152 - LIVE SHOW IFFY BOOKS

Alison:
[0:00] They have all kinds of cute little like tinkering things.

Alison:
[0:04] They've got a really cute logo. You could buy a t-shirt or a tote bag.

Justin:
[0:09] Yeah. I had a really great conversation with Steve about tactile buttons.

Alison:
[0:13] We love the clickety-clack.

Justin:
[0:15] Clickety-clack. So there are so many clickety-clack things in here that you can buy.

Alison:
[0:20] Yeah. Does anyone need to stim? Yeah. Do you need to stim?

Jay:
[0:23] Do you need to stim during the show?

Alison:
[0:25] Yeah. That's what I'm saying. That's why I have the fan even when it's not hot.

Jay:
[0:28] We know our audience. Yeah. it's library school students

Justin:
[0:31] This isn't Postponies, check out Gigi's podcast Postponies,

Justin:
[0:40] gotta.

Alison:
[0:40] Love a podcast host who's like don't listen to my podcast that's me

Justin:
[0:45] We suck what are you doing someone asked me for my blue sky at a show recently and I was like someone asked me for someone asked me for my blue sky at a show recently and I was like we gotta know each other more before I do this.

Alison:
[0:59] That's like third base it's like asking to see my underwear right no yeah it

Justin:
[1:05] Took you a second the library.

Alison:
[1:09] Future is blue sky and not by accident on the federalist society account that I owned dang they took away the

Jennie:
[1:18] Federalist society from you

Alison:
[1:21] I thought blue sky was supposed to be a place for freedom

Justin:
[1:24] Yeah right I.

Jay:
[1:25] Just become a second amendment guy Yeah,

Alison:
[1:27] I'm a third amendment guy. You will never put a soldier in my I don't think they should even have barracks put a soldier nowhere Yeah,

Jay:
[1:35] Just don't have them.

Alison:
[1:36] No soldiers.

Justin:
[1:37] No, they took away, I had Lexus Nexus and I kept getting tagged by lawyers like thank you Lexus Nexus for assembling for the Empire Award we.

Jay:
[1:49] Got one minute I

Justin:
[1:50] Okay what are you shouting at me for yeah quit.

Jay:
[1:53] Yapping right there

Justin:
[1:54] You run this podcast too nope everyone.

Alison:
[1:57] Knows you're in charge justin yeah

Justin:
[1:58] I'm seeing the light i'm seeing the light in the back all right all right i've got i'm gonna i'm gonna try a thing are we recording still we've been recording okay nice funny all right this is well this is the highest quality version of the theme song i can get so let's go great.

Jay:
[2:16] The speaker is here honey let's

Alison:
[2:18] Just sing it

Jay:
[2:19] Yeah there we go can you tell we're a free part DIY bitch yeah we don't have a patreon fuck the system we do this in our free time i'm gonna talk over it let's

Sadie:
[2:38] Make this as difficult for justin as possible

Justin:
[2:41] No, shut up.

Jay:
[2:45] Kill it.

Justin:
[2:46] Robots trying to take my job. I'm Justin. I forgot my job title again.

Justin:
[2:52] I don't really care about it. My pronouns are he and they.

Jay:
[2:55] Hi, everybody. We're going out of order, I guess. I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian. My pronouns are he, him. My brain doesn't work anymore.

Justin:
[3:07] Just update them.

Sadie:
[3:07] I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they, them. Woo! And we have guests!

Jay:
[3:13] Yeah, we do!

Alison:
[3:14] Hey, what's up, queers?

Jennie:
[3:16] Woo!

Alison:
[3:16] Yeah, that's right. Clocked ya. My name is Allison, I use she, her pronouns, and I am the director of Library Freedom Project. Woo! Got some fans. Yeah, we did. Okay, cool. Thank you.

Jennie:
[3:28] Hi, I'm Jenny. I use she, her pronouns, and I am the director of Library Futures at NYU Law's Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, which I always get wrong. Woo! That's not right, I think.

Jay:
[3:42] Yeah, everybody, round of applause.

Alison:
[3:44] Thank you to our sponsors.

Justin:
[3:46] Thank you to our sponsor, Gigi. Yeah. And Hippie Books.

Jay:
[3:50] And Hippie Books. Thank you, Hippie Books.

Justin:
[3:52] Yes.

Jay:
[3:52] Buy Things.

Justin:
[3:53] Buy Things. They sell batteries here. So if you do want to lob batteries at us during the show, you can support your local info shop by buying batteries. They are on that shelf behind you.

Jay:
[4:02] Yes, heckle us.

Alison:
[4:03] Justin, did you know that lobbing batteries is a great Philadelphia tradition? I'm not even making that up. No, I just...

Justin:
[4:08] I didn't... No.

Alison:
[4:09] Oh, fuck off, man. You see what I have to bob with? I see. I'm going to lob a battery at you.

Justin:
[4:17] Isn't it traditionally 9 volts?

Alison:
[4:18] It's a D battery because the guy they were lobbing them at, his nickname was like D battery or something.

Alison:
[4:24] so they were like it was a sports situation um and it was an opposing team i don't actually know you know it's like i'm a philadelphia nationalist go birds but i don't care about any sports so i don't know the particulars of it but that's basically what happened yeah i

Justin:
[4:40] Think it's cheering for birds in general yeah it's like the birds of.

Alison:
[4:44] Philadelphia any bird yeah yeah go birds your

Justin:
[4:47] Pigeons are underfed they're not rounded up.

Jay:
[4:50] We got some fat ass

Alison:
[4:51] Pigeons in boston we have some really fat like yeah cool

Jay:
[4:54] All right thank you everybody for coming yeah we've been doing this since 2021 yep it's four years four years yeah cool all right let's get fucking going all right this is what it's like behind the scenes by the way yeah

Alison:
[5:10] It's look behind the curtain i

Justin:
[5:11] Cut out silences yeah so like automatically so it takes like 15 minutes off every episode.

Alison:
[5:16] What silence none of us will have stopped talking since we sat down i have I

Jay:
[5:20] Never shut up in my

Alison:
[5:21] Entire life. It's my promise to you.

Justin:
[5:24] You cannot do more than five people on a podcast because it literally becomes impossible.

Jay:
[5:30] Cool.

Justin:
[5:31] I did want to talk about because we had Kelly Jensen on the podcast recently and if you are affected by the IMLS cuts, please go. Yes. Boo. Live audience reactions for once. Boo.

Jay:
[5:45] Yeah.

Justin:
[5:47] What the fuck's up, Philly?

Jay:
[5:48] What the fuck is up?

Justin:
[5:50] How many people here are actually from Philly?

Alison:
[5:53] Holler. E-A-G-L-E-S. Eagles.

Jennie:
[5:57] That's right.

Justin:
[5:58] Thank you. go birds I don't have my sound a soundboard so I have to do my own soundboard.

Sadie:
[6:04] I'm free Jay gets a moment of peace

Justin:
[6:07] Are we.

Jennie:
[6:08] Gonna get like foley like live foley

Justin:
[6:10] Action yeah from me with my mouth into the mic get the mic closer to you because I'm worried it's not gonna fit.

Jennie:
[6:17] I have to eat the mic

Justin:
[6:20] I don't know why they're like that but that's how we don't get feedback elemental we're at.

Jay:
[6:26] A punk show

Justin:
[6:26] So, yeah, go to... I'm definitely holding it like Henry Robbins.

Alison:
[6:30] You're aware of the copying the mic.

Justin:
[6:32] I can't stop doing it. I've been doing it since I was 16.

Jay:
[6:35] Let's open up this pit, Philly.

Justin:
[6:38] Yeah, I did this at work one time, and I just forgot that everyone is really quiet in the mic, so they handed me the mic, and I'm like, what about public-private situations? Just screamed it.

Justin:
[6:51] So, yeah, check out Kelly Jensen's stuff, and then if you are affected by it please put it in there so that we have like a tab of what's happening with imls because it's both me and her are trying to like track these things so that we have like an idea of all of the different like downstream impacts and it's really difficult so hopefully making it a little more crowdsourced will will help um getting an idea um so that's my plug for this segment but you don't need a segment when you have two guests so yay yeah.

Jay:
[7:21] Guests. Hi.

Alison:
[7:22] Hey.

Justin:
[7:23] So the subject today is library advocacy. What are you doing and what are your options? And I believe Jenny has a big update.

Jay:
[7:29] Yeah, Jenny, you're up.

Jennie:
[7:30] We do have a big update. So yesterday, Library Futures got to announce that we received a big grant from the Arcadia Foundation in order to do work on contracts, on digital contracts with folks. So we'll do a bunch of research for quite a while, we will hire a lawyer. And, you know, maybe one of the only good things I can think of is that there are probably a bunch of lawyers who used to work for the United States who now want to do more radical stuff and might be willing to come and work with us, maybe. And so we are going to hire a lawyer and they will effectively take on small to medium sized institutions as clients and negotiate contracts with them. And from that work, we will understand much better about what is negotiable in the sort of contracts that we sign from vendors all the time and what is not. We'll create a big database. I see that Nick from Spark is here, and they have a wonderful contracts database already. And sort of building on some of the work without being duplicative of that organizations like Spark have been doing, but particularly with public libraries. I actually had somebody say to me yesterday, like, wow, that's really cool. We haven't renegotiated our OverDrive contract since 2006. And like lots of stuff has changed since then. Yeah.

Jennie:
[8:59] So, yeah, and it also will sort of help hopefully start to head off some of the issues with AI slop in digital collections and really setting guidelines and really setting limitations and boundaries around that as well.

Jay:
[9:17] One of the conspiracy theories i believe in is that like the media perception of defense attorneys and lawyers in general as like skeevy assholes is like a part of copaganda because like well i organize with lawyers those people are fucking fearless like you also

Jennie:
[9:33] Probably get to see the good

Jay:
[9:35] Lawyers that's also true uh but yeah i

Alison:
[9:37] Think it's a both and situation yeah yeah they're they're dirtbags but there are dirtbags

Jay:
[9:42] There are dirtbags sometimes

Justin:
[9:44] Yeah we need dirtbag socialism i was not talking to i was doing an interview with um forgot his name, i will repost it when he posts the interview um but i was telling him you know you you're allowed to like get mad about stuff you believe in it's kind of like a normal thing to do like if someone says you can't have queer people in this country uh i will get into a physical fight with you like because that's that it's not a live and let live like sort of option for me so it's like you know uh you need people to be combative i'm always telling people to be more combative and especially if we have good politics if we have bad politics stay at home everyone.

Jay:
[10:20] Here has good politics yeah you came to

Alison:
[10:22] The show and i also love to be combative i love to fight so exactly fuck you

Justin:
[10:28] Fight me do anything yeah queer.

Alison:
[10:29] Doesn't fuck you yeah queer doesn't fight me

Jay:
[10:33] Thank you for your update jenny

Jennie:
[10:35] Yeah well thank you thank you for for starting off with that get those coins yeah it will the price of the project will be four years which is an a lot of time but it gives a lot of space to sort of really think through how how we're going to do it but sort of speaking of being combative like one of the things we hear the most is like it's too risky to talk to a rep as a person who's paying them i guess for some reason but anyway instead of sort of having the risk beyond the individual institution, we can take on a lot of risk. And basically, like a lot of the work I think that we're trying to do is like, give your risk to us, like, let us say the shit that you can't say, let us like, sort of take on some of the like risk mitigation from institutions from the more shitty general counsels who are like, don't do anything, like, don't anger your vendor for whatever reason. But I don't care. I mean, yesterday I was in a room with Steve Potash from Overdrive for some reason and was like, Overdrive is owned by KKR, which also destroyed nursing homes and newspapers. And I thought I was really holding back. But multiple people were like, oh, my God, like you really went for it. And I was like, no, you have no idea. I took out a bunch of slides.

Sadie:
[11:54] If that was going for the throat, then you're not prepared to see the real.

Justin:
[11:59] It's really weird how you kicked him after you started crying.

Jay:
[12:02] Stop, he's already dead.

Sadie:
[12:04] He was already down.

Justin:
[12:06] No, that's great. How does the renegotiation process work? So like you like universities and purchasers like libraries come to you and then is it like you negotiate like you give them advice about what they should say in the negotiations?

Jennie:
[12:23] Well, so the hope is that we'll run a an open RFP. so basically anybody who has a contract that's up for renegotiation and wants us to uh and wants advice effectively um will come and we'll go through a um a process we put i cannot remember how many but we put in the grant like how many we will try to do a year and yeah if you have if you work in a library particularly a public library and you have any kind of contract with you know evil hoopla or evil overdrive in particular coming up and you would like to to to work with an organization to figure out what terms you can negotiate in which terms you cannot um definitely reach out and we can try to to work through it um it's a little bit of an experiment and it's the sort of the question is like i don't think that we actually know what is negotiable and what is not yeah um and the hope is that by doing a few we can start to make like a library of um negotiation based on contractual work so

Justin:
[13:27] It'll be kind of like the spark contracts database.

Jennie:
[13:29] Yeah so that's why i that's why i shouted it out okay

Justin:
[13:32] Yeah yeah no i'm sorry yeah i like i've been running too many things in my head.

Jennie:
[13:36] No it'll be very soon it'll be sort of like the spark contracts um database but more about the negotiation process itself and

Justin:
[13:44] I got you.

Jennie:
[13:45] Um the negotiable terms within and non-negotiable terms within different vendor contracts.

Justin:
[13:51] And can you explain open RFPs for people who aren't in that, that's not part of their job?

Jennie:
[13:56] An open RFP means that we will put out on our website a request for people with a bunch of questions that asks, do you want to be part of this process? And then we'll go through a vetting process just to figure out like which ones we think are going to be um we can help with actually and which like where we can't help um and but that's actually like not for a year like it's going to be a while so

Jay:
[14:22] We're getting the inside scoop

Jennie:
[14:23] Yeah it's inside scoop it's it's a long it's these things do take kind of a while awesome but we will have a job application out um or job rec out i guess next week oh

Justin:
[14:35] Nice yes for all the lawyers who listen to this podcast.

Alison:
[14:38] Yeah i

Justin:
[14:40] Don't know how many that might be one.

Alison:
[14:41] People might know a lawyer do

Jay:
[14:43] We got any

Alison:
[14:43] Lawyers have anyone been arrested if you're a lawyer do

Jay:
[14:46] We got any library school students here we know right yeah library school students

Justin:
[14:50] Allison i wanted to talk to you about updates with library freedom projects so we were at your ai panel yeah which was good.

Alison:
[14:58] Thank you and there's another one right somebody sent me a text that someone sent them so I don't know who this came from but they said it was the best ALA session they have attended in 25 years. Wow. Alright. I know that this is not relevant to the podcast listeners but for the audience we will be doing the session again at 9am tomorrow. Go to it. The version that happened today was the real version. Tomorrow is the hungover and tired version but sloppiness counts. Who cares about that? The podcast listeners are like, who the fuck? Why? That was like weeks ago. What's going on with Library Freedom Project? That was your question.

Justin:
[15:37] Well, it was just like updates with you. And we were talking about like, I think I have a bullet point here for risk. And I don't want to do that.

Alison:
[15:42] Yeah.

Jay:
[15:43] Risk is the theme of this episode.

Alison:
[15:44] Okay. Well, let me just give a little sort of like over bird's eye view of who we are and what we're trying to do. So Library Freedom Project is an organization that works with, that we build community with library workers and we do political education for library workers to try to support liberatory change in our libraries in our communities with our labor unions with ourselves and our focus is basically on privacy anti-surveillance critical analysis of technology and And what we've been, you know, as a part of that, we want things that other

Alison:
[16:22] library organizations, present company excluded, other library organizations won't touch. So something that you may have encountered recently, given our current political conditions, is like already all the people that you work with who are like super afraid of taking any kind of political or politicized stance about anything have become even more frightened, some would say even cowardly, about approaching the conditions that we find ourselves in now. So a big focus that we have in this moment is how do we get more library workers willing to take risk for the things that we care about, show up for the people in our communities who are most impacted by mega bullshit,

Alison:
[17:03] Find the ways that we can actually like step in and recognize that while everyone's risk has sort of increased, I think that there are a lot of people who think of themselves as at greater risk than they actually are.

Jay:
[17:18] Agreed.

Alison:
[17:18] Yeah and like that is what one of the things that we're really trying to cut through like look yeah everyone's more scared now but that doesn't mean that you like middle class white cis etc library worker are somehow gonna be like the next one up against the wall you're just not so what can you do with your positionality to defend the kind of world that you want to live in also

Jay:
[17:45] People who are at greater risk of like specific marginalized identities and

Jay:
[17:49] everything are allowed to define their own. Justin, shut the fuck up.

Justin:
[17:53] Gigi started laughing and I started laughing.

Jay:
[17:55] Uh-huh.

Justin:
[17:56] He started laughing at the same time.

Jay:
[17:57] Uh-huh, okay.

Justin:
[17:58] He talks with his hands and he has bad mic discipline so I knew when he had to hold the mic that.

Jay:
[18:04] He was going to

Justin:
[18:04] Do this a couple times.

Jay:
[18:06] Okay.

Alison:
[18:07] I'm not going to lie. Blatant homophobia, I'll tell you what. We hate to see it.

Jay:
[18:12] Yes, he's homophobia.

Justin:
[18:13] Yes he's homophobic.

Jay:
[18:16] We exist no but like people who are uh at greater risk are also allowed to decide their own risk-taking tolerance yes because one thing i see a lot in organized spaces is like i think well-meaning like white folks being like oh well we have to like take all the risk because these people can't and like but i think people who are like marginalized get to decide how much risk they're willing to take. So that's also a thing. Yeah.

Jennie:
[18:43] I think the other thing is like some of it is risk and some of it is like, are you willing to, are you, are you willing to even take the risk within your own employment? Like to support your own colleagues. Yeah. Like these are jobs at the end of the day. And like, you know I think that I see a lot, like, you know, if someone, for example, you know, again, not naming names, like, you know, decides that they want to do a bunch of advocacy with Librarian Freedom Project or around, you know, the ebook issues around the vendor contract issues. And they're like, hey, this this shit is fucked up and bullshit. Like, and get thanked, do get targeted by these huge corporations, by administration, by, you know, if they want to, if somebody wants to stand up for Palestinian rights, for example, like, are you also willing to take the risk to stand up for your own colleagues within your own work

Jay:
[19:36] Fucking unionize by the way you can put this stuff in your CBAs and even if you like can't actually like unionize or anything you can still organize your workplace even if it isn't an officially recognized union like you can still organize with your co-workers and you can stand up to this shit right like I'm a I'm a city worker so like oh we have to cooperate with ICE or whatever the fuck ever and it's like no you can also just like create a rapid response network like with your co-workers like straight up Like I'm fucking tired of it.

Alison:
[20:05] Yeah. And that's how we build. I mean, what Jenny's talking about, it's like, we have to build greater trust with each other. We have to find those people. Maybe they're people we work with and maybe they're not. Maybe they're people that we meet at ALA or they're like at our state library conference or whatever. Maybe they're outside of the library world, but I'm talking about within the library context and what we can do with our spaces there. But like starting to have these conversations, what's your group chat where you talk shit about your boss right that's a great starting point for organizing even if you're not in a place where you can be like and we're gonna start a union it's like what Jay's talking about there's all kinds of other worker organizing that can become the seed of something much bigger. And to your point about ice rapid response, we actually have a resource that we just created in LFP. It's like just about to get published. So email us at info at libraryfreedom.org if it's not on our website by the time this goes up. But like how to create a rapid response network, but like not even starting 10 steps back of like literally who's in your group. How have you built trust? Who are the people that you don't trust? How do you exclude them how do you like prevent them from being the ones to call the cops or whatever so all the different steps to create your sort of affinity group or whatever you want to call it and everything then that you can do once you have that unit who

Jay:
[21:28] All is unionized in the audience yeah nice

Alison:
[21:31] Let's go i

Sadie:
[21:32] I will add an adamidium do not do this shit on microsoft

Alison:
[21:36] Teams do not do not thank you so much it is

Sadie:
[21:41] It is so searchable yeah if

Jay:
[21:44] You're a city worker it's foiable

Sadie:
[21:46] Yeah and that too if you work at a public library it's foiable and uh yeah having having this just been through some major shit at my job where we got reminded exactly how foiable everything is like keep that shit in mind when you're organizing shout

Jay:
[22:03] Out to brian you know for calling

Sadie:
[22:05] Yeah that goes for slack anything connected to your work account yeah not use it for this shit

Alison:
[22:10] Yeah just

Jay:
[22:13] Talk to people in person i know we're

Alison:
[22:15] All like scared

Jay:
[22:16] Library introverts or whatever but like learn how to talk to people i swear it's fine that's

Justin:
[22:22] Not fair it's a public service profession people do know how to talk.

Alison:
[22:24] Sometimes but also i think people are conflict averse yeah and they're like you know but But I think that there's great tools out there for like having organizing conversations that give you literally a script. And if you're nervous, here's a good way to disarm that. Be like, hey, Jay, I really want to talk to you about this thing. But like, I'm nervous. Yeah, just say it. And it actually it's wonderful how well that works. You can be like, oh, it's gone. Or at least the other person is then like, no, it's cool. We're good. You have to be nervous.

Jay:
[22:56] A one on one is as easy as asking a coworker if they want to go get coffee on their on their break like and you can start from there yeah facts facts i

Justin:
[23:06] Lost my transition.

Alison:
[23:07] I forgot yeah what do you guys want to talk about now

Jay:
[23:08] I've never lost my transition i have to make a trans joke at least once yeah i know

Alison:
[23:17] That was a setup

Justin:
[23:18] I completely lost my train of thought because it was like five minutes ago, um yeah word yeah i know it's it's also extremely hot thank you everyone for making it out in.

Jay:
[23:29] This yeah what happened to that like rain we got like thursday night like and it was all misty and shit yesterday what happened it

Alison:
[23:37] Was like beautiful yeah philadelphia sorry swamp

Jay:
[23:40] Yeah yeah oh my god yeah boston had like some real bad heat this week it was rough the weather podcast this is a weather podcast now uh shouts out um yeah yeah

Alison:
[23:54] Anybody else have any weather takes yeah yeah facts

Jennie:
[24:00] Good take is it a conspiracy that it's gotten harder to predict the weather

Jay:
[24:03] No no the weather machine takes podcast now where it's like what's your take man i 100 agree why

Jennie:
[24:11] Is the weather prediction always wrong now

Jay:
[24:13] Yeah i

Alison:
[24:14] Liked subway takes until they got all corporate about it yeah they used to just interview normal people and now it's like for real right it's like celebrities and then their takes are so much more tepid and stupid and now i hate them yeah yeah anyway no i agree yeah but you but hot people can be stupid too i know and have bad takes yeah i know stupid hot people you're still valid

Jay:
[24:37] Thank you allison uh do we want to talk about more about like privacy and security and like meeting this moment because i think that's the thing people are really worried about is like how do we even get our like do talking with each other yeah we were

Justin:
[24:52] Talking about threat models before that was what i was thinking about and yeah well i was saying like someone got onto me for like getting a uh like a new roomba that maps out your house and i'm like i don't think anyone can do anything with that information aside from nowhere where my like fridge is.

Alison:
[25:10] Yeah, not in threat model. You don't have to worry about every last thing. I mean, yeah, like we can riff some more about risk. I think that it's one thing to be like, you should think about your risk more realistically, but it's, but most people are like, what the fuck does that even mean? And so there's some frameworks that you can use when you get your little affinity group together and you start having conversations like, what do we, what's in our immediate environment that we need to like stand up to? Is it like vendor bullshit and AI slop? Is it like that we're concerned about ICE having a presence on our university campus? Is it, you know, name your thing, right? When you start having those conversations, you can also start thinking about your own risk assessment. Sometimes it's called threat modeling. And we do a lot of it in Library Freedom Project. And it's basically like taking an account of who you are, like the conditions of your existence, both like, you know, social, economic,

Alison:
[26:09] Gender, race, all of the things that like make us who we are and also make us more or less at risk. So starting and thinking about those things and then thinking about like, okay, what do I want to do? And who might want to try to stop me from doing those things? And those are your adversaries. And then you think about what can my adversary really do? You know, can they get me fired? Can they out me to people? Can they like beat me up? Can they, you know, there's a whole bunch of different things depending on your context. And you're thinking about this as a group. You're also thinking about like how you're in relation to other people. So my risk model as a white cis woman is different from somebody who has a different identity than me. So like, I'm also thinking about who I'm in community with and how the choices that I make impact the people that I'm in community with. And so anyway, it's a group activity that you do. And so after you think about what your personal risks are, what kind of adversaries you have, then you start thinking about like, okay, so what am I going to do about it? What steps do I need to take to protect myself and my organizing? And it means that like, you know, some of these conversations, like Sadie said, like we're not having them on Microsoft Teams or like any other kind of work owned devices or platforms.

Alison:
[27:29] Maybe we move our conversations to signal. Maybe we have them in person. Maybe there are additional things that we need to do. Like, let's say what my affinity group wants to work on is researching how my university is contracting with like Israeli companies or something. So, you know, you would one, not only not want to use your work devices, but you might also want to like, if you're like, I'm, I'm still going to like steal some work time. I'm going to be like on, I'm at my desk, but I'm like on my phone or whatever. Well, you're still connected to their Wi-Fi. So you could use a VPN. So there's all different kinds of things, stuff, different tools that are appropriate for our own circumstances. It's not a one size fits all model, unfortunately, because I would just tell you it. But yeah, that's, that's a lot of what we're thinking about in LFP right now.

Jennie:
[28:18] Yeah. And, and quite frankly,

Sadie:
[28:20] I think feel like a lot of this could actually be a great anti-anxiety exercise.

Jay:
[28:24] Yes.

Sadie:
[28:25] Because once you start thinking about this shit realistically, as opposed to just a, Oh my God, I have to flee to Canada, even though I'm, you know, Canadian yeah even though I'm the last person who's gonna be like you know need refuge there but like yeah like once you start thinking about it practically and you start thinking about it alongside people yeah who are like you it it can take down that anxiety a lot and turn it into something more

Alison:
[28:50] Actionable you're so right Sadie it's like right it's like what what actually could happen versus the things that I don't need to worry about that I don't need to just like create a stress ball about. And then also, it's about the kind of practical actions you can take with yourself and your group towards harm reduction.

Jay:
[29:08] And how does this sort of like thinking about threat modeling and privacy and digital security, like, like, how does this apply to sort of like the work that like library futures is doing and like, how we can actually at the more like contractee work level, like put this into practice?

Jennie:
[29:24] So, so much less and I really, I really admire the work that obviously that Library Freedom Project does. We are much we do just sort of different work. And I think, I think what I'm, what I'm seeing with a lot of particularly the public librarians that we work with, and I guess I didn't sort of give an overview of like, what are we as library teachers? I can do that in a sec. But, you know, one of the things that I'm seeing is like, I have the privilege to work every day in advocacy. I work for a big university that our colleague calls, quote, very entrepreneurial, which means that they basically don't give a shit what we do as long as we bring in some money for the university. It is a real estate company that's also a university.

Jay:
[30:14] So a university.

Justin:
[30:16] There are two genders of university, which is one that's a real estate trust with a school attached and one's a football team with a school attached.

Jay:
[30:23] Sometimes they're both. Yeah.

Jennie:
[30:26] But yeah. So but one of the things that I'm seeing is like, particularly within the within with vendors, things have gotten really bad. I mean, most public libraries can't can't build a digital collection at all. People are seeing incredible levels of censorship across search platforms in particular, just absolute dis and misinformation and digital content. And there are a sort of a there are a large number of advocates who are frankly kind of doing this in addition to their work, because they care so much about their communities and the kinds of materials that they get. And one of the things I have, I think a lot about, and that we're trying to address in many ways is that, you know, it's not like everybody in the over 90% of public libraries use overdrive, because like, they love overdrive, some people love overdrive, but like, it's not because the terms are so great, or whatever, it's because it is, it works, right? It does the thing. And I think sometimes, you When it comes to choosing resources, there has been a push toward, you know,

Jennie:
[31:35] Whoever sells it best and has the best product that you can just plug and play in without a ton of thinking about just like kicking the can down the line of what's going to happen, you know, in 10 years when you've rented your digital collection now for 20 years. and OverDrive has now sold itself to the 20th private equity company that it might be owned by and closes or decides that all the data that it's collecting from you that they're going to somehow weaponize against public libraries or the federal government decides that they're going to seize all the data from OverDrive.

Jennie:
[32:13] And so now, like particularly with the Libby app, the majority of people who are using OverDrive in many places are using it in the Libby app because they have absolutely no incentive to take people out of the app, because then they can get their data. So it, you know, I think sometimes in Sarah Lambden's work, who many of us know, really proves this is that, you know, the kind of public information tech that we rely on is big tech, it is follows a lot of the same playbook, it follows a lot of the same patterns. And it is also it also, I think, often gets a pass because it's library stuff. So it's it is actually, frankly, like very underregulated. And now that we don't have a functioning Department of Justice, for example, to investigate what, you know, what what a monopoly might look like in these spaces, you know, how are we as advocates going to approach privacy and security, as well as the ways in which companies who license content abuse contracts in the United States, considering like, in Europe, you can't put anything into a contract. Like, you can't just have a, you know, a 95-page contract that has who knows what in it. Here you can. And so we've replaced owning media, we've replaced owning a collection with what Jason Schultz calls a mutant form of contract law.

Justin:
[33:34] It always comes back to contract law. If it's labor, if you study anything about, like, the formation of free labor or anything. You just realize how absolutely a stranglehold over your life contracts can have because a lot of Like, even after the invention of free labor, a lot of people were bound by, like, we can drag you back to your job or we can keep you in this contract for so many times. It really, like, fills in all the gaps of the law in ways it's, like, really.

Jennie:
[34:00] Well, I mean, taken to its logical extreme, I mean, we've already seen it. There were a couple months ago. I might have talked about this last time I was on the podcast because it's so horrifying. A couple months ago, there was that example where somebody signed up for a free trial of Disney Plus. And because they signed up for a free trial of Disney+, which included a forced arbitration clause, when unfortunately their wife died from an allergic reaction at a Disney park, Disney said that they had no grounds to sue, even though their allergy had been very clearly discussed with Disney. and they had, it was really tragic and all they were asking was for funeral fees. Disney tried to use that contract from a free trial of Disney Plus that they had signed up for many years ago in order to say that they had no standing. In another example, I don't know the specifics as well, but there was a woman who had signed up as a gig worker for Walmart during a holiday season. They had signed a contract to do that. And while shopping at Walmart about a year later, I think their family was harassed and arrested because they were black in a Walmart parking lot by the cops. And Walmart used that contract against them and said that they also had no grounds to sue because of a forced arbitration clause within that contract. So, yeah, I mean, contracts rule a lot of stuff around us. We do not know all the time what we're signing.

Jennie:
[35:29] And in a much less extreme or consequential example, the Amazon Kindle contract contains a lot of terms that contradict each other. And it's, you know, X number of pages long. Nobody's going to read that shit. And it's just it's very unclear if that's on purpose or if that like if that's or if it's just sloppy, frankly.

Jay:
[35:51] Learn copyright law learn contract law know thine enemy yeah

Jennie:
[35:56] Well our most popular webinar ever was how to read a contract which i guess uh was a little bit of a surprise we're gonna we've been saying we're gonna reprise it for months uh but we are going to reprise how to read a contract part two and also develop many more resources around how to read contracts

Jay:
[36:14] I've been having to get better at legalese because i'm uh a union rep now i'm like on my unions e-board and so like yeah shouts out unions like when you fill out a grievance you have to do it in like legal talk and it's the most insane shit to like translate what happens into like well and then this person who's affected that can then be made whole and whatever else an arbitrator might decide blah blah blah it's like yeah it's like the way you have to like wrap your mind around just like these made-up standards that we've come up with is like but

Jennie:
[36:45] It's also like you know If I don't want to sign the Amazon Kindle contract, but I want access to e-books, what am I going to do? It puts you in a double bind. If I need to do gig work for Amazon or Walmart or whatever, but I don't want to have a forced arbitration clause, then I don't have any real standing there. And a lot of it has to do with, you know, like contracts are not collectively bargained. And now we're in a space where class action lawsuits, which are wildly underutilized and ineffective and hard to do, are, you know, potentially going to replace a lot of the kinds of legal action that we could have taken to begin with. And so I think, yeah, I mean, there has been a lot of, I guess I can say this here, like one of the first things that came up when we just had a pretty big e-book summit was someone was like, what if we could negotiate our e-book contracts collectively like a union? And it was like amazing. It was like great. But I think that folks are starting to understand that like if you get a group of people together who want to negotiate a contract together, it's very powerful. And that is why public sector collective bargaining is illegal in at least in the state I live in and in many other states is because it is really powerful.

Jay:
[38:03] But that doesn't mean that you can't still organize just because you can't do collective bargaining.

Jennie:
[38:07] Oh, no, absolutely. And they, you know, meet and confer is a big thing.

Jay:
[38:12] Meet and confer is real. With some folks I organize with, they do a lot of meet and confer. Yeah, it's really powerful.

Justin:
[38:18] Yeah, that's why I brought it up, because like contracts in labor are like it's really why we harp on unionization so much. because it fills in a lot of areas that you are not really protected in law.

Jay:
[38:31] My union has an anti-AI clause in it.

Justin:
[38:33] Yeah?

Jay:
[38:34] Yeah.

Jennie:
[38:34] What has an anti-AI clause?

Jay:
[38:35] My collective bargaining agreement. Oh, wow. It has a technology clause that's both that you have to let us know and also we're allowed to say no.

Alison:
[38:41] Oh, wow. Can you send me that? Yeah, I sure can. We need that. Yeah, that's great. That's great.

Justin:
[38:46] Yeah, we need to bring that up tomorrow for the guys in the front row.

Jay:
[38:48] Yeah.

Alison:
[38:49] The guys in the front row that we referenced were a trio of dorks who came to our AI ethics talk today and they were all together. So I'm assuming they were like vendors from the same company or something. But one of them was wearing a like Accelerate AI gaming shirt. And they were so mad the whole time. And it was funny. Yeah. And they said nothing because what was there for them to say? Nothing.

Justin:
[39:12] Allison stared them down. It was great. Yeah.

Alison:
[39:14] Yeah.

Justin:
[39:16] There's something that I don't know why this is like crossed my mind.

Justin:
[39:19] But as far as like, I think Jenny mentioned like seeking out information in this moment. I've had a hard time talking to information literacy people. I know that sounds like a wild gear change, but from what we've been talking about.

Jay:
[39:33] Let's talk about information literacy.

Justin:
[39:35] But it's it's seriously I kind of want to get a read from both of you on like because we're working with AI and people are always talking about like what's the information literacy approach to this? and can we have AI literacy, which is a term I really hate because it's just literacy. Let's just leave literacy alone. Let's let it have its own space to work in.

Jay:
[39:54] You've got to do the framework. Yeah, but whatever the fuck ACRL calls it.

Justin:
[39:58] Every single chat interaction I do, I have to pick an ACRL framework that it lines up with. I don't know what will be done with this. This is fucking nothing like every other survey I have to fill out at work. I literally ask my boss, I'm like, so does this data ever get looked at or used? No, waste my fucking time. But like, what is kind of the approach in this area talking about like AI and data brokers for like discussions about information literacy? Because like, I really, I think I've scared off a lot of information literacy people from coming on the podcast. So good.

Alison:
[40:31] Well, they're wrong. Well, I think the first thing to say, and I think you're kind of hinting at this is that like, unfortunately, in the moment that we're in right now, there are a lot of library people who work on information literacy who for various reasons fomo hype not having read a fucking book even though they're a library worker um really are they think that the the proper responsive information literacy in the realm of generative ai is like We need to teach people how to use it instead of what I think it should be and what our approach in LFP is, is we need to teach people like what it is and what and who paid for it and how it works to the best of our ability. Because obviously we know one of the issues with it is the people who make it don't even know how the fuck it works. And, you know, the various other issues that it raises, you know, copyright, labor, the fact that it's draining our fucking rivers um and burning trees we do have stickers at our booth that say chachi bt eats trees there's like five left so get them while they're hot well somebody grab me one grab one for sadie if you're listening to this and you're at the booth right now no we'll grab you one we'll grab you one tomorrow if

Jay:
[41:48] You're a time traveler

Alison:
[41:48] Yeah and i think and i think what really gets me about this approach is not just that i think it's so boring and anti-intellectual and just like some of the worst that I love library workers I am one we work with them but there's some things about us that I fucking hate and one of them is that we're like oh like we're if we don't do it this way like we're we're not going to be relevant anymore and it's like this so cowardly like overcautious and I also think the other thing that really frustrates me about it is that it expects that our patrons are idiots that they don't want the critical approach either, that they just want to type in the machine and whatever the mathy math computes or whatever. And I think that couldn't be further from the truth. And that goes for no matter what that person's actual literacy level is. So what we do in Library Freedom Project is we have a whole bunch of different popular education resources and trainings for library workers. Some of them are quite in-depth. We have one about data brokers and it's like, here's what a data broker is. Here's where they get their information from. Here's how it gets used for these different kinds of industry. This is how they're turning your personal information into profit. And we use that kind of framework of capital

Alison:
[43:01] And it's a very popular resource, even though it's like a little dense. It's got some graphics and stuff, too. But then we also have things that we're working on that are like very simple. One idea per a quarter sheet page for people who might not be able to engage in something that's like written at a 12th grade reading level or whatever, but like are not stupid. You know, they're for whatever reason excluded from the educational force or labor force or whatever. But like they have real questions about these things. And so I think that we need to take ourselves a little more seriously, take the moment that we're in more seriously and recognize that our patrons are like they're people who are curious and have questions about this stuff and that we can have a more holistic approach in how we do our infolit.

Jay:
[43:45] It's like real talk. Why do librarians like why are we so patronizing? Yeah. To our patrons. Yeah. Like why do we think everyone's a fucking idiot?

Justin:
[43:52] Like it's strange because um i just started a new job and i was talking to uh one of my co-workers and she was saying you know i've got to integrate this thing about ai into the class i don't remember exactly what it was but it was like i think she might have said ai literacy and uh it was it was like so they don't miss out on using ai but i'm like the whole point of ai is to de-skill the labor force so that anyone who is not skilled can come in and do the job for a lot less money at least competently enough so on what world do we have to actually teach them how to query the thing that is actively making them worse at understanding the world, yeah i think a lot of people think like this will be the internet like this will this will have a change in the same way that like you know the internet changed reference and like we have to be on top of this and like i like a lot of academic libraries it's.

Jay:
[44:47] Just second life again No,

Alison:
[44:48] Literally the meme that I made that was on our AI ethics talk that was like, it's the future of librarianship and it's the Grim Reaper knocking on the doors and it's like Second Life, MOOCs, NFTs. There's a whole bunch of other shit in there, right? Library 2.0 or Web 2.0 or whatever. Sorry, Library 2.0 is like an actual training thing, but like they're pro cop. Fuck them.

Jay:
[45:13] Um audience folks who remembers the whole like libraries doing reference in second life thing yeah the younger folks who are here and i was on like the cusp of this there used to literally be classes in library school would be like we need to set up like a reference desk in second life for our university or whatever like that was real like

Justin:
[45:32] And it cost two hundred thousand dollars to do no.

Alison:
[45:35] Totally and it looked like

Jay:
[45:37] Shit it looked like shit i

Alison:
[45:39] Graduated in 2008 and my library school had that

Jay:
[45:42] Class yeah so yeah that was a real thing we're dumb sometimes i

Jennie:
[45:46] I remember doing boolean searches in google

Jay:
[45:49] Oh yeah when they

Jennie:
[45:51] Still had it

Sadie:
[45:52] Back in my day remember google and

Justin:
[45:55] Let's all get mad about Google Reader.

Alison:
[45:57] Yeah, the only good thing they ever had.

Jennie:
[45:59] I feel like I'm sort of on one track. But, you know, obviously access is not where any of this stuff ends. But, you know, if more patrons are using digital collections and, for example, when they go to a catalog because a digital database has decided that what you need is a bunch of slop in it. And what they get is mis and disinformation and or AI slop for the most part in the in the top of their results, which has been happening a lot. Or a vendor tells you like, oh, well, you know, you can you can buy books from independent publishers. But first, you have to sort through 20,000 sets of chat GPT directions.

Jennie:
[46:41] You know, I think that it becomes very difficult to even get to the place where we're talking about information literacy if we can no longer trust that the collections that we're buying are collections that we want. You know, it's this thing of like, you know, we all know this,

Jennie:
[47:00] but libraries are not warehouses for books. They do not collect absolutely everything. But I think a lot of the vendors that we work with don't believe that. And everybody has this like endless race to the bottom of AI data and enormous collections that, you know, are just filling that are just filling catalogs with dreck. They won't fix the problem. And the problem is major. If you search for vaccine in Hoopla, you get all misinformation.

Jennie:
[47:33] And, you know, you get actual hate speech for certain for certain searches. And this has been going on for years. And in Overdrive, you know, you are trying to buy, but at least Laura Crossett, who's here in the audience, says like, well, at least Overdrive lets you, you know, choose what books, like very sarcastically, because it's like, you know, you search for any kind of independent publisher in Overdrive now, and now you're going to get thousands of AI slop books. And I mean, Sadie, you probably know better than anybody with a microphone, like you're going to get tons of AI slop. And how do you even search through that? How do you sort through that? Why is the onus suddenly on the library rather than the company to just provide a good product?

Sadie:
[48:13] Yeah. And, like, I haven't done a whole lot of research in that space. But, like, it's a problem on, like, so many levels. Like, and...

Jennie:
[48:23] Well, I was at I was I was at a colleague's office a couple of weeks ago and they had two books out on their desk and they were like, do these look like normal books? One, they were two dance books and they were bound and they looked totally like a book that one would buy. They were bought by a dance selector who has a master's degree in dance and has bought dance books for many years. They were just lists of directions from ChatGPT when they got them like they spent the money on them. they bought them and then when they were in by the time they were in the library they were like these are not real books

Jay:
[48:54] Because also real talk publishers and like vendors like baker and taylor and ingram uh hate working with libraries um we're not the ones who provide them with money bookstores are and so when they make it harder for us to buy physical or even electronic books from them where else do we go to get them you know because we don't have the infrastructure to do this ourselves like we can't it's the like we the way that we have sacrificed our ability to set up a shared infrastructure between libraries or even internally within a library for this kind of thing has like meant that we are now just like at the mercy of like oh we're just gonna feed you all this shit because then we can't no other places are wanting to like prioritize selling to us.

Jennie:
[49:42] But I also think, you know, it's firing on a lot of levels. So it's like, there's the collections issues, there's the patron education and information literacy issue, there's the being beholden to corporations, in many ways, issue. And then, you know, I, I don't, I do not work with patrons every day. So like, I don't know how many patrons are coming to the library and asking to learn chat gbt queries right or if it's sort of a an invented need

Alison:
[50:12] And i think what's more likely is that they're observing our posture towards all this garbage they're looking at the hoopla catalog and they're like the fuck is this and all this trust that we've spent all these all this time building and like need i remind you that we still somehow occupy this position of enormous public trust at a time when trust in institutions is like at an all-time low,

Jennie:
[50:40] Right?

Alison:
[50:41] It's like us in the fricking post office, right? And shouts out to the post office doing...

Alison:
[50:50] Doing as much as they can with as little as possible um that sounds fair yeah no shit uh

Alison:
[50:57] But like that's what i actually think is way more likely that they're like wait i thought that the library cared about literacy i thought the library was the place that would like have the sort of critical eye about this stuff and if we're not to if we're instead just pushing it and i think it's not just about trust it's also that like our patrons are seeing the world that we live in they're seeing the inshittification, they're seeing the way that, you know, obviously, like, you know,

Alison:
[51:25] corporate power is growing significantly, all these things. And that instead of us taking the posture of like, something as an alternative to that, that we're just jumping on the bandwagon of a bunch of shit that sucks that everybody hates. That's the thing about AI, right? It's like, How many of us in this room have been against all the bad stuff forever, right?

Alison:
[51:48] Now, everybody else is too. Nope. There's tons of people who are against AI, who never necessarily had a critical position about other kinds of technology. And I think we really have to seize that. And it also has to do, and I swear I'll stop talking in a second, it has to do with the way that it is being foisted upon us. It's so much more obvious to people. I guarantee you, if you talk to any rando, just go out here on the street in Philadelphia, go to Rittenhouse Park and hang out and be like, hey, what do you guys think about like the AI search results? Everyone's mad about it. So why are we not recognizing that like, this is an opportunity for us to have the alternative approach?

Sadie:
[52:27] And like Jay always says, like, learn about copyright, because there's a lot of people out there like artists who are like, oh, generative AI is so bad, but they don't actually understand how it works or what the copyright issues actually are. They just are very reactive. So like, how can we

Jay:
[52:44] Please don't make intellectual property law worse? I'm begging you.

Sadie:
[52:48] You know, like, how can you take those that that sort of movement and feeling and turn it into something that is like useful on and can help establish trust in the library in a in a way that we actually like deserve.

Jennie:
[53:05] And a huge part of the privatization of everyday life and particularly the privatization of life through technology includes an erosion of fair use rights. And so like as much as the content industry wants to say like, oh, fair use, it's so bad. It's what's causing all these problems. Like a lot of the problems with AI, I would say most of the problems with AI are not copyright problems and correct that and that framing it as a copyright problem is a little bit like a false flag. Like they are labor problems, they are societal problems, and they are part of this general privatization. I mean, even when you're talking about the post office, I was like, the post office is doing incredible work. And also, you know, if you order something online now, you probably have seen that like a lot of private shipping companies have popped up because the government has defunded the post office in large scales. And like,

Jennie:
[53:59] And it's one of the things that I hope is not happening that I think we are kind of at the brink of is with the defunding, with the kind of sudden loss of funds, if it is a way to continue to defund the public sphere as a way to provide a vacuum for even more private interests to step in, which has happened in many, many parts of everyday life. I mean, it's like the number of people I know who are reading capitalist realism now. And I'm like, yeah, like I just read Mark Fisher.

Jennie:
[54:36] And he has this thing called the business ontology where he says that, you know, it's this general idea that everything in the world should run like a business. When, you know, 20 years ago, 20 years ago, a lot of the things that we think that we see run as businesses would have been absolutely unfathomable, you know, the continued privatization of health care to the point where Medicare, Medicaid is going to be maybe annihilated within our lifetime. And like, I do think that, you know, again, it's this kind of very crucial crux point where there's a defunding while there's a really strange new it's not actually it's not strange and it's not new. It's actually very explainable and has been around for a long time, but it's sort of captured the zeitgeist technology, which could create a vacuum for, you know, I don't know, like a lack of staff for laying off staff for, you know, continuing to be sold these products that don't necessarily help communities, workers or the environment.

Jay:
[55:45] If you refer or think of library patrons and users as customers you are not a comrade straight out stop that shit

Justin:
[55:54] It was it's what allison mentioned which was student there was a study i had recently and i've been kind of keeping my eye on these things because uh my co-workers are kind of really into ai because they've been so drastically underfunded and many of them have been at the same university for so long that they remember having like twice the amount of librarians uh maybe even three times and so they're like well how do we keep doing new things and so like oh we'll just use ai to fill some of these gaps like you know we'll use the new tool like we always have um you know we're learning how to use canva now we're learning how to use chat gpt that spells our library with three n's in the middle like okay it's fine but.

Jennie:
[56:35] Remember the libraries as gap fillers debate of like 20 years ago I guess at this point it was like librarians are gonna fill the gaps for everything in society and now it's like

Justin:
[56:46] Instead we made the police do it yeah and.

Jennie:
[56:49] Like you know it's like robots are gonna replace librarians fill all the gaps

Justin:
[56:53] Yeah, sure. I mean, yeah, it is weird. For some reason, I was just struck at how odd it is that you can just like go out on the street and everyone's like, yeah, I use like this search engine that's like indexing all these websites. That's just a normal thing that everyone does with their life. It's like, yeah, I looked up where to find like local convenience store on my library catalog. It is just strange the kind of changes that have happened in the past few years. But like from what I have seen is when you set the framing of like use of AI, even if students are already using it to like make classes easier, which of course they would like, why are you shocked? They will still follow librarians on their stances saying like, here's why you should be skeptical of this. Here's why it's not going to work. Here's all the problems with it. So I think the approach of just trying to explain to students and the place where I work is really bad about this, but like as adults, like, listen, this is a real problem. This is this is like going to mess up your brain in some way, probably if you use it too much. And it's you know, it's got all these different problems in terms of like, you know, if I talk about it in labor discussions, like it people immediately get what the problem is. But if we talk about like, oh, it's it's fair use issues.

Jay:
[58:04] Students are cheating.

Justin:
[58:06] No one cares about copyright yeah because it's hard to explain and copyright's weird but people will follow when you're like here's the exact step that people with money are trying to do to like make you get paid less and it's not too many steps.

Alison:
[58:20] Yeah i mean so there's a couple things that you said in there but i want to address two of them one is like you know what do we do about students who are relying on these tools when you're like yeah that's an that's a position I can empathize with. You have way too much reading, you have way too much writing. And no one is going to respond well if you're like that bad and you should not do it. And I'm just going to scold you for young people. I think we have to like lean into the ways that these tools are like radically uncool. You use chat. Oh, chat. TBT is for dorks. But I also think that another angle for young folks is like, first of all, being like, yeah, it's fucked up that you have so much reading to do that you feel like you can't do that um but like young people as a group care about the environment climate like much more than any other generation typically and so like that's a little bit of an angle to take with them but also like i don't know you might point out to them that they're like like is it worth it to you to incur all this student debt if you're not actually learning the thing exactly maybe you maybe you want to actually do that reading so that when you're paying your student loans off later you're not like man fuck i don't even remember a word of this do

Jay:
[59:39] They not teach the children how to skim anymore like

Alison:
[59:43] Well i think probably what's happening is that like it's an available tool and so many other people are using it that like they're just using it they're not really thinking about what are the issues with it um and i really believe that like i mean there were a bunch of people who came to our talk today who literally said, wow, I never thought of it that way. I never thought of any of these things that way. And I think that's where kind of a lot of people are that you just have to like, kind of give them a little bit of an in. I also think here's a thing that is really resonating with a lot of people in my life. I mean, there have been like 15 of these articles recently about people falling in love with chat GPT, people using it as a therapist, you know, people having sort of like quasi religious experience with it, like, and make no mistake, AI has always been a religion. Okay. Always has been. But like that stuff is really terrifying. Right. And you'll notice that part of what those stories have in common is that it's people who have typically like pre-existing mental illness or like had not expressed their mental illness until it like came through in this way with Chatty PT. It's like their first manic episode or something like that. I think that kind of thing resonates with young people because they have a way better analysis about mental health than like certainly my generation had when I was their age. I think that resonates with people a lot. They don't want to see that happen to people that they care about. And so I think that can be a sort of like shifting or at least problematizing in.

Justin:
[1:01:09] Yeah. Well, we are at an hour and I wanted to do like audience interactions.

Jay:
[1:01:15] Yeah. Because you're here.

Justin:
[1:01:17] Yeah. Wow. It's literally not something we can do all the time.

Jay:
[1:01:21] So join the Discord and then you can. Yeah.

Justin:
[1:01:23] You can email us in the Discord and watch legally downloaded movies that I think.

Jay:
[1:01:28] Legally acquired.

Sadie:
[1:01:28] How many people in the audience are already part of the Discord?

Jay:
[1:01:30] Anybody? yeah i'm not

Justin:
[1:01:33] So like we were talking about like how are people organizing yeah it's like anyone want to it's i know it's hard to get up to the front but like does anyone want to talk about like the informal conversations you've been having like has anyone had like a conversation, recently with co-workers like shout.

Alison:
[1:01:52] It out and we'll repeat it yes

Speaker5:
[1:01:53] Oh i'm a new city employee so I am unionized but I personally did

Justin:
[1:01:58] Not hold a name.

Alison:
[1:01:59] Hey, that's alright. A New York City employee who's unionized. We'll take it. Shout out to your union. Hell yeah. What's the name of your union? DC 37.

Jay:
[1:02:07] Yeah.

Alison:
[1:02:10] Hell yeah.

Jay:
[1:02:12] Anybody trying to unionize? Yeah! How's that going, my friend?

Justin:
[1:02:16] We were having a hard time finding enough people so the small group of.

Alison:
[1:02:20] People that we

Justin:
[1:02:20] Did have just got together and we all took time to go.

Jay:
[1:02:24] Yeah, Debbie, Debbie. yeah so we got a friend over here who's trying to organize and they just affiliated or joining with the iww to help that out it's that's fucking sick

Justin:
[1:02:36] What i always tell people is if you have no other options and have no other way to like join a union you can join the iww and they will tell you how to organize your workplace and i think it's one of the weird things about the iww is they're very good at getting people set up and then having them split off and it's kind of like they're ideal now in many ways like i walk was like an iww thing and i walk split off so like even the organizing organizations i mean cp usa yeah.

Jay:
[1:03:00] Anybody doing any sort of like anti-ice or like rapid response like network stuff like in your libraries yeah do you want to talk about it yeah here if you can come up it's john i will hand you my microphone

Justin:
[1:03:11] All right yeah.

Alison:
[1:03:14] Can it reach? I'm just going to describe what's happening right now. We're dragging a mic cord to its natural limit.

Justin:
[1:03:22] Get real close to it.

Speaker5:
[1:03:23] Does it work now? Yes, it works now with a mask. I can see it right over my face. So I work in a larger library, obviously a large library system, but a larger urban library. So we get a lot of people in the building. We have a large immigrant population.

Speaker5:
[1:03:38] We get a lot of nannies. We were discussing in our children's librarian meeting a couple of weeks or a couple of months ago now what to do if ICE shows up. We have a library policy if ICE shows up and it is basically stall them until we can tell them we need to get the library lawyer and have her drag her feet. But, you know, we're in New York City.

Speaker5:
[1:03:58] The unmasked people are like taking Brad Lander out of the courthouse. They're not going to stop doing that. So we have a intercom. We have a room in the back with a lock. Our policy is that, you know, ICE agents cannot legally go into ticketed events. And a ticketed event only needs to be a piece of paper with a sign up. So we have a code word over our microphone. We page somebody who doesn't exist over the intercom. And then whoever's down on the children's desk has whips their sign up sheet out of the bottom shelf. We have a coloring page. We announced to everyone in the room, hey, we're doing a coloring event. um there are you know if you would like to come sign up you know your first name your child's name you can come into this room um we have gotten word that there are you know ice agents in the building they are not allowed to come into a ticketed event um come in this room we will lock the door and we will not let them into the room um that's about as much as we can discuss you know as we just in our discussions we could

Speaker5:
[1:04:58] have done uh legally in our children's librarian meeting but I think it's a good start. I don't know if they will respect any of those boundaries, but they have to respect a lock on a door.

Alison:
[1:05:10] That's rad. Nice work. That's clever.

Jay:
[1:05:14] That's like the button he has in the young pope where he doesn't want to be in a meeting anymore and so he pushes it and they're like, you have a next meeting, Holy Father.

Jennie:
[1:05:22] So where I live, there is an organization that has a program where you could volunteer and I'm sure this exists in other places and you can you get trained to go to different local businesses and teach them what to do if ICE comes into your workplace. It's an organization called Siembra based in North Carolina. And they're wonderful. I think I think there are other chapters. It's a I just moved. So I've not started volunteering yet, but it's a great organization to volunteer with. It's a great thing to learn how to do to protect your community. And yeah, I would I everybody in this room, I'm sure, is at least open to this idea, but definitely get in touch with immigrant rights groups because they have years and years and years of organizing practice for so many people. This is different, but definitely not new.

Jay:
[1:06:15] There's some like really cool organizing happening in North Carolina, by the way, like in the public librarians and the public school teachers are doing some incredible labor organizing.

Jennie:
[1:06:22] First meet and confer in the state.

Jay:
[1:06:24] Yes. First meet and confer. I know those folks. They're great.

Jennie:
[1:06:27] Yeah, they're wonderful.

Jay:
[1:06:28] Yeah. Shout out if we have any North Carolina listeners. Yeah. Yeah.

Justin:
[1:06:33] Yeah. It was something earlier in the discussion I forgot to mention was with with a lot of things, but particularly like the ice things or if you have a you know, are you working in a place where it's not as compliant not as open to you know being you know have like setting up a support system for if ice shows up um and when you have people like you don't know if you necessarily trust them to get the information or like call the police you can always say you'll do something and don't do.

Jay:
[1:06:58] It yeah you can yeah i

Justin:
[1:07:00] Do this all the time you can lie.

Jay:
[1:07:02] Yeah it's a crazy superpower so and i know that like a lot of focus in these discussions have been about like protecting patrons right like what do we do if ice comes in for a patron or like protecting like our trans patrons whatever are folks doing anything like to protect other staff as well that folks want to talk about like in your cbas or anything can't see anything no because i feel like this is something i also noticed when i because i no longer work in an academic library but when i was in academia like it was always the focus is on the students right it's always on like the users of the library or whatever and not the people who work there like this is not just a like our patrons issue this is also a labor issue yeah

Justin:
[1:07:46] It was like when you brought up that uh i think it was like zimbabwe's country code is still rh.

Jay:
[1:07:52] Yeah uh

Justin:
[1:07:53] And it's wow.

Jay:
[1:07:55] Yes it is in mark and uh in mark uh the country code for zimbabwe is still rh which stands for rhodesia which is bad yeah

Justin:
[1:08:04] Uh google it And so lots of military magazines funded a country. Anyway. You're totally right. Gigi said make a new account on Twitter. They'll show you. Also YouTube. But with – gosh, I completely like froze on what I was thinking.

Alison:
[1:08:27] Supporting staff.

Jay:
[1:08:28] Speaking of which, I had a union issue pop up because I'm a union rep and no rest for the wicked.

Justin:
[1:08:33] Supporting staff. But with the country code being RH, many places don't want to fix things like that because they are not patron visible. I thought, yeah, I bet there's no staff who are upset by seeing this. There's no other people in the workflow that are actually important. So there are a lot of issues that will affect staff, and I'm sure we can apply this to AI and job satisfaction. You know, there's always that study about the chemical researchers who, you know, the highest performers performed a lot better, but they hated their job a lot more because they were basically just checking what the computer told them. So they no longer had any... creativity in their job.

Alison:
[1:09:11] A few things come to mind um for examples of supporting library staff so one is a shout out to urban librarians unite the same thing i beat you urban librarians unite if you don't know um they're doing a great deal of work right now around trauma and library work like i think particularly with public librarians but not exclusively um and they've done some studies they They do some like cohort building, a lot of community support. And so they're doing really amazing work there. I also am encouraged by those of us who are working on like intellectual freedom defense. We've started to take more of like incorporating more of a civil rights approach and not just like a freeze peach approach. My freeze peach. My freeze peach. and so thinking about yeah things like you know my workplace environment and safety and my civil rights in the context of of having to be like screamed at by some right-wing lunatic and then in lfp i mean we're building a supportive community of people who are oriented towards this kind of work and these values but it's about it's a lot about like starting with the worker and supporting us and doing this work but like number one it's most important that we're supported because you got to put your mask on first etc

Jay:
[1:10:34] Yeah doing the like how this affects a worker thing was like literally like how one of the ways that we're fighting against ai in cataloging at my workplace was um i actually i had to i had to sacrifice my own ability i had to use it i had to do some ai stuff to show how bad it was and then i got actually interviewed by my union because like the way that my salary works is like there's like a salary grade and then there's steps within it right and the step that i'm at can technically supervise other workers but anyone below me cannot and i had to like basically when i like gave my little interview to the union because we were maybe going to be doing a grievance if stuff continued in a certain way i had to be like the amount of time i just spent just fussing around with correcting the prompts and this was literally just to be like can you clean up some call numbers in a fucking spreadsheet it wasn't even doing cataloging it was just like data cleaning right and like the amount of work that i had to put into i had to be like this was like supervising an employee and my my like supervisor literally went say that again and i was like it was like supervising an employee and he went that's our angle because people below me are not compensated to do that so it literally would have been violating our collective bargaining agreement to have anybody work with it to the degree that i did sick now then i was fucked but you know

Sadie:
[1:11:48] Yeah, and that pervades all levels of library work, because I've seen that happen in NIT, too, where I've gotten been like, hey, I need help with this. I'm trying to find this information. And I get back something that's it took me an hour to figure out was actually complete and utter bullshit. yeah and uh when i was handed that i wasn't told that it was generated using gpt and i like lost an hour of good time i could have been using to make that spreadsheet myself which is what i ended up actually doing so it's just like okay so like now not only do i have to like do this work to figure out you know part of my job but now i have to question where my colleagues are getting their information too so it's like it it's yeah it's not just cataloging or public service work it's it's every level yeah

Jay:
[1:12:40] So we have a little

Justin:
[1:12:42] Yeah if there are any questions if there are any questions you ever wanted to ask the podcast yeah oh hi uh feel free yeah.

Jay:
[1:12:49] Do you have this

Justin:
[1:12:50] Mic on untangled yeah.

Jay:
[1:12:52] If you have questions yeah

Justin:
[1:12:54] Okay previous guest okay.

Jennie:
[1:12:56] Hi case later friend of the pod I have a shameless plug to make I have an article coming out in Library Trends about AI and librarianship that is like why are librarians being stupid right now about AI but it's a lot nicer than that but look out for it, it's open access I think so yeah, that's my little plug but yeah, this is a great podcast

Jay:
[1:13:18] That was more of a comment than a question Say the text The question is,

Alison:
[1:13:23] Will you read my article?

Jennie:
[1:13:25] Yeah, please, it's in Library Trends the second issue of the generative ai special issue that's coming out this year we

Jay:
[1:13:32] Will make sure to share that thank you any other questions from folks

Justin:
[1:13:36] If it is not oa you can always put it somewhere to make it away no one no one can stop you forced.

Jay:
[1:13:41] Away no one said a dog couldn't play basketball i've done that

Justin:
[1:13:46] Yeah self-piracy yeah that's what i did with my master's thesis because pro quest wouldn't let me uh go back and make it away yeah um yeah i'm big big advocate for self-piracy uh if if you wrote it no one's actually going to yell at you yeah everyone does it every day on academia.edu i saw something about like a ai someone was like did did you know that ai academia edu is feeding your stuff into ai i'm like yeah do you know what academia edu is, it's a really bad website yeah.

Jay:
[1:14:15] Trying to like scooch around wow everyone's here wow Any questions or anything or just anything at all? Yeah. Yeah. So I'll repeat the question. So we have someone works in a school and not just like students using AI, but like teachers using it to make like worksheets and stuff because they already have a million things to do. Worksheets bottom of the priorities. And so that's what they're going to use AI to create. And so what are like strategies, talking points for talking with coworkers and other people who might be using AI to maybe encourage them to stop? Do we have any?

Justin:
[1:14:51] This is a big OER trend.

Jay:
[1:14:54] Is it?

Justin:
[1:14:55] Because OER is openly licensed, so you can feed it in, you can pull it back out. And some of the earliest AI libraries was people saying, oh, we can finally have supplementary materials for all of these OER textbooks that faculty want. because they don't want to make the slides and they don't want to make the assignments necessarily because, you know, if you work with a commercial publisher, a lot of that's packaged for you. It's one of the classic problems of OER. I'm kind of glad I'm not in that space right now because it seems really awful to like have to deal with the amount of like dealing with people pushing OER to do this. This wonderful like openly licensed community and movement that's finally starting to break through in a lot of ways into the mainstream. and now it's like let's feed it all into the bullshit machine from the book the bullshit machine please don't make the bullshit machine well.

Jay:
[1:15:45] Written by cory doctor oh yeah shouts out dude writes

Alison:
[1:15:49] So many books it's

Justin:
[1:15:49] Crazy chuck tingle's version i fucked the bullshit machine.

Jay:
[1:15:52] Also friend of the pot can you believe we had both cory doctor oh and chuck tingle on our fucking podcast

Sadie:
[1:15:57] Fucking amazing legends

Jennie:
[1:15:58] I love it

Jay:
[1:15:59] Like what the hell anyway

Sadie:
[1:16:00] Well my first question would be is there a policy about that oh

Jay:
[1:16:04] Yeah what's your ai policy

Sadie:
[1:16:06] I feel i feel like policy is probably going to be uh something we're going to have to weaponize and use in a lot because you know we don't have the protections legally or whatever so like what is your policy about this because it's something you can point to um so like do you have a policy for teachers about you to make curriculum or like is there a space where past or current teachers can provide like those sorts of like reusable resources like and i don't know anything about k-12 teaching so these are like genuine questions like how do teachers do this stuff and is there a way you can leverage that in within your school i guess yeah there's a

Justin:
[1:16:51] We actually have like an official.

Alison:
[1:16:53] Ai platform

Jay:
[1:16:55] So okay so we've got an ai platform magic school

Alison:
[1:16:58] Okay so

Sadie:
[1:17:00] It's like bill it's like baked into

Alison:
[1:17:02] And remember when magic used to be like magical and not fucking garbage uh i got a response to this i mean it sounds like what you're talking about is a labor problem right so this person needs to be radicalized about how their labor is being exploited.

Alison:
[1:17:19] And like, I would start by being like, yeah, man, it fucking sucks. Teaching fucking sucks now. And like, for all kinds of reasons, like teachers morale is lower than it's, you know, it's like my twin sister

Alison:
[1:17:32] is a teacher, like everyone is having a really hard time teaching. So like, start with validating that. And then be like, you know, what if you don't work harder and faster? What if you just don't do some of this shit? Because we're like, ask them quite, you know, get Socratic with it. Like, do you feel like your employer has been asking you to do more and more and more and not compensating you for it? Like you should join the union or like we need to get organized in other ways. And also I would add that like, you know, it's, it's like chat GBT for worksheets today. It's some other shit tomorrow. There's no end to if you start getting gaining more efficiency your employer is just going to ask for more and more from you so why why would you set yourself up like that right and so i think that like this person like they're obviously tired they just want to like get through the day and whatever and i think like you can have this conversation and then turn it into hopefully more of an organizing conversation and fight together yeah

Sadie:
[1:18:37] And like what yeah like what happens if they just don't create the worksheets i mean that's obviously not high on their priority list. So what is their priority? It's fucking hate worksheets. Yeah. And like what, what, But what happens instead? You actually get your students fucking talking to each other and you have to moderate that. And that's the part that you need help with or education on or like, oh, God, I had a thought and it's gone now. Thank you, ADHD.

Jay:
[1:19:07] I can start. And if you want to jump in with that help. Yeah, go for it. Yeah. So I've got a couple of things. One, so when I was in grad school, Dr. Emily Knox was my graduate advisor. uh yeah shouts out to fucking dr nox um she's great um and what one thing she told me that has stuck with me is that policies are what let you say no um obviously they are sometimes a way to start a conversation but policies are what allow you to say no and they protect both you and your employees and also your patrons or students whomsoever right and then the second thing is that like teachers when they get organized are some of the most radical people in this country like teachers unions are the ones that will break the no strike ordinance they're the ones that go i don't care if this strike is quote unquote illegal we're going on strike anyway and then they don't get fired like the only illegal strike is a failed one and the teachers do not fail like there are so many examples of teachers breaking no strike clauses and organizing um if you go to if you do anything with labor notes also go to their conference in chicago next year i think registration's open now but they have workshops all the time so many of them are teachers right teachers are so radical because they are treated like shit so like yeah it will not be hard to radicalize them, hopefully.

Sadie:
[1:20:17] Well, and I remember the thing I was thinking of.

Jay:
[1:20:19] That was my point.

Sadie:
[1:20:20] It's like part of the discussion about AI use among our staff in my IT department has been, you know, ways that we can then control the data that's actually being used. So if you, your system has a designated platform, you know, is it written out if that's to help protect teacher data is it going to help protect student data you know so like like we talk about like using copilot right but if we actually endorse copilot then people aren't using chat gpt and who knows what the hell they're putting in chat gpt you know it's also kind of a security issue uh you know like probably less so in libraries but you know people putting code and stuff through chat gpt so there is that kind of angle to think about too and how you can work that to be like yes it's a labor issue but it can also be an issue so if you want us to use this platform what are we like what why have that spelled out too i

Jennie:
[1:21:21] Think just this sort of i think more piggybacking off of allison um I think, you know, so one of the mantras of the teachers unions is that teaching conditions are learning conditions and that has driven a lot of teachers unions forward for a very long time and has really made them very successful. But one of the other things about using an AI worksheet is, frankly, like most teachers are not teaching something so novel that there is no like grade seven worksheet that has ever been done on it. Right. And like that is, you know, there are a lot of databases or you could even email a teacher who might have a similar curriculum, like particularly is for better or worse, curricula becomes more standardized across, you know, a state. Like, unless you're teaching something, I can't even think of anything, but like, you are probably teaching something that has a worksheet already that was drafted by a human. And in certain ways, it's, you know, it has its own problems. Like my ex-husband was a teacher. And one of the issues he had was that a lot of his colleagues would kind of just pass the worksheets forward and do them over and over again or pass the same curricula forward. And then they'd end up teaching like awful books, like a separate piece forever. And like every piece is good. Oh, fine.

Jay:
[1:22:48] I'm gay. It's good.

Jennie:
[1:22:50] The one, the one, uh, no, the alchemist. Okay.

Jay:
[1:22:54] I've never even heard of that one.

Jennie:
[1:22:55] Oh, the terrible book. Um, but anyway, so like, you know, uh, not, you do, you do not basically like you can, um, you can work with other people. Like you don't have to work with a machine. You can support other teachers. Like, wouldn't it? You know, that's also one of the reasons why we have Creative Commons licenses. Shout out. So that resources can be shared across. And for those people who are in the room, if I can maybe embarrass two folks a little bit, we do have two experts on OER in the audience. Do we? We have Michelle Reed, who works at Library Futures. And we have Nick Schake, who works at Spark. So if you want to talk to them about creating, maintaining, supporting open educational resources, they are here. They're wonderful. And I hope they're willing to answer questions.

Jay:
[1:23:47] We are getting to be at about six.

Justin:
[1:23:50] What are they going to do? Call the police?

Sadie:
[1:23:52] Well, and maybe this is a good note to end on. But I'm pretty certain that this is something I actually picked up from Allison and the LFP courses I did. Yeah, it really always just seems to come back to the two relationship building. Yeah, right? So especially in our current client or climate like it's it's so fucking scary and all of this stuff like I You have you have to work local. And even if that local is just like your friends and family, like there are people out there who have no idea what libraries do. And I'm always like, oh, yeah, no, this is a this is the kind of shit that libraries are experiencing right now getting. Oh, well, I never even thought about that kind of thing. But like, so, yeah, like, what is your local situation? What are the relationships you have there?

Sadie:
[1:24:36] How can you build those and then use that to branch out further? like that's always the thing that i come back to even in it where i don't work with a lot of like patrons or customers i'm still like this is still relationship building there isn't this is just relationship building there

Jay:
[1:24:50] Is a great online resource about how you do a one-on-one and we can link it in the notes of this episode because we've used it at the lucy parsons center before it's great

Sadie:
[1:24:58] I'm not making that up am i no you

Alison:
[1:25:00] Nailed it yeah thank you i'm so glad to wow be part of the community with you.

Jay:
[1:25:05] Oh, wow.

Justin:
[1:25:06] That's what about OER. Because, I mean, that was the entire idea was that people would, teachers are constantly remixing things and that they would make these things and share them so that labor isn't duplicated. We save all this labor, we save all this time. And then people who are trying to use AI for OER are like, oh, it's about the material. It's like, no, it was about the whole community and labor saving. If you fill it with slop, people are going to have to check the slop and everyone's going to go through waiting to have to fix it so yeah i mean definitely when i'm when you talk with faculty um and teachers in k-12 it's all about priorities you can't make more hours in the day for them so you always have to like get down to the root of the issue so i think asking questions about like what are these what do these like worksheets mean to you and as like for your teaching and is there something we can do that's a little more human-centric i'm.

Jay:
[1:25:59] An anti-worksheet anarchist now yeah is that it do we have yeah and

Alison:
[1:26:05] On that thought

Jay:
[1:26:06] And on that thought yeah at time uh yeah oh my god thank everybody for coming this is our first live show like wow we did it

Sadie:
[1:26:19] And seriously thank you

Justin:
[1:26:26] Someone take a picture we have to get a good picture.

Sadie:
[1:26:28] Thank you to allison and jenny yes

Jay:
[1:26:30] Our wonderful guest.

Alison:
[1:26:32] Go Birds.

Sadie:
[1:26:33] Gold star guests and friends of the pod. So I'm getting it around for them as well.

Alison:
[1:26:38] Thank you.

Jennie:
[1:26:40] Thank you. And thank you to Iffy Books for hosting this.

Justin:
[1:26:45] Yes, buy something on your way out.

Alison:
[1:26:46] Local legends.

Sadie:
[1:26:48] Buy something on your way out.

Alison:
[1:26:49] Buy something.

Jennie:
[1:26:50] Definitely buy something.

Jay:
[1:26:50] Everyone say Go Birds and Free Palestine.

Alison:
[1:26:53] Go Birds and Free Palestine.

Jay:
[1:26:55] That was great.

Justin:
[1:26:57] All right, good job.

Jay:
[1:26:58] Yeah, we did it. Cool. Good night.