librarypunk ep 141

Justin:
[0:27] Hi, I'm Justin. I'm a Scalcom librarian. My pronouns are he and they.

Sadie:
[0:31] I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they, them.

Jay:
[0:35] I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian, and my pronouns are he, him.

Justin:
[0:39] And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Jennie:
[0:42] Sure. I'm Jenny. I use she, her pronouns, and I'm the director of library features at NYU's Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy.

Justin:
[0:55] Oh, that's so quiet. Why isn't that any louder? Okay. Yay. Welcome.

Jennie:
[1:00] Thank you. This is like a real long time caller. Sorry, long time listener, first time caller moment for me. I've been a fan for a very, very long time.

Jay:
[1:08] Oh, yay.

Jennie:
[1:10] Yeah.

Justin:
[1:11] Thank you. I recently got to talk to some of your interns. They're a fun group of people.

Jennie:
[1:16] They're the best. Our internship program is rocking so hard. The stuff that folks are putting out is just really amazing. I just read this morning, two of our interns wrote a post on e-waste and libraries and sort of what it might look like in the future with AI and the incredible amount of energy that that takes. It's really cool. It's really, really good. They did a great job researching it.

Justin:
[1:43] Oh, we should really get them into like George Bataille and they can talk about waste and excess and usage and e-waste of whole life cycle of expenditure.

Jennie:
[1:55] I can't think that they're not.

Jay:
[1:57] Get the interns into hot Bataille fall.

Sadie:
[1:59] Most would say this is just an excuse to bring up Bataille, isn't it?

Jay:
[2:04] Hot Bataille fall.

Justin:
[2:06] Sorry if we interrupt you. We have our own flow and if there's crosstalk, I can always fix it in post. So don't worry about anything. I'm extremely annoying and.

Jay:
[2:16] Will interrupt people and I can't do anything about it.

Jennie:
[2:19] I'm only nervous because I've listened to so many episodes right and so I feel like I know you all at this point.

Justin:
[2:28] I just saw you start to talk and I was like uh oh did we like spooker no absolutely not I love the tie, yeah have you seen the Asaphail tarot deck that Asset Horizon is doing no oh i'm backing it i'm getting like a very big print of one of the tarot's yeah they're very cool but check out asset horizon they talk about patai anyway cradle to cradle stuff, so for people who might not know about library futures because there's a lot of like library organizations out there that do different types of organizing and like different types of advocacy. What is library futures? How would you describe it?

Jennie:
[3:13] So we work on policy and digital libraries. So we work largely with librarians and policymakers and community members on digital rights issues for sort of three major issues, which is advancing clear policy on digital objects, fighting against corporate consolidation and promoting a technology-forward future. And because everybody loves things that come in threes, we do that through research, advocacy, and education. And we're based at a law school, so we have a lot of resources for legal work that I actually think are kind of underutilized. I would love if more people reached out to me and asked for connections to legal scholars or to students who could kind of help them through legal issues. We keep a list that you can request access to. You actually just have to email me of friendly law clinics for intellectual freedom issues. In particular, we have somebody in every state who's willing to answer questions or talk to press or sort of do work. So, you know, sort of being a part of the library legal community is a big part of what we do.

Justin:
[4:28] Actually, you mentioned in Unrelated Secret Underground Library IRC channel that you had some connection to Harvard Law. Had you been a law librarian at some point? I didn't realize there was such a close legal relationship here.

Jennie:
[4:43] No. So I worked at Creative Commons for a number of years and then left there to take a job at Harvard Law School Library, where I was the assistant director for outreach. I was effectively the outreach librarian. And that was where I met Kyle Courtney, who asked if I wanted to start a project with him in the depths of the pandemic. And that project, which he had started with a group of four other people, became Library Futures. It was a contracting job for me. And by January, we felt like we were ready to launch. And honestly, it launched and just kind And it took off really quickly. And now we're four years old.

Justin:
[5:25] Yeah, pandemic projects do that.

Jay:
[5:27] Yeah, I remember when Kyle was first like talking about this. I was really excited for it.

Jennie:
[5:33] Yeah, I mean, there needed to be sort of, sorry, I'd like, just give me one sec.

Jennie:
[5:40] Yeah, I mean, I felt like there was a real need for an organization that wanted to take on copyright issues and wanted to take on the questions of particularly the corporate issues within digital access and libraries. You know, it's like to the point where I think For library technology, a lot of times you started to refer to really basic library functions by their product names in certain ways. Like when, you know, public library patrons access Libby, a lot of the times they'll say, oh, yeah, my e-books, that's Libby. But that's not your library. That's a rental service that your library pays in order to rent e-books to you. And they have an entirely different set of incentives than a library would have. And so, you know, one of the things that we focused on since the very, very beginning is this question of, you know, what is the role of vendors in libraries? What is the role of corporations and libraries? And, you know, how do we think about and fight against these mismatched incentives, which is that these corporations are out to make money? It's the first thing you learn in any kind of corporate finance class is the only the only thing that a company does is they make money and then you know libraries are public bureaucracies in many ways they.

Jennie:
[6:57] Have an entirely different culture, and they have to make choices that are often truly misaligned with the corporations that are trying to sell them shit. The other way that this comes up a lot is within contracts, which I'm sure we'll get into more deeply.

Justin:
[7:13] Yeah, I mean, that's kind of an episode that has never fully come together, but it's kind of like, why are all library websites bad? And the thing is, it's hard to make an episode about it because the answer is really simple which is like libraries are there are thousands of them they all have different governing structures they can't all just use the same platform like Netflix can they can't be a monopoly and every time we try and do that you end up with something like you know Libby which I really don't like and but then that becomes identified with your library where you know I think we were on Poddam America and they said oh yeah you know you go to your library and they maintain libby and it's like well they don't no they don't they pay for it it would be nice if we had stuff like that that's why i've i've harped about controlled digital lending for so long it's like it'd be nice if we could build some of these things but you know we're not there yet and also the legal foundation isn't there and so there's there's the flip to that which is the ebook market the licensing the contracts and i'm really interested in contract negotiation it's just like, I don't get to do it as part of my job. Because again, that, because of the structure of my university is not really done at, we don't have a contracts librarian. We don't have someone who goes, let's just do this a la carte. We're just going to not even take the spundle. I'm going to go and I'm going to argue with them about every single one of these. We can't really do that.

Jennie:
[8:39] So there are two things that come up that come up for me with this. The first that we can maybe kind of table for a minute is that we really started as a controlled digital lending organization. That was a really core part of our work, and it remains a really core part of our work. But controlled digital lending looks really different than it did four years ago, and I think it is in... A bit of a transition point also in sort of understanding what people actually want from controlled digital lending. They want to be able to own their materials. They don't want to have to license them. They don't want to have to pay for them a million times. They don't want to be completely, you know, at the beck and call of these huge conglomerates and they want interoperability, which is a, and like good user experience, which I think is something that is often forgotten in these conversations is like.

Jennie:
[9:25] You know, when we're talking about controlled digital lending as a term of art in the way that it exists in print world where you make a scanned copy of a book and then you scan and then you lend it one at a time as a very specific way of thinking about controlled digital lending but you know as we were writing the NISO standards on controlled digital lending it became clear that you know one of the things that digital enables us to do is to do something different and to to live a little bit outside of print world and that we really could write standards that would meet needs for people that didn't necessarily have to sort of follow this specific way of doing it in the five use cases within the NISO document really show how libraries can own and lend digital materials. But on the contracts thing, I mean, I'm going to try to get the number right. The University of California, when they negotiated their Elsevier contract a number of years ago, they had in the hundreds of amendments.

Jennie:
[10:22] And a smaller university, a public library, any other kind of institution that's not the University of California system, they can't afford to do that. They can't afford to negotiate a contract like that. And no court has really weighed in on whether or not these kinds of institutional contracts are even conscionable. If you're not reading a contract and you're signing it or you're reading it and it's like, you can either have access to the world's research or negotiate this contract for three years, I don't know if that's a fair contract. What Jason Schultz from the Engelberg Center, who wrote the book The End of Ownership, calls it a mutant form of contract law. Yeah.

Jay:
[11:09] And like, you know, not every, you know, place is the University of California with all of the resources for the contract, but also like, you know, to non-librarians often say like the reason why you can't like check out an ebook because there's like a six month hold time on it is because librarians are a bunch of libs who like following rules and all that. But the real answer that I give is like, we don't have the resources, like the money or the staffing to actually develop these things on our own. And so we're like forced to. To use third-party systems because administration would rather use money to pay a third party to do something than to hire people and like with the skills to do it in-house or for libraries like to work together to build these things are like for us and by us as opposed to companies doing it like it's not just like having a lawyer that can do the contract all it's like even just, infrastructure kind of stuff too.

Jennie:
[12:10] And it's not unique to libraries. I mean, this happens also in all sorts of other public information systems. This happens in government. I think government is probably the primary example where you can see it, but it happens in schools too. You know, like the majority of public schools in the country use Google Classroom at this point because, you know, how is a school supposed to build an LMS?

Justin:
[12:33] Yeah. Wild to think about that. I I mean, having like a whole cloud-based system in K-12, like I was able to take online classes in high school, if maybe, but because Florida was like really big on that. Oh, right.

Jennie:
[12:48] There's a Florida virtual school.

Justin:
[12:50] Yeah.

Jennie:
[12:50] Yeah.

Justin:
[12:51] And because they don't want to teach sex ed. And so, cause and effect, they don't have enough schools for pregnant teenagers. And so that's why there's a very robust virtual campus, because there was no infrastructure for all the pregnant teens that the sex ed policy of Florida created. I grew up in rural Florida. I have grew up. I have grapes.

Jennie:
[13:13] Oh, that's wild. I actually, so I come out of the like free software community. And I just remember years and years ago, this kid getting up at the Free Software Foundation annual conference before, you know, it was as clear just how problematic that organization was. So I think they've gotten better and reading this manifesto about how, you know, forcing him to use Google Classroom is akin to child abuse. Like he will not lay down.

Jay:
[13:41] He's cooking. let him speak, I'd be in the audience like a proud parent being like yeah I.

Jennie:
[13:53] Think his dad was.

Jay:
[13:54] There I was like so.

Justin:
[13:55] Excited hell yeah that's very funny that's.

Jay:
[13:59] Good get him on the pod.

Justin:
[14:00] Yeah exactly he's going places and that kid's name Luigi, straight line.

Jay:
[14:12] We're gonna have a writing letters to him in prison party in the discord you know not that he'll go because he's got a really good lawyer but, oh

Justin:
[14:24] I love watching his lawyer talk okay we can't talk about this because i don't know how much i'm gonna have to cut and i don't want to cut i'm too lazy to cut yeah i already said on the i already said on blue sky i was like i'm really gonna have to use the cut tool next week and i'm like no i'm not doing that. We have a guest. We'll behave.

Jay:
[14:42] I can't thirst about Luigi on man during the podcast.

Justin:
[14:46] We can't lose another episode within two months because of all the actionable things we say.

Jay:
[14:53] Just don't tell people to get guns, Justin.

Justin:
[14:58] I'm really glad that episode didn't come out.

Jennie:
[15:01] I admitted they haven't been following it so much, but when I first was looking, it seemed like he 3D printed the gun. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Jay:
[15:12] Guy from Japan or like shaking hands.

Justin:
[15:14] The the receiver because I was explaining ghost guns to Jay, I think I don't know if it was on the podcast or not. But yeah, the what counts as a gun is like the part that does like the firing mechanism, like the lower half of it. So what they did starting in like the 2020s is you can buy kits of like all the other parts that don't have serial numbers and the parts that would have a serial number. You 3D print that and that can be more accurate. It won't jam and you can shoot it like thousands of times. So, and the version he had was like actually kind of an old one. I read an interview where they interviewed all these ghost gun aficionados and they're like, yeah, that's like a three-year-old design. Now we got better designs. He should have, he should have used the liberator XKX.

Jay:
[15:55] I don't know. The adjudicator seemed pretty effective. A jester, that's what it was.

Jennie:
[16:00] It's the logical outcome of library makerspaces.

Jay:
[16:04] Yes.

Justin:
[16:06] I did think for a while ago, because two months ago, I was printing ghost guns in the library makerspace. I'm like, do I have to go delete that now?

Jennie:
[16:16] You just made the same joke, right?

Justin:
[16:20] But no, the funny thing about this guy is because he's a tech bro, it seems like he made a ghost it seems like he made a ghost gun just because he was a tech dude thought it would be cool huh he just like wasn't because he could have easily got a gun because he's like well off dude yeah he's from.

Jay:
[16:36] A wealthy family they like own end of life care facilities.

Justin:
[16:40] Yeah they own like Delaware and so, yeah I mean I don't understand the east coast I've never pretended to I'm from cow country, but yeah it seems like he just like thought it was cool and maybe he was like a little libertarian in his libertarian phase and had access to a 3d printer because he works in tech i just thought it would be cool to do god bless america because he didn't ditch the gun so that's a funny yeah rich.

Jay:
[17:08] Tradition of italian insurrectionists in this country.

Justin:
[17:13] I saw some people from ak.

Jay:
[17:15] Press being like by the way we have this book about this one guy who was also an Italian insurrectionist back in the day. You should read it, Croft.

Justin:
[17:24] I love how every week when decades happen, everyone's like, hey, by the way, we did an episode about this and it's just under CNN's tweet, which I do it too, because it's funny.

Jay:
[17:37] Anyway.

Sadie:
[17:38] Sorry.

Justin:
[17:39] No, Jay, you were saying something about...

Jay:
[17:41] I was.

Justin:
[17:43] Oh, you were saying about paying for capacity and that was taking me back to California because the thing that was going around library blue sky library sky what are we calling it now I don't know was that class in I want to say it was UC system that was going to be like they made a basically an OER textbook but they made it with like chat GPT and it looked like crap and then they were explaining how this how this worked and they were just explaining a flipped classroom with OER and they're like oh and it'll be like $25 and I'm like wow Wow. We've done all of this. We've already done this. You've reinvented the bus kind of situation. You've made a bus again of OER. You just created OER in a flipped classroom, except you made it proprietary. You made it way more computationally expensive. And you could have spent that $25 to $40 and given them a proprietary homework system, which would do all the grading for you. So like you could have just made an oer and still done the proprietary because you can just still charge them 40 i mean obviously this is to enclose oer and ai and it's also to shove ai into a lot of things but well.

Jennie:
[18:53] If i can plug two of our projects uh we just released a report we just released a report on oer in public libraries that's pretty extensive we got it was a smaller sample size, I think, than we had initially wanted. But so we have this new report out on OER and public libraries. The sample size was definitely large enough to make some conclusions. The report is really beautiful and really well done. And it's at libraryfutures.net slash OER. And it basically talks about, you know, how many public librarians in particular are sort of aware of OER, but don't use it in the way that academic libraries and librarians do, not for any particular reason other than just learning about it, knowing more about it. And of course, Michelle Reed, who's our director of programs and is really wonderful, is an absolute expert on this. And so we're starting to think about, you know, what would it look like to be able to integrate more OER into public libraries and into educational settings and into sort of more public spaces rather than just academic spaces. And then the other thing that is coming out pretty soon is the issue of AI-generated content in both Hoopla and Overdrive. I don't know, Sadie, have you seen this at all yet?

Sadie:
[20:19] A little bit. I think we talked about it as a segment. Maybe that was just AI narration on a whole bunch of voices, like a whole bunch of audiobooks, but I haven't. Not a lot.

Jennie:
[20:31] Well, so Hoopla, as has been shown for at least two years, is just ingesting enormous amounts of content that's completely inappropriate and often really, really biased and in certain cases like transphobic or homophobic. And they'll do things like they'll invest ingest an entire site called ebookit.com and just put that shit in your public library and so what we're seeing what we were seeing two years ago was like literal noxie content which they hand talking about that yeah they seem to have hand removed that like the stuff that we pointed out but now you go in and my favorite one is when you search for Colleen Hoover, which they suggest that you search for on the front page, you get an AI generated summary of a Colleen Hoover book that says Colleen Hover.

Jay:
[21:27] Her books.

Jennie:
[21:28] And it's like that for a number of different materials. And with Overdrive, you know, they're ingesting the same kinds of catalogs. They do give you the choice of whether or not you want them in your library catalog, which Hoopla does not. But it's starting to get really overwhelming. And we're starting to hear from people that it's very hard to make selections when the platform is just flooded with dreck, with just low quality AI generated, or there's hate speech in Hoopla. We have one example in which someone we spoke with had found an enormous number of links to commercial content in children's books. She said she had found pornography in children's books, like links to pornography and children's books.

Jennie:
[22:17] We couldn't replicate that search, but we could replicate the commercial content. And just looking around the site, it's so easy to find. If you do any basic search, you just come up with all sorts of just crap content that they're just injecting into public libraries. And I said this at the time, but I think the thing that really has bothered me about it and still bothers me about it is what it says to me is another example of these misaligned values, right? It says to me that this is a company that does not care that people who utilize the public library and maybe don't pay for a streaming service don't deserve access to quality information. And that is a fundamental equity problem. And that is a fundamental issue within digital spaces that I think, you know, I think librarians are very aware of it. And I think they're really working on, to, you know, create communities of practice and really working against it. But it sometimes does feel like you're up against a wall. And when we, we spoke to 60 people about this hoopla problem and almost all of them were like, oh, I thought this was just my problem. Like I didn't realize that this was a problem for so many different people.

Jay:
[23:28] And I mean, like what, there was that like one poll that said like, like libraries are some of the only institutions that people still consider like trustworthy right like that's like one of our things yeah and it's like now what happens when that starts being eroded because of this slop like in my cataloging department because the obvious question of like oh they're gonna want to use ai to take away the cataloging jobs so we need to show them how bad it is at cataloging right and it was like even beyond all of the other ethical questions it's just producing factually incorrect stuff and that will erode our trustworthiness. And that's against our mission statement and our values. If Hoopla continues to do this, libraries should stop using Hoopla. Just period. And explain to patrons why. Just be honest about it.

Jennie:
[24:16] It's also treating libraries like warehouses for books. Anything that anybody ever thought of suddenly deserves to be in a library. And we are seeing it. That survey that was done about... Oh, whose dog is that?

Jennie:
[24:32] Oh, nice. That survey that was done about libraries being super trustworthy. It was done quite a while ago. I don't know if anybody's done a sentiment analysis of libraries around the country in quite a while. And what we see with the intellectual freedom issues, which are pervasive and are very much a part of the current culture wars, is that there is a vocal but extremely dangerous and extremely scary minority of people who not only don't trust libraries don't trust the fact that we live in a society and the social contract and they don't trust news and they don't trust anything.

Jennie:
[25:17] And this question of trust and trust in professionalism and trust in institutions really is at the core of a lot of the intellectual freedom issues and We have another report that's coming out that traces the bans that we've been seeing. There's this sort of narrative that it's like, oh, they started in 2020 when a lot of things were really fomenting. But what we found was that the first lawsuit in this new wave of neo-censorship was against EBSCO in 2018. It was filed against the Colorado Library. I think the Colorado Library Consortium is what it's, yeah, CLIC, the Colorado Library Association.

Jennie:
[26:04] And it was dismissed, of course, because it was ridiculous. Two parents in Aurora, Colorado claimed that they found pornography on EBSCO and they could, like, surprise, surprise, never replicate that search. But it cost the Colorado Library consortium, tens of thousands of dollars.

Jennie:
[26:23] Even though their legal fees were paid, that was money that could have gone to libraries and instead was spent fighting this spurious lawsuit. And then from that, there was another ban in Utah for a year where the state just slipped off all research databases for 600,000 students for a year, where they, quote, audited it for porn, even though there's just no evidence of any of this happening. I'm really excited about this report coming out. It's going to come out in January. And it really just started with a question of like, oh, well, we hear so much about book bans and we hear so much about Bombs for Liberty and these truly horrific, horrible threats against our profession and the people we work with and our communities. But I hadn't heard a lot about, you know, research databases that students use or the kinds of things that we rely on.

Jennie:
[27:20] And this, you know, EBSCO really has taken the brunt of it, to be honest. But, you know, we've seen it in other in other spaces as well.

Justin:
[27:28] Yeah I remember that EBSCO case and I remember the, the I remember some of the stuff they were complaining about was because EBSCO's like kind of so cheap and so ubiquitous and if like you're gonna get a bundle of databases you usually go with EBSCO although for some reason my consortium just like negotiated itself out of EBSCO somehow I don't know how they did that but we got it back but like they we lost like a bunch of them for a little bit, but yeah it's always the one that Because there's just information in there. And if you're, you know, thinking about libraries as something that like a five-year-old uses, they're like, oh, this is pornography. It's like, no, it's just regular information about human anatomy or sexuality or gender or anything. And I think that was probably what they originally were upset about. And then we're like, it was porn. I remember. And then did the Ralph Wiggum thing. And then, yeah, there was nothing there.

Jennie:
[28:24] And to be fair, you know, I think there are sort of a couple of issues at play. I mean, I don't actually really want to be fair to Christofascists, but to be fair to sort of the allegations, I guess, you know, there were a couple of examples of materials that were not totally appropriate for young people in the database, but they were very quickly removed. But what has happened is that these database products have allowed people under extreme threat to put stop words on materials, which means that in many cases, if you search for something like breast cancer, you just wouldn't come up with anything. It's not even that it's, you know, specifically banned from your library. It's this form of soft censorship. And we don't actually know if the vendors are putting that on before they send it to schools and libraries. EBSCO is in 49 out of 50 states. So it is a really ubiquitous product. And it's sort of this thing, you know, like Sarah Lambden writes in Data Cartels is like, we kind of know what's going on, but we actually also kind of don't. And that's the point. So, you know, we can only see what we can see. And, you know, one of our interview participants, not to like tell you the entire report, but some of the really juicy parts of it, like one of our interview participants said that one of the reasons why they think that...

Jennie:
[29:53] Fight moves from the digital space from trying to effectively ban the internet and schools to the physical space is because of this circus-like feeling within a lot of public hearings. It's really hard to hold up a database and it's super confusing, but it's extremely easy to hold up this book and read out from it and be like, you know, my child learning about LGBTQ issues is pornography or like taking things completely out of context. And that, I don't, I mean, I don't know how, you know, I don't, I don't know if that's necessarily the reason why it has switched, but it's, it's certainly a compelling argument. You know, when you look at some of what's going on, when you see what's going on online, I, you know, have the utmost respect for people who are fighting this in their communities.

Justin:
[30:44] Yeah the what was it the promise of communism movie what was that one the, bet davis oh the one we watched for vanguard yeah yeah yeah when you when you said pageantry of it it just reminded me of the the whole plot and storm center is like just everyone the whole community just gets more and more whipped up about like this one book which is like a stand-in for the communist manifesto being in the public library and it gets like you know the whole point of the movie is it gets more and more and they start doing pageants and they have like little kids and they have like and then eventually they just burn down the library.

Jennie:
[31:21] What movie is this.

Justin:
[31:22] Storm center it's.

Jay:
[31:23] Called storm center it has betty davis in it and it's actually a um like the people wanting to ban the books are shown to be bad it's about like she plays a librarian who's like i might not be a communist but i believe in intellectual freedom or whatever and so it was like defending the communist book and it was made at a time like when there was like the red scare in hollywood and everything and so it was a sort of like anti-red scare film um but yeah it's it's pretty cool it's got like a cute like the little promise of communism or whatever it's cute oh.

Jennie:
[31:55] I love this.

Jay:
[31:56] Yeah.

Justin:
[31:57] And of course.

Jay:
[31:57] Betty davis like she's a dream like she's great as a librarian like come on.

Justin:
[32:03] Yeah i think it was 1954 movie so like just this is very it's very timely but unfortunately not like an amazing movie but it was fun to watch yeah that makes a lot of sense about the pageantry like when we talked about why people get into book bans i mentioned you know a lot of this is a lot of this infrastructure is already built into a lot of communities like the white citizens councils moved into like the baptist churches so those are the people who keep the ground game going a lot of the energy right now that's happening is coming from primarily a lot of money around the desantis campaign that was not being able to be spent in other ways and that's So Moms for Liberty gets a lot of their money because all that money couldn't be spent on his presidential campaign. So now they're spending it on astroturfing this group around the country.

Justin:
[32:53] And they're getting more and more radicalized. You see a lot of like open fascists hanging out with Moms for Liberty. So, I mean, none of that is really surprising, but it is sort of a really direct line between like a Republican Party and fascism in a way that's. Concerning you know you can see like the sort of matt gates types getting into the mainstream areas of power and you know people take their cues from these things so i think if you did do that library trust survey today i think it unfortunately would be significantly more eroded but a lot of that i think has to do with just people taking cues from what's in what political leaders talk about so i think there's a chance that it would reset once the once the culture war moves to something else but with the nature of right populism right now is particularly anti-intellectual and anti-institutional.

Jay:
[33:44] Something idly knox said but when we had her on was that like the physical book like when people like if something's in a physical book people are like well that's true because only true things can be put in physical books whereas like people don't have the same tangible response and connotations around ebooks so i think physical books feel more dangerous to people as well which like might like to tie this back into like ownership of digital materials as well like maybe that's why it's been harder to get people to rally behind that because they just it feels less intangible than like here's a real physical book and it's got words in it and they were allowed to be put into books so they must be true even if it's a fiction book so i don't know Totally.

Jennie:
[34:27] And I really love the Emily Knox episode. Some of the things that she said have stuck with me for years now about how, you know, you have to understand that these people also believe that reading changes you, right? If they didn't believe that, then they wouldn't be fighting these materials. And, you know, not to sort of move or to move into a sort of a related, but sort of different sphere picking up on something that you said, Jay, is like, I think fundamentally, one of the challenges within this work is kind of asking the question of what is X for? What are libraries for? Who are they for? Who does copyright protect is something that we think a lot about. You know, why does copyright exist? And we're really starting to see the breakdown of that, particularly within AI and AI. The fact that a lot of these issues that people have with AI, creators have with AI are fundamentally economic issues rather than copyright issues. And copyright does exactly one thing and it's not going to save us.

Jay:
[35:32] Thank you. We've been trying to yell at people like copyright's not your friend in that way.

Jennie:
[35:39] One of the things that Kyle and I have joked about is like, you know, when we first started, Maria Palante from the Association of American Publishers was waving her arms around and was like, they hate copyright. And Kyle and I were like, we love copyright. Like, that's why.

Jay:
[35:56] He's a copyright librarian. Like, literally. He dead ass.

Jennie:
[36:01] I'm obsessed with copyright. Like, I wouldn't be doing something else if I didn't love copyright this much. But I do think that we're starting to see so many of the limitations. And this is not, you know, a particularly novel thought at this point. We're really starting to see the limitations of the institutions and the public institutions that in certain ways, particularly like liberal society, took for granted. And I think in a lot of ways just continues to take for granted.

Jennie:
[36:28] The one of the ways that I think about it with libraries is like, you know, the thing that keeps me up at night sometimes is like, how did how did we get here? Like, how did we get to a place where all of our digital services in at least in public libraries and a lot of our digital services and academic libraries and in the law, you know, which has two legal vendors have become so consolidated and have become so monopolistic with overdrive serving over 90% of public libraries in the country.

Jennie:
[36:59] And, you know, consolidation is a feature, not a bug of capitalism. Like capitalism is going to just pick stuff up and make big, big systems unless it's regulated and broken up. And I think some of it also comes from ignoring libraries as a as a locus of power and a locus of technology for many, many years. And now we're sort of at this point where there's the intellectual freedom communities who are really up against a truly terrible and terrifying, what do you even call it? Hydra, I guess.

Jennie:
[37:40] And then there's the copyright, the progressive copyright community that we're really involved with, that we're really involved with. And, you know, we're trying to figure out like, what does digital ownership look like? What can it look like? Knowing that we're in a situation where congressionally it's aggressively against anything that's going to challenge major rights holders or corporations.

Jennie:
[38:03] And, you know, then there, a lot of people are honestly trying to do their jobs and do the best job that they can for the people they work with and for their patrons. So I feel really privileged that we can do the sort of meta library work around policy and advocacy.

Jennie:
[38:19] And also, I think most people am trying to figure out as a policy person, is this the best time to stay and do policy in the United States? Or is it going to just be four years of praying that this administration is as inept this time, and this Congress is as ineffective this time as they were last year? And this administration continues to just fumble. And every single head of every department stays for five months again. You know, because I can say like from I'm involved with the committee on legislation of the ALA. And that is a conversation that we're having is like, you know, one of the charts that we were shown through that project is like every year Trump would put in his budget, IMLS is funded at zero. And every year was funded at the same amount. But like, I don't know if that's going to be true this time. And I think that that uncertainty and the Frisian, like the grind is still the grind, shit's still fucked up and bullshit, and we still live under capitalism. But I do think that there is really palpable and tangible lack of clarity and sort of concern that this time, the administration, and they did do a lot of really terrible, horrible things in the last time. But I think that the concerns, particularly in our field of funding.

Jennie:
[39:44] Even though the federal government provides like, under 3% of all library funding in this country. I think that there's this sort of hope that like things will stay status quo as they were for four years. And maybe we can just keep our heads down and not get noticed, which I don't think is the correct way of doing anything. I think, you know, if we're going to envision what a different world can look like, we have to have something in mind that actually imagines what that other world is that isn't just trying to maintain current policy that really moves the Overton window enough that you can land in a place where you get at least some of what you actually want, not just the world as we have it.

Justin:
[40:32] And I think that's probably one of the main reasons for the democratic losses. They failed to imagine a future and to you know if you don't have a goal of you know things can be not even just saying things can be better but what do you want the world to look like you know it's a question we asked on the show long for a long time is what would you want this to look like in an ideal world to make people actually use their fantasy and use their imagination because without an image of something to go towards you do just sit there and go well let's just hope no one picks on me, and then they do eventually. And you go, oh, no, I wasn't ready for it.

Justin:
[41:07] And yeah, it is that, you know, the right-wing resurgence, the anti sort of status quo, and the sort of breaking of the neoliberal consensus is an international project. And of course, the reaction to that has to be an international project. We live in the United States. It's, you know, the most powerful country. We tend to focus on our own legislature. Everyone else focuses on our legislature. But, you know, if there's not an opening here, maybe there's an opening in some other country where we can start to build, you know, model legislation, you know, maybe somewhere in EU country or somewhere in the UK or somewhere in Canada or somewhere in Mexico, you know, there might be an opportunity to make something that is like, oh, this looks good. This is a model. People can start dreaming of what kind of things we can implement here. And so, yeah, being, being positive is good because you can't just keep, we can't just keep going back to Bernie Sanders to tell us to think about the future. Like, you know, I know they don't make that model anymore, but you know, we got to like start pumping out some new, some new types of politicians who

Justin:
[42:04] actually think about the future and imagine thing.

Jennie:
[42:07] I wish that we could have Bernie forever, but unfortunately I know that our time with him is limited. Yeah. I, and I want to thank you for bringing in this international, perspective to it there is from the copyright side and from the library side there's some really cool work going on in europe if you look at some of the marketing materials particularly for european libraries there's this really great one that came out of sweden a couple of years ago that has a picture of like a really angry white guy and it's like do you want this man to be your new librarian he owns a corporation it's really really different than the way that we think about, all right let him cook yeah it's so good I'll try to find it and I'll put in the show notes but yeah I mean there is there's some really good work particularly in digital going on in Europe but at the same time like I went to the IFLA the International Federation of Library Associations I think is the acronym so I went to the IFLA ebooks summit a couple of years ago in Ireland it was really lucky to get to go and you know the Danes are talking about their digital services and how absolutely incredible and open source they are and how everybody should protect and serve Danish literature. And the Brits are like, nobody will sell to us, but at least we have e-books and the Germans have their own. We're never going to subscribe to anything, but we still have digital services.

Jennie:
[43:29] And somebody from Macedonia got up and was like, it must be really nice to have digital access to materials, both in the language that you speak and also to be able to afford them. And so I do think that, you know, from the perspective of my own issues, like, I really, really try to keep that in mind. And also to understand that, as I'm sure we've all read a million times, every incumbent around the world was defeated this year. If you have any Canadian friends, they're all telling you to please do not think about moving to Canada. Don't even say that because it's just as right moving as the United States and at least say the universal healthcare. But other than that, you know, the sort of the liberal establishment is falling there too. But I do think that this, I mean, this is, this has to be the moment because this is the only moment that we're living in, right? Like there's, it's not like all of a sudden things are going to just change and we're going to be able to get through the policy that we want. And the only way.

Jennie:
[44:35] To do it is to partner with people who are fighting on the ground in other places, and also to actually have a vision, and frankly, also to support marginalized communities who don't necessarily have the kind of access and don't necessarily have the kind of historic support that some of the communities that we work in have.

Justin:
[45:00] Yeah, we fight nationalism with solidarity. So don't fall for any of this anti-China sentiment you're going to be seeing, this anti-Mexico sentiment you're going to be seeing, you have more in common with a worker in those countries than you do with, the jet ski dealership owner who writes the legislation in your state.

Justin:
[45:18] So, yeah, that's the tool is to not fall for it. I also have a note because you mentioned Enemy of the Pod, Maria Palante. If anyone, if she's listening, I was still saying that I hate copyright, but, I don't mean to undermine you, Jenny, but you need to point to me as the boogeyman for them and be like, if you don't compromise with us, you're going to have to deal with guys like him going around saying copyright is bad in all cases at all times. So I'm just going to be over here just going.

Jennie:
[45:50] I mean, I do have a T-shirt that says it's not copyright you hate, it's capitalism. So I think that's really sort of how it's going.

Jay:
[45:58] It's pretty good, Sherry.

Jennie:
[45:59] It's also written in Comic Sans.

Jay:
[46:02] Oh, fuck yeah, dude.

Justin:
[46:04] That rolls i have the tech dirt one that's the mickey mouse with the copyright logo and it has all the dates mickey mouse was supposed to go into the public domain and this was before the steamboat willy finally did.

Jennie:
[46:17] I made i had this on you know the platform formerly known as twitter but last year in like you know i we also do the public domain day organizing when we're trying to for Congressional Public Domain Week because things can't always be sad. So we love public domain work. And last year I was sort of deep in the depths of planning for Public Domain Day and started making all of these fake t-shirts just to make myself laugh of Steve Boat Willie with different Marx quotes underneath them. Like Steve Boat Willie doing the thing with the hand pump and it says you have nothing to lose but your chains. I thought it was pretty funny.

Jay:
[46:56] It's pretty good.

Jennie:
[46:59] Yeah, I mean, so the Association of American Publishers is really evil. Like, there's a sort of...

Jay:
[47:07] Are they sad?

Jennie:
[47:07] Yeah, they're a trade organization. I just, I don't... I mean, even like, you know, we work with a lot of independent publishers, and even they are not, don't feel represented by the Association of American Publishers. And like, you know, the thing with the Authors Guild is like... They're also very bad. Who are they representing? I don't know how else to put it. I wish I were more eloquent on the fact that both of these trade organizations are bad, but they're trade organizations. They represent the rights holders. They represent the big people who pay them the most money. They are not there to represent the people. Harper Collins is the only unionized major publisher. And that is a relic from before Rupert Murdoch bought it, right? They recently had an increase in wages, and I think it was like $65,000 a year in New York City, and you have to work in Manhattan.

Jennie:
[48:09] So yeah, I mean, the force of trade organizations, the lobbying power of them, I mean, the fact that they're coming out against these completely reasonable ebook laws that just say, please do not put unconscionable language into state contracts for purchasing digital materials. That is bizarre. I almost want to be like, don't you have better things to do with your time? To send a lawyer to Hawaii and to spam the Hawaii legislature.

Jennie:
[48:44] With hundreds of fake comments about how I'm an author my favorite one was there was this comment that said so basically like when the ebook model legislation we have on our website was up and adapted for Hawaii. This also really evil woman, Michelle Schacht, had set up an organization with a really ridiculous name that I can't just, you know, I'm just gonna look it up. And she set up this organization and then spammed the Hawaii legislature with all of these comments. And my favorite one was this guy who was like, I'm not an author. I just found this website. I have been to the state of Hawaii, and it's beautiful. And like wasting people's time. And, you know, but at the same time, like these lobbying forces are so strong that the legislation, you know, is very, very difficult to to pass. You know, they'll send a lawyer in and they'll intimidate a bunch of librarians who just want better prices on e-books. And like, if you look at the force with which they came after the Internet Archive and continue to come after the Internet Archive, it's just completely unacceptable.

Jennie:
[50:02] Like, you know, however you feel about the case, like I, you know,

Jennie:
[50:06] I think what the Internet Archive did was obviously right. We wrote an amicus brief in the case. I really strongly stand with the Internet Archive and their work. At the same time, I don't think that it's a real stretch to say that suing a nonprofit digital library for five years and hundreds of millions of dollars for taking lending limits off of books for two weeks.

Jennie:
[50:33] That's such an overreaction. And that's obviously just another way in which the publishing industry and the rights holders are trying to restrict fair use. And they knew what they were doing. And they were trying to put a chilling effect on controlled digital lending, on any kind of lending that goes outside of their rent seeking, rentier capitalism systems. And I refuse to say, I'm obviously pretty optimistic. I try to be optimistic. I refuse to say that it worked because I think there's still incredible innovation going on around digital lending. I think that, you know, the work that the Boston Library Consortium is doing, I think the work that Project Reshare is doing, you know.

Jennie:
[51:17] Palace has the licensing problem, but even palace like is at least amenable to community concerns. Right. So yeah, I think that the, you know, we don't, again, we don't really know what's going to happen after the second circuit decision. The archive is obviously not appealing and they are not going to bring this to the Supreme court, but you know, as we wrote in our blog posts, like this isn't the end for controlled digital lending. This isn't the end for digital lending at all. It is a defeat on fair use, and it's part of a tendency for rights holders to try to take away fair use, which is a right under copyright. And it's something that's really special to American copyright, and it's something that I think for education, for libraries, for all of the, you know, for government that we, for the internet working, that we need to continue to protect as a community and also protect through policy. Because if they had their way, like, you know, it wouldn't even be just like, you know, pay me every time you use something. It's like pay Maria Palante and her cronies every time you use something. It's not because again, it's not like they're fighting for your favorite author. They're fighting for huge corporations that are making enormous sums of money without providing remuneration proper remuneration to the artists who who make the work.

Justin:
[52:44] Yeah and fair use is such a good thing that it's it's been imported wholesale into other legal systems because like people looked at fair use in the u.s and went wow that works really well that's really kind of as annoying as it is it's like kind of simpler than what.

Justin:
[53:00] The alternative would be, which is like endless licensing and really old statutes that are a couple hundred years old at this point. It's like, yeah, let's just import American style fair use. And like Australia did that and a couple other places I remember. And so like, yeah, it is a good thing. And I was reminded while you were talking, like the internet archive was singled out for that lawsuit, because if you remember at the time they had done that, but everyone else was was playing around with fair use and digital uses at the time so i remember like the hullabaloo over digital story time which is it's derivative like which is anyone could see like it's a stupid thing to argue about like we're in the middle of this exceptional situation and then and then of course rights holders were like oh well for this year it's fine for this year you get free access to textbooks and ebooks and stuff like that and i didn't buy any of it and i was like we're redoing our collection development pipeline for textbooks like we are gonna buy these things we're gonna have permanent access we're not relying on this at all because i didn't buy it for a second and it also like worked into my textbook affordability stuff i did for work and so it was like long term now we have a budget for that stuff we can buy textbooks and ebooks and that's going back to like the whole thing with you know why are why are libraries paying for chat GPT when they could be paying to empower and build capacity for building

Justin:
[54:25] OER, which is openly licensed stuff.

Justin:
[54:28] And for building things, you know, we've got a really like successful thing going at my university and we're not anyone special, but we just had just enough support and just enough money so that our faculty are like, yeah, let's, let's start making ancillary materials. Let's start making chapters. Let's start playing around with this stuff. Let's start making.

Justin:
[54:48] Hey, we made this thing. Why don't we put it in press books? Why don't we build this or that? Why don't we put it in the repository? It doesn't take a whole lot of investment. It takes a lot. If you're a really small institution, I've worked at really small institutions. But if you're like, you know, a regional college or regional state university, I mean, there's no reason you can't be investing in this stuff. And instead, we see the richest institutions building worse things with a lot more money. It's just very strange. And so that's why I find like, to take it to licensing with all of this AI slop getting pushed in, similar to like the legislation with eBooks, which I'm still really interested in. I want to ask you like what you see the near future of those laws being for contract negotiations. What do you see libraries could be able to do to say, stop shoving this into the product? Like we don't want this and we want to keep it out?

Jennie:
[55:40] So I do think that there's a little bit of a realignment. We're convening, group of public librarians. And again, if anyone is listening to this and wants to be part of this group, definitely send me an email to get together in the spring to discuss what an actually national strategy for ebook licensing or hopefully ownership and public libraries could and should look like. And even the fact that folks were willing to do that with us is huge. It's really wonderful. The summit's going to be in May. We'll hopefully make it hybrid.

Jennie:
[56:17] And from that, we're really hoping to understand, you know, what are the actual needs that people have? Like, is legislation the best way to deal with this issue? Or is the best way to deal with this issue to empower people to have more resources for contract negotiations? Like, is there a place where Library Futures could step in and support people with better contract negotiations, considering that we are in a law school. So there are so many different places where I think there can, you know, be wrenches and screws and levers in what is honestly becoming the worst case scenario for fair use, like particularly in AI, which is like, you know, all the largest players are able to license materials without consent. You just keep seeing it like every day. It's like Another large company has partnered with Microsoft to make their shit AI, right? But I do think that there is still room and opportunity to reverse course in some ways. So I guess the first thing to answer your first question is with the e-book laws, it's in eight states. A close organization, e-book study group, stewards that bill largely,

Jennie:
[57:27] and it helps states adapt it to each individual circumstance. It still hasn't passed. It's been a couple of years, so like it's still pretty new, but I do, you know, I don't want to discount, although I'm sure that the public librarians on this call, on this.

Jennie:
[57:43] Podcast are going to cringe. I don't totally discount a boycott. Why are we just continuing to take what they'll give us? I don't think that a national boycott is off the table yet. And I don't think it should be. I think that we've seen it be successful. We saw it successful with Macmillan. I think it has to be strategic and I think it has to be really well thought out. But it has gotten to the point where it would make sense for a large number of people to just refuse and just say, we just don't have digital materials until we get something better. And then on the contract side, hopefully in the spring, we're going to do a lot more work on contract. How to read a contract was a webinar we had back in the, I guess, in the spring. It was our best attended webinar, like over 500 people wanted to come to hear how to read a contract. And granted, our speakers were also incredible, but it's on the internet archive.

Jennie:
[58:44] Included in the show notes. It's great. We're going to do how to read a contract part two. Every year we're like, this is the year of contracts because it really does come down to this question of contracts and how can we make them make, just make them better. Cause just saying like, I've, I've heard other folks who work on this issue, just be like, don't sign shitty contracts. And it's like, yeah, but you don't really have a choice to sign shitty contracts or not. And the last thing that I'll just say about that is like, you know, there has been a lot of conversation over the last 20 years about the concept of contract preemption. There is a law in Europe, granted it's not as strong as it should be, that says that you can't override the law with a contract. We just don't have anything like that in the, inscribe a line into the Copyright Act that says you can't override the law with a contract. And again, I don't know if that's the right way to go, but I do think that there is a potential there.

Jennie:
[59:49] And I don't think that that way of approaching the problem is dead.

Sadie:
[59:54] What you're saying about contracts is really applicable in so many other places too, because my library has been dealing very heavily the past couple of years with accessibility on our website. So much of that is vendors.

Sadie:
[1:00:09] It's not actually things that we control. It's things that we need our vendors to fix and update for and that kind of thing. And it's the same with cybersecurity, which lends itself to patron privacy. So being able to understand and even having the power to be able to say, no, I'm going to take my time to read this contract and understand it before I sign it over. I think within public libraries, a lot of that comes down to siloing. Like in it it's like somebody decided that they want this product and has pushed for it and has gotten executive like executive support and so now we're being told we have to do it but their cyber security is shit and we have no way to reinforce that or their accessibility is shit and we have no way to enforce that so yeah kind of and that's been a constant discussion in it in the several years I've been in library IT is how to actually get other people in the library even within your own library to kind of build that coalition against it to even give yourself permission to say no, I'm going to take my time with this I'm going to try to do this the right and just way instead of just saying well, the patrons want it let's just throw it out there or, you know whatever. Yeah.

Jennie:
[1:01:27] I'm going to, I'm going to call out the library freedom project vendor score cards, which are so valuable. I think they're really, they're, they're just, they're just so good. But yeah, I, I mean, I, I hear you and I, I don't think that the blame is remotely on the people who have to choose a product, but even when you think about it again, from like a policy point of view, there is a legal accessibility mandate. And to think that a company is so obsessed with their own profits that they don't want to do the bare minimum to follow the law for accessibility. And as we know, as technology people, and as we know, as library people, having more accessible services makes things better, not only for the people who need accessible services before everyone.

Jennie:
[1:02:18] This issue, particularly of accessibility, I think is one, Sadie, that you're totally right to point out because it's just a constant fight with vendors to just get them to do the bare minimum that even would fit the requirements that the state might put in in order to sign a contract. And that was the point of the model legislation for eBooks was just to say, like, if you're contracting with a state, like, you have to follow rules, like every other state contractor. And for the publishing industry to fight that extremely, frankly, pretty milquetoast request, I would, I'm not going to say their model legislation is milquetoast, but like, it's not, you know, the kind of fiery stuff that we have out in our other communications. It's very legal, right? To have the publishing industry fight like just even the bare minimum tooth and nail, I think really shows just how opposed the big industry players are to actually supporting any kind of information equity, any kind of knowledge justice, any kind of access to knowledge, or even just frankly, the public institutions that serve communities.

Justin:
[1:03:32] I'm looking at, I don't know if you can answer this for me. This is totally off topic kind of, but I was looking at Authors Alliance stuff

Justin:
[1:03:39] and what's with them and AI things. Recently are they just like all in on ai now like.

Jennie:
[1:03:46] No i mean maybe i i don't know i haven't talked to dave about it i will also boost authors alliances resources and everything they do i really respect them and i really respect their work.

Justin:
[1:03:59] Me too i i recommend people to them all the time.

Jennie:
[1:04:02] And they've been they have an incredible set of resources on their website i mean i think some Some of it is like, do you remember for the hot minute when Web3 was, everybody was talking about Web3? I think there is a sense, and AI has really gotten its tentacles in significantly more of like, you know, this is kind of going to happen no matter what. And, you know, as a progressive policy community, as a progressive copyright community, like we need to have a response of some sort. Like, you know, it's kind of unclear, but ChatGPT was almost certainly trained on books three. And that's like that really that really implicates like how do you trust? And that implicates like a lot of the like, like it's Google books. And I don't know how different because it's a really new project. And we're actually interviewing Dave for our blog about it. Like, I don't know how much of this work comes out of another project that I think Dave and I were both involved in. that sort of set the intellectual framework for what a book's comments would look like for AI to train on. But yeah, I mean, I think that it comes out of the need for us to have some sort of response. The Recreate Coalition, which we're also part of, is all in on AI. There are going to be several AI bills that come on the Hill.

Jennie:
[1:05:24] There needs to be opposition to the big tech players, including the L-spheres of the world, the relics of the world, to have some sort of response to the worst abuses of people corporate players within AI. And so, you know, I don't know, it's a really, really new project. And like, to boost our own blog, it's like, check out our blog, and maybe two weeks, and you'll get to know what they're thinking about exactly. I think it's a pretty interesting project. And I think that having better data, I mean, it's having better data sets for AI is necessary. That's not even a question. There just needs to be at least some sort of ethical response. The thing that has been worrying, I think, recently is also just looking at the amount of data that these systems are taking and the amount of load that they're putting on data centers, which are already expected to use 10% of the world's electricity.

Jennie:
[1:06:24] Just the centers in, I think, five years. I don't even know if this continues on, like what's going to happen in terms of world electricity use. I don't know if y'all saw that the world's largest data center is being built in like one of the most environmentally fragile and totally forested parts of the world in Alberta. It's just kind of bleak. So I think, you know, from, I feel like I just kind

Jennie:
[1:06:53] of got a little bit off topic, but I think if... I think in terms of the Authors Alliance project, I'm excited about it because I think that, you know, the more that we can have, again, that is forward thinking, that is a library-based response to, or even just a progressive policy response to what's been happening with AI, I think is better. And having a good corpus of materials, a good corpus of research books that are available to train AI on, I don't really see why that could be bad. I could see why it can be challenging.

Jay:
[1:07:34] Yeah like sometimes when this kind of topic goes up like i have my own politics and opinions about it but in my workplace and what i think will be effective i'm very much of the like instead of just saying no to it it's the the shiny keys that you jingle to distract your admin um you show them it will be bad at this thing look how bad it will be at the thing i know you really want it to do would just replace me but here's this other thing over here where it could be kind of useful and it's stuff that's a legacy project anyway and you weren't going to hire people to do that and it would be annoying as shit to do anyway and who wants to if you were going to hire people they'd be doing something else so like that kind of thing like if to like ride the wave out to ride the bubble out because it will pop eventually it's going to have to but if you just tell your admin know they're just going to replace you so you have to just jingle some keys to distract them i think where it could work and not hurt you i.

Justin:
[1:08:35] Mean it's it's not that it'll pop entirely but there's such it's so computationally expensive.

Jay:
[1:08:43] Yeah that.

Justin:
[1:08:44] Like the comparison has been to like remember when google said that like institutions would get unlimited storage and how you don't have that anymore that's kind of what this is it's going to lose a lot of money as soon as they can pump it into your workflow and once it can replace people once it can do it good enough then you'll start getting charged for it i mean chat gbt is so expensive like even to get it to kind of work in the way that you hear about you still have to be on the 20 a month version which is like you know i don't remember how much adobe suite costs i get it through work but like you know that's that's serious software money to pay 20 a month and then the pro version is 200 a month month, and that's already live. So, I mean, it's extremely... Computationally expensive. And so there's, there's, there will be a point where like, this cost has to get passed on to someone. And that will be kind of the hard limit of how far AI can go. But yeah, I mean, I'm not trying to like, you know, throw any more jabs at nonprofits that might be hiring in the future than I need to on this show.

Jennie:
[1:09:51] Well, I, I also think one other thing.

Jay:
[1:09:54] Justin's looking for a job.

Jennie:
[1:09:56] Hire Justin, everybody. Yeah, I mean, I think the other thing that sometimes gets lost in these conversations also is that, like, generative AI didn't, like, come out with chat GPT. Like, it is based on a corpus of research that has been done for, you know, at least 30, 40 years.

Jay:
[1:10:17] Machine learning's a thing.

Jennie:
[1:10:18] I mean, even calling it AI is kind of ingenuous machine learning and like machine learning has been a field forever. And one of the things that we talked about when we were writing this paper about the first steps toward building a creative commons book corpus for AI machine learning training is that even books three was a legitimate research data, like, sorry, a legitimate research data set for a very long time. And a lot of the data sets that now people are frustrated about ChatGPT using, like Common Crawl, were used in academic research for a really, really long time. And now that they're commercial, people are suddenly paying attention to them. And I do think that it's really important to understand that machine learning is not just ChatGPT. It's also spell check. And a lot of the things that have now come into it. Or the example I use a lot is… It's just digital.

Jay:
[1:11:18] Humanities shit that we've been doing forever.

Jennie:
[1:11:21] I mean, even just like improved algorithms. The example I use a lot is like, I'm not that old, but like when I started working, I, my, the company I worked for had a travel agent, or even like, I remember my parents contacting a travel agent if they were going to travel. When's the last time you used a travel agent? The, the flight algorithm has gotten so good that people don't use travel agents anymore. And so we're like translators are another canary in the coal mine, like translation got good enough And they're in many ways being replaced. And I think that the whole buzz and bubble around machine learning that is coming out right now is very much the legacy of all of this algorithmic, all of this research work that has been done for so many years.

Justin:
[1:12:18] And in, you know, in a just society, these wouldn't be problems to worry about. Like, you know, look around your community, there is work to do. It's that when you lose your particular job, you lose in this country, your health insurance and your mortgage payments and your rent. And so, you know, we don't want those kinds of quick disruptions. You know, if you if you told me librarians are obsolete, what you're going to do is go around and make your neighborhood look beautiful for the rest of your life. Fine. That's a great job. Pay me to do that. You'll take care of I can live somewhere and have free time and stuff like that. Great. I'll go around and trim trees and sweep and make the this will be the most beautiful place to ever live. There's not a lack of work to do. Just look around. But yeah, I mean, obviously, but what Jay was saying is you have to. Do constantly advocate for other people who are doing kind of this work and say, like, OK, we can use the work in this way. We can use the technology in this way. And that way we're not going to lose our human capacity, because ultimately, like you still need humans to do the work. But maybe we can ease into things that aren't going to be so absolutely destructive to people's lives. Right.

Jennie:
[1:13:25] Well, that's what David Graber says at the end of bullshit jobs. He's like, he's like, I as an anthropologist, I don't really make policy prescriptions. That's not what I do. But if we could imagine what the world would look like without these bullshit jobs, you know, we could imagine everybody hanging out in cafes and like this kind of luxury automated communism world that we can all dream of. And I actually, as the AI stuff has been coming out and also like, you know, UBI is a mask for a lot of these tech guys to, not always guys, but like, let's be real, like a lot of these tech people to sort of cover up the fact that like they want UBI because they want to automate people out of jobs and they want to bust unions. Like, I think that, you know, within the zeitgeist, there is so much more to talk about than just the sort of copyright issues that we're seeing, than the sort of hand-wringing, hair-pulling concern about it. I think that there's a whole host of things that in a just society would be just wouldn't be the same kind of problems but I do want to make it clear that like I really do think that the the role of generative AI and automating people out of jobs is an is an actual threat like I think that we're already seeing it and we haven't but we but I also want to say that like I think we've been seeing it for a while.

Jennie:
[1:14:55] I think that what we're seeing is somewhat is different because it's accelerated and it's also...

Jennie:
[1:15:01] It touches people much more closely. But I do think that it is a global problem and that the world is going to have to have some solution for what it's going to look like when a number of jobs are automated and also shitty at the job

Jennie:
[1:15:16] that they're automated to do, right? Like computers are not great at not following at any kind of policy exception, right? Actually, this is like, actually a real side note. But like, one thing that has absolutely shocked me is I was reading a paper a couple of months ago and chat GPT was relatively new. And I was like, you know what chat GPT would be really good at is storing my citations. So I was, it is, it is actually pretty good at pulling the metadata from pages. If you give it a URL and then ask it to be in Chicago style or whatever, like it's, you have to double check it, but it's not great, but it's sorry, but it's not super bad at that. But what surprised me is I was like, when I thought about what a computer could do. A computer is really good at storing a list and then giving you that list back in alphabetical order. But I stored probably 40 citations in it. And this is a real shame on me issue that I did not save them in Zotero also.

Jennie:
[1:16:13] But I asked, I put them all in. I was like, this is amazing. And then I asked ChatGPT to give them back to me. And it kept forgetting citations. and you're like how did you forget this citation it's like oh i'm so sorry and then it would just give you back another random list of citations that were not all of the ones that you put into the system in the same session and i had to read i felt like a fool and i had to redo all of my, citations and when chat jbt was really new i totally got duped by the ghost the ghost citations Because I also was like, oh, we have this new tool of generative AI, what it's going to be really good at before I understood the technology at all. It's like, what it's going to be really good at is telling me what are the best articles in librarianship and copyright. And it gave me all of these fake articles that looked very real. Yeah. So, yeah, live and learn.

Jay:
[1:17:14] You got got.

Justin:
[1:17:20] It's funny because it was the first thing i did was try and understand how llms work and so all of my early like sometimes at work i'll put on little webinars so like i had everyone read like sarah landon's book and then i had like a book talk about it with the librarians and so the first thing i did was like okay justin's little corner soapbox let's explain how LLM works, because I just jumped straight into it before anyone had even played with ChatGPT yet. But I was like, here's why it won't work the way you think it will work. And here's how it iterates sentences. And I don't think a single person understood where I was coming from. But eventually I People who are better at science communication than me came up with these terms like hallucinations, ghost citations, things that like stick in your mind and you realize, oh, that's why that's happening. Whereas I was like, okay, look at this chart, right? So here's the chart and you can see how it feeds this sentence into this sentence and it labels them. So a bank is stored as a series of numbers and a bank can be a financial institution or it can be the side of a river. Now, those are entirely different series of numbers. I'm just sitting there explaining this to our e-resources librarian who's like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. He's great. Love John. Shout out John.

Jennie:
[1:18:35] I mean, I feel like I now have a pretty good idea about it, but there is a lot of power in feeling like a fool. And I think that it definitely accelerated my own knowledge of it. And I'm trying to think if there's, maybe you all know better than I do. I'm trying to think if there's like a good explainer on how these things work, just like a basic explainer. Like when the whole crypto blockchain stuff was starting, unsurprisingly, this was like back in 2016, the best explainers were on the Goldman Sachs website. They had these incredible like 10 minute explainers as to how blockchain and cryptocurrency worked. And I gave them to all sorts of people because I was like, if you want to know how this stuff is going to affect our lives going forward, like definitely go to the Goldman Sachs website. And so I wonder if there's some sort of good, just kind of short overview to explain these things. I, again, had to learn the hard way.

Justin:
[1:19:37] Yeah, there must be by now, but they're not super easy to explain because they're so iterative. And now the new trick is you have two GPTs talk to each other, sort of more like a GAN does, and fight against each other to then give you an answer that doesn't sound as crazy. And that's kind of like the new trick is to just keep having it iterate against itself. So I don't know.

Jay:
[1:20:05] I know Adam Conover had some sort of video about AI, but I don't remember exactly what it was. I'm trying to think of Ed Zitron, or however you say his last name. He does a lot of writing about the AI bubble, but I don't know if he has any basic explainers on it. But he's one of the tech journalist writer people, I would say, who's doing the most comprehensive writing on AI bad.

Jennie:
[1:20:31] And Violet Fox's new zine, AI think you should leave is very good.

Jay:
[1:20:38] Shout out to Violet. We love you, Violet.

Jennie:
[1:20:40] We do love you, Violet.

Justin:
[1:20:42] Yeah, one thing I kept wanting to bring up is, you know, when we're talking about like the balance, like the problem with like AI in particular and the copyright aspect of it is, you know, like HarperCollins, just the CEO just said something about what if we had books that talk to you? And so like we put the corpus, we had the corpus of a book put into an AI and then you could ask the book questions and it's like, read a book. Um, you can already ask a book questions. It's called reading with your human brain.

Justin:
[1:21:11] But the, the thing that's so interesting to me is like, you mentioned this early on, who does copyright protect and who does it not protect? And this is sort of why I'm so anti-copyright in general is I'm like, this is a, this is a toy that the ruling class will wield in whatever way it wants to. And yes, we live in a society of rules and laws, but it's just been very, very fun for me to watch disney turn into like the pirate party of like actually fair use says we can scrape all the data we want and don't worry about it and actually it's fine we're going to license stuff now because we don't want our buddies to like yell at us at the country club that we stole like all of harper collins ip but like you know now that they've already scraped all this stuff and use like books three and other things you know it's sort of like well it's not our problem anymore and so i do find like the you know copyright is flexible when it needs to be and this is sort of my i don't know it just gives me a little bit of i understand that like copyright abolition is not going to happen but i i do enjoy watching you know just every corporation stand up and go no copyright law in the universe is going to stop me well.

Jennie:
[1:22:21] I mean who uses the public domain or what company uses the public domain more than any other company is Disney. So I mean, we would not have anything from Disney from mid 20th century, early mid 20th century without a robust public domain. And I think, yeah, I mean, you cannot take something out of a system once it is an AI system, machine learning system, once it's generative language model, sorry, large language model, once it is in there, like that is a fool's errand. And also, So I do think that the, I do think obviously that the outputs of AI should be fair use. Like, I think that the more flexible and broad fair use is as sort of a release valve for copyright, for restrictive copyright, the better. Like that's, when we talk about it in the Reshare Coalition, it's a balanced copyright. Like a copyright that's totally locked down is not a balanced copyright and no copyright also not balanced. So I think there is this sort of happy medium, but instead we're just getting toward increasingly restricted, restrictive corporate issues.

Jennie:
[1:23:33] Copyright regimes. And we haven't even talked about, and I've been talking for a long time, about Creative Commons, which is a lot of lawyers sort of deciding that there

Jennie:
[1:23:43] needs to be some sort of middle ground or flexibility within copyright and creating the licenses. And then the internet changed around the licenses and they're useful in a number of contexts, but the sort of dream of a bunch of artists really wanting to contribute to a global commons. In my opinion, and I actually have a paper coming out about this, in my opinion, part of the reason it didn't happen was because it wasn't really a commons. It was a license.

Jennie:
[1:24:13] It was a copyright license. And part of building a commons means you have to tend the commons and you have to sort of think about what's in it. And that might mean dealing with the free rider problem much earlier on than they chose to. They were very much about the growth of the licenses. And I do think that Creative Commons is an incredibly vital tool. And I think that particularly in scholarly communications, it's super, super important. But I do think that, I mean, I have seen from like students for free culture to now a real, you know, I don't want to contribute my stuff to the internet. Just pay me born by increasingly restrictive copyright increasingly more precarious work for artists and i think it's really unfortunate and i think it's really sad and i also think it's so much of an economic issue rather than a copyright issue but there's this like extreme fear and agita of you know an ai ingested my stuff and it's spitting out things that look like something I drew, that's violating my copyright. Again, copyright is not the tool that will deal with this. It's an economic problem. It's a social problem. And I think that we need better answers and we need more socialist, more anti-capitalist ways to address this.

Justin:
[1:25:39] What was the word you just used there? Fear and agita?

Jennie:
[1:25:42] Agita. I think it's like when your heart beats really fast that's a great word g-i-t-a my mom used to use it all the time oh.

Jay:
[1:25:52] Yeah it's from an italian word oh like agitation.

Jennie:
[1:25:57] Yeah, my mom was like a real Jewish mom, and she's like, oh, you're giving me agita.

Justin:
[1:26:01] Well, that was my first thought. I was like, oh, is that like a Jewish cultural word? So I was like, you've got to teach me this word. Agita. Okay, that's indigestion. It comes from the word indigestion as well. That's great. I love this.

Jennie:
[1:26:17] Thanks.

Justin:
[1:26:18] When I was in graduate school and I didn't have any money, I used to collect words because I didn't have the money to collect anything else. So I would keep, I would collect words. So I had lists of Jay's just looking at me because he loves me for being as weird as I am. Look at the love on his face.

Jennie:
[1:26:36] That's very sweet.

Justin:
[1:26:37] I would, I would, yeah, I had like long, long lists of words and I would constantly use them. Then my professor would be like, okay, I looked up this word. I know it's a real word, but could you stop using it? I used the word severally in an essay. one time my professor was like okay this is a word but stop using it.

Jennie:
[1:26:56] It's like when you're a child and you read a word and then you use it out loud and you pronounce it completely incorrectly i still don't know how to pronounce the word w-i-z-e-n-e-d i just can never remember how to pronounce it because i read it and then mispronounced it wrong as a child for years and now i just can't remember So I don't even want to say it because I don't want to embarrass myself again.

Jay:
[1:27:25] I used to think Macabre was Macabre.

Sadie:
[1:27:27] Yeah, Macabre.

Justin:
[1:27:28] I used to do that too. Thanks, Magic the Gathering.

Sadie:
[1:27:31] That's supposed to stop when you are a kid because I still do that as a fully formed adult.

Jennie:
[1:27:36] Oh, I still do that too. Oh my gosh. All the time. No, definitely. If you haven't heard something spoken, it's completely acceptable to pronounce it.

Jay:
[1:27:44] English is so fucked.

Jennie:
[1:27:45] Yeah.

Sadie:
[1:27:46] It's so fun, but it's also so fucked. And too, Justin, do you still have those lists? because like I want to peruse them now please.

Justin:
[1:27:54] Send them to me I'll put them in the show notes or something I don't know.

Jennie:
[1:27:57] The other language I speak is German which is also fucked but at least it's phonetic it.

Jay:
[1:28:04] Follows its own goddamn rules.

Jennie:
[1:28:07] I took German in college and.

Jay:
[1:28:09] I was like oh thank god there's some principles.

Jennie:
[1:28:10] Until you.

Justin:
[1:28:12] Go farther back in time because I tried to read Bruno Bauer in German and that was before the spelling reforms and so I was like sitting there trying to phonetically sound it out and my German was already so bad and I was like I can't do this.

Jennie:
[1:28:25] My for one of my early jobs and libraries was that the University of North Carolina got a collection of German medical books from the 19th century from some professor yeah I mean you can imagine what the illustrations were like they were there and so because I I knew enough German to catalog them. I went through like probably like a hundred German medical books in a year as a cataloger. And that was how I learned that cataloging is definitely not for me. I am not a very detail-oriented person, so you can probably imagine how that went. But yeah, I think I do still have some pictures I took of the illustrations and these horrendous, the sort of gothic-y script.

Jay:
[1:29:15] FRACTUR! Pain of my fucking existence, FRACTUR! I just saw an example in literally the other day, where it's because of fucking FRACTUR, someone had made a typo in a WorldCat record because this book was like a catalog of maps or something in Landkarten or something, but because the K the lowercase k in FRACTUR looks like an F, because FRACTUR in the WorldCat record it said Landfarten, which is also weirdly a German word, because of course it is fucking Fractur, I swear to god I have to deal with Fractur a lot in my job because of the collection that we're working on right now what is it?

Justin:
[1:30:01] Is this a word?

Jay:
[1:30:02] Fractur, F-R-A-K-T-U-R it's like a font typeface that's mainly used in German but can be used in other languages, but when you see old German books that have that really annoying, hard-to-read typeface, it's a gothic script, it's Fractur.

Jennie:
[1:30:20] I never knew what it was called. Actually, Jake, I know that you love opera. I'm going to see The Magic Flute tomorrow.

Jay:
[1:30:27] Oh, The Magic Flute's so good. It's so good.

Jennie:
[1:30:31] I can't wait.

Jay:
[1:30:31] Are you seeing it auf Deutsch or in English? I know there's an English translation of it.

Jennie:
[1:30:36] Yeah, I'm seeing it at the Met Opera.

Jay:
[1:30:39] Oh the met's so beautiful and they got.

Jennie:
[1:30:41] The chandeliers.

Jay:
[1:30:43] I love the met.

Jennie:
[1:30:44] When i was in college is it the julie taymore production oh that's a good question i think it is yes the papagena.

Jay:
[1:30:52] Duet with papagena and papagena at the end and her version is so unhinged it's so good.

Jennie:
[1:30:58] Two things first off was when i was in college i i went to college in new york city and i I one year was like, you know what? I don't know enough about opera and how many more years am I going to be able to get effectively free tickets to the Met? And I saw the entire season, but I was out of town for the magic flute because they do usually do it on christmas and i went home for the holidays so now i'm really really looking forward to seeing it and the other thing my probably my greatest claim to celebrity is that julie tamer's father delivered me what yeah he He was an OB-GYN in the Boston suburbs.

Jay:
[1:31:42] That's so cool. I love Julie Taymore, dude. She's one of my favorite film directors, but then she also does really great theater, because where she came from was theater. She's so cool.

Jennie:
[1:31:56] She is really cool. I feel like her work is mixed, but always interesting.

Jay:
[1:32:05] Yes across the universe is bad we we we know across the universe is bad eddie suzy i think she's going by now but suzy is really good in it okay i haven't.

Jennie:
[1:32:17] Seen it since it i think i haven't seen it since it came out so i can't say.

Jay:
[1:32:21] It was my mom's favorite movie she was a big beatles head and i got it for her for mother's day one year and we would watch it together and when when she when she passed that was one of her possessions that i kept was her copy of across the universe that i got her and so i try to watch that like every year so i watch it way more than any human person should um that's really sweet yeah it's a bad movie um but you know it's got its charms so.

Justin:
[1:32:51] To this has been like.

Jay:
[1:32:53] A classic library.

Justin:
[1:32:54] Punk episode this is great we've covered everything we've covered opera covered copyright i've yelled at maria.

Jay:
[1:33:00] I need to do an episode yeah this.

Justin:
[1:33:04] Has everything yeah we should do an opera.

Jay:
[1:33:06] Episode.

Jennie:
[1:33:07] I would listen to that. I mean, I do listen to every episode, but I would listen to an opera episode.

Jay:
[1:33:12] Hell yeah. I'll find some way to make it work.

Jennie:
[1:33:15] Cool.

Justin:
[1:33:16] To do our classic question then, since this is a classic episode, what do you imagine our library future to look like? What do you want it to look like? That is such a big question. Isn't it?

Jennie:
[1:33:31] Well.

Jay:
[1:33:32] Let's be blocky and utopian over here.

Jennie:
[1:33:34] Yeah. Well, I want to hear, I actually want to hear all of your answers also so we can do like a go around. But I think, I mean, I think there's sort of a few different things really just off the top of my head, even though I probably should have had this answer prepared. You know, worker rights. We want to see more unions. We want to see more solidarity.

Jennie:
[1:33:57] We want to see a change in the professionalization of the field. One of the first things I wrote was a study of debt among librarianships, among librarianship. And at that time, and I don't know if it's changed, so I actually can't say it is accurate right now, a third of all paraprofessionals, so people without the degree, were people of color. And then, as we all know, my librarianship is like 93% white. And the only thing standing between people was $100,000 degree. And everyone was like, I can't imagine why the profession is so white. And so, you know, I think that without deprofessionalizing the field, I actually do think that from just like a worker and from a professional point of view, like I think that there does need to be a reckoning with the way who gets to be a librarian and the way that library workers' rights work. There should be a national union also. So that's on sort of one axis of stuff. I think a balanced equitable copyright, and I think that libraries can have a really large role in that in terms of protecting fair use and protecting materials and, In terms of protecting fair use and protecting materials and archives, I think that the role of climate is something that is a little bit under-considered sometimes.

Jennie:
[1:35:19] Ensuring that cultural heritage, both physical and digital, is protected over time. A huge number of particularly North American archives are not climate safe. There's a very strong chance that, you know, within our lifetimes, they will not be able to exist anymore. So I guess if I'm just going to say on that access, it's a question of preservation, right? And I think the last thing, although I know that there's a lot more, I think in general, it's a lot of it is what we talked about. I don't want to see libraries and librarianship sort of fighting for its life and always being reactive. I want to ensure that there is a vision of what another world can look like and what is the library's place within that. Like, you know, it is not, not everything has to be looked at through a library lens, right? Like it is not the solution to everything. There are a number of issues that are not appropriate to be looked at. Through this lens, Even the concept of library socialism, which I love, is not really library-based. It's sort of using what library is like a metaphor, a metonym.

Jennie:
[1:36:33] But I think that really, ultimately, what it is is to have a vibrant commons, to have – sorry. I think that it – I'm sorry, it's also quite late. I'm very tired. I think that what I would like to see supported is a vibrant commons, enough public spaces, just physical spaces, the protection and preservation of physical and digital materials, and the creativity and experimentation and work. The ability to actually, I hate the word innovate, but actually innovate within the field and actually do things that are exciting and radical and different. So those are just really off the top of my head, some thoughts that I have, but I do want to hear from all of you.

Justin:
[1:37:24] See, I was going to focus around library socialism. The great thing about library socialism is it works as an intuition pump and you can move it into different fields at a time. So I do like the idea of libraries as like a locus of struggle for society because it is a place where we're saying this is what we're going to value here. Like if we're talking about actual building commons, this is kind of the best thing that we can point to of people put in, people get out, people maintain, you know, clean up from a very young age. You're taught, you know, put your books on the cart, put your toys away, all the way up to an adult of put your books on the cart, put your phones away, don't leave stuff on the table. It's, you know, it's the exact same lessons through our entire lives. And, you know, you can go to a public park and they can have things that you can check out. You can check out a canoe. You can check out an accessible, like, all-terrain vehicle that you can use for wheelchair workers, wheelchair users. So, for me, the deprofessionalization would be fine if we just took librarianship as a model of career that spread out. You wouldn't have to be a certified librarian to do library work because library work would be ubiquitous, right?

Justin:
[1:38:37] So we can do that in the small in terms of making more government programs run like libraries, tool libraries, info shops. We have to keep away. I think the weaknesses that you're talking about of how library socialism can't be a model for everything is you end up with the kind of like the same problem that like libertarian experiments always have where everyone shows up and they're like, I'm going to start a Bitcoin information center. I know unlike farms. So. Yeah, it is a problem where everyone wants to do like, my job in the commune is to do this. And it's like, no, we just need to use this as an intuition pump for different types of work that already exist. How can we make them so instead of swatting people away saying, like, come in, help us build this. And I think libraries themselves can model themselves better on library socialism. Yeah.

Jennie:
[1:39:25] And so, sorry, just to be clear, I actually totally agree. And I do think that library socialism is a really vital framework to consider the world. I think more of what I mean is I think there's sort of this impulse when you're really deep in a field to make everything about libraries themselves as they exist now. And I think that that actually can be more limiting. But yeah, I completely agree with you. And as somebody who would be really excited to garden on the commune, it is a little bit of like, let a thousand library socialist projects bloom.

Justin:
[1:40:04] Yeah I like how it it can adapt to any situation because really it's just a metaphor when you explain it to librarians they start to think of like okay but how would the catalog work there it's like no no no you're not the intuition pump's not working on you you're thinking too hard about it, in the weeds yes.

Jay:
[1:40:22] I know I'm thinking too hard about it Justin.

Justin:
[1:40:25] Well but yeah I mean I believe in libraries otherwise I would leave them so I think that having them as places where we can say these are our values. And unfortunately, I think there's a real leadership crisis on like every level of our institutions where, you know, particularly they're not well-equipped to deal with the right wing and sort of underlying fascist tendencies to say like, have no values, only listen to us. You know, you have no positive values. You only have trying to maintain the status quo as we slowly pluck pieces of it away from you. And I think that's entirely the mismatch for the moment, which is to say, like, this is what this institution does, like a university exists to be, in a way, co-sovereign with the state. It is meant to be interdependent and independent from the state. It has to do that. In the same way with libraries, some of the unique ways libraries are funded in public libraries keeps them away from the meddling of the local government. So they're funded in all these extremely strange ways, but that also means there's kind of a direct democracy to them. So they're places of a great amount of hope for me, both public and academic. And I think in the United States, we have a great heritage of libraries, and we're very lucky to have it.

Jay:
[1:41:48] I'm tired and forgot the original question, but my answer to the question, and to be brief, is more focused on how do we empower libraries to not only build their own infrastructures, but to sort of consortially and together build better infrastructure so that we don't have to rely on third parties as much. And like how do we get there what does that actually look like to make sure that can happen because like i i was i was watching i'm trying to get better at mark at it so i was watching a terry reese webinar and he said that he used to feel like every librarian should be better at programming that but he has since gone back on that statement and that he thinks that like no there's a reason why certain people are programmers because if you have everybody doing it then there's just going to be inconsistent slop and not everyone's going to be great at it but if you have someone dedicated to do it then it's a lot better so not everyone needs to learn all of this but someone needs to and so like is there someone at every library who's like competent enough and has the skills to like help build and maintain this tech infrastructure and then what does that look like to fund that right so it's like about the labor thing it's the way the admin chooses to allocate money thing because people are more and more running libraries like businesses and that is an incorrect way to run a library.

Jay:
[1:43:10] But that, and instead of each library building their own infrastructure, I think it, like, what does it look like if we shared, infrastructure and like actually like work together like i think like the sort of library national library union is kind of part of that like what does it actually look like when we start working together instead of being so siloed and isolated the way that capitalism wants us to be yeah.

Jennie:
[1:43:33] And i mean i don't i'll if it's okay if i respond to.

Jay:
[1:43:36] Of course i.

Jennie:
[1:43:38] Just yeah i mean so one of the things that i really subscribe to is this concept within the study of democracy that the more that people practice democracy, the more likely they are to want to be a part of democratic institutions. And so like the union is the most obvious locus for that, right? Like you, because you have to know people who you probably don't agree with on everything and you probably find kind of obnoxious, but you have to come to some sort of democratic decision. And when I was hearing you talk, Jay, I think one of the things that I'm actually thinking about is like, you know, if you've ever been a part of an open source project, like it is not only just programming, if you've been part of a consortial project, it's not only programming, it's it also is a democratic way of creating technology. And I do wonder if some of the impulse toward just paying a vendor to do it is because investing in humans and the messiness that is humans, and that it might be a little bit harder, but it also might be more generative is challenging for, neoliberal administrations to think about.

Jay:
[1:44:46] Yeah, because everybody's a part of the project, right? Even a reference librarian or a kid, children's librarian or whatever, who might not be part of the building of the infrastructure could still be part of what shapes it.

Jennie:
[1:45:00] Totally.

Jay:
[1:45:01] Everyone's a part of it.

Jennie:
[1:45:02] Totally.

Jay:
[1:45:03] Totally.

Sadie:
[1:45:04] I think Jay covered kind of the bulk of it for me in that I would love to see just way more exchange of information and resources, which I think libraries are actually already pretty good at compared to a lot of other arenas. So we could build that infrastructure, those coalitions.

Sadie:
[1:45:27] I think, like you mentioned boycotts earlier, I think it was the Macmillan boycott, but the Washington State Library sponsors Washington Anytime Library, which is basically a consortium of libraries that are too small to have their own overdrive collection, basically. And one of the libraries I used to work at was a part of it and participated in the boycott. And it's like seeing things like that, whether or not you think the boycott is effective or the best way to have gone about it, being able to see that sort of intercooperation funneled through something like the state library. I really don't understand why we don't already do more of that, especially when it comes to technology. So I would love to see libraries build their own infrastructure and their own technology and support that and then be able to turn that into, like you've been saying, a creative commons so that people, our patrons, could do more things that are creative and fulfilling and share it with their communities around them without having to worry about things like publishers and copyright and whether or not it's going to get sucked up by generative AI. So libraries as a space, which they already are for creative access and fulfillment.

Sadie:
[1:46:48] But also just be able to take that underlying infrastructure and bloom it out into how a community can sort of start to become, like, have the freedom to do that sort of pleasure-seeking intellectual fulfillment thing that is really what we're also tired, way too tired to do, right? So, like, you know, that's kind of the end goal for me. Like, I work in technology, so it's, like, very sort of, like, it doesn't seem like it lends its way that to, but that's really why I went into technology. I saw libraries sort of whiff it with the whole Overdrive ebook thing back in the day when I was in public services. And I was just like, this is going to go really badly or really well, but either way, there's going to be a lot more technology in libraries. So I want to stay in libraries. I want to support libraries. This is their direction. I'm going to go with it. But ultimately, all of that is work towards, a very robust public good that people who already have everything they need to survive can then use to create more beauty around them, if that makes sense.

Jennie:
[1:48:05] Oh, I love that so much. And I feel like sitting in, frankly, a policy and advocacy space, sometimes it's easy to take your eyes off the prize, which is like, ultimately, it's about creating equity and information it's about creating a more equitable society and it's about helping people build a more informed populace and a more informed citizenry and i think i i mean i they like thank you so much for really bringing it out toward patrons and users and the people that libraries actually serve because like that's anyway sorry so thank you for bringing it out toward library users in particular and towards communities and creativity and where we're actually trying to go. I really thank you all also for giving me these answers. It's a great way to end a very long two-hour podcast, I think.

Jay:
[1:49:06] Yes.

Sadie:
[1:49:06] Thank you so much for being with us for two hours.

Jennie:
[1:49:10] Oh, my gosh.

Jay:
[1:49:11] Yes, thank you.

Jennie:
[1:49:12] I'm actually in my office. I'm actually in my boss's office at NYU and it's, it's really nice, but I, I live in South Brooklyn.

Jay:
[1:49:21] Oh no. How are you going to get home?

Jennie:
[1:49:23] Oh, it's fine. No, I don't live in Boston anymore. So the trains run past 11 PM. Um, let's be real here. Um, yeah. So I, I was actually at the seven stories pressed christmas party or holiday party before this so i stayed i stayed in the office jake can i ask what neighborhood are you in in i'm in alston oh nice alston is good i i feel like often it's like a secret transportation hub like it's actually it's actually really nice i lived in jp most of the time i was in boston i.

Jay:
[1:50:00] Used to live in jp.

Jennie:
[1:50:01] Yeah i lived down at like where did you like.

Jay:
[1:50:05] Technically i was in roslindale but i was like right like i would cross a street and i was in jp on washington street like by the forest hill stop.

Jennie:
[1:50:13] I so i lived right near the green street stop do you know where that enormous housing development is with a huge courtyard and like the beautiful gardens it's co-housing it's an intentional community yeah i lived there for a long time and i truly regret leaving it's like one of my only true regrets in life is that i left That community was COVID was not great to it, but it was a really, really special place. And it's, it's gorgeous. So if you're ever around in JP and want to go to Porch Fest at co-housing. Definitely. It got so expensive. Actually, the reason I left was that I, at the time, was living with my partner and our dog, and our apartment was way too small, and we couldn't afford to move within the building anymore. It was just way too expensive. So we moved to Fort Hill.

Jay:
[1:51:05] Yeah. I'm in JP a lot because I volunteer at the Lucy Parsons Center.

Jennie:
[1:51:09] Oh, cool. I like the Lucy Parsons Center.

Jay:
[1:51:12] Yeah, they're great. I was very excited when I moved to Boston, and I was like, I'm within walking distance. This is great.

Jennie:
[1:51:18] Is the Democracy Center still doing stuff? They used to have the paper good zine library.

Jay:
[1:51:22] The Democracy Center, their landlord decided they didn't want to have that building be used anymore.

Jennie:
[1:51:29] What?

Jay:
[1:51:29] And so they kicked the Democracy Center out and the building's not being used.

Jennie:
[1:51:35] That sucks.

Jay:
[1:51:35] So there's no spaces. I think the LPC is one of the only spaces in Boston where you can freely meet without having to pay. I know JP for Palestine meets at the First Baptist Church there on Center Street. But yeah, there's not a lot of spaces for radical organizing anymore. And I don't even know where the paper cut zine library is being housed now because

Jay:
[1:52:04] that was at the Democracy Center.

Jennie:
[1:52:05] Well, thank you all so much for this. This was so much fun.

Justin:
[1:52:09] Yeah, thanks for coming on.

Sadie:
[1:52:11] Yeah.

Jennie:
[1:52:12] And yeah, if there's anything you need from me, let me know. I put, I kind of just put like a random set of things I like in the show notes.

Jay:
[1:52:23] That's great.

Justin:
[1:52:25] I'll like try and put it in kind of order. This is what I've been doing as we've been recording. I also put the list of words in the show notes because it was, I didn't want to put it in a word document.

Jennie:
[1:52:37] Why do you like this? I love it.

Justin:
[1:52:40] See, they love it.

Jennie:
[1:52:44] Yeah and hopefully i'll talk to you all soon it was really it was actually like very nice to see your faces that's a weird thing to say but i've always been like who are what do these people look like i've never seen them in my life mysterious strangers yeah voices on the radio i used to listen to library punk when i was walking my dog i would like go out in the afternoon like wait for an episode and walk my dog now i listen to it when I walk to the gym.

Jay:
[1:53:09] I see. Yeah. Got to get in the mood to pump some iron.

Jennie:
[1:53:12] Totally.

Sadie:
[1:53:13] The rain.

Jay:
[1:53:15] I'm sad Arthur didn't show up more this episode.

Jennie:
[1:53:18] I know. Just a little bit.

Jay:
[1:53:20] Okay.

Justin:
[1:53:22] And good night.