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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31368 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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HISD to eliminate librarians and convert libraries into disciplinary centers at NES schools

Not worth a post as top level thread on it's own; but hilariously dystopic enough to post here. It's only one (admittedly large and important) SD, but this is the type of shit Margret Atwood would write about as a totally out there thought experiment.

Hopefully enough people get mad it stops there.

Libraries are obsolete. Books aren't expensive enough to justify them anymore.

Naturally institutions try to justify themselves and find reasons for their own continued existence. The proper response is to dismiss such efforts.

Libraries are a lot more than just a warehouse for books. They provide a lot of services, including research help, internet and computer access, rooms that can be booked (hah!) for various purposes, and often a variety of other programs (tax help, kids programming, etc.). Also, just because some books are cheap doesn't mean that borrowing books as no purpose. Some people are still poor, or just have limited space, so "books are cheap" isn't that strong of an argument.

I mean more relevantly books may not be terribly expensive, but they’re durable goods that most people only use briefly, once. Libraries make sense in that context- borrowing really is the more efficient arrangement even for the non-poor.

Books are free if you have internet and know where to look.

I doubt that the particularly rare or niche books that can't be readily found online would be stocked in a school library.

A computer and reliable internet access aren't free (nor a VPN), and many people rely on the library for the internet (ironically enough).

I don't think the internet replaces what libraries currently do, even around getting books. Being able to easily browse, to find books you never even thought of... a physical space like a library is way better than the internet.

My VPN that I use for piracy is entirely free, and I very much doubt that even the poorest of Americans don't have access to cellphones, since even Indian beggars usually have a phone of some kind. Despite what manufacturers would want you to believe, a phone is a computer too.

I'm not claiming that all libraries are useless, I'm just claiming that the ones in schools are no longer anywhere near as essential as they once were.

Books are free if you have internet and know where to look.

I would add the pretty major caveat that you have to be okay with stealing them. I mean don't get me wrong, I have pirated thousands of books in my life, but let's call a spade a spade.

I would have an issue with stealing a book, pirating said book I see almost no issue at all. To me piracy is behavior on level of using adblocker or not paying voluntary fee for using toilet. I see it as a much lesser crime than theft.

Eh. Copying data you aren't authorized to copy and non-consensually appropriating physical objects that someone else was using don't seem similar enough to me to merit clustering them closely.

I don't feel like they're both spades. I think-

  • Taking a thing in such a way that it damages their livelihood because they were dependent on it to survive.
  • Copying something that someone might have otherwise have had some % expectation of being able to derive rent from you and similar minded people from that they need a certain threshold of to survive.

Have a substantial cleaving of the ethical reality in between them. In fact... I might even put stealing physical objects from sufficiently wealthy people who will tank it in a third category.

This isn't to make strong claims about the ethics just yet- there's also the consequences of disrupting societal norms around certain property rights via direct action to consider.

So all that said- yeah.

Re: "I would add the pretty major caveat that you have to be okay with [pointer at ethics around non-con copying] them."

I agree. Some issue taken with the word "steal" here and the claim that you're "calling a spade a spade" because it's equivocation in culture war debates elsewhere say- around copy-write or AI art- feel like disingenuous weaponizations.

That's true but it's not like the author gets paid when you borrow a book from the library either.

This isn't true globally. For example, in the UK the Public Lending Right Act 1979 grants authors a small payment each time their book is borrowed from a public library.

Checking Wikipedia for "Public Lending Right" indicates that similar schemes exist in other countries, e.g. Canada, Germany, Israel.

Libraries organize books in a physical space. I can find most books free online if I know exactly which book I'm looking for. I can't, practically speaking, wander through the philosophy section in the Dewey decimal system and notice something.

There's also a significant difference between reading a physical book and a digital one.

It is impossible to browse Amazon the way you browse bookstores or libraries. Amazon is 95% less fun.

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