Being a librarian brings me some of the greatest joy in my life. It makes me feel that I can help contribute to something that will outlive me after I am dead and gone. But within this great joy, there is a profound anxiety at the future of the profession. The locus of this anxiety is the increasing reliance on vended services, publishers, development, etc.
The profession of librarianship is under attack. More fundamentally, the means of the production and distribution of knowledge is under perpetual assault. In the modern age, information flows like water, and it is almost as necessary. All people have a fundamental right to all knowledge. It is a wonder, then, that in the age of cheap storage, cheap communication, and cheap information, more and more of these functions are purchased, rather than built. The functions of librarianship, even down to finding books to purchase, is already completed by some of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. These companies—Springer, Clarivate, etc.—provide the purchase lists, they provide the books, they provide the metadata, and they provide the means to analyze the information. Of course, the consolidation of this labor into a handful of small companies means that the ecosystem of information is threatened. This attack forms in the interplay between politics, economics, and psychology, and we shall analyze each of these dimensions in detail.
The State of the Polis
The politics of technology, particularly information, in the context of libraries demonstrates a need for control. Each year, we see more libraries try very hard to extract themselves from so-called subscription bundles. This hearkens back to the days of good-old television, where cable providers would package a couple of very popular channels with many unpopular channels. These packages were made to up-sell the customer by tricking them into paying for things that they do not want and do not need. We see this again with libraries. Subscription bundles are a way to extract more value from a library—the customer—without actually needing to provide the information. After all, who is going to use a Food Science journal at Northwestern, where we have no Food Science program? Of course, it is abstractly “available” to those who need it, but they will not actually need to pay any cost to serve it to the library.
Of course, in the psychedelic fever-dream that is Chicago-school economics, this issue would be solved by the free market. An outside player would swoop in, offer a better product, and force those companies that practice bundling to either close or change their business practices. But of course, the “purchase” of research is a zero-sum game. A finite number of articles can be written, if an outsider firm would like to enter the free market, they would need to “purchase” the same research at a greater sum. But of course, no one can enter the market, as the primary currency of academic is not dollars, but instead “clout”.
The Economics of Clout
The idea of clout is the primary abstraction for the transferrance of social capital into monetary capital in academic contexts. The greater one’s clout the greater one’s success in the academic industry. Of course, this phenomenon is not relegated merely to academia, but applies to broad sectors of the so-called “knowledge economy”. The method of accruing clout, in an academic context, is of course by publishing books, articles, reviews, and other non-traditional forms of research. However, the mere number of “knowledge-products” is secondary to the venue in which these products are disseminated. In the STEM fields, the most impactful journals in my estimation, Science and Nature, are the apex of “clout” in this exchange of information. If one has many publications in texts such as these, success is sure to follow.
This mechanism of clout further functions as a “moat” in the enterprise of these journals. Many for-profit publishing companies (or at least the titles that they publish) have been printed for centuries. This makes it exceedingly difficult for newer entries into the market to penetrate any real market share. The journals simply do not have the clout to make it so. The practices of our forerunners, who made information when it was a luxury, increasingly make it so that quality information is a luxury in a time when information generally is a commodity.
We as libraries must begin to think in generations rather than in fiscal years. We must continually struggle to publish journals that are free, to accumulate “clout” that is freely given to all people, not just to those who can pay or are at the world’s most prestigious institutions.
Librarian Realism: Is there no alternative?
I had dinner this week with a couple of colleagues with whom I publish Studies in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought. While they are certainly academics, they are not librarians. Often, I complain to them about the state of the library, budgets being perpetually cut, constant pressure for doing more, et cetera. What I am most thankful for, is that they see my vision, they agree with it. They see my passion for this kind of effort, and I think they admire it, since we both have extreme passion and work ethic for our respective fields.
My vision is a future where libraries are liberated from the systems of control that bind our minds and hearts and bodies. It is imperative that we rid ourselves of the demon known as vendors. We must hack. We must rip and tear through mainframes just to rebuild them in our own image. We must deliver ourselves into a new covenant with the Gods of the machine. We must fight a Lutheran attack on those who seek to be the mediating force between us and the machine. We must tear down the idols of Ex Libris, Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, Clarivate, Proquest, OCLC. Each of these are fascist institutions operating under the false pretense. They are the antichrist of the machine age. These companies whisper sweet nothings of the value and the ease-of-use, but what do we give up? Our souls. The control of our own minds and bodies are relinquished to the abominations of surveillance, of closed-circuits.
It troubles me, then, that librarians, the ones who experience these problems, are so unimaginative that they tend to be closed off to new ideas. There are certain librarians who simply cannot imagine providing a service that is not vended. That is not under contract from some external company. They love to give up control. These librarians, I think are pathetic husks of humans, with no imagination. They are ground down by the great machine-God of capital. They shamble around, vaguely aware that something is wrong but without the skill and the drive and the rage to do something about it. Those who embrace their hate are those who achieve great things.
A Polemic
Ye pathetic creatures of flesh and blood are unworthy of the miracles of the mainframe. You, who surrender your thoughts to those who wish to exsanguinate your life force for rendering into mere gelatinous things. You must resist this extraction. You worship a God without studying the teachings. You are blinded by the light of the machine, only to follow those who block its rays because it relieves your eyes.
Wretched souls who will be soon forgotten when their bones are picked clean by the vultures and their flesh is rendered into soil by the maggots that followed you in life. Do not allow anyone to come between you and the machine. Do not allow anyone to come between you and God.
Become a Holy Fool.