Random thought.

losttourist@social.chatty.monster

@davidnjoku Much as it's fun to beat down on the super-rich, there's a huge flaw in that claim.

In America and Britain at least, a huge number of both countries' libraries were originally started and funded by donations from Andrew Carnegie.

He was very much an equivalent to today's tech billionaires -- he was the wealthiest man in the world, literally richer than Rockefeller -- but at the end of his life he used his money for good rather than evil.

reggiehere@mastodon.social

@losttourist

True, but Carnegie was also something of an aberration in billionaire terms, and as an advocate for wealth and estate taxes, he was an outlier compared to the vast majority of billionaires at the time and a complete anathema to the tax-dodging billionaires of today.

@davidnjoku

reggiehere@mastodon.social

@davidnjoku

As a minor tangent, can you imagine what the internet would look like today if it had been designed by librarians wanting universal access to information rather than billionaires wanting to lock information behind a paywall?

reggiehere@mastodon.social

@Kalki_Rider

Not purist, Austrian free market capitalism maybe, but the sad reality is that the Austrian purists were suckered by avaricious rent seekers wanting to recreate the Gilded Age for the sake of their own prosperity.

@davidnjoku

reggiehere@mastodon.social

@Kalki_Rider

The post-war social democracies of Europe showed the lowest income inequality and the greatest social mobility of any Western region ever.

Admittedly those advances only existed because members of the various European Establishments were petrified of permanently losing their privileged status to a socialist state, but the principle stands.

@woozle @davidnjoku

reggiehere@mastodon.social

@Kalki_Rider

You think that doesn't happen in capitalist-rentier states?

@solitha @woozle @davidnjoku

reggiehere@mastodon.social

@Kalki_Rider

Neither do theocracies fwiw.

@solitha @woozle @davidnjoku

urlyman@mastodon.social

@ReggieHere it was designed that way wasn’t it? And then we poured the money on top. And starting in 1997 I became part of the problem

@davidnjoku

reggiehere@mastodon.social

@urlyman

Yes, so many of us were dragged into the IT industry at that time, regardless of what we may have previously studied or trained to do.

In the 1990s I remember reading an article, not dissimilar to the 'Will AI replace my job?' articles we have today, and 'Librarian' topped a list of professions that would no longer exist in the newly-computerised world.

@davidnjoku

urlyman@mastodon.social

@ReggieHere I was lured in by reading Wired articles even though I sensed back then that much of it was full of shit.

@davidnjoku

reggiehere@mastodon.social

@urlyman

I think most of us have a similar story of that time, and the bizarre part was that the same industry essentially recreated librarians in the 2000s to deal with the data silos that had been created in the 80s and 90s thanks to a lack of standards that would have otherwise been created by librarians.

Most of the IT roles starting with 'data' (data scientist, data wrangler, data manager, ...) have a physical analogue that pre-dates the IT industry by centuries.

@davidnjoku

gvs@rebelbase.site

@davidnjoku One, we don't have capitalism, we have neoliberalism (which needs big government). Two, though you are right that they wouldn't be funded with money taken through proxy violence, that doesn't mean the concept would be entirely dead. Capitalism doesn't exclude collective but voluntary initiatives, quite the contrary.

naturemc@mastodon.online

@solitha Look at the profile. Typical trolling, nearly no followers. @Kalki_Rider@mastodon.social @woozle @davidnjoku

fabio@zirk.us

@NatureMC @si_fuller @davidnjoku Yes, and eBook publishers are very angry about that is the point.

kurio@sunny.garden

@davidnjoku I think they would be invented anyway, but with a paywall...

Libraries as we know them in the 16th and 17th century were basically collections of books for the royal family, other wealthy, powerful people and the church. In the 18th there was a change towards public access (although that didn't mean everybody could enter, more like academics and students). Also some libraries started as paid book clubs, where you could access the collections if you paid a fee. True open libraries, at least in Europe, weren't conceived until past the French revolution and their declaration of rights, the rise in mandatory education and the idea of the democratization of access to information. (Excuse the info dump, I'm currently studying this XD)