poor. Similarly, the purpose of Gates' philanthropic projects has always been to help reduce inequity in the United States. So for both of them, they think that the library is a means to do this and then there's the initial outlay for buildings, computers, software. And then, of course, the amount of influence that then Gates gets to have in policy because of the philanthropy. So what sort of impact can you have on education when you're giving all this money to schools or libraries when you're giving all this money or to the federal government and you're having all of these different internet programs and computer programs and software packages, which probably also help to solidify Microsoft.

various monopolies over certain markets, which Google then tried to do, and Apple also tried to do. So it wasn't unique to Gates, but Gates was obviously very, and still is, because of Microsoft's approach to AI and the fact that Gates is still alive,

directing their approach to AI in such a way as well, which is, it seems to be kind of an outdated playbook. It seems like he's playing the same playbook from 20 years ago. Yeah, I think that's the question is like, you're trying to do the same thing in a different environment and what does that mean, but for the person doing it in the society around it. The way I think about it in the long d'erre is like, you know, we have this sense that the New Deal, you know, this was like first big application of Keynesian principles to government kind of like fixed the problem of, or at least

smoothed over the problem of regular depressions in capitalism. You know, it was too unpredictable. Roosevelt, famous rich guy, you know, saves lives, probably our best president, but, you know, never stopped being a capitalist. He just sincerely wanted to save the system and make sure that it didn't keep throwing people out of work. You know, he was scared that it would end up with either fascism or communists. You know, there were just too many angry people out of work. So they needed to figure out, you know, what we now call like deficit stending. We didn't pay people to dig holes or whatever. But that's just like the money. side. And so much of what happened in the progressive era, and then again in the New Deal, you know, through the, through the 60s of the great society, is figuring out the kind of socialist side. You know, if there, if we have to, you know, on the one hand, spend money in order to stabilize the system, then we also need to establish these, you know, what Gramscii calls consent to hegemony with these various kinds of social programs. And Gates is a great example of that because I think you're

you know, you're totally right, Justin. Like he, you know, is maybe followed a little back as other people have started, you know, the effect of altruists have gotten. There are billions, but like, you know, for most of my life, Bill Gates has been the single most important decision maker and education in public health and humanity. And not just for the U.S.

for large swabs of what we call the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa. The Gates Foundation are the people deciding what public health means. And you've got to get on board because, you know, post-structural adjustment, your country does not have its own funds for public health. You have to deal with the American tech sector. And so he's, you know, Stevenson is kind of comparing him to Carnegie in that moment in the 90s when it looked like, you know, it could have been broken up. Like Microsoft could have gone the way of Bell. There was some very serious antitrust talk over, you know, what sounds

a little silly now, like, forcing people use Internet Explorer along with the rest of Windows. But it was, you know, it was a huge deal. And people hated it. Like, they're, you know, I think we can forget these days, like, how, you know, just down to like the dumb stuff of, like, spelling Microsoft with like a dollar sign where the S was. Like, it was just, you know, it was a joke about how, like, the evil empire. And the process that happens there is, yeah, you know, probably advancing. the selling stuff, but it's much more than that. It's about this whole culture of information technology similar to what happened

a hundred years earlier. I just want to interject that the regular IT workers still think of Microsoft that way. The amount of times that I shit talk Microsoft on a very regular basis is pretty astounding, just throwing that out there. Absolutely true. It's just, I don't know. Maybe he looks a little more sane than like the Zizians or whatever that we have to deal with now. He didn't write a Harry Potter and the methods of rationality.

Oh yeah, aren't all the effective altruists like they're doing Pascal's wager about an AI monster in the future or something? Like they're on another one now. Yeah. I will not pretend. Yeah. I mean, they're welcome to do it. I mean, they can move to underneath the ocean. But yeah, I won't pretend to understand.

to be where that's coming from. Now, I'm learning some of their names now, but I have avoided learning about the Zizzians and everything until someone has been talking about the group of people I follow have been talking about like, you know, this is all like a Harry Potter fan fiction guy, and then he just thinks that AI is like actually sentient

and read too much sci-fi and cooked his brain. It's like, oh, okay, you know what? Everything does descend into roleplay forums. Turns out everything does. to send all forums turn into role play. It turns out that doesn't just mean internet forums. But I think, because I'm trying to write down, like, in my head, like, what does Gates want out of his philanthropy, which is, like, control over public policy on health, technology, intellectual

property, international policy around intellectual property? Like, you can't, you know, like, Europe can't decide that they are going to ignore IP so that they can reverse engineer how to make an outlook inbox or whatever, which, of course. Okay, but also to maintain like as much of Microsoft's market position as possible because that's where his wealth comes from. That's where his influence comes from. If there's no wealth, you don't get to do the philanthropy to get to all the influence. And I'm trying to compare that to like, you know, he wants this control of the education sector and that includes, you know, a little bit tangentially, tangentially libraries. And then I think about what do people like Musk want, which is like complete AI atomization, which is like you,

sitting in your goon cave and your AI interacts with the world for you and you are completely socially atomized to an antisocial extent and you will then be in some way either made redundant

or in his words you'll be taking care of or whatever but most likely you'll just be turned into goo in Musk's mind of there's just going to be a whole bunch of unnecessary people and we'll just let them starve because we'll have destroyed the welfare state and we'll have destroyed consensus reality and we'll, you know, human beings to him just don't sort of figure as humans.

They sort of figure as like Starcraft characters, I think, is the way he thinks about the world. But it also means that there's really no one at the head of, you know, the tech sector who has any sort of political philosophy other than sci-fi, other than like Warhammer of like, oh, we need to sacrifice 10,000 espers every day to keep the emperor alive. And then after that, I haven't thought about politics in any real way since my AP US history exam. So I wonder then to bring it back to Gramsci, like, what does that do to society with, you know, making a consensus hegemonic reality when the whole idea is the sort of, as far as I can tell, like this hyperatomization. I don't know what else to call it. Yeah, he doesn't, he doesn't care about consent in the way that

Carnegie or even Gates did. I do think he has a political philosophy, even if it's not thought out his head, Swiss-cheased as it is. And it's, there's actually, rather than 40K, the example that Quinceladian and Ben Tarnoff bring up in their book, Muskism, is that as a kid, he was crazy into Robotech, the anime that got, you know, was like a mecca kind of thing. where the central conflict was around a city-sized spaceship that, you know, humans could get on and then leave, and then they would, you know, become cyborgs by, you know, hanging out in these cool mecca. And, you know, in that kind of fortress city where everyone is a little bit cyborg, that's his

politics, is, you know, is building a wall, keeping all the non-white people out, plugging everyone into the system and eliminating what he sees as like pollution to the system, woke mind virus, which is, you know, basically transphobia is, you know, via any kind of meme that runs through the cybernetic system that is kind of counter to his purposes. But it's an extraordinarily kind of anti-humanist vision. Like it does really not have room for like, you remember when like Joyce Carroll Oates roasted him and she was like, this person doesn't seem like he's ever read a book or a movie.

And then he spent like three days replying people to like, that's a good Armagedon slaps. And so I, you know, the, an anecdote you often hear if you hang out with artists enough is that one of the reasons the art market is in trouble is that techies don't buy art.

They just, they don't care. They're not creating museums. They're not in the market for, you know, that old Cizan or whatever, but they, you know,

because they just want to make AI videos of themselves, you know, playing with Optimus Prime. And it does seem like they have given up on even like Gates's facade, you know, obviously like Zuckerberg to do some public health stuff. He has a hospital named after him and his wife. But I think one thing that might be happening to my eye is that Musk is a little more honest and realizes correctly that for most, of the tech wealth, he's actually a little bit exception to this because he has a car factory, but for most of tech wealth, and that's most of his money is like speculative fines, you don't need a ton of people, or at least the people are elsewhere. You don't live near the people.

That's not Carnegie. Carnegie was managing thousands of people. There were probably, you know, a million-ish Americans in the Knights of Labor at a time when the country was, you know, what, a third of the size. And Carnegie was at war with them. You know, this is the age of the Pinkertons. This is calling in the feds to, you know,

open fire on folks. And so I think the, the libraries are a natural reaction to that in many ways. Like a lot of the first ones in Pennsylvania, in Braddock or whatever, are immediately before or immediately, after the homestead strike when he has this massive pitch battle

and defeats the steel union. So it has to be on man's mind that the people are restless and I need to design a state, a social reproductive sector in Jay's words, that are going

to get people in line with the system. You know, and it might not have thought about it in that is utilitarian terms. You know, he probably, you know, had very big thoughts about progress. about health. Maybe he did really want more trained engineers or whatever, the same way that

Ford wanted people to be able to buy the Model T if they built the Model T. But he was face to face with this problem of potential revolution. And that's just not true of rich tech guys today. And it's not just because industrial production is outside the U.S. largely.

It's because most of these guys are financiers. And that's where their mind comes from. It comes from their stock price. They are, you know, and when they do get even the littlest bit of resistance, as we saw in like 2018, 2019, those tech revolts over cooperation with the Trump administration, that seems to have driven large amounts of the tech elite, including Musk insane. You know, Mark Andreessen talks about that period as him and his friends being scared for their lives, thinking that like the guillotines were going to come. when at worst what happened is like Google employees walked out of work because they were tired of being sexually harassed in the breed. And so it's just, I think it's an index of like how thin-skinned these people are and how distant they are from actually existing politics in a way that Carnegie just couldn't be. You know, he had to be face to face with the problem because he was actively in a war.

And Musk is just post, you know. Yeah, I actually have been going back on forth on like, am I going to commit to reading this muskism book? It sounds like it's worth it, but I just haven't like, am I really going to read this whole thing? Like, you know, is it one of those things? Because I've made the mistake of reading some of those like political biographies that what's his name puts out, the big journalist dude, like Woodward, Woodard.

And I'm like, wow, I learned some interesting personal things, but nothing useful. Although I did, the one reason I wanted. wanted to read muskism is because the way he approaches his companies is kind of a new approach in terms of like bringing in the production chain like he controls his production chain in a way that like other people don't care to do because neoliberalism was we'll produce this in Mexico will produce this in china we'll produce this here there and elsewhere and musk is like no i want to control the entire chain and by doing that has given himself like a lot of power in a way that like other, like, like Zuckerberg kind of doesn't have.

Yeah, and this is, I think the, this is not original thought for me, this is from the book, which I adore and recommend, is that control over the supply chain is on the one hand, what allowed Musk to survive COVID a little bit better than his peers, both in the auto industry and in tech, you know, because he did not have to rely on all these disrupted supply chain. In fact, he had built a gigafactory in Shanghai. And so it didn't even need to worry about, you know, crossing back and forth. The Pacific, but it's also what drives him insane because that control over his supply chain means it's really centralized. And that all of his, all the Teslos are coming out of that Fremont factory in California, them.

And so when the COVID restrictions come down, that really truly is like a dire threat to who he, to what he's about. about. And that seems to fully drive him off the deep end, the idea that, you know, someone would try to protect the public health, you know, think about other people, and that would require him to shut down his factory, which then, of course, reopens and becomes just a hot house for COVID infections, you know, hot drinks every month. There's also just like this, like, and I still keep coming back to like, why do most folks still think Carnegie's okay? Right? Like, why?

And like it, like, I, I don't think she was the first person to make this point, but I think she was the first person that I saw make this point and, like, talk about it at length. So, I don't mean to credit her with making the point, but it's where I got up. But there's a cool

contrapoints video about like aesthetics, right? And in it, and like, taste. And in it, she goes into, like, A lot of the reason that, like, people dislike Trump, but also a lot of his appeal is because he is tacky and he's gaudy and he's bawdy and he's bawdy. And he doesn't follow the conventions that people of his class should be following. And that both includes respecting the American project in the way that, like, liberals would prefer. But also, like, the sort of, like, WWE kind of personality.

that like kind of apply is like I think is maybe what attracts him to like rural middle America like as someone from that area of the country and from that class like like why are poor people voting against their best interest well because Trump is honest and body and I also want to live in cheesecake factory like that kind of mentality and I feel like Carnegie versus Musk and is kind of similar and like Gates is in here too. like Carnegie was the good one, right? Like he was respectable. He funds libraries, you know, yada, yada, yada.

Whereas Musk is like gooning on Twitter all the time and talking about video games he doesn't play and pays other people to play for him and like come up with shitty AI movies. And he's like very deeply cringe. And for a lot of people, that's where the sort of I dislike Musk because comes from. he's cringe and annoying and he's this like nerd chud and that's why he makes

bad decisions and that's why he does all of this stuff and that's why all these losers like him and that I think one that is why a lot of people like him but like the fact that people can't look past the taste aspect and be like

him and Bill Gates are the same him and Carnegie are the same just because one of them is more socially respectable according to this American project that you can't let go of doesn't mean that they're like any better or worse like I don't know yeah that's that was sort of my such a good point that I think that that is really really right

because you know the Carnegie really does kind of not set but I guess embody this like aesthetic of welfare state liberalism with the columns and the, you know, the lions outside and whatever. And Musk and Trump do not. I mean, if they do, it has like five layers of gold on it. It looks like shit. I mean, it's clearly it's not authentic. It's tacky.

And we must remember that 10 years ago, maybe a little more and a little less, Musk was not cringe. He was Tony Stark. In fact, he guest starred in the second or third Iron Man movie. And, you know, he really, you know, I had students all the time coming up to me like, yeah, you know, I got to be the Elon of X, Y, Z. And, you know, he really was a role model because he kind, in part because he fit in with that same pop cultural aesthetic that was, you know, maybe looks a little cringe now. We're all making fun of the movies now, but it wasn't mainstream as much in 14, 15, even if they were exactly the same. And to your, I think the, what really brings home that they're, they're, they're, they're.

not actually different. It is all aesthetics for me is what happened to one of the D.C.'s Carnegie Libraries. So I, last time I was here, I was talking about my book, which mostly took place at the Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library, which is now the central branch of D.C.'s public system. But we did have an enormous, beautiful Carnegie Library, kind of looks like the Jefferson Memorial, or I'm sorry, the Lincoln Memorial. But near what is now the convention center. And it closed a couple decades back. You could still walk around. It was very pretty, but it wasn't a library. And then, lo and behold, who buys it and puts something in it, but Apple? The Carnegie Library in D.C. is now a giant Apple store. And it feels sacrilegious, sort of,

like, when you hear about it. But then, like, to Jay's point, you walk in and it feels, you know, it's very clean and calm. It's not that far from the Apple aesthetic. So I can understand how the, you know, this tech sector and this Carnegie area industrial capitalism aren't that different. I can understand how they all fit together in one kind of unbroken chain. But that's not necessarily how it feels, right? Like, because we are used to this kind of like aesthetic in case.

I mean, we think about that. Have we all been in Carnegie libraries before? Yeah. I used to live in Dover, New Hampshire, and their public library is still, like, a Carnegie library hasn't been turned into anything else. And, like, it's gorgeous. Anytime I, like, brought people to Dover, drove through Dover, I'm like, that's the public library. It's really cool. It's got, like, cool stairs in there. It's got, like, upstairs that are in every fucking Carnegie library. It's, word of God. But, yeah, like, the Carnegie libraries are all beautiful buildings. Like, the, um, where I went to college, the building that the English department was in used to be a Carnegie Library. And it was gorgeous. Like, every building on that campus was gorgeous, right? Like, they are this sort of type of propaganda in a way, right? Like, you know, it is, you know, like, well, to me, what is more sacrilegious is not the Apple store

and the former Carnegie Library, but the Apple store where Club Salincio and Will Holland Drive was that theater is now an Apple store. That's more sacrilegious to me. That's the one that I'm like, that hurts. That seems much more discordant. Like I can understand now one begun the other. Yeah.

Right. But like it also reminds me of like people freaking out about Trump demolishing the White House. And like uncritical support is cool thing he ever did. Like I'm holding on to this like American like exceptionalism project of like the old. The one house, you can't do the White House. I'm like, shut up. Like, like the way that, yeah, of all the things, right? Like, the way that, like, and I think this does tie into, like, how the public views libraries,

like, Carnegie helped shape that, but I think that also reinforces Carnegie is this, like, this, like, it's sacred, right? To go back to, you know, vocational awe with, like, like, like, Pobazi. Like, this, like, they have become these churches, like, these sacred. spaces and like it almost puts Carnegie up in this like saint type of type of type of place i don't know and you can't and you can't criticize that because he we wouldn't have this library without him don't you know like i don't know one of the first big uh you know and still read social histories of libraries was de garrison's apostles of culture you know it's it's always talked about as

temples with a kind of a priestly cast to them. And that's, that's normal for most professions, right? Like we, you know, in part because we don't get paid as much in money, to Fibhazi's point, you know, we make up for it in this, this feeling of, of saviorship, which is, you know, on the one hand, part of the system of, yeah, saving people's lives, giving people, you know, all the wonderful, amazing things that happen in a library that, you know, inside and outside of literacy proper. But, you know, on the other hand, there is the rest of the project of missionary work, you know, of civilizing the natives, of helping people adjust to, you know, a cruel system. You know, like for all the, so much of the discussion about homelessness and

libraries is about either how to get rid of the problem, to exile people, or to somehow make people comfortable, you know, where they're already at. And that's in part because of the structural role of the libraries. You know, we're there to ameliorate the problem, get people okay with the problem, but we can't solve problem, you know, despite everything that society puts on us. That's not what we're built to do. Same with the school. Same with the hospital. Same with the cops, you know.

Yeah. I was trying to figure out if I have been to a Carnegie. library. I don't think so. There's not a lot in Florida. And now I live in Boston and there aren't any in Boston. They're all outside of Boston because we already had a big public library. So I don't think I've ever been in one, but Tampa does have two. Tampa has one and West Tampa has one, which is interesting. West Tampa one looks really nice, by the way. You should look at a photo of it. It's like bright red. It's like a calming children's hospital. So I have like a final question, which is kind of like what I've been thinking about while doing this episode, which is like, what does all of this mean? And because I work in

academia, I work at a private institution now, which sucks, but it's a rich private. So I always said, like, if I'm going to work at a private institution again, I'm going to go to a rich one because non-rich private schools just end up scamming working class kids and it's bad. And you should go to the community college. You should go to the big state school out of town. Like, you should not go to a small private college that is not for wealthy people if you are not wealthy. Or, or got a big scholarship to a wealthy one, top tip. But, you know, what does all of this mean for the futures of libraries and academia in terms of like an end of philanthropy or like, you know, the Trump administration cutting

all of these grant programs, which are again not philanthropy, but it's trying to turn this into a publicly funded philanthropy or to end the public giving of grants so that you are reliant on philanthropy, so that you were reliant on grant agencies, which were already pretty politically captured, as we saw through like open access movement. Like, you know, I know a lot of people who worked for the Gates Foundation because in the open access publishing space, they controlled the dialogue. And they kind of ruined it worldwide. And we're still dealing with the fallout of that. I talk to so many Skalkom librarians who were really like, I don't know, we kind of lost. I don't know. It's like, it's not, we didn't reach a turning point. So I am kind of thinking, like, what is, you know, what, what does, because we've kind of established that the Carnegie's material conditions meant he had to be a statesman in a way that, like, Musk doesn't, in a way that Gates really doesn't need to anymore, in a way that it seems like not even much, much of our political class has to be anymore. You know, the senators were just wheeling in and out of hell just for, you know, a day visit.

So I don't know. I think about it a lot, but I don't know what it could mean, but I want to know what you think then about what it means for the future. I think we, because in large part, because of Jay's point about aesthetics and how important that is to our understanding in politics, I think a lot of people in America who are to the left of the segregationist party currently in power expect. a return that like when we, you know, this is an aberration. It doesn't look and feel like how politics is supposed to look and feel. And so when adults take the wheel, things will kind of just snap back into place. And I do anticipate that there will be plenty of political amnesia. You know, to quote, political philosopher Don Draper, it will shock you how much this never happened. But reality has a mind of its own. You know, like, and Gates is different from Carnegie because Gates is in a different economy.

Carnegie, Musk is different from Gates because Musk is in a different economy from Gates with different goals and different alliances that he wants to build. You know, I think Musk in many ways, like burned a lot of Gates's project to the ground. You know, what is what is the killing of USAID, but like the end of liberal and, you know, internationalism. Some quite close to my work. My dad worked there for most of his career. But I, you know, as much as people might want things to come back, I just, I do not think that can have on like the grant side, for example, you know, Justin, you're entirely right

that like, yeah, not necessarily philanthropy in terms, but, you know, did we think of the scientific enterprise as like a backdoor funding mechanism for higher education infrastructure in the U.S. because we don't have a centralized funding infrastructure equivalent to other developed countries? No, that was never the plan that we would need this overhead to stay alive. You know, that's just something that happened because we stopped funding things through taxes. So if that money comes back, and I think like there's a good chance of it coming back, it's not going to be under the same terms because the world has changed because the deal that was

made in like the 50s or 60s or whatever is no longer the going deal. We have different needs for different people in a different economy. I don't think things can snap. Private philanthropy may be more important, but unless we've radically changed their tax structure, they're probably not going to go full Carnegie. They're not scared and there's no incentive to give away their stuff before they die. So I don't think there's the possibility of a return as much as people might wish it. You know, so that could go a couple of different ways, you know?

Like, I am fighting for, and I know you guys are fighting for, like, real actual public funding. You know, that is taking money from the public, taking more money from rich people than other people, but still taking money from all of us. To be able to fund the goods that we need, you know, I think the coalition in New York to get their library funding back. Fighting Momdani, anyways, was the plan NYC or NYC plan. Yeah. For a really great example of that, where they're just like, it's, I think this came up in an earlier episode you guys did, I was talking about earlier, but like, you know, it just, it became, they were so disciplined that it became a meme really fast.

It was like, we need 0.5% in the budget. We need 0.5% in the budget. Period. End of story. And just because this is a base public good and treated as a public good. So I think there are many of us that are fighting for that alternative from philanthropy for taxation. And there are good examples of that

all over the country. I'm very much inspired by Massachusetts teachers at all levels who were able to get a millionaires tax in and has brought in even more money that I thought it would and they're able to offer to my understanding free community college, along with an enormous

amount of infrastructure and troops. I desperately want to make that happen. In my state, it's good. Mass teachers unions don't fuck around. They're awesome. Yeah, it's a long walk for the rest of us. And we can imagine President AOC or President Osoff doing something similar. But I don't think they can come back to what was happening before because that world doesn't exist. On the other hand, the other alternative vision is muskism.

You know, it is Elon totally not caring for public goods in the least and kind of hiving off a, you know, a playground, the kind of like, not even Singapore model, but, you know, really the Dubai model of, of the world where there's like a small class of extremely wealthy people who are, you know, either related or all look very similar, and then a much larger class of laborers in slave-like conditions. And you don't really need to take care of those other people because there's such an enormous surplus and because your control over the law is, and the, you know, monopoly of violence is ironclad. You know, I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of Musk's allies on the right right now, people like Joe Lonsdale, are involved in defense and defense tech. Like they are, you know, the cyber truck is in many ways of vision of his future. It's like building a little shitty little fortress for yourself and your and your pals, you know, a fully armed treehouse for the boys. And so I think those, that's what's on offer. You know, there'll be some intermediary things. There might be some variations. It's very easy to imagine like

localized evangelical Christian versions of the, of William and operational treehouse. But it's either that, or we fully organized the libraries, fully organized the schools, poorly organized the hospitals, all the stuff that they can outsource, which our economy is currently based, the things that reproduce our social relations, and we decide to reproduce them differently and we decide to use that power to have real public goods for everybody. So that's my offer on the table. You guys can either sit outside the fully armed and operational treehouse or you can get on board of the war to claim our libraries and our schools and our hospitals for the people.

Also, while Jay was talking earlier about aesthetics and how a Middle America moves, is moved by Trump in some ways because it is WWB personality. that my brain combined that with the idea that American rednecks would become Maoists if they hung out with Chinese people for a week Chinese peasants for a week and so I think the solution going forward

is Maoist dusty roads which is going political power grows out of the barrel of a gun daddy I got some relatives that fit in pretty there yeah that sounds like a good plan to me unironic malice dusty roads full support War can only be about

War, Daddy. If there's two things Dust the Road hates, it's that the workers of this nation don't own the means of production in Rick Flair. It's fun recording in the same room

because I can go strangle him when he does shit. I was a son of two and most peasant farmers, Daddy. All right. Well, I swear I'm in, my new character, Mowis Dusty Roads. And thanks for coming on.

This is really fun. I'm really glad to get you back on. And thanks for making me read all Gramsci. Oh, by the way, if you ever read the edited version of the prison notebooks, I don't know why, but the editors of the prison notebooks are way more invested in the internecine conflicts of the 1930s Italian Communist Party than Gramscii ever is in the body of the work. So skip the editorial parts and just go to the part where Gramsci is talking. Insurrection bad.

No, insurrection. Good. Fight, fight, fight. I will, if I'm going to make one nerd recommendation, I am never, I mean, it's probably the wrong thing to say on this podcast, but I never care about additions and, you know, who puts what together in general, but everyone's kind of shaking their head, pointing their gun at me, crying. But I encourage anyone interested in Gramsci not to read the prison, no folks, but instead

to read David. for Dex is the Antonio Gramsci Reader, which is a selection of writings that is much shorter, and it's kind of grouped thematically. So because the prison notebooks are a mess, you know, he's writing in in prison. It's all over the place. And then the translations of mess and yada, yada, yada. So the Antonio Gramsci reader by David Forgex is lovely. And there's a nice little introduction by Eric Cobstom that is one of the plus.

I'm looking that up right now. That might have been the one I read, but I was just like, well, they really care about the explaining all of these, And I was like, this is, I'm a vegetarian. I don't need all this beef. Well, we all, you know, it's like you said before, everything comes down to role play. And we're all, there's so many people still kind of role playing other revolutions of the hundred years ago. Yeah, that's true. You can let the first international beef go, guys. I promise it's fine.

We can be friends now. All right. Was there anything you wanted to plug, Dan, before you go? Oh, I don't know, the wonderful American Union movement. If you're listening to this and you're in. higher education, you need to join the AAP at AAP.org slash join. Your money is what pays for our lawsuits against the Trump administration, which we keep winning, and it pays for local organizing of your campus and elsewhere. If you're a at many universities, that will also include

librarians, but either way, librarians should also be organizing where they're at. Shout out to Maryland librarians who are signing contracts left and right. with AFSCME and other local unions after we finally got the right to collectively bargain in our public libraries a couple years ago. But yeah, that's how we're going to win. Let's fucking go. Let's fucking go. Let's fucking go. I don't know if you're a librarian who's faculty at a university, you might be part of your university's AAPU.P.

You might be in the union. So that's what I was where I used to work. So pick it out. It's good. Yeah, I'm looking up the version at my university. mine, which is not a union. It is an advocacy chapter. Yeah, because your librarians are not faculty. Well, the AAUP is not a union. Yeah, private schools are tenure track faculty are forbidden legally from unionizing. But, you know, Justin, we'll talk offline. There's,

you know, does the NLRA really exist anymore? Who knows? So, you know, we'll talk about it. Yeah, we'll talk about it. Yeah, there's anything, you know, the only union fight. that's unsuccessful is the ones that lose. All right. Thanks, Dan. Good night.