The through-line of this post began sometime while I was watching this video from Technology Connections. In it, I learned that I was part of the 3% of this channel’s viewers who discovered new videos from YouTube’s Subscription page.
(Brave souls might be also interested in this video that also tackles our collective loss of agency in our media consumption).
I said that’s where the thread starts but to be honest, I can’t remember when there was a time in which I was not being warned of merchants about trying to capture our attention directly (such as through advertising) or indirectly (such as through the news). In high school, I dutifully read A Clockwork Orange, 1984, and Brave New World. I think I read Fahrenheit 451 on my own accord.
It is a good time to be reminded that Fahrenheit 451 is not about censorship.
Bradbury makes clear that the firemen who famously start fires to burn books are doing so only long after people stopped reading books of their own accord as other forms of media came to dominate their experience. Actually, to be more precise, they did not stop reading altogether. They stopped reading certain kinds of books: the ones that made demands of the reader, intellectual, emotional, moral demands that might upset their fragile sense of well-being.
The fireman are here but they are not burning books. They are burning budgets.
Let me share with you this song by Tom Waits, that keeps coming to my mind, like a mantra and like a prayer.
Pin your ear to the wisdom post
Pin your eye to the line
Never let the weeds get higher than the garden
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Always keep a diamond in your mind
This is how I pin my ear to the wisdom post.
Most days, when I am online, I start the day by checking my still.social feed, which gives me the most popular links shared by the people who I follow on Mastodon and Bluesky. I use it to answer the question, did I miss anything?
This is what I saw this morning:
Later in the day, I will visit https://www.inoreader.com to skim through recently published news articles, blog posts, and local reddit threads, all made possible by RSS feeds. I will also be kept up to date of some websites that ioreader lets me monitor, despite lacking any available feeds. I could use inoreader to read my daily intake of newsletters, but I choose to use email.
RSS is the reason why we say, “Listen to wherever you get your podcasts and why its a radical statement“. I use a separate app for podcast listening. Recently, I heard and enjoyed the mailbag episode of the Never Post podcast, in which listeners shared their strategies to find fun on the internet in spite of the algorithms. There is a wonderful list around the 22:48 minute mark and this list includes going to the library on a weekly basis to discover new music, comics, and authors.
There are many ways that the library and library staff already support non-algorithmic discovery. I want to suggest one particular way that libraries could encourage peer-to-peer recommendations, largely because I have not seen this done before. Instead of live-tweeting a conference, you can try to capture what works and writers are being recommended by speakers and the audience. That’s what I did from last Thursday to Saturday, when I had the pleasure of attending the WeRobot 2025 conference.
We Robot is the most exciting interdisciplinary conference on the legal and policy questions relating to robots. The increasing sophistication of robots and their widespread introduction everywhere—from the battlefield to the home, from hospitals to public spaces—disrupts existing legal regimes and requires new thinking on policy issues.
If you are on the front lines of robot theory, design, or development, we hope to see you here in Windsor. Come join the conversations between the people designing, building, and deploying robots, and the people who design or influence the legal and social structures in which robots will operate.
We Robot is a conference that is designed to encourage generosity and collaboration and to uplift diligence and care. I saw evidence of this all through the event. People were sharing the work of others and were sense-making as they were making these connections.
I want to amplify something that Kendra shared on her blog, Library Attack: librarians need to be in the communities that they serve.
I am sure every field scrambling to preserve and continue the work right now has librarians involved, but I also can tell that a lot of librarians are on the outside due to the structural nature of their positions. Our organizations want to help, but again… we see our work as in service of everybody without being in the community which is hugely important right now. And I think that dynamic is why we were collectively unprepared for the attack on the information ecology we’re experiencing right now. Library workers don’t see themselves as part of these systems, but consumers and peddlers of the data and information. Throughout all this tumult and chaos, I think it’s worth considering how we can go back to being a part of subject communities. If for no other reason than to help us be connected to something beyond ourselves. That is what organizing is all about.
There are some disturbing signs that suggest that the open web is currently under a DDoS attack from all the bots trying to scrape content for their LLMs, even when they make their content readily available for machine-consumption. Those who used to make advertising revenue from sharing their work online have seen their income plummet as Google’s AI overlay cannibalizes their traffic.
I don’t have any solutions for these problems that I’ve shared in this post. But I wanted to connect you with people who are facing this moment with you.
Pin your ear to the wisdom post
Pin your eye to the line
Never let the weeds get higher than the garden
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Always keep a diamond in your mindYou got to get behind the mule in the morning and plow
Got to get behind the mule in the morning and plow
Got to get behind the mule in the morning and plow
Got to get behind the mule in the morning and plow