Sam Popowich

For 2021, I’ve decided to refresh my website. As a result, I will no longer be maintaining redlibrarian.github.io as of January 1, 2021. I’m going to leave the blog up so that all the posts remain available. After January 1, 2021 new blog posts, etc, will be available at spopowich.ca....

In political thought — which generally means liberal political thought — there is a tendency to “unmark” or play down political orientations that are unethical, unpopular, or are simply meant to be taken for granted. For example, in John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971), a book which revitalized liberal thinking...

I spend a lot of time critiquing the concept of intellectual freedom, but I rarely if ever try to articulate what alternative conception I think would be better suited to librarianship. One of the ways I think intellectual freedom is undertheorized is that, while many commentators and scholars debate the...

In the last blog post, I criticized the idea that Intellectual Freedom is an origin. Intellectual Freedom as origin is mixed confusingly with Intellectual Freedom as outcome, which can also be criticized from a social justice perspective. But I want to stay on the topic of IF as origin here,...

One thing I’ve figured out in my research on intellectual freedom is that two competing notions are hidden beneath what is presented as a clearly defined legal and moral concept. Intellectual freedom can be understood as both an origin - something which naturally pertains to individuals, must be protected and...

I’ve written about library values on this blog many times before. Basically, I’ve questioned whether our espoused values are anything but rhetorical public-relations tools, whether they enjoin actual behaviours on the part of library workers (this holds true for “professional ethics” in an unregulated profession as well), and how they...

One of the questions asked about the Marxist theory of ideology is this: if social relations determine our thoughts, ideas, values, opinions, etc; how do we account for the fact that new ideas arrive, some people do think differently, etc. One of the more orthodox Marxist answers to this is...

the COVID-19 crisis has brought the question of the role of the state back into sharp focus. Under neoliberalism, the state is reduced to an almost Robert-Nozick-style minimum, its role simply to steward the economy (almost exclusively through fiscal policy and free trade negotiations alone). The neoliberal state is a...

I’ve been trying to understand how the room-rental to transphobic speakers at Toronto Public Library and the “airport-style” security implemented at Winnipeg Public Library are connected, first to each other, and then to the dominant conception of intellectual freedom. This blog post is a “thinking aloud” about one way to...

In a Guardian article from this past Friday, Marina Hyde asked the question “What are the Conservatives conserving?” I’ve been reading some of the classic statements of conservatism recently - particularly Edmund Burke - and I think I’ve come to a realization: today’s conservatives are not conservative at all, in...

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) was, for a time, considered one of the foremost conservative thinkers of the Twentieth Century. He is little read now, but in any event he would likely have objected to the term “conservative thinker”. For Oakeshott, conservatism was a “disposition” rather than a political theory, still less...

Last night (October 15), Donald Trump took part in a town-hall style Q&A rather than participate in a virtual or online presidential debate. At one point, moderator Savannah Guthrie questioned Trump on his retweet of a conspiracy theory that “[Joe] Biden orchestrated to have Seal Team 6 killed to cover...

As part of my PhD research into the philosophical assumptions in LIS, especially around intellectual freedom, I’ve come to realize that what I initially thought was a left-wing insight - that liberalism is the hegemonic ideology of capitalism - is in fact not denied by many mainstream political theorists. In...

I just read Emily Drabinski’s incisive review of Bundy and Wasserstein’s “Professionalism Reconsidered”, a really useful re-evaluation of the understanding of librarians as professionals (has anything really changed?). Drabinski’s conclusion, that transformation of the underlying social forces and relationships is necessary, is spot on, especially in the context of attacks...

Is it possible for academics to strike? The expansion of factory logic and factory relations outside of the factory itself, the process Marx called the subsumption of labour under capital, brought labour that had previously been outside the exploitation/production dynamic (i.e. contributing to the production of surplus value) fully into...

NOTE: I’ve written previously about algorithmic bias from a Marxist perspective here What does “algorithmic bias” mean at the level of computer science classes or writing code? When I took computer science classes, the basic tendency of what was taught was that procedures are the encoding of algorithms. Admittedly that...

One of the questions that has occurred to me since the beginning of the pandemic is why governments seemed reluctant to actually mandate anything. By their nature, governments are not libertarian - despite the “small government” protestations of conservatives and populists - and they clearly relish the deployment of state...

About a year and a half ago I began to get seriously into photography. I have always had (indeed, had to have) an artistic occupation that was separate from work, but which felt like more than a craft or a hobby. For a long time, I wrote poetry - I...

As part of my PhD research into the political theory of intellectual freedom and how it plays out in various contexts in Canadian librarianship, I’ve been reading Charles Taylor’s work on multiculturalism and the politics of recognition. Glen Sean Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks also engages with Taylor’s work from...

When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burka rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural...

NOTE: This blog post has been updated a number of times. All revision history for this blog can be found at the github site. Liberal democracies, for want of a better term, subject their own structural need for violence to Freudian levels of repression. From the ongoing “so-called primitive accumulation”...

In 2016, I wrote a post about Race, Class, and the Police, and in the wake of Amy Cooper, George Floyd, and Regis Korchinski-Paquet, I think most of it remains relevant. However, I get a sense of fatalism or determinism in it now, the idea that real social justice can’t...

In critical theory circles, one of the ways “critique” functions is by exposing the assumptions made by proponents of a particular theory or worldview. Sometimes these assumptions are unconscious, but whether they are consciously-held or not, they are always withheld or not made explicit by the discourse in question. This...

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post on technology or programming, but this week I returned to some legacy code I wrote when I arrived at University of Alberta and inherited a programming project. The details of the project are unimportant; what I found interesting returning to...

“When a seller has no choice about selling, it should be called pillage, not purchase.” Cicero. In Confronting the Democratic Discourse, I argued that two of the main precepts of liberal-democratic thinking librarianship are: that lives are protected, and that there is all the time in the world for debate...

(NOTE: I have gone into the question of intersectionality and identity in more detail in chapter 2 of Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship on “Vectors of Oppression”). I don’t pay much attention to OLA’s OpenShelf, but when John Pateman’s post on identity politics and intersectionality was sent to me,...

As my PhD research on Intellectual Freedom in Canadian libraries evolves, it is moving away from ethical and political-economic questions towards what should more properly be described as political theory. One thing I am trying to do is to situate the IF transphobia incidents at VPL and TPL within larger...

Yesterday, I was reading Baylis, Smith, and Owens’ The Globalization of World Politics, an introductory textbook in International Relations. One of the first things the authors do (in the “Introduction” no less) is to layout the various theoretical approaches to IR, three “mainstream” approaches (Realism, Liberalism, Social Constructivism) and four...

Two of the main tenets of liberal intellectual freedom are that IF-protections are in place so that minority views are able to be expressed, and that the only way to challenge incorrect views is to subject them to debate and argument in order for the truth to emerge. These two...

The writers of the Enlightenment looked on human nature through the prism of particular social needs and relations. But they did not suspect that history had put some prism before their eyes. – Plekhanov We live, whether we like it or not, in postmodern times. For many people, the postmodern...

In normal times, under normal circumstances, I prefer to focus on the long-term strategy of full communist democracy, constituent power, the utopian possibilities of a fundamental change in subjectivity, etc. In many ways, this is in order to keep these utopian possibilities in view, to make sure they are not...

Periodically, the accumulation of capital reaches a point where such a vast amount has already been accumulated that every addition of surplus value or profit makes only a minuscule difference to the total. Such economic limits combine with social and political ones to produce crises, like the Depression or the...

Read part 1 here Having taken all meanings for our object, we can no longer speak of them in terms of significations as such, and find ourselves obliged somehow to take a position outside the realm of meanings in order to judge what they all, irrespective of their content, have...

On Monday, March 9, Toronto City Librarian Vickery Bowles gave a speech to the Empire Club - formed to ensure the maintenance of the “imperial bond” between Canada and Britain amid anti-British sentiment in the early years of the 20th century - in which she argued that the reaction against...

In an article I wrote for Library Trends (open access preprint link), I argued that neoliberalism should in large part be understood as a process of restructuring of labour in order to increase profits and (just as importantly) make sure those profits fall into the right hands. Neoliberalism was a...

The philosophical lineage of intellectual freedom in libraries relies mainly on either J.S. Mill’s On Liberty, Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, or a combination of the two. Often, Mill’s influence goes unacknowledged, because Mill’s liberalism and the reasoning used to justify it, is hegemonic in Western bourgeois society. We breathe...

Antonio Gramsci has long been a critical darling in LIS, in part because his philosophy - stripped of its revolutionary power - is easily assimilatable to the profession’s unacknowledged liberalism. He adds a touch of red spice to an otherwise bland and unpalatable porridge of political commitments. Stephen Bales’ “counterhegemonic...

History is what hurts. - Fredric Jameson I somehow missed Richard Beaudry’s post post on the Ryerson CFE site last December. In the post, Beaudry asks “What is it about Meghan Murphy that is polarizing some librarians and academic librarians as well as some library associations in Canada and why...

I’ve been rereading the Weld v. Ottawa Public Library Ontario Superior Court decision, as well as Allana Mayer’s post about it and the more I think about it, the more I think this decision completely undermines the legal justification of TPL’s and VPL’s decisions rent space to transphobic speakers in...

Since October of 2018 I’ve been pursuing a distance PhD in political science from the University of Birmingham. My research project was on Italian Theory (e.g. autonomist Marxism), AI, and jobs in Canada. While I was engaged with the political theory part, it was hard to really dig into the...

One of the main tenets of intellectual freedom absolutism is that the library does not take a side, but instead provides a “neutral” platform for the discussions necessary for social, political, and ethical progress. Jim Turk, for example, has written that it is vital that the TPL uphold public libraries’...

Very often in this blog I have attacked the individualist, liberal conception of freedom in general and intellectual freedom in particular. In this post I want to offer an alternative conception of intellectual freedom that might have the potential to avoid some of the absolutist pitfalls that attend the current...

Science is often claimed as the triumph of materialism over idealism, superstition, opinion, etc. For a long time, science was considered to be nothing more than the straightforward, progressive uncovering of facts. Newton famously wrote that he “made no hypotheses” (hypotheses non fingo), he simply observed and explained. This model...

This was the year I started focused work on my PhD, so almost all of the books I finished were fiction (as opposed to last year which had a good balance between fiction and non-fiction), and often not particularly challenging, something to get my mind off my work. I read...

It was announced yesterday that the same transphobic speaker who rented rooms from Vancouver Public Library and Toronto Public Library is scheduled to be on a panel at Seattle Public Library. Seattle Public has responded to critics of this decision with the same trite defenses that VPL and TPL have,...

Canadian librarianship is heading into a moment of truth/crisis around intellectual freedom. The events around hosting transphobic speakers at Vancouver Public Library and Toronto Public Library, accompanied by a doubling-down on free speech absolutism and a dismissal of critics as confused, naive, or inexperienced, have exposed deep faultlines within the...

In my last post I noted how the October 15th, 2019, statement from the Toronto City Librarian, Vickery Bowles, used the expression “free speech” rather than the more usual expression in librarianship, “intellectual freedom”. “Free speech” is absent from Bowles’ previous statement from October 12th, which made me think more...

In an early defense of TPL’s platforming of a transphobic speaker, Vickery Bowles made the rhetorical move from the usual library term, “intellectual freedom”, to “free speech”, a term with particular political connotations and a set of adherents who range from centrist liberals to the most rabid alt-right white supremacist....

[Adorno] seems to have had more sympathy for the student movement of ths sixties than he was willing to express publicly (a sympathy not a little tarnished by the deathless shame of having called the police into the University. Jameson, Late Marxism To speak of constituent power is to speak...

Last Friday, Greta Thunberg was in town, and local climate activists organized an afternoon rally. The rally was organized and led by young Indigenous people, and one of the questions that arose was whether much of the 10,000 strong crowd was there for Greta’s celebrity, or for the cause. Put...

One of the consequences of beginning to think seriously about society and politics in the early to mid 1990s is that, because theories like Marxism had been cast on the dustbin of history, and it we had seen the “end of ideology”, the hegemonic philosophy of the time was a...

This is part three of a series of blog posts written in response to Meghan Murphy’s room booking at Toronto Public Library. Read part one and part two. The debate around Toronto Public Library’s room rental to Meghan Murphy continued over the long weekend, and today TPL responded with a...

Given my critical position with respect to what I consider the maximalist view of Intellectual Freedom, I have lately been trying to determine what positive sense of Intellectual Freedom can be salvaged. I have remarked elsewhere on this blog that I think “intellectual freedom” is a misnomer, since it is...

In English writers of the seventeenth century we still often find the word ‘worth’ used for use-value and ‘value’ for exchange-value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the actual thing, and a Romance word for its reflection....

“Men believe that they are free, precisely because they are conscious of their volitions and desires; yet concerning the causes that have determined them to desire and will they have not the faintest idea…” Spinoza, Ethics, Appendix to Part One. After writing the last post on Necessity and (Intellectual) Freedom,...

It has recently occurred to me that in “bending the stick” away from the dominant, maximalist view of intellectual freedom in various posts on this site, I may be giving the impression that I don’t subscribe to the library’s role in upholding intellectual freedom. I do, but not in a...

Or, why there’s no such thing as machine intelligence. In his seminal paper on machine intelligence, Computing Intelligence and Machinery (1950), Alan Turing replaces the question “can machines think?” with the more tractable question of what would happen if a machine took the place of one of the human beings...

John Locke has a lot to answer for. As I argue in Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship, Locke’s writings - especially the “Letter Concerning Toleration” provide the ideological justification for free-speech/intellectual-freedom maximalism. However, Locke’s philosophy is based on the presumption of a homogeneous society, a democracy made up solely...

As part of yesterday’s “Diversity Day” at University of Alberta Libraries, Jessie Loyer gave a thought-provoking workshop called “Where do you work? Rooting responsibility in land”. The workshop was essentially a set of guided questions on land, indigeneity, settler rights and responsibilities, sovereignty, communities, and relationships. When I got home...

The machine… is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools. (Capital, Chapter 15, p. 495). For Marx, a machine consisted of three parts. In modern terms, the power supply, the transmission mechanism, and the...

Over the last while, two observations have been floating around in my head. The first is that several radically different kinds of work with different perspectives and values have been shoehorned into a single profession: technical services, systems/digital projects, public services/reference/teaching, etc. The dominant perspective on this is siloization, as...

On Friday, Code4Lib Edmonton hosted a day of lightning talks and workshops at the University of Alberta Library’s new Digital Scholarship Centre. The last session was a Fail4Lib session led by UAL’s Digital Scholarship Librarian Lydia Zvyagintseva. Using the Fyre Festival as a case study, participants in the session discussed...

(The following is the opening section of a paper I presented this summer at the Canadian Political Science Association conference. The full paper can be found in the University of Alberta’s Education and Research Archive.] Much of the analysis of platforms, data, and surveillance are predicated on a methodological individualism...

Next week I’m presenting a workshop for Code4Lib Edmonton, An Introduction to Machine Learning using Ruby, and I made sure to include a section on AI ethics, which is going to combine some of the lessons from Safiya Noble’s work, as well as some of the criticisms of analytics and...

Over the last while I’ve been investigating anti-positivist methodologies as a way to approach questions in librarianship. In “A ‘Common Sense’ in Librarianship” I looked at how hermeneutics - specifically Gadamer’s hermeneutics - might supplant a positivistic commitment to “documentation” in librarianship. In that post I commented on the strict...

(Full disclosure: I’m neither a philosopher nor a logician. What follows is my own inadequate and incomplete understanding of predicate and dialectical logic.) I was going to call this post “Classical and Dialectical Logic”, and to begin with the syllogism, that form of logical argument which can take many forms,...

“… too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And...

Spinoza, Modernity, and Intellectual Freedom, part two. In my previous blog post, I (following Negri) included Spinoza in an anti-modern genealogy which included Machiavelli and Marx. Rory Litwin considered my reading of Spinoza odd, especially since Spinoza (who I contrasted with Locke) “believed liberal democracy would be the best form...

In his book Eurocentrism, Samir Amin writes that modernity “is the claim that human beings, individually and collectively, can and must make their own history” (13). It is this claim that underpins a host of thinkers mainly, but not exclusively, forming the hegemonic core of the liberal tradition, such as...

An article by Karen Hao from April 15th described a (long-overdue) trend in the capitalist centres to start taking seriously the idea of regulating artificial intelligence. A bill before Congress, the Algorrithmic Accountability Act, “would require big companies to audit their machine learning systems for bias and discrimination and take...

There are two things I’ve noticed recently in discussion of Marxism on the one hand and political economy on the other, and I think I’ve finally figured out how they’re connected. In the first place, we have an image of Marxism as rigid, deterministic, or “programmatic”, which always strikes me...

The rise of Marx-based Social Democracy among the revolutionaries in Russia depended crucially on the growing conviction that a political revolution had to precede a social revolution. Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done in Context. In Lars Lih’s monumental book, he tries to place Lenin and...

In “Algorithmic Bias and the ‘Fragment on Machines’” I quoted Marx’s Grundrisse, where it describes how the development of fixed capital (specifically tools, machinery, and automation) embody the built-up intellectual development of a given society. Marx writes that “the development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge...

On this blog I am very critical of what I see as a hegemonic view of intellectual freedom, a view which arises out of a mainly unquestioned liberal perspective. My main criticism is that this view employs an abstract value - “freedom” - divorced from social, political, and material realities...

These books seemed to be about a life he had never encountered - a life where there were no barracks, no strict-regime camps, no brigade leaders, no armed guards, no security officers, no systems of internal passports, and none of the sufferings, anxieties, and passions that made up the lives...

Two of the major touchstones for discussions of algorithmic bias in librarianship are Matthew Reidsma’s 2016 article “ALGORITHMIC BIAS IN LIBRARY DISCOVERY SYSTEMS” and Safiya Noble’s Algorithm’s of Oppression from 2018. Both of these pieces discuss the encoding of particular social values within ostensibly “neutral” algorithms. Earlier this year, when...

In Descartes, as in the ‘new science,’ once it has separated itself from the spurious elements of philosophical development, the trust in method attaind an almost mythical status and takes on a Promethean force, defining itself - along with its commitment to scientific verification - as a sort of heroic,...

Having heard the Beethoven, we hear Ives differently, and having heard the Ives, we hear Beethoven differently. We carry the discourse around in our heads. We can no more ignore it - can no more listen ‘innocently’ - than we can follow the ancient recipe for turning lead into gold…...

Just a quick update on the status of the book I’m currently writing on the democratic discourse of librarianship. The book now has a publisher page and an expected publication date of May 2019. Next week I’m presenting the basic argument of the book at the Ontario Library Association Superconference...

Note: I am indulging here in thinking out loud, putting these things down to clarify my own thought a little. In his 1947 study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye remarks that “idealism is a doctrine congenial to poets” (14). I think there is something to this, since in...

Last year, I resolved - as a chronic book non-finisher - to finish reading as many books as I could. I didn’t particularly succeed at that, but I did manage to slog through some books to the end that I would ordinarily have given up on. This year, partly because...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about alternatives to exchange economies, prompted by David Graeber’s analysis of the mythical origins of exchange and money in his book on debt. One thing that Graeber discusses is that, contra the bourgeois economists and contemporary hegemonic thinking on the subject, members of ancient...

NOTE: This post contains some details about a recent episode of The Good Place that could be construed as a spoiler. In season three, episode four of The Good Place, Simone tries to help Eleanor understand what’s wrong with her by explaining that she never really got past the “me...

The other day the results of the National Heritage Digitization Strategy funding competition were announced, and it got me thinking about the place of grant-funding in librarianship and in academia more broadly. When I was applying for a PhD at University of Alberta last year, it was presumed that I...

As part of my PhD research, I’m investigating what’s become known as ‘Autonomist Marxism’, a Marxist tendency that grew out of workers’ struggles and theoretical positions outside the Communist Party in Italy in the 1960s. In its early days, this tendency was known as operaismo (usually translated as “workerism”), and...

This morning I went to the Edmonton Public Library’s Leader-in-Residence panel on Intellectual Freedom. Toni Samek, Jim Turk, and Gail DeVos were the panelists and it was moderated by Alvin Schrader. I didn’t know Gail DeVos, but Toni, Jim, and Alvin have all been active participants in the intellectual freedom...

I’m not sure anyone will be interested in this, and it feels a little narcissistic to write this post, but I wanted to capture what’s currently going on in my life. As of August 1, 2018, I have gone on a one-year research leave from University of Alberta Libraries. I...

I don’t normally weigh in on scholcomm discussions, as that isn’t really my area. However, reading Aaron Tay’s interesting blog post “Can posting a preprint be morally wrong?” got me thinking. The issue Tay is investigating is the bioRxiv preprint wall of shame and hinges on questions of what constitutes...

NOTE: What follows are a few notes on one aspect of the current ALA debacle. April Hathcock and Carrie Wade have both written more important and significant contributions, which you should read before (or instead of) mine. The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and...

In a recent Guardian article on the state of Canada’s libraries, Vickery Bowles, the Chief Librarian of TPL, is quoted as saying, “Access to information and pathways to learning were the great equalisers of the 20th century.” According to the writer of the article, Bowles “sees a vital role of...

Yesterday, a blog post by Kevin Seeber was making the rounds, and while it struck a chord with a lot of people, I think there are some problems with the way Seeber frames the question of collections. Mainly, I think the problem is that while Seeber is right that “libraries...

Yesterday, I finally had a chance to read the CFLA Position Statement on Indigenous Knowledge and the Copyright Act. What I took away from the Statement - and subsequently tweeted about - was that CFLA promoted the protection of Indigenous Knowledge within the existing regime of Copyright Law and (European)...

Note: what follows are my own impressions and evaluations, and don’t necessarily represent the views of the other organizers, presenters, or attendees. Yesterday was the first annual (we hope) Politics of Libraries conference, held at the School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta. The conference was organized by...

Two interesting tweets showed up in my timeline today, one by April Hathcock and a reponse by @hayzeus89. The gist of the tweets was that, given the increasing recognition of a PhD in place of an MLIS, then we should also accept years of service in non-MLIS positions, in effect...

Yesterday evening, I made an off-the-cuff tweet about university central administrations abdicating responsibilities which libraries then pick up out of a sense of confusion around the role of the library in the university, and the consequent necessity to keep proving our “value”. Under some probing by Lisa Hinchliffe, I realized...

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, (Heron Books, 1966) [1847/1850] Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book,—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it. – Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, January 15...

Last January, I resolved to finish as many books as possible. I’m a chronic book-abandoner, and I thought that perhaps putting a review up of each book I finished would be an incentive to finish more things. As a result, I read (to completion) 27 books (11 novels and 16...

Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (Penguin, 1973) [1930] J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country (Harvester Press, 1980) ‘My private schoolmaster used to say, “If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.” My Church has taught that in different words for several centuries. But these young people have...

Endnotes, Endnotes 1: Preliminary Materials for a Balance Sheet of the Twentieth Century (Endnotes, October 2008). According to their website, Endnotes is a discussion group based in Germany, the UK, and the US “primarily oriented towards conceptualising the conditions of possibility of a communist overcoming of the capitalist mode of...

A few years ago, I began mentioning to colleagues a tension I felt in my work which I described as a tension between projects and services. No-one I brought it up with ever really seemed to understand what I was getting at, and so I tried articulating things differently or...

Kennet McNaught and David J. Bercuson, The Winnipeg Strike: 1919 (Longman, 1974). I grew up the North End of Winnipeg, not far from the Ukrainian Labour Temple and the Winnipeg headquarters of the Communist Party of Canada. I played soccer at R.B. Russell Vocational High School, but never knew anything...

I haven’t paid much attention to developments going on in the vendor world around alternatives to IP authentication until recently. Yes, the current duct-tape-and-glue solutions libraries have are broken, but that’s nothing particularly new. And yes, Shibboleth has been around at least since I started in libraries, but vendors have...

Raymond Chandler, The High Window, in The Big Sleep/Farewell, My Lovely/The High Window, Everyman, 2002 (originally published 1942). I was glancing at this omnibus volume on my bookshelf and realized that I hadn’t gotten around to reading The High Window. My dad has always been a Chandler fan, and I...

Yesterday, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) voted overwhelmingly to reject an offer by the College Employer Council that the union argued was made in bad faith and an attempt to do an end-run around negotiation by putting the offer directly to a ratification vote by the membership. The...

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, in Four Novels of the 1960s (Library of America, 2007). First published in 1962. The Man in the High Castle is a book about racism. Racism imbues every interaction, every relationship in the novel. But racism, while the most immanent, is...

This week there was a lot of discussion about the ethics of tracking library users (specifically students) and passing that data along to university administrations to help support the “student experience”, ensure “student success”, and “prove the value of libraries”. There was a lot there to get into - I...

NOTE: I imagine there must be a way to connect “values” in programming with Marx’s theory of value, but I’m not sure what that is, and it’s beyond the scope of this post. My friend Kyle let me know about this post on “Clojure vs. The Static Typing World”, which...

When David Camfield drew my attention to Rebecca Lossin’s “Against the Universal Library” (New Left Review 1-7, Sept-Oct 2017) I was initially surprised that anything to do with libraries would appear in the NLR. The long-standing traditions of critique within modern librarianship, dating from the 1930s and the establishment of...

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, Penguin Books, 1989. I read The Remains of the Day over a long-weekend shortly after Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize. I’ve been meaning to read Ishiguro for years; my friend Kyle listed it as one of the top three fiction books he read...

On Friday, McMaster Rare Books rightly took issue with the erasure of archival labour coincident with the use of a letter written by Bertrand Russel, which is in their archives. This letter has “gone viral” several times over the last few years, variously claiming to have been “unearthed” by a...

J. Moufawad-Paul, The Communist Necessity: Prolegomena to Any Future Radical Theory, Kersplebedeb, 2014. Finally, after decades of post-modernism and capitalist triumphalism, it is no longer considered impolite for academics and popular intellectuals to speak the word communism. (15). I started my undergrad in 1995, six years after the fall of...

In “Books and the Nation”, her chapter in the Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (2015), Trish Loughran writes that the fact remains: there is no radical history of the book, no comprehensively leftist or revolutionary or decolonizing tradition to speak of. There is no queer history of...

In my review of Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, I asked the following question: What if the library recognized and took ownership of its etymological history as a place of books? What if it began to take seriously a mission not of ‘access to information’ or ‘access to material’, but...

When I was in library school, we discussed the ways in which information is a commodity. We never actually decided on a definition of “commodity”; like pornography, we were expected to know it when we see it. But anyone with a passing familiarity with Marx’s Capital knows that the concept...

In What Is To Be Done? (1902), Lenin wrote that without an organized party to push demands further, the working class would never move beyond ‘economism’, that is the demand for purely economic betterment: higher wages, benefits, etc. These demand would leave the social and economic foundations of society intact....

Caveat: The dharma that can be spoken is no dharma at all. I’ve been thinking/reading a lot about dialectics lately, especially the relationship between Hegel’s idealist dialectic and the materialist dialectic of Marx and Engels. But I’ve also been doing a lot of yoga - this week, I did an...

J. Moufawad-Paul, Austerity Apparatus (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2017). Moufawad-Paul, who blogs at M-L-M Mayhem is the author of two previous books: The Communist Necessity(2014) and Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain(2016). Austerity Apparatus rounds out a trilogy of sorts focused on the need to revitalize the theory and practice...

Richard Norman and Sean Sayers, Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980. First of all, I never intended to read this book. Last Thursday I was looking for a copy of Hegel’s Shorter Logic in our Humanities and Social Sciences collection, which wasn’t on the shelf, so...

This post was inspired by a couple of tweets by Ryan Regier: Understand that authors want to get paid, maybe need to rework our fair dealing arguments so we show how fair dealing ultimately helps them?— Ryan Regier (@ryregier) July 14, 2017 These tweets got me thinking about the contradictions...

The dialectic that Marx adapted from Hegel sees the world as categories which are constantly changing, dependent on history and the way in which they interact with other categories. Human perception can only “grasp” these categories at specific moments in time, freezing them and seeing only particular aspects of them...

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon. Scribner’s, 1941. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West. Modern Library, 2000 (1985). I decided to reread The Last Tycoon when I saw the trailer for the upcoming Amazon TV adaptation. Just as with the recent Gatsby adaptation, this really...

Yesterday morning, I was at the Canadian Open Data Summit (CODS), where a lot of the discussion was around the benefits of open data for governance. Beth Blauer from Johns Hopkins discussed her experience working in various muncipalities in developing data infrastructure to support governance decisions. This led to the...

Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, Verso, 2009. From what I can tell, after reading just two of Rancière’s books, his political project is based on a radical egalitarianism that I’m not sure I’ve seen to urgently expressed anywhere else. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, he argues for a recognition, or at...

In her presentation at yesterday’s session of Marx’s Capital after 150 Years, Ursula Huws ridiculed the idea that increased automation (e.g. robots) will (soon) replace all human workers. She bases her argument on Marx’s understanding of both the organic composition of capital and the temporary profitability gained from automation. The...

Tyler A. Shipley, Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras, Toronto: Between the Lines, 2017. (Disclosure: I’ve known Tyler since we were both in a Russian history seminar taught by Oleh Gerus at University of Manitoba, sometime in the late 1990s). NOTE: This is a pretty hot...

I first wrote about John Pateman around this time last year, responding to one of his Open Shelf columns about what Pateman understands as the “true community-led library” (an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy). As I said in “Public Libraries, History, and the State”, Pateman isn’t exactly wrong...

In discussing classical liberalism, the Oxford University Press Introduction to Politics (Second Canadian Edition) writes that “the liberal critique of fascism as ideologies is a reflection of a tendency among some liberals to regard liberalism as somehow above the ideological fray” and quotes Barbara Goodwin’s Using Political Ideas. The full...

Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. There are books that you read at exactly the right time. I have been struggling with a long time with the feeling that libraries are without a mission, without a solid, concrete purpose. All our...

Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1999) The title of Franklin’s 1987 Massey Lectures are an homage to C.B. Macpherson’s 1964 Lectures, The Real World of Democracy. Macpherson saw the Soviet and Post-Colonial states of the mid-sixties as challengers to the Western Liberal Democracy to...

On May 5 and 6 of this year, I attended a conference on “Precarious Academic Labour in the Age of Neoliberalism” at Okanagan College in Kelowna, BC. I had initially put in a proposal to talk about precarity and academic librarianship with a fairly broad view of what precarity entails....

Razmig Keucheyan, The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today, Verso, 2014. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading this; I worried that it might be simply be a checklist of thinkers and ideas on the left today, that it would be dry and schematic, or that it...

Sometimes I'll mention that people in the humanities don't use "data" to describe sources, and ppl get mad at me? I guarantee you it's true.— Miriam Posner (@miriamkp) April 26, 2017 data specialists and data librarians in particular get mad at me, I should say.— Miriam Posner (@miriamkp) April 26,...

Note: spoilers for s01e04 The Americans, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a TV show that started in 2013, following the lives of two Soviet sleeper agentsi in the early 1980s, a husband and wife team who have been operating in the US since 1963. The show was inspired by...

V.I. Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an infantile disorder (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency, 1970). Originally published in 1920. In his “Study on the Unity of [Lenin’s] Thought” of 1924, Georg Lukacs argued that the “core of Lenin’s thought” was the actuality of the proletarian revolution. When I first read this, I was...

My proposal had been submitted last year and I had been planning to attend the upcoming Libraries, Archives, and the Anthropocene Colloquium hosted in New York by Litwin Books, but due to the unethical travel ban implemented since then by the US Government, I have decided not to travel to...

William Gibson, The Peripheral (New York: Putnam’s), 2014. Neal Stephenson, Seveneves (New York: HarperCollons), 2015. Note: Spoilers for both books I don’t often read contemporary fiction, but every so often I get the urge to see what’s being written nowadays. Perhaps because I’ve been writing so much about technology these...

(source: The Strategic Direction of Research Library Leaders: Findings from the Latest Ithaka S+R Survey Library directors are increasingly recognizing that discovery does not and should not always happen in the library. Compared to the 2013 survey results, fewer library directors believe that it is important that the library is...

In reading Chris Bourg’s great talk “What happens to libraries and librarians when machines can read all the books?” I kept coming back to a couple of things that are outside its scope, but relevant to the question that she asks. Bourg is arguing, I think, that - given the...

Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015). The possibility that the vast pool of workers was surplus to capital’s requirements was partially hidden by precarity and informality. When the consequences of a low-wage global economy became apparent in terms of inadequate consumption and...

Before getting down to it, I recommend watching the stream of Christina Harlow’s c4l2017 keynote “Resistance is Fertile: Building a Manualfesto for LibTech”. Go, do it now. While you’re there, check out the rest of the c4l2017 talks too. It makes me sad that the #critlib tribe pays no mind...

Note: this post intersects with a post I wrote for Behind the Stacks on Practice, Reading, and Fake News The last few years have seen the rise of a critical trend in librarianship towards “Freedom to Read Week”, a period when libraries typically draw attention to the everpresent threat of...

One of the things that Marxist theory insists upon is that socio-economic phenomena cannot be viewed in isolation. Every phenomenon exists within a social context, is the product of social relations (grounded, fundamentally, in economic relations), and possesses a history (i.e. it changes over time). Since this is Fair Dealing...

“simplicity buys you power” – Daniel Higginbotham Complexity and the ILS At a recent presentation about FOLIO, I was reminded of conversations that took place a couple of years ago with Gillian Byrne and others around the idea of “disintegrating” the ILS. The “integrated library system” which developed out of...

Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. It’s always seemed to me that there were two trends in the English novel (the novel in English, not the novel of England). There’s the Jane Austen-type, where the “ironic distance” between the narrative and the...

One of the things I’ve become aware of over the last few years is how process can be (and often is) used as a substitute for thinking, discussing, debating, interrogating, critiquing, and reaching consensus. In short, process becomes an alternative for the hard work we should expect to be doing...

I was asked to write a guest blog post for The Alberta Library’s website, Behind the Stacks. I wrote about how broad and varied reading is an important element in negotiating and navigating fake news, or propaganda. Behind the Stacks: Practice, Reading, and Fake News.

One of the complaints about programming tutorials is that they have the same problem as drawing tutorials, which John Fink refers to as “the owl problem”. Essentially, the problem is that the tutorials give you a couple of simple, manageable steps, and then expect you to fill in the gaps...

As someone who has worked in library systems/discovery for nearly ten years, I knew our systems had problems, but I generally thought they made the best of a bad situation. I’ve used academic libraries for three degrees, and in general, they were fine - they served their purpose. But I’ve...

Weil, Simone. On the Abolition of All Political Parties, New York: NYRB, 2014. Dick, Philip K. The Last Interview and Other Conversations, New York: Melville House, 2015. There are many ways that books can resonate with a reader, and most of them, I think are situational – reading the right...

Although I was never a member of the Canadian Library Association, I - along with many other people - had some criticisms of it. One my my main concerns was that while it officially endorsed intellectual freedom, its endorsement had - at least as far as I could see -...

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage, 1963. Recently, in a Facebook exchange (on politics, of course), someone was ridiculed as a liberal for calling another person “unkind”, and I think there is something to this. To my mind liberals, just as much as conservatives, have things they...

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Poor Folk / The Gambler, translated by CJ Hogarth. London: Everyman, 1962. Since it’s the new year, I thought it would be a good plan to commit to writing a post for each book I finish this year. I’m a chronic leaver of books unfinished, but over the...

To link oneself with one’s users, one must act in accordance with the needs and wishes of one’s users. All work done for the users must start from their needs and not from the desire of any individual, however well-intentioned. It often happens that objectively users need a certain change,...

My review of Fredric Jameson’s An American Utopia (Verso, 2016), appears in this month’s issue of International Socialism: Let’s all join the army

This Friday, I was interviewed along with University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies professor Michael McNally on the CJSR radio show “Shout for Libraries”. We were interviewed by Celine Gareau-Brennan and Lorisia Macleod, two SLIS students. We began by discussing the age-old question of library neutrality. Neither...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the criticism that librarians tend not to look outside their own field for inspiration, best practices, cautionary tales, etc. This problem isn’t specific to librarianship, of course, but given our culture of “permanent crisis”, looking beyond our disciplinary borders (such as they are)...

Here is the video and text of a talk I gave at University of Alberta’s School of Library and Information Studies, November 16, 2016. Watch Video Read Text (pdf)

As I write this, the University of Manitoba Faculty Association, which represents faculty members, librarians, and other academic staff, is on day 4 of a strike. Today, they are leading a march to the Administrative Offices of the University to demand improved working conditions and job security. After interference from...

This weekend, I attended the Alberta Open Data Summit. It was very interesting to hear from libraries working with open data, but also to hear from all the “policy wonks” about their vision of how Open Data can support municipal policies around inclusion, social welfare, etc. The keynote was be...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the gender pay gap (especially in universities, because that’s where I work). Over the last few years, some Canadian universities (e.g. McMaster and Waterloo) have done internal studies to determine the extent of the pay gap and have implemented pay raises in order...

In ‘Who Signs the Paychecks’, I wrote: Hiding the fact of an unequal employer – worker relationship behind an illusion of equality is dangerous at the best of times, but especially so in a period of collective bargaining. And only a couple of months later we have the example of...

In organizing my files this weekend, I came across a paper I wrote in library school under the influence of exposure to the history of reading. For some reason, the act of reading struck me while rereading Greene’s Heart of the Matter, and I wanted to explore some of the...

(part two) Blog posts are, by definition, “hot takes”. But even as I finished part one I realized that I had not treated Libraries as Dual Power with anything like the depth it required. In this part, I want to dig a little deeper into some of the assumptions of...

(part one) When I was in library school, our collection development class rehashed the Berninghausen Debate (probably for the millionth time - sorry, Dr Howard). Essentially, the debate boils down to the social role of libraries, often framed as a debate over the “neutrality” of libraries. In terms of collection...

I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately about the presumed values of our presumed profession. “Presumed” in this case both in the sense that we presume we agree on meanings (of the words we use to describe our values, for example) and in the sense that a profession of librarianship...

What follows are a few thoughts about precarious labour and Marx’ Capital. They should not be considered exhaustive. I have also simplified Marx’s argument to a large extent. In reading Michael Heinrich’s masterful 2012 Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, I was struck by his remark that,...

Note: these thoughts are, necessarily, incomplete - they do not, for example, discuss the oppression of women - but I hope they add constructively to the discussion of a difficult, complex, and emotional issue. They are likely inadequate, and in some cases maybe wrong, but they are set down in...

One of the interesting discussions in John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology is the discussion of “coevolution”. Foster relates how, due to their study of Darwin and other 19th century scientists, came up with the idea that, just as the internal organs of animals evolved along with changes in their environment,...

Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, John Bellamy Foster, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Marx’s Ecology fills a gap in Marxist scholarship by, in a sense, taking seriously Marx and Engels’ claim to materialism. Reading 20th century Marxists, it can sometimes seem as if “materialism” is being used metaphorically, or...

In Karl Marx and Critical Librarianship, John Pateman, CEO of Thunder Bay Public Library, seeks to provide a Marxist framework for a “Needs Based” library model. In 2008, Pateman wrote in Information for Social Change on “Developing a Needs Based Library Service” which, while not naming Marx directly, did refer...

When I was young, I attended a meeting of the Winnipeg IWW, in the course of which a young bike courier asked about union certification for his “cooperative”. An older man took issue with the young man’s characterization of the organization as a cooperative, demanding to know who owned the...

After making a workshop proposal to the Access Conference, I began thinking of how I would approach explaining functional programming to programmers who “just don’t get it”. When I first looked into functional programming, it made my head hurt - it was a different way of approaching programs. It took...

Apologies for the length - there’s been a lot to think about the last few days. This is an initial, provisional attempt to formalize some thoughts that came out of #lodlamto At the end of an interesting workshop on SPARQL at the #lodlamto conference on Thursday, I overheard two software...

The usual fate of the object of new historical creativity is to be mistaken for the replica of older and even obsolete forms of social life to which the new institutions may bear a certain similarity. (Marx, quoted in Lenin, The State and Revolution, 49) John Pateman, CEO of Thunder...

I would like to propose a thought-experiment. Rather than the top-down, centralized library – either academic or public – in which decisions are made by a funding organization and implemented by library workers responsible, ultimately, to a chief librarian; what if rather than this organizational structure, libraries were organized instead...

[T]he problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. “ Lukacs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” An outside observer would be forgiven for thinking librarianship...

Naomi Klein opens This Changes Everything with an anecdote about an airplane prevented from taking off because its wheels have sunk deep into the overheated tarmac. In this story and others, Klein sees an important irony within the truth that is climate change: The temperatures in the summer of 2012...

Note: this post is drawn from a larger project applying critical theory to data structures. Every model is an interpretation, a simplification, a representation. In The Prison House of Language, Jameson discusses the way in which our choice of a model affects how we think through problems, and the effect...

Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) is mainly known for a certain kind of high-concept, countercultural science-fiction, full of drug use, paranoia, and metaphysical “big questions”. But what struck me in going on a PKD jag lately was not only the focus on commodities in Dick’s fiction, but the focus...

Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour power which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its free play an industrial reserve army independent of these natural limits. – Marx, Capital, Volume 1. The other day, following a various discussions in...

The recent post on Scholarly Kitchen about SciHub and its attendant comments provide a good illustration of Marx’s theory of historical materialism. In the article and comment section, two ideologies struggled for supremacy. One we might characterize as ‘pro-Access’ - supportive of Open Access in general or SciHub in particular...

This is the text of a talk I gave at the Digital Pedagogy Institute last year at University of Toronto, Scarborough. There has been a lot of discussion around the question of library workers learning to code, and this was my attempt to set out my thoughts on the subject....

“We need new goals.” - Karen Coyle. Karen Coyle ended her SWIB 2015 talk, “Mistakes have been made” with a call to arms: “There’s so much more we can do for the user, but how can we develop a technology on top unless we have figured out what our goals...

I am the Discovery Systems Librarian at University of Alberta, prior to which I was the Emerging Technologies Librarian at the University of Ottawa. At both universities, I have been responsible for implementing library discovery systems and other technology services. I have have experience programming in C, PHP, JavaScript, HTML/CSS,...