December Days #16: How To Route Around Interference Given By Know-Nothings

[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]

Here at the turn of the month, I want to take a moment and acknowledge the passing of onyxlynx earlier this year. A stalwart and knowledgeable member of the Non-Statistics Division of the baseball fandom, onyxlynx offered many thoughts about cards to use and ideas to engage with when I was doing the Baseball Tarot December Days, and was always a person to talk the art and craft of the game without the belief that the numbers were the only thing that mattered. onyxlynx is sorely missed.

Today's entry is dedicated to Ajit Pai, CIPA, and people that believe they know what's best for everyone else. Ask not for whom the rude gesture rolls, it rolls for thee.

"The 'Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," said John Gilmore in 1993, according to TIME Magazine. The Streisand Effect is a documented phenomenon that points out the more you try to bury a thing, hide it, or censor it, the more attention you draw to it (and consequently, the more likely it is to be disseminated widely and swiftly). Net Neutrality enforces the idea that all traffic is equal, regardless of whether it is from a large media conglomerate with deep pockets or a personal site somewhere in the depths of the Internet. The legions of trolls in the world see doors, locks, and other measures of security as challenges to be overcome, and will delight in the distribution of the material behind those doors if it is embarrassing to the people who will be affected by it. Or the further harassment of those that they can attack and make to feel worse about themselves.

Libraries are about access to information. While we don't necessarily have the tools or the desire to find state secrets and then expose them to the population, we do want information to be available as much as possible. We will fight decisions to classify things, to censor them, to prevent them from being able to exist. As much as we might think the material in question is abhorrent, disgusting, low quality, or otherwise not going to exist in the canon of great works for generations to come, librarians are generally in favor of letting it exist. (And then hoping, in many cases, that the fad that has brought this into existence goes away equally as swiftly.) Net Neutrality going away severely impacts our ability to provide timely and accurate information to our customers and opens the doorway to accusations that we're being partisan, because if our service provider decides they're going to make Fox News fast, the Daily Beast slow, and always "mysteriously" time out the Democratic Party of [Your State], then it's going to look like we're the bad people that are preventing people from getting to what they want. And while we might be able to complain that someone is engaging in an unfair trade practice, it's going to take mass action to get a provider to change their mind about it. And if you're in a place that has a broadband monopoly, well, then, guess you're sunk. We shouldn't have to rely on the idea that companies won't screw us over because they need us as customers. Not only is it not true, anybody who's in a sort of monopoly or pseudomonopoly position is not going to take the threat of mass unsubscription seriously because there's nobody to go to. We outlawed company towns, and we theoretically prevent monopolistic behaviors with laws...but at this stage of the game, if someone wants to keep Net Neutrality repealed, they're going to have to really foster competition among ISPs, media providers, and those entities that NBC Universal, American Telephone and Telegraph, Verizon, and the like have been happily in chokehold control of for the last decade or so. Might be a good time for metropolitan governmental agencies to seriously consider using a policy like eminent domain to buy up the fiber in their area and make sure their networks do not discriminate in traffic. It might not be up to them, though, if the upstream or backbone providers decide that they're also not going to treat things neutrally. The network will reconfigure itself, though, in search of finding the fastest hops to get from source to destination. So it's entirely possible that those entities that pick and choose what they want to give speed to will find themselves without traffic because of it.

There's another way of avoiding censorship that librarians could get involved with - being TOR exit nodes. Considering that public libraries already have people doing a lot of Internet traffic of all sorts, being exit points where people can access information that might be forbidden in their area wouldn't make the traffic all that much more weird. The trickiest part of being an exit relay is the part where people will get after you for copyright violations "you" committed, try to snowball you with Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt that you're going to be assisting criminals and terorists accomplish their goals (as if our strong commitments to privacy and not tracking people weren't already doing that in one way or another), and the very real danger that the relay might not be configured correctly and so information is being leaked out of you to places and people it shouldn't be. At least until the decision today, having a neutral network mostly free of censorship made the United States an attractive destination after the hops to get the information you wanted.

That said, anyone who claims that the United States is free of censorship has failed to notice the way that we vigorously try to shield the eyes of anyone under eighteen about the fact that they have parts that can be used for their pleasure. They get exposed to the idea that people have weapons that can kill them easily, that there are mind-and-body-altering substances that can produce profound effects on them (and kill them if used improperly),that there are a multitude of ways that a person can be condemned as a politician and person for the crimes they commit against others, and that fame, avarice, and fortune are the the things that will be useful companions to them on their journey in life, but at the first mention of the acknowledgement of sexual activity, a red alert sounds, conversations are shut down, and resources are confiscated. I can see the wisdom in making sure that someone has the requisite wisdom before they see the full array of possible sexual activity that humans are capable of (and can thus make their own informed choices about what looks attractive to them), but when the advice you get about sex is "Don't, until you're married, only with your wife, and even then, only if you want children," that's not trusting your child to make mature and sensible decisions for themselves, as well as closing off an entire spectrum of possible queerness that might be really instrumental in helping your child come to their own happiness.

There's not an arbitrary age at which this wisdom arrives, and for most of our population, especially since their media tends toward saturation with sex and sexuality, curiosity about the things that are being referenced arrives long before the age in which the society deems it okay for people to be curious and start making their own decisions about sexuality. This would normally be the province of the library -- honest, accurate information about subjects someone is curious about -- or at least the school, but it's trivially easy to be pulled out of that part of your health class and so miss the opportunity to get it in school. No problem, right? The curious can collect their information from the library. And they're almost right in that regard. Any information that someone cares to collect from printed materials and books in the library, with or without checking them out, is freely available to those that want it, and are willing to risk being seen reading it. Not surprisingly, books that are about human maturation appear on the list of materials most challenged for removal from library shelves on a regular basis. Or books that make no bones about the fact they acknowledge not just sex, but sex all across the QUILTBAG acronym, because there's serious denial in many places that kids can know, with certainty, who they're interested in, how they want to identify and present themselves, and whether or not there are certain aspects that really turn them on about sex. And greater hangups when those ideas from the child are different than what the parents expect them to be.

When it comes to matters of the Internet, though, there's an extra wrnech that's been thrown into a kid's access abilities. If a library or school wants to take advantage of a discounted rate for Internet access and for the purchase of technology for their institution (the e-rate), the Children's Internet Protection Act, or CIPA (Not to be confused with COPPA, which is about privacy and the collection of information of those under 13 years of age) mandates that "technology prevention measures" be installed on a child's access to the Internet such that they are to be prevented from various categories of actions, including not seeing age-restricted material. The easiest and least effective way of meeting the requirement is to install content filters on the access of a child.

I loathe filters. They do not do what they are supposed to do, excepting in the most obvious of cases, and they are generally made and maintained by companies with an outlook on life that insists the only thing a child should be exposed to is whatever the most evangelical of WASPs believes is acceptable, and so it will block materials related to research on spiritual practices and groups they deem to be "hate groups" or "cults".

A website whose name contains something like "porn" or a search for the same will be picked up by the filter and blocked. If, however, one knows a tumblr address of an artist who likes to draw nudes or doujins, so long as the actual posts themselves don't contain any forbidden keywords, the filters will let that imagery right on through. It's one of the first things you learn about how to get around the filter - which keywords get blocked, which keywords go through. how to describe what you want without actually rousing the sentinel. Sure, you're going to have some false starts, but it's part of the learning experience, and so long as you don't poke at the filter too hard or too often, there won't be consequences for your actions. Once you know what the filter is looking for, it's not that difficult to avoid it for naughty purposes. The greater aggravation is when you are looking for something that is totally legitimate and the filter denies you the information you seek. For example, our work computers, when logged in with the work filter active (which is even more restrictive than the public computer filter, because it also wants to dissuade you from doing not-work on work time), it is nearly impossible to answer a question about what the latest computer or video games are coming out, and whether they have been reviewed positively. Or to show someone how to install, say, Steam, which would fall well within our remit of helping people learn new software. Because "game sites are blocked" at the filter level, this also means that new news about Pokemon, TCGs, and other things of interest to our users are blocked. Our filters actively prevent us from being able to do our jobs. (We can still access social media, though - they're not complete monsters about it.

Now, if we should desire, we can ask for unfiltered Internet access, but that's tied specifically to our own accounts, rather than the generic logins that are put on the public-facing computers because we don't want to have to wait five minutes at shift changes for the computers to come back up. If we ask, we have to solemnly swear that we're not going to do things with our access that would be in violation of CIPA, and file that paperwork with the library. Essentially, if we can't justify why we need it, then we don't get it, and the library knows which of us have unfiltered access at all times. The user-facing equivalent of this is that a child can ask us to unblock a site from the filter if they beleive it's been misfiled. Which requires a tremendous amount of courage to ask in the first place, because then it puts a name to the request and is essentially an assertion that we are wrong. (It's really the filtering company that's wrong, but we're the public face of that wrongness.) I know plenty of kids at that age who might be rightly concerned that if they put a name to their request, then we're going to inform people that have no fucking business knowing, whether intentionally or accidentally. It's not worth the risk, and so the filter fails to learn from the humans that it is wrong and needs to be better.

This is a federal law that impedes us deliberately by restricting our ability to do our jobs in exchange for being able to afford what he have to have to do them. Independently wealthy library systems can tell the law to go away and fund their own access at whatever rate they can negotiate for themselves, but there are very few independently wealthy libraries these days. It has much of the same thinking behind it as the people that believe the Hyde Amendment is a necessity, so that federal monies are not being spent on something that their personal beliefs consider to be monstrous. Many of these same people want to tout the family as the ultimate arbiter of what is appropriate for children when it comes to things they don't like, but they're more than happy to use the government to force the things they do like onto everyone, using whatever moral system they subscribe to and it's Higher Authority as the justification. A consistent position would be that the family should be allowed to determine when a child is wise enough to encounter these things, and how they want to steer that conversation. We stake the position that the individual themselves is the best person to know when they're ready for this kind of information and exploration, and that our jobs are to provide them with access to accurate information when they decide it's time to venture out into the topic. The best we can do is say that since the law only applies to those under seventeen, when someone turns seventeen, they are an adult in the eyes of our access and computer systems, and leave it up to them where they want to take this newfound power.

Humans are remarkably good at getting around blocks we put in their way, if their determination is sufficient to do so. There will always be the enterprising person that finds a way of getting around the ban on installing programs by putting their portable versions on a flash drive and running them off of there. Or, failing that, finding a cloud-based application they can use to accomplish the same task. They develop applications that hide the presence of superuser access from applications that are designed to fail to work if there's even the hint that a phone or tablet might be outside their control. They find books at the library that they don't bring home. They search for things elsewhere that they don't want appearing in browser histories. They find what they need to help them survive and thrive, whether by word of mouth or otherwise. They band together and demand change when they're powerful enough. They band together and do what they are going to do in secret if they're not. It's not so much that information wants to be free, it's that information has the same properties that water does -- it slips, it flows, it finds cracks, it gathers, it wears away at what impedes it, and if you try to hit it with a hammer, the only thing you're going to get is wet.

December Days #17: How To Be A Consumate Professional To Those You Work With

[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]

There's an entire genre of situation comedy that is all about how people in a dysfunctional workplace sabotage each other, harass each other, aggravate each other, and yet, somehow, the company manages to stay together and running (often because one of the characters is hypercompetent and can run the entire office by themselves without having to interact with the dead weight that's also along with her). While most of those comedies are set in corporate environments, there are enough of them that take place in the government or nonprofit worlds that this is essentially a trope of storytelling in fiction.

The library profession, though, seems to have a popular opinion that the people who work there are more interested in the materials, the books, and the stuff on the shelves than in the people who they interact with, if they're in a setting that has them interacting with a group of people, whether students or the public. They don't make many library-related situation comedies, and Unshelved is the only cartoon strip that I know of that takes place in and around a public library and the people that work there and is intended as a comedy strip. For some reason, librarianship has mostly been spared the office comedy as a trope, and library school likes to assert that because you are all people who have a shared mission and a desire to be there (because they pay is crap), then the group of people at your branch or in your system are going to get along better than most other office environments.

This is entirely false, if for no other reason than there's not actually anything that exempts the library world from any and all of the things that get in the way of liking the people you work with . The library world has its own share of bosses who carry petty grudges, who micromanage everything, who cultivate and use rumors as the basis of their decisions, and coworkers who do those things that get underneath your skin, or who belittle you, or who are otherwise the kinds of people you don't actually want as your compatriots. There are plenty of people that I work with that I would not want to hand out with after work, because our personalities clash pretty badly. There are some approaches that make me cringe every time they happen, because taking that attitude with someone is a near-guarantee that they're not actually going to listen to you and correct their behavior for the next time they come in. There are some who clearly resist working with you or taking suggestions because that would make more work for them, and they're not taking on any more work because of what they're already doing. (Which, incidentally, is solid boundary enforcement. The part that grates is often the way of the rejection, and that's on me for being annoyed at perceiving like someone's just shutting me out without taking the time to listen.) There are people who are so focused on making sure the rules spell out everything in detail because they don't want to have to use their judgment. There are people that leave things too vague for us and blithely tell us to use our judgment, when they haven't done the work of proving to us that if we use our judgment on the matter, we're not going to be hauled up before a discipline hearing.

Co-workers misgender other co-workers, even with their pronouns displayed in easily readable type on their name badges. People get harassed by their bosses and their coworkers about their identities and for sticking up for themselves. There's plenty of dysfunction present in the library, but if we're doing our job, the people who come into the library won't know a thing about it, because for as much as we do or don't like the people we work with, we don't let it show. Because the customers are a completely different class of things to deal with. And, to some degree, we have tools that we can use to correct behavior from users when they do things that aren't okay. You can't ban your coworker from the building for a few days because they said something flagrantly insensitive to you.

I deal with it in my own way, as others do. My way is mostly just to let the stuff bounce off me. I might be hurt by it, but I don't generally pursue things because it's not really worth the effort in the long run, and many of the things that are going to get to me are fundamental parts of the personalities of the people. And, y'know, co-worker, not supervisor, not boss. It doesn't happen enough to be a thing that gets in the way of my work or creates a bad environment for me, and there's probably some residual from the first bad boss about the rumore mill and how it was weaponized to hurt me. There's still traces of that here and there, when the manager who does good things about giving heads-up about things that could become problems before they do mentions a thing or two about stuff that could be interpreted badly. There are definitely people who I work with that have definite opinions about how I should do my work and manage my time, and many of them don't ask about anything they're going to make complaint about, so as to see if the thing they're looking at is something that is a problem or is actual work that might look like a problem.

A large amount of how to be a consumate professional to your co-workers is to take the same attitude with them that you might with users - more often than not, the information being accessed or the things being done have a rational purpose behind them, or there's missing context that might be obtainable with further inquiry. I believe people can be aggravating and annoying unintentionally, bu I don't want to start in malice what can be explained sufficiently by ignorance. It can be tough, though - a co-worker mentioned that one of my previous co-workers was doing their level best to get me in trouble with the management while they were here. I didn't recall any hostile interactions, but I also have to take into stock that this particular co-worker left under circumstances that were not the best, either. Do I believe the co-worker that's telling me about this, or my own experiences?

Maybe it makes me a naif, or easy to be taken advantage of, but it's hard for me to see someone as actively malicious unless they demonstrate that capacity in a way that's not mistakable. It's probably why my last relationship lasted for as long as it did - I wasn't willing to see what was present to everyone else, and then I was too scared to act on it for a while. I'm paying the price for that now, but things will get better.

the annoyance is sharp, but also short. And if it's easier for me to just keep to myself and not generally seek our opportunities to work with them, that's my fault for taking the accumulated evidence of all those annoyances and drawing a conclusion about how much I'd like to work with that person. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to interact with them. It just means that things will never get to the point where we're a friendly team. A well-oiled one that runs on professionalism, definitely, but not the friendly group that library school wanted to sell me on.

And that's okay. There are plenty of other things about the job that I love that more than make up for the fact that I work with some people who suck some of the joy of that out of me.