This is the difference between having a sense of civic duty and community vs. not. The customer/business relationship is a poor substitute for the real thing, even when they try to foster the trappings of false "community."
there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying.
As it should be. There are institutions and cohorts of society trying to control access to information and opinion. This has been going on for quite some time. Noam Chomsky co-wrote a book about it in the 80's.
Libraries don't play nearly as much of a role in making sure that people can access information privately as they used to, they've been shoved out of the way, but they were far more principled guardians of it than tech companies
A librarian friend of mine noted that libraries had come into the business of de-facto social work.
A sense of civic duty?
These words sounds like they are from another period.
I think this is low in the mindshare of the population of many western countries. As a society we're mostly concerned with personal progress, social influence and monetisation.
In the words of Toby Keith - It's all about me, it's all about I, it's all about #1...
"“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. " Margaret Thatcher, 1987
It used to be that people would make a living then give something back in later life - either public service such as becoming a politician or joining one of the many societies like the Rotary Club that performs philanthropic acts.
Now politics is a career, philanthropy is the preserve of the astonishingly wealthy and everyone cares about nothing but self, making a buck and what they can get.
We lost a huge amount in that process. I sincerely hope we see it rise again sometime soon.
Nobody gets shadowbanned on HN for using the term neoliberalism[0].
I'm going to guess from the age of your account that you had a former account which was banned, and I would bet money that using the word "neoliberalism" was not the cause of it.
Neoliberalism is more of an academic, economic concept, it's not inherently anti-community, it just happens to be.
McDonald's and Starbucks don't want to wipe out civic cohesiveness etc., but it just might happen in some situations wherein everyone ends up working for 'large corps' instead of local businesses etc..
The opposite political ideology is called 'Communitarianism'. It does not have a current identifiable place in America politics.
The Christian Democrats (i.e. Angela Merkel in Germany) are of this philosophy, it's more of a culturally conservative kind of socialism, it puts families, communities, people and the wellbeing of said groups at the centre of political and economic objectives. It's done in a localist manner (in the same way the Catholic Church has given great local leeway to parishes etc.), i.e. local context matters more than top-down authorities etc..
Whether you buy into it or not, I suggest it's really sad that it's missing from the American dialogue because a lot of that is just what we need right now.
Inherently localist ideals have a hard fight against more globalist ones (neoliberalism, state socialism) for obvious reasons ... if there were more established Communitarian ideals, I'll bet Donald Trump would not be president right now.
The personal freedom to buy your social housing (without building more), have a personal pension with individual charges (with no attempt to ensure "enough" pension or group benefits), the privatisation of community and state assets and on and on. The removal of community power by constraining the rights and budgets of local government, centralising ever more then privatising or closing in the search of market solutions and smaller government. At a higher level it enabled the rise of globalisation.
There was absolutely need to re-balance in the seventies and constrain the unions. Effectively abolishing them was perhaps too much seeing today's gig economy and zero hours contracts. Another example of personal responsibility! After thirty years neoliberalism appears to be a means to restore the pre-war gilded age inequalities whilst completely forgetting why the post-war consensus (social security, society and Bretton Woods) came about.
Hopefully Communitarianism will get its chance soon.
Government sector Unions for example need to be reformed.
And FYI 'personal responsibility' existed long, long before neoliberalism as an ideal.
Communitarianism fundamentally requires 'personal responsibility' as one cannot 'help the community' until one has 'one's own house in order' so to speak. It goes even further: Communitarianism implies that 'personal responsibility' actually includes responsibility towards the community.
My grandparent owned a large lumberyard and employed people fairly, and in their retirement, spent several days a week visiting retirement homes, playing music, entertaining, 'doing stuff' in the community etc.. That's communitarianism.
But yes - neoliberalism does require the 'breakdown of the community' in the classical sense. They would be happy if we were replaced with docile, human drones that work, consume, and don't have opinions.
The Air Traffic union in the US seems, from this side of the Atlantic, much less clear cut. They seemed to be a middle class, white collar union. Reagan supported them during campaign, then after election crucified them.
Nonetheless both cases were the start of the neoliberal changes and the neutering of unions good, bad and indifferent.
I should have made myself clearer, I meant personal responsibility and choice as political catch phrase. It was the well worn 1980s selling point and justification of many of the changes and privatisations. Many of them in areas that were generally accepted as having a place in society, such as social housing etc. Which is not at all the same as real personal responsibility and civic duty.
My own parents did similar - neither of them talked about it much or felt any need to show anyone what good they were doing. They quietly did it as part of their beliefs, contributing to the community.
If you are criticising neoliberalism, depending on the conversation and thread, it's distinctly possible you may be downvoted to oblivion. That's a different, and disappointing, thing. :)
Cell phones happened and Facebook happened and everyone was like "Hell yeah this is awesome!". Later on, it became clear that all these companies were offering services were slurping up all kinds of information about us that given the choice we probably would say no to.
But when the cost of gaining back that privacy is giving up all these conveniences we've come to base our lives around, it becomes a pretty tough sacrifice to make.
Company: A community is an asset to a company.
"That's the whole point."
When I lived in a semi-rural area as a teenager the library was one of the few places me and my geeky friends could congregate for hours. They would let us reserve meeting rooms so we could play games together. If that library hadn't been there we would have had no third place.
The public libraries in Seattle are an amazing thing. My wife goes to "kids play time" with our ten month old son at a couple of different libraries every week. And we can also bring him in to the kids play area any time and take the kids area books on the honor system. It's a really great way to interact with other kids until we start using day care or he gets to preschool age. And it gives my wife a chance to meet other parents and get a break.
They also provide a free subscription to Lynda with your library card.
You can also get free tickets to a lot of local museums: https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/arts-and-culture/m...
I'm so damn glad King county does a good job maintaining the community libraries.
Are you sure that's true? I mean, my local library (like most, I'm sure) has a fully digital checkout log which keeps a pretty decent amount of state for active records.
A pretty reasonable architecture, given the size (small) of the system, would simply keep this data around for as long as needed. Sure, they might not be particularly diligent about backups and preservation for stale/useless data. And no, they probably aren't exploiting it to sell you ads.
But I'd bet anything that they aren't deliberately purging old data. They probably have it all sitting around somewhere, because frankly that's the obvious implementation choice. Designing systems to affirmatively delete stuff (and not break in crazy ways) is actually fairly hard, and libraries aren't given to elaborate engineering.
I'm willing to bet that the quote you got from the librarian was aspirational: she doesn't keep data, she cares about privacy, and she hopes and expects that the people who wrote the backend do too. My intuition says otherwise.
http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/guidelines/library-manag...
> For example, if the LMS offers the ability to save the checkout history, this should be an opt-in feature not turned on as a default.
The policy also recommends libraries minimize collection of data in general, use HTTPS whenever possible, and maintain a warrant canary.
See also: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/FAQ
I worked at a much larger library system in the same city and I know for the fact that most do need to keep such transactions for years, at least for tracking and billing patrons for books lost or never returned. After another few years, they sell their overdues to (debt) collection agencies for a few pennies on the dollar.
n.b. My company creates and manages library software.
Policies haven't gotten much worse. The ease of data aggregation has simply gotten much better.
So yes, I can imagine when it was normal to be able to know who borrowed a book last.
This was also common in Japan as it's important to the plot of the movie "Whispers of the Heart" (English title)
Which was fascinating: "Wow, no one has checked this out in a decade!"
I think younger people are just in general more relaxed about privacy.
Wasn't that more or less part of the plot of either SE7EN or Along Came a Spider (or maybe some other late-90s procedural thriller)? tl;dr they tracked down the suspect because the NSA or FBI was secretly keeping records of library checkouts.
Library's true customer is the reader and hence everything is designed to suite the reader. For Amazon the true customer (!) is the shareholder whose value needs to be maximised. That is why Amazon has astronomical market value where as libraries mostly depend on charity or taxpayer funding. There is a good reason why Amazon can offer you millions of products but a local library will have only thousands of books. There is a good reason why Netflix can afford to produce so much original content for your tastes but the libraries do not produce anything original. The factors you are citing are correlated.
There is no value judgement here, but I think we need to appreciate the good both kind of organisations are doing to the world and they are not comparable.
I have a friend who found a red envelope with some money in it in a book that he'd checked out of the library. He figured it belonged to whoever had checked the book out earlier, so he went into the branch and mentioned it. They said that they could find out the last person to read the book, but no more than that, because by and large, librarians (at least in that system) deliberately avoided keeping long term records of what people are reading, to safeguard privacy rights.
Can you imagine Netflix or Amazon, Google or Facebook behaving this way? Could be that I'm from an older generation, but there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying. Add in cell phone tracking devices that show where we are, map apps that show where we go at what time and what routes we take, commence sites that show what we buy and consider buying. You know for a while there it was impossible to remove a film from your recently watched list on Netflix? (the tech advice was to just select a bunch of stuff randomly and bury it deep if you didn't want it sitting there for everyone else to see the next day).
Libraries don't play nearly as much of a role in making sure that people can access information privately as they used to, they've been shoved out of the way, but they were far more principled guardians of it than tech companies (I mean, night and day, they were guardians, tech companies are rapacious violators of this principle).