So I turned in some library books that were way overdue and now I have more than $10 in fines. When you have more than $10 in fines on your account, your account is restricted. You know what. Fair enough. I don’t really agree with the practice of library fines, but I’m not that put out over it and will pay them when I am able.
First, it blows my mind every single time I remember that I can’t pay the fines online. Nor can I pay them with card while I’m physically at the library. I was able to pay fines in the Arapahoe Library District in like 2005. What’s Chicago’s excuse?
Second, now that I have restrictions on my account, I am not allowed to access the Chicago Overdrive system. BUT, while I had several overdue books at their maximum fine that were not yet turned in there were no restrictions on my Overdrive usage. I do most of my library interactions through Overdrive. It’s much more valuable to me than having access to physical books.
This all means that if I have several overdue items out and have no plans to acquire more physical properties from the Chicago Public Library, I’m actually disincentivized from returning my materials in a timely fashion, if at all. I can’t be the only library user who has also noticed this. It’s very frustrating. One more argument for abolishing fines. Or at least making it as convenient as possible for me to pay them if we’re going to insist on this antiquated system.
Do not mistake this screed for something well thought out or researched. I’m having a crisis and working it out here on my semi-secret blog. Comments welcome.
What’s a part of the internet you think back on and realize that you’ve lost something beautiful, both as an artifact and as a piece of yourself?
I think back to gURL.com circa 2003. We still have the archive to look back on, but it’s not the same. gURL had personality and was useful in a way that a lot of the more sanitized sites we see today aren’t. The archive page linked above includes links to things like
“i have a sharp pain around my ovaries. is that normal?”
make fake blood for your halloween costume!
featured user generated poetry
a prompt to write about what you’re thankful for, with the chance to be featured to other site members
Today when you go to gURL.com it redirects to the Seventeen Magazine website, and headlines as of this typing include
Khloe Kardashian Just Got Real About Claims That Tristan Cheated On His Pregnant GF with Her
Taylor Swift Made Katy Perry Cookies with the Words “Peace at Last” to End Their Feud
Fall Might Be Cooler, But These Trends Will Keep You Looking HOT
Now, I’m not precious about the Kardashians or girls being interested in fashion. I think it’s great that these things exist and I’m happy for the people who find joy in this content. But outlets for these stories existed before, and will continue to exist until the breakdown of civilization. But the unique, quirky, earnest, and informative world of gURL.com has been completely erased.
When I was a tween my mom bought me the gURL.com book. It, like the website, is heavily influenced by 90s zine aesthetics. Lots of block letter headings, and bright colored background chunks where blocks of text lived. It included frank discussions about puberty and development, in a way that had a sense of humor and was devoid of shaming tactics. It feels painfully earnest now, looking back at previews on Amazon.com (where the book is available used for less than $2). It’s like a relic from the kid’s room at Lilith Fair. But I learned a lot from that book. So much so that nearly twenty years later I remember it fondly and can still picture the aesthetic of the book.
What will tweens today be able to look back on and remember fondly and specifically? Everything looks the same now.
But I’m not just worried about the kids these days. What is it doing to all of us that our online history is both so permanent and so fleeting? All of our transgressions [teenage indiscretions on Facebook, leaked nudes, poorly worded or understood tweets (or hell, BBS posts – I have no idea what people are keeping on me from the old days of the internet)] are screencapped and infinitely distributed – held against us forever. (or at least that’s what they want us to believe) None of us, especially in the United States, has any real right to be forgotten. But the things that shaped me [gURL.com, a half remembered fanfic that wormed into my brain in the summer of 2003 but which no combination of keyword searches seems to produce, proto social networks that allowed for customization like myspace and vampirefreaks] are either gone or have been purged of their historical content. The MySpace purge of 2013 was devastating. The admission from them earlier this year that all of the music is gone was played for laughs on Twitter, but we should be horrified that so much of ourselves that we thought safe is lost forever because some DBA fucked up one day.
Our desires, secrets, and fuck-ups are profitable. Our passion projects from a decade ago are not.
We’re forced to deal with our mistakes forever, and have those mistakes mined and used to create ever more accurate and invasive models for advertising to us every second of our waking lives. But the context from which those mistakes were made is eroding. What is that doing to our image of ourselves? What is it doing to our ability to relate to and trust one another?
This is all happening at the same time as the physical world around us is eroding. If we really want to talk about disappearing context, let’s take a look at the increasing lie that is “seasons” or “historical precedent” when it comes to weather.
Everything seems like it’s falling apart. Inside and out. Physical and digital. With only the glaring and irreversible consequences of our mistakes remaining.
And it’s not like the physical and digital are separate here. Hyper-specific advertising and machine learning models are inherently created to maintain the status quo. Machine learning does not identify how to make things “better.” It takes training data and makes more of what already is, whether or not that will produce a more desirable outcome for its targets. This leads to things like disinformation campaigns around vaccines or climate science. People don’t want to change their lives or confront their flaws, and we have created giant reflective chambers where people will only ever need to interact with things that re-entrench those worldviews. Digital lack of foresight and maximization of “engagement” has real world policy and behavioral implications.
What can we do to turn this ship around? I don’t have answers. If the failures of the modern condition could be solved with code, they would have been. Everything we do in that arena only seems to be making things worse. So what do we do? I can’t be the only one perpetually on the brink of a nervous breakdown fueled by existential despair, can I?
As everyone knows by now (I have the zeal of a newly sober junkie who is desperate to let everyone know about it), I have removed myself from the social media giants (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). I’m still on Goodreads. I don’t think that’ll change anytime soon. But I’ve been developing a bit of a Tumblr habit that I think I’ll need to squash. I feel like these behemoths are a large part of the problem; they provide the illusion of granting context and increasing engagement, while really stripping us of those things. There’s no such thing as context in a 280 character tweet, and stringing a bunch together into a choppy simulacrum of a blog post is no substitute. The things that you see in “feeds’ are filtered by their potential to enrage you, because that’s the best proxy software engineers have discovered to figure out what will engage you, and you don’t see them in any sort of logical order (like chronology or topic) that might enhance your understanding rather than muddle it further.
But there’s a compelling argument to be made that by abandoning these noisy public squares, I’m ceding my right to a voice. If I retreat to secure my own oxygen mask, I lose the access necessary to help others secure theirs. I’ve been very deliberate about not linking this blog on any of the social media giants. I’m not hiding it, but I’m not promoting it as part of my “””brand””” either. Am I making a mistake by not letting the public image of ‘Jess’ absorb every part of me?
To some extent I think we can look to art for guides on what we might do to retain a sense of individuality and meaning. The central question of queer art and queer life is “how do I exist meaningfully in a system that does not want me?” and it’s a potentially useful and inspiring avenue of thought to go down. But that only addresses the social conundrum in which we find ourselves, and not the way in which social and ecological dissolution are increasingly interlocked.
What can an individual do to actually affect things? We can call our congresspeople until the cows come home, and some of us have. We’ve voted, but still there’s no meaningful global or local action on the climate, or researching increased bacterial resistance to medicine, or kids in cages, or any of the existentially threatening issues we face. Received wisdom does not seem to be working. Many people I see online seem to be advocating for a revolution as the agent of change, but at the end of the day we’re all armchair anarchists, and Netflix is an effective opiate.
Who needs a guillotine when you’ve got a gif?
Read some things by people who are smarter than me:
It is a constant source of frustration for me that the Chicago Public Library overdrive setup only allows a person to have 5 digital holds at a time. I can check up to 20 things out, but I can’t have more than 5 holds. This seems totally flipped to me! Shouldn’t I be able to reserve more things and put the bottleneck on taking books out, rather than flagging books for the future based on availability?
Someone smarter than me is probably going to have to explain it to me someday. Probably something to do with money. Bah.
