Untitled

[Justin]
[rock music] I'm Justin. My husband got me a rock, and my pronouns are he and they. 

[Sadie]
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. [chuckling] 

[Jay]
I'm Jay. It's coal. I, I got it at the city's- 

[Sadie]
[laughing] 

[Jay]
-archival center for free. It was in a bowl. Us, [chuckling] and I use he/him pronouns. 

[Justin]
And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? 

[Dan]
I'm Dan Greene, he/him. I'm here to rock. I am an associate 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. [cheering] 

[Sadie]
Hell, yeah. 

[Justin]
Yeah. 

[Jay]
We need the air horn. [making air horn sound] Let's fucking go. [laughing] 

[Justin]
I don't think I have the air horn anymore. 

[Jay]
[laughing] 

[Sadie]
The end of an era. 

[Jay]
[laughing] 

[Sadie]
And here's a damn ass fucking gay damn ass rock. 

[Jay]
Yay. [laughing] 

[Justin]
I still have the-- I still have a little rock. 

[Jay]
. 

[Sadie]
I still have that one. 

[Jay]
[laughing] 

[Justin]
All right. So I've been talking about this episode for a while 'cause it is-- 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 this show for, like, five years, so we must be just, like, cycling them in and out 'cause we're still, like, fifty percent 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. 

[Jay]
Mm-hmm. 

[Justin]
Uh, and the whole-- I would-- I wouldn't quite say the ethics of donations was mentioned other than he was for it. 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, 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. 

[Sadie]
[chuckling] 

[Justin]
Um, so weird. And so I started asking people, like, "What did you learn about Carnegie at all?" Because some people were 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, 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' thoughts? And Gates is always about, like, bridging the digital divide. I just saw a thing the Gates Foundation is like, "We're gonna bridge the AI divide." So he's got the same exact playbook as, like, fifteen 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 thread, I think, talking about Gramsci and talking about, like, the, 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, going over the notes, like, first, first thoughts about talking about Carnegie? Jay, did you learn anything about Carnegie? 

[Jay]
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, pro- uh, like, progressive libs or even you might see, like, DSA folks, like, spout this sometimes. And it continues to remind me that, like, it's, 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, uh, 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, 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 real fucking rich, though. But, like, you can't become a philanthropist unless you're hoarding wealth, 

[Jay]
just straight up. So, like, that's-- I, I don't know if that answers your question, Justin, but just sort of, like, the idea of Carnegie as, like, the, the one good one and, like, how that's not challenged often, even among, like, leftists, I, I think, just because he made libraries, and libraries are a good thing. So I don't know. That's my thoughts. 

[Sadie]
Yeah. The, the thing that I really liked was actually the ar-- the sort of off-the-cuff article about W. E. B. Du Bois and the- [chuckling] 

[Justin]
I was just about to bring that up, Sadie. 

[Jay]
Wonder who Du Bois is. 

[Sadie]
The tiny, tiny anecdote, anecdote of there of him not being meek and, like, was it Booker T. Washington leaving him out of the meeting because he wouldn't be meek enough for, for Carnegie? And I'm like, yeah, that, that tracks. But that was, that was the one that I, like, out of...

[Dan]
Would you guys mind terribly if I read it out loud? It's a little sh-- It's pretty short. 

[Jay]
Do it. 

[Speaker 4]
Go for it. 

[Jay]
Yeah. 

[Dan]
So this is one of the reason... You know, I, I, on the record saying I think Du Bois is the, you know, is the greatest American. He was one of our greatest writers, certainly our greatest social theorist. And, you know, one of the incredible things about his life is that he, you know, died pretty freaking old. And so, and so he saw the 

[Dan]
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 remained 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 nineteen sixty-five. 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 steel workers in Homestead. 

[Dan]
So Du Bois says, "Washington makes a compromise." And he says, "We talked about it. You know, I went to see some of the Eastern philanthropists who were helping him with 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, is difficult to understand now. He's, you know, was, was worth what is now probably a hundred billion dollars, 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 love so much is, like, he knew. Like, he got it. [giggling] He got it, and he's able to, as our greatest theorist, 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 gonna 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, you know. He's literally not in the room that, um, that Carnegie was holding. And I think that's the whole story right there. 

[Justin]
Yeah, the, the back and forth between, like, Washington and Du Bois is very... There must be a good book that just puts them side by side. Like, there must be a really good, like, you know, fact, counterfact kind of thing, 'cause, you know, Du Bois is really interesting. And one of the, the sort of, like, central writers of American history that I just haven't gotten around to reading, 'cause I started doing it and was like, then I was out of the, like, like, then I was out of the history game by the time I was doing it. It was like I was in library school, and 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- 

[Dan]
Mm-hmm. 

[Justin]
-because 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? Dewey's approach to women, like all these things. So it was strange kind of like how much the, the writing about Carnegie doesn't come up. But I think the first thing, the, 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 pained 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 Gramsci, 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? 

[Dan]
Yeah. So for those who may not know the man, uh, the little dude from Sardinia, 

[Dan]
Gramsci was a leader and eventual, I believe the title was president or chairman, something like that, of the Italian Communist Party during and immediately after World War I. In nineteen twenty-six, late 1920s, he's imprisoned by the Mussolini regime, and he dies in prison. Gramsci 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 Grace Lee Boggs in the US, folks like that. The thing that Gramsci is trying to solve, especially after the war, is why does the Rev- Russian Revolution succeed, but the revolutions fail everywhere, everywhere else? And, you know, he-- Because, like, the formula was there, right? Like, their Marxism had become very formulaic, 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 and not here? And ultimately, the answer is that the kind of, like, civil society institutions in, in Russia were extremely undeveloped. Like, it was, it was a real-- You know, Russia was a giant contradiction where it was, on the one hand, one of the most advanced economies in the world in the major cities, and on the other hand, it was, you know, still basically a middle 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, as the Frankfurt people would go on to call it, uh, 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 bloc like steel, you know, as powerful as it may be, is always gonna be the minority of political power. It's always gonna be the kind of minority in 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 he calls hegemony, where the interests of one class come to stand in for the interests of everybody else. He is very interested in America as another example of this, and a lot of his examples, uh, about hegemony are in this, uh, great chapter called, like, On Americanism. And, you know, he talks a lot about, like, the five-dollar 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-- Gramsci correctly identified, like, yeah, you know, to have this thing where everybody's committed to working twelve hours a day at a breakneck speed on the assembly line and getting their fingers chopped off, we're gonna pay them a higher wage. That will make them happy, but it'll also ensure that everyone can buy the Model Ts that they're building, and thereby cements this kind of, like, wage productivity compact that'll stick around until the seventies when it falls apart. So for-- I think, you know, Gramsci 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. And I think the best possible example of that is that this histor-- library historian named Siobhan Stevenson has this article where she compares the-- how the Knights of Labor, a big mass US union movement, looks kind of like a secret society before the nineteen hundreds with Carnegie, their archnemesis. 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 in himself. So they all kind of bought into that same system, and that's, that's what hegemony is, is where even our people who are nominally en-enemies have the same kind of terms of debate, um, the same way of understanding the conflict. 

[Justin]
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 thing that 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, 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 had 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. 

[Jay]
And, like, as far as, like, the social reproduction of libraries, like, I, I remember, like, e-even back in grad school, like, I, 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, have always been that way." And it's like, no, the librarians, especially, like, in the early twentieth century, like, with the waves of, like, immigration coming in the United States, like, librarians played an active role in social reproduction and, like, telling immigrants, like, 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, like, the way that librarians have been complicit in, like, capitalism, like, in this country, like, I, I feel like people don't quite [chuckles] re-realize, but it's, it's, like, pretty baked into how libraries work. 

[Dan]
Yeah, the, the-- I-I'm glad that you both mentioned, like, libraries as 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 guy's stuff, you know, it really is beginning to show up in that late eighteen hundreds after the first Great Depression to, you know, af-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 Reichs 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, yeah, totally right, turn into engines of Americanization, in part because, uh, you know, it's, it's difficult to overstate the, the dual shocks of both this massive depression, which was, you know, the 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 with the other major shock of the period, which is the-- this mass immigration wave from Southern and Eastern Europe pouring into our cities and, and staffing steel yards, staffing, you know, stockyards, staffing the railroads. And, you know, so I often think of that, that great American, Henry Ford, who was also super interested [chuckling] in, in Americanization. In the, in the twenties, 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, to wear this stuff. And then they would be in the pot for a little bit, and then they would come back out, and they'd be wearing American clothes, 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, abs-- of course, they save people's lives, like, you know, the nurses and public health workers and 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. 

[Justin]
Yeah. And it's also sort of the, the rise of kind of the-- I mean, modernism already 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, 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 this sort of same factory logic, where the, the logic of the factory is moving into the social sphere. And so you have humans acting more machine-like. What's, what's the, what's the Charlie Chaplin movie? Modern Times? 

[Dan]
Modern Times. I just aired it for my students last week. Uh- 

[Jay]
Great movie. 

[Dan]
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 US, 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, or wear, but it's also our, 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, you know? Just because they're not charging a fee doesn't mean they're not involved in reproducing the system. 

[Justin]
It was also interesting, this is kind of an aside, and I don't know where else to fit it in, but in Shannon Mattern's paper, which was talking about, like, 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 gonna be linked, so you should read it. But also mentioned that the-- 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 ar- 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 was doing community puppetry in the seventies, and he's just like, "Hey, you wanna 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 is it called? History Project, I think. Or not History Project. Yeah, History Project, which is the gay archive here in Boston that I'm gonna 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 Library exists- 

[Dan]
Yeah. 

[Justin]
-or the gay library exists, or a Black community exists. 

[Dan]
These different definitions of public, right? Like it's, you know, the-- is a, a public agency supported by property taxes the same as a, a public space that's for everyone and the same as a public good? And I-- One thing Shannon is really good at pointing out in that article is that, like, it's not like anyone was, was tricked at the moment. Like, obviously you want the building if the rich guy is gonna 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, he loses. He doesn't convince the city fathers. But all throughout the South, Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction- And frankly, the-- I never know how to pronounce his name, but Wiegand, Wayne Wiegand, shows that this happened in, 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 fundraise 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 pub-- it's not truly public, you know. It's the-- You know, because this America is not truly democratic until maybe, what, nineteen-sixty-five, something like that. And people were totally aware. 

[Justin]
Yeah. Let's see. 

[Justin]
So we covered the, the social control. Let's see, discourse on the... Yeah, there's another article in here by Gisbrecht 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 of, in terms of things like the, the mainstream culture refuses to think about. And so that's why, like, segregation was such, like, uh, 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 a 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, you know, Arabs, but you can, you could have an expansion of whiteness to almost anyone else. But there's always going to be this other category that is just perpetually othered and, and not allowed into this new social dynamic, except to be just kept separate. 

[Dan]
And it seems like- 

[Justin]
Um, which, yeah. 

[Dan]
It seems like Washington and his contemporaries and, and philanthropists that were in support of him, like, gosh, the guy that ran Sears, Rosenbaum, were-- they tried pitching people like Carnegie on the whitening effect of libraries for the Jim Crow South and saying like, you know, in the same way that the Knights of Labor and Carnegie generally agreed on what the, you know, 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, uh, down here. And it certainly did happen and... 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 or Northerners did besides crushing the slavers, local control ends up being segregation. And so there, that vision that they were selling got the building, but not a fully public library. 

[Justin]
Mm-hmm. Moving forward to, like... So we have the construction of these Carnegie libraries. We have their handover to-- because part of the, 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 mending, 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 a, an extension of his idea that, you know, like, charity is harmful to people, that if you... [sighs] He had some, he had some awful quote that he got from, like a, like a stoic philosopher or something. He was like, "If I, if I let you be a, be a beggar and then 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, like, 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 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, you-- all you can do is create a society in which people are productive and helping themselves and maximizing their, their utility. So a lot of his philanthropy works to that extent. And I think a lot of what we see later with, like... The, the way Stevenson talks about this is, and I got a quote here, "During Carnegie's era, these problems were captured under the, the heading labor question." That's the problem of, like, the social problems of the changes in 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 in- inequ- 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 in- 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 when you're having all of these... Different internet programs and computer programs and software packages, which probably also helped to solidify Microsoft's various monopolies over certain markets, um, which Google then tried to do, and Apple also tried to do. So it wasn't, um, 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 twenty years ago. 

[Dan]
Yeah, I think that's the question is, like, you're trying to do the same thing in a different environment, and, and what does that mean both for the person doing it and the society around it? The, the way I think about it in the longue durée 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, uh, 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 communism. 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 spending. Um, we need, uh, paying 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 sixties with the Great Society, is figuring out the kind of social 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 Gramsci 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, you're totally right, Justin. Like, he, you know, has maybe fallen a little back as other people have started-- you know, the, the effective altruists have gotten their billions. But, like, you know, for most of my life, Bill Gates has been the single most important decision-maker in education and public health in, in humanity. And, and not just for the US. For, for large swaths of what we call the developing world, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, the Gates Foundation are the people deciding what public health means. And you gotta 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, is kind of comparing him to Carnegie in that moment in the nineties 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 to use Internet Explorer along with the rest of Windows. But it was a, you know, it was a huge deal, and people hated him. Like, there-- You know, I, I think we can forget these days, like, how, you know, just sounded 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, you know, the selling stuff, but it's much more than that. It's about building this whole culture of information technology similar to what happened a hundred years earlier. 

[Sadie]
I just want to interject that, uh, the regular IT workers still think of Microsoft that way. [chuckling] The, the amount of times that I shit-talk Microsoft on a very regular basis is, is pretty astounding. Just throwing that out there. [chuckling] 

[Dan]
Absolutely true. It's just, uh, I don't know, maybe it looks a little more sane than, like, the Zizians or whatever that we have to [chuckling] deal with now. He didn't write, uh, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. 

[Jay]
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, [chuckling] they're, they're on another one now. 

[Dan]
Yeah. That, uh- 

[Sadie]
Moving to fucking Pluto or- 

[Dan]
I will not pretend to... Yeah, I mean, they're welcome to do it. I mean, they can move to underneath the ocean. But yeah, I, I won't pretend to understand exactly where that's coming from. 

[Justin]
No, I'm learning some of their names now, but I have avoided learning about the Zizians and everything until I-- someone has been talking a-about-- The, 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, uh, AI is, is, like, actually sentient and read too much sci-fi and cooked his brain. It's like, oh, okay, you know what? Everything, everything does descend into role-play forums. Turns out everything does, uh, descend. 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 int-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, 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 that gets you all the influence. And I'm trying to compare that to, like, you know, he wants this, this control of the education sector, and that includes, you know, a little bit tangentally-- 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 I-- and your AI interacts with the world for you, and you are completely socially atomized to, to an antisocial extent. And you will then be, in some way, either made redundant or, in his words, you'll be taken care of or whatever, but most likely you'll just be turned into goo in, in Musk's mind of there's just gonna be a whole bun- 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... I mean, 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, he thinks about the world. But that 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 ten thousand 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, 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 this sort of, as far as I can tell, like, this hyper-atomization. I don't know what else to call it. 

[Dan]
Yeah, he doesn't, he doesn't care about consent in the way that Carnegie or even Gates did. I, I do think he has a political philosophy, even if it's not thought out in his head, you know, Swiss cheesed as it is. The... And it's... There's actually... [chuckles] Rather than 40K, the example that Quinn Slodian 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, it was like a, a mecha kind of thing, where the central conflict was around a, like, city-sized spaceship that, you know, uh, humans could get on and then leave, um, and then they would, you know, become skybo- cyborgs by, you know, hanging out in these cool mecha. 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, collusion to the system, woke mind virus, which is, you know, basically transphobia is, you know, the, uh, any kind of meme that runs through the cybernetic system that is kind of counter to his purposes. But in-- it's an, and it's an extraordinarily kind of anti-humanist vision. Like, it does really not have room for... Like, remember when, like, Joyce Carol Oates roasted him, and she was like, "This, this person doesn't seem like he's ever read a book or a movie." And then he spent, like, three days, like, replying people to like, "That's a, that's a good movie. Armageddon slaps." 

[Justin]
[chuckles] 

[Dan]
You know? 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, that old Cezanne or whatever, but they, you know, because they just wanna make AI videos of themselves, you know, playing in with Optimus Prime. And it does seem like they have given up on even, like, Gates' facade. You know, obviously, like, Zuckerberg did 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, 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 finance, 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 pitched battle, uh, and defeats the steel union. So, you know, it has to be on man's mind that people are restless, and I need to design a state, a social reproductive sector, in Jay's words, that are, uh, going to get people in line with the system. You know, and he might not have thought about it in that, as utilitarian terms. You know, he probably, you know, had very big thoughts about progress, about health. You know, 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, you know, he was face-to-face with this problem of potential revolution. And that's just not true of rich tech guys today, you know? And it, and it's not just because industrial production is outside the US largely. It's because, like, most of these guys are financiers, and that's where their money 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, 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, Marc 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 break room. 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 posting, you know? 

[Justin]
Hmm. Yeah, I, I actually have been going back and forth on, like, am I gonna commit to reading this Muskism book? It sounds like it's worth it, but I, I just haven't, like... Am I really gonna read this whole thing? Like, you know, is it one of those things? 'Cause I've made the mistake of, of reading some of those, like, political biographies that what's-his-name puts out, the, the big journalist dude, like Wood-Woodward, Woodard. 

[Dan]
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. 

[Justin]
Um, and I'm like, "Wow, I learned some interesting personal things, but nothing useful." Although I, I did-- The, the one reason I 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, we'll produce this in China, we'll produce this here, there, and, and elsewhere." And Musk is like, "No, I wanna control the entire chain." And by doing that, has given himself, like, a lot of power in a way that, like, other... Uh, like, like, Zuckerberg kind of doesn't have. 

[Dan]
Yeah, and this is, I think, the, the-- This is not an original thought for me. This is from, 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, 

[Dan]
p- both in the auto industry and in tech, you know, because he did not have to rely on all these disrupted supply chains. In fact, he had built a gigafactory in Shanghai, um, and so 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 Teslas are coming out of that Fremont factory in California then. And so when the COVID restrictions come down, that really truly is, like, a dire threat to who he-- to what he's 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 hothouse for COVID infections, you know, hundreds every month. 

[Jay]
There's also just, like, this, like... I still keep coming back to, like, why do most folks still think Carnegie's okay, right? Like, why? And, like, it... [chuckles] Like, I, 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 it from. But there, 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 doesn't follow the conventions that people of his class should be following. And that both includes the 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 a-apply-- is, like, I, 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 interests? Well, because Trump is honest and bawdy, 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, [chuckling] um, 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. Like, he's cringe and annoying, and, like, he's this, like, you know, 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 that, 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, "He, him and Bill Gates are the same. Him and Carnegie are the same." Like, 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, I don't know. Yeah, that's, that was sort of my- 

[Dan]
That's, that's such a good point. That I, 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, we must remember that ten years ago, maybe a little more, a little less, Musk was not cringe. He was Tony Stark. In fa-- And he sh-- he, he guest starred in the second or third Iron Man movie. And, you know, he real-- You know, I had students all the time coming up to me like, "Yeah, you know, I gotta be the Elon of, 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, uh, it wasn't mainstream as much in, in fourteen, fifteen, even if they were exactly the same. And to your-- I think the-- what really brings home that they're, they're not actually different and it is all aesthetics for me is what happened to one of the DC's Carnegie Libraries. So I-- Last time I was here, I, I was talking about my book, which mostly took place at the Martin Luther King Junior Public Library, which is now the central branch of DC'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 DC 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, it's not that far from the Apple aesthetic. So I can understand how the, you know, this tech sector and this Carnegie era industrial capitalism aren't, 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 engaged with. I'm gonna be thinking about that. 

[Jay]
I mean, wh- have we all been in Carnegie Libraries before? 

[Jay]
Yeah? I used to live in Dover, New Hampshire, and their public library is still like a Carnegie Library. It hasn't been turned into something 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 those, like, upskirt stairs that are in every fucking Carnegie Library. I swear to 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, in a way, right? Like, you know, it, it is, you know, like, well, to me, what is more sacrilegious is not the Apple Store in the former Carnegie Library, but the Apple Store where Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive was, that theater is now an Apple Store. [chuckling] That's more sacrilegious to me. 

[Dan]
That's crazy. 

[Jay]
That's the one that I'm like, "Ugh, that hurts." 

[Dan]
That seems much more discordant. Like, it-- [chuckling] Like, I can understand- 

[Jay]
No one's mad. 

[Dan]
-how one become the other. Yeah, yeah. 

[Jay]
Right. But, like, it also reminds me of, like, people freaking out about Trump demolishing the White House. I'm like, uncritical support is the coolest thing he ever did. [laughing] Like, still holding on to this, like, American, like, exceptionalism project of like, "The old-- The White House. You can't do the White House." I'm like, "Shut up." Like, like the way that- 

[Speaker 5]
Of all the things. 

[Jay]
Yeah. Of all the things, right? Like, the way that, like... And, 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, it's sacred, right? To go back to, you know, vocational awe with, like, like Fobazi, 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, I don't know. 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. 

[Dan]
One of the first- 

[Jay]
I just, yeah 

[Dan]
...big, uh, you know, and still read social histories of libraries was D. Garrison's Apostles of Culture. You know, it's, it's always talked about as temples with a kind of a priestly cast to it. 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 Fobazi'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, the, all the wonderful, amazing things that happen in a library that, you know, inside and outside of, of literacy proper. But, you know, on the other hand, [chuckling] there is the, the rest of the project of, uh, missionary work, you know, of civilizing the natives, of, of helping people adjust to, you know, a cruel system. You know, like, for all the-- so much of the discussion about homelessness in 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 the 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? 

[Justin]
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. [chuckling] 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. The West Tampa one looks really nice, by the way. You should look at a photo of it. It's, like, bright red. It's, it's like a calming children's hospital. 

[Justin]
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 gonna work at a private institution again, I'm going to go to a rich one, 'cause 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 got a big scholarship to a, 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, 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're 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, the dialogue, and they kind of ruined it [chuckling] worldwide. And we're still dealing with the fallout of that. I talked to so many Scholcom librarians who are really like, "I don't know. We kind of lost." I don't know. It's like, it's not... We didn't re- 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 Carneg- 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 of, much of our political class has to be anymore. I mean, you know, the senators were just wheeling in and out of hell just for, you know, a, a day visit. So I don't know. I, I, I think about it a lot, but I don't know what it could mean. But I wanna know what you think then about what it means for the future. 

[Dan]
I think we... Because, in large part because of Jay's point about aesthetics and how important that is to our understanding of 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, 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, and I do anticipate that there will be, you know, plenty of political amnesia. You know, it will, 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 Mu- 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 [sighing] and different alliances that he wants to build. You know, I, I think [chuckling] Musk, in many ways, like, burned a lot of Gates' project to the ground. You know, what is, what is the, the killing of USAID but, like, the end of, of, you know, liberal internationalism? Something quite close to my heart, actually. My dad worked there for, 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 happen. 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 US 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, and I think, like, there's a good chance of it coming back, it's not gonna be under the same terms, because the world has changed, because the, the deal that was made in, like, the '50s or '60s or whatever is no longer the going deal. Like, we have different needs for different people in a different economy. I, I don't think things can snap. You know, private philanthropy may be more important, but, you know, unless we, like, radically change their tax structure, they're probably not gonna go full Carnegie. Like, [chuckling] 'cause they're not scared, and there's no incentive to give away their stuff before they die. The... So I, I don't, I, I don't think there's a, 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, I am, 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, I think the coalition in New York to get their library funding back, fighting Mom Dani anyways, was the Plan NYC or NYC Plan- 

[Justin]
Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

[Dan]
... are a really great example of that, where it is 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 point five percent in the budget. We need point five percent in the budget, period, end of story." And just because this is a base public good, treat it 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. You know, I'm, I'm very much inspired by Massachusetts teachers at all levels who were able to get a millionaire's tax in and has brought in even more money than they thought it would, and they were able to offer, to my understanding, free community college along with an enormous amount of infrastructure improvements all over the state. I desperately wanna make that happen in my state. It's g- 

[Jay]
The mass teachers' unions don't fuck around. They're awesome. 

[Dan]
Yeah. [laughs] It's, it's a long, it's a long walk for the rest of us. And, you know, and we can imagine President AOC or, or President Ossoff, you know, doing something similar, but I don't think they can come back to what was happening before because that world doesn't exist anymore. On the other hand, the other alternative vision is, 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 

[Dan]
s- 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 J.D. Vance, are involved in defense and defense tech. Like, they are-- You know, the Cybertruck is, in many ways, a vision of his future, is like building a little shitty little fortress for yourself and your, and your pals, you know, a, a, a fully armed tree house for the boys. And so I think those-- that's what's on offer. You know, there, there'll be some intermediary things. There might be some variations. Like, it's very easy to imagine, like, localized evangelical Christian versions of the-- of fully armed and operational tree house. 

[Dan]
But it's either that or we fully organize the libraries, fully organize the schools, fully organize the hospitals, all the stuff that they can't 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, that's my offer on the table. You guys can either sit outside the fully armed and operational tree house, or you can get on board with the war to claim our libraries and our schools and our hospitals for the people. 

[Justin]
Also, while Jay was talking earlier about aesthetics and how middle America moves-- i- i- is moved by Trump in some ways because of his WWE personality, that-- I-- 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 Rhodes, which is going, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Daddy." [laughs] 

[Dan]
I got some, I got some relatives that fit in pretty there. Yeah, that sounds like a good plan to me. 

[Jay]
Unironic- 

[Sadie]
Yeah 

[Jay]
... Maoist Dusty Rhodes, full support. 

[Justin]
"War can only be about war, Daddy." 

[Dan]
[laughs] 

[Justin]
"If there's two things Dusty Rhodes hates, 

[Justin]
it's that the, the workers of this nation don't own the means of production and Ric Flair." [laughs] 

[Jay]
It's fun recording in the same room because I can go strangle him when he does shit. [laughs] 

[Justin]
"I was the son of two peasant farmers, Daddy." All right. 

[Justin]
Well, 

[Justin]
that's where I'm ending it, my new character, Maoist Dusty Rhodes. Dan, thanks for coming on. This is really fun. I'm really glad to get you back on. And, and thanks for making me read all of Gramsci. Oh, by the way, if you ever read the, the, 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 nineteen-thirties Italian Communist Party than Gramsci ever is in the body of the work. So skip the editorial parts and just go to the part where Gramsci's talking. 

[Jay]
Interruption bad. No interruptions good. Fight, fight, fight. [laughs] 

[Dan]
I will-- If I'm gonna make one nerd recommendation, I am never-- I mean, this is probably the wrong thing to say on this podcast, but I, I never care about editions 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 Notebooks, but instead to read David Forgacs' 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 it in prison, so it's all over the place. And then the translation's a mess and yada, yada, yada. So The Antonio Gramsci Reader by David Forgacs is lovely. And there's a nice little introduction by Eric Hobsbawm that I think everyone would love. 

[Sadie]
I'm looking that up right now. 

[Justin]
That might have been the one I read, but I was just like, wow, they really care about the-- explaining all of these beefs. And I was like, this is-- I'm a vegetarian. I don't need all this beef. 

[Dan]
But 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 a hundred years ago. 

[Justin]
Yeah, that's true. All right. 

[Jay]
You can, you can let the first international beef go, guys. I promise it's fine. 

[Sadie]
[laughs] 

[Jay]
We can be friends now. 

[Justin]
All right. Was there anything you wanted to plug, Dan, before you go? 

[Dan]
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 AAUP at aup.org/join. Your law-- money is what pays for our lawsuits against the Trump administration, um, and which we keep winning, and it pays for local organizing on 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, uh, 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 gonna win. 

[Jay]
Let's fucking go. 

[Sadie]
Let's fucking go. 

[Dan]
Let's fucking go. 

[Jay]
And if you're a librarian who's faculty at a university, you might be part of your university's AAUP. You might be in the union. So that's what I was where I used to work. So check it out. It's good. 

[Justin]
Yeah, I'm looking up the version at mine, which is not a union. It is an advocacy chapter. 

[Jay]
Yeah, because your librarians are not faculty. 

[Dan]
Well- 

[Justin]
Well, the, the AAUP is not a- 

[Jay]
Oh, right, right 

[Justin]
... a union. 

[Dan]
Yeah, private schools, uh, our tenure track faculty are forbidden legally from unionizing. But, you know, Justin, we'll talk offline. There's, you know, there's-- Does the NLRA really exist anymore? Who knows? So, you know. 

[Justin]
Yeah. 

[Dan]
We'll talk. 

[Justin]
Yeah. Does, does anything, you know? The only union fight that's unsuccessful is the ones that lose. All right. Thanks, Dan. Good night.