This morning I asked one of my much younger colleagues, a librarian, if she knew what RSS is. I was delighted to find out that she does know, and that she uses an RSS thingie to subscribe to feeds via email.
I feel like she is one of the few. I have not talked to a single colleague who knew what Fediverse is. None have known what I mean when I say the “open web” or “small web.” They are all good, smart people, but they don’t know. When I have talked about the electronic spying done via Instagram and the like most have shrugged their shoulders and don’t seem to care. Many now are young enough that they’ve never known a different world. For them there has never been any privacy.
I went to grad school at U.T. Austin, in the School of Library and Information Science, in 1994/1995. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago its name was changed to the “iSchool”. When I look at the staff now, it is full of computer science people. The school is about to become just a department in the newly created School of Computing, where no doubt they are indulging in AI bullshit. This of course makes sense, as universities tend to chase the money, and the money is in computing, AI, and fornicating in the capitalist gangbang with the humanities strapped to the top of the metaphorical pool table.
I just want people – any people – someone – to stand up and say “I am an m-f’n librarian, an ancient and honorable profession, and we will outlast this bullshit!”
We need some indieweb/openweb/HTML-writing freaks in library schools across the country!
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