Going Down with Books

SUBHEAD: It is getting clearer as to how the complex and poisonous system we are riding will fail. 

By Juan Wilson on 4 March 2020 for Island Breath -
(https://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2020/03/going-down-with-books.html)


Image above: View from a full wall home library. It's a start. From (https://images.app.goo.gl/634TXyX3moM2Fcvt5).

Don't count on a last minute reprieve, a bailout, or escape from our current condition. The impending failure of the system we depend on is an on-going process has been accelerated now by a worldwide virus pandemic.

We have become blind to our total dependence on "The System" (or "The Grid") that we see no alternative reality.

As we have discovered the "System" requires massive inputs of resources ans energy and, as a result, huge outputs of waste and pollution.  It also requires that we have no scalable substitutions or alternatives to this dependency but turning to total collapse.

There is simply too many of us and too much our stuff and too little of everything else. Kicking and screaming we will be dragged to the consequences.

How blind are we? Is the best we can come up with for our next president is a contest between Trump and Biden?

These are two fossils who either have no clue of the existential challenge we face or are counting on fleeing with the billionaires to the Alps or some inaccessible tropical island.

Three elements of the perfect storm we are sailing into are:

• Loss of individual, family, or group knowledge of fending for one's own. 
• Uncontrolled debt inflation to finance industrialization and economic growth.
• Ravaging of the Earth for settlements, agland, resources, and places to toss garbage.

For the few who get through the breakdown of the delicate networks of interdependent systems providing us shelter, food, water, and energy it will be best you acquire skills in self-maintained off-grid living.

That would include skills growing food and procuring potable water; experience with building and maintaining the home; knowledge of medical care; and an idea of the principals of general science.

At some point in the not so distant future your iPhone will be about useful as a drink coaster for acquiring and storing these, instructions, and techniques in independent living.

Yes, fifty years ago young people were seriously considering getting "Off the Grid" and taking actions to get back to "The Land" and be self-sustainable. The mantra was from our guru Timothy Leary was "Tune In, Turn On and Drop Out!"

They almost made it but traded bluejeans for polyester bell-bottoms and LSD for cocaine.

It's a good idea to keep acid free paper books on the principals of all of these subjects.

Half a century ago this kind of information was widely published and identified in "The Whole Earth Catalog" and can still be found in  "Back to the Land" books and other publications from the Hippy-Trippy1970's.

Fortunately, not all has been forgotten of the knowledge of the earlier Urban Hippie diaspora.
This survival knowledge can still be obtained from bookstores and online.

Having a printed book library of basic techniques is a crucial resource, just as much as a toolshed of wood working, metal working and garden implements.

Vital information can be found in publications like the US Army Survival Field Manuals and tomes with specifics on the knowledge  required for basic survival, and sustained living independently of the sprawl of suburbia, office parks,  malls, hospitals and supermarkets.

Many libraries offers free older hardcover books of fiction and non fiction as they are rotated off their shelves. Many libraries are still getting rid of entire sets of hardcover encyclopedias.

I recommend that you start building a library of crucial information and reference books... but also collect classic reading material for entertainment. Much is available and there won't be any Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime.

Author's note:
One little book (3"x 5" x 3/4")  I would suggest everyone own is "Pocket Ref" by Thomas J. Glover by Sequoia Press. My version is the Third Edition (ISBN 978-1-885071-33-0). It is an encyclopedia of information showing everything from illustrations of a wide variety of rope knots and bends to a listing of all the phone area code numbers by state in North America to the friction loss in pipes of various materials, to the square, cubes, square roots, and cube root of all numbers from 1 to 1,000 to five place accuracy... plus much, much more. You'll be amazed what's in this tiny gem. I got mine at my local Ace Hardware Store.

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Review of 'Dangerous Years'

SUBHEAD: David W. Orr he demolishes the lies of climate crisis denial, and a  minimalist response to this emergency.

By Gene Marshall on 28 July 2017 in Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-07-28/dangerous-years-a-conversation-with-david-orr/)


Image above: Apocalyptic vision of buildings sinking into landscape. From original article.

[Resilience Editor's note: This piece was originally published in the Realistic Living newsletter. More information about the work of Realistic Living can be found on their website.

I started to write a brief review of David W. Orr’s 2016 book Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward. I found, however, that a longer “essay” was what I felt called to write.

Orr’s book is the best thing I have read on the overall social-change challenges of this century. I am ranking this book, along with the Bible, as something to read over and over for the rest of my life. I recommend that you buy a hard copy, and wear it out over the next decade.

The social content of this book is broad, deep, and on target, and Orr’s prose reads like poetry. His choice of words is beautiful, gripping, and often funny. I am going to quote some examples for you to taste.

First of all, he demolishes the lies of climate crisis denial, as well as the lies of minimalist response to this emergency:

Nearly everything on Earth behaves or works differently at higher temperatures. Ecologies collapse, forests burn, metals expand, concrete runways buckle, rivers dry up, cooling towers fail, and people curse, kill, and terrorize more easily. Climate deniers . . . are doomed to roughly the same status as, say, members of the Flat Earth Society. page 25

The solutions Orr develops begin with a shift in the human will or heart, then move on to a shift in the human mind, and end with real-world, down-and-dirty, power-politics, as well as the year-in-and-year-out local tasks of reconstruction. Here is a quote about the educational care of our social minds:

We would be embarrassed to graduate students who could neither read nor count.  We should be mortified, then, to graduate students who are ecologically illiterate—clueless about the basics of ecology, energetics, systems dynamics—the bedrock conditions for civilization and human life.  page 110

Orr prepares our awakening “hearts,” “wills,” and “minds” for our real-world politics with sentences like these:

And there will be no Deus ex machina, or cavalry, or invisible hand, or miracle technological breakthrough that will rescue us in the nick of time.  It will be up to us to change the odds and the outcomes on our own.  page 144

The next passage I will be reading aloud in my speeches. It is a gem that notices the spirit depth of our call to action:

If humanity is to have a better future it will be a more “empathic civilization,” one better balanced between our most competitive, hard-driving selves and our most harmonious, altruistic traits; one that embraces the yin-yang poles of behavior.  It must be a change sufficiently global to bridge the chasms of ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, and politics and deep enough to shift perceptions, behaviors, and values. The change must enable people to grow from a “having” orientation to a “being” orientation to the world.  It must deepen our appreciation, affiliation, and competence with the natural world, albeit a natural world undergoing accelerating changes.

I do not think, however, that we can simply will ourselves to that empathic new world.  The transition will result from social movements, activism, education, and political changes.  But there is always an X-factor, an inexplicable process of metanoia, a word meaning “penitence; a reorientation of one’s way of life; spiritual conversion.”  It is a change of inner sight.  “I once was blind, but now I see” as the former slave trader John Newton wrote in the hymn “Amazing Grace.”  Metanoia is liberation from bondage—physical, mental, emotional—a total change of perspective. pages 147-8

I view the core of the revolution for a next Christianity to be the creation of metanoia circles, small groupings of people in which our deepest humanness can be nurtured on a regular basis and our compassion and persistence prepared for our wide-world responsibilities.

Orr pictures the role of politics as a “long revolution.” We now need more than small teams and edge movements: we need large structures of action that year-in-and-year-out for decades do all the little and big things that need to be done for this huge transition.

Orr works through our core challenges with thorough analysis and inspiring description of practical options. He also continues to indicate the spirit courage and persistence it is going to take. He deals with sustainable democracy, ecological design, hotter cities, systemic thinking, a new agriculture, and much more.

Orr concludes his book with a description of the Oberlin Project—a multi-committee, local project of community-renewal organized by Orr and others, in Orr’s Oberlin, Ohio home town. He pictures the kind of things that the co-pastors of future Christian Resurgence Circles might envision for their quality action in their local parishes of responsibility. Here is a quote taken from that final chapter:

We need people who make charity and civility the norm.  We need more parks, farmers’ markets, bike trails, baseball teams, book groups, poetry readings, good coffee, conviviality, practical competence, and communities where the word “neighbor” is a verb, not a noun.  We need people who know and love this place and see it whole and see it for what it can be. page 227

Orr is also clear that we need people who lead the global level responses to the climate crisis, economic equity, democratization, campaign financing, racism, sexism, and more.

• Gene Marshall has a long history of participation in Christian renewal and interreligious dialogue. In 1952 he made a decision to leave a mathematics career and attend seminary at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas. In 1962 he joined a religious order of families, the Order Ecumenical, and became a teacher and lecturer of Spirit topics.
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Review of "The One Device"

SUBHEAD: A new book on the birth and manufacture of Apple's now ten year old iPhone. 

By Les Grossman on 19 June 2017 for the New York Times -
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/books/review/one-device-secret-history-iphone-brian-merchant.html)


Image above: Apple CEO Steve Jobs introducing the first iPhone at the Macworld Conference in January 2007. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note:  In regards to President Trump's "Muslim Ban" on Syrians entering America - it should be remembered that Steve Jobs was the son of Syrian immigrants.]

Before anybody outside Apple was aware of it, the project that would become the iPhone was referred to internally by the code name Purple. No one seems to remember exactly why; it may have been named after a toy purple kangaroo that belonged to one of the engineers.

Purple was so secret that even inside Apple hardly anybody knew about it. It was developed in a lab sealed tight behind badge readers and a metal door. Employees had to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements for their Non-Disclosure Agreements.

The lab became known as the Purple Dorm because people worked there round the clock, through weekends, holidays, vacations, honeymoons.

They ate there. They slept there. It smelled bad.

In fact, although it would eventually emerge as the gleaming quintessence of the collaboration between the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Apple’s design magus, Jony Ive, Purple could seem like a nightmare of overwork, insoluble technical tarballs and political infighting.

“You created a pressure cooker of a bunch of really smart people with an impossible deadline, an impossible mission, and then you hear that the future of the entire company is resting on it,”

Andy Grignon, one of the iPhone’s key engineers, has said. “It was just like this soup of misery.” The Purple Dorm will no doubt one day be the setting of a taut claustrophobic drama by some future Aaron Sorkin.

If it does, that drama may well be based on “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone,” a new book by Brian Merchant, an editor at Motherboard, the science and technology division of Vice.

Merchant does the important work of excavating and compiling large numbers of details and anecdotes about the development of the iPhone, many of them previously unrecorded. It’s important because along with being splash-, water- and dust-resistant, the iPhone is resistant to history.

The iPhone dwells among us, but it looks — it’s designed to look — as if it just moments ago entered our world from some higher, more ideal plane of existence. Just as its flat black face makes no compromise with the contours of the human skull, its gleaming, lickable surface offers no clues about where and when it was made, or by whom, or how.

You can’t even open it without a special proprietary screwdriver called a Pentalobe. This is an effect not just of the iPhone’s physical design but of the strange culture of reverence and secrecy that Apple has created around its products. The iPhone knows everything about us, but we know very little about it.

An example: multitouch, the technology that allows the iPhone’s touch-screen to track several fingertips at once — it’s why you can pinch to zoom. Where does it come from? Jobs always maintained that multitouch was invented at Apple. It wasn’t.

As Merchant demonstrates, it was actually invented several different times, including in the 1960s at England’s Royal Radar Establishment and in the 1970s at CERN. The specific multitouch technology that went into the iPhone was pioneered around the turn of the millennium by a man you’ve almost certainly never heard of named Wayne Westerman.

A brilliant engineering Ph.D. at the University of Delaware, Westerman worked on multitouch in part because he suffered from severe repetitive strain injury, which made conventional keyboard interfaces agony. Apple acquired Westerman’s company, FingerWorks, in 2005 — whereupon it and Westerman disappeared behind Apple’s Titanium Curtain.

The rest is, and isn’t, history. (Apple wouldn’t let Merchant interview Westerman, or any current Apple employee, for “The One Device.” Merchant did, with characteristic thoroughness, track down Westerman’s sister.)

The iPhone is designed for maximum efficiency and compactness. “The One Device” isn’t. The three chapters on the development of the iPhone are the heart of the book, but there’s some filler too.

It’s curiously unilluminating to read a metallurgical analysis of a pulverized iPhone, or to watch Merchant trudge around the globe on a kind of iCalvary in search of the raw materials Apple uses — through a Stygian Bolivian tin mine and a lithium mine in the Chilean desert and an e-waste dump in Nairobi where many iPhones end up.
This kind of hacker tourism can be done well — the gold standard is Neal Stephenson’s epic 1996 Wired article “Mother Earth Mother Board".

His one conspicuous success in this line is his visit to a Foxconn factory outside Shenzhen, China, where iPhones are manufactured.

Foxconn has a reputation for bad labor conditions, and visiting Westerners are generally closely chaperoned, but during a trip to the bathroom Merchant manages to ditch his minders and take a stroll through the vast, dystopian facility. “It is factories all the way down,” he writes, “a million consumer electronics being threaded together in identically drab monoliths.

You feel tiny among them, like a brief spit of organic matter between aircraft-carrier-size engines of industry.” It’s a palpable glimpse of the way the iPhone has, like a shiny glossy virus, physically reshaped the world to produce copies of itself.

Merchant also tells the origin stories of the technologies that converged into the iPhone: Gorilla Glass, motion sensors, lithium-ion batteries, ARM chips, wireless technology and so on.

He shows how many people’s work went into the creation of the iPhone, as a counterweight to “the myth of the lone inventor — the notion that after countless hours of toiling, one man can conjure up an invention that changes the course of history.”

The lone inventor starts showing his straw stuffing after a couple of paragraphs, but Merchant spends entire chapters chatting with people like Mitsuaki Oshima, the father of image stabilization.

Oshima undoubtedly has hidden depths, but as an interviewer Merchant is powerless to reveal them. (“Even with a shake of the camera, the image did not blur at all. It was too good to be true!” etc.)

Even worse is Merchant’s ghastly time-traveling habit. In order to talk about magnetometers we first have to sit still for a history lesson (“compasses can be traced back at least as far as the Han dynasty, around 206 B.C.”).

To get to assembly-line production, a concept with which most readers are already pretty familiar, we have to slog back to the Pleistocene Era (“Homo erectus, which emerged 1.7 million years ago, were the first species to widely adopt tools.…”).

And so on. The origin of this kind of writing can be traced back at least as far as the Undergraduate Era, to those leaden essays that begin, “Since the dawn of time, mankind has wondered.…”

But when he gets back to the actual iPhone’s creation, Merchant tells a far richer story than I — having covered Apple for years as a journalist — have seen before. If you’ve ever worked on a hopeless project that felt like it was going nowhere, you will draw spiritual strength from Merchant’s account of life in the Purple trenches.

It includes fascinating dead ends and might-have- beens (a prototype based on the original iPod’s click wheel, backlit in blue and orange); personal sacrifices (“The iPhone is the reason I’m divorced”).

There were obscure technical hurdles (the phone’s infrared proximity sensor, which turns the screen off when it’s near your head, wouldn’t recognize dark hair)

And there was the backstage tension at the launch (I was actually there, watching Jobs rehearse the famous iPhone keynote, but apparently missed everything); even a symbolic onstage assassination (when Jobs publicly demonstrated swiping to delete a contact, he used Apple vice president Tony Fadell’s name, foreshadowing Fadell’s imminent departure).

The iPhone masquerades as a thing not made by human hands. Merchant’s book makes visible that human labor, and in the process dispels some of the fog and reality distortion that surround the iPhone. “The One Device” isn’t definitive, but it’s a start.

What we need is the critical equivalent of a Pentalobe, a book that will crack open the meaning of the iPhone, to properly interrogate this digital symbiont, or parasite, that has introduced new kinds of both connection and disconnection into our lives.

If the iPhone was a revolution, who or what exactly was overthrown? One of the stories Merchant tells comes from Grignon, who was the first person to receive a call on the iPhone.

“Instead of being this awesome Alexander Graham Bell moment, it was just like, ‘Yeah,… go to voice mail,’” Grignon says. “I think it’s very apropos, given where we are now.”

THE ONE DEVICE
The Secret History of the iPhone
By Brian Merchant
Illustrated. 407 pp.
Little, Brown & Company. $28.

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The Day the Earth Changed

SUBHEAD: Club Orlov Press promotion of a new book on how collapse might really unravel the lives we now lead.

By Dimtry Orlov on 17 January 2017 for Club Orlov -
(http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-day-world-changes.html)


Image above: Detail of cover art for doomster collapse novel "Seat of Mars"by Jason Heppenstall and published by Club Orlov Press.  From original article.

We are conditioned to think of change as lots of small changes—a continuum—although history tends to be punctuated by large, unforeseen events that are only understood after the fact.

Last year's reconquest of Aleppo was one such incident. People are still assuming that Pax Americana is still an item; well, we'll just have to see. The US defense establishment may have just joined higher education, medicine and, of course, finance as just another brazen swindle.

Whenever something big happens, people become confused. Is a power cut just a temporary glitch in the grid, or is it the end of the grid?

Novels can very helpful in helping us think through scenarios, filling the void left by journalism, by journalists who are conditioned to think that there will always be the next news cycle—until there isn't one. Jason Heppenstall's The Seat of Mars, now available from Club Orlov Press, is one such novel. Here's an excerpt.

The crowds became tighter and the sounds of a Samba band swirled around them as they walked along with their plates of food. Shrill whistles pierced the air and the streets reverberated to the sounds of drumming and singing.

Huge figures appeared above the heads of the revellers and the crowd began to cheer. The monstrous tentacled face of a movie pirate appeared – twenty feet tall and with a mechanical arm that raised an oversized bottle of rum to its lips over and over. Cat squeezed her way through to the front of the crowd to get a closer look.

The effigy was being borne on a bamboo palanquin by a dozen schoolchildren, their teachers all wearing plastic pirate hats. Next came a giant tin man, followed by a Cyclops, followed by a red-skinned devil with smoke pouring out of his nostrils. She laughed. What kind of crazy place has Jack brought me to? she thought

The sound of the samba band receded and as the parade passed people poured back onto the roads, which had been blocked off from cars. Jack spotted Cat and came over to her. “Let’s go down to the seafront and get a drink,” he said.

They walked down a narrow street past a house that had been turned into an Egyptian folly, through a churchyard and down a hill that led to the sea. Strung out along the promenade was a funfair, the cries and whoops of teenagers rising above the drone of the diesel generators that powered the rides.

There was a tent selling beer and Jack went in and ordered drinks. He emerged a couple of minutes later holding two plastic glasses containing frothy Cornish beer. “Been ages since I had a pint of Doom,” he said, handing one of them to Cat, who eyed it suspiciously before taking a small sip. They sat on a low wall together and watched the revelers.

Mostly it was families, strolling along with buggies and candyfloss. Gaggles of teenagers charged about, unable to contain their restless energy. And behind this human scene of fun and frivolity lay the sea, blue and implacable, glinting in the sun.

There are a lot of drunks here,” stated Cat matter of factly. Jack looked around. It was true. They stood outside the beer tent, men with sun-reddened noses, softly bulging beer bellies and raucous laughs, gabbled loudly with one another.

Close by, a particularly large woman with faded shoulder tattoos was holding court with a group of them, causing them to bend over with laughter at something she said.

A muscular man with a shaved head and a dog tied to a piece of string staggered past holding a bottle of vodka, followed by his equally plastered girlfriend who was hurling insults at him. Cat sipped her drink and tried not to stare.

It was early evening when the tide came in and the crowds began to drift away. “I am hungry,” announced Cat, prodding Jack.

Jack knew a place. It was an old beachside tavern, redone as a bistro and with a star chef from London. He knew Cat would approve and he wasn’t wrong. They ate Newlyn crab and fresh mussels for starters, and beer battered pollock with monkfish tail and wild mushrooms for the main.

The waiter suggested a wine pairing for the crab, saying the lightness and acidity of a bottle of Domaine Chandon Brut would “elevate the crab’s sweetness and purify your palates.”

I could get used to this,” said Cat, thinking it would please Jack to hear it.

When it came to paying it was already getting late and candles had been lit at each table. The waiter took Jack’s credit card and wrote down the details, getting him to sign a receipt. The manager came out and spoke to the diners one table at a time. When he got to Cat and Jack’s he said “We will take payment when the system comes back online.”

The pair returned to the town centre, walking beside the sea as the light faded. Some beach revelers had set fire to a pile of debris and their techno music pulsed across the bay as sparks rose into the darkening sky.

In the center of the town once more the pair came across a troupe of well-lubricated Morris dancers who were leaping about, bashing their sticks together and waving handkerchiefs.

A heavily bearded man with a black top hat squeezed an accordion and a thin woman with grey hair played a tin whistle as the dancers performed their ancient fertility rite.

“I’ll just use the bathroom,” said Jack, disappearing into a nearby pub and leaving Cat by herself. She carried on watching the dancers as she waited, getting out her mobile and taking some pictures of them. She was about to tweet it with a suitably sarcastic message when she remembered. “Still no signal,” she said out loud to nobody but herself.

And neither will there be for a very long time,” interjected a man standing next to her. Cat looked up at him. He was a smooth-faced and overweight man in late middle age, and he appeared to be slightly unsteady on his feet.

What do you mean?” said Cat. “When will the signal come back?”

Problems upcountry is what I can tell you,” he replied. “Power’s out all over the place, they say. Motorways at a standstill, shops shut everywhere, no word from anyone as to what’s going on. For all we know it could be a nuclear war’s ’appened and they forgot to tell us.”

Cat stared at him in horror. “How do you know this? My boyfriend says the television and radio is not working.”

The man looked at her for a moment and took a swig of beer.

“Driver, I am. Been in haulage since ’84 and never seen anything as bad as this. Got a radio in the rig and I’s been on it ’alf the night speaking with our boys. Pumps stopped working, they say, and one of ’em’s got a load of dairy and he’s stuck on the M5. ’Parently there’s some sort of tyre depot fire near Bristol, he says, black smoke billowing all over the place and nobody to put it out.”

But why?” said Cat. “What’s happening?”

"Your guess is as good as mine. Seems there’s some sort of power outage, though nobody’s saying why. Army’s out on the streets of London, trying to stop what ’appened the last time, what with all them riots and all.” The man paused for thought for a second, as if something had just occurred to him. “You wouldn’t be down from London would you?”

At that moment Jack reappeared, another couple of pints in his hand. He smiled at Cat sheepishly. “I couldn’t just walk past the bar, could I?”

Cat ignored him. “Jack, we have to leave this place and get back home. We need to leave right away.”

They never “leave this place,” and they never “get back home.” And that's actually a good thing, because by then their home—London—is no longer a desirable destination. To find out more, please read the novel.

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Robots culling Libraries

SUBHEAD: Automated software culling endangered titles drive librarians to fake patrons checking out books.

By Cory Doctorow on 2 Janury 2016 for Boing Boing-
(http://boingboing.net/2017/01/02/automated-book-culling-softwar.html)


Image above: Mashup of photo of  PR2 Robot reads the Mythical Man-Month by Troy Straszheim, superimposed on photo of The Leeds Library in Yorkshire, England, by Michael D Beckwith. From original article.

Two employees at the East Lake County Library created a fictional patron called Chuck Finley -- entering fake driver's license and address details into the library system -- and then used the account to check out 2,361 books over nine months in 2016, in order to trick the system into believing that the books they loved were being circulated to the library's patrons, thus rescuing the books from automated purges of low-popularity titles.

Library branch supervisor George Dore was suspended for his role in the episode; he said that he was trying to game the algorithm because he knew that these books would come back into vogue and that his library would have to spend extra money re-purchasing them later. He said that other libraries were doing the same thing.

–– ADVERTISEMENT ––

This is datification at its worst: as Cennydd Bowles writes, the pretense that the data can tell you what to optimize as well as how to optimize it makes systems incoherent -- it's the big data version of "teaching to the test."

The library wants to be efficient at stocking books its patrons will enjoy, so it deploys software to measure popularity, and raises the outcomes of those measurements over the judgment of the skilled professionals who acquire and recommend books, who work with patrons every day.

Instead of being a tool, the data becomes a straightjacket: in order to get the system to admit the professional judgment of librarians, the librarians have to manufacture data to put their thumbs on its scales.

The point of the library becomes moving books by volume (which is only one of the several purposes of a library), and "the internal framing of users shifts. Employees start to see their users not as raison d’être but as subjects, as means to hit targets.

People become masses, and in the vacuum of values and vision, unethical design is the natural result. Anything that moves the needle is fair game: no one is willing to argue with data."

Software is not objective. The designers of the library's software made a subjective decision to take the measurements they are taking, and to respond to them in the way they are responding to them.

The librarians who'd use the software are treated as adversaries, not allies -- they are there to be controlled by the software, not informed by it. Just like the nurses who assign junior staffers to hit the spacebar at 10 second intervals to keep their terminals from re-prompting them for a password, the librarians who could not override the software by executive edict resorted to chicanery to get their jobs done.

That's the important takeaway here: these librarians didn't monkeywrench their software for personal gain. They did it because they wanted to make the system better, to teach it how to weight the circulation data to reflect the on-the-ground intelligence and historical perspective they had on their libraries, their collections and their patrons.

Science fiction has grappled with this exact problem in the past: Connie Willis's 20-year-old classic novella Bellwether features a patron (a social scientist who specializes in fads!) who goes to the library every week to check out titles that she knows to be out of vogue, but significant, to trick the library systems into retaining them.

The problem here isn't the collection of data: it's the blind adherence to data over human judgment, the use of data as a shackle rather than a tool.

As the article in the Orlando Sentinel hints, this is because "money wars" have made enemies out of the city and its librarians -- and as this episode highlights, there is no good way to proceed amidst that enmity.

Just as treating teachers as lazy welfare bums who must be measured with standardized tests has lowered educational standards and driven out the best teachers, so will any other system that treats employees as problems rather than solutions engender a continuous, spiraling arms race that will never solve the problem.

Dore and library assistant Scott Amey created “Chuck Finley” simply to save certain books from being ditched at the library, according to Dore and inspector’s general’s notes.

Records show that dozens of books were checked out and then checked back in again all in the same hour.

The fictional Chuck Finley was named after “a ballplayer,” according to the inspector’s notes. Chuck Finley is a retired major league baseball pitcher who played mostly for the California and Los Angeles Angels during a 17-year career.

Dore said in interviews with the inspector general’s office that it was happening elsewhere but didn’t provide specifics.

“He did know that other libraries have had ‘dummy’ patron cards and institutional cards,” according to the interview notes. “There was a lot of bad blood between the libraries because of money wars.” The inspector general’s report said creation of a fake library card “amounts to the creation of a false public record.”

See source here:
To save books, librarians create fake 'reader' to check out titles [Jason Ruiter/Orlando Sentinel]



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