Near-valueless concepts

“Today's internet for most Americans…is an immeasurably potent vibes machine. One powered by a complex fuel of negative emotions — hatred, rage, hopelessness, nihilism, grievance, cynicism, paranoia, discontent and addiction. It’s a machine more than capable of constructing false realities and corroding our lived experiences. Intent, meaning and sincerity are near-valueless concepts in this realm, while things like knowledge, understanding and good faith — critical elements to any healthy public sphere — have been gradually distorted beyond the point of recognition, or abandoned completely.”
Charlie Kirk’s Killing and Our Poisonous Internet, guest essay by Nathan Taylor Pemberton. (“Mr. Pemberton writes about extremisn and American politics.”) New York Times. 14 September 2025. (Soft paywall.)

An Advanced Civilization

“An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future. Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”
A passage from the founding legislation that established the American National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities in 1965. The Trump White House fired most of the NEH's advisory council yesterday, "hoping to place members on the board who alighn more closely with [the President's] vision." (Washington Post.) HT Marsha Semmel, who noted in her LinkedIn post, “What a shame, just as we are commemorating the 60th anniversary of the founding legislation for NEA and NEH.”

Not preordained

Cory Doctorow at a podium giving his speech.
Ursula Franklin told us that the outcomes of technology, they're not preordained, they're the result of choices we make about how we will use technology in society.

And I really like this. This is a very science fiction way of thinking about technology. I think the message of good science fiction is that it doesn't matter so much what the gadget does as who it does it for and who it does it to. Those social factors, they're far more important than the specifications of the gadget. It's the difference between a system that warns you when your car is about to drift outta your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted outta your lane so they can add $10 to your insurance bill this month. I's the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you made a typo and a spell checker that runs under the “bossware” that lets your manager know that you're like the third most typo prone employee in your department so that they can cut your bonus. It's the difference between the app that remembers where you parked your car for you and the app that uses the location of your car as a criterion for including you in a, in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone who is in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I think that enshittification is not caused by changes in our technology, but by changes to the policy environment, changes to the rules of the game undertaken in living memory by named parties who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, who face no consequences and no accountability for their role in ushering in this and should have seen that we live in, who venture out into polite society every day without ever once wondering whether someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.
2025 Ursula Franklin Lecture: Cory Doctorow, at 34:34.

Careless People, Facebook and de Tocqueville

To me, it seems like a very American thing. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the US in the nineteenth century, he was on a rickety steamboat that hit a sandbar and capsized, and he nearly drowned. Afterward he found the manufacturers and asked them why they didn't make the vessels safer. They explained that technological innovation in America happened so quickly there was no point; by the time they made the necessary changes, the boats would be obsolete anyway. Better just to take a chance on what you have. If some drown, no need to dwell, safe in the knowledge that something better is just around the corner. That cheerful recklessness combined with passivity, that forward motion without introspection, that's what Javi's team has.
From Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of public policy at Facebook. Page 54. “Javi” is Javier Oliván, who was head of Facebook's “growth team” from 2007 to 2022. He is currently Meta's COO.
“One study, published last year, found that fifty-eight per cent of students at two Midwestern universities had so much trouble interpreting the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, that ‘they would not be able to read the novel on their own.’ And these were English majors.”
What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing? By Hua Hsu. The New Yorker [soft paywall]. June 30, 2025.

For reference, this is the opening paragraph of Bleak House:

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Elon stopped believing in Mars

“Peter Thiel says 2024 is the year Elon stopped believing in Mars. Mars was supposed to be a political project. It was building an alternative. And in 2024, Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist US government, the woke AI, it would follow you to Mars. He says, if I had the seasteading version with Elon where I said if trump doesn’t win, I want to just leave the country, and then elon said there’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to go. This is the only place that. Maybe that was when elon decided to pump a quarter of a billion dollars into the trump campaign. I guess it was.”
Futurist and author Amy Webb, This Week In Tech episode 1040, 13 July 2025. [Around 1:12:17] Light editing for clarity.

Only a void

Like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational. We, too, exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, fash across our screens all the time. Traditional religions are in long-term decline. Trusted institutions seem to be failing.

Techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can't understand. And in the hands of the New Obscurantists — who actively promote fear of illness, fear of nuclear war, fear of death, dread and anxiety are powerful weapons.

The supporters of the New Obscurantism have also broken with the ideals of Americas Founders, all of whom considered themselves to be men of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker but a scientist and a brave advocate of smallpox inocula-tion. George Washington was fastidious about rejecting monarchy, restricting the power of the executive, and establishing the rule of law. Later American leaders - Lincoln, Roosevelt, King-quoted the Constitution and its authors to bolster their own arguments.

By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

The New Rasputins, Anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy around the globe, by historian Anne Applebaum. The Atlantic, February 2025.

Connected Audience Conference — slides, references, and notes

Image of program description listing speakers

Thursday I’ll present a talk at Connected Audience 2025: Factors, Challenges and Opportunities of Cultural Participation for Youth sponsored by the IfKT, Institute for Cultural Participation Research (Institut für Kulturelle Teilhabeforschung), Berlin.

The session will be moderated by Ryan Auster of the Museum of Science, Boston, with Kaly Halkawt Lundström of Stockholm University and Dimitra Christidou and Sofie Amiri from the National Museum, Oslo, Norway.

My contribution will be about why we need to create new kinds of museum institutions — everywhere, urgently, starting yesterday — that support young people as legitimate “doers” and problem-solvers in society, and how we approached developing the voice, know-how, and agency of of our visitors at the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai.

I’ll post the full talk (both shortened and full versions) as well as slides, notes, and a transcript below.

Slides and Video

Four thumbnails representing the slides, video, and transcript

References

“The right to the future tense”

This is one of the recurring themes of Shoshana Zuboff’s stunning 2018 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Honestly, Google’s AI did a better job summarizing this concept than any single source I’ve found, including Zuboff’s book iteslf: Shoshana Zuboff defines the "right to the future tense" as the fundamental human ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future. It is the essence of free will, autonomy, and the ability to make meaningful choices about one's life. Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism, which involves companies using data to control and predict behavior, encroaches upon this right by limiting individual agency and autonomy. (Google Gemini on May 18, 2025, citing an interview with Zuboff in The Harvard Gazette and a book review on Taylor & Francis Online.)

“Information-deficit model of behavior change.” Wikipedia.

“The knowing-doing gap”

Jose Antonio Gordillo Martorell, Founder and CEO of Cultural Inquiry

Hart’s Ladder of Children’s Participation

On the Opening of the Museum of Solutions (my blog; linkedIn)

Webinar, Create Dangerously: Museums in the Age of Action

via NEMO — the Network of European Museum Organizations, 14 February 2023 (Video, slides and background)

“Do we really need to overthink animated movies of fairy tales?” But then I realized, actually, we do. There are lots of things we overthink in our society. I overthink everything all the time, and most of the things I overthink are not nearly as important as the narratives we tell children.
From Little Mermaid Part 1: The Golden Contract (podcast and transcript), Malcolm Gladwell's exploration of how young people develop their understanding of the moral/legal universe.

Looking in the wrong place

But … by the mid-2000s, there still were no real digital books. The Rocket eBook was too little, too early. Sony launched the eink-based Librie platform in 2004 to little uptake. Interactive CD-ROMs had dropped off the map. We had Wikipedia, blogs, and the internet, but the mythological Future Book—some electric slab that would somehow both be like and not like the quartos of yore—had yet to materialize. Peter Meirs, head of technology at Time, hedged his bets perfectly, proclaiming: “Ultimately, there will be some sort of device!”

And then there was. Several devices, actually. The iPhone launched in June 2007, the Kindle that November. Then, in 2010, the iPad arrived. High-resolution screens were suddenly in everyone’s hands and bags. And for a brief moment during the early 2010s, it seemed like it might finally be here: the glorious Future Book.

Yet here’s the surprise: We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.

[…] Our Future Book is composed of email, tweets, YouTube videos, mailing lists, crowdfunding campaigns, PDF to .mobi converters, Amazon warehouses, and a surge of hyper-affordable offset printers in places like Hong Kong.

For a “book” is just the endpoint of a latticework of complex infrastructure, made increasingly accessible. Even if the endpoint stays stubbornly the same—either as an unchanging Kindle edition or simple paperback—the universe that produces, breathes life into, and supports books is changing in positive, inclusive ways, year by year.
The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, But It's Not What We Expected, by Craig Mod. Wired, 20 December 2018.
“If a society creates situations where people have to get a loan to buy a burrito, is the problem with the person getting a loan to buy a burrito or the society?”
Patrick Beja, commenting on the societal implications of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) vendor Klarna's deal with food delivery service Door Dash, allowing customers to buy a burrito and pay later in 4 easy installments. Via This Week in Tech #1024, Mar 24, 2025 [2:34:00]

What Are We Missing? Libraries and AI

Computers In Libraries 2025. Leslie Weir and Claire McGuire on stage with Erik Boekesteijn on the video link, Washington, DC. CC-BY

Updated March 30, 2025 at 4:27pm EST.

(Notes and references are at the bottom of the post.)

What Are We Missing? Libraries and AI? (Google Slides or pdf) was my short provocation for the March 27th Computers in Libraries keynote panel.

I made the following 5 assertions regarding the library sector’s response to AI.

  1. At the heart of librarianship is a Jeffersonian/Franklinian bond between a librarian and a citizen.*
    This bond serves a profound purpose in democracy & human rights.

  2. AI, developed by/for narrow, private/governmental interests, drives a wedge between librarian, citizen, and democracy.
    We are in the midst of a cultural revolution, not yet usefully recognized by public intellectuals, that cuts at the heart of our Jeffersonian/Franklinian bond. AI is one of the drivers of, and characters in, this revolution.

  3. We are only investigating a small subset of AI’s scope and impact.
    As we try to understand the impact of AI on our societal purpose, we are making a “thinking error” that restricts our vision: We are primarily considering AI as an assistive technology that helps with our standard modus operandi, which is only a small subset of AI's consequences for librarianship and democracy.

  4. We are misjudging the speed of AI’s emergence and the intentions of its primary owners.
    AI is emerging fast — more quickly than institutions can typically react; Big Tech has unprecedented power/wealth and a poor track record vis-a-vis culture, democracy, and human rights.

  5. We have an obligation to intervene on behalf of our Jeffersonian/Franklinian purpose.
    We have the nascent skills, community, and mandate to act, as well as a history of involvement in issues of societal importance.

Action is critically important. See the link below for more info about a "23 Things" for AI.

* For readers not steeped in the lore of American librarianship, Benjamin Franklin is credited as the inventor of the free lending library. Thomas Jefferson advanced the idea that a well-educated and informed populace was essential for the success of a democratic republic.)

Notes and references

Program

Program description (CIL 2025 website), featuring Claire McGuire (IFLA), Leslie Weir (Director of Libraries and Archives Canada and president elect of IFLA), Erik Boekesteijn (National Library of the Netherlands), and me.

Get involved — 23 Things

My Slides

What Are We Missing About AI? (Google Slides or pdf)

References for the slides

Matrix Diagram (above)

  • This is the chart I showed to illustrate how we’re primarily talking about AI as an “assistive” technology — basically as an individual/office productivity tool, while more-or-less ignoring AI that has a higher level of cognitive ability/utility or a broader scope of societal impact. Here’s the full chart in various manifestations on Google Sheets.
    I used the following resources to come up with these hierarchies,

Other works referenced and cited

Anything else? Feel free to ask!! (Link to my contact me page.)

“Let’s face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behaviour on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organises and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, that’s what makes it beautiful, and that’s what makes it work.”
Donella Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. Page 181. Via Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics.
It is an often overlooked fact that one of the easiest ways to learn about a foreign culture is through the books it produces for its children. Shortly after my family moved to the Netherlands last summer, we discovered “zoekboeks” (pronounced “zhook-book”) the genre of kids’ picture books that invite you to search (“zoek”) for characters, objects or events obscured by visual busyness. English-language books for kids are hard to come by here, and we didn’t speak or read Dutch yet, so the wordless zoekboek was a welcome find.
The zoekboek is closely related to a German genre, the Wimmelbuch, or “teeming book.” A “wimmelbook” — in this era of fluid borders and cultures, the word is often rendered as a mash-up of German and English — is “a book of plenitude,” writes Cornelia Rémi, a German professor who is the only scholar known to consider the genre in depth.

She argues that the zoekboek and the wimmelbook differ from each other: The zoekboek gives the reader explicit search tasks (where’s Waldo?) and often uses words, while the wordless wimmelbooks “allow for manifold reading options and encourage a highly active response from children and adults, which rightfully might be called a form of playing.” When I now read traditional storybooks (which we also do at home), they seem rigid and prescribed in comparison.
My family reads our wimmelbooks so much, we’re loving them out of their bindings. But they really sank their teemingness into me as I was reading Richard Sennett’s “The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile,” in which he describes how the political revolutions of 1848 redefined nationalism from one based on monarchies or concocted geographic partitions to one based on ordinary rituals, everyday life and authentic selves.

The revolutionaries of the age “believed that a nation was enacted by custom, by the manner and mores of a volk: the food people eat, how they move when they dance, the dialect they speak, the precise forms of their prayers,” Mr. Sennett writes. Wimmelbooks do just that — they show people glorying “in their ordinary selves,” as he puts it.

Unprecedented concentration of power

We can recognize that over the centuries we have imagined threat in the form of state power. This left us wholly unprepared to defend ourselves from new companies with imaginative names run by young geniuses that seemed able to provide us with exactly what we yearn for at little or no cost. This new regime’s most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, and purposeful cultural misappropriation.”

[…] This unprecedented concentration of knowledge produces an equally unprecedented concentration of power: asymmetries that must be understood as the unauthorized privatization of the division of learning in society.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. 2019. Wikipedia link. The two passages quoted are from different sections of the book, but their placement together helps with context.

Not a citizenry (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)

Uncertainty is not chaos but rather the necessary habitat of the present tense. We choose the fallibility of shared promises and problem solving over the certain tyranny imposed by a dominant power or plan because this is the price we pay for freedom to will, which founds our right to the future tense. In the absence of this freedom, the future collapses into an infinite present of mere behavior, in which there can be no subjects and no projects: only objects.

[…] Google’s ideal society is a population of distant users, not a citizenry. It idealizes people who are informed, but only in the ways that the corporation chooses. It means for us to be docile, harmonious, and, above all, grateful.”
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. 2019. Wikipedia link. The two passages quoted are from different sections of the book, but their placement together helps with context.

Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire

Part of the 826 Valencia Tenderloin District space in San Francisco

Kids are used to cinderblock walls, plastic chairs, and industrial wall-to-wall carpet. So many spaces for kids are designed to withstand their presence, as opposed to celebrating it. Sterile, brutalist learning boxes can suffocate the mind and make a young person feel they are being contained, instead of being set free. If we want to foster creativity and sensitivity and students, we must surround them with a necessary, even extravagant beauty.

An inspired learning environment sets the imagination on fire and makes a young person feel loved. This is true: they feel loved, sensing the encompassing affection and respect that went into the creation of that learning space. And with beauty all around them, they will want to make beautiful things, too.
Dave Eggers, introduction to Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire (McSweeneys, 2008).