[ROCK MUSIC] DAVID PARSONS (clip): You know, I was so much utopic thinking about the internet in the early years of Steve Jobs. All those guys were like, this is going to revolutionize the world. They came from the '60s. They were guys that did acid. The iPhone is literally a creation of a guy that was on acid and saw, like what if we all had devices that we could touch and move through information. Now we're living in that world. We're living in the dream of like the weird '60s radical counterculture entrepreneurs. And what has it brought to us? It's brought us an alienated world, a world that's got all the same problems that we used to have. We can be done with the idea that this was a utopic technology. I think that the '90s was before the internet really, and the whole discourse was about alienation entirely, right. I mean, the internet seems like it accelerates that impulse. I'm imprisoned to a machine that only increases my alienation. [ROCK MUSIC] CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the virtual studio with Ameet Doshi, Fred Rascoe, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Amanda Pellerin. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it. AMEET DOSHI: That's right, Charlie. Today's show is called "Nostalgia and Late Capitalism." Today the whole Lost in the Stacks show team is discussing these two concepts. AMANDA PELLERIN: I have some questions about today's episode. AMEET DOSHI: All right. We're going to try to answer them. Go for it. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Who came up with a theme of this episode? Why did we have to read PhD level cultural criticism about postmodernism before we recorded the panel segments? And what kind of contortionist moves are we going to do to connect this with information science and archival practice? FRED RASCOE: I have a question too. What does late capitalism really mean? WENDY HAGENMAIER: I have answers to all of those questions. AMEET DOSHI: I knew it. I'm glad Wendy's here. WENDY HAGENMAIER: This episode is Charlie's way of unpacking some ideas about libraries and archives in the age of the internet that he read in the book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative by the PhD holding author Mark Fisher. And late capitalism is a catch-all term these days for the general confusion and absurdity of modern life and free market nations. CHARLIE BENNETT: Nailed it. AMEET DOSHI: Our songs today are about commodities, the systems of information production and profit, and the search for authenticity. When we talk about nostalgia, we think of the good old days. But were the good old days really that good? And how much of our future is limited by the way we, in the present, look back to our past? It's a complicated question. So let's start with a song about looking back to a complicated history with mixed feelings of admiration and regret. This is Victoria by The Kinks, right here on Lost in the Stacks. Victoria. [THE KINKS, "VICTORIA"] CHARLIE BENNETT: This is Lost in the Stacks and today's episode is called "Nostalgia and Late Capitalism." In this segment, I'm talking to the archivists of the show, Wendy and Amanda. Wendy Hagenmaier is the digital collections archivist at the Georgia Tech Library, leading the development of workflows for preserving and delivering born digital special collections and managing the library's retro tech initiative. Amanda Pellerin is the access archivist at the Georgia Tech Library, teaching collection based instruction sessions, providing access to records of enduring value, and promoting the legacy of George Tech. They are troublemakers of the best kind, and I'm delighted to pick their brains about nostalgia and the archives. Let me give you all some definitions, like we're starting some kind of undergraduate paper. Nostalgia in the individual is affection or longing for the past. Nostalgia as a commodity is goods or services designed to evoke nostalgic longing or confirm nostalgic affection for the past. My go-to example these days is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, nostalgia as a commodity. So I put to you, archivists of Lost in the Stacks, does the archives present the past in some way that a person can simply consume? Or is it just raw material that requires the work of the archivist or someone outside the archives to create an idea of the past? WENDY HAGENMAIER: The first thing that comes to mind is I hope that it gets to the point where it can be discovered. Speaking of consumption, I feel like we spend so much time just trying to preserve stuff. Ideally, then it's made accessible, of course. But the concept of the backlog and like hopefully it's accessed, even if that's consumption. I would like to think that it's raw material, but I don't think it's raw. I mean, that certainly depends on the institution. But if you think of the archives as institutions originated around the French Revolution really focus on property records. And so there's always been this connection to consumption and power, monetary power and landed power. Go for it, Amanda. AMANDA PELLERIN: So your questions are asked in yes or no. So does the archives present the past in a consumable way? I would say yes. Is it raw material for narratives of the past? I would also say yes. I heard you, in your framing of the questions, insert an 'or.' So I would say, why not and both? Of course, things that come to the archives are meant to be consumed in some way. Otherwise, I have a hard time understanding why I would spend my time and effort, and an employer would spend their time and effort in making those things preserved. So for those questions, I feel like my answer is yes to both. I was at the Society of American Archivists conference, I think out in Portland in 2016. And you know how conferences always have these little badges that you can add, or stickers you can add to your badges. And one of them on the table said, archivists against racist nostalgia. And I grabbed it, because like, I'm against racist nostalgia. But it was also kind of, I had this moment of like, what does that mean? What is racist nostalgia? To me, nostalgia means more somebody looking for something that's comforting. And we're comforted by the things that we know. Yes, people will come to the archives to consume nostalgic things or to reinforce their need for nostalgia, their desire to feel comfortable and in a familiar place. CHARLIE BENNETT: That makes me wonder, are there people who just come to the archives for pleasure, for that sort of remembering pleasure? WENDY HAGENMAIER: It really feels like it depends on the nature of the archives. And there's certainly that sort of special collections, artifacts, or people come to see a rare book and feel its power and feel comforted by it maybe, or feel transported by it. One thing I've noticed a lot with our retro lab, which contains older computers and things people recognize from when they were younger, is there's so much nostalgia going on. And maybe it has a dark side, but I feel like what I experience and what I witness is more like empathy. They're feeling themselves. They're returning to their earlier self. There's an empathy with a previous generation. Like there's some emotional response that feels more like compassion than like nostalgia. Maybe that's just me wearing rosy colored glasses, but I'm hopeful about that very visceral emotional response to those kind of technological artifacts, which can also be really alienating, as we heard in the cold open. CHARLIE BENNETT: So if I can connect that, Amanda, to your sort of questioning, what is racist nostalgia, can you imagine that racist or damaging nostalgia is one kind of that feeling that Wendy is talking about? AMANDA PELLERIN: I think the harmfulness-- I mean, racist nostalgia, for me, sitting with that for years, it makes sense to me in that how my comfort, my nostalgia may be someone else's horror or traumatic time period. And that nostalgia runs the risk of diluting the past into this very undynamic place that we go to be like, oh, do you remember when it was this way, and that was better or good for me, or whatever. But then it doesn't take into account everyone else's experience in that past. The archives, just like any other cultural institution, will have people coming, visitors, consumers, users, researchers, whatever word you want to use, with their own intention and their own background, their own baggage that will necessarily dictate what they get out of their experience in the archives. CHARLIE BENNETT: I am speaking with Wendy Hagenmaier and Amanda Pellerin, Georgia Tech archivists and Lost in the Stacks hosts, about nostalgia and the archives. I'll be back with more about nostalgia and late capitalism after a music set. WENDY HAGENMAIER: File this set under HD 9999.i492r53. Lots of nines. [PIANO MUSIC] FRED RASCOE: You just heard Everything's Ruined by Faith No More. That was a song about the danger of valuing information as a commodity. CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's Lost in the Stacks is called "Nostalgia and Late Capitalism." In a way, it's a postscript to our series years ago called Ameet versus Nyan Cat, in which we discussed internet culture. The problems of information and communication in the post-modern age seem deeper than the anarchy and pastiche of Tumblr and Twitter. So I'm talking to my fellow Lost in the Stacks hosts to clarify my thoughts and prepare myself for a much deeper dive. In this segment, it's Marlee and Fred. Marlee Givens is the librarian for the schools of modern languages, psychology, and literature, media and communication, and she is the library learning consultant at the Georgia Tech Library, where she supports faculty and student teaching, learning and scholarship, provides classroom and online instruction, and facilitates learning for library employees. Fred Rascoe is the librarian for the School of Aerospace Engineering and for graduate studies and the scholarly communications librarian at the Georgia Tech Library, where he supports user engagement for curating digital collections of locally created scholarly content and provides support and service for the scholarly communication needs of faculty, students, and researchers. Let me explain the landscape of this segment. The first Carnegie Library in America opened in 1886 and Melville Dewey founded the first library school in 1887. So that's right in the middle of the rapidly growing American economy post-Civil War, when it was very clear that there were capitalists who owned the materials and machinery of industry and there were workers who needed to sell their labor to those capitalists to make a living. The Gilded Age, robber barons, industry, the American dream, it's all in there. Andrew Carnegie was one of the richest men in the world, building a steel empire. And he was funding public libraries at the same time that he was breaking strikes with the violence, the Pinkertons. He said, in a letter, that he was giving libraries and culture to the workers instead of raising their wages, which leads me to this question. Is the romanticism and vocational awe of libraries and librarians inflicted by the ruling class onto the working class? Have we been living a kind of constructed, idealized librarian vision that actually came from a paternalistic drive by those in power to keep the workers somehow satiated? MARLEE GIVENS: I don't know if you remember a long time ago, sitting in my and Fred's office, and I had just read an article-- and of course, I'm not going to be able to find it while we're here-- on the ideals of the Victorians and how we're really just sort of repeating that Victorian age of someone in the upper class knows what's best and that definition of what's best changes over time. But people can signal that they're doing the right thing because they are doing what the prevailing right thing to do is, because someone has established that for the culture. Libraries were part of the culture like everyone else. And so why are we different? FRED RASCOE: We do, I think, as librarians have this idealized version of ourselves that we are presenting collections, information, data that can be used to generate knowledge for anyone, for the entire community. It kind of reminds me of that show that we did a couple of years ago with our colleague who's now at Emory, Sonya Slutskaya, she talked about the libraries in Leninist Soviet Russia. And everything there was distilled, everything in the catalog, everything in the collections, the organization of the information, it was all distilled through a Leninism viewpoint. And there's just no escaping that whatever system you were in, we exist in a capitalist system and we are going to reflect the fact that there are elites in capitalism that control a lot of the resources and can control those resources to fund things like higher education, like libraries, other cultural resources like that. CHARLIE BENNETT: So are we a public service? Are we a sort of dodge by a paternalistic culture? Or are we both? It seems like we're saying, or the culture is saying, lifelong learning, betterment, make yourself a better person. Here's something quote-unquote free for you to use in lieu of better wages. FRED RASCOE: It's both. We have to acknowledge that we exist within a system. But we, as librarians participating in the system, we have to consciously act to the best of our professional ability to be a public good, whether it's public libraries, academic libraries, any kind of library that serves the public community. MARLEE GIVENS: I was in a class earlier this week, and the professor was talking about a newspaper that she needed to reference in some of her research. And she had gotten some free month access to this newspaper. And it was not something that the library subscribed to. And so she got so much out of it, she decided to find out how much it would cost for the library to subscribe to it, to provide it to campus. And I know that I can't give a monetary figure on this show. I will just say that it flabbergasted the students when she gave the figure. If libraries weren't taking the burden on of providing access to some of these things that would be out of reach for regular people, then all of the knowledge would be held in the hands of the elites. And I constantly think that we're in danger of that happening. FRED RASCOE: Libraries, for the most part, they're nonprofit. But that just means they are nonprofit to us. We buy the things and make them accessible to our community. But we buy things. It's profit to somebody. Because we exist in that system, goods are traded and data and information is considered a commodified good. Now whether that's a positive development or a negative development, that's definitely debatable. But that is currently our system. My hope is that libraries can move to a point beyond having to demonstrate a marketing impact or a kind of value impact in order to be funded, in order to get resources. We, as libraries often have to quote-unquote justify ourselves. When funds are cut from a university because of a pandemic, we have to justify why we shouldn't get cut. And how do we do that? Well, we have to demonstrate impact, impact on the community. It's not enough just to be something that exists. It's not enough just to be something that's a public good. We have to demonstrate an impact. And I'm starting to think, maybe it's just enough that libraries exist. MARLEE GIVENS: If we're doing that, we have to be able to say that we are responding to and answering every aspect of the community that we serve. And I don't know that we're doing that. I think we have a long history of not doing that. I think we have a long history of deciding what is good and providing that. But it is encouraging to listen to people in our profession who are trying to find a different way and trying to make changes in how we do it so that we can better include and provide what everyone in our community needs. CHARLIE BENNETT: I've been talking with Marlee Givens and Fred Rascoe, librarians at the Georgia Tech Library, my colleagues and my Lost in the Stacks co-hosts. We'll be back, and I'll explain all of this to Ameet on the left side of the hour. [ROCK MUSIC] TOM CRAMER: This is Tom Cramer, the chief technology strategist at the Stanford University Library, and you are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. SUBJECT 3: I think you already know what this song is about. CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's Lost in the Stacks is called "Nostalgia and Late Capitalism." Here's the quote that sparked this whole shambling adventure, from Mark Fisher's book, Capitalist Realism, published in 2008 by Repeater Books. Fisher is writing about T.S Eliot's essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." It was in this essay that Eliot, in anticipation of Harold Bloom, described the reciprocal relationship between the canonical and the new. The new defines itself in response to what is already established. At the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliot's claim was that exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all. There's some of that contortionism that Amanda was talking about. File this set under z21.k6. [ROCK MUSIC] AMANDA PELLERIN: You just heard Rich Man's Dreams by the Neo Boys and Surveyor by Shellac, songs about the way the elite create the systems that benefit themselves, right here on Lost in the Stacks. CHARLIE BENNETT: Welcome back to Lost In the Stacks. Today's episode is called "Nostalgia and Late Capitalism." And for my sins, I am now going to explain some things I learned to Ameet Doshi, the director of service experience and program design at the Georgia Tech Library. Things that Ameet is interested in include bibliometrics, assessing the user experience, sustainability and library design, and designing library and learning spaces. He's also served since 2016 on the ALA Center for the Future of Libraries advisory board. This is a guy who thinks about libraries and what they mean and what they might do. He is my colleague and my co-host. Ameet, are you ready for what I've learned? AMEET DOSHI: I think so. Thanks for the invitation. CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, you're welcome. You were right next to me, so it seemed like the right thing to do. OK, I took some notes while I was sort of processing the two sets of interviews. The people who are listening to the show have heard them. You're coming into this cold. So what I'd like to do is present a few things to you and get your first reactions, and then we'll bring this thing to a close. You ready? AMEET DOSHI: I'm ready, yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK. Nothing in the process of libraries or archives has inherent vice or worth. The archivists and the librarians are the ones who are directing or driving the collection and access. So the mere fact of an archives collecting records or a library maintaining a collection doesn't actually have moral weight. The end result of these two things, their effect on culture, is essentially outwardly directed, right. It comes from the top down. It has to, because the top is where decisions are made. Certainly some individuals might be doing stuff, but from the top down, the direction that a library or archives takes is defined by people and their interests and their needs. It could be a public service. It could be a consumer good. Netflix, for instance is a for profit library. It could even be propaganda. Now, if I think about that and I imagine that the purpose of the library can be driven by the user or consumer, now we're getting a little bit into a kind of commodity theory of information, if we find the library or archives in the feedback loop of what people want, what the consumer wants, we can fall into what Mark Fisher suggests might be damaging to cultural progress or productivity. For instance, he says, "the interpassive simulation of participation in postmodern media, the network narcissism of Myspace and Facebook has, in the main, generated content that is repetitive, parasitic, and conformist. The reason that focus groups and capitalist feedback systems fail, even when they generate commodities that are immensely popular, is that people do not know what they want. This is not only because people's desire is already present, but concealed from them, rather the most powerful forms of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the weird, despite the fact that nostalgia is a force for satisfaction and comfort." You know how you hate the internet, Ameet? AMEET DOSHI: Yeah, even more now. CHARLIE BENNETT: Turns out that the internet might be the platform for weird, strange, improving cultural products, while simultaneously providing the tools for pastiche, recycled ideas and a uniform delivery of them. Can we resist the nostalgic urge enough to avoid the kind of creation of a consumer good from information, while also still presenting what people are interested in, while also making sure that the ruling class does not inform the library too much? That's what I've got. What do you think? AMEET DOSHI: Wow, my head's spinning a little bit, Charlie. But I think you're right. So I'll speak personally. During the current COVID-19 crisis, I've made an intentional effort to minimize my consumption of media and information. I guess you could call it slow news, just like slow food. And that requires, I find myself going to digital libraries, like public libraries that offer digital services, because it seems to strike the right balance between the strange, the kind of under the radar materials, and uplifting edifying classics. Luxuriating in the warm glow of the Atlanta Fulton Public Library's electronic collection and exploring that collection, it's certainly not doomscrolling. CHARLIE BENNETT: You might be indulging a little bit in some form of nostalgia. You're going back to the classics. You're using sort of older things. You're trying to avoid the new fangled way that people are consuming news. Does that feel like safety or protection, or does it feel like something else? AMEET DOSHI: It feels like safety and protection. I'll answer directly. And I'll give you another personal anecdote from just last night. Last night, my son, who's a borderline obsessive Braves fan, wanting to watch the Braves take on the Yankees in a doubleheader, which is just too much baseball for anyone in our family. So we compromised and we pulled out a Scrabble board. And we found a radio stream from South Georgia that was playing the play-by-play of the Braves and the Yankees. And talk about nostalgia, it took me back, just quietly working on a puzzle or playing a board game and listening to an announcer, who was probably in his 60s or 70s, calling balls and strikes. And what was really wonderful, this moment where, because there's no crowds, you can hear the umpire call strikes at a Major League Baseball game, which is kind of rare. Usually the crowd noise is so great that you can't hear those little nuances of the game. You can hear the crack of the bat, which was very cool. So yeah, full on nostalgia, but in the service of self-protection and self-care during this endogenous shock. CHARLIE BENNETT: Are you able to use that, that feeling and that satisfaction, to in some way guide your sense of how to design libraries? Or does the design process resist that sort of feeling you just described? AMEET DOSHI: If you're working on a large library project like we did, we typically work with consultancies who have their way of doing things. But their way of doing things is firmly embedded in late capitalist approaches over the last 20, 30 years that are pretty rigid. Neoliberal concepts like project management. I think the term that comes to mind is McDonaldization. It does feel like libraries and library design has some element of that. So shout out to the people in our library who are able to resist that. Because that's how we ended up with some really unique aspects of our new facility, but also just our new concept of a library, things like the retroTECH lab. My one regret, and perhaps my one opportunity for growth, is finding opportunities to resist the McDonaldization of libraries on future projects. CHARLIE BENNETT: You just heard Ameet Doshi, director of innovation and program design at the Georgia Tech Library, and also the subject librarian for the School of Public Policy and Law at Georgia Tech. Hey, thanks for putting up with us, dude. AMEET DOSHI: Thank you. Now I want to go listen to some baseball. FRED RASCOE: File this set under bf575.n6s83. [TECHNO MUSIC] You just heard Show Me Something Real by the late and lamented Turbo Fruits. And before that, Dancing Shoes by TV on the Radio. Those are songs about trying to find something authentic and true CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's show is "Nostalgia and Late Capitalism." And I think we have plenty of ideas for future shows where we might get deeper into the questions we only skimmed today. MARLEE GIVENS: Like is there anything wrong with consumable archival products? FRED RASCOE: Or, what does library impact mean when you measure it in wealth? WENDY HAGENMAIER: How are we going to handle, gulp, a world where for profit corporations want to be your personal archive? AMEET DOSHI: And why don't more of us listen to baseball games on the radio these days? CHARLIE BENNETT: Roll the credits. [ROCK MUSIC] AMANDA PELLERIN: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library. Written and produced by Ameet Doshi, Amanda Pellerin, Charlie Bennett-- CHARLIE BENNETT: That's you. AMANDA PELLERIN: Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and Wendy Hagenmaier. FRED RASCOE: Today's show was edited and assembled by Charlie at an active construction site while also surrounded by children attending online school. That's a hectic environment. AMEET DOSHI: Legal counsel, and a well-worn copy of The Wealth of Nations-- did you really read that-- were provided by the Burris Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. AMANDA PELLERIN: Special thanks to Repeater books and the legacy of Mark Fisher. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Find us online at lostinthestacks.org, and you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week's show is a rerun, and we'll be back with a new show the week after that. AMEET DOSHI: It's time for our last song today. We started the music with a look back by that most nostalgic of bands, The Kinks. The Kinks do have a tendency to look back on hard times with rose-tinted spectacles. Where have all the good times gone? So let's come full circle with another Kinks song about looking back, this time as interpreted by Van Halen. This is Eddie, Alex, Michael, and Diamond Dave with their version of Where Have All The Good Times Gone? CHARLIE BENNETT: It's like a nostalgia sandwich. WENDY HAGENMAIER: So consumable. AMEET DOSHI: Have a great weekend, everybody.