Steve Thomas: David Lankes, I am running out of fingers to count the number of times that you’ve been on the show, but welcome back to the show.
David Lankes: It is always a pleasure.
Steve Thomas: So big news from you. You’re gonna be moving to a new position at the University of Texas at Austin after five years at University of South Carolina. And it’s obviously still early in the process, but can you kind of talk through how you came to that decision?
David Lankes: Sure. So I’m going to be the inaugural Virginia and Charles Bowden Professor of Librarianship at the University of Texas at Austin. And you know, it was a long process to think about it, but a couple things people don’t know is that, at least at South Carolina, the director position is actually a five-year appointment. It’s renewable, but I was at that five year point, and while I love this job, and I love this faculty and staff and what we’ve done here at this school, and I could really see myself staying here. At the end of the day, there were two things that made me go investigate this opportunity and then eventually take that opportunity at Texas.
One was, it’s a dream job. I mean, it really is focusing research on librarianship and how many endowed professorships are there and will there be in the field specifically around librarianship? It’s at a top information school and it gives me a chance to really go in and strengthen ties and work in the library field and once again, focus on research and the creative projects and all that thing. So one, it was like, oh, that would be a nice job.
And the other part of it is honestly the University of South Carolina, the reason that five year thing is in there is that I think the school’s ready for something else. When I came in, I had a task to do, which was sort of look at strengthening the faculty and faculty governance, the idea of growing an undergraduate program. In other words, there was a set of tasks, and I feel like we’ve accomplished those and I think that they’re ready for another director who’s frankly a little bit more detail-oriented as someone who can really take what we’ve done and push it to the next level.
They don’t have to do much, they don’t have to do rebuilding. They don’t have to do where good financial, our enrollments are up. And so I think it was just a matter of. A reason to go, which is a dream job. And you know, a reason here, which was, I think the school’s ready for the next leader to come in.
Steve Thomas: And I think sometimes you want to take on, you know, a new challenge and that doesn’t mean that one you’re currently in is bad, it’s just, it’s something different.
David Lankes: Sometimes there’s also life stuff. My youngest is about to be a freshman here at the University of South Carolina, and so there’s a bit of empty nest coming up, and administrative duties mean that you usually have a little less flexibility in summer for travel and spending time with my wife and even the idea of traveling during the year. A lot of what the work I do is international and well, which over the past year and a half has not been particularly full of travel, but it will be. And so it’s just a matter of where I thought I could make a contribution, and there you go.
Steve Thomas: Well you have a new book, but we’re gonna talk about that in a second. I did wanna talk about another subject first that’s kind of come up. It’s kind of always coming up, but I think it’s come up more since the last time you were on the show, and that’s neutrality in libraries. And we have talked about it a little bit before, and I know you’re on Team Libraries Are Not Neutral, but I wanted to kind of think about this in a different way. Can you sum up the argument of the other side of that and then talk about why you disagree with that?
David Lankes: I will try in the sense that I wanna be intellectually honest and say that, you know, since it’s one that I don’t, but in my investigation, let me say that the argument is that we are trusted community partners.
That in many cases, whether we’re in school libraries or if you look at public libraries, but even academic libraries, particularly state-run institutions, we are part of the government, and you want your government to provide a level of objectivity of, I would say, equal treatment, which is part of why I break from it, but that idea that libraries, to build trust, to be part of the institutions that we are, and to serve all of a community, which is a stated goal, one needs to not be a strong advocate on one side or the other.
And for a long time, that has treated us well. The reason I am on the negative side of that is I don’t believe it. That oftentimes, I really think that what we define as objectivity and neutrality is actually adherence to a majority view, that it’s easy to say that we serve all parties, but when it’s the group that defines who are those parties that are considered, that is itself a choice.
I think also when it comes to the inherent contradiction between the stated goals of librarians and libraries, which is we want to improve society. We’re not there to be a place and to be a repository and to have people come check things in and out. We’ve never been that. We’ve talked about it as a central role, but when you do selection, what do you buy, where do you buy? When you do shelving, where do you put it, how do you put it? When you do classification, when you do programming, when you do, who gets to come in and even the hours that you’re open…? All of those are choices, and we do the best we can to make choices that we think best matches community needs, but choices means you’re not neutral.
We don’t have an infinite amount of funds where we can say, we collect everything that’s ever published, so we can’t say that our collections are somehow neutral because that’s what’s there. We had to pick. You can’t say that, well, the services we offer are neutral when if you offer story hours during eight to five during the weekday, you’re really appealing to a demographic of stay-at-home parents that is no longer the majority in this country, right?
All these little bits and pieces fight against the concept of neutrality, but at the very end, the biggest thing is we wanna make the community a better place, which means you have to have a vision of better place, and we want to be active in shaping that community to be better.
We want to, today we’re talking about anti-racism, we’re talking about breaking up systemic racism. We’re talking about truly providing social justice aspects, but in all aspects, we wanna improve. When you talk about literacy, we’ve defined literacy primarily as the love of reading. That is not the only way to define literacy. Many schools, and you look at K – 12 schools, define literacy as encoding and decoding of texts, the idea of pattern recognition and neurological symptoms and picking a curriculum. We may complement it, but that’s not what we do. We don’t teach kids how to read necessarily. We provide the materials that hopefully help them, right? That’s a choice, and it’s a non-neutral choice, and it has direct impacts into the community.
We did a project on community literacy specifically around that topic, and what we found is when you talk to parents, they were confused because they had one set of language, one set of approaches, and maybe even the different terms being used differently in a classroom (this is how we’re helping your child read) and the same language, but really different concepts and ideas going on in the library. And it was confusing the parents and it was keeping the librarians from talking to the teachers. When we put them in the same room, we realized that there was this gulf between them.
All right, if we’re going to move beyond that, we have to pick a perspective and we have to pick a way of doing it. So yes, social justice, we should be improving the world. We should be anti-racist, we should be definitely being proactive in helping the community, but even on all the aspects we do, we have to recognize that we are humans making human decisions and choices, and we have to be responsible for those choices. And I think all too often when we talk about neutrality, when we talk about objectivity, sometimes we use it as a shield to hide behind.
And it was easier to do when we had collections, when we could just say that’s what the stacks were. But as we’ve really begun to continuously redefine librarians as community hubs and community centers, the idea of being serviced, what we’ve seen, you know, the condensed version of that we see over Covid, where it started with we’re a wifi spot and we’ll help you do ebook lending, and it ended with massive video programming and supporting Zoom and advocating for broadband. You know, in a year and a half we demonstrated the transition that’s been going on for 30 years in the field. The endpoint isn’t, that was not a neutral shift. That took choices, that took decisions, that took allocation of resources, and it took people to make it and make it happen. And so that’s why I guess, I’m Team Post-Neutral…?
Steve Thomas: Yeah. It kind of came to me, and I keep saying this, I think now, is that we in the field, so we say on one hand some people say, we’re neutral, but then on other we have a code of ethics. The code of ethics just doesn’t just say be neutral 10 times. You know, those two things don’t go together for me.
David Lankes: Right, right. We are principled, we are hopefully transparent. We are hopefully intellectually honest, believing and subscribing to rationalism as an example. Right. When we look at anti-vax, when we look at flat earth, when we look at all of this, including racist propaganda and natures, we reject them based on a scientific, a rational approach, which is different than what exists in other communities, from religious communities, to ideological communities, to political communities, and we’d like to think that that means we’re more objective, but in essence, it means that we’ve subscribed to a sentence of principles and tenants of how we see and describe and then project the world.
Steve Thomas: And then how the world got to how it is today, which is a very poor transition, you wrote a book called Forged in War: How a Century of War Created Today’s Information Society, and I wanted to start with just how did you come to the central idea of the book using war as a lens for creating our information society of today?
David Lankes: Well, I began really being interested in the history and looking at how we talk about the history of the information field. I wanted to talk and to be really clear at the outset, my goal with this book was not to write a book for librarians, which is what all my other books have been, or write a book for the information community or write it for a general community about libraries. This was a specific intention to write a general audience book. I think it will have great appeal and certainly has great ideas that I bring from the library community, but I wanted to talk about the history of the field and how it developed and I was really…
I start most of my books by trying to give myself a puzzle and then figure it out. That’s why I love writing. It, to me, it’s sort of puzzles. In this case it was how do you sort of look through history and connect it in a sort of thematic way versus in a chronological way. And I’m very much influenced by James Burke who’s a historian and broadcaster out of the UK who wrote things like the Day the Universe Changed in Connections, and so I owe all of my ideas on history to him and I ruthlessly stole from his methods.
But the long version is, as I was doing this and looking at the history, I really came to the conclusion that that really is true, that a lot of the technologies and the systems that we have in place today were either developed in response to, funding from, or as part of military and civil enforcement actions. I was listening to, I’m a great listener to a podcast, of course, yours is the best ever, but the other I listened to is On the Media, and On the Media was doing a piece in the midst of the pandemic, about the pandemic. And one of the questions was, is the military metaphor the right one for the pandemic? That is, that we’re gonna fight the pandemic, that this is a battle against the pandemic, et cetera. And I said, and what I realized talking to myself as I’m walking along the street was, we don’t have another metaphor. War on Drugs, War on the Pandemic, War on Poverty. We have crises. We treat it as, oh, where’s the president on this and where’s the war room?
And so I began really looking at the field that I am in, that we are in, of information science and library science, and realized that those metaphors are there and if they’re not there, they’re still shaping how we’re going based on these concepts, right? The idea of, we can talk about new business models and data based business models while we want, but it is surveillance and it is the utilization of intelligence and surveillance for some sort of gain of an organization or institution, and so that’s what really led me into this. So I would say it started out by looking at history and then quickly turned into this concept of, when I kept looking through history, I kept seeing these connections back to this adversarial, militaristic view of information.
Steve Thomas: I think most people know the thing about, you know, oh, the internet was a distributed thing because nuclear war and the military made this up and a lot of the like things you talk about I have heard about before, but yeah, I never put ’em all together into one big thing. Oh yeah. I guess that is all connected to the, the Defense Department in the US and then other places as well. But you write about how American society has largely turned away from, and sometimes actively distanced from, expertise, depending on who it is, and we’re sort of embracing, even the media that we kind of quote unquote, trust is more interested in. I dunno, hot takes and deep dives or as it’s, get the splashy headline, get ’em to watch, and then you’ve got what you need for the advertisers and we’re good to go. And I think it’s better a lot of times to sort of soak in an idea and kind of let it get into you and explore it deeply. Why do you think we’ve gotten to this state of, I don’t know, hot take state or whatever you wanna call it?
David Lankes: We have to spend a lot of time on that because we have ended up in clickbait land and we’ve ended up in… you know, one part of the book, I talk about sort of the dopamine wars that we really realize that, particularly now that we have these digital tools and we have them literally in people’s hands 24/7 that we can use neuropsychology and neurobiology to influence behavior, that is click on this ad, look at this ad, watch this story, understand these kinds of things.
And I think, so part of it is just our tools have caught up to our evolutionary biology, that is that we now have finer tools. And so as you have tools they get utilized. I think also it’s the fact that we have so much information available to us and it allows us to truly see past the filters we had.
Back when we were talking about the post-neutrality, that idea that many people see neutrality or objectivity as a subscription to a majority view, we now have so much access to non-majority views that it forces us to try and filter quickly. And the more that we have to filter through, the more we look for neurological tricks and our brains look for the fast way to do things. I mean, it’s from the old days when 10 tigers are coming at you, you don’t have time to soak in the idea of tiger-ness, and we have the same transfer now to, and 10 different ideas about a conspiracy theory about politics or whatever coming at us, we don’t have time to do this, and so we quickly, we jump, that’s what we’re supposed to do.
And what that means is that the worldview we have, how we set up and establish this worldview becomes more and more important because that’s how we behave. It’s not that every situation is new. If every situation we’re treated as new and with consideration, we would never get up in the morning. There’s too many choices to make. And so we build this worldview of how do we sort of generally interpret this kind of stuff, and that allows us to quickly sort of deal with the information and move on. It’s an information overload problem.
The world and libraries are certainly part of this as well. We still live in a scarcity economy. The difference is, and this is hardly revelatory, this is something we’ve been doing for the past 40 years, the scarcity has moved from the information to the attention, right? It’s no longer, can I find this information? It’s, good Lord, do I have to deal with this information? And in a scarcity environment, you behave in the most opportunistic way. People have won Nobel prizes around satisfysing, and the idea that people given an imperfect situation still make decisions and they try to optimize on personal benefit as much as possible. And that’s been true since we started walking on two legs.
Steve Thomas: I actually wrote down a quote from the book where you said “Facts have never been enough for a society.” So it’s like we’ve always kind of needed, like some somebody else figure that out and you know, filter it down and tell me what that’s all about. You know, I don’t know the mating patterns of tigers. I don’t know where to go in over there at that certain time of year. I don’t know. You tell me when it’s the best time to walk past the tigers!
David Lankes: For a long time, I mean, a big part of this is narratives. Who develops a narrative? How do we push that narrative? Right? So there’s a whole big discussion about propaganda and I was really interested that really before World War I, propaganda was seen as a positive thing. It was actually seen as a duty of an institution to create a narrative and put it out there, whether that was a government, a church, or an institution or organization.
And it was only after World War I when people realized that this was not just sort of sharing a view, but actually manipulating of you, that we began to think of it differently. And so, as we develop narratives and we connect to them, and we know psychology with things like confirmation bias, that people, once they have this narrative in mind about a given topic or situation, they will quickly adopt things that reinforce it, and they will quickly reject things that don’t match to it.
And once again, this is the nature of how we survived for so long. But now there’s just so much information to go through and the problem is that the narratives, the sort of big national narratives we have are breaking down and we now have competing narratives. I’m a huge fan of Yuval Harari’s work. He’s a medieval scholar and historian working in the EU and coming out of Israel, and he wrote this brilliant book called Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind. Read my book first and then go read his. And actually, yeah, that will keep you from being disappointed. Anyway, he talks about in the 20th century how there were these three massive international narratives. One was around fascism, one was around communism, and one was around liberal democracy. And he said, World War II, fascism is off the table, that clearly failed, that’s bad, we don’t like that. And then after the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union, communism was discredited. And so we’re left with liberal democracy, and that’s the narrative. And then what he clearly points out in his later books is, and now that narrative is beginning to break down as well. People are beginning to question sufficiency, people are beginning to question all this nature of it, the fairness of it, the equitable nature of it, et cetera. And we don’t have another narrative ready to step in. And what we see in the United States is we see the same narratives, you know, ideological narratives on the right and the left and the libertarians and such. And it’s a real interesting question.
And so one of the things I kept coming back to is when we talk about the information field, information technology, when we talk about data is, what’s driving this narrative? And there’s a really strong narrative of data =good. There’s a really strong narrative of technology = good. There’s a really strong narrative for a long time that the more information = the better. And what we’re seeing now, and I’m certainly not the first one to look at this, tons of people that I stand on top of their shoulders talking about is, these narratives come with a cost and we need to be aware of those costs.
And you talked about expertise, and that’s one of them. The expertise narrative was someone who knew what they were talking about and could sort of make sense of this. And we have now a competing narrative, which is, I have access to so much information out there through Google, through Wikipedia, through Facebook, through chat groups and whatever. I can be an expert because expertise is processing a lot of information. And to a degree we set this up, which is we made expertise seem like it was information processing as opposed to reflection, connection, deep thought integration, looking across this kind of thing.
And so that’s one of the themes that runs throughout this book is sort of a humanist approach to expertise and to the understanding of information. And a dataist approach, once again, Harari’s concept, about if we just have more data, we’ve become an expert. And I saw a great graphic, which was looking at the pyramid of higher education and at the bottom and the wide areas, you know, basic education in elementary and then high school, and then graduate school, undergraduate, graduate, PhD, and at the very tip was “access to Google.” And so, and time.
And there was a great book, a great piece in the Atlantic talking about the problem of expertise is that people have defined research now as I can go find stuff and I can look at it. And the problem is that people who say, no, no, no, that’s not expertise. You really need all this other stuff. They’re two different narratives around expertise and they don’t bridge well together and unless we understand either side, we’re never gonna make that connection.
Steve Thomas: And you see a lot of this resistance to this of where these companies obviously make lots of money from this data and selling off this data and collecting this data.
And you kind of see that when Apple recently introduced a thing where you can block those tracking pixels on iPhone and Facebook obviously flipped out and were like, no, you’re gonna take away a lot of our money. So, I mean, they just wanna make money. They don’t really care what you’re doing, like, but they can give it to an advertiser who can market to you.
David Lankes: And once again, I’m not a purist. I’m all for making money and I understand that market. I understand, for example, I look at privacy as a continuum, not a yes or no, which puts me at odds with others, particularly in the library field of good thought and good character. Right. That’s a good conversation, and I’ve always looked at privacy as a continuum, and in essence it’s become a tradable factor. I can give you my privacy if I get a service for it. And some people go to the extent to say that we have the death of privacy. And what we’re seeing with Apple is, I love to say, oh, Apple has the white hat on today, and they’re writing to our rescue, but Apple has realized that privacy is a marketable feature.
What I worry about is that people don’t realize when it’s happening. So there was just an article that a major television manufacturer, I wanna say it was Samsung, it might’ve been LG, now makes as much money selling your data of what you’re watching on your TV as they do in selling you the TV to begin with, and I think that a lot of times I was working with a reporter here and he’s like, I wanna do a piece on privacy, how Facebook is watching you. And I said, no, no, do it on how your television’s watching you because people don’t realize. That’s what’s happening is that the reason you can buy a 4K 70 inch TV with wifi and smart features for like a dollar where the price is the same as 10 years ago when you could buy basically a big tube TV for 20 inches, et cetera, is not that, yes, technology is advanced and so it’s cheaper to produce them, but that’s only a small part. What’s happened is they’ve turned them into data collection mechanisms and they’re selling the data. And when I say this and I had the conversations with folks about this, they look at me and go, is that legal? And I said, kind of? But you know, it is because they’re based on the idea that anyone can be watching TV and so they’re not tracking you uniquely, which to me is a big loophole. But it’s interesting that when you plug in your brand new 70 inch TV, it doesn’t come up with a big message going, please click here so that we can report on your watching. I mean, it’s like, click here to enhance your watching situation or sometimes they don’t even ask.
And that was back to the idea of, that’s not a new theme, right? There are great books on this, Algorithms of Oppression, and all of these things that are great. What I wanted to do was give it context to say that didn’t just happen in the past five years. That starts way back in World War I. Even before that, when we were looking in virology and looking at epidemics and cholera and such, it began with the notion that data could be collected and analyzed and we could track these things, and so, we’ve evolved to this point, this idea of surveillance economy, data economy, expertise, narratives, all of these things are not brand new to us.
And my belief, and this is a personal belief, which is, if we can provide that context, if people can sort of see that history, it calms us down a bit so that we realize that this didn’t happen overnight and that we’re not gonna change it overnight, but we need to be much more understanding of how it happened and what are the different factors that are going into it.
Steve Thomas: And you follow the history of lots of different technologies. You do it kind of almost like a technology at a time of going through how it started and how it got to where it is today. Before we get into specifics, was there anything, any notable things that you learned in your research that you didn’t already know about?
David Lankes: Yeah. My big learning in this, and that’s, once again, why I really love writing these is cuz I get to spend some time learning in it. And where I spent most of my time learning and coming up to speed was really in the concepts of media. So when I came to South Carolina five years ago, I came from an information school, which had library science and information management, information technology, and I came down to a college that had a library and information school, and a school of journalism, mass communications. And so for five years I really have been sitting, working, and learning from people that come from a communications background, a journalism background. The original title to this was gonna be Data, Media, and Society. And so I spent a lot of time learning on the media side and learning about the growth of propaganda, learning about the growth of the mechanisms by which we disseminate information. The librarians and the information scientists have spent a lot of time on data and data analysis and technology, but the mass media was an invention as well, and looking at how the mass media was one, first developed, then looking at how it did begin to shape this narrative, that whole thing to me was remarkable.
Milton Mueller, a professor in communications, we were on the faculty together many years ago at Syracuse, and he kept talking about convergence and it was the convergence of media and technology, and I think he was ahead of his time because we all sort of nodded our head and we’re only now getting to the point where we’re sort of now realizing that mass media and newspaper and television station are really, their metaphor is more than they are reality, cuz underlying it is this sort of technology enhanced way of disseminating information. But the history is different.
The invention of the internet, the invention of the web, the invention of this whole concept that comes out of libraries with information infrastructure and such is different than the history of mass media and journalism, and so they’re converging on a technical basis. But now we’re really starting to see the convergence of the ideas and the history that goes with it. We’ve always talked about it, and I wanna be really clear that there have been great Milton Mueller, Mike Nyman, there have been great researchers, Brenda Dervin, in both fields who’ve straddled that and looked at it, but now it’s becoming reality.
And so that was what I spent a lot of time learning about. The whole concept, really, for me, my big learning was the development of mass media, starting with the radio, then coming into films, then coming into television, how that happened, how that began to transform as a society, how we became informed, how we had to wrestle with issues of neutrality.
It’s kind of interesting when I sit and talk with my journalism colleagues. And we sit with journalism and librarians and we go, we are both having the same discussion, which is post-neutrality, should reporters be neutral and report all the sides? And at the same time, librarians are having this conversation and they’re coming at it from different approaches, and you realize that librarians are sort of coming to it. It’s not that we’ve never dealt with it, but we’re dealing with it in a much more profound way, when much of this conversation in journalism actually happened at the late 1800s with yellow journalism. And if you think clickbait’s a thing now, you should have seen what they were doing when they sold papers for a penny and how sensational they made the articles and made up the articles and made up the news so they could sell, and they came to a reckoning, and that reckoning became an ideal that really shaped that profession until today and now trying to discuss, does it still make sense? How do we break it down?
So for me, that was the big learning. Learning about the media perspective on this and the media history, and looking at some of the parallels going on in the information side, but realizing why we’re having the same discussion, but not necessarily in the same way with the same background.
Steve Thomas: An important concept in the book is knowledge infrastructure. Can you talk about what you mean by that?
David Lankes: Yeah, so the general concept is how we get to know the world, right? So if you were to look at the thesis of this book, it’s the fact that the military, and once again talking about civil unrest, in other words words, I don’t wanna just talk about wars on foreign soil. It also goes into the civil rights era, into today, in terms of face tracking and such. But this adversarial world that it has changed how we build our view of the world. And so when you go to build your view of the world, that is what I do, the value that I have, the value society has, what our politics should look like, all of these things are shaped by the information and knowledge that you have access to, right, the people around you, the materials you read, what you can find on the internet, what you can watch on your television, what you can ask Alexa for, et cetera. And that infrastructure, which consists of the people that you can connect to and that can share information, the sources that are out there that you can access, the policies that shape that, and then the infrastructure and tools to make all of this happen.
If you look at those pieces, they’re changing and evolving and they’ve existed forever, right? It existed from when you could see what the weather was because it was a red sky at night, et cetera. But now we’re seeing it converge. We’re seeing it increasingly digital. We’re seeing it increasingly connecting to people online, not just to materials online, and we need to spend some time seeing how we can make this system better. Every generation needs to improve its knowledge infrastructure, and every generation has challenges with it. And unless we look at something under underlying that this piece of infrastructure that underlies all these things, we’re gonna keep sort of picking on little pieces and problems and never solve the bigger problem.
The idea that, well, we saw that Facebook was horrible for the 2020 election. Well, Facebook was horrible for the 2020 election because it was part of a military cyber campaign that came out of Russia that itself was part of a propaganda technique that set up different ideologies, right? In other words, one piece is connected to the other, and so the use of knowledge infrastructure is really a mechanism that tries to combine all of the things so that we can take a more holistic view of how we become informed and how we find meaning in our lives.
Steve Thomas: Since this is a library podcast, I wanted to talk about a specific library related thing. You talk about libraries being weaponized during the Two World Wars. Can you talk about that story and what the effects of that is even today?
David Lankes: That was, oh, I love, oh, that was another big learning for me. I was geeking out left and right. The big one is that during World War II, I mean, it happened during World War I, it happened in other ways, but World War II was when it really was a deliberate weaponization of libraries. And it was the notion in the early building of intelligence, what was started out as the Office of Special Services later became CIA, it began in a partnership with the Library of Congress and the Librarian of Congress at the time, and they viewed the information service and the counterintelligence as a massive library that they could use to understand what was going on. And the goal was to look at publicly available information, not just what you could, you know, spy and get, but if in essence, if we could read the newspapers of Nazi Germany, if we could read the books and articles and the plans and even things out in the public in Nazi Germany, we would have a better chance of defeating them in the war.
And so it turned into a whole series of librarians being hired, sent over to Europe to go and initially buy materials at bookstores and buy the journals. Eventually, as the allies made their way through Germany and occupied lands, confiscating, and taking materials and using those materials to once again advance the war effort.
Also, in terms of propaganda and how and how we disseminate that information internally. And if some folks might be familiar with the Museum Men concept, where what happened was this concept that western civilization being, of course, the best and most wonderful western civilization given the predominant narrative at the time. (Yes, misogynistic. Yes, racist. Yes, classist and xenophobic.) but that idea that, we had to preserve it, and Europe was no longer a safe place for our heritage because it was getting bombed and destroyed. And so we had to, we, the United States, had to not only go and grab this information. Yes, we talk about paintings and, and this, but we were also going into university libraries, we are going into private libraries and we were confiscating the entire collections of these, bringing them back to the United States and distributing them to academic libraries and special libraries across the United States. Many an academic library today is built on the foundations of the materials that we took from Europe and not hundreds of years ago, like, 60 years ago.
And that concept that librarianship could be weaponized, that it was for strategy and intelligence. It also then became a way of gathering materials so that we could understand and preserve the culture. It became a way of, in the military, protecting materials from military assault, the military ideals of World War I very much shaped how we see librarianship today, how we built our academic libraries of today, and how we began to understand this information.
What really just hit me was, it was deliberate, specific, explicit, and supported in doing it. And I’m not saying it was wrong and bad. I really don’t want, I really don’t want to go and judge my colleagues ahead of times. Clearly there were ethical questions and ethical lines that were taken over. But the question, even today, you know, the War on Terror, and after 9/11, we saw it again. What is the role of libraries in this, you know, how do we prevent misinformation, disinformation, how do we support or not support the idea of government work, right? The PATRIOT Act and the stance that the library community took in response to the PATRIOT Act, which was very negative, is very different than the stance that they took after World War I and after World War ii, which was, they were all for the national goal. In World War I, it was much less about building up this intelligence system.
It was much more about using libraries to support the troops abroad, sending them materials, sending them books, sending them materials, supporting our troops, and in fact, the largest English language library, which is in France, was built as a remnant of the collection that libraries during World War I built to supply the soldiers with reading materials.
There’s a great book that if people are interested in this, that really goes into particularly World War II in a much more in-depth way. And just a fascinating reading. And if you ever wanna walk away with the image of librarians as truly kickass individuals, it’s called Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe, and it is just a wonderful, wonderful book, so I can’t recommend it highly enough. And the author of that was Kathy Peiss P-E-I-S-S.
Steve Thomas: I’ll include a link to that in the show notes so people can find that.
You, it’s kind of an odd time, I think probably to be writing a book like this in the middle of a pandemic cuz you don’t know when you’re writing what’s gonna be happening at the point of , and I know at one point you wrote, well I hope we’re coming out of it when this has been coming out, and in some ways we are in that process, certainly you can see the end of the tunnel now even if we’re not there yet, but how do you think the pandemic is gonna change all of this? Do you have any predictions of what the pandemic’s gonna change about our knowledge infrastructure?
David Lankes: Yeah, I think so. I phrase it more in what we need to change, and I talk about, not in the book, but elsewhere, I talk about something called the New Normal Agenda, what we need to fight to make the new normal cuz what we took as normal before Covid really should never have been normal. The idea of the lack of internet connectivity to rural communities and even urban communities that don’t have access and enough funds to pay for it. The idea of how libraries need to be sort of ready to respond, but one of the things that I really took away as a strong learning moment during the pandemic in libraries was when library workers stepped up to worry about their own wellness and safety and really tackle the narrative that libraries have to save the world and be first responders and be there and said, well, wait, is this really worth putting our workforce at risk for disease and death and such?
And so I think what I hope comes out of Covid in the library world is a better understanding of our role within communities, how we build trust, how we’re more than just the physical buildings and that we’re an industry with a workforce and that workforce are not just monks with religious fervor, that they’re human beings that have to worry about their own nature, their own health, their own life, their own wellness, their own responsibility to themselves and their family as much as to the community.
But I think that in terms of the knowledge infrastructure, we clearly learned that our technology, meaning broadband internet, is insufficient. That we do need to talk about the internet, not as a lovely service that needs to be regulated as a business, but by God, it is a piece of infrastructure and needs to be regulated as such that we need.
In the latest pandemic acts that come are coming out of of Congress, there’s broadband money. There’s broadband money in all of the acts, and certainly in the infrastructure plans now, and it needs to be there just like we did after World War I, and we understood after the depression, that telephone and electricity infrastructure was important. We now know that the internet is that way, and we also know that it’s not enough to simply bring a piece of fiber and drop it off at a front door, that there’s a whole realm of training, of understanding, of policy, of protection and of wellness, that needs to go into that conversation as well.
And so the other part that clearly, and I tackle as you point out, sort of the best that I can because, you know, I had to at some point stop writing the book and send in the manuscript and it was before the vaccine and it was before the election. I mean, there could be a whole nother chapter on the election that are the way that we understand and learn about health, that we learn about politics, the idea, the rise of conspiracy theories that our knowledge infrastructure is to the point, not up to tackling those issues because our focus on monetization, our focus on business, that we have intimately tied personal data to business models, to information acquisition, those are now connected. Really challenge the idea, what do we do against misinformation and disinformation? It’s easier to monetize clickbait and conspiracies than it is truth and depth of knowledge.
And so we need to have policies, infrastructure in place, we need to have libraries step up as active roles in providing guidance and contextualization, and we need to have very local community connections, bringing people across ideological spectrums to find commonalities again. And that’s how we begin. How we see the world our worldview, which is based on this knowledge infrastructure.
So yeah, I make some recommendations towards the end on everything from intellectual policy and copyright to the notions of privacy and dataification, even to how we look at data. I talk about, it sounds like it’s in the weeds, but when you look at it for a moment, you realize what we’re talking about. I talk about something called self-sovereigntry, which I can’t even pronounce right. I clearly just messed it up before, but it goes like this: right now think of, compare how you treat data and the internet treats data, your personal data, then how you treat your money. Right now, if we treated your money and banking the same way that we treat data, instead of you having a bank account, instead of you having a credit card, you would have Google dollars that you would spend at Google and you would have Amazon dollars that you would spend at Amazon, you have Facebook dollars you spent, and they would control it and they could change the policies of how you use it and they can define whether this money is transferable. It’s insane. Yet we do the same thing with data.
And so self-sovereigntry systems and it can use technologies like blockchain and all the big, fun, fancy stuff, but it comes down to this, which is instead of wherever I go to use a service on the internet, I create an account, they own my data, they collect my data, they set the policy for the data they set, whether it’s transferable or not, we treat it the other way, which is when I sign up for a service, I allow them access to my personal information, that I understand what’s being shared when it’s being shared, and can block it when I want and how I want.
And you’d mentioned before Apple, that’s sort of the difference, right? Facebook doesn’t like this because Facebook says, well, by us having your data, we can provide you better service. More targeted advertising, more targeted information, that’s their pitch. And Apple is saying, no, no, no, no. That’s their data. They get to choose whether they give it to you or not. And that choice is in their hands. Those are the two approaches that we’re talking about. And what we’ve done very rapidly is we’ve adopted one of monetization and we need to now seriously think about data as an asset.
And when you think about data as a personal, owned, published asset, it changes how you think about a lot of stuff, right? It says that I’m no longer a consumer where I can argue about what I get or not. I’m now a publisher. A publisher of my own data. I can now set value. I can now look at the marketplace. I can now worry about it’s reuse. I can look at it as a piece of intellectual property, and that’s a much more empowering of the individual, but it challenges the major business model. So, I think there’s lots of things that we, coming out of Covid, we need to do it anyway. Covid just highlights them in terms of how we look at data and treat data.
Steve Thomas: I like using Gmail and I understand what the exchange is there that I know they’re, whether they’re anonymizing it, whatever, they’re reading all my emails and I know they are because they’re giving me prompts of how to finish the sentence. So, they’re obviously see reading it and figuring it out. But it works well for my needs. And it’s good for my workplace because it has got this good infrastructure where you can use all the apps associated with this, but you have to understand what it is that exchange is like you said.
David Lankes: Right. And what I was trying to do with the historical context here, cuz this is not really a straight history book. It uses history to get into this conversation, but the history part becomes important because there was every step of the way that led you writing that Gmail came from decisions back to World War I. Encryption, the idea that Google can look at it and you’re okay with it because you’re pretty sure only Google can look at it, and the way they assure that is through encryption. Well, encryption comes out of the use of the telegram network back in World War I and in encoding messages and sending messages.
You’re going over the internet, which came out of yes, trying to bypass nuclear war and such, but even continues to look at that wouldn’t even be possible without massive scale computing, which also came out of World War II’s attempt to automate firing of munitions and battle munitions, and all of these bits and pieces add up, and at each point we made decisions about how to open or not open, and unless you go back and sort of have an understanding of that, then your solution may be, well, we tried that before, or maybe we didn’t try that before, or, we tried that before, but it didn’t have this other factor going along with it. And so that’s the goal. The goal is, as you say, to get people to think about this and the history is giving them context, but then it is getting into what do we do about it now?
Steve Thomas: The last thing I wanted to ask about was the fact that you’re on this podcast, but you actually have your own podcast. Can you talk about how you came to be doing that and what the show is?
David Lankes: Yeah. We started a podcast here at the University of South Carolina last year, and it’s evolved in something else, but lemme start where it came from. We offered a new core course to our master’s with library students in community engagement, and the idea that you know everything from public service and how do you do programming to why do you do programming, and ultimately how the community fits into how you think about libraries and the first time we offered that class was right in the middle of the pandemic, and so every book about how you do public services suddenly was like, well, maybe not worrying about how people come into your building, and maybe it’s not about treating people assuming they can actually leave their house, et cetera, and so rather than just assign a bit of outdated readings, we decided to take a look at what they were doing. So we went, reached out to some absolutely fabulous library directors, trendsetters thinkers. We did interviews and by the we, is the university, but really Nicole Cook, who’s our Augusta Baker chair, here as my co-conspirator. We had brilliant interviews with these folks, and those became the lectures of the class. We thought they would be useful for sharing out. So we put it out in something called the Skillset Podcast. She continued it the next semester talking about wellness, self-care, and community care, particularly with issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And so that was the goal was, let’s see what the current thinking is and get our students to see how, in real time, we can demonstrate their power to shape the field that, you know, this is being made up as we go, but it’s being made up by thoughtful people that have this kind of background that we’re sharing these skills.
That evolved into, I don’t think that one’s gonna go much further because it sort of served its initial purpose, and I’m headed to Texas, but it turned into a conversation. I reached out with a mentor of mine, the former dean at the University of Washington’s iSchool, Mike Eisenberg, and we’ve been friends for a long time and we really looked at the podcast as the interviews in Skillset were great, they were long, there were a lot of rambling like people like me, but we also wanted to play around with a much more interactive conversational tone. And so Libraries Lead in the New Normal is the podcast that’s moving forward from this, and that’s Mike and I and we invite other folks to come in. We just had Angela Craig, the head of the Charleston County Public Library, and we’ve had lots of people coming in and we just, the conversation is, okay, not just how do libraries themselves change or move forward as we emerge from Covid, but how can they inform the rest of what’s going on in with society? Things like coworking spaces, things like how do we deal with wellness? Things like how do we deal, we had a big conversation the other night about customer service and can reference and how librarians handle reference inform customer service, to which I kind of said no, because they’re two different things. But anyway, so that’s the podcast now is if you want to basically hear two old guys with beards yelling at each other for a half an hour, that’s that’s what we’re doing.
Steve Thomas: That would’ve been a better title too.
David Lankes: Yeah, true. Yeah, you’re right.
Steve Thomas: David, thank you so much for coming back on the show and for your. Many, many appearances over the last 10 years. You were one of the first guests in the first year, and I appreciate that everybody go out and buy the book. It’s Forged in War: How a Century of War Created Today’s Information Society, and if people wanna get in touch with you to follow up, how can they get in touch with you?
David Lankes: Best is email, which is R-D-L-A-N-K-E-S, so rdlankes@gmail.com, and happy to talk about it. And if the thought of having to read this scares you, the audio book, this is a first for me. The audio book is now available, in the sense that I didn’t do it. That’s another publisher. So you can hear someone with a much deeper and more important voice, which will make it sound authoritative at the very least. So, thanks, Steve, this podcast is a great service to the community sharing voices, and I really appreciate it and do whatever I can to support the work you do.
Steve Thomas: Thank you so much.
Circulating Ideas 