I always found it interesting how hacker culture is largely propped up on the protections society has carved out for librarians following world war 2 (where certain sections of society had been identified based on what books they had looked at).
The hacker culture of “information wants to be free” is largely predicated on the librarian mantras of the same sentiment and only given protection by western europe after clear and serious abuse.
Librarians are the very forefront of information access and the privacy of looking up certain information, we owe them a lot.
I grew up in an extremely repressed and abusive household. I wasn't allowed to watch the majority of television or film, and my room was regularly searched for offending non-Christian records and such.
My aunt was the librarian at my elementary and middle school. I was a voracious reader, but I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7 and the books available to us in our school library just weren't cutting it. I also pined for more adult-oriented themes and plots.
Out of sympathy, my aunt allowed me to access the "forbidden zone" of adult books of which our school apparently had a large cache, hidden in the back rooms. She didn't tell my guardians, and I can't overstate how important this was for me. I've always deeply admired her work and attitude towards information accessibility, and it left an indelible mark on me.
And this is why things like requiring identification to access the Internet is a bad idea, and the narrative it's wrapped in - "protecting the children" - is really more about keeping children away from differing viewpoints
I'll expand a bit on my perspective to avoid just sealioning here:
Where I've come across proposals for policies like actual age verification is in the "social media is bad for kids" milieu. I'm extremely skeptical that these proposals are workable purely technically, but ignoring that, I have some sympathy for the concept. I do think that kids mainlining TikTok and YouTube Shorts and PornHub is really bad.
So having cleared my throat, I'm back to wondering about your comment. How, in your view, is this kind of policy "protecting parents at the expense of children"?
I mean there are many reasons that people say that TikTok is bad.
If you think TikTok is bad because it promotes unhelpful or malicious advice around body standards, that's one thing. (See: bigorexia getting promoted into the DSM)
If you think TikTok is bad because it puts children under a lens, that's another thing.
If you think TikTok is bad because it exposes contrarian viewpoints that are not available on your television, like, say, something Gaza related, then that's yet another thing.
Interestingly, one of the things cults and totalitarian regimes have in common is a singular obsession with subverting the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship.
I'm confused though, children getting information via unfiltered access to the internet is a subversion of "the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship", no?
that's just a kid, unsupervised
where are the parents in your scenario
anyways that's how I learned to fly, without the chains people like you want to throw on the rest of us
stay down there in the muck and grime
One of the things all abusive and controlling parents have is a singular obsession with maintaining the primacy of the nuclear family and absolute parental authority.
I think it's a pretty fundamental mistake to conflate the library with the internet. Even the "dangerous section" of the library is still a curated, by nature of the medium (the printed word), high information, low noise environment.
The internet is a commercial, mass media space, in large parts an entropy machine, where you're unlike in the library backroom are always under surveillance, where it's not you actively engaging with books but the internet engaging with you. A library is a repository of knowledge (which is not the same as information or "data") the internet is a dark forest where some pretty eldritch entities are always on the lookout for someone to pounce on.
Kids can be free in the library because, as to the title of the thread, there's always a librarian. There's no heroin needles on the tables. You buy the freedom of the library by it being an ordered and protected space.
Kids should have to identify themselves to access the Internet. I echo part of a previous comment from a ways back:
> I would not be the person I am today without early unfettered access to an uncensored Internet, and I say that both as a blessing, and a curse. It gave me at once access to early technology that's turned into a prosperous career, while also afflicting me with a lifetime of mental scars of varying severity and intrusive thoughts of things I saw and cannot forget. I struggle to label this trauma, but it's certainly not a good thing I carry.
And having reflected on this, yes, it's trauma. It's the dictionary definition of trauma. And crucially, none of this has anything to do with viewpoints. I wish I had found more shit about different viewpoints, and less about animals and people being tortured.
But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that. And I don't think anyone is going to argue that seeing some of the shit I saw was a growth moment for me or contributed in any way positively to me being a more well rounded person.
I think a far more effective actionable path here is disentangling the stranglehold that parents have regarding how their children are raised. We still ascribe very diligently to the Western notion that children effectively "belong" to their parents, and that their parents are the single authority figure that decides how this person is raised. Most of the time that's benign to a bit obnoxious on the part of entitled parents, but it also very very easily ramps up into straight up abuse. The notion that, for example, a heavily Evangelical parent feels entitled to and is endorsed by the system to be able to deny their child knowledge of anything outside their specific sect and it's religious text, and enshrine that as a reasonable choice, is horrendous. This is a whole other person, this child is, and in our current system they are effectively a resident of a totalitarian mini-state until the age of 18 (and given economic challenges, potentially much longer now) that is largely reinforced by our surrounding systems.
A child has basic rights, sure, to food, water and shelter, but even the enforcement of those can be inconsistent due to a combination of poor funding and an overall deference to parents that frankly is not deserved. We have reams upon reams of evidence of parents doing inconceivable evils to their children. It is not a given that a parent wants to care for their child and see them succeed. And advanced rights? They're a joke. A child doesn't have the right to consume and learn knowledge their parents find adversarial. They do not have the right to free association, parents destroy relationships their children have all the time, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of neglect, sometimes out of cruelty. Children's desires, identities, and interests are not able to be pursued if their parents disagree with them because there is nowhere a child can go (save for perhaps a Library, relevant to our thread) where they can freely do so, and their economic disadvantages put a hard limit on even that.
The notion that parents should have 100% authority to effectively shape other, new people into being whatever they think they should be is frankly unhinged if you think about it for more than a few moments. This isn't a matter of coming to grips with a child different from yourself, and learning who they are, and helping them be the best them that they can be: this authority grants parents the right to determine what a child can be, with ZERO oversight, and no ability for the child themselves to speak on the subject until it's possibly a decade or more too late.
It's incredibly frustrating as well because the same Evangelicals who will claim that every woman must be ready to lay down her life to bring a child into the world will then out of the direct other side of their mouths claim that that child, once born, has effectively no rights if said rights are potentially to be utilized against this unquestionable authority wielded by their parents.
The issue is that by forcing children to identify themselves to access information, be it the internet or a library, etc is that by doing so you are normalising that there are limits to what knowledge a person is allowed to consume or possess based on who they are.
That immediately paves the way for expansion of those restrictions.
We see that currently with efforts to "protect the children" by limiting access to things like porn. It's reasonable on it's face but immediately gets weaponised to start banning access to any content that isn't gender or sex normative.
There is a very intentional framing of "protecting children" while book bans are really targeting what are more fairly described as "young adults". The goal is of course ensuring young adults are only exposed to a certain world view.
It is good to normalise that because that is true. Children are not allowed access to lots of things, and that is a good thing.
Yes, "content that isn't gender or sex normative" should be included. Children should not be exposed to sexual subcultures or encouraged to experiment with gender non-conformity. They are not ready to handle that.
The real question is, what is it that you're so afraid of with gender/sexuality that you think it makes sense to show some expressions of it but not others? Sexual norms change regardless of what is officially considered normative and regardless of what is repressed, so you must know you're fighting a losing battle. So who or what is it exactly that you're fighting for? I think it has more to do with yourself than with children.
> But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that.
The problem is you'll be hard-pressed to have one without the other - not to mention that even if it starts off like that, the system is so easily abused to destroy privacy on the Internet for everyone, not just kids.
And by the way, I do actually believe more people need to see graphic violence, and I do believe it helps people grow. We all hear about gun violence and club shootings and the like, but it doesn't drive home the reality of it.
Do I think kids should see that? Probably not, but I also don't believe it's inherently going to 'traumatize' all of them - I saw much of the same stuff you did, I'm sure, and I don't count it amongst my trauma.
I saw people literally get scalped and flayed alive growing up on the internet and all it did was increase my empathy for people and compel me to pay attention to the violent struggles happening around the world.
I'm not saying exposure to such material doesn't risk traumatizing a child or even an adult, or that I am entirely untraumatized by what I've seen, but it still pales in comparison to the violence I faced at home. The problem is that it's like abstinence or prohibition: If such material is legally restricted, when people do encounter these materials, it won't be in a safe environment and the risk for trauma is much greater. To be clear, I do understand that some people fetishize violence, but I believe this risk is also greater if there is not a safe avenue for understanding the darkest sides of humanity.
Being compelled to pay attention to violent struggles doesn't sound to me like a particularly good thing. Nothing wrong with empathizing, donating, doing what you can for the causes you happen to hear about. But in my experience, people who are incapable of ever tuning out violence inevitably fall down radicalization spirals about it. There's just nothing I can meaningfully say or do about most of the violence in the world.
But on the subject of compulsion: there is definitely a line where utility is not worth the trauma, but as a child I was shown images of the Holocaust, of emaciated and abused Jews, and that has influenced me to now be against Israel and their continued holocaust against the Palestinian people, so I'm quite thankful for that.
In general, because school introduced me to it, I read quite a lot of Holocaust-related literature in my free time, both fiction and nonfiction, and that led me to learning about ongoing genocides and neoliberal violence-backed economic power struggles, and identifying with other oppressed people across the globe, greatly influencing my politics and turning me into the exact kind of person that my current state considers radical and would love to imprison and extract slave labor from.
> Do I think kids should see that? Probably not, but I also don't believe it's inherently going to 'traumatize' all of them - I saw much of the same stuff you did, I'm sure, and I don't count it amongst my trauma.
I remember when it was fashionable for trolls to post shock images like tubgirl or lathe accidents. I seen to have survived ok.
Yeah, it's my view that people don't truly understand how fragile life is unless they've seen how easily it is shattered.
People would get in less street fights and do less dumb shit if they knew what the world was like. The cartels are not your friend, falling and hitting your head can kill you, wearing a seatbelt is mandatory, there are no winners in armed conflict, factory farming is not ethical, etc.
People that say these things, but they don't truly understand them until they see it.
It’s very easy to fetishise war when you have not seen the grim barbarity of true conflict.
It’s not like the movies, and we should not think of it as a desired or easily entered venture.
Street/Knife fights are another, I’ve seen them first hand and its impressive how mundane things or subtle movements are actually just lethal. There’s a saying that “The winner of a knife fight is the one who dies at the hospital” but even glib phrases like this are not enough to prepare you.
Kids would be less keen to join gangs if they saw the brutality before thinking they might get cool points.
Clear meaning: yes. But idiomatic? I have to protest XD
Could care less has indeed left the barn by now and I could care less (as you can tell) but mixing up understate and overstate? I hope we’re in time to stop this horse.
It's alright. Human languages aren't really logically tight the way computer languages are.
An example that goes completely unremarked on is "near miss", which logically means something that came close to missing but actually hit, and yet in idiomatic use means the opposite. People also get upset at "literally" to mean "figuratively", another one I find strange because it's an intensifier.
Clarity matters more in formal writing, and "couldn't care less" isn't particularly formal in any case.
I wouldn't put these in the same category. The inversion of "could care less" meaning "couldn't care less" or "unloose" meaning "loose" are similar.
But "near miss" is more a parsing ambiguity, if not a mere disagreement about grammar. People who think it is illogical seem to assume it is "nearly missing". But in actual usage it is more that "near miss" is like a "narrow miss" and a "far miss" is like a "wide miss", all encoding distance to the implied target/hit zone.
And I can't agree with you. As a non native speaker, I deeply appreciate people making an effort to use language correctly to transmit information. I call that being mindfull of your interlocutors.
It is alright. Most people can figure out from context clues what the writer means and the only thing being pedantic and demanding about other peoples’ language does is make them REALLY not want to do what you’re saying.
Sounds vaguely similar to Jesperson's cycle and double negatives, the "couldn't care less" idioms. And "absolutely avoided for clarity" is a bit harsh, language is by its nature imprecise and telling people how to speak has (thankfully) almost never worked to avert language change.
There was an article I read by Keith Gessen about contacting his 3rd grade teacher as a parent during Covid and the thing that stuck out with me was the teacher talking about how some kids entered kindergarten able to read and some didn’t learn until second grade and in third grade, you’d be hard-pressed to know which ones were which.
This helped calm me as a parent of kids who entered first grade in the fall of 2020 not able to read (I was one of those early readers). My daughter picked up reading during the course of first grade but her twin brother not so much. Then, during the first month of second grade, he went from refusing to read “the” in a chapter title when I would read to them at bedtime to being a self-sufficient solo reader pretty much overnight.
Both of my kids are pretty dedicated readers now. When we go on vacation, if they spot a library, they want to visit it. I’m always happy to oblige.
I was one of the kids who didn’t learn to read until the 3rd grade. The only kid, as I was made aware at the time.
At first the urgency to rectify the situation propelled me into not only learning but reading a lot, but I didn’t know how much my peers were reading or what, so I started reading voraciously
Didn’t take long to outpace my peers. I have kept it up ever since
I see, thanks for clarifying. I don't know. I still think the most important thing we can do is empower children to be as smart and well-rounded as they can be. As the only intellectual, atheist, etc. in my entire living family I experienced a near-constant struggle for growing myself despite my circumstances.
I lived in poverty and abuse, under constant surveillance, and was subject to a cultural war for my own mind against my family and government. This led to strong feelings about my own capabilities and intellectualism, and a desire to prove others wrong about my limitations.
Maybe on one side it might seem a little silly, but the child in me still takes all of this extremely seriously even now in my 30s. The cultural and intellectual war against children never ended, we just stopped paying attention or became complicit with the system.
> I still think the most important thing we can do is empower children to be as smart and well-rounded as they can be
I agree. If we were actually gifted kids they should have given us real challenges with a chance of failure or discovery. Instead they just told us how smart we were and taught to emulate the appearance of intelligent people. Memorizing passages, quotes, checking out prestigious books. It’s to such a degree that much of millennial culture is references and tokens of intellectual landmarks from the 20th century - with no accomplishments for itself.
I did NOT experience this level of abuse or control but I did go to a religious school - not a weird one but you know they beat children just as much or more as the other schools there did and all that talk about the kindness of Jesus seemed to mean very little to them. Information was not controlled there, however, so one eventually did get to make one's own mind up.
I can see how you had a struggle to emerge and overcome a form of control. I can understand it because I had a similar, though much smaller, struggle.
What seems silly to me is the particular cultural excitement and optimism around education and liberalism, and the way it was manifest in school, that I lived through as a kid and is now dead.
The next/current phase of the library and librarian is as a community center, and not exactly a center of information. Instead it will be eyed for its physical accommodations for purposes like student meeting rooms, or tutors who rent rooms to sell their services.
Mine has rooms to park your kids in with cartoons playing on a TV. I want my kids to be interested in reading, not watching cartoons. When I discussed this with them, their answer was "Well, kids aren't that interested in books anymore."
That’s a parenting problem. Can’t blame the library. They need to meet people where the are.
When I had a kid I made a vow that I would immediately buy them any book they showed interest in. Any other toy or game would be a discussion but books, anytime anywhere.
And we put up bookshelves, so they would always have books nearby. There was a study I read where just the existence of books was beneficial, regardless of how much reading was done.
Oof, that's too bad. The libraries near me are great for my toddler. They do story time and play time, and it's a good chance for my kid to play with other kids. My kiddo always checks out a book (or three) when we visit.
Yes - they built a huge new library in the town next over as the old one was overflowing with books and then only moved about 1/5 of the books over when it was completed. They disappeared the entire CS section. But it has about 5 unused meeting rooms, an unused “media maker space” and an enormous light filled open second floor area with two couches.
If your CS section is anything like the “computers” aisles I see here, good riddance. I would rather see open space than shelves of outdated Dummies books.
We need to bring back “third places” (not home, not work/school) and libraries are excellent at providing that. You don’t need to buy anything, you can stay as long as you want, and there is ample community space to socialize.
Without a third place, folk just end up wasting their time online and tanking their mental health. Those connections aren’t real.
I truly feel that the rise of LLMs will devalue online interactions to the point where in person interaction is the only thing we trust and value. And we will be better off for it.
The trick to handle it well is easy access to catalog and ability to recall books from storage.
Another superpower in some countries is the inter library loan - you might need to befriend the local library to utilise it fully, but a classmate of mine in high school used it as effectively free pass to university libraries that you can't borrow books from when you're not suffering or faculty.
Where I live now, a large fraction of the suburban libraries are part of a consortium (SWAN—covering mostly south and western suburbs of Chicago). They have a shared catalog and any book/CD/DVD/etc.¹ can be requested right out of the catalog for pickup at my local library.
In California, I think you can get a library card at any public library system as long as you’re a California resident. At one point I had cards for L.A. County, Orange County, Beverly Hills, L.A. City and Santa Ana.
Many public libraries will do ILL for books outside their system for free, although that’s generally funded with money from the federal government which Musk and his band of hackers have decided it’s vital to eliminate.
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1. Well, mostly. A few libraries won’t send out CDs or DVDs but you can still check them out with your card if you go to that branch and then return it at your home library.
The books don't get put in storage in most places, they get thrown away.
> but a classmate of mine in high school used it as effectively free pass to university libraries that you can't borrow books from when you're not suffering or faculty.
The mass de-accessioning of older books is such a huge problem you often cannot find (even famous!) works through ILL anymore.
That’s in a lot of way a reversal. The default state of thing before World War II was very little data collection and even less aggregation.
Everything pretty much started in the 30s with data processing mechanisation and World War II didn’t end with more protection. It ended with states having the tools to collect and feeling ready to use them with things like the generalisation of passports, social security numbers becoming standard.
It has actually pretty much gone down hill from there since. I think people overestimate what’s appropriate to collect and misunderstand how things used to work which is why they tolerate so much monitoring.
Years ago, I pointed this out in a university forum, where a lot of the students didn't know this history of public librarians as intellectual defenders of freedom (e.g., promoting access to information by all, protecting privacy of records against tyranny, resisting censorship and book burnings).
I don't know whether this awareness-raising was net-positive, because it turned out that had painted a target on their backs, for a bad-apple element who was opposed to all those things, in that microcosm.
With that anecdote in mind, at the moment, with all the misaligned craziness going on the last few months especially, and the brazen subverting of various checks&balances against sabotage... I wonder how to balance communicating to the populace what remaining defenses we have against tyranny, balanced against the possibly of adding to an adversary's list of targets to neutralize.
In the specific case of public libraries, techbros have already insinuated themselves, and partially compromised some of the traditional library mission, before the more overt fascists have even started to use their own tools. (Go check your local library Web site or computerized catalog, and there's a good chance you'll find techbro individual-identifying cross-Web tracking added gratuitously, even for the physical copy media. I just did in mine. And the digital-only lending may have to be thrown out entirely.)
But when we happen to realize non-library ways to further good ideals, in a period of being under occupation by comically evil adversaries with near-ubiquitous surveillance (again, thanks in part to techbros), we might have to figure out discreet ways to promote the goodness.
Every school librarian I ever had fought against the administration constantly about restricting access to "banned books".
We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.
I'm not sure what you mean about hackers restricting the flow of information, please provide a citation that backs up your blanket generalization.
> We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.
These titles are invariably widely accessible and banned from public schools because they contain graphic displays of sexuality that parents don’t want their children to be exposed to. The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter).
They’re never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has actually been banned by a national government on these displays.
I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school.
> The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter)
I wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter at my home, but my librarian allowed me to anyway. I wasn't allowed to read books with sexual content, but my librarian allowed me to anyway. I was raised by massively abusive religious extremists. I didn't give a fuck about their attempts to control my mind then, and as an adult now I don't give a fuck about other idiots' attempts to control their kids minds now.
My guardians did every single thing they could think of to stunt my growth and turn me into a good little Catholic extremist. You simply won't understand unless you have been through such a horrible experience, as a curious mind with a voracious appetite for knowledge.
"I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school."
What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf? Makes no sense, doubt it's true, and obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level, let alone content.
It's not a difficult read. It's the historical context that's hard to get. The major political players of a century ago are mostly gone now.
In the early 20th century, there were still a lot of kings, emperors, and princes hanging onto power. The era of monarchy was on the way out, but it wasn't over yet. WWI started after an archduke was killed by an inept but lucky assassin. The ancient noble families still mattered.
The Marxists were quite active. They were the anti-monarchists. Today, Marxists are nearly extinct. There are still some Communist states around, but no Marxist mass movements.
The Catholic Church was still a major political power. That's gone.
Hitler was a competent craftsman and had done construction work. This was an era which required a huge number of people doing manual labor in big groups to get things done. That's when unions arise, by the way. "Working class" was very real, and that's where Hitler started.
The term "macho" wasn't available yet, so he wrote: "In times when not the mind but the fist decides, the purely intellectual emphasis of our education in the upper classes makes them incapable of defending themselves, let alone enforcing their will. Not infrequently the first reason for personal cowardice lies in physical weaknesses."
There's a long rant about Jews, which seems to come from clerk jobs in the WWI German army being dominated by Jews, described as physically weak and overly intellectual. Today, that might be a rant about AI. There's a similar grumble about parliamentarians, elected legislators and their staffs, who talk too much and don't exercise enough. The ideal is a muscular, disciplined society run by strong working people. He writes approvingly of how the US exercises quality control on immigrants, rejecting the sick and weak ones.
Now, this is where a librarian can help. Someone reading this needs background reading on Europe from 1900 to 1925. Searching with Google for "The World in 1900" turns up a terrible essay on Medium that looks like LLM-generated clickbait. A good librarian will offer better choices.
Kids who get all that background will question the way things are today, of course. Which scares some people.
Do you always immediately disregard what people say in favor of your own beliefs?
> obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level
I had a collegiate reading level in first grade... I taught myself to read at age 3 in order to escape my situation. I should not have to suffer because other people did not invest the same amount of time and energy into their literacy.
> What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf?
I learned about Hitler and why he was a massive piece of shit, but also formed my viewpoint while considering all available information and opinions, instead of just internalizing what other people told me.
Sorry that you had a bad childhood, but the answer to you, personally, having a bad childhood is not “the state should subvert the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship.” Just consider things under Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance: would you want a hypothetical extremist Catholic state to be able to subvert your relationship with your own (hypothetical) children?
> the state should subvert the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship
No, the State needs to get the fuck out of my business. That's the point.
> would you want a hypothetical extremist Catholic state to be able to subvert your relationship with your own (hypothetical) children?
See the above. Providing protections for open access to information is translatable across both situations you've described. Access is access. Censorship is censorship.
This isn't about the "nuclear family". It's about me, an individual, and my inalienable rights for self-determination, regardless of what others around me want.
Make no mistake, I am not using my anecdotal experience as the basis for my beliefs. I am using it as supplementary evidence for why this is all so important. My heart goes out to every child who has been or is currently in the situation I faced growing up. I don't want them to be like me, holding a gun in their mouth with the finger on the trigger at the ripe age of 9, wishing to escape a seemingly unending violent war for control of my thoughts. The represented majority will never understand the struggle of the unrepresented minority.
A librarian (who is employed by and thus an agent of the state) giving children access to books with sexual content against the will of parents is definitely subverting the parent/child relationship.
I didn't have a parent-child relationship. I didn't live with my mother or father, they were mostly absent in my life after the age of four and I was homeless by 16, after seeking emancipation for many years earlier and my parents denying me.
And fuck "the will" of the people who raised me, they were extremely abusive and traumatized me in every way imaginable, including through sexual repression and agency to chose my own destiny and seek my own sources of truth, knowledge and creativity. They sought to enact a chilling effect by surveilling me at every level of my life, including through my school systems. They repressed nearly every creative outlet I engaged in, including programming or exploring computer literacy, fearing it would turn me homosexual or turn me into a "hacker".
When he wasn't punching me in the face me or throwing furniture at me, or beating me with a belt for hours until I stopped crying, because "men don't cry", my grandfather used to shake and choke me violently and tell me I was a demon and would never love anyone or be loved by anyone.
They were evil people and I do not support any institution or government which wants to perpetuate the experience I had for other children. I seek to enable children to have access to knowledge and tools they need to determine their own destiny, and I firmly believe that full access to information and supporting institutions will naturally lead to a more empathetic society than will restriction of information.
I’m sorry for your experience but your extreme case does not invalidate the right of normal parents to exercise guidance over their children and to decide when and to what types of books, movies, games, etc. they are exposed.
FWIW, the most egregious issues you’ve mentioned about your upbringing are physical and mental abuse and there are already mechanisms for the state to intervene in those cases and nobody in this thread is arguing against those. Now it so happens that your abusers also limited your access to information, but it’s not actually clear there’s anything wrong with that, which is why we’re arguing about it, but it’s certainly the case that the fact that you were physically and mentally abused as a kid is orthogonal to whether or not the state should intervene in matters of mere access to information.
It's one thing for a librarian to call a teen over and say "hey, you should look at this book. It's full of ***." But if a teen wants to check out a book that has sexual content in it, then the librarian shouldn't prevent them. I think it would be prudent for the librarian to have a short conversation with the kid if they suspect the kid might be getting in over their head, but the kid can check out whatever they want.
I think checking out any* book, without a parent's explicit consent, is potentially subverting the parent/child relationship. Families are unique - there's no clear agreed upon standard of which books are "good" and which books are "bad." And without such a standard, it is, in my opinion, the library's responsiblilty to make literature and information as accessible as possible with few, if any restrictions. It's not the library's responsibility to choose which books are somehow "appropriate," that's the parents' job. And if kids are sneaking out to library behind their parents' back, idk, that seems pretty wholesome. Seems a lot better than sneaking cigarettes or booze or whatever.
I think the reasonable stance is for the state, in its various forms, to only expose kids to a (small c) conservative subset of what is widely agreed upon as factual and morally acceptable and to leave everything beyond that to parents. Kids aren’t under the purview of their parents forever; they’ll soon get out into the world and come to their own conclusions.
> definitely subverting the parent/child relationship.
That's the job of schools. Okay, it's not all about parents. We stopped allowing parents to do everything because, as it turns out, most of them are fucking stupid.
So we have public school, where real things are taught. And now, most people aren't illiterate. So, yay us!
But this notion that everything should always bend over backwards to cater to what parents want... uh no. This is some 2000s bullshit. This is not the way it worked before. If parents don't want their kids learning about X, Y, Z then their options are either getting over it or pulling their kids out of school to home school. Bending the public school to whatever their dumbass whim is, isn't an option.
Hopefully you can see the irony of, on the one hand, arguing that the state should have the right to intervene in the parent/child relationship wrt what information a child has access to and, on the other hand, complaining that the state is requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in schools. The power you’re arguing for is the very same thing you’re complaining about.
There is no irony here, you're not understanding the context. It's never been against the law for a teacher to show them here in school. But now they're forced to, even if they personally disagree with displaying and perpetuating religion in their public school classrooms, when separation of Church and State is such a core component of our Constitution. A huge amount of our state was against this violation of free speech, but our governor signed it into law anyway.
The library is still a resource for those who wish to learn more about religion, and I certainly used it while learning about various religions that I was not allowed to research at home.
They're not going to understand unless they lived here long-term. My friends in St. Martinville told me stories about Jeff Landry's (adoptive) family growing up choosing a different pharmacist because the one they went to not being cool with Vatican II was still too liberal for them.
The context of this thread is access to information, so that was the implied context of my comment. But to be clear: I agree that the state is right to intervene in the parent/child relationship in cases of physical abuse.
But then the State is implicitly deciding morality by deciding what is and isn't abuse. It's engaging in censorship, and is subject to corruption, as was and is my government in the Deep South. It's actively hostile towards information.
Literally just last month, we as a city came together and narrowly avoided the city passing a sneak ballot that was going to remove a lot of funding from our public libraries and redirect it towards police retirement funds. They even tried to repress our vote by making it a parish-wide vote instead of a city-wide vote, inviting in people who were ignorant of the consequences of the ballot but easily swayed by local identity politics.
Libraries are in danger, and it's precisely because they provide things that our local governments, and the current rogue federal government which they massively support, and their generationally brainwashed constituents, don't want people like me and other pacifists and archivists to access and share.
Ah, I see you are in EBR parish. Congratulations from NOLA on voting down the proposal. We did our part with the constitutional amendments but I won't be in this state for much longer. I thought that EBR parish and BR city were coterminous however?
Hey, thanks, everyone was pretty nervous but we came together :)
There is Zachary, St. George, Baker, Central and Baton Rouge. This is one of the games these cities sometimes play in order to sway local elections. I too will be leaving the state again soon once things line up. I hope you find a community that you feel connected to.
Probably eastern seaboard - I have spent over a decade in New Orleans and while I love it I don’t think it really loves me back and I haven’t really developed deep long lasting ties beyond the family I already had here.
Are you willing to take the inversion of your position: that you should have no ability to control what information the state exposes your children to?
What about media with sexual content? Or content that promotes creationism or the idea that there are two biological sexes, which were created by God?
My position is balance between the family and the state for the maximal benefit of the child.
Also the balance should be towards access to information. There is no symmetry between exposure to harmful ideas and restricting good ones. With your example of two biological sexes created by God it is pretty easy to explain that the reality is more nuanced. If parents restrict access to information and the state doesn't intervene, the harm is bigger.
To what degree should the state be able to intervene if parents are preventing their children from access to the truth? Should homeschooling be allowed? Should children be taken from their parents? Should parents who don’t agree with certain content be compelled to fund distribution of that content via public libraries?
They also are banning books that are critical of authoritarian governments, because they don’t want their children to resent the one they’ve chosen to install here.
Every single one of the books you listed were suggested to me by a teacher. It often felt like some of my teachers latched onto my strong ethical stances and continual disregard for the brand of institutional authoritarianism common in the Deep South, and felt compelled to nurture it.
Of course, it goes both ways. Plenty of teachers fixated on the idea of breaking me and making me fall in line. By middle school I had over 50 write-ups, a few suspensions, and had been subject to corporal punishment (literal State violence) mainly for "willful disobedience", a derogatory term which always confused me because I felt it positively described exactly what I was doing. In middle school, that number exploded as some authoritarian teachers became fixated on forcing me to adhere to school uniforms or demanding that I stood and participated in the cult-like Pledge of Allegiance, attempting to embarrass me in front of the class or to get my guardians to whip and punish me at home.
Public school was a battleground for the future of our society. It felt like 99% of people at the time simply didn't understand that. The few teachers who "saw" me and did what they could to help me navigate my abusive and restrictive home life became the most important people in the world to me, and I owe everything to them.
Show me one that was banned at the federal or state level from being either owned, read, possessed, transmitted, and / or sold. This is what an ordinary person understands when you say that a book has been banned.
I know you don’t have any examples of this occurring in the United States or you would have offered up specific examples.
> Wikipedia has a complete collection of titles that have been banned.
> because they contain graphic displays of sexuality
This is literally always the excuse used when censoring content from people.
At the end of the day, we need to acknowledge A LOT of the bans were because of racism, homophobia, and other prejudices, and that these "safety" arguments are just made to conceal that.
My mom when I was growing up found any expression of same sex relationships to be outright pornographic.
I find it is best to be deeply deeply skeptical of anybody defending book censorship because frankly the most common pro-censorship movements in the present US use words like "sexualization" to mean things like "gay couples and trans people exist".
Normal people wouldn't agree with that definition, but they'll nod along with "kids shouldn't have access to sexual material", so that's the code word that pro-censorship camps used.
I wish I could remember the link, but there was some website where it would accept uploads of banned books and host them so people could freely read them.
It had its own list of banned books that it wouldn't accept, The Turner Diaries and stuff like that.
I thought it was clear that the point is that "banned book week" is not about exposing people to fringe materials. It's about exposing people to the things that the librarian/teacher approve of but the community doesn't/didn't agree.
The real banned books are the ones that don't even show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books is long.
> I thought it was clear that the point is that "banned book week" is not about exposing people to fringe materials. It's about exposing people to the things that the librarian/teacher approve of but the community doesn't/didn't agree.
Yes, but that was already a given, and is the entire topic of this thread. Librarians in many cases became involved in the struggle for access to information even if "the community" didn't agree. I was raised in an extremely backwards, religiously zealous, racist, totalitarian-supporting Deep South state and never once have I thought, "I better do what the community thinks".
> The real banned books are the ones that don't even show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books is long.
Pat yourself on the back, you've discovered that librarians have to make compromises in order to continually push the envelope and not undo all of the progress that has been made. This is called politics.
The whole idea that "banned book week" is a time when students learn to think for themselves is silly, then. It's merely a time when one authority figure who doesn't like another authority figure grabs the reigns. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
That a cool opinion, but my own experience completely invalidates it. I always looked forward to banned book week as a chance to expand my horizons, and generally sought out texts that I felt the State and its supporters would rather me not have.
Just because they're a-okay now doesn't mean they weren't once controversial. It doesn't take a genius to deduce that something like To Kill a Mockingbird was probably wildly controversial before integration.
A lot of those books received a complaint by some parents or were maybe even possibly removed from a school library in one of the thousands of schools in the US. That's what they mean by "banned." It's just a way to market approved books to kids who have to read them anyway as if they were edgy.
In TKAM's particular case, a lot of the complaints came from across the spectrum because of the use of racial slurs, so it was often not even controversial for the reason you might think. Frankly the book is not even good outside of its propaganda value for fighting racism. At any rate, even then it wasn't meaningfully a "banned book", even in the south.
Sometimes "banned" is a complete misnomer, as when back in 2017 it was simply removed from the required reading list in one Mississippi school district because people complained about reading racial slurs out loud. But the reporting, as you can see from Google, almost all says "banned."
If you want to ban a book that deals with racism in a meaningful way because you are actually for the racism, this is the argument you would make in public.
Reading racial slurs and understanding how the character felt and feeling bad about it is the entire point. If your only exposure is casual racism on the worst parts of the internet then you just normalize that way of thinking.
> The Mukilteo School Board voted unanimously to remove the book from the required reading list on Monday evening, The Everett Herald reported.
> Michael Simmons, the board's president and an African American, told Newsweek that he and other board members made their decision after "seriously considering" the information provided
You can find story after story like this. I don’t think people like Michael Simmons are secretly for racism. I think your mental model may need adjustment.
The biggest thing is probably that in 2025 there are a lot of people who are genuinely not comfortable with anyone reading certain racial slurs, even when though they’re quoting. A lot of style guides and editorial policies also reflect this. The second most common complaint is probably that it is an example of “white savior” literature.
You and I can agree this is silly if you like, but the model of TKAM censorship as usually told is just false in every direction - almost never “banned” and almost never complained about for the reasons people assume.
I think both texts should be available to those who request them, but this cannot happen in a vacuum. We have to teach important context to our children early on, expose them to systems of ethics and overall ensure that they go into it understanding why Marquis de Sade was an absolute psychopath and why his writings must be read through the proper lens.
And Lolita is a tragedy, a story about flawed characters. Supporting access to the novel and supporting child abuse are two wildly orthogonal stances.
Yeah but do they include the spicy ones like Mein Kampf or just the ones that agree with their politics. It's not really a "banned book week" unless you're pissing everybody off.
The point they’re trying to make is the librarian is already the censor by the fact that they decide what books to buy.
The librarian gets pissed if someone attempts to “do their job” or override them, either by banning a book they want or forcing them to carry a book they do not want.
I find it hard to believe that someone doesn’t have some books they think the library shouldn’t carry, even if it’s just The Art of the Deal.
This was simply not the case at my middle school, and since my aunt was the librarian, I had a lot of insight into the administrative war going on behind the scenes. She was constantly being denied books that she wanted to introduce into our library.
The tone was set by the parents and administration, which comes from a heavy Christian brand of authoritarianism which has had the Deep South in a vice grip since the beginning.
The librarians did the best they could under the circumstances, and the only way we can consider them censors is if we overgeneralize and oversimplify the situation to the point where words start to lose their semantic value and anything can be anything else if you squint hard enough.
Providing a wide range of books based on pedagogical goals and training in library sciences or education is quite a bit different than showing up at a school board meeting to get a book removed because you read a one page excerpt that involved something in the valence of sex.
And it's a bullshit argument meant to invalidate people working against authoritarian measures. If everything (even selecting/recommending books for others to read is censorship than the term becomes meaningless, which I guess is the intent of the argument).
> Why is everyone responding to this thread going right to Mein Kampf?
Because they're riding a political hobby horse, insisting that the only valid defense of 1A (free speech) is to demand a figurative repeal of 3A. i.e. to require librarians to quarter the enemy's troops in their house. Because apparently the only valid measure of how free your speech is, is how much you tolerate some of the most censorious regimes in history.
Mein Kampf is just the most stark example of a book that is forbidden, but very significant to read if you want to understand WWII history. Uncle Tom's Cabin is another example of a book you wont see but is another piece of literature you should read if you want to understand the ideology of a given time period. You don't have to agree with a book to read it.
Another commenter pointed out the anarchist's cookbook, which is another great book to read.
Incidentally Mein Kampf often is available in libraries in Germany (in a commented version, here for example https://www.provinzialbibliothek-amberg.de/discovery/fulldis...), and was never banned in the sense that people understand banned. You could always own and sell old versions however, printing and distributing new uncommented versions could be deemed Volksverhetzung.
It's also a crappy text and definitely not necessary to understand WWII, there are better texts.
I’ve only read excerpts from it, and frankly, you don’t need to read it to understand WWII history. The important bits are well covered in any decent book on the subject and you won’t get any deeper insight by reading the source material.
> Another commenter pointed out the anarchist's cookbook, which is another great book to read.
Again why is it a good example, it's not banned in any meaningful sense of the word. I can get onto Amazon and buy it right now.
Calling it a good book to read is quite a stretch as well. It's a poorly written assembly of instructions for bomb and drug making (written by a 19 year old). Many of the instructions being outright dangerous, so much so that it has been suggested that the book was actually a plant by the CIA, FBI... (not that this is a very credible conspiracy theory). If you want to learn about bomb making better just pick up a chemistry textbook.
>> As far as I know, it's never been banned in the US
The question is not if it is banned.
The question is if it is general circulation in public libraries.
This is motte and bailey. If a school library decides not to include a book in their library, that's curation, if it is a book you don't like. If it is a book you do like, it is censorship.
If you walk into your public library and browse the shelves, is the Anarchist Cookbook there? Mein Kampf? If they're not, does that mean they are banned?
I go to my public library quite often, and the books I am interested in are most often not on the shelves there, and the books that are on the shelves there have a political slant towards a politics that I detest. Librarians are in fact dangerous.
Now, that doesn't mean the books I want to read are banned, I have to put a hold on them from the stacks at central and they will ship them over, but they will never be on display at my local library.
They're not banned. But the books on display at my local branch library are curated by dangerous librarians I want nothing to do with.
At my local public library, I could request books to be bought and put on the shelves. I was allowed to host open mic nights in middle school where I and other friends would read poetry and whatever else, free of censorship. Civil engagement through the library was easier than a lot of other public institutions, because while librarians curate, they also have the job of catering to their audience, and respecting requests.
The library became a sanctuary for me after school as it meant I could avoid abuse back home and have a less surveilled access to information such as books, wikis, news, protest music, games, etc. which I was able to later take back home or to other places and consume without fear of reprimand. It was also a third place, where I could meet people, gather people and engage with my community.
> They're not banned. But the books on display at my local branch library are curated by dangerous librarians I want nothing to do with.
Did you persistently try to civically engage with your local library over time and form a personal, positive relationship with the librarians? If so, and if denied, did you seek restitution in city hall or by contacting local congressmen? Or are you just complaining?
A public library is a third space where ideas can be accessed and exchanged, and a focal point where the community can civically engage. In the past, that has mostly meant books, which have been a great way of archiving things, but many public libraries also have rooms for listening to music, watching films, or at least renting them to take home.
Many public libraries also welcome and encourage open mics if they have space to host them without affecting others. In my case, it was a small library in a small town, so I hosted the open mic after hours with the grace of the librarians who worked there, who were more than happy to encourage literacy through poetry.
Yes, and I'm trying to enlighten you on the historical purpose of the institution so that you have a better understanding of what a library is, instead of just relying on a personal feeling or opinion.
I would much rather have a person who has gone to school to study childhood education and library science choosing books for the library, than randos trying to force their religion on everybody else's kids.
For your public library, if they get requests for books, they get the books. Lots of people want to read fantasy romance, so those are the books they buy. Hardly anybody requests the anarchist's cookbook, so they rely on interlibrary loan to get it when someone wants it. They buy the books that are popular. This isn't rocket science.
Just about any book you want is going to be available. This is what libraries do.
I'm pretty sure nobody commenting here actually wants Mein Kampf in particular. It's just a well-known example of a book that most people would agree to restrict. (The Anarchist Cookbook would probably be better if we need to pick a single work.)
... and since it's well known, its presence can get improperly used as a proxy for "this library is uncensored", when in fact the less-known books get restricted anyway.
The Anarchist Cookbook is a great example. I had to acquire that from the internet.
The people responding here mainly just come across as either ignorant or intentionally obtuse, thinking that if they can prove that in some cases the school administration overruled our teachers and librarians on the most egregious texts (as they constantly did), then the entire idea of "banned book week" is performative and not useful
No one here seems to have actually made a real point, just looking for "gotchas".
> It's just a well-known example of a book that most people would agree to restrict.
That's just completely wrong. In America it's a book most libraries would keep around as a visible indicator that they're not censoring books, and a book the letter-writing busybodies who want to censor books would not prioritize because there's no sex in it.
> It's just a well-known example of a book that most people would agree to restrict.
I don't think most reasonable people would agree to restrict such an impactful piece of history. It's shocking to me that people think something they disagree with should be entirely censored.
Mein Kampf has been available at every school I've been at. It's not part of the curriculum but why would it be? Libraries usually have it because they have robust collections on authoritarianism for obvious reasons.
The Anarchist Cookbook not so much. But neither are terrorist training manuals or other guides for making improvised weapons.
My guess is there are forums somewhere where people complain a lot about librarians not giving access to Nazi material and how it's a crime against free speech absolutism.
I get your meaning but it feels overly reductive. I'd call good faith picking a catalog and not trying to prevent people from finding certain books "curation". I'd call "delete anything that says gay" censorship.
It's hard to have an objective standard. A curator and a censor are both trying to pick content they think is appropriate for their community.
There may be a difference in what they do when the community requests content not in the catalog. I would think most librarians would consider adding requested content or at least referring the patron to another library or other means to access it.
> There may be a difference in what they do when the community requests content not in the catalog.
My partner is a librarian and I can tell you they frequently add books they personally dislike or outright loathe (be it for content reasons or if they just think it's a bad book).
This can happen at the request of the community, or even if they believe somebody in the community might want said book.
This "curation is actually censorship" balderdash is completely out of touch with what library curation looks like and how librarians work and see their responsibility to their community
I think the point is that whoever is in charge of curation can (and likely sometimes do) quietly and easily delete anything that says gay without anyone really noticing
Then those same people will often make a fuss when someone else tells them what they are allowed to curate
> It's just called "curation" when you agree with it rather than "censorship".
At least in Germany, virtually all public libraries are interconnected with each other, so if one library doesn't have a particular book, another one which has it can send the book their way. And in the case that there's no library at all holding it in stock in all of Germany (which is damn near impossible), as long as the printers have fulfilled their legal obligation to send at least two copies of the book to the National Library, they'll be the "library of last resort".
This interconnection is the case in the US as well. It's trivial to get books within the same regional system, and you can do inter library loans for pretty much any other library in the country (though not the Library of Congress, which is the US "library of last resort").
The core "engineer mindset" is solving interesting problems. The core librarian mindset is connecting people with the information they are seeking. That's what drives them.
I peeked at your profile and, well, do you know about OhioLINK? I think maybe you're holding it wrong.
The last time I grabbed something rare via OhioLINK it was a twenty year old instructor's manual that accompanies a calculus textbook I own, which they shipped all the way from across the state from some little college's library. It didn't occur to me to calculate the market value of that book. But here's a test...
I see seven copies of Asimov's Annotated Paradise Lost "AVAILABLE" for borrowing and...
Your request for Asimov's annotated Paradise lost. Text by John Milton, notes by Isaac Asimov. was successful.
I fully expect this to go through but I'll make a note here if it doesn't. And hey, you should totally try this yourself, it's an interesting book. (edit: although if we're being honest that's coming from a big Asimov fan, so I'm hopelessly biased. This went out of print after one print run, so it's probably not objectively great.)
I would call the difference: A librarian has perspective, intent, and a fierce optimism honed like the edge of a knife through abrasive contact with the world.
A censor sees only wrong thought and choices without any of the qualities of a librarian.
(The Seafood in a bar that mostly serves alcohol is probably not up to code in terms of food safety, the bar might occasionally have live shows and some of the things done at the live show might not be 100% safe, the dishwasher might have taken the job because he is not a legal citizen and the bar owner pays him outside of normal employment contracts...)
But if you see another allegory then it’s a good joke.
Look, I love the sentiment, and the illustrations are charming.
Unfortunately, the writing.
It's...stilted.
It's presented as a letter/email, but it reads as though the author wants you to hear someone with good comedic timing... DELIVERING IT LIKE STANDUP!
But ellipses...do not translate to funnier text. The text just has to be funny! "Pauses" only enhance what's already there!
> write a quippy, funny letter from a "concerned citizen" to their community highlighting the "danger" posed by librarians. said "danger" is their vendetta against ignorance, illiteracy. style should involve SUDDEN CAPS FOR EMPHASIS, ellipses...for...artificial comedic timing. But there's something more important to the style. Something being demonstrated in this very sentence. Yes - it's *short, narration-like rhythms". These shorter sentences should occupy their own paragraph.
If you can replicate a blog post with a single LLM prompt, you start to wonder whether the author had the same thought.
Why is criticism bucketed with cynicism? I led with my appreciation of the good things in the post.
When the day comes that I post something of mine on HN, I will be tremendously disappointed if all of the comments are the textual equivalent of a participation trophy.
do enough PR reviews and you start think everything is one. alternatively, with the causality reversed, explains why most people are pricks in PR reviews.
Yeah I see this kind of paternalistic condescending style of writing in many left-leaning circles. It sounds like it's geared for children but no they're actually writing for adults. They see themselves as moral beacons and they need to proselytize the stupid unwashed masses because they just don't know any better.
I was thinking it reminded me of a LinkedIn inspir-tizement post, but yea, also feels like a Reddit lecture. It reads like it is trying desperately to hold the reader’s attention while they are simultaneously driving a car and in another browser window scrolling through brainrot TikTok videos.
Joking aside, librarians have always been facing so much. Kids and parents are a whole topic, but many adults coming to a public library aren't just there to spend some time, they can be at a pivotal time in their life with a specific need, and getting enough info or access to the proper resources is so critical.
I still remember a clerk at our public library talking to an old lady who's husband was hositalized, and trying to guess what medical book covered the proper stuff.
A fun fact that please excuse me if off-topic: Mao Zedong was a librarian before he started the Bolshevik Revolution in China, and then he changed all of China. So it's often said in China that it's really dangerous to upset a librarian.
My understanding is that Mao was a rural peasant from the distant Countryside who was looked down on and marked by his more (self declared) socialist Coastal betters along China's Coast who were contesting with the kmt and later Japanese invasion. The idea that Mao invented the communist or socialist revolution in China is laughable because that revolution had been ongoing prior to Mao's entrance into it. My understanding is that Mao was the guy that stood up and said look, the peasants in the Hinterlands are an Unstoppable Army that is going to come flooding from distant and Central China on to the coast and push all opposition aside and so Mao was basically saying that that the Communists should be attempting to position themselves as favorably as possible in relation to the rising peasant tide of discontent in China. If anything the concern is that if you say anything that the modern Chinese Communist party does not like or agree with they will disappear you to all the corners of the Earth. It is probably only in Taiwan that you could speak openly and honestly about the nature of modern Chinese history from let's say 1900 to the current day. They probably have a better accounting of what was actually going on, and that will soon be deleted by the now dominant Communist Party of China. You can see how they have treated their assimilation of Hong Kong, and Macau before them to imagine what awaits Taiwan.
The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the attention span for good books. Libraries are getting rid of the classics to make room for new books, the majority of which are not worth the paper they’re printed on. We would do well to heed C.S. Lewis’ call to read more old books for every new book that we read.
I personally think the focus on attention span is a red herring.
Many good books don't require that much attention span, and putting the onus on the reader to like and focus on a book that is supposed to be good feels kinda backward. Given that people binge watch whole tv series and still read a ton online there is a desire, and probably ways to properly reach the audience.
Not all classics need to be liked forever, tastes change, and the stories are retold in different manners anyway. I'd be fine with people reading Romeo and Juliet as a mastodon published space opera if it brings them joy and insights.
Even a short and engaging chapter book will require someone to focus for more than 10 minutes on the text
I have been online since the early web and have seen how much content has changed to engage people. It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now. If you post anything longer I have seen people actually get upset about it.
People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine. I am trying to train my own children to seek out difficult things to consume and balance out the engagement bait.
It’s hard these days. Everything is engineered to hijack your attention
> People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine.
This. Both movies and series are now FAR less popular (and profitable) than video games, and video games are far less popular than social media. Even the minority that still enjoys legacy media enjoys it WHILE consuming other media.
Movie theaters are in as much trouble as libraries, and blaming either of them for their decline in popularity without mentioning the root causes would be myopic.
The cost of all this is that nuance and the ability to have a single train of thought that lasts longer than the length of a TikTok video or tweet are dying.
> The cost of all this is that nuance and the ability to have a single train of thought
People aren't watching TikToks while video gaming. The rise of video games, and the success of narrative ones, should tell us that people engage with the content and focus. For hours at a time.
But they need to care about it, expect way more quality and are way less tolerant of mediocrity. That's sure not great for Hollywood producers, cry me a river.
Libraries are reinventing themselves in many places, IMHO they'll happily outlive movie theaters by a few centuries.
I’m not sure if it’s true but I’ve heard that the reason so many streaming shows are like twice as long as they should be to best-serve their stories, and are so repetitive, is because they’re written for an audience that’s using their phones while they “watch”.
I wonder if it's not that people are getting dumber or less able to hold attention; rather, that everyone is being more exposed to lowest common denominator material because of efficient distribution.
Reader's Digest was always there on the shelf at the store and was very commercially successful. Most people who consumed more advanced content ignored it.
> It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now
We've had more publicly available educational content than ever with 40+ minutes videos finding their public. Podcasts have brought the quality of audio content to a new level, people pay to get additional content.
People are paying for publications like TheVerge, Medium and newsletter also became a viable business model. And they're not multitasking when watching YouTube or reading on their phone.
That's where I'd put the spotlight. And the key to all of it is, content length is often not dictated by ads (Sponsors pay by the unit, paid member don't get the ads) but by how long it needs to be.
If on the other hand we want to keep it bleak, I'd remind you that the before-the-web TV was mostly atrocious and aimed at people keeping it on while they do the dishes. The bulk of books sold where "Men come from Mars" airport books and movies were so formulaic I had a friends not pausing them when going to the bathroom without missing much.
Basically we accepted filler as a fact of life, and we're now asking the you generation while they're not bitting the bullet. And honestly, I can still read research papers but I completely lost tolerance for 400 pages book that could have been a blog post.
I’ve come to the same conclusion after years of feeling like the idiot for not being able to sit through books. If people aren’t making it through your book, they might have a short attention span but your book also might just be bloated, unclear, or uninteresting. It may even not have set expectations well enough. As Brandon Sanderson says, it’s very easy to skip out on the last half of Into The Woods if you don’t know who Stephen Sondheim is as a writer.
Early in life I learned the rule: If one person is a jerk, he's just a jerk. If you feel like everyone is a jerk, you are probably the one being a jerk.
The same is true of books. If you think one book is bad, it's probably the book. If you think all/most books are slow you should work on your attention span.
Shouldn't we take into account that the industry is also famous for being a monetization path for bloggers, pundits and grifters, for whom a book deal means jackpot; combined with a minimum word count pushing authors/ghost writers to pad their work to reach an average page volume ?
I mostly read non-fiction, so the landscape is probably grimmer, but actual good books aren't that many, and I feel that has been a common wisdom for centuries. Except we're trying push that fact under the carpet as already fewer people are buying books.
Most libraries track circulation of their catalog. If nobody is using the classics, they're going to get weeded. Most libraries have limited shelf space, and it's best used for things that people are using.
Archival can be part of a library too, but I think a reasonable tradeoff is interlibrary loans, public catalogs, and considering copies in other libraries while weeding. Some library systems can also move items to non-public stacks which may be less space constrained, and only access them on request.
This has been an ongoing discussion within libraries for more than a hundred years not a recent issue. Should libraries be a place with classics to uplift people or popular books that people want to read even if they are low quality?
> The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the attention span for old books.
Fixed that to mean what you say.
Luckily, people still have the attention for good books. Which is why libraries still stock good books, classic or otherwise. They also stock books that people want to read. Which might seem odd until you realize that libraries are there for the community to use.
However, you are free to setup a library that stores books that no one reads.
I think this is a somewhat wrong framing, and its also shitty to blame libraries for this shift. Tech companies, for the most part, are responsible for the destruction of attention spans, if that has really happened. And I'd be happy to bet that by whatever criteria you choose to select there are more great books written per year now than in 1240 or whatever time you think they only wrote great shit. Its just that now there is much more to wade through and the media environment is totally different.
At any rate, I just think that its a very strange thing to do to use "old" as a substitute for "good." There are tons of old books that are moronic and if the population of the world back then had been the same as now there would be tons more.
Are you being too passive aggressive to say directly that you're offended by commentary about AI that disagrees with your stance, or do you really keep track of these timings?
I find that old books can often take away more than they give to me. They often have outdated ideas on women or race and are usually far clumsier with depicting homeless, disabled, or sick people. Engagement with fans of old books often is a set of very sheepish defensiveness when I point these out.
I wish much of the lore about librarians were actually true, but these days they seem to be mostly focused on either filling up dumpsters full of old books for sale (why are they getting rid of all of the old books), stocking the shelves with DVDs (why are libraries in the movie-rental business?), or else organising things that seem to be quite tangentional to being a "library". For example, I think it's fine to take family photos or ID photos for kids... but is this really the primary mission of a library?
When I need an inter-library loan of a hard-to-find book, they say they can't do it since the Amazon price of the book is over $1,000. (Of course, we all know the Amazon prices are basically made up - offering books for sale that aren't in stock, and on the chance they get an order at an outrageous price, go try and find it cheap on the secondary market.)
Nonetheless, they're always asking for money - whether applying for grants, putting property tax levies on the ballot, attempting to raise sales taxes, despite the ever-decreasing levels of service, alongside requisite threats "If we don't pass this item, the library will close!!!"
I view librarians as ones that completely missed the boat when it comes to their traditional domain of organising indexes to literature, which has been eclipsed first by Google, and now by AI in general.
> When I need an inter-library loan of a hard-to-find book, they say they can't do it since the Amazon price of the book is over $1,000.
That's extremely odd. My experience is that libraries will sometimes exclude their particularly rare books from the interlibrary loan system (or from lending more generally), for the obvious reasons, but I wouldn't have thought the library you're trying to use to place the request would have anything to say about it at all.
I've never heard of that either. But I can guess it's meant to shield the requesting library for financial liability if the patron never returns it. If they're on the hook for replacing the book, then...
And actually, there are a number of academic books I've had to request through ILL because they're only in a handful of libraries, the initial print run from the academic press was probably 500 at most, and replacing one would probably cost $1,000, simply because there's only one person in the world currently with a copy to sell (if you're lucky), and they can basically set their price.
I used to skip school for at least two days to go to the big library in my city. I taught myself a lot of things. Did have access to books and high speed internet (by this era standards anyway) that I couldn't have or afford at home.
I wouldn't encourage people to skip school to do that of course. But I owe this period of my life a lot of what I am today. Someone with interest in science and tech. I have known some of the people working there and they were happy helping me navigating the library (and grap books for the short boy who is too short for most of the shelves).
I wasn't happy with how it turned out the last year when I visited.
I've never met a librarian like this article describes. I have met people like this in many other walks of life, but I've never met a librarian who seemed like anything but a scold with a stick up their ass.
Ideas are dangerous, librarians just stockpile and distribute them. In terms of potential energy books are more disruptive than nukes. The keepers who wrangle their power should have proportional status.
You could say they are the censors of the ideas that get into the library. So they should be accorded status based on that power, but there also should be accountability and transparency.
> You could say they are the censors of the ideas that get into the library.
But I wouldn't. This context incorrectly implies librarians are working from a position of restricting knowledge. In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.
> but there also should be accountability and transparency.
There is. 'Books on the shelf' is a gold standard of transparency. They are showing their work in the fullest possible measure.
In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good faith. The appropriate accountability for that is letting them do their jobs.
> In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.
A thousand times this. People who think that librarians are secretly censoring the flow of information are completely out of touch with how librarians work.
Librarians take their responsibility to their community seriously. This responsibility, to them, is nothing less than presenting their patrons with all of the information (books and beyond) that they are trying to access, regardless of their personal feelings about said information.
> People who think that librarians are secretly censoring the flow of information are completely out of touch with how librarians work.
Absolutely. My farthest r-wing years overlapped with my heaviest library patronage. Libraries were a space where my overactive, fault-finding radar was quiet.
Seriously. Librarians have always been there for everyone.
>But I wouldn't. This context incorrectly implies librarians are working from a position of restricting knowledge. In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.
> Choosing what to put on limited shelf space is inherently a process of choosing what to remove and to exclude. It is zero sum.
Titles are removed when the card catalogue shows they aren't being checked out. Those titles can be bought by the public at a steep discount.
What is included are titles that are likely to be checked out, plus what individual patrons ask for.
I've done the latter. For some unusual titles I had to supply the ISBN. If they were in print, they were on the shelf within a month.
Excluding books is a recent phenomenon driven by book-banning agendas.
> Books on the shelf is partial transparency. What was excluded, what was removed. What was requested for by patrons but not chosen.
This seems to flow from wholly imagined concerns - ones that are trivially debunked.
What is removed can be seen for sale and is also recorded in the card catalog. What is excluded (when book-banning efforts are successful) is also recorded.
What is requested by patrons is stocked. Again, I've done it.
Sure you could argue that with limited shelf space, a librarian is a censor by choosing what they do and do not carry, but then you have to ignore a lot about what censors and librarians actually do.
Ah! It makes a reference to Rose, the Hat (character in the Doctor Sleep movie). "My head is a library [...] you're just a fucking child". Hence the drawings looking like children homework.
So, if it is an AI that wrote it, maybe it has movie script training. That would be a smart move. Movies themselves draw specific personas to the foreground of a human mind and could put them in specific moods.
Or is it a human who wrote it? Maybe it was an angel.
--
Ok, no movie business. Is there a difference between biblioteconomist and librarian? I think one is more akin to that notion of classifying without curating or censoring that so many here aluded to.
In practice, I wouldn't know! (fun oversharing fact: I actually considered biblioteconomy as a degree).
I think the post is good and kind for a general audience. It's a good message that I truly believe in.
But I believe it could be harmful for those diagnosed with conditions such as Havana Syndrome, Schizophrenia and similar disorders. That is due to the fun ambiguous tone of "dangerous", which could have unexpected effects in someone going through a psychotic episode (I had one once, not a pleasant experience). There must be a better, less snarkier way of promoting literacy without creating those potential side effects.
Librarians are very dedicated, this was missed in the article. They are the first defenders against our freedom to think, read and express our thoughts.
Recently, I interviewed 2 librarians for an essay about recent book banning. They are vehemently against book banning, specially classics as seen in recent media.
My local libary is great for me at the point I am at life. Clean bathrooms, 3d printers and laser cutters, video conference rooms, free videos to watch, comfy chairs, a huge manga section. Not a lot of physical books anymore. I guess I can just use an e-reader and check one out that way. No more discovery.
While librarians can be "dangerous", libraries can be extremely beautiful (or vice versa, who knows...?). When traveling, I often try to visit ones, and, of course, we have some iconic photographs of them too.
This is consistent with my experience. One of the most impressive and inspiring presentations I saw at last year's HOPE conference [1] was from members of the Library Freedom Project [2].
This reads like the sort of self-congratulatory articles journalists were fond of writing about themselves in the late-2010s, just as public trust in journalism was reaching an all-time low.
I suspect the same thing is happening with librarians as they’ve begun to abandon all pretence of being impartial guardians of information in favor of larping as members of The Resistance. Ironically, the experts never seem to learn that you can only play this game for so long before no one cares what you have to say anymore.
This works if you actually have dangerously good librarians. I had one that could remember every single book location but she was extremely rude and treated everyone as a mentally challenged. Her daughter lived under severe dictatorship with no confidence and self esteem.
Okay. The point is that someone, yes, SOMEONE, needs to make the call as to what goes on the shelves. Mien kampf? The Anachist's Cook Book? Lady Chatterley's Lover? Is is librarians who make the decision AND IT IS NOT THE SAME FOR EVERY LIBRARY GOER!!!! Yep. They consider who's asking and why. They are some of the few remaining trusted professionals, and they remain so because we think they're harmless drudges. Power to 'em!
I miss the days when they shushed people. Nowadays, librarians where I go (to several local libraries) are invariably the loudest, most shameless talkers in the place.
Just a comment that the library has become my "third space" these days.
I am sooo grateful my local University library is open for public visitors. I visit every weekend and enjoy fast internet, a pleasant and quiet environment and can plug my laptop into one of many large desktop monitors here.
It seems relevant to this article, and its portrayal of librarians as dangerous, that the national Institute for Museum and Library Services was recently essentially destroyed by Presidential executive order and DOGE, probably illegally, its grants largely or entirely revoked, and its employees laid off.
It's interesting to note that at the core of Asimov's Foundation (spoiler: Va n frafr, ng gur pber bs obgu bs gurz.) was a bunch of librarians that were supposed to help restore the galaxy to order after a prolonged period of decline brought by disintegration of the galactic Empire.
I have begun taking my children to the local library, and I am shocked at how bad the selection is. There are very few books of lasting value in any part of the library. Nothing of serious or intellectual interest. And were I to give a factual description of the childrens and teens sections, I would get banned by dang. This is wildly different from the collections that I grew up with, in libraries trashed now by standard publishing spam, despite having vastly more money and space than they did when I was a kid.
Poorly curated libraries (though often staffed to the gills with "librarians") are a gaping cultural void and vacuum, while well-curated libraries are an important treasure. Good curation has little or nothing to do with "battling" misinformation/censorship, which in practice always seems to be about librarians championing a very bland and particular political monoculture. Good curation is the art of discerning the important, the unique, and the interesting, and avoiding the vast flows of spam that overwhelm everything these days.
My town votes 50/50 Republican/Democrat, yet our newly rebuilt library is filled with lib/women oriented non-fiction and contemporary women’s pulp fiction. They no longer even have paper sets of encyclopedias. It’s not possible to learn much about science or technology there anymore - they weeded much of that out during the remodeling.
Women reading mostly romance and the occasional “young adult” fantasy book is practically the only market left for authors, if they want to sell fiction.
Science and tech is obsolete like the format of paper encyclopedias? (It isn't.)
It's worth considering if a short-term focus on stocking fad romantasy comes at the long-term expense of a body of knowledge. Consider the classic value of college degrees - they're (largely) not optimized for fad pop knowledge or even vocational skills, instead optimizing for a rounded body of knowledge considered to be broadly 'educated'.
I don't doubt you, but in many locations you don't have to take your children to the local library. For example I lived in Sunnyvale for a long time, and yet after visiting the nearby libraries I decided to get a library card at the Mountain View public library. It doesn't matter I don't live or work in Mountain View.
In this particular city, at least, it's cultural malaise, and one that is hard to escape just by going to another branch. That said, there are some good used bookstores out here (not the big chain stores) that have great collections.
> There are very few books of lasting value in any part of the library. Nothing of serious or intellectual interest.
I've noticed this at my library as well. I was shocked that there wasn't a copy of Spinoza's Ethics which seems kinda basic. That being said, I think people underestimate how much garbage each generation produces. Past generations have done the work of curating the good stuff of their time for us.
> And were I to give a factual description of the childrens and teens sections, I would get banned by dang.
I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about but I'm going to take a leap and assume you're complaining about the presence of LQBTQ books in the library. I've noticed this trend where conservatives think that any book with queer characters is sexual by definition. People get upset by children's books with 2 dads that are just like any other book and it's honestly tiring. Queer people exist and have normal, boring lives and there's nothing inherently sexual or pornagraphic about that.
Let's not jump to the gun here. It could be as well that there's nothing there, or so on. And being accused of something you didn't is something I think we'd all want to not deal with.
That being said, I do also very much hope it's not what you say because I've been noticing that trend too :(
In a world with so many different opinions, where you know neither my nation or city or native language, it's odd that you would immediately jump to this. After all, my library could be run by Scientologists attempting to propagandize children, or Soviet-era revanchist apologists, or so on. Regardless of what material it is, yes, anyone who propagandizes children really is "dangerous", and not in the fake patronizing way that the the author of the article means it either.
> After all, my library could be run by Scientologists attempting to propagandize children, or Soviet-era
I admitted it was a leap and you're absolutely free to clarify what you meant instead of pointing out some ridiculous edge cases without explaining yourself.
> Regardless of what material it is, yes, anyone who propagandizes children really is "dangerous", and not in the fake patronizing way that the the author of the article means it either.
I don't see how having books with queer characters is propaganda but having books with straight characters isn't. I'm queer and I don't go around insisting that people ban Christian books from the children's section even though I think those values aren't great.
That’s because librarians have been making a concerted effort to “deaccession” (throw them into the dumpster or send them for pulping) old books, no matter how valuable. Often this teeters into ideological territory - old books might contain unacceptable thoughts. Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.
A second awful thing is this usually goes along with the idea that “well, it’s available online” - even as those resources are lost. There’s a lot of long tail works on niche historical, scientific, and technical topics that have been lost forever, aside from the loss of serendipity from discovering this books in your library and reading them.
In the past 20 years, my local library system has deaccessioned nearly every work from Ancient Rome and Greece. This is happening not just as small local libraries like mine, though, but even at large, old research libraries.
> Step two of curation is an anti-racist and inclusive audit, where quality is defined by "resources that promote anti-racism, cultural responsiveness and inclusivity." And step three is a representation audit of how books and other resources reflect student diversity.
When it comes to disposing of the books that are weeded, the board documents say the resources are "causing harm," either as a health hazard because of the condition of the book or because "they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate."
For those reasons, the documents say the books cannot be donated, as "they are not suitable for any learners."
So besides the "no old books" that was purportedly a misunderstanding is the official policy, there was also explicit ideological filtering.
Yup, they employed intense scrutiny on books before 2008, followed by ideological filtering as you noted, resulting in empty shelves.
On that note, it's sad to see the GP downvoted for raising this uncomfortable truth. I guess "deaccessioning" or "weeding" reveals a certain hypocrisy among those who supposedly hate banning books.
Just a few days ago, I visited the community college library reference desk. We were discussing and browsing the shrinking stacks of reference volumes.
I commented that some of these extant books must be kept because it was difficult to typeset or compile them electronically, and I pointed out a “Lakota language dictionary”...
but the reference librarian immediately disagreed with me, and she said that electronic resources were great and fantastic and better, and there is nothing of value that cannot be electronically reproduced... So I did not argue, because the Lady of the House is always right
There's something about that that simply sounds dangerous to me. I can't put my finger on it, but there's a certain resiliency in keeping printed copies of reference materials: they cannot be changed, disappeared (other than unloading them into the bin), or made impossible to access (unless the library starts putting books behind lock and key). If I want to learn about gardening (for example), I'd much rather get a reference text at the library than search for stuff online... which half the time is clickbaity or AI-generated trash.
It's not like the librarians have unilateral choice here. Old books on the shelves get vandalized and stolen; new books are not easy to come by, due to reduced print runs and supply-chain issues. How many times have we heard complaints about Amazon orders being "print-on-demand", and the quality is horrible? And if a published book is typeset in original PDF format anyway, why not distribute it that way to begin with?
Librarians have the demand side to cope with too. Personally, I don't enjoy checking-out books from the library. They're heavy; they require a backpack to carry them; they're not ubiquitously available to me wherever I am; they need to be physically lugged back to the same place where I found them. So yeah, I'd rather have an eBook.
But I contend (not in front of librarians) that a book such as a "Lakota Language Dictionary" is irreproducible in electronic form, because scholars have striven to compile those in print form; they developed new orthographies and documented the existing ones; and any new electronic-format dictionary must be recompiled, retypeset, and re-edited to satisfaction for a new publisher. So we won't have the same materials.
I used to derive great joy from finding really old copies of the Vedas, or a Navajo dictionary, but mostly Hindu texts in the original scripts. And yeah, they were painstakingly compiled by British colonisers and oppressors. But that history is preserved because of those colonists having a scholarly interest in "Hindooism". And those Vedic texts, and Panini's grammar, will not be directly transcribed to eBooks. They may take photographic images of them and shove them into a PDF, but those volumes will be given short shrift, because they're all Public Domain anyway.
The money's in stuff that you can copyright and IP that you can defend. And that's where libraries and librarians are going to follow.
Well, you don't need to think too hard about this when sites like archive.org are in legal danger, and the dream of Google Books is dead. I had not considered the "everything on the Internet is AI/SEO slop now" - that's a good point too: even if the stuff exists online, it's often almost impossible to find.
A few months ago I half-remembered a quote from a famous philosopher. Google and Bing returned only the vaguest, most useless search results - basically assuming I didn't actually want the quote, but general information about the philosopher. So then I turned to ChatGPT, which asserted that no such quote existed, but here were ones "like it" (they weren't.) Finally I skimmed through all the books I had until I located it.
> Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.
I think you might be missing that there are many different types of libraries. For a city or county library, they have to meet the very diverse needs of the local residents.
Yet these same local libraries used to be filled with the sorts of books I'm talking about. They threw them away to replace them with DVDs of Marvel movies, the worst dreck imaginable in the children's section, and shelves and shelves of the latest romance and mystery novels, along with whatever "hot" ghostwritten politics book is out.
Frankly, I look at that is abandoning their original mission and no longer feel inclined to support them in any way. Libraries should have led their communities as centers and sources of learning. What we have now is something else wearing libraries as a skinsuit, and I don't see why libraries like this deserve public support as a library.
But at any rate, as I said, the problem is not limited to municipal libraries, it's ongoing even at institutional libraries.
I've been working in the space the last few years and what I've gathered is Librarians themselves often hate what libraries have become. The ones working in University libraries seem to enjoy their job a lot more than the ones in large cities that act as homeless shelters.
On my campus, almost all institutional libraries have been closed down over the course of the last 20 years. There's still the main campus library and I went there quite a few times to work in peace and quiet. However, I have to admit that I never needed any of their books.
Why do people speak online as if the library is a place anyone goes to? I understand some people still go to libraries, but this cannot be considered a commonplace activity like it once was. Librarians do not hold any meaningful position in society because so few people come in contact with them.
Do you have kids? Virtually every parent I know (myself included) visits the library at least once a week with their kid. In my community the library is very well trafficked.
This sounds like some upper middle class white Boston shit. This is 1000% not the experience of most parents in America, especially the browner and poorer parts of America. Good luck getting one library attendance a year from most American children…
I thought this was going to be about how librarians are exposed to raw knowledge that is true goes against the current-year narrative, a.k.a. "malinformation", and librarians should be monitored for signs of wrongthink.
Many of my coolest collaborators have been library science or information studies people. They are just the people I trust the most to have a sensible balanced worldview between theory and action, and with enough distance to understand the false idols of capital and power.
I feel librarians so often get to be the sort of people that teachers wish they could be, if those teachers weren't so micro-managed by the state and the system
My local library was much denser as a child as well.
Except that's because the library was tiny. The denseness was a necessity and the library was constantly trying to get rid of books to make room for newer books.
Thankfully they eventually replaced that tiny library with a much bigger one. And the one we live near now is also much bigger and much better. I think the kids section of the library is probably double the size of the entire library we had growing up, with more books as well.
Yep. My local library when I was a kid I get to on my bike, and I looked for books on computing topics. I ended up with a book that was a compilation of articles from Dr. Dobb's Journal.
In the late 90s, there was a cornucopia of amazing books available - one was on programming Windows, and came complete with a CD in the back with a fully working copy of Visual Studio C++ 1.52.
I decided to poke into the library my kids go to for story time and see what computer books there were. It was truly bleak. There was really nothing that would bring back the sense of discovery I had as a kid going to the library.
When I was interested in programming as a kid in the late 90s, I too went to the library, but they only had books about computers from the 80s. idk whether my experience or yours is more representative. But today there are tons of free resources online, so idk if a kid would be looking for that stuff at the library these days.
I mean, they were never so narrow that a person in a wheelchair wouldn't fit. Or couldn't turn spin around.
I guess the benefit is that now two people in wheelchairs can pass each other, thus avoiding one of them needing to spend a few seconds going backwards, were two people in wheelchairs to travel in opposite directions in the same lane.
Yay. Totally worth halving the inventory for, not.
Because I saw others here speak about their libraries, I will too.
I'm Polish, I live in a big city. My libraries around, are, to say it mildly, awful. At best, they'll contain old school readings, some history book from communist period and old tech manuals (old as in, Win 95 guides or for tech that is no longer used).
sounds like underfunding issues, but they're trying their best with what they have. And as others have said, they are important community spaces for studying, meetups etc.
I really dislike fiction where the author tries to convince you it's real but has so many holes that it reads like more like a hastily conceived debate premise than a real work.
In reality libraries are one of the most conservative classes of people, especially odd the distinction since I'm sure there are plenty of progressive minded librarians. Doesn't help that the average age gap between a reader and their librarian is greater than average life expectancy.
Ebooks and Internet sources of all forms of media have rendered public libraries moot as book providers: every person alive (in the US) has a cell phone, and most have laptops, and can with a modicum of bootstrapping access these sources, without having to travel to a special building (partially) filled with paper books, to obtain a copy of almost any book in existence.
> Today’s dangerous librarians are much more. They are part educator, part tech wizard, part data analyst, and part myth-slayer.
> They host storytimes, teach kids about misinformation, explain how to 3D print a prosthetic hand, and calmly help a grown man named Todd recover his Gmail password for the seventh time. All before lunch.
> [Librarians] are dangerous to: Misinformation, Censorship, Outdated printer settings, Small thinking, apathy, loneliness
Who asked them to play these roles? If the public school system has failed to the extent that people are incapable of using online methods to find books or other resources, or login to their Google account, why is it the role of a librarian to backfill these gaps (and for taxpayers to be forced to fund such a peculiar backfilling approach)?
And some of the touted roles ("dangerous to: Misinformation, Censorship, Small thinking, apathy") are clearly social activist in nature; the meaning of all of these is in the eye of the beholder. So why are taxpayers obligated to (unquestioningly) fund people who clearly perceive their role, at least in part, as activist in nature? IMO you are welcome to engage in activist activities on your own dime, not mine.
So I certainly wonder where the value is in "libraries" since, say, 2010 (and yes, I read the article). If not for "book banning" stories, I doubt librarians would be a topic of conversation. Libraries and librarians are like some weird 20th century anachronism which persists into the 21st century largely because it's part of a (by definition well-established) bureaucracy (and lobby/union).
Treating “knowledge” in the abstract is dangerous. “Knowledge” consists of manuscripts . A book store or library is merely a curation of those manuscripts (or their copies).
Librarians actually are dangerous, in that they present “knowledge” as neutral, and “more knowledge” as an unquestionable good. Nearly all librarians and book store clerks share a skewed ideology.
Everyone expects a Christian, Muslim or Jewish book store to be filled with a tailored curation of books. Libraries and book stores are ironically treated as neutral “knowledge repositories”.
My point is that every collection is curated according to the taste and the agenda of the curator or librarian.
It is the quality of the collection that makes it good, not the volume. Librarians are dangerous because they’ve convinced the public that they are gatekeepers of knowledge, when they are actually just curators.
This reads like the sort of self-congratulatory articles journalists were fond of writing about themselves in the late-2010s, just as public trust in journalism was reaching an all-time low.
I suspect the same thing is happening with librarians as they’ve begun to abandon all pretence of being impartial guardians of information in favor of larping as members of The Resistance. Ironically, the experts never seem to learn that you can only play this game for so long before no one cares what you have to say anymore.
This comment got flagged within minutes after I had originally posted it, which is an indication of how seriously freedom of information is valued by those on the other side of this issue.
I always found it interesting how hacker culture is largely propped up on the protections society has carved out for librarians following world war 2 (where certain sections of society had been identified based on what books they had looked at).
The hacker culture of “information wants to be free” is largely predicated on the librarian mantras of the same sentiment and only given protection by western europe after clear and serious abuse.
Librarians are the very forefront of information access and the privacy of looking up certain information, we owe them a lot.
I grew up in an extremely repressed and abusive household. I wasn't allowed to watch the majority of television or film, and my room was regularly searched for offending non-Christian records and such.
My aunt was the librarian at my elementary and middle school. I was a voracious reader, but I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7 and the books available to us in our school library just weren't cutting it. I also pined for more adult-oriented themes and plots.
Out of sympathy, my aunt allowed me to access the "forbidden zone" of adult books of which our school apparently had a large cache, hidden in the back rooms. She didn't tell my guardians, and I can't overstate how important this was for me. I've always deeply admired her work and attitude towards information accessibility, and it left an indelible mark on me.
And this is why things like requiring identification to access the Internet is a bad idea, and the narrative it's wrapped in - "protecting the children" - is really more about keeping children away from differing viewpoints
It's protecting the parents at the expense of the children.
Honestly curious: What does this mean?
I'll expand a bit on my perspective to avoid just sealioning here:
Where I've come across proposals for policies like actual age verification is in the "social media is bad for kids" milieu. I'm extremely skeptical that these proposals are workable purely technically, but ignoring that, I have some sympathy for the concept. I do think that kids mainlining TikTok and YouTube Shorts and PornHub is really bad.
So having cleared my throat, I'm back to wondering about your comment. How, in your view, is this kind of policy "protecting parents at the expense of children"?
I mean there are many reasons that people say that TikTok is bad.
If you think TikTok is bad because it promotes unhelpful or malicious advice around body standards, that's one thing. (See: bigorexia getting promoted into the DSM)
If you think TikTok is bad because it puts children under a lens, that's another thing.
If you think TikTok is bad because it exposes contrarian viewpoints that are not available on your television, like, say, something Gaza related, then that's yet another thing.
Interestingly, one of the things cults and totalitarian regimes have in common is a singular obsession with subverting the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship.
I'm confused though, children getting information via unfiltered access to the internet is a subversion of "the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship", no?
Yes, I was agreeing with you.
that's just a kid, unsupervised where are the parents in your scenario anyways that's how I learned to fly, without the chains people like you want to throw on the rest of us stay down there in the muck and grime
One of the things all abusive and controlling parents have is a singular obsession with maintaining the primacy of the nuclear family and absolute parental authority.
Excellent riposte!
(I’m already responding more thoughtfully in other areas of this thread, so won’t regurgitate the same points here)
You mean like our current totalitarian, oligarchical US government?
I think it's a pretty fundamental mistake to conflate the library with the internet. Even the "dangerous section" of the library is still a curated, by nature of the medium (the printed word), high information, low noise environment.
The internet is a commercial, mass media space, in large parts an entropy machine, where you're unlike in the library backroom are always under surveillance, where it's not you actively engaging with books but the internet engaging with you. A library is a repository of knowledge (which is not the same as information or "data") the internet is a dark forest where some pretty eldritch entities are always on the lookout for someone to pounce on.
Kids can be free in the library because, as to the title of the thread, there's always a librarian. There's no heroin needles on the tables. You buy the freedom of the library by it being an ordered and protected space.
Kids should have to identify themselves to access the Internet. I echo part of a previous comment from a ways back:
> I would not be the person I am today without early unfettered access to an uncensored Internet, and I say that both as a blessing, and a curse. It gave me at once access to early technology that's turned into a prosperous career, while also afflicting me with a lifetime of mental scars of varying severity and intrusive thoughts of things I saw and cannot forget. I struggle to label this trauma, but it's certainly not a good thing I carry.
And having reflected on this, yes, it's trauma. It's the dictionary definition of trauma. And crucially, none of this has anything to do with viewpoints. I wish I had found more shit about different viewpoints, and less about animals and people being tortured.
But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that. And I don't think anyone is going to argue that seeing some of the shit I saw was a growth moment for me or contributed in any way positively to me being a more well rounded person.
I think a far more effective actionable path here is disentangling the stranglehold that parents have regarding how their children are raised. We still ascribe very diligently to the Western notion that children effectively "belong" to their parents, and that their parents are the single authority figure that decides how this person is raised. Most of the time that's benign to a bit obnoxious on the part of entitled parents, but it also very very easily ramps up into straight up abuse. The notion that, for example, a heavily Evangelical parent feels entitled to and is endorsed by the system to be able to deny their child knowledge of anything outside their specific sect and it's religious text, and enshrine that as a reasonable choice, is horrendous. This is a whole other person, this child is, and in our current system they are effectively a resident of a totalitarian mini-state until the age of 18 (and given economic challenges, potentially much longer now) that is largely reinforced by our surrounding systems.
A child has basic rights, sure, to food, water and shelter, but even the enforcement of those can be inconsistent due to a combination of poor funding and an overall deference to parents that frankly is not deserved. We have reams upon reams of evidence of parents doing inconceivable evils to their children. It is not a given that a parent wants to care for their child and see them succeed. And advanced rights? They're a joke. A child doesn't have the right to consume and learn knowledge their parents find adversarial. They do not have the right to free association, parents destroy relationships their children have all the time, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of neglect, sometimes out of cruelty. Children's desires, identities, and interests are not able to be pursued if their parents disagree with them because there is nowhere a child can go (save for perhaps a Library, relevant to our thread) where they can freely do so, and their economic disadvantages put a hard limit on even that.
The notion that parents should have 100% authority to effectively shape other, new people into being whatever they think they should be is frankly unhinged if you think about it for more than a few moments. This isn't a matter of coming to grips with a child different from yourself, and learning who they are, and helping them be the best them that they can be: this authority grants parents the right to determine what a child can be, with ZERO oversight, and no ability for the child themselves to speak on the subject until it's possibly a decade or more too late.
It's incredibly frustrating as well because the same Evangelicals who will claim that every woman must be ready to lay down her life to bring a child into the world will then out of the direct other side of their mouths claim that that child, once born, has effectively no rights if said rights are potentially to be utilized against this unquestionable authority wielded by their parents.
The issue is that by forcing children to identify themselves to access information, be it the internet or a library, etc is that by doing so you are normalising that there are limits to what knowledge a person is allowed to consume or possess based on who they are.
That immediately paves the way for expansion of those restrictions.
We see that currently with efforts to "protect the children" by limiting access to things like porn. It's reasonable on it's face but immediately gets weaponised to start banning access to any content that isn't gender or sex normative.
Indeed. This is how precedents get abused.
There is a very intentional framing of "protecting children" while book bans are really targeting what are more fairly described as "young adults". The goal is of course ensuring young adults are only exposed to a certain world view.
It is good to normalise that because that is true. Children are not allowed access to lots of things, and that is a good thing.
Yes, "content that isn't gender or sex normative" should be included. Children should not be exposed to sexual subcultures or encouraged to experiment with gender non-conformity. They are not ready to handle that.
The real question is, what is it that you're so afraid of with gender/sexuality that you think it makes sense to show some expressions of it but not others? Sexual norms change regardless of what is officially considered normative and regardless of what is repressed, so you must know you're fighting a losing battle. So who or what is it exactly that you're fighting for? I think it has more to do with yourself than with children.
> But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that.
The problem is you'll be hard-pressed to have one without the other - not to mention that even if it starts off like that, the system is so easily abused to destroy privacy on the Internet for everyone, not just kids.
And by the way, I do actually believe more people need to see graphic violence, and I do believe it helps people grow. We all hear about gun violence and club shootings and the like, but it doesn't drive home the reality of it.
Do I think kids should see that? Probably not, but I also don't believe it's inherently going to 'traumatize' all of them - I saw much of the same stuff you did, I'm sure, and I don't count it amongst my trauma.
I saw people literally get scalped and flayed alive growing up on the internet and all it did was increase my empathy for people and compel me to pay attention to the violent struggles happening around the world.
I'm not saying exposure to such material doesn't risk traumatizing a child or even an adult, or that I am entirely untraumatized by what I've seen, but it still pales in comparison to the violence I faced at home. The problem is that it's like abstinence or prohibition: If such material is legally restricted, when people do encounter these materials, it won't be in a safe environment and the risk for trauma is much greater. To be clear, I do understand that some people fetishize violence, but I believe this risk is also greater if there is not a safe avenue for understanding the darkest sides of humanity.
Being compelled to pay attention to violent struggles doesn't sound to me like a particularly good thing. Nothing wrong with empathizing, donating, doing what you can for the causes you happen to hear about. But in my experience, people who are incapable of ever tuning out violence inevitably fall down radicalization spirals about it. There's just nothing I can meaningfully say or do about most of the violence in the world.
My argument is about restriction, not compulsion.
But on the subject of compulsion: there is definitely a line where utility is not worth the trauma, but as a child I was shown images of the Holocaust, of emaciated and abused Jews, and that has influenced me to now be against Israel and their continued holocaust against the Palestinian people, so I'm quite thankful for that.
In general, because school introduced me to it, I read quite a lot of Holocaust-related literature in my free time, both fiction and nonfiction, and that led me to learning about ongoing genocides and neoliberal violence-backed economic power struggles, and identifying with other oppressed people across the globe, greatly influencing my politics and turning me into the exact kind of person that my current state considers radical and would love to imprison and extract slave labor from.
> Do I think kids should see that? Probably not, but I also don't believe it's inherently going to 'traumatize' all of them - I saw much of the same stuff you did, I'm sure, and I don't count it amongst my trauma.
I remember when it was fashionable for trolls to post shock images like tubgirl or lathe accidents. I seen to have survived ok.
Yeah, it's my view that people don't truly understand how fragile life is unless they've seen how easily it is shattered.
People would get in less street fights and do less dumb shit if they knew what the world was like. The cartels are not your friend, falling and hitting your head can kill you, wearing a seatbelt is mandatory, there are no winners in armed conflict, factory farming is not ethical, etc.
People that say these things, but they don't truly understand them until they see it.
I couldn’t possibly agree more.
It’s very easy to fetishise war when you have not seen the grim barbarity of true conflict.
It’s not like the movies, and we should not think of it as a desired or easily entered venture.
Street/Knife fights are another, I’ve seen them first hand and its impressive how mundane things or subtle movements are actually just lethal. There’s a saying that “The winner of a knife fight is the one who dies at the hospital” but even glib phrases like this are not enough to prepare you.
Kids would be less keen to join gangs if they saw the brutality before thinking they might get cool points.
As with many things, the concern is that it's bimodal. Some people learn empathy through this kind of exposure, and some people learn the opposite.
> I can't understate how important
Overstate?
It's like "could care less": not perfectly logical but quite idiomatic I think, and in any case the meaning is clear.
Clear meaning: yes. But idiomatic? I have to protest XD
Could care less has indeed left the barn by now and I could care less (as you can tell) but mixing up understate and overstate? I hope we’re in time to stop this horse.
I agree and I'm glad I was corrected.
I think we lost the plot once "unloosen" and "loosen" started meaning the same thing: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/unloosen
(for the record it's all inconsequential pedantry and in good cheer :) thanks for being a good sport)
Don't get me started on "try and"
Try and get started :D
We can take the horse that's fled the now-closed barn door to water, but can we make it think?
"Idiomatic" is idiomatic usage for "wrong".
The meaning is likely understood/inferred by many if not most, sure.
It's still a "contresens" (can't find the right word in English, literally counter to its meaning), and should absolutely be avoided for clarity.
Let's not just say that it's alright
It's alright. Human languages aren't really logically tight the way computer languages are.
An example that goes completely unremarked on is "near miss", which logically means something that came close to missing but actually hit, and yet in idiomatic use means the opposite. People also get upset at "literally" to mean "figuratively", another one I find strange because it's an intensifier.
Clarity matters more in formal writing, and "couldn't care less" isn't particularly formal in any case.
I wouldn't put these in the same category. The inversion of "could care less" meaning "couldn't care less" or "unloose" meaning "loose" are similar.
But "near miss" is more a parsing ambiguity, if not a mere disagreement about grammar. People who think it is illogical seem to assume it is "nearly missing". But in actual usage it is more that "near miss" is like a "narrow miss" and a "far miss" is like a "wide miss", all encoding distance to the implied target/hit zone.
I did use literally correctly.
And I can't agree with you. As a non native speaker, I deeply appreciate people making an effort to use language correctly to transmit information. I call that being mindfull of your interlocutors.
I'm also a non-native (though near-native) speaker and writer. I grew up reading a lot of English but not speaking much of it.
In a way there’s nothing wrong with ”near miss”. It’s a miss not far from the target. Still a miss.
George Carlin had a bit about “near miss” and other illogical phrasings.
It is alright. Most people can figure out from context clues what the writer means and the only thing being pedantic and demanding about other peoples’ language does is make them REALLY not want to do what you’re saying.
Sounds vaguely similar to Jesperson's cycle and double negatives, the "couldn't care less" idioms. And "absolutely avoided for clarity" is a bit harsh, language is by its nature imprecise and telling people how to speak has (thankfully) almost never worked to avert language change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle
Whoops! Thanks for the catch :)
underscore
> I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7
They told me that one too.
They didn't tell me that one. I could hardly read at 8
Once I started reading tho things really opened up for me
There was an article I read by Keith Gessen about contacting his 3rd grade teacher as a parent during Covid and the thing that stuck out with me was the teacher talking about how some kids entered kindergarten able to read and some didn’t learn until second grade and in third grade, you’d be hard-pressed to know which ones were which.
This helped calm me as a parent of kids who entered first grade in the fall of 2020 not able to read (I was one of those early readers). My daughter picked up reading during the course of first grade but her twin brother not so much. Then, during the first month of second grade, he went from refusing to read “the” in a chapter title when I would read to them at bedtime to being a self-sufficient solo reader pretty much overnight.
Both of my kids are pretty dedicated readers now. When we go on vacation, if they spot a library, they want to visit it. I’m always happy to oblige.
I was one of the kids who didn’t learn to read until the 3rd grade. The only kid, as I was made aware at the time.
At first the urgency to rectify the situation propelled me into not only learning but reading a lot, but I didn’t know how much my peers were reading or what, so I started reading voraciously
Didn’t take long to outpace my peers. I have kept it up ever since
And? I was literally reading high school and college texts then, are you indirectly claiming that this wasn't the case?
No I don’t doubt your ability to read.
I just happened to grow up in a similar time and culture with libraries, child prodigies, etc and it seems quaint and a little silly in retrospect.
I see, thanks for clarifying. I don't know. I still think the most important thing we can do is empower children to be as smart and well-rounded as they can be. As the only intellectual, atheist, etc. in my entire living family I experienced a near-constant struggle for growing myself despite my circumstances.
I lived in poverty and abuse, under constant surveillance, and was subject to a cultural war for my own mind against my family and government. This led to strong feelings about my own capabilities and intellectualism, and a desire to prove others wrong about my limitations.
Maybe on one side it might seem a little silly, but the child in me still takes all of this extremely seriously even now in my 30s. The cultural and intellectual war against children never ended, we just stopped paying attention or became complicit with the system.
> I still think the most important thing we can do is empower children to be as smart and well-rounded as they can be
I agree. If we were actually gifted kids they should have given us real challenges with a chance of failure or discovery. Instead they just told us how smart we were and taught to emulate the appearance of intelligent people. Memorizing passages, quotes, checking out prestigious books. It’s to such a degree that much of millennial culture is references and tokens of intellectual landmarks from the 20th century - with no accomplishments for itself.
I did NOT experience this level of abuse or control but I did go to a religious school - not a weird one but you know they beat children just as much or more as the other schools there did and all that talk about the kindness of Jesus seemed to mean very little to them. Information was not controlled there, however, so one eventually did get to make one's own mind up.
I can see how you had a struggle to emerge and overcome a form of control. I can understand it because I had a similar, though much smaller, struggle.
I also studied independently at a more advanced level than I was supposed to be at. Not sure I follow why this seems quaint or silly to you.
Half of all people are above average.
(Or maybe a third of all people if you count it as a range rather than a point.)
Only if you assume normal distrubition or similar where median and average are the same.
What did it do for you?
I enjoyed it, and it gave me confidence that I was capable of doing some interesting things. My schooling wasn't very inspirational.
Still not sure why it seems silly to you.
What seems silly to me is the particular cultural excitement and optimism around education and liberalism, and the way it was manifest in school, that I lived through as a kid and is now dead.
The next/current phase of the library and librarian is as a community center, and not exactly a center of information. Instead it will be eyed for its physical accommodations for purposes like student meeting rooms, or tutors who rent rooms to sell their services.
That has been a thing for about a decade.
Librarians and libraries are more like community outreach centers now that you can Google anything.
Many are struggling to help people with media literacy, and I don't know of any that are really doing a great job with that.
Mine has rooms to park your kids in with cartoons playing on a TV. I want my kids to be interested in reading, not watching cartoons. When I discussed this with them, their answer was "Well, kids aren't that interested in books anymore."
That’s a parenting problem. Can’t blame the library. They need to meet people where the are.
When I had a kid I made a vow that I would immediately buy them any book they showed interest in. Any other toy or game would be a discussion but books, anytime anywhere.
And we put up bookshelves, so they would always have books nearby. There was a study I read where just the existence of books was beneficial, regardless of how much reading was done.
https://www.jcfs.org/blog/importance-having-books-your-home
Finally, I read to them every night I could. Just 10 minutes a night.
Then you just put limits on screens. Let them get bored. They will start reading on their own, and when they do it’s just amazing.
Mine has 3d printers and laser cutters. I don't have kids but if I did I wouldn't mind having a place to park them while my print finished.
Ideally they'd be interested in more enriching activities, but I'm sympathetic to the idea that that's maybe harder than it sounds.
Oof, that's too bad. The libraries near me are great for my toddler. They do story time and play time, and it's a good chance for my kid to play with other kids. My kiddo always checks out a book (or three) when we visit.
Yes - they built a huge new library in the town next over as the old one was overflowing with books and then only moved about 1/5 of the books over when it was completed. They disappeared the entire CS section. But it has about 5 unused meeting rooms, an unused “media maker space” and an enormous light filled open second floor area with two couches.
If your CS section is anything like the “computers” aisles I see here, good riddance. I would rather see open space than shelves of outdated Dummies books.
We need to bring back “third places” (not home, not work/school) and libraries are excellent at providing that. You don’t need to buy anything, you can stay as long as you want, and there is ample community space to socialize.
Without a third place, folk just end up wasting their time online and tanking their mental health. Those connections aren’t real.
I truly feel that the rise of LLMs will devalue online interactions to the point where in person interaction is the only thing we trust and value. And we will be better off for it.
The trick to handle it well is easy access to catalog and ability to recall books from storage.
Another superpower in some countries is the inter library loan - you might need to befriend the local library to utilise it fully, but a classmate of mine in high school used it as effectively free pass to university libraries that you can't borrow books from when you're not suffering or faculty.
Where I live now, a large fraction of the suburban libraries are part of a consortium (SWAN—covering mostly south and western suburbs of Chicago). They have a shared catalog and any book/CD/DVD/etc.¹ can be requested right out of the catalog for pickup at my local library.
In California, I think you can get a library card at any public library system as long as you’re a California resident. At one point I had cards for L.A. County, Orange County, Beverly Hills, L.A. City and Santa Ana.
Many public libraries will do ILL for books outside their system for free, although that’s generally funded with money from the federal government which Musk and his band of hackers have decided it’s vital to eliminate.
⸻
1. Well, mostly. A few libraries won’t send out CDs or DVDs but you can still check them out with your card if you go to that branch and then return it at your home library.
> suffering or faculty
I assume this is a typo, but it’s brilliant.
The books don't get put in storage in most places, they get thrown away.
> but a classmate of mine in high school used it as effectively free pass to university libraries that you can't borrow books from when you're not suffering or faculty.
The mass de-accessioning of older books is such a huge problem you often cannot find (even famous!) works through ILL anymore.
That’s in a lot of way a reversal. The default state of thing before World War II was very little data collection and even less aggregation.
Everything pretty much started in the 30s with data processing mechanisation and World War II didn’t end with more protection. It ended with states having the tools to collect and feeling ready to use them with things like the generalisation of passports, social security numbers becoming standard.
It has actually pretty much gone down hill from there since. I think people overestimate what’s appropriate to collect and misunderstand how things used to work which is why they tolerate so much monitoring.
Good observation.
Years ago, I pointed this out in a university forum, where a lot of the students didn't know this history of public librarians as intellectual defenders of freedom (e.g., promoting access to information by all, protecting privacy of records against tyranny, resisting censorship and book burnings).
I don't know whether this awareness-raising was net-positive, because it turned out that had painted a target on their backs, for a bad-apple element who was opposed to all those things, in that microcosm.
With that anecdote in mind, at the moment, with all the misaligned craziness going on the last few months especially, and the brazen subverting of various checks&balances against sabotage... I wonder how to balance communicating to the populace what remaining defenses we have against tyranny, balanced against the possibly of adding to an adversary's list of targets to neutralize.
In the specific case of public libraries, techbros have already insinuated themselves, and partially compromised some of the traditional library mission, before the more overt fascists have even started to use their own tools. (Go check your local library Web site or computerized catalog, and there's a good chance you'll find techbro individual-identifying cross-Web tracking added gratuitously, even for the physical copy media. I just did in mine. And the digital-only lending may have to be thrown out entirely.)
But when we happen to realize non-library ways to further good ideals, in a period of being under occupation by comically evil adversaries with near-ubiquitous surveillance (again, thanks in part to techbros), we might have to figure out discreet ways to promote the goodness.
Librarians are also at the forefront of censorship and shaping information, so we also must put them under the greatest of scrutiny.
We don't live in an age where access to information is limited. Curation (retrieval) is more important than ever.
It has never really been about "information wants to be free". Librarians (and hackers, etc.) have always restricted the flow of information.
It's just called "curation" when you agree with it rather than "censorship".
Every school librarian I ever had fought against the administration constantly about restricting access to "banned books".
We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.
I'm not sure what you mean about hackers restricting the flow of information, please provide a citation that backs up your blanket generalization.
> We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.
These titles are invariably widely accessible and banned from public schools because they contain graphic displays of sexuality that parents don’t want their children to be exposed to. The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter).
They’re never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has actually been banned by a national government on these displays.
I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school.
> The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter)
I wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter at my home, but my librarian allowed me to anyway. I wasn't allowed to read books with sexual content, but my librarian allowed me to anyway. I was raised by massively abusive religious extremists. I didn't give a fuck about their attempts to control my mind then, and as an adult now I don't give a fuck about other idiots' attempts to control their kids minds now.
My guardians did every single thing they could think of to stunt my growth and turn me into a good little Catholic extremist. You simply won't understand unless you have been through such a horrible experience, as a curious mind with a voracious appetite for knowledge.
"I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school."
What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf? Makes no sense, doubt it's true, and obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level, let alone content.
It's not a difficult read. It's the historical context that's hard to get. The major political players of a century ago are mostly gone now.
In the early 20th century, there were still a lot of kings, emperors, and princes hanging onto power. The era of monarchy was on the way out, but it wasn't over yet. WWI started after an archduke was killed by an inept but lucky assassin. The ancient noble families still mattered.
The Marxists were quite active. They were the anti-monarchists. Today, Marxists are nearly extinct. There are still some Communist states around, but no Marxist mass movements.
The Catholic Church was still a major political power. That's gone.
Hitler was a competent craftsman and had done construction work. This was an era which required a huge number of people doing manual labor in big groups to get things done. That's when unions arise, by the way. "Working class" was very real, and that's where Hitler started. The term "macho" wasn't available yet, so he wrote: "In times when not the mind but the fist decides, the purely intellectual emphasis of our education in the upper classes makes them incapable of defending themselves, let alone enforcing their will. Not infrequently the first reason for personal cowardice lies in physical weaknesses."
There's a long rant about Jews, which seems to come from clerk jobs in the WWI German army being dominated by Jews, described as physically weak and overly intellectual. Today, that might be a rant about AI. There's a similar grumble about parliamentarians, elected legislators and their staffs, who talk too much and don't exercise enough. The ideal is a muscular, disciplined society run by strong working people. He writes approvingly of how the US exercises quality control on immigrants, rejecting the sick and weak ones.
Now, this is where a librarian can help. Someone reading this needs background reading on Europe from 1900 to 1925. Searching with Google for "The World in 1900" turns up a terrible essay on Medium that looks like LLM-generated clickbait. A good librarian will offer better choices.
Kids who get all that background will question the way things are today, of course. Which scares some people.
> doubt it's true
Do you always immediately disregard what people say in favor of your own beliefs?
> obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level
I had a collegiate reading level in first grade... I taught myself to read at age 3 in order to escape my situation. I should not have to suffer because other people did not invest the same amount of time and energy into their literacy.
> What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf?
I learned about Hitler and why he was a massive piece of shit, but also formed my viewpoint while considering all available information and opinions, instead of just internalizing what other people told me.
Oh hi, I too was in the same boat with reading level.
Sorry that you had a bad childhood, but the answer to you, personally, having a bad childhood is not “the state should subvert the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship.” Just consider things under Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance: would you want a hypothetical extremist Catholic state to be able to subvert your relationship with your own (hypothetical) children?
> the state should subvert the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship
No, the State needs to get the fuck out of my business. That's the point.
> would you want a hypothetical extremist Catholic state to be able to subvert your relationship with your own (hypothetical) children?
See the above. Providing protections for open access to information is translatable across both situations you've described. Access is access. Censorship is censorship.
This isn't about the "nuclear family". It's about me, an individual, and my inalienable rights for self-determination, regardless of what others around me want.
Make no mistake, I am not using my anecdotal experience as the basis for my beliefs. I am using it as supplementary evidence for why this is all so important. My heart goes out to every child who has been or is currently in the situation I faced growing up. I don't want them to be like me, holding a gun in their mouth with the finger on the trigger at the ripe age of 9, wishing to escape a seemingly unending violent war for control of my thoughts. The represented majority will never understand the struggle of the unrepresented minority.
A librarian (who is employed by and thus an agent of the state) giving children access to books with sexual content against the will of parents is definitely subverting the parent/child relationship.
I didn't have a parent-child relationship. I didn't live with my mother or father, they were mostly absent in my life after the age of four and I was homeless by 16, after seeking emancipation for many years earlier and my parents denying me.
And fuck "the will" of the people who raised me, they were extremely abusive and traumatized me in every way imaginable, including through sexual repression and agency to chose my own destiny and seek my own sources of truth, knowledge and creativity. They sought to enact a chilling effect by surveilling me at every level of my life, including through my school systems. They repressed nearly every creative outlet I engaged in, including programming or exploring computer literacy, fearing it would turn me homosexual or turn me into a "hacker".
When he wasn't punching me in the face me or throwing furniture at me, or beating me with a belt for hours until I stopped crying, because "men don't cry", my grandfather used to shake and choke me violently and tell me I was a demon and would never love anyone or be loved by anyone.
They were evil people and I do not support any institution or government which wants to perpetuate the experience I had for other children. I seek to enable children to have access to knowledge and tools they need to determine their own destiny, and I firmly believe that full access to information and supporting institutions will naturally lead to a more empathetic society than will restriction of information.
I’m sorry for your experience but your extreme case does not invalidate the right of normal parents to exercise guidance over their children and to decide when and to what types of books, movies, games, etc. they are exposed.
My experience is the edge case that people like you try to pretend either doesn't exist or doesn't matter when justifying the current system.
FWIW, the most egregious issues you’ve mentioned about your upbringing are physical and mental abuse and there are already mechanisms for the state to intervene in those cases and nobody in this thread is arguing against those. Now it so happens that your abusers also limited your access to information, but it’s not actually clear there’s anything wrong with that, which is why we’re arguing about it, but it’s certainly the case that the fact that you were physically and mentally abused as a kid is orthogonal to whether or not the state should intervene in matters of mere access to information.
Parallel really, not orthogonal. It's better that I cut off your internet than hit you with a hammer, but not much better.
Is cutting off a teen’s internet bad if they’re being bullied or groomed on social media?
Do you think if a teen is being bullied, cutting them off from the Internet will help?
It's one thing for a librarian to call a teen over and say "hey, you should look at this book. It's full of ***." But if a teen wants to check out a book that has sexual content in it, then the librarian shouldn't prevent them. I think it would be prudent for the librarian to have a short conversation with the kid if they suspect the kid might be getting in over their head, but the kid can check out whatever they want.
I think checking out any* book, without a parent's explicit consent, is potentially subverting the parent/child relationship. Families are unique - there's no clear agreed upon standard of which books are "good" and which books are "bad." And without such a standard, it is, in my opinion, the library's responsiblilty to make literature and information as accessible as possible with few, if any restrictions. It's not the library's responsibility to choose which books are somehow "appropriate," that's the parents' job. And if kids are sneaking out to library behind their parents' back, idk, that seems pretty wholesome. Seems a lot better than sneaking cigarettes or booze or whatever.
I think the reasonable stance is for the state, in its various forms, to only expose kids to a (small c) conservative subset of what is widely agreed upon as factual and morally acceptable and to leave everything beyond that to parents. Kids aren’t under the purview of their parents forever; they’ll soon get out into the world and come to their own conclusions.
> definitely subverting the parent/child relationship.
That's the job of schools. Okay, it's not all about parents. We stopped allowing parents to do everything because, as it turns out, most of them are fucking stupid.
So we have public school, where real things are taught. And now, most people aren't illiterate. So, yay us!
But this notion that everything should always bend over backwards to cater to what parents want... uh no. This is some 2000s bullshit. This is not the way it worked before. If parents don't want their kids learning about X, Y, Z then their options are either getting over it or pulling their kids out of school to home school. Bending the public school to whatever their dumbass whim is, isn't an option.
And now my state has this bad boy: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/28/what-is-louisianas-...
"Louisiana is the first US state to require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in schools. The law stipulates the following:
- Public schools are required to display a poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, school library and cafeteria.
- They must be displayed on a poster of minimum 11×14-inch (28×35.5cm) size and be written in an easily readable, large font."
Separation of Church and State, my ass.
Hopefully you can see the irony of, on the one hand, arguing that the state should have the right to intervene in the parent/child relationship wrt what information a child has access to and, on the other hand, complaining that the state is requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in schools. The power you’re arguing for is the very same thing you’re complaining about.
There is no irony here, you're not understanding the context. It's never been against the law for a teacher to show them here in school. But now they're forced to, even if they personally disagree with displaying and perpetuating religion in their public school classrooms, when separation of Church and State is such a core component of our Constitution. A huge amount of our state was against this violation of free speech, but our governor signed it into law anyway.
The library is still a resource for those who wish to learn more about religion, and I certainly used it while learning about various religions that I was not allowed to research at home.
They're not going to understand unless they lived here long-term. My friends in St. Martinville told me stories about Jeff Landry's (adoptive) family growing up choosing a different pharmacist because the one they went to not being cool with Vatican II was still too liberal for them.
When you are a child you are not an individual. You are a child. What your parents want matters more than what you want.
Under Rawls' Veil of Ignorance I actually want the state to protect me as a child born into a random family that could happen to be abusive.
The context of this thread is access to information, so that was the implied context of my comment. But to be clear: I agree that the state is right to intervene in the parent/child relationship in cases of physical abuse.
But then the State is implicitly deciding morality by deciding what is and isn't abuse. It's engaging in censorship, and is subject to corruption, as was and is my government in the Deep South. It's actively hostile towards information.
Literally just last month, we as a city came together and narrowly avoided the city passing a sneak ballot that was going to remove a lot of funding from our public libraries and redirect it towards police retirement funds. They even tried to repress our vote by making it a parish-wide vote instead of a city-wide vote, inviting in people who were ignorant of the consequences of the ballot but easily swayed by local identity politics.
Libraries are in danger, and it's precisely because they provide things that our local governments, and the current rogue federal government which they massively support, and their generationally brainwashed constituents, don't want people like me and other pacifists and archivists to access and share.
Ah, I see you are in EBR parish. Congratulations from NOLA on voting down the proposal. We did our part with the constitutional amendments but I won't be in this state for much longer. I thought that EBR parish and BR city were coterminous however?
Hey, thanks, everyone was pretty nervous but we came together :)
There is Zachary, St. George, Baker, Central and Baton Rouge. This is one of the games these cities sometimes play in order to sway local elections. I too will be leaving the state again soon once things line up. I hope you find a community that you feel connected to.
Probably eastern seaboard - I have spent over a decade in New Orleans and while I love it I don’t think it really loves me back and I haven’t really developed deep long lasting ties beyond the family I already had here.
I meant abusive in the general sense, including overt restrictions in access to information.
My hypothetical parents behind Rawls' Veil should not be able to prevent me from learning about evolution to give a concrete example.
Are you willing to take the inversion of your position: that you should have no ability to control what information the state exposes your children to?
What about media with sexual content? Or content that promotes creationism or the idea that there are two biological sexes, which were created by God?
My position is balance between the family and the state for the maximal benefit of the child.
Also the balance should be towards access to information. There is no symmetry between exposure to harmful ideas and restricting good ones. With your example of two biological sexes created by God it is pretty easy to explain that the reality is more nuanced. If parents restrict access to information and the state doesn't intervene, the harm is bigger.
To what degree should the state be able to intervene if parents are preventing their children from access to the truth? Should homeschooling be allowed? Should children be taken from their parents? Should parents who don’t agree with certain content be compelled to fund distribution of that content via public libraries?
They also are banning books that are critical of authoritarian governments, because they don’t want their children to resent the one they’ve chosen to install here.
Which specific books are being banned? Where are they being banned?
here is an example https://youtu.be/G0XWn6S1_iA
What? There are a shit load of books banned for being "offensive" that aren't because of graphic displays of sexuality.
The perks of being a wallflower has been banned. 13 reasons why. Slaughterhouse 5. The Decameron. Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Grapes of Wrath.
Do I need to keep going? The sexual nonsense has been used recently to ban lgbt books, as if queer kids aren't a thing that exists.
Every single one of the books you listed were suggested to me by a teacher. It often felt like some of my teachers latched onto my strong ethical stances and continual disregard for the brand of institutional authoritarianism common in the Deep South, and felt compelled to nurture it.
Of course, it goes both ways. Plenty of teachers fixated on the idea of breaking me and making me fall in line. By middle school I had over 50 write-ups, a few suspensions, and had been subject to corporal punishment (literal State violence) mainly for "willful disobedience", a derogatory term which always confused me because I felt it positively described exactly what I was doing. In middle school, that number exploded as some authoritarian teachers became fixated on forcing me to adhere to school uniforms or demanding that I stood and participated in the cult-like Pledge of Allegiance, attempting to embarrass me in front of the class or to get my guardians to whip and punish me at home.
Public school was a battleground for the future of our society. It felt like 99% of people at the time simply didn't understand that. The few teachers who "saw" me and did what they could to help me navigate my abusive and restrictive home life became the most important people in the world to me, and I owe everything to them.
Where have these books been banned?
Inside the United States.
Wikipedia has a complete collection of titles that have been banned.
> Inside the United States.
Show me one that was banned at the federal or state level from being either owned, read, possessed, transmitted, and / or sold. This is what an ordinary person understands when you say that a book has been banned.
I know you don’t have any examples of this occurring in the United States or you would have offered up specific examples.
> Wikipedia has a complete collection of titles that have been banned.
No it doesn’t.
https://pen.org/book-bans/pen-america-index-of-school-book-b...
> because they contain graphic displays of sexuality
This is literally always the excuse used when censoring content from people.
At the end of the day, we need to acknowledge A LOT of the bans were because of racism, homophobia, and other prejudices, and that these "safety" arguments are just made to conceal that.
My mom when I was growing up found any expression of same sex relationships to be outright pornographic.
I find it is best to be deeply deeply skeptical of anybody defending book censorship because frankly the most common pro-censorship movements in the present US use words like "sexualization" to mean things like "gay couples and trans people exist".
Normal people wouldn't agree with that definition, but they'll nod along with "kids shouldn't have access to sexual material", so that's the code word that pro-censorship camps used.
I somehow doubt that Mein Kampf or playboy magazines would feature at "banned book week."
I wish I could remember the link, but there was some website where it would accept uploads of banned books and host them so people could freely read them.
It had its own list of banned books that it wouldn't accept, The Turner Diaries and stuff like that.
Is there a specific point that you're trying to make?
I thought it was clear that the point is that "banned book week" is not about exposing people to fringe materials. It's about exposing people to the things that the librarian/teacher approve of but the community doesn't/didn't agree.
The real banned books are the ones that don't even show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books is long.
> I thought it was clear that the point is that "banned book week" is not about exposing people to fringe materials. It's about exposing people to the things that the librarian/teacher approve of but the community doesn't/didn't agree.
Yes, but that was already a given, and is the entire topic of this thread. Librarians in many cases became involved in the struggle for access to information even if "the community" didn't agree. I was raised in an extremely backwards, religiously zealous, racist, totalitarian-supporting Deep South state and never once have I thought, "I better do what the community thinks".
> The real banned books are the ones that don't even show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books is long.
Pat yourself on the back, you've discovered that librarians have to make compromises in order to continually push the envelope and not undo all of the progress that has been made. This is called politics.
The whole idea that "banned book week" is a time when students learn to think for themselves is silly, then. It's merely a time when one authority figure who doesn't like another authority figure grabs the reigns. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Get exposed to enough different authority figures' different favored ideas and there might not be that much left that you haven't been exposed to yet.
This is a good point, but in US public schools, you only get two. The librarians and teachers are pretty much a monoculture.
That a cool opinion, but my own experience completely invalidates it. I always looked forward to banned book week as a chance to expand my horizons, and generally sought out texts that I felt the State and its supporters would rather me not have.
I've yet to see a "banned book" week display that wasn't almost entirely books that were required reading in high school.
A lot of those books were actually banned.
Just because they're a-okay now doesn't mean they weren't once controversial. It doesn't take a genius to deduce that something like To Kill a Mockingbird was probably wildly controversial before integration.
A lot of those books received a complaint by some parents or were maybe even possibly removed from a school library in one of the thousands of schools in the US. That's what they mean by "banned." It's just a way to market approved books to kids who have to read them anyway as if they were edgy.
In TKAM's particular case, a lot of the complaints came from across the spectrum because of the use of racial slurs, so it was often not even controversial for the reason you might think. Frankly the book is not even good outside of its propaganda value for fighting racism. At any rate, even then it wasn't meaningfully a "banned book", even in the south.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/to-kill-a-mockingbird...
Sometimes "banned" is a complete misnomer, as when back in 2017 it was simply removed from the required reading list in one Mississippi school district because people complained about reading racial slurs out loud. But the reporting, as you can see from Google, almost all says "banned."
If you want to ban a book that deals with racism in a meaningful way because you are actually for the racism, this is the argument you would make in public.
Reading racial slurs and understanding how the character felt and feeling bad about it is the entire point. If your only exposure is casual racism on the worst parts of the internet then you just normalize that way of thinking.
https://www.newsweek.com/schools-drop-kill-mockingbird-requi...
> The Mukilteo School Board voted unanimously to remove the book from the required reading list on Monday evening, The Everett Herald reported.
> Michael Simmons, the board's president and an African American, told Newsweek that he and other board members made their decision after "seriously considering" the information provided
You can find story after story like this. I don’t think people like Michael Simmons are secretly for racism. I think your mental model may need adjustment.
The biggest thing is probably that in 2025 there are a lot of people who are genuinely not comfortable with anyone reading certain racial slurs, even when though they’re quoting. A lot of style guides and editorial policies also reflect this. The second most common complaint is probably that it is an example of “white savior” literature.
You and I can agree this is silly if you like, but the model of TKAM censorship as usually told is just false in every direction - almost never “banned” and almost never complained about for the reasons people assume.
I will fight anyone that says To Kill A Mockingbird isn't good.
Given that school teachers tech pedo shit like Lolita by Nabhkov all the time officially, why not?
Unironically is Justine by Marquis de Sade that much different?
I think both texts should be available to those who request them, but this cannot happen in a vacuum. We have to teach important context to our children early on, expose them to systems of ethics and overall ensure that they go into it understanding why Marquis de Sade was an absolute psychopath and why his writings must be read through the proper lens.
And Lolita is a tragedy, a story about flawed characters. Supporting access to the novel and supporting child abuse are two wildly orthogonal stances.
Ok
Yeah but do they include the spicy ones like Mein Kampf or just the ones that agree with their politics. It's not really a "banned book week" unless you're pissing everybody off.
Absolutely. Why is everyone responding to this thread going right to Mein Kampf? It was very easy for me to access that book.
> It's not really a "banned book week" unless you're pissing everybody off.
They did. Oh, they did. Lots of parents got pissed every year. Censors will censor.
The point they’re trying to make is the librarian is already the censor by the fact that they decide what books to buy.
The librarian gets pissed if someone attempts to “do their job” or override them, either by banning a book they want or forcing them to carry a book they do not want.
I find it hard to believe that someone doesn’t have some books they think the library shouldn’t carry, even if it’s just The Art of the Deal.
This was simply not the case at my middle school, and since my aunt was the librarian, I had a lot of insight into the administrative war going on behind the scenes. She was constantly being denied books that she wanted to introduce into our library.
The tone was set by the parents and administration, which comes from a heavy Christian brand of authoritarianism which has had the Deep South in a vice grip since the beginning.
The librarians did the best they could under the circumstances, and the only way we can consider them censors is if we overgeneralize and oversimplify the situation to the point where words start to lose their semantic value and anything can be anything else if you squint hard enough.
Providing a wide range of books based on pedagogical goals and training in library sciences or education is quite a bit different than showing up at a school board meeting to get a book removed because you read a one page excerpt that involved something in the valence of sex.
And it's a bullshit argument meant to invalidate people working against authoritarian measures. If everything (even selecting/recommending books for others to read is censorship than the term becomes meaningless, which I guess is the intent of the argument).
> Why is everyone responding to this thread going right to Mein Kampf?
Because they're riding a political hobby horse, insisting that the only valid defense of 1A (free speech) is to demand a figurative repeal of 3A. i.e. to require librarians to quarter the enemy's troops in their house. Because apparently the only valid measure of how free your speech is, is how much you tolerate some of the most censorious regimes in history.
Lol you've really triggered the pro Mein Kampf culture warriors
Mein Kampf is just the most stark example of a book that is forbidden, but very significant to read if you want to understand WWII history. Uncle Tom's Cabin is another example of a book you wont see but is another piece of literature you should read if you want to understand the ideology of a given time period. You don't have to agree with a book to read it.
Another commenter pointed out the anarchist's cookbook, which is another great book to read.
Incidentally Mein Kampf often is available in libraries in Germany (in a commented version, here for example https://www.provinzialbibliothek-amberg.de/discovery/fulldis...), and was never banned in the sense that people understand banned. You could always own and sell old versions however, printing and distributing new uncommented versions could be deemed Volksverhetzung.
It's also a crappy text and definitely not necessary to understand WWII, there are better texts.
I’ve only read excerpts from it, and frankly, you don’t need to read it to understand WWII history. The important bits are well covered in any decent book on the subject and you won’t get any deeper insight by reading the source material.
Yeah, reading the whole thing is a bit excessive.
> Another commenter pointed out the anarchist's cookbook, which is another great book to read.
Again why is it a good example, it's not banned in any meaningful sense of the word. I can get onto Amazon and buy it right now.
Calling it a good book to read is quite a stretch as well. It's a poorly written assembly of instructions for bomb and drug making (written by a 19 year old). Many of the instructions being outright dangerous, so much so that it has been suggested that the book was actually a plant by the CIA, FBI... (not that this is a very credible conspiracy theory). If you want to learn about bomb making better just pick up a chemistry textbook.
As far as I know, it's never been banned in the US which makes it an odd choice to focus on.
Nazi material is generally banned in Germany and probably some other European countries. And this has been a point in the culture war for years.
>> As far as I know, it's never been banned in the US
The question is not if it is banned.
The question is if it is general circulation in public libraries.
This is motte and bailey. If a school library decides not to include a book in their library, that's curation, if it is a book you don't like. If it is a book you do like, it is censorship.
If you walk into your public library and browse the shelves, is the Anarchist Cookbook there? Mein Kampf? If they're not, does that mean they are banned?
I go to my public library quite often, and the books I am interested in are most often not on the shelves there, and the books that are on the shelves there have a political slant towards a politics that I detest. Librarians are in fact dangerous.
Now, that doesn't mean the books I want to read are banned, I have to put a hold on them from the stacks at central and they will ship them over, but they will never be on display at my local library.
They're not banned. But the books on display at my local branch library are curated by dangerous librarians I want nothing to do with.
At my local public library, I could request books to be bought and put on the shelves. I was allowed to host open mic nights in middle school where I and other friends would read poetry and whatever else, free of censorship. Civil engagement through the library was easier than a lot of other public institutions, because while librarians curate, they also have the job of catering to their audience, and respecting requests.
The library became a sanctuary for me after school as it meant I could avoid abuse back home and have a less surveilled access to information such as books, wikis, news, protest music, games, etc. which I was able to later take back home or to other places and consume without fear of reprimand. It was also a third place, where I could meet people, gather people and engage with my community.
> They're not banned. But the books on display at my local branch library are curated by dangerous librarians I want nothing to do with.
Did you persistently try to civically engage with your local library over time and form a personal, positive relationship with the librarians? If so, and if denied, did you seek restitution in city hall or by contacting local congressmen? Or are you just complaining?
>> I was allowed to host open mic nights in middle school where I and other friends would read poetry and whatever else, free of censorship
That's nice. Keep it down though, we're trying to read books in here.
I'm beginning to suspect we have completely incompatible ideas of what a library is.
A public library is a third space where ideas can be accessed and exchanged, and a focal point where the community can civically engage. In the past, that has mostly meant books, which have been a great way of archiving things, but many public libraries also have rooms for listening to music, watching films, or at least renting them to take home.
Many public libraries also welcome and encourage open mics if they have space to host them without affecting others. In my case, it was a small library in a small town, so I hosted the open mic after hours with the grace of the librarians who worked there, who were more than happy to encourage literacy through poetry.
>> A public library is a third space where ideas can be accessed and exchanged, and a focal point where the community can civically engage
I'm beginning to suspect we have completely incompatible ideas of what a library is.
For me it is mostly about access to books.
A public library is different than a regular library, as an institution it has a rich history in what I've described. You can still access books.
I'm beginning to suspect we have completely incompatible ideas of what a library is.
Yes, and I'm trying to enlighten you on the historical purpose of the institution so that you have a better understanding of what a library is, instead of just relying on a personal feeling or opinion.
I would much rather have a person who has gone to school to study childhood education and library science choosing books for the library, than randos trying to force their religion on everybody else's kids.
I'm an adult. I don't need someone who has studied childhood education to tell me what books to read, for fucks sake.
Sorry, I was taking about school libraries.
For your public library, if they get requests for books, they get the books. Lots of people want to read fantasy romance, so those are the books they buy. Hardly anybody requests the anarchist's cookbook, so they rely on interlibrary loan to get it when someone wants it. They buy the books that are popular. This isn't rocket science.
Just about any book you want is going to be available. This is what libraries do.
Ha, I'm so confused! Where the fuck did these guys come from?
I'm pretty sure nobody commenting here actually wants Mein Kampf in particular. It's just a well-known example of a book that most people would agree to restrict. (The Anarchist Cookbook would probably be better if we need to pick a single work.)
... and since it's well known, its presence can get improperly used as a proxy for "this library is uncensored", when in fact the less-known books get restricted anyway.
The Anarchist Cookbook is a great example. I had to acquire that from the internet.
The people responding here mainly just come across as either ignorant or intentionally obtuse, thinking that if they can prove that in some cases the school administration overruled our teachers and librarians on the most egregious texts (as they constantly did), then the entire idea of "banned book week" is performative and not useful
No one here seems to have actually made a real point, just looking for "gotchas".
> It's just a well-known example of a book that most people would agree to restrict.
That's just completely wrong. In America it's a book most libraries would keep around as a visible indicator that they're not censoring books, and a book the letter-writing busybodies who want to censor books would not prioritize because there's no sex in it.
> It's just a well-known example of a book that most people would agree to restrict.
I don't think most reasonable people would agree to restrict such an impactful piece of history. It's shocking to me that people think something they disagree with should be entirely censored.
Mein Kampf has been available at every school I've been at. It's not part of the curriculum but why would it be? Libraries usually have it because they have robust collections on authoritarianism for obvious reasons.
The Anarchist Cookbook not so much. But neither are terrorist training manuals or other guides for making improvised weapons.
I don't know but they all have the same response.
My guess is there are forums somewhere where people complain a lot about librarians not giving access to Nazi material and how it's a crime against free speech absolutism.
I get your meaning but it feels overly reductive. I'd call good faith picking a catalog and not trying to prevent people from finding certain books "curation". I'd call "delete anything that says gay" censorship.
It's hard to have an objective standard. A curator and a censor are both trying to pick content they think is appropriate for their community.
There may be a difference in what they do when the community requests content not in the catalog. I would think most librarians would consider adding requested content or at least referring the patron to another library or other means to access it.
> There may be a difference in what they do when the community requests content not in the catalog.
My partner is a librarian and I can tell you they frequently add books they personally dislike or outright loathe (be it for content reasons or if they just think it's a bad book).
This can happen at the request of the community, or even if they believe somebody in the community might want said book.
This "curation is actually censorship" balderdash is completely out of touch with what library curation looks like and how librarians work and see their responsibility to their community
I think the point is that whoever is in charge of curation can (and likely sometimes do) quietly and easily delete anything that says gay without anyone really noticing
Then those same people will often make a fuss when someone else tells them what they are allowed to curate
Seems relevant: https://www.thefp.com/p/the-truth-about-banned-books
How have hackers restricted the flow of information?
I have, personally.
There was a local municipal hack that affected in-person county operations.
The fix would be around $2.2M.
I chose to keep quiet because that money could be better spent elsewhere.
So yes, I did censor myself because the harm of speaking was much greater than being quiet.
- any ransomware gang when their target pays up
- the people on the technical side of Digital Restrictions Management stuff
- the folks behind SELinux
- anyone DOSing a service they don't like
> It's just called "curation" when you agree with it rather than "censorship".
At least in Germany, virtually all public libraries are interconnected with each other, so if one library doesn't have a particular book, another one which has it can send the book their way. And in the case that there's no library at all holding it in stock in all of Germany (which is damn near impossible), as long as the printers have fulfilled their legal obligation to send at least two copies of the book to the National Library, they'll be the "library of last resort".
This interconnection is the case in the US as well. It's trivial to get books within the same regional system, and you can do inter library loans for pretty much any other library in the country (though not the Library of Congress, which is the US "library of last resort").
The core "engineer mindset" is solving interesting problems. The core librarian mindset is connecting people with the information they are seeking. That's what drives them.
It's become difficult to get books "valued" at over $1,000, which is basically any out of print book now thanks to Amazon's bogus valuations.
I peeked at your profile and, well, do you know about OhioLINK? I think maybe you're holding it wrong.
The last time I grabbed something rare via OhioLINK it was a twenty year old instructor's manual that accompanies a calculus textbook I own, which they shipped all the way from across the state from some little college's library. It didn't occur to me to calculate the market value of that book. But here's a test...
I see seven copies of Asimov's Annotated Paradise Lost "AVAILABLE" for borrowing and...
Your request for Asimov's annotated Paradise lost. Text by John Milton, notes by Isaac Asimov. was successful.
I fully expect this to go through but I'll make a note here if it doesn't. And hey, you should totally try this yourself, it's an interesting book. (edit: although if we're being honest that's coming from a big Asimov fan, so I'm hopelessly biased. This went out of print after one print run, so it's probably not objectively great.)
Oh wow, I didn’t know about that one. His Shakespeare and Bible books are tons of fun, I’ll have to track that down.
I wish we had this in the U.S.
We've actually had to travel (as in physically drive to D.C.) to the Library of Congress because it was the only place that had a book.
A librarian and a censor walk into a bar. The librarian orders 3 drinks and a glass of water.
The censor orders seafood, a live show with pyrotechnics, and the dishwasher's birth certificate.
Took me a second, but it's a great analogy for the difference in power.
I would call the difference: A librarian has perspective, intent, and a fierce optimism honed like the edge of a knife through abrasive contact with the world.
A censor sees only wrong thought and choices without any of the qualities of a librarian.
(The Seafood in a bar that mostly serves alcohol is probably not up to code in terms of food safety, the bar might occasionally have live shows and some of the things done at the live show might not be 100% safe, the dishwasher might have taken the job because he is not a legal citizen and the bar owner pays him outside of normal employment contracts...)
But if you see another allegory then it’s a good joke.
Look, I love the sentiment, and the illustrations are charming.
Unfortunately, the writing.
It's...stilted.
It's presented as a letter/email, but it reads as though the author wants you to hear someone with good comedic timing... DELIVERING IT LIKE STANDUP!
But ellipses...do not translate to funnier text. The text just has to be funny! "Pauses" only enhance what's already there!
> write a quippy, funny letter from a "concerned citizen" to their community highlighting the "danger" posed by librarians. said "danger" is their vendetta against ignorance, illiteracy. style should involve SUDDEN CAPS FOR EMPHASIS, ellipses...for...artificial comedic timing. But there's something more important to the style. Something being demonstrated in this very sentence. Yes - it's *short, narration-like rhythms". These shorter sentences should occupy their own paragraph.
If you can replicate a blog post with a single LLM prompt, you start to wonder whether the author had the same thought.
Only on HN can a light-hearted librarian appreciation post still be treated with heavy cynicism, geez lol
Why is criticism bucketed with cynicism? I led with my appreciation of the good things in the post.
When the day comes that I post something of mine on HN, I will be tremendously disappointed if all of the comments are the textual equivalent of a participation trophy.
> I led with my appreciation of the good things in the post.
Maybe you like frosting on shit, but it's still frosting on shit.
I guess they want a 500 page manual done with LaTeX or gtfo :)
do enough PR reviews and you start think everything is one. alternatively, with the causality reversed, explains why most people are pricks in PR reviews.
If I reviewed PRs like I comment on HN I'd get fired. Know your audience!
Seems like you think PRs are the only place where criticism happens.
Seems like you think everyone is just dying to consume your brilliant critique.
Reminds me of the old The Oatmeal infographics. Very epic mustache
It’s written in the style of a children’s book but with a millennial accent. Not a good fit for this audience but it’s not that bad
It’s millennial speak
Unfortunately, the comment. Witless. Pointless. Worthless. Less.
"Write a critique of the following article, using the style of the article:"
If you get anything as succinct and focused as what I (genuinely) wrote myself, I'll gladly take the criticism!
to be fair i pasted your prompt into chatgpt and it was genuinely funnier and more readable than the article, it even had jokes.
They are EVERYWHERE. Behind desks. In alcoves. Possibly in your very home...if you've recently borrowed War and Peace and failed to return it on time.
lol
Agreed. This kind of writing is skimmable but not readable to me.
No one asked.
Yeah I see this kind of paternalistic condescending style of writing in many left-leaning circles. It sounds like it's geared for children but no they're actually writing for adults. They see themselves as moral beacons and they need to proselytize the stupid unwashed masses because they just don't know any better.
I despise it.
The style of this blog post probably owes a lot more to the author's career as an author of kids' books rather than to his political tendencies.
It's like one long Reddit post. Very cringe.
I was thinking it reminded me of a LinkedIn inspir-tizement post, but yea, also feels like a Reddit lecture. It reads like it is trying desperately to hold the reader’s attention while they are simultaneously driving a car and in another browser window scrolling through brainrot TikTok videos.
> Very cringe.
The irony.
Indeed
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_War
Joking aside, librarians have always been facing so much. Kids and parents are a whole topic, but many adults coming to a public library aren't just there to spend some time, they can be at a pivotal time in their life with a specific need, and getting enough info or access to the proper resources is so critical.
I still remember a clerk at our public library talking to an old lady who's husband was hositalized, and trying to guess what medical book covered the proper stuff.
A fun fact that please excuse me if off-topic: Mao Zedong was a librarian before he started the Bolshevik Revolution in China, and then he changed all of China. So it's often said in China that it's really dangerous to upset a librarian.
Wasn't Lao Tzu a librarian as well?
Yes, and an upset one too.
Is it known which kind of books he read?
Many of his readings are mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong
My understanding is that Mao was a rural peasant from the distant Countryside who was looked down on and marked by his more (self declared) socialist Coastal betters along China's Coast who were contesting with the kmt and later Japanese invasion. The idea that Mao invented the communist or socialist revolution in China is laughable because that revolution had been ongoing prior to Mao's entrance into it. My understanding is that Mao was the guy that stood up and said look, the peasants in the Hinterlands are an Unstoppable Army that is going to come flooding from distant and Central China on to the coast and push all opposition aside and so Mao was basically saying that that the Communists should be attempting to position themselves as favorably as possible in relation to the rising peasant tide of discontent in China. If anything the concern is that if you say anything that the modern Chinese Communist party does not like or agree with they will disappear you to all the corners of the Earth. It is probably only in Taiwan that you could speak openly and honestly about the nature of modern Chinese history from let's say 1900 to the current day. They probably have a better accounting of what was actually going on, and that will soon be deleted by the now dominant Communist Party of China. You can see how they have treated their assimilation of Hong Kong, and Macau before them to imagine what awaits Taiwan.
The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the attention span for good books. Libraries are getting rid of the classics to make room for new books, the majority of which are not worth the paper they’re printed on. We would do well to heed C.S. Lewis’ call to read more old books for every new book that we read.
I personally think the focus on attention span is a red herring.
Many good books don't require that much attention span, and putting the onus on the reader to like and focus on a book that is supposed to be good feels kinda backward. Given that people binge watch whole tv series and still read a ton online there is a desire, and probably ways to properly reach the audience.
Not all classics need to be liked forever, tastes change, and the stories are retold in different manners anyway. I'd be fine with people reading Romeo and Juliet as a mastodon published space opera if it brings them joy and insights.
Even a short and engaging chapter book will require someone to focus for more than 10 minutes on the text
I have been online since the early web and have seen how much content has changed to engage people. It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now. If you post anything longer I have seen people actually get upset about it.
People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine. I am trying to train my own children to seek out difficult things to consume and balance out the engagement bait.
It’s hard these days. Everything is engineered to hijack your attention
> People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine.
This. Both movies and series are now FAR less popular (and profitable) than video games, and video games are far less popular than social media. Even the minority that still enjoys legacy media enjoys it WHILE consuming other media.
Movie theaters are in as much trouble as libraries, and blaming either of them for their decline in popularity without mentioning the root causes would be myopic.
The cost of all this is that nuance and the ability to have a single train of thought that lasts longer than the length of a TikTok video or tweet are dying.
> The cost of all this is that nuance and the ability to have a single train of thought
People aren't watching TikToks while video gaming. The rise of video games, and the success of narrative ones, should tell us that people engage with the content and focus. For hours at a time.
But they need to care about it, expect way more quality and are way less tolerant of mediocrity. That's sure not great for Hollywood producers, cry me a river.
Libraries are reinventing themselves in many places, IMHO they'll happily outlive movie theaters by a few centuries.
People definitely watch YouTube videos while playing video games and play games on their phones while watching TV/movies.
Narrative video games are a tiny and obscure niche.
I’m not sure if it’s true but I’ve heard that the reason so many streaming shows are like twice as long as they should be to best-serve their stories, and are so repetitive, is because they’re written for an audience that’s using their phones while they “watch”.
I wonder if it's not that people are getting dumber or less able to hold attention; rather, that everyone is being more exposed to lowest common denominator material because of efficient distribution.
Reader's Digest was always there on the shelf at the store and was very commercially successful. Most people who consumed more advanced content ignored it.
> It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now
We've had more publicly available educational content than ever with 40+ minutes videos finding their public. Podcasts have brought the quality of audio content to a new level, people pay to get additional content.
People are paying for publications like TheVerge, Medium and newsletter also became a viable business model. And they're not multitasking when watching YouTube or reading on their phone.
That's where I'd put the spotlight. And the key to all of it is, content length is often not dictated by ads (Sponsors pay by the unit, paid member don't get the ads) but by how long it needs to be.
If on the other hand we want to keep it bleak, I'd remind you that the before-the-web TV was mostly atrocious and aimed at people keeping it on while they do the dishes. The bulk of books sold where "Men come from Mars" airport books and movies were so formulaic I had a friends not pausing them when going to the bathroom without missing much.
Basically we accepted filler as a fact of life, and we're now asking the you generation while they're not bitting the bullet. And honestly, I can still read research papers but I completely lost tolerance for 400 pages book that could have been a blog post.
I’ve come to the same conclusion after years of feeling like the idiot for not being able to sit through books. If people aren’t making it through your book, they might have a short attention span but your book also might just be bloated, unclear, or uninteresting. It may even not have set expectations well enough. As Brandon Sanderson says, it’s very easy to skip out on the last half of Into The Woods if you don’t know who Stephen Sondheim is as a writer.
Early in life I learned the rule: If one person is a jerk, he's just a jerk. If you feel like everyone is a jerk, you are probably the one being a jerk.
The same is true of books. If you think one book is bad, it's probably the book. If you think all/most books are slow you should work on your attention span.
Shouldn't we take into account that the industry is also famous for being a monetization path for bloggers, pundits and grifters, for whom a book deal means jackpot; combined with a minimum word count pushing authors/ghost writers to pad their work to reach an average page volume ?
I mostly read non-fiction, so the landscape is probably grimmer, but actual good books aren't that many, and I feel that has been a common wisdom for centuries. Except we're trying push that fact under the carpet as already fewer people are buying books.
Most libraries track circulation of their catalog. If nobody is using the classics, they're going to get weeded. Most libraries have limited shelf space, and it's best used for things that people are using.
Archival can be part of a library too, but I think a reasonable tradeoff is interlibrary loans, public catalogs, and considering copies in other libraries while weeding. Some library systems can also move items to non-public stacks which may be less space constrained, and only access them on request.
This has been an ongoing discussion within libraries for more than a hundred years not a recent issue. Should libraries be a place with classics to uplift people or popular books that people want to read even if they are low quality?
> The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the attention span for old books.
Fixed that to mean what you say.
Luckily, people still have the attention for good books. Which is why libraries still stock good books, classic or otherwise. They also stock books that people want to read. Which might seem odd until you realize that libraries are there for the community to use.
However, you are free to setup a library that stores books that no one reads.
I think this is a somewhat wrong framing, and its also shitty to blame libraries for this shift. Tech companies, for the most part, are responsible for the destruction of attention spans, if that has really happened. And I'd be happy to bet that by whatever criteria you choose to select there are more great books written per year now than in 1240 or whatever time you think they only wrote great shit. Its just that now there is much more to wade through and the media environment is totally different.
At any rate, I just think that its a very strange thing to do to use "old" as a substitute for "good." There are tons of old books that are moronic and if the population of the world back then had been the same as now there would be tons more.
People don't even have the attention span for tweets. You see people asking grok to summarize the points of whoever they're fighting with.
Try going back in time and explaining to Neil Postman that people today find watching TV to be a chore that needs abbreviation or summarization.
"Grok summarize this comment"
I kid you not, I've had people ask Grok to summarize a 3-4 tweet thread I posted.
40 minutes or so? You guys are getting lazy. I expected an AI connection in less than 10 minutes after the post.
Are you being too passive aggressive to say directly that you're offended by commentary about AI that disagrees with your stance, or do you really keep track of these timings?
My stance is chaotic good, and HN keeps track of timings for me, I just have to look.
I find that old books can often take away more than they give to me. They often have outdated ideas on women or race and are usually far clumsier with depicting homeless, disabled, or sick people. Engagement with fans of old books often is a set of very sheepish defensiveness when I point these out.
You're lucky these days if all you get is sheepish defensiveness and not revanchist conservatism.
I wish much of the lore about librarians were actually true, but these days they seem to be mostly focused on either filling up dumpsters full of old books for sale (why are they getting rid of all of the old books), stocking the shelves with DVDs (why are libraries in the movie-rental business?), or else organising things that seem to be quite tangentional to being a "library". For example, I think it's fine to take family photos or ID photos for kids... but is this really the primary mission of a library?
When I need an inter-library loan of a hard-to-find book, they say they can't do it since the Amazon price of the book is over $1,000. (Of course, we all know the Amazon prices are basically made up - offering books for sale that aren't in stock, and on the chance they get an order at an outrageous price, go try and find it cheap on the secondary market.)
Nonetheless, they're always asking for money - whether applying for grants, putting property tax levies on the ballot, attempting to raise sales taxes, despite the ever-decreasing levels of service, alongside requisite threats "If we don't pass this item, the library will close!!!"
I view librarians as ones that completely missed the boat when it comes to their traditional domain of organising indexes to literature, which has been eclipsed first by Google, and now by AI in general.
> When I need an inter-library loan of a hard-to-find book, they say they can't do it since the Amazon price of the book is over $1,000.
That's extremely odd. My experience is that libraries will sometimes exclude their particularly rare books from the interlibrary loan system (or from lending more generally), for the obvious reasons, but I wouldn't have thought the library you're trying to use to place the request would have anything to say about it at all.
I've never heard of that either. But I can guess it's meant to shield the requesting library for financial liability if the patron never returns it. If they're on the hook for replacing the book, then...
And actually, there are a number of academic books I've had to request through ILL because they're only in a handful of libraries, the initial print run from the academic press was probably 500 at most, and replacing one would probably cost $1,000, simply because there's only one person in the world currently with a copy to sell (if you're lucky), and they can basically set their price.
> why are libraries in the movie-rental business?
Because why not. Books and DVDs have similar footprint and cultural relevance.
DVDs? Probably incentives. They get some kind of kick backs or “points”.
I thought this was going to to be about how librarians were instrumental in forming the OSS, which helped the US win WWII (yes, this is real).
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/book-and-dagger-elyse...
I used to skip school for at least two days to go to the big library in my city. I taught myself a lot of things. Did have access to books and high speed internet (by this era standards anyway) that I couldn't have or afford at home.
I wouldn't encourage people to skip school to do that of course. But I owe this period of my life a lot of what I am today. Someone with interest in science and tech. I have known some of the people working there and they were happy helping me navigating the library (and grap books for the short boy who is too short for most of the shelves).
I wasn't happy with how it turned out the last year when I visited.
I've never met a librarian like this article describes. I have met people like this in many other walks of life, but I've never met a librarian who seemed like anything but a scold with a stick up their ass.
Why were they scolding you?
Ideas are dangerous, librarians just stockpile and distribute them. In terms of potential energy books are more disruptive than nukes. The keepers who wrangle their power should have proportional status.
You could say they are the censors of the ideas that get into the library. So they should be accorded status based on that power, but there also should be accountability and transparency.
> You could say they are the censors of the ideas that get into the library.
But I wouldn't. This context incorrectly implies librarians are working from a position of restricting knowledge. In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.
> but there also should be accountability and transparency.
There is. 'Books on the shelf' is a gold standard of transparency. They are showing their work in the fullest possible measure.
In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good faith. The appropriate accountability for that is letting them do their jobs.
> In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.
A thousand times this. People who think that librarians are secretly censoring the flow of information are completely out of touch with how librarians work.
Librarians take their responsibility to their community seriously. This responsibility, to them, is nothing less than presenting their patrons with all of the information (books and beyond) that they are trying to access, regardless of their personal feelings about said information.
> People who think that librarians are secretly censoring the flow of information are completely out of touch with how librarians work.
Absolutely. My farthest r-wing years overlapped with my heaviest library patronage. Libraries were a space where my overactive, fault-finding radar was quiet.
Seriously. Librarians have always been there for everyone.
>But I wouldn't. This context incorrectly implies librarians are working from a position of restricting knowledge. In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.
Peel District restricts books to materials post-2008 and deemed antiracist, which is an incredibly narrow slice of the historical body of human literature: https://www.peelschools.org/documents/a7b1e253-1409-475d-bba... https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/teacher-librarians-sp...
On the opposite end of the western culture war, we have the elimination of the corpus of queer texts at a Florida college: https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/education/2024/08/1...
Either way, it's a position, institutional or otherwise, of restricting knowledge that is inherently subject to the political pendulum swings.
>In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.
Librarians apparently are the factions that do that. What books or why varies, but the "weeding" is the euphemism of the day to restrict with.
>In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good faith.
I think this is closer to hero worship or beatification than a useful model for a political process.
Libraries stock what gets checked out.
>>In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good faith.
>I think this is closer to hero worship or beatification than a useful model for a political process.
I assert that librarians fall toward the end of the scale we use to example good faith actors. Someone has to be there.
Choosing what to put on limited shelf space is inherently a process of choosing what to remove and to exclude. It is zero sum.
Books on the shelf is partial transparency. What was excluded, what was removed. What was requested for by patrons but not chosen.
> Choosing what to put on limited shelf space is inherently a process of choosing what to remove and to exclude. It is zero sum.
Titles are removed when the card catalogue shows they aren't being checked out. Those titles can be bought by the public at a steep discount.
What is included are titles that are likely to be checked out, plus what individual patrons ask for.
I've done the latter. For some unusual titles I had to supply the ISBN. If they were in print, they were on the shelf within a month.
Excluding books is a recent phenomenon driven by book-banning agendas.
> Books on the shelf is partial transparency. What was excluded, what was removed. What was requested for by patrons but not chosen.
This seems to flow from wholly imagined concerns - ones that are trivially debunked.
What is removed can be seen for sale and is also recorded in the card catalog. What is excluded (when book-banning efforts are successful) is also recorded.
What is requested by patrons is stocked. Again, I've done it.
A curator promotes. A censor deletes.
Sure you could argue that with limited shelf space, a librarian is a censor by choosing what they do and do not carry, but then you have to ignore a lot about what censors and librarians actually do.
You know this isn’t true.
Ah! It makes a reference to Rose, the Hat (character in the Doctor Sleep movie). "My head is a library [...] you're just a fucking child". Hence the drawings looking like children homework.
So, if it is an AI that wrote it, maybe it has movie script training. That would be a smart move. Movies themselves draw specific personas to the foreground of a human mind and could put them in specific moods.
Or is it a human who wrote it? Maybe it was an angel.
--
Ok, no movie business. Is there a difference between biblioteconomist and librarian? I think one is more akin to that notion of classifying without curating or censoring that so many here aluded to.
In practice, I wouldn't know! (fun oversharing fact: I actually considered biblioteconomy as a degree).
I think the post is good and kind for a general audience. It's a good message that I truly believe in.
But I believe it could be harmful for those diagnosed with conditions such as Havana Syndrome, Schizophrenia and similar disorders. That is due to the fun ambiguous tone of "dangerous", which could have unexpected effects in someone going through a psychotic episode (I had one once, not a pleasant experience). There must be a better, less snarkier way of promoting literacy without creating those potential side effects.
Librarians are very dedicated, this was missed in the article. They are the first defenders against our freedom to think, read and express our thoughts.
Recently, I interviewed 2 librarians for an essay about recent book banning. They are vehemently against book banning, specially classics as seen in recent media.
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill
https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/
https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2023/03/record-book-...
https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/media/2023/October/book-bans-may-h...
edit: newlines to separate links
My local libary is great for me at the point I am at life. Clean bathrooms, 3d printers and laser cutters, video conference rooms, free videos to watch, comfy chairs, a huge manga section. Not a lot of physical books anymore. I guess I can just use an e-reader and check one out that way. No more discovery.
I love libraries and I credit the library of my home town for being who I am.
I don't remember much that the actual people in the library did for me, beyond letting me take books at a time than was allowed.
But still, they did let me do that, and asked me for books to buy.
Maybe they did more for me than I thought.
So I kind of hastily posted this one as a follow-up:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43737275
While librarians can be "dangerous", libraries can be extremely beautiful (or vice versa, who knows...?). When traveling, I often try to visit ones, and, of course, we have some iconic photographs of them too.
So it might have been what they call a Freudian slip... ;-)
This is consistent with my experience. One of the most impressive and inspiring presentations I saw at last year's HOPE conference [1] was from members of the Library Freedom Project [2].
1. https://hope.net
2. https://libraryfreedom.org
This reads like the sort of self-congratulatory articles journalists were fond of writing about themselves in the late-2010s, just as public trust in journalism was reaching an all-time low.
I suspect the same thing is happening with librarians as they’ve begun to abandon all pretence of being impartial guardians of information in favor of larping as members of The Resistance. Ironically, the experts never seem to learn that you can only play this game for so long before no one cares what you have to say anymore.
Resistance against book banners has always been part of their core ideology, there is nothing new about that.
They are not resisting anything.
This works if you actually have dangerously good librarians. I had one that could remember every single book location but she was extremely rude and treated everyone as a mentally challenged. Her daughter lived under severe dictatorship with no confidence and self esteem.
Okay. The point is that someone, yes, SOMEONE, needs to make the call as to what goes on the shelves. Mien kampf? The Anachist's Cook Book? Lady Chatterley's Lover? Is is librarians who make the decision AND IT IS NOT THE SAME FOR EVERY LIBRARY GOER!!!! Yep. They consider who's asking and why. They are some of the few remaining trusted professionals, and they remain so because we think they're harmless drudges. Power to 'em!
I miss the days when they shushed people. Nowadays, librarians where I go (to several local libraries) are invariably the loudest, most shameless talkers in the place.
Varies heavily by location. But I’ve experienced the same - maddening.
Just a comment that the library has become my "third space" these days.
I am sooo grateful my local University library is open for public visitors. I visit every weekend and enjoy fast internet, a pleasant and quiet environment and can plug my laptop into one of many large desktop monitors here.
It seems relevant to this article, and its portrayal of librarians as dangerous, that the national Institute for Museum and Library Services was recently essentially destroyed by Presidential executive order and DOGE, probably illegally, its grants largely or entirely revoked, and its employees laid off.
See, e.g., https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/11/trum...
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l...
It's interesting to note that at the core of Asimov's Foundation (spoiler: Va n frafr, ng gur pber bs obgu bs gurz.) was a bunch of librarians that were supposed to help restore the galaxy to order after a prolonged period of decline brought by disintegration of the galactic Empire.
I have begun taking my children to the local library, and I am shocked at how bad the selection is. There are very few books of lasting value in any part of the library. Nothing of serious or intellectual interest. And were I to give a factual description of the childrens and teens sections, I would get banned by dang. This is wildly different from the collections that I grew up with, in libraries trashed now by standard publishing spam, despite having vastly more money and space than they did when I was a kid.
Poorly curated libraries (though often staffed to the gills with "librarians") are a gaping cultural void and vacuum, while well-curated libraries are an important treasure. Good curation has little or nothing to do with "battling" misinformation/censorship, which in practice always seems to be about librarians championing a very bland and particular political monoculture. Good curation is the art of discerning the important, the unique, and the interesting, and avoiding the vast flows of spam that overwhelm everything these days.
My town votes 50/50 Republican/Democrat, yet our newly rebuilt library is filled with lib/women oriented non-fiction and contemporary women’s pulp fiction. They no longer even have paper sets of encyclopedias. It’s not possible to learn much about science or technology there anymore - they weeded much of that out during the remodeling.
They are likely stocking the books their users are asking for. If you ask for something else I'm sure they can get that too.
> They no longer even have paper sets of encyclopedias
Honest question from someone who has never actually had to use a paper encyclopedia. Do they still print paper encyclopedias?
It’s safe to say the market who purchases books is women, under the age of 40.
Women reading mostly romance and the occasional “young adult” fantasy book is practically the only market left for authors, if they want to sell fiction.
Bummer. Do you have to go far to find another library that has paper encyclopedias when you need to look up some texts?
Science and tech is obsolete like the format of paper encyclopedias? (It isn't.)
It's worth considering if a short-term focus on stocking fad romantasy comes at the long-term expense of a body of knowledge. Consider the classic value of college degrees - they're (largely) not optimized for fad pop knowledge or even vocational skills, instead optimizing for a rounded body of knowledge considered to be broadly 'educated'.
I don't doubt you, but in many locations you don't have to take your children to the local library. For example I lived in Sunnyvale for a long time, and yet after visiting the nearby libraries I decided to get a library card at the Mountain View public library. It doesn't matter I don't live or work in Mountain View.
In this particular city, at least, it's cultural malaise, and one that is hard to escape just by going to another branch. That said, there are some good used bookstores out here (not the big chain stores) that have great collections.
Libraries vary greatly in quality. I don’t know why this is downvoted.
Because they're dancing around specific complaints and this line, for example,
> were I to give a factual description of the childrens and teens sections, I would get banned by dang.
reeks of "I don't want LGBTQ representation in my library" or similar.
If I'm wrong, so be it. But the commenter isn't helping their own case.
> There are very few books of lasting value in any part of the library. Nothing of serious or intellectual interest.
I've noticed this at my library as well. I was shocked that there wasn't a copy of Spinoza's Ethics which seems kinda basic. That being said, I think people underestimate how much garbage each generation produces. Past generations have done the work of curating the good stuff of their time for us.
> And were I to give a factual description of the childrens and teens sections, I would get banned by dang.
I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about but I'm going to take a leap and assume you're complaining about the presence of LQBTQ books in the library. I've noticed this trend where conservatives think that any book with queer characters is sexual by definition. People get upset by children's books with 2 dads that are just like any other book and it's honestly tiring. Queer people exist and have normal, boring lives and there's nothing inherently sexual or pornagraphic about that.
Let's not jump to the gun here. It could be as well that there's nothing there, or so on. And being accused of something you didn't is something I think we'd all want to not deal with.
That being said, I do also very much hope it's not what you say because I've been noticing that trend too :(
In a world with so many different opinions, where you know neither my nation or city or native language, it's odd that you would immediately jump to this. After all, my library could be run by Scientologists attempting to propagandize children, or Soviet-era revanchist apologists, or so on. Regardless of what material it is, yes, anyone who propagandizes children really is "dangerous", and not in the fake patronizing way that the the author of the article means it either.
> After all, my library could be run by Scientologists attempting to propagandize children, or Soviet-era
I admitted it was a leap and you're absolutely free to clarify what you meant instead of pointing out some ridiculous edge cases without explaining yourself.
> Regardless of what material it is, yes, anyone who propagandizes children really is "dangerous", and not in the fake patronizing way that the the author of the article means it either.
I don't see how having books with queer characters is propaganda but having books with straight characters isn't. I'm queer and I don't go around insisting that people ban Christian books from the children's section even though I think those values aren't great.
That’s because librarians have been making a concerted effort to “deaccession” (throw them into the dumpster or send them for pulping) old books, no matter how valuable. Often this teeters into ideological territory - old books might contain unacceptable thoughts. Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.
In some places it’s particularly absurd, for example, here’s one that had the school libraries junk anything written before 2008: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-lib...
A second awful thing is this usually goes along with the idea that “well, it’s available online” - even as those resources are lost. There’s a lot of long tail works on niche historical, scientific, and technical topics that have been lost forever, aside from the loss of serendipity from discovering this books in your library and reading them.
In the past 20 years, my local library system has deaccessioned nearly every work from Ancient Rome and Greece. This is happening not just as small local libraries like mine, though, but even at large, old research libraries.
From your article:
> Step two of curation is an anti-racist and inclusive audit, where quality is defined by "resources that promote anti-racism, cultural responsiveness and inclusivity." And step three is a representation audit of how books and other resources reflect student diversity.
When it comes to disposing of the books that are weeded, the board documents say the resources are "causing harm," either as a health hazard because of the condition of the book or because "they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate."
For those reasons, the documents say the books cannot be donated, as "they are not suitable for any learners."
So besides the "no old books" that was purportedly a misunderstanding is the official policy, there was also explicit ideological filtering.
Yup, they employed intense scrutiny on books before 2008, followed by ideological filtering as you noted, resulting in empty shelves.
On that note, it's sad to see the GP downvoted for raising this uncomfortable truth. I guess "deaccessioning" or "weeding" reveals a certain hypocrisy among those who supposedly hate banning books.
It's definitely a double edged sword. Librarians can plant seeds for thought and introspection.
They can also wield the sword of censorship, hiding or discarding books they don't personally like, and fronting all the ones they do.
Just a few days ago, I visited the community college library reference desk. We were discussing and browsing the shrinking stacks of reference volumes.
I commented that some of these extant books must be kept because it was difficult to typeset or compile them electronically, and I pointed out a “Lakota language dictionary”...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakota_language
but the reference librarian immediately disagreed with me, and she said that electronic resources were great and fantastic and better, and there is nothing of value that cannot be electronically reproduced... So I did not argue, because the Lady of the House is always right
There's something about that that simply sounds dangerous to me. I can't put my finger on it, but there's a certain resiliency in keeping printed copies of reference materials: they cannot be changed, disappeared (other than unloading them into the bin), or made impossible to access (unless the library starts putting books behind lock and key). If I want to learn about gardening (for example), I'd much rather get a reference text at the library than search for stuff online... which half the time is clickbaity or AI-generated trash.
It's not like the librarians have unilateral choice here. Old books on the shelves get vandalized and stolen; new books are not easy to come by, due to reduced print runs and supply-chain issues. How many times have we heard complaints about Amazon orders being "print-on-demand", and the quality is horrible? And if a published book is typeset in original PDF format anyway, why not distribute it that way to begin with?
Librarians have the demand side to cope with too. Personally, I don't enjoy checking-out books from the library. They're heavy; they require a backpack to carry them; they're not ubiquitously available to me wherever I am; they need to be physically lugged back to the same place where I found them. So yeah, I'd rather have an eBook.
But I contend (not in front of librarians) that a book such as a "Lakota Language Dictionary" is irreproducible in electronic form, because scholars have striven to compile those in print form; they developed new orthographies and documented the existing ones; and any new electronic-format dictionary must be recompiled, retypeset, and re-edited to satisfaction for a new publisher. So we won't have the same materials.
I used to derive great joy from finding really old copies of the Vedas, or a Navajo dictionary, but mostly Hindu texts in the original scripts. And yeah, they were painstakingly compiled by British colonisers and oppressors. But that history is preserved because of those colonists having a scholarly interest in "Hindooism". And those Vedic texts, and Panini's grammar, will not be directly transcribed to eBooks. They may take photographic images of them and shove them into a PDF, but those volumes will be given short shrift, because they're all Public Domain anyway.
The money's in stuff that you can copyright and IP that you can defend. And that's where libraries and librarians are going to follow.
Well, you don't need to think too hard about this when sites like archive.org are in legal danger, and the dream of Google Books is dead. I had not considered the "everything on the Internet is AI/SEO slop now" - that's a good point too: even if the stuff exists online, it's often almost impossible to find.
A few months ago I half-remembered a quote from a famous philosopher. Google and Bing returned only the vaguest, most useless search results - basically assuming I didn't actually want the quote, but general information about the philosopher. So then I turned to ChatGPT, which asserted that no such quote existed, but here were ones "like it" (they weren't.) Finally I skimmed through all the books I had until I located it.
Maybe you can't get all the nice semantic benefits of marked-up plaintext, but there's still always the .tiff option.
> Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.
I think you might be missing that there are many different types of libraries. For a city or county library, they have to meet the very diverse needs of the local residents.
Yet these same local libraries used to be filled with the sorts of books I'm talking about. They threw them away to replace them with DVDs of Marvel movies, the worst dreck imaginable in the children's section, and shelves and shelves of the latest romance and mystery novels, along with whatever "hot" ghostwritten politics book is out.
Frankly, I look at that is abandoning their original mission and no longer feel inclined to support them in any way. Libraries should have led their communities as centers and sources of learning. What we have now is something else wearing libraries as a skinsuit, and I don't see why libraries like this deserve public support as a library.
But at any rate, as I said, the problem is not limited to municipal libraries, it's ongoing even at institutional libraries.
I've been working in the space the last few years and what I've gathered is Librarians themselves often hate what libraries have become. The ones working in University libraries seem to enjoy their job a lot more than the ones in large cities that act as homeless shelters.
On my campus, almost all institutional libraries have been closed down over the course of the last 20 years. There's still the main campus library and I went there quite a few times to work in peace and quiet. However, I have to admit that I never needed any of their books.
Why do people speak online as if the library is a place anyone goes to? I understand some people still go to libraries, but this cannot be considered a commonplace activity like it once was. Librarians do not hold any meaningful position in society because so few people come in contact with them.
Do you have kids? Virtually every parent I know (myself included) visits the library at least once a week with their kid. In my community the library is very well trafficked.
This sounds like some upper middle class white Boston shit. This is 1000% not the experience of most parents in America, especially the browner and poorer parts of America. Good luck getting one library attendance a year from most American children…
Are these the same American children who graduate high school without anything above basic literacy?
Kind of the point of the post, isn't it?
I thought this was going to be about how librarians are exposed to raw knowledge that is true goes against the current-year narrative, a.k.a. "malinformation", and librarians should be monitored for signs of wrongthink.
I expected this to be about the Brandon Sanderson teen series that starts with Alcatraz vs The Evil Librarians.
Librarians are wonderful. I married one.
Ha ha, so did I as it happens.
That was enjoyable. And the artwork doubled it.
Holy shit librarians are fucking wonderful.
Many of my coolest collaborators have been library science or information studies people. They are just the people I trust the most to have a sensible balanced worldview between theory and action, and with enough distance to understand the false idols of capital and power.
I feel librarians so often get to be the sort of people that teachers wish they could be, if those teachers weren't so micro-managed by the state and the system
long live librarians
I’ve moved to UK and I’m annoyed by lack of STEM books in libraries.
I really loved the local library in the 80s/very early 90s (as a kid without network access). I probably spent like 20-25 hours per week there.
Now when I visit it's always meh. They have sacrificed breadth and density for "curation" and "experience spaces".
The space between the book shelves seems to have almost doubled. Why?
Bring back super high dense book shelving filled with interesting stuff.
My local library was much denser as a child as well.
Except that's because the library was tiny. The denseness was a necessity and the library was constantly trying to get rid of books to make room for newer books.
Thankfully they eventually replaced that tiny library with a much bigger one. And the one we live near now is also much bigger and much better. I think the kids section of the library is probably double the size of the entire library we had growing up, with more books as well.
Probably depends on if your local community - which includes you! - has valued (and funded) libraries. Ours is really well done.
Yep. My local library when I was a kid I get to on my bike, and I looked for books on computing topics. I ended up with a book that was a compilation of articles from Dr. Dobb's Journal.
In the late 90s, there was a cornucopia of amazing books available - one was on programming Windows, and came complete with a CD in the back with a fully working copy of Visual Studio C++ 1.52.
I decided to poke into the library my kids go to for story time and see what computer books there were. It was truly bleak. There was really nothing that would bring back the sense of discovery I had as a kid going to the library.
When I was interested in programming as a kid in the late 90s, I too went to the library, but they only had books about computers from the 80s. idk whether my experience or yours is more representative. But today there are tons of free resources online, so idk if a kid would be looking for that stuff at the library these days.
> The space between the book shelves seems to have almost doubled. Why?
Accessibility is probably a factor, narrow spaces are hard to navigate with a wheelchair.
I mean, they were never so narrow that a person in a wheelchair wouldn't fit. Or couldn't turn spin around.
I guess the benefit is that now two people in wheelchairs can pass each other, thus avoiding one of them needing to spend a few seconds going backwards, were two people in wheelchairs to travel in opposite directions in the same lane.
Yay. Totally worth halving the inventory for, not.
> Bring back super high dense book shelving filled with interesting stuff.
Sure thing but your community would have to pay insignificantly more in local taxes
To be crude: Books and shelvings are very affordable compared to employees. Every part of each library doesn't need to curated by a local librarian.
The primary goal of libraries is to educate the public - not to employ librarians, right?
My local library on the other hand got a lot better.
Awwe! I teared up! 'cause it's true!!!
Indeed. Power-hungry authoritarians, demagogues, and ideologues of all stripes (ethnic, religious, etc.) have always viewed books as dangerous.
Just look at the long list of major book-burning incidents throughout history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_book-burning_incidents
Books are dangerous, because knowledge is dangerous -- dangerous to ignorance, censorship, and misinformation.
Because I saw others here speak about their libraries, I will too.
I'm Polish, I live in a big city. My libraries around, are, to say it mildly, awful. At best, they'll contain old school readings, some history book from communist period and old tech manuals (old as in, Win 95 guides or for tech that is no longer used).
I really envy Americans in this aspect.
sounds like underfunding issues, but they're trying their best with what they have. And as others have said, they are important community spaces for studying, meetups etc.
not in here - they aren't a place for that :( at best, events for primary/secondary school, and that is it
and yup, they are certainly underfunded and i don't envy them, i do believe that most of them are trying to do as much as they can. :(
I really dislike fiction where the author tries to convince you it's real but has so many holes that it reads like more like a hastily conceived debate premise than a real work.
In reality libraries are one of the most conservative classes of people, especially odd the distinction since I'm sure there are plenty of progressive minded librarians. Doesn't help that the average age gap between a reader and their librarian is greater than average life expectancy.
Ebooks and Internet sources of all forms of media have rendered public libraries moot as book providers: every person alive (in the US) has a cell phone, and most have laptops, and can with a modicum of bootstrapping access these sources, without having to travel to a special building (partially) filled with paper books, to obtain a copy of almost any book in existence.
> Today’s dangerous librarians are much more. They are part educator, part tech wizard, part data analyst, and part myth-slayer.
> They host storytimes, teach kids about misinformation, explain how to 3D print a prosthetic hand, and calmly help a grown man named Todd recover his Gmail password for the seventh time. All before lunch.
> [Librarians] are dangerous to: Misinformation, Censorship, Outdated printer settings, Small thinking, apathy, loneliness
Who asked them to play these roles? If the public school system has failed to the extent that people are incapable of using online methods to find books or other resources, or login to their Google account, why is it the role of a librarian to backfill these gaps (and for taxpayers to be forced to fund such a peculiar backfilling approach)?
And some of the touted roles ("dangerous to: Misinformation, Censorship, Small thinking, apathy") are clearly social activist in nature; the meaning of all of these is in the eye of the beholder. So why are taxpayers obligated to (unquestioningly) fund people who clearly perceive their role, at least in part, as activist in nature? IMO you are welcome to engage in activist activities on your own dime, not mine.
So I certainly wonder where the value is in "libraries" since, say, 2010 (and yes, I read the article). If not for "book banning" stories, I doubt librarians would be a topic of conversation. Libraries and librarians are like some weird 20th century anachronism which persists into the 21st century largely because it's part of a (by definition well-established) bureaucracy (and lobby/union).
Treating “knowledge” in the abstract is dangerous. “Knowledge” consists of manuscripts . A book store or library is merely a curation of those manuscripts (or their copies).
Librarians actually are dangerous, in that they present “knowledge” as neutral, and “more knowledge” as an unquestionable good. Nearly all librarians and book store clerks share a skewed ideology.
Everyone expects a Christian, Muslim or Jewish book store to be filled with a tailored curation of books. Libraries and book stores are ironically treated as neutral “knowledge repositories”.
My point is that every collection is curated according to the taste and the agenda of the curator or librarian.
It is the quality of the collection that makes it good, not the volume. Librarians are dangerous because they’ve convinced the public that they are gatekeepers of knowledge, when they are actually just curators.
This reads like the sort of self-congratulatory articles journalists were fond of writing about themselves in the late-2010s, just as public trust in journalism was reaching an all-time low. I suspect the same thing is happening with librarians as they’ve begun to abandon all pretence of being impartial guardians of information in favor of larping as members of The Resistance. Ironically, the experts never seem to learn that you can only play this game for so long before no one cares what you have to say anymore.
This comment got flagged within minutes after I had originally posted it, which is an indication of how seriously freedom of information is valued by those on the other side of this issue.