A love letter to libraries amid tech utopianism

putting the T in STEM

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!

A huge thanks to the SmallStack team for kickstarting this project! 💜

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A young Ev is on the second floor of a two-story light brick building with large windows on a tired yet bustling main street in an exurb 45 minutes south of Cleveland, Ohio. Construction on the upgraded public library finished the year before, and she enjoys the sleek feel of the new upstairs children’s section. She looks intently at the rows of books, seeking one that would occupy her mind for the day. It is easy to get lost among the stacks with each book discretely occupying its space on the shelf - a particular spot dedicated to the product of a particular author’s work. Ev takes even more joy in the colorful and unique cover art. The images dance in her head as she peruses her options. Each book can be admired in its own time.

Finding one that appeals to her sense of aesthetics, she grabs it and heads into the reading room with the other kids in the summer program. After a few chapters, she realizes she forgot about lunch. Whoops! She makes her way downstairs - past the circulation desk and into the library’s administrative offices. The staff working at their desks smile warmly and ask what she is reading today. They are genuinely interested. Ev shyly answers as she makes her way to the corner office where the director works. The door is open, so she walks in and inquires: “Can I have my sandwich?”

Her dad looks up from his computer and smiles. He is surrounded by artful scribbles and clay magnets Ev and her brother made the previous year. “Of course,” Dad says, “and then, we can grab a donut from the shop down the street.”

A few days later, Ev finds herself in a different kind of library - still brick but 12 stories of it. She and her brother are in her mom’s small office in the library of a large public university. Mom is a lecturer in the School of Information. She worked from home before it was cool, so her office is more bare than Dad’s. But, the décor is tasteful as the shelves are adorned with framed family photos. Mom has meetings all day and brought the kids along rather than trying to find a babysitter. They try to pass the time while they wait for her to return.

And today, Ev and her brother are abuzz because they would soon travel as a family to the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference where both Mom and Dad have business to attend to. The family attends every year and uses the opportunity to sight-see in the host city. But, their vacation will also include wandering down rows of vendors in the convention hall where publishers offer free, unedited copies of new books. Despite their youth, Ev and her brother never feel out of place. Each year, they get free books and their parents’ friends in the industry fondly recall how they held the siblings as babies. The excitement between the two is palpable.

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To say I grew up in libraries is in understatement. They were the water my family swam in. I still feel a certain comfort when I walk into a library.¹ Libraries - especially public libraries - are a unique institution. They are open to anyone and don’t require you to spend money while you are there. Instead, they make knowledge, resources, and technology freely available to the community. At a public library, you can find that new novel by your favorite author, scholarly work on a topic of your choice, or a cute picture book that your toddler will love. The litany of offerings is only growing: Internet, tools, museum passes, etc. Some systems are even eliminating late fees because they are a harmful economic burden. Libraries are an oasis in the desert of capitalism.

Of course, libraries are not the only model of accessible knowledge, and it is worth contrasting that model with an emerging one: artificial intelligence. AI has a lot problems, particularly around human creativity, journalism, fossil fuels, and the racism that they are imbued with. I’d like to approach it from a different angle - the promise of “democratized knowledge” which guarantees new insights and art if we simply pool our expertise and productive outputs in AI. I developed these ideas while reading Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget - a prescient (yet imperfect) manifesto on how tech design reduces humanity to our most base forms.

The promise of knowledge democratization requires “experts” (defined ambiguously) to turn over their scholarly work to train a super powerful AI. After this act of submission, the AI will make connections faster and more accurately than any human. With this new knowledge, humanity can begin to solve extant social problems and enjoy the most sublime collection of art (created by AI). Admittedly, this sounds enticing. But, can AI deliver? I doubt it.

For example, imagine a world where Substack wants to make a SuperStack (the opposite of SmallStack) so it trains an AI to write posts using the combined data of every existing post on the platform. The result would be ;;; not so super. Posts would be generic and artificial - a snore. The AI would balance everything wholesome and productive with everything vile and gross. Take a topic like queer issues (but this applies to every other topic where people disagree). How would the AI negotiate the work of queer people with the work of those that hate us? That’s a decision made by the AI designers, and they will probably choose something similar to what Microsoft Copilot (powered by DALL·E 3) does - just ignore it. To show how, I asked Copilot to “make an image of a queer person,” and it changed the topic as if I activated its sense of shame:

So, most mentions to “queer people” will be erased from SuperStack. Maybe the rainbows will survive, but that's it. Do rainbows sum up queer experiences? Of course not! The differences between us add texture to art, culture, and scholarship. It’s why both Oscar Wilde and Audre Lorde are both considered great writers despite their styles and subjects being so divergent. But to AI, these differences are only surface-level. The algorithm dissolves the boundaries between them as it consumes training material.

In contrast, a library assigns entries a specific number and a specific location. Books can easily found and admired on their own, as I did on those summer days wandering around the library where my dad worked. When we read books, they intersect with our lived experiences and reorient us in a personalized way. We manage discord between texts according to our values, and some people even use the discord to power their own great art. If all else fails, the librarians are there to help.

An AI can’t do that. It can’t tell you how it knows anything. Just try asking an AI where it found a specific piece of information. It has no idea! Even the algorithm’s designers can’t access an AI’s reasoning. To them, AI is a “black box.” That’s not accessible or “democratized” knowledge.

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On Monday, I once again found myself on the second floor of a building and surrounded by shelves of books. My end-of-summer project for Stanford’s queer community center was to catalog the space’s library. I designated a number to each book and logged the work’s information in a spreadsheet to make access easier with the new school year starting. 565 books on queer themes available to the community - a valuable resource with limitless potential.

I glimpsed the potential earlier in the summer when I organized an ice cream social at the center. It was a hit, and I ended up chatting with queer and trans high schoolers who were taking classes as part of a summer program. Many were from states run by anti-trans politicians eager to ban books². These youth are carrying heavy burdens just trying to survive, even if that meant staying in the closet or clandestinely seeking hormones despite family members’ wishes. But, their eyes lit up as they scanned the center’s shelves and the seemingly endless options of reading material. Some even grabbed books and sat down to read while they ate ice cream.

Their zeal reminded me of myself only a few years ago as I explored my queerness for the first time. Books helped free my mind from the constraints and shame placed on it years ago. I’ll never forget the moment in My New Gender Workbook when Kate Bornstein warns that continuing to read would likely transgress gender boundaries. I stopped mid-paragraph as shock waves rippled through my psyche. I had no intention of putting the book down and could no longer deny my own trans identity. For the first time, I was certain about my impending transition. I kept reading and then sought more books.

Those books gave direction to my growth as I formed my identity as a trans woman. The process led me to that moment in the center, bearing witness to courageous youth on their own journeys. As they read and devoured ice cream, I sat in awe of what they will create.

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Want to see more posts from this Seed Pod or join in on the fun? Head over to our thread to learn more!

1. With the exception of one specific branch in San Jose, but that’s a different story.

2. Speaking of book bans, ALA keeps track of them!