Atop Empty Bookshelves of The Flatbush Library, Brooklyn Public Library Trustees Meet Displaying Holiday Spirit As They Fuss Over Expensively Tiny Library Space

“Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic”: That’s a certain snide metaphor most of us are familiar with– 

The quip doesn’t have exact application to the December 11, 2018 meeting of the Brooklyn Public Library trustees, but what the trustees did at their close-of-the-year, seasonal holiday meeting does stand as a very apt, stark and not altogether different metaphor for things wrong at the BPL.  They devoted their time to a presentation about rearranging furniture in shrunken library spaces like the one they were in.  Their meeting occurred atop a library of empty library shelves, and, although the Trustees were theoretically in charge, nobody in the meeting seemed to notice or care that the library book shelves in the building below them were empty. 

Blithely, the trustees were in happy holiday spirit.  And the holiday gifting that was going on?: To put the final ribboned bow of symbolism on this event, each library trustee was given a copy of a book about the neglectful destruction of libraries.       

At their close-of-the-year, December 11, 2018 trustees meeting the board of Brooklyn Public Library treated themselves to a special showcasing of what we have refereed to as their “Murphy Library” concept, the idea that if spaces in libraries are flexible enough in the ways certain people are conceiving, that libraries don’t need to be large at all; they can be tiny.  In other words, the size of a library is virtually just a state of mind— To quote Hamlet: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.”* And there is a corollary concept that the BPL trustees and their cohorts advance along with the concept that with sufficient flexibility, space of almost any size can be enough library space: That corollary is that just about any space, any time, can be library space.

(* On the other hand, Hamlet experiences the entirety of Denmark to be a prison, knowing what he knows of the crimes afoot and knowing that “the time is out of joint.”  NYPL librarians were told to discard "extra" copies of Hamlet, even if there might be demand for them, in order to keep their shelves half empty.)

An Overview of The Fussing Over Library Space

Before, we get to the details of the December 11th “Making Space” presentation to the trustees, which we will in a moment, it is worthwhile to consider an overview.

The fussy energy that library administration officials and others are putting into their “Making Space” initiatives could, at first blush, be regarded as a valiant effort to squeeze the most out of library resources, communicating to onlookers that library spaces are intensely valued by these people . . .  That’s until you realize that these same people, the same coalition of economic forces (the Revson Foundation, The Center For an Urban Future, the BPL trustees themselves) are at the same time working hard to justify the selling off of libraries, turning them into real estate deals like the shrink-and-sink Donnell Library sale (creating, as a priority, a luxury tower where you can now go for $1,500 ice cream sundaes) and the similar -shrink-and-sink sale of the Business, Career and Education Brooklyn Heights Library with the concurrent elimination of books and librarians. . . (We are eliminating the city’s largest science museum!)  When that is considered these perky “Making Space” optimisms look much more like an effort to justify the shrinking of libraries by proving that there is no need or benefit fulfilled when libraries spaces are larger.

The zest for `flexibility’ that these “Making Space” initiatives show may seem to demonstrate commendable creativity and inventiveness in envisioning how library spaces can be used. . .  But that is until you realize that these same people are the ones that over and over again suggest that existing libraries must be rushed into the hand of real state developers who will tear them down because, the vision and insight of library administrators failing them, they just don’t see how the spaces of those, often larger, libraries can still be flexibly or valuably used by the public.  This same lack of competence, creativity and this propensity to abject despair also crops up when these people can’t believe how libraries they want to give to real estate developers could ever be kept in good repair.

The presentation of the “Making Space” initiatives involve an almost absurd delectation of, a preoccupation with, the value of repeatedly reconfiguring the arrangement of space, as if the arrangement and configuration of space matters.  Indeed, as just noted, these same library administration officials will argue that they want to sell libraries because of their poor configurations as with NYPL COO (and Senator Schumer wife) Iris Weinshall in 2017 stressing that a reason to sell the Inwood library was so that it could be reconfigured or BPL president Linda Johnson saying the same things about the central destination, downtown Brooklyn Heights Library she wanted to shrink.  But then, at the developer meetings where these libraries are being sold off, the developers are told that the development proposals they submit will not get extra credit for good configuration of “replacement” library space.  In the case of the redevelopment of the former Business, Career and Education Brooklyn Heights Library, the horse-shoe shape of the smaller, more underground  “replacement” library was clearly just an afterthought to the developer being able to first cream off the top what was most valuable to him.

In the case of the Inwood Library and Downtown Brooklyn Heights Library, the library spaces being jettisoned were recently accomplished expansions that were praised.  Likewise, the city’s largest science library, SIBL (the Science, Industry and Business Library at 34th street) that is being done away with is a recent expansion of space, configured with modern needs in mind, and was also praised even as the public invested heavily to produce it.

All these things considered, what might be the theoretically praiseworthy aspirations of the “Making Space” initiative look a lot more like just one more overturned walnut shell being pushed around the table in a much larger shell game of distractions.

Then there is the question how the “Making Space” initiatives focus cleverly to such a significant extent on re-imagining what has clearly been library space with broader and broader redefinitions where, particularly at the outer edges, the relationship of such uses to the essential mission of libraries becomes quite vague: Case in point?– making library space into karaoke space.

There is a desperate need for public spaces and public services of all sorts.  That need is felt all the more acutely as the world around us is privatized and government services contract.  There is nothing wrong and everything right with wanting more theater space and, for instance, museum space.  Furthermore, the tradition of libraries also providing community and public assembly space already goes back.  But throwing everything in the same pot creates an opportunity for muddling and can even create destructive competition where instead of being properly augmented, public resources that have already been made scarce get divided up into ever smaller fractions.

And that muddling can work against, instead of in favor of, those other groups getting thrown into the same pot with the libraries.  For instance, in a consolidating shrinkage, the BPL is giving up its Brower Park Library space.  Although that library, the “smallest library” in the BPL system, desperately needed to be enlarged (and could have been enlarged) the “replacement” library will be no bigger, perhaps smaller, and will take over and shrink space in the Brooklyn Children’s Museum that not long ago needed to be enlarged at public expense.

When what is “library” space keeps getting redefined to include other increasingly broad alternative uses, it draws in other constituencies to claim the space.  One experiment, of the BPL and NYPL officials in this regard was to privatize and shrink library space by turning library space over to the private Spaceworks corporation (actually set up for that purpose), which would then charge for artists to use the space.  Thus the BPL gave away the second floor on top of its Williamsburg Library and was marching next toward a similar substantial shrinkage of the Red Hook Library. Spaceworks proclaimed that one of it's central purposes was to take over library space because it was “underutilized.”

At the same time, this kind of muddling is potentially a distraction and deflection from the loss of books and core library services.  Plus, finally, somewhere along the line, the constituency for defending libraries is likely to get confusingly diffuse.

If you are going to dismantle libraries it is a useful start to first dismantle the concept of what “a library” is: If any space of any size used for virtually anything can be “a library,” and if virtually any space anywhere, anytime can be considered “a library,” then it is almost as if, nothing in particular is a library and everything is a library.  In other words there is nothing that is not “a library.”  If you are confused enough about what a library actually is, how do you defend them?

Probably those of us who are not entranced and excited by “Making Space” initiatives presentations are supposed to be viewed as old, behind-the-times fuddy-duddies unwilling to pay homage to the marvelous future that’s unfolding. . .

. . .  That’s as if we are not supposed to notice that as the BPL trustees were in exuberant holiday spirit enjoying this presentation they were sitting atop a library full of empty bookshelves.

The “Making Space” Initiatives Presentation

The “Brooklyn Public Library’s Making Space” initiative is a “Featured Project” of The Revson Foundation, a “pilot” project to deal with the “major challenge,” of library administration officials “finding spaces that can accommodate the diverse variety of programs.”  The presentation to the trustees on december 11th was by David Giles.  Mr. Giles came to the BPL as staff after working for the Center For an Urban Future (CUF) doing work funded by the Revson Foundation, where he advocated for sales that turned libraries into real estate deals. That included writing op-eds CUF got published in newspapers favoring library sales.  Giles is on the BPL’s strategy staff.  “Strategy” is the rubric under which library administration officials generally put their libraries-as-real-estate venture activities.

Giles explained that his presentation was a version of the presentation given for the AIA, American Institute of Architects, earlier in the year.  It reflects the design work of SITU Studio, an Architectural Design and furniture fabrication company which is lucky enough to be located in the subsidized Brooklyn Navy Yards.  SITU Studio has branded its “Re-Envisioning Branch Libraries” as “L+.”  The “+” branding is a nice PR touch, an example of what has become the fairly standard Owellian tactic these days of reverse naming things: It counters the fact that the project focuses on making use of inadequate, small and insufficient spaces.  Making certain the “+” branding doesn’t go unnoticed or unremarked upon SITU Studio’s used the “+” design as a motif for door handles and sprinkled it around liberally for other of its furniture design accents.

Giles explained to the trustees that the project:

was meant to sort of re-envision The library community room as a more dynamic education and collaboration space.  And it was meant to address the gap between the types of services and programs that we put on as a 21st century library, uhm and the various buildings that we’ve inherited over the last 120 years or so. [i.e. “old.”]

Giles said these old `inherited' buildings included approximately 18 Carnegie era libraries buildings built at the beginning of the last century (the BPL previously caused the Brooklyn Paper to carry an article about how they ought to be sold), about 15 mid-century buildings, and about 20 so-called “Lindsay box buildings” from the 1960s and 70s.  He described the Carnegie era libraries as being “highly controlled spaces” from the “prime shush period” with lots of space for private work.  (The Flatbush Library in which the presentation was occurring is `Carnegie era,’ the sixth Carnegie, which opened in Brooklyn in 1905,)

The mid-century libraries were “fairly large, two stories” with “lots of spaces for shelving and seating, even, and in some instances, auditoriums and stages for public events.”  The Lindsay Boxes were referred to as stripped down to “a kind of franchise model” avoiding “accouterments” to “spaces” that “are sort of devoted mainly to shelving.”

In January of 2013 Mr. Giles authored a report issued by the Center For and Urban Future with figures we quickly picked up on because those figures argued well against the sell off of libraries and the elimination of books: “[Libraries] have experienced a 40 percent spike in the number of people attending programs and a 59 percent increase in circulation over the past decade.”  Mr. Giles didn’t offer a new figure to replace their previously cited “59 percent increase in circulation” figure that we used against them when we disagreed about whether libraries should be sold, but in saying that program attendance was now putting “an incredible strain on our buildings” Giles had a now boosted figure for program attendance saying that “in just the last five years” there was another 20% increase, making program attendance “more like a 59%, 60% increase” over the previous 18 years. . . . If those numbers don’t quite jibe (and they don’t seem to), it could be because some of those figures are for New York City libraries generally, while others may be for just the BPL’s Brooklyn libraries.

Giles explained that the BPL library programs were hosting cultural celebrations and cultural programs: theatrical performances; and townhall type discussions, media classes, and programs for teens and adults, tell-a-stories and televisits.  And he said that, doing an audit, the BPL decided it was hosting 70,000 or so public programs during the year throughout all its libraries.

Giles explained (starting to refer, as he talked, to what was in the community room where the trustees sat):

As a part of this project, Situ studios, along with our librarians, and strategy office did a complete audit of the 70,000 or so public programs that are happening in the library across the year.  And they categorized these in terms of program types, and took a sort of deep dive in terms of the functional requirements and spatial demands they made, uhm, and sort of systematized these programs, not only in terms of theme and program type, but in terms of furniture requirements and functions. . . .

And then they started developing what they are calling `building blocks' to support these various program demands.  And, two things they wanted to do here, they wanted to create furniture pieces that were incredibly movable, easily rearranged into new constellations, and fairly cheap to produce and manufacture.  So you can see here these quite sturdy metal frames can be used, uhm and, you know, produced in different ways to support different purposes.  Here we have a mobile media cabinet, which has, actually, outlets installed inside.  It holds a game console and television, but that same frame can be repurposed, not by the library staff, but by the manufacturers as a sort of hanging coat hanging unit.  We have different storage units, different sizes. The storage units can double as seats.  All of the services are writable, so people can write on these, use them as white boards.  We have mobile walls that serve as whiteboards, And also pin up boards on the other side.  They help divide up the room as well. 

Here are some other mobile walls and signs. . . .

So, translating, if you will, the idea of all this “fairly cheap” rolling box furniture, is that it is sort of like a theater set, where black clad figures that the audience is supposed to ignore swoop in during scene changes effecting rearrangements that when the audience and actors assist with their imagination suggest entirely different places, indoors, outdoors, maybe even on different continents, palaces or hovels . . .

. . . Will the BPL be engaging black clad stage assistants to swoop in between the library space users?  We imagined turnover time when all the “mobile walls” that have served so ingeniously “as whiteboards” have to be wiped down (make sure you get all the sides) so the next group of users have a clean slate for how they will `conjure’ the room.  We were tempted to try out these BPL whiteboards by writing, “Don’t sell or shrink our libraries” on them and see how fast the trustees would react, but nowhere in the room were there any whiteboard writing implements to be seen.

It's "curtains" for the old fashioned library user of days past!

Giles explained how the room could also be divided (as if into more than one room) for “two different programs simultaneously.” Pointing to the ceiling Giles explained that heavy curtains hung on tracks there could pulled around as enveloping privacy walls.  BPL president Linda Johnson delightedly told the trustees that curtains hanging almost to the floor were designed to be “soundproof” (indeed, like the “Get Smart” television series “cone of silence”?).  And if you don’t like hanging curtain walls evocative of Ninotchka’s satirical vision of Soviet era Russian poverty, there were also rolling walls.

Giles said “You can hang a lot of different things from the ceiling grid: you can hang theater lights, speakers, projectors, and furniture, OK?”

Looking a little bit like a vacuum cleaner nozzle, an electric cord dangling above our heads ready to be dragged down for use by a right-height individual

Included among the things “hanging” from the ceiling grid were dangling electrical cords looking a little like vacuum cleaner nozzles for right-height human beings to reach up and grab

Giles explained:

Uhm, One big need was power.  This room had two outlets.  And with the conduit’s and the ceiling grid we were able to add 24 that’s in here for different programs.  You can see the extendable cords hanging from the ceiling for maker programs.

Wow!  Gosh golly.  Library administration officials and the other library sale promoting organizations they have been working with have cited the lack of electrical outlets of as one of their favorite capital infrastructure shortcomings when describing libraries, but running electric lines or cords is one of the easiest, cheapest things to do, especially when you don’t bury them in the walls when prioritizing aesthetic goals.

One of those electrical nozzles when it's a little closer to nose height

Giles explained that he and his designers had hopes of somehow arranging the constellation of furniture to “create a natural stage” for karaoke and talent shows at the library (part of the
“very different public service model and . .  diverse variety of programs” Giles was telling the trustees could be so ingeniously handled by strained resources with such flexible repurposing of library space).  Giles said that while “it was a nice idea” they had “backed off” of it “because of insurance.”

Then Giles demonstrated the room’s addressable LED “smart lights” and if you want to know when he became most gleeful it was probably as he was talking about “value engineering” and showing off how the lights that hung like children’s party balloons between the grid for hanging curtains, electric cords and furniture (or other lights) could change colors or be multiple colors at the same time.  The lighting was going to be good for karaoke and talent shows.

We have a short little video that captured the moment (click through to Youtube for best viewing): 


Giles said that at first he worried that spending on the lights would be an excessively expensive part of the project, but if you are following these things, you probably know that, along with other computer type things, LEDs tricked up with integrated computer features are getting pretty cheap these days.  What did you put on you Chanucha bush this year?  Giles said the LED lights were “aspirational.”

Fun fact about lighting: One of the defining characteristics of Film Noir is its lighting emphasized dramatic areas of dark shadow contrasted with bright light shining on key objects.  Yes it was partly inherited from early German Expressionist cinema, but one reason it was adopted as part of the look of the genre was that the films of Film Noir tended to be B films and the use of the bare minimum of lighting (already costing virtually nothing), was a way to stretch low budgets to get dramatic effects without investing anything for sets. . . Just saying.

Giles put up slide after slide to show all the “configurations” into which a flexible room could theoretically be rearranged: typical classroom configuration, team cooking classes, job readiness classes, English as a Second Language classes, citizenship test classes, classes on for health insurance enrollment assistance, homework assistance, “maker space” configurations, storytime configuration, movie nights, and of course karaoke and talent shows.

At one point, Giles stopped to admire an image of the divided community room with people filling it and exclaimed that the image was “sort of like a Renaissance painting; I love this picture.”

David Gile's "Renaissance painting," (a Rembrandt?)

At the outset, the trustees were told that the guinea pig libraries for the program experimentation were the Flatbush Library they were in and the smaller Clinton Hill Library’s space.  The Clinton Hill Library has been talked about in connection with a future library sale, but now probably only in conjunction with an upzoning of the area like with the Inwood Library.

At the conclusion of the presentation, Linda Johnson said the community room they were in was “a prototype, the kind of thing we would like to do with other libraries throughout the system.”

Situ Studio partner Brad Samuels said in another "Making Space" presentation video you can watch on video*

That mass production is essentially what Situ Studio partner Brad Samuels said in another presentation video you can watch on video*, that the approach representing a “paradigm shift” is designed to be “replicable” and “implemented anywhere in the city.”  In fact, Mr. Samuels, saying that future of the libraries was “not monumental” and that the future of the libraries “is distributed,” talked in that presentation about how the same approach was also intended to convert other than existing library space into such flexible `L+ library space’ by throwing these L+ “kits of parts” into “community retail space” such as “persistently vacant store fronts.”  Samuels cited, for example how a “cooking class could benefit” if it took place in abandoned restaurant space that still had working sinks.

(* We have our own video of an event we did with Rev. Billy where at about 10:36 we reviewed, with some parody, the L+ ideas for using tiny library spaces.) 

These thoughts about minimal investment library “outposts” that pop up into existence easily by, say, taking over a closed restaurant or another space a landlord is finding hard to rent out, are thoughts that are interesting to sit with a bit, if you consider that the people paying the piper with NYC public library money are people now tending to think of libraries as pieces on a real estate chess board.  These are people who also seem to have no compunction about popping them back out of existence when disappearing acts would convenience a deal being put together– “Outpost libraries” could be rent paying placeholders as time is bided.

This idea that `poof,’ an unused restaurant now becomes `library space,’ that library space can be anywhere, anytime, is based partly on the notion that library space can be anything.  It is also based, as Mr. Samuels referred to in his presentation, on the idea that libraries don’t need to have books on the premises when there is instead a “floating collection” of books theoretically (not at the libraries  themselves). That “floating collection” qualifies every space to be a library.  Mr. Samuels credited Christian Zabriski and Lauren Comito of Urban Librarians Unite (who have argued for all the library real estate sale deals proposed so far) with helping him construct his vision for the libraries.  Mr. Samuels said that the existing space now in libraries needed to “catch up” with this vision.

The Empty Shelves of the Flatbush Library

The BPL trustees were happy with Mr. Giles’ presentation.  Not one of them seemed aware or commented that they had noticed that the bookshelves in the library downstairs below them were, as they met, largely empty.  You could actually see this looking through the atrium windows of the community room in which they sat.  And we have close up photographs that show the situation.  (Would this be a good time to mention that only a few weeks ago we posted information about how to recognize someone who can be the diagnosed as a "communal narcissist"?)

From this vantage you can see through the windows the BPL trustees having an executive discussion meeting at their December 11th meeting, and at the same time empty bookshelves below.

When we went to the mezzanine to take photographs, some arriving library users were just ahead got upstairs seconds before us and we heard them immediately exclaim about the empty shelves we were about to witness ourselves: “They ain’t got jack!”

The goal of these disappointed book seekers was apparently books related to education and to study for college preparation. . .

The Flatbush Library serves a largely Caribbean community.  It seems like the Caribbean is rich in history and culture.  Are there no books and materials about it?  If there are, they are not filing this library.

Some of the same bookshelves could also be seen to be empty in the summer of 2017 when the Brooklyner ran an article (with photos) that the BPL had “announced a drastic cut in their summer hours” for the Flatbush Library “due to a broken air conditioning system.”

The Brooklyner article noted:

Some commenters expressed concern that this reduced schedule signaled the beginning of the end, citing the demolished Brooklyn Heights Branch.

“They did the same thing at the Brooklyn Heights branch a couple of years ago, before they sold it to a developer,” writes another commenter. “The air conditioner can be repaired, the city just doesn’t want to pay for it.”

Who knows what was going on in 2017 (we also don’t have a date for when the community room work was gearing up), but, as Citizens Defending Libraries has frequently written and testified, air conditioning in city libraries seems to suspiciously break and balk at being repaired over and over again when library administrators want to sell or shrink libraries: The Donnell Library, the Brooklyn Heights Library, the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, the Red Hook Library, the Sunset Park Library, the Pacific Branch Library, etc. 

Feeling Good About Themselves BPL Trustees Give Themselves a Popular Book About Library Destruction

Putting a ribbon and bow on it: The ribbon and bow wrapped red books in front of each of the BPL trustees as a holiday present is a critically acclaimed current bestseller about library destruction.

And that book about the neglectful destruction of libraries that each of the BPL library trustees was given as a holiday season present?  It’s “The Library Book,” a critically acclaimed current bestseller by Susan Orlean about the hugely destructive fire in the Los Angeles Library in 1986 when more than a million books were lost or destroyed.  It happened because of the neglect by those officially in charge.  The LA Public Library was rife with fire safety violations and many experts had warned of the worst before the fire happened.

Ed D’Angelo, a recently retired BPL librarian, who has written his own book about what is destroying our libraries generally (based in part on what he personally saw first hand and reacted to) wrote us that the Susan Orlean book is “an enjoyable read” by “a great writer” who “knows how to tell a good story” and did a lot of research.  But he complains that the book is a “`feel good’ book about public libraries.” He says that the book “lacks a critical edge,” and that Orlean “doesn't take the next step and subject all the information she's gathered to critical analysis,” that she “doesn't step back and question” what she has described.

D’Angelo said “You're supposed to walk away from reading the book feel warm and fuzzy about public libraries. . .  But critical analysis doesn't sell books or make library bureaucrats feel warm and fuzzy.”

D’Angelo said that the conclusion that Orlean could have drawn, but failed to was that those in charge in Los Angeles were a “a poor custodian of books” and that “the fire merely dramatized their negligence.” D’Angelo opined that the fact that all the trustees of the BPL were given a copy of The Library Book as a holiday gift this year “doesn't reflect well on the book!!”

 

Sermonizing In Brooklyn Heights About Amazon (you know That “book seller”), Technology and Consumerism

Ana Levy-Lyons delivering her sermon on Amazon on November 11, 2018 at First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn

In New York City everybody is talking about Amazon now because of the plans unveiled to locate Amazon offices (with the piling on of huge public subsidies to the already wealthy) in Queens, New York, Long Island City.

Maybe people should also be talking about Amazon because it is the Christmas season and Amazon is raking it in.

November 11th there was a sermon at the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn.  It was in Brooklyn Heights, just around the corner and only a stone’s throw from the location of the second biggest library in Brooklyn, the central destination Business, Career and Education library that was sold off to build a luxury tower. The sermon by Minister Ana Levy-Lyons was about what it means for Amazon to be taking over.  You can find the full text of the sermon as well as listen to it here- Sermon: Technology & Religion: God As Consumer, November 11, 2018.

If you were there listening to the sermon you would have recognized in it some of the themes we have been writing about in Citizens Defending Libraries. In some respects the most up-to-date coverage of concerns about Amazon surfaced here in connection with books and the libraries has to do with the control of information: Amazon’s collection of information about all of its customers; questions about how it accelerated into total dominance of the market so fast while starting with the sale of books—  Nearly half of all books, both print and digital, are now sold by Amazon. . . . 

That statistic does not bode well for ensuring free speech or unfettered public discourse.  That concern amplifies especially when one considers how Amazon, including its ties to the internet, has significant roots in the defense and surveillance industry.  National Notice updated a Citizens Defending Libraries post publishing an article that addresses this: Interesting to Think That it All Began With BOOKS? Except That Amazon and World’s Wealthiest Man (As We Know Jeff Bezos Today) Didn’t Exactly Begin That Way. . . Saturday, November 3, 2018. – That was before the announcement of the plan to bring a complex of subsidized Amazon offices to Queens.       

But there are other concerns about what Amazon represents, concerns that we have also raised about the commercializing privatization of the libraries, turning libraries into consumer- and private enterprise-driven environments.  They are also to be worried about.  These are the kind of concerns about libraries that have been raised in the books about the dangerous transfigurations of libraries written by John E. Buschman and Ed D’Angelo, respectively:  “Dismantling the Public Sphere- Situating and Sustaining Librarianship In the Age of the New Public Philosophy,” and “Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and the Public Good.”  *  We've written about these books previously.

Ana Levy-Lyons began her November Amazon sermon vividly referencing Amazons’ ruthless strongarm tactics, but immediately segued to reference Amazon’s allure, dressed up in the notion that Amazon serves an ideal, consumerism, specifically that Amazon’s ruthlessness is permitted, even embraced because it serves:

    . . .  one thing, one shimmering, grand ideal: what the consumer wants. And what does the consumer want? Cheap goods. We want to buy stuff – a lot of stuff – and pay as little as possible. Amazon gets us there. . . .  it is quick, it’s easy, and it gets delivered to our door. What’s not to like?

Low prices: it is hard to object or criticize low prices when about half the population of the United States is so financially on the edge, living paycheck to paycheck, that they are not in a financial position to cover basic expenses if confronted with an emergency like the need for unexpected medical care, and they don’t have enough money to come up with even a $400 emergency expense.  And it is hard to, at the same time, remain conscious enough under these circumstances to factor in how Amazon’s subtractions from the economy are actually contributing to this desperation for those low prices.  (As we were writing this post a New York Times Sunday op-ed was published making exactly this point.)

But in her exceedingly eloquent sermon Ana Levy-Lyons went on to speak of how the reduction that redefines us as just mere consumers in the Amazon world flattens our dimensionality as human beings, so that we thus lack the “larger, fuller expressions of our selfhood,” and are reduced to the part of us that just “takes from the world.”  The sermon delivered in a church and Rev. Levy-Lyons’ diagnosis included her verdict that was a de-spiritualization.*

(* Shades of Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, and his choir, who in all their Hallelujah glory have aided our library fight mightily on many occasions.)

Of the list of illustrative examples she offered, most resonant for library defenders and those steeped in the world of books was that, as “consumers we want to buy books and music as cheaply as possible,” but as full-fledged “spiritual beings having a human experience on this earth . .  what we may really want is for writers and musicians to be able to make a living.”

Levy-Lyons also observed that this lack of human dimensionality is associated with a dementia-ality, a dementia that skews reality, that in a mixed-up way views the raising up the market forces of consumerism as paramount as an expression of freedom, democracy at work, if you will, even as an  expression of our individuality.

In his book, “Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library,” Ed D’Dangelo discussed the threat these same ideas pose to the tradition of libraries (p.107) saying the “genius of market populism” is that it is sold “to the public as a form of liberation,” and, because it is supposedly inherently virtuous, the dictates of the market should therefore be allowed to control the managing all society’s choices, including with respect to the delivery of information.  But D’Angelo notes that the market does not necessarily promote democracy at all, and that these shifts of decision making over to the private sector mean that “in a very real sense we have returned to the feudal ages when power was private and the public realm had fallen into decay . .”
                       
One only has to take a step back to remind oneself that, as we witness Amazon quickly making its owner Jeff Bezos the wealthiest man in the world seemingly out of nowhere, plus the accompanying and very fast escalation of wealth inequality during these recent years, the results of unbridled capitalistic forces increasingly deliver more astounding inequality.  The results are far from egalitarian.  If the “freedom” offered in our market-structured consumer economy is to “vote” with our dollars, the opportunity to vote is extraordinarily unequal.  Not only doesn’t the one-man-one-vote ideal apply to the marketplace, but with economic inequality spiraling out of control, the power of the ballot box has been substantially diluted by the influence of money in politics.

D’Angelo, argues for libraries as the kind of public sphere realms essential to support true democracy; he says (p. 117) that “democracy requires rational deliberation in a public domain about matters of common interest” and that “even ideal markets fail to construct public spaces or to recognize common interests.”

Other commentators like Nathan Robinson, editor-in-chief at Current Affairs magazine, posit that the example of properly functioning libraries, which are traditionally egalitarian, publicly controlled and not controlled by a company, are regarded as a threat seen as “dangerous to a certain kind of a free-market orthodoxy” by those who want everything filtered through market capitalism structures.

That trepidation and urge to preclude or ward off such examples of successful alternatives to evermore pervasive market forces, whether it be a consciously developed strategy, or a response to subliminal impulse, may explain the efforts of monied interests to dismantle traditional libraries and recast them in a capitalist mode reflecting, to use John Buschman’s words (Dismantling the Public Sphere, p. 8), a “radically market-oriented public philosophy toward public cultural institutions.”

Flipping the question around, Buschman asks: If libraries are not providing an alternative model, are not serving democratic ideals, “What public purpose is served by public funding of” projects that “are imitative of the private sector?  What right do we have to public funding to compete with [other?] businesses.  Perhaps more importantly, does society need another model of media-dominated, entertainment oriented consumerism in its public institutions?”

Buschman suggests that the key to attaining the equilibrium whereby libraries will provide the needed democratic public sphere is to avoid the “‘steering mechanisms’ of money and power (i.e. corporate-dominated mass media).”

Buschman, serving up themes very much aligned with Ms. Levy-Lyons' sermon, writes (p. 121) that essentially the idea of a consumerish “give ‘em what they want” focus of librarianship, putting up “a large number of `hot’ items on the shelf to compete with bookstore chains” and quantifying the value of a library only through popularity ignores “merit or lasting value” in curating selections.  While not arguing that libraries should be unresponsive to the public, Buschman says that “customer-driven librarianship abandons a number of public sphere roles.”  “The first of these,” he says, is “our role in organized social memory and rational discourse in a democracy.”  He says that the consumer driven fixation on “exclusively what is popular at the moment” by definition “abandons the public sphere goal of a plurality of ‘voices’ and viewpoints on anything not ‘hot’ to a present or future reader.”  He reminds us that “there is a reason some services are in the public sector; their value is very real but difficult to measure and requires a different kind of judgement and management.”

Levy-Lyons similarly bemoans the lack of collaborative curation and creation of value with the Amazon/Bezos “populist” vision being an “anti-expert, anti-intellectual” belief that, high ideals should be set aside “as a matter of principle” and that “the customers around whom the world spins” should “have the final word.”
                               
But returning to the question of democracy, freedom . . .  as well as whether the consumer really does have the last word in what Levy-Lyons calls this “free market ideology on steroids”:  Levy-Lyons makes the case that while the public is sold the notion that Amazon and the market represent “free choice,” that’s hardly the case:

    . . .  here’s the irony: as humans – in our full selfhood as humans – we have free will. But as consumers today, we are far from free. Our consumer desires are manipulated and even manufactured from scratch by corporations. This has always happened to some extent, but today’s technologies allow that manipulation to get deep inside us, using data about our habits and preferences to craft unique campaigns tailored to evoke our particular longing for products. Virtual assistants, like Amazon’s “Alexa,” and smart appliances – entire smart homes! – anticipate, suggest, and even order for you the thing you’re gonna’ want next.

You can read or listen to Ms. Levy-Lyons sermon in full (about 1,100 words), for her examples respecting the implications of this in terms of the devastation of our environment, our politics, nationally and also around the world (Brazil, and perhaps she should now add Andalusia).

As for expressions of individuality as another likely barometer of freedom, Rev. Levy-Lyons suggests that individuality is also suppressed in the Amazon controlled market world. As an example that should particularly concern those who care about books and book culture, Levy-Lyons suggests that the Amazon changes that are bleeding money out of the book world (with the consequent layoff of marketing and sales people and editors and the shrinking of author royalties and advances) mean that, “publishers are less able to take risks on first-time authors or authors with some off-beat weird idea.”  She says that these changes are continuing to happen so fast that she knows “for a fact that” if she had pitched her book, “No Other Gods: The Politics of the Ten Commandments,” even one year later, her “publisher would not have bought it.”  Thus “authors are finding it harder and harder to make a living.”

In her sermon Ms. Levy-Lyons recommended and encouraged her audience to go to a bookstore to buy Franklin Foer’s “World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech” (2017).  Quite possibly, she drew upon it a fair amount when she composed her sermon.  The Penguin (its publisher) site for the book (or you could dare to go to Amazon) says in the overview it provides:

    Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. . . .

    . . . There have been monopolists in the past but today's corporate giants have far more nefarious aims. They’re monopolists who want access to every facet of our identities and influence over every corner of our decision-making.

That’s ominous when you think, as we noted at the outset, that Amazon is selling nearly half the books in the country, that it collects enough information to know almost “every fact of our identities and . . decision-making,” and that with the roots of its origin and plus continuing links to the military and surveillance industries, it chose to launch itself by venturing into the book industry, which it both decimated and now dominates.

The hope that Re. Levy-Lyons offered to confront Amazon is to act collectively, to stop viewing ourselves as competing individuals and that we can instead create our reality collectively.  She gave the example of a collective of antiquarian book sellers that acted together in concert to protect one of their group when Amazon was victimizing them.

Of course, that acting together collectively in concert requires the public realm, public domain spaces for “rational deliberation” and public discourse about “matters of common interest” that writers like D’Angelo and Bushman are reminding us that we need, and reminding us that these are reasons we need traditional libraries organized so that’s what they provide. . .

. .   These public realm spaces, the same spaces so valuable and essential to us if we are to stand up to forces like Amazon, are the same spaces that are under threat from forces like Amazon.*  But, for the time being, we still have our churches and houses of worship.

(* Footnote and PS: And that is why the  New York Times architect critic Michael Kimmelman was wildly misguided when, responding to the announced arrival of Amazon, he suggested Amazon involve itself in providing our public libraries.  (Amazon is already involved anyway.)  See: Michael Kimmelman’s Unfortunate Suggestion That Amazon Invest In NYC’s Public libraries (per Eric Klinenberg)- See: “Amazon’s HQ2 Will Benefit From New York City. But What Does New York Get?”)

Eric Klinenberg in NY Times Op-ed calls for Defending Libraries Promoing His New Book- "Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life"

The New York Times Sunday Review his past weekend included an op-ed by calling for defending libraries by Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist who has authored the forthcoming “Palaces of the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.”  We didn’t hear from Mr. Klinenberg prior to the publication of his op-ed, but no, if you are wondering, we didn’t enlist Mr. Klinenberg him for ventriloquism purposes of having him recite top themes from our website . . .     

. . .  It just sounds a little that way.

Mr. Klinenberg is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University here in New York City.  He tweets at: @ericklinenberg.

Emblematic of our modern world, Mr. Klinenberg’s essay got totally different titles and subtitles in the print and digital editions of the Times even if they conveyed somewhat the same message.

Here is a link to and a sample of what he wrote.  If you want you play a game and try to match his sentences up with many of those on our Citizens Defending Libraries web pages.

New York Times OpEd- Why Libraries Still Matter- To Restore Civil Society, Start With the Library (In an age of polarization and inequality, the are the bedrock of civil society. -  This crucial institution is being neglected just when we need it the most.), by Eric Klinenberg, September 8, 2018.

Libraries are already starved for resources . . . . But the problem that libraries face today isn’t irrelevance . .  in New York and many other cities, library circulation, program attendance and average hours spent visiting are up. The real problem that libraries face is that so many people are using them, and for such a wide variety of purposes, that library systems and their employees are overwhelmed.

    * * *
Libraries are being disparaged and neglected at precisely the moment when they are most valued and necessary. Why the disconnect? In part it’s because the founding principle of the public library — that all people deserve free, open access to our shared culture and heritage — is out of sync with the market logic that dominates our world.* 

     . . .  they’re open, accessible and free.

(* For more about what's previously been written exploring such thoughts as this see the books: “Dismantling the Public Sphere- Situating and Sustaining Librarianship In the Age of the New Public Philosophy,” by John E. Buschman and “Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and the Public Good,” by Ed D'Angelo.)

    * * *
   
    . .  not everyone can afford to frequent [establishments like Starbucks], and not all paying customers are welcome to stay for long. . .  elderly library patrons . .  told me that they feel even less welcome in the trendy new coffee shops, bars and restaurants . .  Poor and homeless library patrons don’t even consider entering these places. They know from experience that simply standing outside a high-end eatery can prompt managers to call the police. [Like the two black young men in a Philadelphia Starbucks for two minutes before the police were called.]  But you rarely see a police officer in a library.
   

    * * *
Forbes magazine published an article arguing that . .  Amazon [should] replace libraries with its own retail outlets, and claimed that most Americans would prefer a free-market option. The public response . .  was so overwhelmingly negative that Forbes deleted the article from its website.

     . . .  it’s important that institutions like libraries get the recognition they deserve. It’s worth noting that “liber,” the Latin root of the word “library,” means both “book” and “free.” Libraries stand for and exemplify something that needs defending.

Yes libraries do need defending!   . .

. . . Mr. Eric Klinenberg's book includes a footnote reference to Scott Sherman's “Patience and Fortitude- Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library,” in which Citizens Defending Libraries and our sister library defending group the Committee to Save The New York Public Library are written about.  Mr. Klinenberg's book doesn't mention us, but we are reaching out to him about how so may of our thoughts seem to be on the same page.

PS: (9/25/2018)  For a second chapter to what is written here and to find out what happened at the Brooklyn Book Festival panel discussion that involved Mr. Klinenberg see:  Authors Anand Giridharadas, Eric Klinenberg, Kristen Ghodsee, and Activist Blair Imani, On Panel at Brooklyn Book Festival Discuss, `How To Change The World’ (With Libraries and Social Infrastructure!) Plus Who NOT To Trust— When In Jumps Untrustworthy, Library-Selling Councilman Brad Lander!!

Libraries As A Threat To The “Perspective” That Virtually Everything Should Be Dictated And Run By The Forces of Market Capitalism

Covering the subject of the current popularity of socialism On The Media used this visual for socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with (library defending) Zephyr Teachout.

WNYC’s On The Media ran a segment July 27, 2018 in which the value of public libraries was discussed (again).  Their value was discussed in terms of the threat public libraries pose to those wanting to promote the idea that capitalism should control and set the terms for virtually all our social exchanges.  (The title of this post of ours intentionally refers to “market capitalism” not “free market capitalism,” because the corporate monopoly markets of today are a sad and far remove from Adam Smith’s idealized environment for “invisible hands” to be at work, but that’s another, longer discussion.)

The OTM segment was about how, with capitalism increasingly unpopular, people, especially Democrats and young people increasingly prefer socialism to capitalism.  This is along with polls that show self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders, who did better in many Trump-voting districts than Hillary Clinton, would defeat Trump if paired in a future election.  (Just like polls showed that Sanders would have defeated Trump in 2016.)   Sanders is currently the “most popular politician in America.”  The segment is: "Socialism" in the Air.

On The Media’s visual for the hour long program, of which the segment is a part, is of socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with (library defending) Zephyr Teachout.  Teachout is now a candidate, in a very important race, for New York State Attorney General.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the organizer for Bernie Sanders who, while she was largely ignored by mainstream media, surged to popularity and a surprise victory running as a candidate for Congress. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is the one who is now, in a rush of fairly embarrassing haste, retroactively getting the mainstream media attention she previously deserved.

Cover of New York Times Sunday Review: Socialism because capitalism makes us less free.

Why is socialism increasingly popular?  As discussed in the OTM segment, it is probably, partly because it appeals to “an egalitarian instinct” and to a sense of fairness and justice associated with a “fair distribution of resources.”  This is not to mention how we are seeing capitalism’s proclivities pushing us perhaps irretrievably over the brink where runaway global warming may destroy most of the life on this planet.  Then there is simply the feeling that, compared to what we’ve got, socialism affords more real freedom.

Here is how during the program, On The Media host Bob Garfield discussed with socialist Nathan Robinson, editor-in-chief at Current Affairs magazine, how libraries are a threat to those who want everything filtered through market capitalism structures:

NATHAN ROBINSON:  . . .  I just read an article about public libraries, why socialists love public libraries. They are places that are free for everybody. They’re controlled by the local people who have authority over them; they’re not controlled by a company. And there is that sense of everyone is equal in a public library.

BOB GARFIELD: Although it does, to some, seem fearsome. It’s the kind of socialism that is usually prefixed with the word “creeping.”

NATHAN ROBINSON: Well, public libraries embody an egalitarian spirit and they do sort of challenge the perspective that almost everything other than basic services, like police and the military, should be left to the market. And public libraries show an example of a well-run state institution. They kind of prove something, which is a little dangerous to a certain kind of a free-market orthodoxy, which is that they suggest that state-run institutions aren't necessarily a nightmare. So the public library kind of provides a vision of a way that common ownership and common control could work. So I, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to view it as creeping.

I think it does creep.

Very similarly, in 2013, National Notice postulated that with no good reason for the Koch brothers to want to deprive U.S. citizens of healthcare, there can be no other explanation for the Kochs to be fighting healthcare so vigorously except for the Kochs' fear that if we had the example of a national government working demonstrably well to provide people with something they very much want and need, good health care, the national agenda would then move on to other obviously necessary top priorities with a stronger, more highly regarded government tackling climate change.  Addressing climate change would hurt the Koch fossil fuel industry profits.

If we conceive that well-run libraries are, indeed, a somewhat “fearsome” example of a public commons that is “dangerous to a certain kind of a free-market orthodoxy” because it provides a vision of a communal escape from the strictures and dictates of private enterprise, then perhaps we can better understand what is being done to New York City’s libraries by the private enterprise enthusiasts who have gotten in charge of them.  These enthusiasts don’t necessarily want libraries to be well run or to succeed in the traditional fashion.

In 2003 and 2006, respectively, two perspicacious writers with intimate knowledge of the libraries and their traditions wrote books warning about how libraries were being destroyed as new management forced libraries to kowtow to and fall in line with capitalist modes of operation: The books are “Dismantling the Public Sphere- Situating and Sustaining Librarianship In the Age of the New Public Philosophy,” by John E. Buschman and “Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and the Public Good,” by Ed D'Angelo.  At the time he wrote his book Mr. Buschman was department chair, collection development librarian and professor-librarian at Rider University and was a co-editor or the journal Progressive Librarian.  When Ed D’Angelo, who has a philosophy background, wrote his book he was a librarian working at the Brooklyn Public Library where he was working until recently for many years, including at the New Utrecht Branch.

Both men in both books recognized the interrelated importance of libraries and education to democracy and the necessity of a public commons for the kind of public discourse and exchange of ideas necessary for democracy to flourish.  In fact, before we decide to try to define libraries in economic terms we should remember that the economics in this country of ours are producing results that are highly unequal and not egalitarian.  Both men also presented strong cases for how libraries and what they can provide wind up dumbed down by the effects of the corporate consumer model, information capitalism, the relentless commodifications thereof, along with neo-liberal ideology and its “radically market-oriented public philosophy toward public cultural institutions.”  Both men concerned themselves with how librarians themselves were being de-professionalized by disdainful higher-up corporately oriented non-librarian managerial overlords with the resulting loss of meaningful curation of content and collections.

Buschman has an especially pertinent question about libraries shifting over to a market-oriented consumer model: He asks if libraries are not providing an alternative model, are not serving democratic ideals, "What public purpose is served by public funding of" projects that "are imitative of the private sector?  What right do we have to public funding to compete with [other?] businesses.  Perhaps more importantly, does society need another model of media-dominated, entertainment oriented consumerism in its public institutions?"

Conversely, why are market capital apostles so afraid of the success of alternative models for organizing society such that they have to deny the success of those models or snuff them out?

A Koch funded Mercatus Center study, although it was slanted and cherry picked while it worked towards a different hoped for result, recently found that the Bernie Sanders medicare for all plan would not only provide more health care while additionally insuring the currently 40 million insured Americans, but would also save the American public $2.1 trillion over ten years.  But much of mainstream media misreported the story communicating the exact opposite, that the Sander plan would cost more rather than more than $2 trillion less: Reporting on Medicare for All Makes Media Forget How Math Works, by Justin Anderson of FAIR, July 31, 2018. . . .  Even worse, when Sanders pointed out how the study supported that his plan would save the public money, mainstream media wanted to debate the obvious facts with entities like the Washington Post and CNN’s Jake Tapper entering the fray to offer false facts that were opposite to the truth in the name of “fact checking.”  Elsewhere on CNN Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs reiterated that the results of the Koch funded Mercatus Center study were indeed being misrepresented in “frightening terms” essentially trying to ignore or bury the facts about the obvious and significant benefit and $2 trillion cost savings of the medicare for all plan.

As anyone paying attention to this back and forth knows, healthcare in the United States costs about twice as much, with less satisfactory results, than pretty much anywhere else in the civilized world.  Yet those who don’t want the government to succeed with medicare for all, because it is essentially a socialist kind of program, try to deprive the public of the achievable benefit by denying the facts.

In the On The Media’s segment, Bob Garfield noted that since the specter of “Soviet Communism” can no longer be invoked to scare people away from socialism “it seems to be Venezuela” that the mainstream media wants to use instead, and the segment provides two clips as examples of exactly that (emphasis supplied):

MALE CORRESPONDENT: My gosh, socialism has never failed so vividly as it has in the modern times, and yet, these guys come out there and say. that’s what America needs. I don’t think so.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: Venezuela is currently at one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Hunger and crime are rampant, clean water and medicine scarce. So why on earth would anybody want to bring those catastrophic policies and conditions to the US?
   
    * * *

MAN: You know, as we look at other countries, like Venezuela, etc., where socialism is imploding their country, do we really want that here?

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: What happened in Venezuela? They call that Democratic Socialism but they don’t have toilet paper…

MAN: Note to socialism fans, go visit Venezuela.

But again, is it fair to allow Venezuela to be portrayed, for negative purposes as “the” alternative?  The United States has gone out of its way to sabotage the economy in that country and create hardship there (in fact, too many people in our government are also pushing to go to war with Venezuela.) To wit, consider this from FAIR:

The United States has for years undermined the Venezuelan economy with economic sanctions, but US media coverage of Venezuela’s financial crisis has gone out of its way to obscure this.

The intent of the sanctions is clear: to inflict maximum pain on Venezuela so as to encourage the people of the country to overthrow the democratically elected government.

See: Exonerating the Empire in Venezuela, by Gregory Shupak, March 22, 2018.

When asked by Garfield about consideration of Venezuela as “the” alternative Nathan Robinson was either too timid or too uninformed to offer such a caveat about problems there.  Instead, he feinted suggesting that “Venezuela doesn’t tell you much at all” and isn’t a “verdict” on the kind of socialism that “strongly anti-authoritarian” people “skeptical of the concentration of unaccountable power” like him would want because it doesn’t have the kind of democracy in the workplace that he’d like to see and “because we oppose every measure that would increase centralized and, and dictatorial power.”  But this goes along with another myth: That things are very `undemocratic’ in Venezuela.

After the last election where President Nicolás Maduro won a second term in May, the New York Times essentially led its reporting of the event (spelling his name wrong at the time- “Nicholas”) with a fairly outright implication that the election should be disregarded as simply“rigged.”

President Nicolás Maduro won a second term as president of Venezuela, a country in the midst of a historic economic collapse marked by soaring prices, widespread hunger, rampant crime, a failing health system and a large-scale exodus of its citizens.

Electoral officials declared Mr. Maduro the victor Sunday night, in a contest that critics said was heavily rigged in his favor.

However comparable or not comparable the very challenging situation in Venezuala makes that besieged country as “the” only possible alternative example to the neo-liberal, capitalist, private-market orthodoxy now routinely promoted in this country, plus whatever controversies can be intruded into the debate about President Maduro’s governance under those difficult circumstances, it is in the very least exceedingly glib to suggest that Mr. Maduro was not democratically elected: He received 5.8 million of the 8.6 million ballots cast, with a turnout of the electorate quite comparable to presidential elections in the United States and France even though the tactic of his opposition was to urge the public to boycott the election.  His nearest challenger in the election received 1.8 million votes.  Further, the country has a history of well run elections.

With calls for regime change the United State has called Venezuela an “extraordinary national security threat.”  Why?

It seems as though no matter what they look like, those in power in the United States don’t want any examples of functioning alternatives to capitalism. . .  As, for instance, in Chile with the CIA backed coup murdering democratically elected President Salvador Allende, or in Iran with the CIA backed coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.  Similarly, we couldn’t tolerate independence leader Patrice Lumumba as the elected president of the Republic of the Congo. . .

 . .  Not liking the communist country of Cuba so close off the shores of Florida, we have made life for that country as economically difficult as possible for decades.  Yes, the merits of our respective systems can be debated, but after the hurricane season ended in 2017 we could see the differences of those systems in operation after both Cuba and the United States territories of the Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands were directly hit by that year’s powerful storms: The Cuban people were largely safe and well prepared and able to send out help to countries elsewhere in the region afterward; in Puerto Rico thousands of U.S. citizens unnecessarily died from what appeared to be malevolent neglect while monied interests viewed the disaster as an opportunity to privatize much of the Island’s resources for the benefit of the wealthy.

The United States under Reagan even found it urgent to militarily invade the tiny Caribbean Island nation of Granada, a recent former colony of Great Britain, to replace the new (in this case, not Democratically elected) Marxist government that took charge there through a coup.

It is not to argue that any of the above mentioned nations should be looked to as particular examples of socialism success (besides we also have other examples, from the Nordic and Scandinavian countries, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark* to the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand and Canada). . .  But one must wonder at the regularity with which the powerful in the United States have the urge to snuff out such alternative systems and the speed and frequency with which that has often been done.

(* Actually, there are those striving to take away the Nordic nations as examples.)

Why snuff out alternatives?

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis offered a concept that our federal system, where states are largely autonomous, offered the opportunity (one of its “happy incidents” he said) where, so long as it was the choice if the respective citizens of those states, states can operate as “laboratories of democracy” trying out “novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”  Concomitantly, successful policies can be expanded to other states or, if appropriate, adopted nationally.  Brandeis ventured that because the “denial of the right to experiment may be fraught with serious consequences” it involved a “grave responsibility” lest “prejudices” went unchecked.

The same principle could and should also apply to different countries. 

Henry A. Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice president, whose once immense popularity meant that he almost became president rather than Truman, envisioned that the United States and Soviet systems could compete in friendly, peaceful coexistence each endeavoring “to prove which can deliver the most satisfaction to the common man in their respective areas of political dominance” and that under such circumstances “the Russian world and the American world” would “gradually become more alike,” the Russians “forced to grant more and more of the personal freedoms” and the United States becoming “more and more absorbed with the problems of social-economic justice.”  Unfortunately, arguably mostly because the idea of peaceful coexistence did not appeal to the United States, the way in which the two countries grew more alike was, instead, in their increasing militarization preparing to defend against and confront the other, something the common man paid for.  The vast resources paid to build up huge parallel military establishments could easily have been devoted elsewhere ingeniously.

What if more alternatives to the dominating style of U.S. capitalism had been allowed?  What if more different national systems centered on ideas of communal welfare had been allowed to evolve and flourish?: Mightn’t some of those other countries have become leaders in a more rational world approach to ensure that mankind successfully forestalls climate change and survives by transitioning away from fossil fuels?

Before we jump on any high horse to argue that these two cold war enemies, the U.S. and the Soviets, could not have become more like each other, borrow from each other, or that their systems were like oil and water, incapable of mixing it up, it should be noted that librarian Ed D’Angelo ranges far enough afield in his examination of potential management systems (including the freedoms for individuals potentially or not provided within them) in “Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library” to note similarities between the Soviet state and American corporations in their top-down, centralized, hierarchical management approaches.  To wit:

The structure of both the state managed economy in the Soviet Union and the American blue-chip corporation of the 1950s could be traced back to the centralized, bureaucratic structure of the Prussian state.

That’s because, as D’Angelo lays out, that style of management (“Weber-Taylor bureaucracy” or “Taylorism” as D’Angelo refers to it, after Max Weber and Frederick W. Taylor) hails back to where it was “especially well represented in Germany” during the era of the Junker Aristocracy (from the late 1880's through the Weimar Republic that ended in 1933) “where monopoly capitalism was somewhat less restricted [back then at least] than in the United States.”  (Although D’Angelo does not make this particular point, the monopolies of monopoly capitalism tend almost inevitably to align themselves so as to act concertedly with the state, and the alignment of such corporations, or at least society’s economic elite, with an ensuing merging of the powers of the state, constitutes one of the classic definitions of fascism or the typical economics of fascism.) 

In turn, the “Weber-Taylor bureaucracy” style of management influenced the United States (“Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller admired* the German model”) and Vladimir Lenin who imported it to the Soviet Union (“Lenin believed that it would be possible to retain the technical advantages of the Weber-Taylor bureaucracy while subordinating it . . to the interests of the working class” and “Lenin sought to do for Russia what the Ford Motor Company did for the United States”).

(* Some of the admiration flowed mutually: Hitler had a life-size, full-length portrait of Henry Ford on his office wall in Munich; the German’s awarded Ford and he accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, in 1938, that nation's highest decoration for foreigners; and Ford subsidiaries busily manufactured armaments that the Nazis used against the U.S., trucks and plans.)

We, ourselves, have gone rather far afield discussing management theory, except that it is worth circling back to say that, D’Angelo asserts that given their totalitarian traits and lack of freedom for the individual, systems incorporating “Weber-Taylor bureaucracy” do not constitute “socialism.”  Nor, for that matter, is that the way libraries have historically been managed.   Further, given a similar lack of freedoms, D’Angelo views as a new tyranny capitalism’s more recently evolved “market populism” incarnations and theories around which capitalists would now like libraries organize themselves.  He cites its enforcement of an unquestioning “humility before the market” and says that following the dictates of these theories reverts us to a `feudal age’ where ‘power is private’ and the `public realm falls into decay’ as high salaried “CEOs with inflated egos” and managers rule by fiat.

Why are some in such a rush to change the way that libraries are run?  What is the threat their traditions pose?  They are time tested institutions.  Isn’t it peculiar and also telling that, as Nathan Robinson suggests, it is their long-standing popularity and success that makes them a threat?  What’s more, we don’t even know and can’t see clearly what is being substituted for the traditions that made libraries such strong, powerful and admired institutions.   . .   Neo-liberalism with its privatizing, let-the-market-prevail-in-everything schemes hasn’t been around long enough for most of us to get acquainted with it or recognize its ploys, let alone for its `promises’ to have been properly tested.  And when it comes to libraries, the neo-liberal proponents piggyback on arguments of change for the sake of change and technology for the sake of technology, thereby introducing huge unknowns.  Technology is changing so fast that, like neoliberalism, we can hardly catch up to acquaint ourselves with it its current incarnations or evaluate its implications.

But let’s keep the conversation simple: Both John E. Buschman and Ed D'Angelo presciently wrote books about how traditional libraries are being dismantled.  As Nathan Robinson pointed out on On The Media, there are those who, because they have a capitalistic private market bent, are more inclined to consider libraries as a “fearsome” threat to their orthodox belief systems, rather than hope libraries will continue to succeed.  Unfortunately, in New York City those people are the people who are in the driver’s seat as decisions are made about whether our libraries should change for better . . .  or worse.