Sometime between Trump’s election and inauguration, I posted something on Facebook to the effect of, “I see many of my friends using language of despair and hopelessness that really scares me. I desperately need all of you to remain in my life. Please do whatever it takes to get rested and ready for the road ahead.”
I still feel this way. I want to share some of the reflection I’ve done on what it means to build community in a time of frightening chaos.
The most important thing you can do right now in this absolutely terrifying hellscape is to build a community of people, preferably in either close proximity or frequent contact, who care for you, and both hold and inspire you to the standards of bravery and accountability you aspire to. This is the foundation for surviving the foreseeable future.
One of the things that distinguishes many Americans right now from previous periods of historical trauma is our collective isolation from a cohesive sense of community identity. Many of us move far from home for education or work. We are told that a mark of success is to do just this – to take opportunity wherever it is. For many middle-class people (particularly in my profession), we take it for granted that uprooting our households and families every few years between cities is the normal price we pay for career success. We rack up student loans in the thousands for the opportunity to do this, without gauging how damaging it is to have to find new friends every couple years. Many of us suffered spiritual trauma so we don’t have a religious community we can count on. What passed for activism for many years was writing a check to a good cause instead of grassroots organizing. After working a long day at an exhausting job it’s far preferable to come home and hang out with Netflix than to go to a neighborhood meeting where people drone on about traffic control measures.
It’s a blessing to see people in the streets protesting the latest fuckery of this administration. At the same time you often hear folks saying, “why aren’t there more? why aren’t we shutting everything down RIGHT NOW?” But I think this misses something: that ambient despair and hopelessness – a large part of why people stay at home – are most effectively held in check by a sense of community solidarity and identity. And the courage people need to stick their necks out is bolstered by community identities that reinforce the importance of doing the work of standing up for others. It’s a lot easier to go to a protest if you know your friends will be there. It’s tolerable to go to a boring neighborhood meeting with droning people if you already have post-meeting beers set up. Many of the most revolutionary social justice acts through history were done by participants who were part of a strong community, knowing that if something adverse happened to them, they could rely on their community to care for their family or homes or even themselves. When you don’t have community identities where this is a normal part of life, it’s a lot harder to go out in the streets or turn up for the work that repairing the world requires.
Here’s where I need to explain some of my own personal history and why I feel such a deep conviction on why y’all need to make building community priority #1.
The first activist-y thing I ever did was joining Food Not Bombs as an awkward teenager. Some of the folks from those days have become lifelong friends for me, but more importantly, we all showed up at anti-Iraq War protests. Fast forward to New Orleans. I joined a pretty badly organized infoshop and radical library. I eventually fell away from it, but I met some awesome people that I still stay in touch with. They remain my connection to what’s happening on the ground in the South.
A few years ago I decided to move back to Cincinnati, where my parents still lived and where a few friends were left. I have a great job, and I hope I keep it for a long time. But a couple years ago, I had the realization that because I have roots here, I’m staying in Cincinnati for the long haul even if my job goes belly up. I decided to choose building community over building a career. In the end, I think it’s a better safety net and quality of life, especially as the safety net of government vanishes.
My husband and I are not planning on having children, and being childless fundamentally colors your perspective on community in many ways. I know that if I want to make sure I have someone who cares about me in my old age, I have to build deep and dense networks across space and time. And because I don’t have children, I have the time and resources to invest into strengthening the communities that I’m part of, in ways that are sometimes challenging for parents with extensive caregiving obligations. Therefore, I feel a fundamental ethical obligation and expression of my values is to devote myself to community building.
Community building looks like lots of things to different people. For me, building community locally has meant investment in political, advocacy, and religious life. I’m involved with local Planned Parenthood advocacy, the Cincinnati DSA chapter, and a Quaker meeting. I am terrified for what the future will bring, but I know that it’s a lot easier to feel that I’m Doing The Work and that I’m Not Alone when I participate in these spaces. I’ve been urging my friends to find their own communities where they can be a part of something larger than themselves. Communities with shared values and organizing principles are critical to shoring up a sense of being anchored amidst the hurricane of terror swirling around us.
This is what my faith says about the importance of community:
Each of us lives in multiple overlapping and interconnected communities. Some we are born into, while others we choose to join. Each one provides us with an opportunity to test, refine, and express our beliefs, attitudes, and preferences. Claiming membership in a community is a way to define ourselves to others. As we live into that commitment, community can be more than just a group of people. It can embody our testimonies – a way we witness to the world about what we believe to be most important.
It really freaks me out to see people I love going “LOL WE’RE FUCKED!!!!” whenever the news keeps getting worse (as it inevitably does). And at this point, maybe even if we are fucked, we can all go down together sharing some comforting memories of friendship and Doing The Work of repairing the world instead of our last memory being horror scrolling through the latest Vox hot take.
All I know is this: if The Revolution ever breaks out, it will be a hell of a lot easier to launch myself into it from a potluck at my house or Yet Another Committee Meeting than if I’m sitting on my couch alone binge-watching some dumb dystopian tv show. I’ve never felt like Black Mirror or The Handmaid’s Tale or fucking social media could reach out and hug me whenever I’m freaking the hell out, but when I spend time with my community I always have that comfort at hand.
I don’t know what the future will bring. People are justifiably terrified. There is no one coming to save us. We have to save ourselves, with each other. Please go join a group of people who are already Doing The Work. Make it your top priority. You need it. I look forward to seeing you at the next meeting.
Ten years ago last week, I received a job offer to work at Tulane University as a paraprofessional archivist. I was graduating from the University of Cincinnati in the summer of 2008, at the same time the economy was collapsing. I had been a student worker at UC’s archives, and thought maybe I’d like to become an archivist. So I sent tons of applications for staff positions out into the wind, hoping I could get a paraprofessional job for a while before deciding whether I wanted to pursue my MLIS. The only response I got was from Tulane, and all my interviewing was over the phone. The first time I ever set foot in Louisiana was when I drove down there, with my dad, to move in to my new city.
I spent five years at Tulane, during which I got my MLIS while I was working full-time. It was probably the most formative five years of my life. New Orleans is where I became an archivist, where I met my husband, where I learned a lot about how the history of a city as complicated as New Orleans is both a warning and inspiration for how to navigate a chaotic future. I moved back to Cincinnati in 2013 for professional and family reasons, and I’ve now lived back here almost as long as I lived in New Orleans. As a lifelong Ohioan, Louisiana is the only other place I’ve ever built a life, and I carry a bit of New Orleans in my heart always.
I’ve been back to New Orleans a couple times since moving back to Ohio, but the trip back for this year’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section conference hit me right in the Feelings Department. The 10-year anniversary of my job offer at Tulane also meant that I’ve been an archivist for a decade. In 2008 I took my first leap into archives in New Orleans, and in 2018 here I am, back in the same city where I got my start, presenting about the impacts of climate change on the profession. I go up for tenure later this year, which comes with all of its own anxieties. Cincinnati is my home – it’s where my family lives, my roots are, where I have a house, and where my husband and I are very deliberately cultivating our communities for the long haul. But I’m so profoundly grateful that even several years later, New Orleans still feels like a very familiar second home.
New Orleans is not an easy place to live in. When I moved down in 2008, I had to evacuate just a couple months later for the first mandatory evacuation after Katrina. I rode out another hurricane a few years later, but my now-husband’s apartment lost power for several nights. The heat was insomnia inducing, to the point where we had to go visit some wealthy family friends with a generator out in the suburbs just so I could sleep for a few hours. When my husband and I had been back in Cincinnati for several months, at one point we turned to each other and said, “We haven’t had to boil our water for several months.” My salary in New Orleans was just a hair above the poverty line, and there was a house down the street from my second apartment in the Lower Garden District where a man had been murdered in a mistaken identity drug dealing ordeal. I jogged past it early on the mornings I would go for a run, and I tried not to look at the front door very hard.
But the thing about New Orleans is that there is no place like it on Earth. I sewed a new costume every year for Mardi Gras. I learned how to cook red beans and rice. I was too poor to drink good beer, so Miller High Life will always taste like a damn good night out. My friends and I made bike maps of the city, organized zines in the info shop, and baked each other deliberately ugly birthday cakes and beautiful homemade king cakes. I doubt I ever went more than a week or two without dancing at some live music. Before I moved in with the man I eventually married, I had four roommates – three of whom were locals. One, the daughter of a shrimping family, helped me find out my shellfish allergy wasn’t as bad as I thought it was and I’ve been safely eating shrimp and crawfish since. One made the best damn gumbo I’ve ever had and then his family guided me through my first Passover Seder. One would bring home fresh soy milk her mother made a few miles away in New Orleans East. I learned a lot about how to be sensitive to an entire city’s collective trauma around being drowned and forgotten. “Y’all” entered my vocabulary and has never left since, and I hope it never will.
It felt so good and so right last week to see old colleagues and friends, dance to brass bands, eat the kind of food that the Midwest can never manage to turn out, and sweat in the ubiquitous sauna heat of the city. This country – this world – is profoundly lucky to have New Orleans. And I feel so fortunate I got to experience it first hand for the time that I did.
(I originally wrote this on Facebook on May 26, 2018, the day my Irish sisters, brothers, and cousins voted to repeal the country’s abortion ban. And now Argentina might be moving in a similar direction. As the US slides into ever more repression of women’s basic human rights, it’s been a joy to witness these victories across the world.)
I’ve been crying on and off with joy and thankfulness since Ireland voted to repeal its abortion ban. I’m so glad to report that it looks like the tiny village of Gurteen in County Sligo, where my branch of the Tanseys came from, went narrowly for the Yes to repeal, by just a few dozen votes. I wrote a long reflection last night trying to figure out why I couldn’t stop bawling my eyes out. Here it is:
On the evening of the 2016 federal election, my dad was the one who phoned to tell me the election was called for Trump. I had gone into a total media blackout after finishing up my duties as a poll worker. I guess that after busting my ass for more than 12 hours to do my part for participatory democracy, I’m glad I learned the shittiest global news of 2016 from someone I love rather than from a TV screen.
Today I got to deliver equally dramatic election news to my father, but I’m glad to say it was far more joyful: that Ireland repealed its abortion ban. I had a much more emotional reaction to this than I anticipated – I saw the exit polls saying the vote to repeal was almost certain as I was getting home from work, and I started crying in the middle of the sidewalk before I even walked through the door.
I think, in large part, my emotional reaction is because of my father.
My dad carries a lot of identities, but probably the most consistent one is that of being an Irish-American. He has a picture of Ben Bulben as his laptop wallpaper. He has an old faded map of the counties of Ireland hanging on his wall. He has shelves and shelves of books about Irish and Irish-American history. He constantly rants about the Notre Dame “fighting Irish” mascot and the phrase “paddy wagons”: both are profoundly offensive to Brian Tansey. The only thing he finds more offensive than Irish stereotypes are people like Bill O’Reilly: Irish-Americans who forgot what kind of discrimination Irish immigrants once faced in the US, but who now turn around and spit on today’s immigrants.
My dad is old enough (85) to have briefly experienced the old-school anti-Irish sentiment that once circulated in bourgie WASP circles, and still talks about the time he got called a “mick” when he was attending Columbia University in the 50s. My dad schooled me on Irish-American history starting with coffin ships up through Irish-American city ward machine politics, and it was threaded through with tons of colorful family legends: like how when James Tansey left County Sligo in the 1890s with his buddy for Liverpool’s docks, they were stumped on where to go next. The coin flip decision turned up America – otherwise it was Australia.
And as if you needed any further proof of how seriously my dad takes his Irish-American identity, well, uh, he’s the one who named me “Eira.” Which, at least in my dad’s telling, was a feminine homage to Éire (the Irish word for Ireland). I’ve yet to find any scholars who can verify this as an accurate variation. Oh well, it’s on the birth certificate. And so every day, when I have to spell out my name on the phone or have someone ask me about it’s origins, I’m reminded that a larger part of my genealogy traces to Ireland, and that my Dad sure wanted me to be reminded of this every day until I expire.
My dad and I have travelled to Ireland together, twice. The first time was when I was studying abroad at the University of Sheffield back in 2006, and the second time was when I was living in New Orleans, in 2011. Both times we got a car and drove up to County Sligo where our Irish ancestors came from. On our most recent trip, we visited the tiny village of Gurteen in County Sligo where Dad’s grandfather came from. We visited with Father Joe, the parish priest, who took us on a tour of the area and pulled out some marriage records from his office desk that mentioned some of our family names. Father Joe even helped us meet and connect to some distant relatives. Dad still talks about the salmon dinner Father Joe served us, I still remember the Guinness pints we drank at the bar where there were pictures of the local darts team with men who had the last name Tansey and the same dark curly hair as mine.
While we were there, it was very clear that the country was moving apart from the church. This was when the Irish leadership and the Dail were told telling the Vatican off for their handling of the child abuse scandals. The stories of how generations of Irish women were systematically abused at the hands of the Catholic laundries were well-known. Ireland was definitely finding its way to an identity that stood apart from Catholicism. It was so affirming to see Ireland resoundingly and democratically pass gay marriage a few years ago. And now this? Y’all. I’m so happy.
Where I live in Ohio, it’s a never-ending horror show of how much politicians want to destroy women’s fundamental human rights to bodily autonomy. I have no doubt that if Pence and Kasich have their way, they would immediately try to create their own 8th Amendment in the United States. Goodness knows they’ve both tried everything up to that point in Indiana and Ohio. I’ve been mulling over what my moral responsibilities will be to my fellow women, and wondering how much we’ll have to relearn the lessons of the Jane Collective. Or more likely, Women on Web, which has helped many Irish women obtain an abortion in the last several years.
Victories for women’s fundamental human rights are so precious and rare these days. Every day I am reminded that I live in a country that profoundly hates women, that does not trust women, and that is led by men who only value women as grabbable pussies or as reproductive chattel.
To see that there is a country in the world today where a majority of voters cast a vote to trust women as opposed to inscribing hatred for them is extremely moving. And tracing some of my own background to Ireland makes me feel a profound connection to all the women whose stories were never told, many of whom suffered terribly, but whose work reverberates across the generations.
Thank you, Ireland, for giving us a bit of light in these dark times. I am so proud, but more importantly, I am inspired.
Back when I was running my mouth on Twitter, I posted this extremely hot take on shabby news coverage of archives. Unlike many of my previous hot takes, I think it’s timeless and I still stand by it 100%. My archivist friends coined it “the Tansey test.”
Since I deleted my Twitter account, I realize there is not a definitive place where folks can go to cite the Tansey test. Before I deleted my account, I downloaded my twitter archive and saved a few screenshots, too. So here you go, y’all.
Each year the Society of American Archivists (SAA) sponsors MayDay on May 1, a day dedicated to disaster preparedness and response. MayDay is intended to be “a time when archivists and other cultural heritage professionals take personal and professional responsibility for doing something simple—something that can be accomplished in a day but that can have a significant impact on an individual’s or a repository’s ability to respond.”
On MayDay, archivists are encouraged to update and review emergency response plans for archives (for example, what’s the plan if you walk into the stacks and find mildew everywhere?) or inventorying disaster response supply boxes (which would include various things to help with a water leak), and a number of other ideas.
Of course Mayday is a distress signal that traces its lineage as a reference to the French m’aidez or m’aider ‘help me!’, and it is this reference that SAA is primarily alluding to. The Oxford English Dictionary traces “Mayday” to the 1920s:
For those of us who identify as comrades, May Day (without the space) on May 1 has long had a very particular meaning. May Day is also known as International Workers Day, and traces its origins to an important event in labor history, the Haymarket Tragedy, which took place only 2 miles from the current headquarters of the Society of American Archivists.
On May 1, 1886, Chicago unionists, reformers, socialists, anarchists, and ordinary workers combined to make the city the center of the national movement for an eight-hour day. Between April 25 and May 4, workers attended scores of meetings and paraded through the streets at least 19 times. On Saturday, May 1, 35,000 workers walked off their jobs. Tens of thousands more, both skilled and unskilled, joined them on May 3 and 4. Crowds traveled from workplace to workplace urging fellow workers to strike. Many now adopted the radical demand of eight hours’ work for ten hours’ pay. Police clashed with strikers at least a dozen times, three with shootings.
Since Haymarket, May Day has become an international day of remembrance to honor the labor movement’s sacrifices on behalf of workers. It was widely observed within the United States until the Red Scares.
Inspired by the American movement for a shorter workday, socialists and unionists around the world began celebrating May 1, or “May Day,” as an international workers’ holiday. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and other Communist countries officially adopted it. The Haymarket tragedy is remembered throughout the world in speeches, murals, and monuments. American observance was strongest in the decade before World War I. During the Cold War, many Americans saw May Day as a Communist holiday, and President Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 as “Loyalty Day” in 1955. Interest in Haymarket revived somewhat in the 1980s.
So how come on MayDay (the SAA version), archivists rarely, if ever, also acknowledge the other May Day (the one that’s been around for over a century)?
A Garland for May Day 1895, by Walter Crane. Crane was an English artist who was sympathetic to the Haymarket defendants. Image via the University of Michigan Labadie Collection.
My friend and archivist colleague Steve Ammidown made the image at the top of this post, and it basically says it all. To effectively respond to archival disasters, archives have to have adequate staffing of professional archivists. A disaster plan is only as good as the people and resources available to put it into action. As someone who has been writing a lot about both labor and climate change issues within our profession, I completely agree with Steve’s assessment that disaster preparation and emergency response cannot be separated from the larger labor and staffing issues that haunt our repositories.
So by all means, archivists – do your part for MayDay. But until we deal with the long-term labor issues articulated by workers each May Day since the late 1800s, anything else is a band-aid on top of a gaping wound.
(Thanks to Steve for letting me use this image and inspiring this post!)
Several months ago, I learned about John Hersey’s epic essay, “Hiroshima.” Hersey, a reporter in Japan between 1945-1946, interviewed several survivors of the atomic bombing. His magnificent essay appeared in the August 31, 1946 issue of the New Yorker, and was the focus of the entire issue. In typical New Yorker practice, the cheerful cover (illustrated by Charles E. Martin), gives no hint to what is in the following pages. Published just over a year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hersey’s essay bore witness to the instantaneous deaths of more than 100,000 men, women and children, and the nightmarish hell the survivors navigated in the hours and weeks after the bombing.
I’m not sure when I learned about Hersey’s essay, but as soon as I did, I filed it away for when I knew I would have a couple uninterrupted hours to read it (yes, it takes that long; the essay is also a 160 page short book that’s been in print for decades). You can read it on the New Yorker website.
On a recent bus ride from Cincinnati to Chicago, I finally got around to reading it. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more moving account of anything in my life, from the small graces most of us possess, to the way we harden our hearts and close our ears and eyes to others suffering more than us, to the way we traverse all the emotions in between in about five minutes. And yet, this is not any ordinary backdrop: it is a story in which a woman’s skin comes off her hand like a glove, in which men’s eyes have melted out of their sockets, in which a woman carries her dead baby for four days hoping her missing husband will be able to see them before the cremation. It is a story that is anything but universal, because less than 200,000 people are still living today who have ever witnessed being so close to the heat of the sun. Every day we run the risk that an accident could go terribly wrong, or men could become terribly vindictive. The tally of 200,000 witnesses could grow by several zeroes in an instant.
But today, only 0.00002% of the world’s population can tell you what it was like to live through cruelest human experiment ever conducted by science’s most brilliant minds.
A few days after I read “Hiroshima,” news broke that John Bolton is going to be the new national security advisor. The Bush administration was bad enough, but bringing back the greatest villains from those terrible eight years is just too much. Bolton is a batshit madman who is the living embodiment of “some men just want to watch the world burn.” And a week later, we were bombing Syria because Trump felt like he had to back up his bombastic tweets with military action (and I felt more secure than ever that I made the right decision to leave Twitter, given its role as a platform for war-mongering).
Last year, I felt that my rights were hanging on by the thinnest of threads. I still feel that way, but I’ve also been mentally preparing myself for what I’ll do if and when the worst happens with the judiciary destroying everything I hold dear. But lately, at annual events like family holidays or professional conferences, I have a fleeting thought that whispers around the edges. I wonder if something so unspeakably bad will happen, plunging our country into some kind of civil war, that it would prevent us from gathering together again next year.
Going back and reading what I wrote last year, it’s clear I’m struggling to define and come to terms with ideas of citizenship and patriotism. They are concepts often profoundly opposed to one another. Although citizenship is far too often constructed as state-sanctioned legal residence, I’ve begun to appreciate that citizenship encompasses a much more holistic set of experiences than patriotism. One can be a citizen of a state, a city, their neighborhood, their nation, or the planet Earth. Citizenship implies personhood and identity (often in multiple instances), but patriotism implies a certain set of practices oriented around principles of defense. Citizenship is a concept that, in my mind, transcends boundaries and can exist within a borderless world. But patriotism is inherently bound up in the idea of the nation-state (you wouldn’t say your neighbor who picks up the litter in your neighborhood is a good patriot, but you would likely say they are a good citizen). And the geographically-bounded notion of patriotism and the nation-state is where patriotism begins to break down for me.
Historian Christian Appy has said “patriotism means never having to say you’re sorry.” After I read Hersey’s essay, I read a little bit about how it was received at the time. Apparently many people read it and wanted to know how much the victims of the bombings blamed Americans, and many were relieved to learn that many of the victims did not blame Americans. I guess discourse about collective trauma, responsibility, truth and reconciliation have come a long way since then, but it’s still a telling clue to how guilt is the essential magnetic force that orients our moral compasses.
When you remove a sense of guilt, you remove an obligation to apologize. Guilt and patriotism do not easily coexist. So instead we tell ourselves that the ends justify the means, that incinerating hundreds of thousands of people who don’t look like us is always a justifiable cost to spare American lives. That having the misfortune to be born in the wrong place in the wrong time in history on the wrong side of America means that you’ll never get an apology when our country fucks up. Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place decades ago, but similar body counts from the insistence on protecting American lives at any cost are still with us.
We are told by our parents at a young age to say we’re sorry when we hurt someone, but when we acquire the means to the most anodyne deadly weapon most of us have – a car – the advice changes. Insurance companies say, “Do not discuss whose fault it was (even saying “I’m sorry” may be considered an admission).” Lawyers and insurance companies advise us that if we screw up, if we hurt someone, if we hit a car, that we should not apologize. Because to apologize would be to admit guilt. And admitting something can be used against you.
It’s no wonder that saying sorry does not come easily to us, and that we cloak our refusal to say we’re sorry under a thicket of legal excuses and justification. It’s not just the US government. It’s our entire culture.
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If you really want the honest truth of why Twitter will never ban Donald Trump from its service, you don’t need to read their public relations statements. Read what they tell the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Twitter is a company that measures its success by how many active users (measured by both monthly and daily metrics, aka MAUs and DAUs) it has. Looking at their most recent SEC filing, it’s clear that the company is working on increasing daily active user activity – likely because they’ve probably hit saturation points with how many new users are using the system. SEC filings require companies to disclose risks, and Twitter states:
If we fail to grow our user base, or if user engagement or ad engagement on our platform decline, our revenue, business and operating results may be harmed.
The size of our user base and our users’ level of engagement are critical to our success. We had 330 million average MAUs in the three months ended September 30, 2017, representing approximately a 4% increase from 317 million average MAUs in the three months ended September 30, 2016 (see “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations – Note About Our MAU Adjustment” above). DAUs for the three months ended September 30, 2017 increased 14% year over year. Our financial performance has been and will continue to be significantly determined by our success in growing the number of users and increasing their overall level of engagement on our platform as well as the number of ad engagements. We anticipate that our user growth rate will continue to slow over time as the size of our user base increases. […] If people do not perceive our products and services to be useful, reliable and trustworthy, we may not be able to attract users or increase the frequency of their engagement with our platform and the ads that we display.
Twitter then goes on to state the following, something which is so brazen in its denial of the problem it has created, it’s actually kind of amazing (emphasis mine):
“[…]if we are not able to address user concerns regarding the safety and security of our products and services or if we are unable to successfully prevent abusive or other hostile behavior on our platform, the size of our user base and user engagement may decline. We rely on the sale of advertising services for the substantial majority of our revenue and a decline in the number of users, user growth rate, or user engagement, including as a result of the loss of world leaders, government officials, celebrities, athletes, journalists, sports teams, media outlets and brands who generate content on Twitter, advertisers [sic] may deter new advertisers from using our products or services or cause current advertisers to reduce their spending with us or cease doing business with us, which would harm our business and operating results.”
None of this is shocking or surprising for a company that notes the “substantial majority of our revenue is currently generated from third parties advertising on Twitter.” So when I see Twitter banning Next Door Neighbor Nazis and not banning Trump, I see Twitter trying to have it both ways: attempting to show they’re “doing something,” but also doubling-down on the fact that “world leaders and government officials” are the cash cows that keep on driving engagement. In other words, Twitter does not distinguish between any world leaders threatening nuclear annihilation and world leaders attempting to keep us from sliding into the gates of hell. They are simply content generators, like the rest of us, that lead to advertising. Global consequences be damned.
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After the 2016 presidential election, many people implored us to determine where our line was. To identify where angels fear to tread among where there be dragons. To draw a line in the sand. We were cautioned against letting the unthinkable become normalized, that doing so would be to cede the grounds of not only the American democratic process, but our basic humanity.
The problem with this framing is that it conjured up scenes of going up against the barricades, of hoping that the US would suddenly be inspired to go on a general strike when most folks had never marched around and chanted. It set up expectations that America’s citizens would run a marathon when most of us were still learning to walk for the first time.
Over the last year I feel like I’ve been plunged back into being a teenager – when my political baptism was protest against the Iraq War. My country invaded Iraq before I could vote. When I was 17, I somehow convinced my boring west-side-of-Cincinnati Episcopal church to kick in some money to help fund a bus of protesters to go to DC. I spent many dreary afternoons shouting chants on a street corner I can see from the windows of the library that I work at 14 years later.
As the war drums start beating again, there is at least one line that has become increasingly uncomfortable for me over the last several days. I can no longer use a platform serving as a propaganda outlet for normalizing and trivializing the horrors of nuclear war. This is why I’m leaving Twitter, after using it regularly for over seven years.
Twitter is clearly committed to amplifying the voice of a racist demagogue with impulse control and the unilateral authority to launch nuclear weapons, and this is in direct conflict with my opposition to war and militarism. The President clearly has many platforms he can use to spread his propaganda besides Twitter – George W. Bush certainly managed to do so well before the advent of social media. By not shutting this down, Twitter is saying is that there is no line in the sand for them; that allowing their service to become a tool of nuclear propaganda is preferable to any possible alternative.
Nuclear proliferation is often discussed in coldly clinical supply-chain terminology. Some state acquired uranium, another is expanding testing of missile delivery systems, etc etc. What gets left out of deterrence game theory bullshit is that banging on the war drums constitutes a form of nuclear proliferation by repeatedly putting the option on the table. As we get further away from the cultural memory of what it means to industrialize war, to efficiently kill thousands (really, millions) of people, joshing about having a nuclear button that is “much bigger,” “more powerful,” and “works” just goes to show that the very person with the unilateral authority to annihilate much of the planet within minutes is treating global holocaust like a fucking game.
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Deciding to leave Twitter is not easy. I’ve taken several breaks from Twitter before, typically during Lent. After a while, I don’t miss it that much. But I’ve always hesitated to cut the cord entirely for two reasons: Twitter has undeniably helped me accumulate a lot of social capital in my profession, and it’s been one of the most efficient and fun methods of professional networking I’ve ever found.
Archivist Twitter is a real thing, and it’s been a huge part of my professional identity formation. I joined Twitter right around the time I decided that being an archivist was the career path I would set out on. I used Twitter to follow archives conferences before I started attending them, and then I used Twitter at my first SAA to network. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations that start “hey I follow you on Twitter…”
On Twitter, I’ve found professional development opportunities, cultivated new collaborations, learned so much about my profession’s history and culture, and forged affirming and wonderful friendships that are the real deal, with people I’ve broken bread with offline, who I know will be in my life for a very long time. I strongly suspect that a lot of the public profile I’ve built within my field has been thanks to my presence on Twitter. Walking away from that is really hard.
I know how silly this must sound to people who haven’t had this experience with Twitter. Even though I’ve received some pretty ugly harassment on Twitter, my good experiences outweigh the bad. And that’s why it’s taken me months now to come to terms with exiting a service that clearly does not give a shit about the safety and stability of the world at large. I don’t know what my career will look like without the networking and informational capabilities of Twitter, or how promoting my work will change without Twitter. That’s scary in a culture that emphasizes rapid engagement, developing a voice (the nice writer word for brand), and being easy to reach for any opportunity that might land in your lap.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about Quaker war tax resistance. Not because I think my decision is on the level with tax resistance, but because it’s about withdrawing one’s personal participation in the normalization of war machinery. On and off throughout history, many Quakers refused to pay taxes that fund militarism. This has often been at great cost to their livelihoods, liberty, and economic security.
I find the history of tax resistance refreshing within a current leftist atmosphere that tries to decouple personal individual morality from the political organizing work of dismantling larger systems of oppression. It’s a mistake for us to assume that choices made to reflect a personal moral stance are synonymous with the organizing work that dismantles oppression. Sometimes it’s a good thing just to make a moral choice that allows one to live with an easier conscience, even if the only person it “makes a difference to” is a single individual.
The phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is true. But it’s not an excuse to step away from examining one’s life choices, and too many people treat it as one. You must start somewhere.
We’ve confused Twitter for a commons because it is fantastic at helping us find voices we wouldn’t encounter otherwise, which makes it easy to ignore that Twitter has been enclosed from day one because its only real goal is to make money. To continue to participate in the only form of capital it has – regular participation that drives advertising – is to enable its continuance as a platform that trades in bigotry, undermines democratic processes, and now, reaps money from the proliferation of nuclear threats.
After spending a lot of time thinking about what the current state of archivist discourse is like, I started thinking about how much more and better and varied it could be. So, this last post in this series is a bit of a wishlist of things I want to see develop over the coming years.
Let’s start planting some seeds, archivists.
We need to increase the amount of conversation in general and with more archivists’ voices at the table.
It’s striking to me how few archivists are engaged in public conversation about the profession. I wish it were a professional norm among everyone to engage in active conversations about the nature of our work, and yet there are many archivists out there who are not participating in these conversations whatsoever. As a result, the same voices dominate conversations about digital preservation, archival social justice, metadata, DACS, copyright, etc etc. I personally find this really baffling. Sometimes I get the sense that lots of people are listening, and reading but not… contributing. Why is this? Is it because they feel like they don’t have something to contribute? Is it because we’re afraid to critique others’ ideas? I often hear anecdotal evidence that people are “not supported” in their jobs to read and write, but I also don’t know of many archivists who are working in a billable hours environment.
Divest our dialogue from platforms owned by profit-oriented companies.
This is a big one for me because I am planning to leave Twitter soon, and the only reason I haven’t quit sooner is because Archivist Twitter brings me a lot of joy and information.
I don’t really know what the answer to this is. Could we go back to 2005 with everyone owning their own domain, when people read blogs and left really thoughtful comments on them, and our main hits of new information came via RSS, and that was the main internet discourse? I know that that environment had its issues, but I miss how non-monetized it was and how people didn’t give a shit about their brand and how it was SLOW. I guess I can dream. I personally want to revive Reading Archivists.
We need a renewed emphasis on the public implications of institutional recordkeeping, especially by governments.
I am a bit skeptical of the recent emphasis on collecting social justice from demonstrations and private parties as the major expression of archival social justice (and I say this as someone who is active in some of those efforts). In my opinion, the greatest impact we could have on effecting social justice through recordkeeping is to assert the public interest on records issues – like demanding consistent access to law enforcement records, pushing against the creation of surveillance records, and so on.
Millions of people are affected by records that will never be transferred to an archival repository. These are also the same records that will disproportionately affect marginalized communities. Archivists need to be active participants in these efforts, and right now, we generally are not.
We need the voices of government and corporate archivists in our professional dialogues.
I’m not the first archivist to observe how atomized our already small profession is, and how dominated by university affiliations the general makeup of the Society of American Archivists has been. Clearly many archivists have found organizational homes elsewhere that meet their needs more than SAA. I don’t blame them, but I still miss their voices. As a past Nominating Committee member, and a current chair of the SAA Records Management Section, I’ve seen how much the domination of academic archivists within SAA has pernicious underdiscussed effects. While I’m an academic archivist myself, a huge part of my work is informed by public records issues. It is stunning to me how many archivists within SAA spaces do not understand extremely basic information about FOIA and the way state records issues depart from federal records issues, and I think this is because we do not hear from government archivists as often as we hear from academic archivists within archival discourse.
This would be kind of amusing if it weren’t such an obstacle for our profession. The worst is during the inevitable “politicians who fuck up their recordkeeping obligations.” I’ve seen SAA leaders, who come from an academic background, sharing information that blatantly is contradictory to NARA policy. How the hell are we supposed to advocate for the archival profession when we can’t even get our news stories right?
We need ways for great minds that think alike to find each other for collaboration
Much like finding a way to divest from profit-driven platforms, this one is a bit of a head-scratcher but I still feel strongly about it. I’m pretty well-connected and know who to ask if I’m thinking about starting a new project and want to find collaborators. But this takes a really long time to figure this out for new professionals and it shouldn’t have to be this hard. I wish there was a universal matchmaking directory where people could say “here are the projects I’m working on, I’m looking for collaborators to help me with this part” and then we could all be doing fun amazing things together.
We need more archivists to represent our profession outside of our profession
As my interests have drifted towards environmental issues, I’ve started to attend conferences in other fields. I’ve also published in non-archives journals. And it’s the best thing ever. I realize that flexible conference funding is a huge area of privilege, and I wish I had a good answer for how to start solving this. But I strongly encourage other archivists within whatever capacity they have to present to, work with, and write for non-archivist audiences when possible. It helps us learn how to talk about what we do to people who have no idea what we do (or at history conferences, people who think they know what we do), and often times non-archivists get super-excited about your work when you talk about it, which is lovely and affirming.
[Content warning: brief references to sexual harassment/assault & current media coverage]
Two or three times a week, I go to the campus rec center early to exercise before work. Even though I love the repetitive monotony of the rowing machines, I generally do not row much these days because the rowing machines are in front of a million televisions playing CNN/Fox/ESPN/NBC/ABC/CBS. The sound is turned off, but the ocean of chyron shit is not how I like to start my day.
So I tend to exercise in the parts of the facility that aren’t in front of a million TVs. I often run on the indoor track, but sometimes when I’m feeling lazy, I walk on a treadmill so I can zone out and listen to a podcast. There are treadmills that don’t face the bank of chyron shit, but unfortunately too many new treadmills are souped up with built-in TVs that start up automatically before you can change it to something more benign, like an image of a stopwatch.
This morning I was in lazy mode, and I scrolled through my always-increasing queue of podcasts. I listen to a lot of current news podcasts, and have racked up several unplayed episodes covering the latest revelations confirming far too many men love power more than they love women. It’s too much, it’s all too much, and like many women who’ve experienced abuse and harassment in my past, I’ve mostly disengaged from the ongoing revelations beyond reading headlines. Engaging any more deeply keeps forcing open the places where I’ve packed my sadness and undiluted anger into a form that allows me to function on a daily basis. I picked a podcast about academic writing and hopped on the treadmill.
And no sooner do I hop on the treadmill than the built-in TV starts up with the TODAY show, and my jaw drops when I see what’s going down. There is no more wild distillation of the period we are in than to see Matt Lauer’s women co-anchors announce why he isn’t there. I grab my phone and take a picture of it because every time I think 2017 can’t get any more intense I take a picture or a screenshot, as if documenting all the bullshit insanity could make it stop.
I thought for a second about posting it on social media, and then I remembered how I don’t want to contribute to the problem I, and many other women, are trying to escape from: that most men (given the overwhelming majorities of women who are abused by an intimate partner or harassed by someone she knows) do not love us, do not value our safety, and do not acknowledge our personhood. We know this, and most of us are not shocked by any of this, because we’ve experienced it from men everyone else thought were “the good ones.”
I don’t know that there has ever been a time in patriarchal culture when it hasn’t been hard to be a woman. But the last two months has been an undeniably difficult period to be a woman. I don’t know how this all will end, and maybe thinking there is an end, as if there is a linear story here, is part of our collective delusion.
Since the post-Weinstein effect got rolling, I think I’ve read virtually every essay about women and anger. They speak to me, and I carry the image of Beyoncé smashing in the windows of men’s cars in my heart, all the time. There is a part of my rage that undeniably takes a small helping of solace knowing that powerful men are scared, that many are nervous that their bill will soon come due. But the fragment that’s stayed with me most was from Rebecca Traister’s essay:
…it’s easy to conclude that this moment actually isn’t radical enough, because it’s limited to sexual grievances. One 60-year-old friend, who is single and in a precarious professional situation, says, “I’m burning with rage watching some assholes pose as good guys just because they never put their hands on a colleague’s thigh, when I know for a fact they’ve run capable women out of workplaces in deeply gendered ways. I’m very frustrated, because I’m not in a position right now to spill some beans.”
Online and offline, I’ve been saying over and over that one of the most important things people can do if they care about women is to proactively consume, cite, and promote the work of women. Because all of these stories are not just about getting your ass grabbed, they’re about who has visibility. They are about who gets more bylines (men), who gets more invitations to keynote (men), who gets more citations (men), who gets installed in the cannon (men). They are the stories of who we listen to, and who we regard as authorities.
You often hear a lot of people say at times like this, “listen to women.” And while yes, obviously, duh…. to my ears, this phrase positions listening to women as a choice. It betrays an acknowledgement of the reality that, as a rule, our culture does not choose to listen to women. It especially does not listen to women of color and poor women.
One of the most underrated beautifully radical things said by a famous woman in the last few years is when Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the Supreme Court would have enough female justices when it has nine of them. I think about this all the time, and it is powerful as fuck because no one has the choice but to listen to the Supreme Court.
When I talk about how people should consider only reading books by women, or some other avenue of basically transferring their attention from the works of men to the works of women, this is what I’m getting at. I’ve recently learned that some men in my life who talk a good game about supporting women are beyond threatened by this idea, implying that I’m advocating shutting out their voices. The insinuation is that women owe men their attention. It isn’t clear in this equation what, exactly, men owe women to overcome generations worth of hoarding intellectual, legal, and cultural authority.
Is it because they are worried they won’t be writing the stories any longer?
That they won’t be the editors?
And that today’s fact-checkers, today’s women, aren’t afraid to demand an honest story?
Part Two: Or, the landscape of archivist professional dialogue (Part One here)
Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about the announcement of the #thatdarnlist shutdown wasn’t the rampant denialism of longstanding problems, but the fact that a lot of A&A subscribers seemed to be genuinely baffled about where to find information about the archives profession after the list is shut down at the end of 2017.
Archivists are information professionals. That a bunch of information professionals are melting down about where to find professional information is truly bewildering. Or as Matt Francis put it:
Seriously, y’all.
So as an act of public service (you can and should thank me for this labor by buying me a beer the next time you see me) here are some of my recommendations for “How to be a professionally conversant American archivist in 2017”. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, but it is fairly reflective of the way that I consume professional content. I tend to focus on the American archives profession, and I hope readers will contribute non-US suggestions in the comments.
I can already hear someone howling “but I don’t have tiiiiiiiiiiiiiime to review all these sources.” If you want to be treated like a professional, you need to act like it, and that means being conversant with the ongoing conversations in your profession. No one is saying you have to read everything, but you have to pay attention to something on at least a semi-regular basis, or else quit calling yourself an archivist. I have Additional Strong Feelings about this that I’ll save for Part 3.
Peer-Reviewed Literature
Why you should pay attention to it: Even with peer reviewing’s myriad nonsense (and there is so much, but trust me when I say it’s a million times worse outside of the archives profession), there is no substitute for a process that allows people to call you out on your bullshit. I sometimes see questionable assertions (aka hot takes) by archivists bubble up on social media or blogs that I know would not last through peer review if the person had to marshal evidence for their claim. At its best, peer-reviewed literature can have long-lasting impacts on practice (Greene and Meissner!), provide inspirational reading that feels as relevant today as it did when it came out decades ago (Gerry Ham!), and provide a clear ethical framework for moving our work forward (Michelle Caswell!)
My favorite resources: Many of you might know I created an entire calendar assigning reading days to prominent journals in the field. Since I originally created it for the type of reading I need to do for my work, it skews heavily towards American archives and academic libraries. It’s due for an overhaul, but I think it’s a handy tool and I’m always delighted to hear other people find it useful. (github version if you want to adapt for your own needs)
Blogs
Why you should pay attention to it: Blogs occupy that nice space between needing to say more than can be said via social media, but with greater immediacy and casualness than peer review demands. Within archives-land, there are repositories that have blogs, there are archival organizations that have blogs, and there are archivists that have blogs. A lot of the prominent archivist blogs from several years ago are far quieter these days (ArchivesNext, You Ought to Be Ashamed, Chaos->Order) which is a bummer. Those blogs were sites of incredible archivist dialogue, and I sort of miss blog comment-oriented discourse.
Individual archivist blogs are a gold-mine, since many of us tend to put up copies of conference talks (which often never get published elsewhere). If you’re an archivist who does talks and you don’t have your own blog, please put something up so we can share your work and give your conference talks a second life!
Archives and the Old Mole (the tagline is “Draft work on archives, archivists and socialism” and even when I disagree, I am almost always entertained. More polemics, less practice is the kind of MPLP I enjoy reading in archivist blogs.)
Why you should pay attention to it: Social media – and especially Twitter – is often scapegoated whenever discussions about A&A come up. I think this is unfair, because it tends to erase how useful it can be, particularly given the exodus of many archivists from listservs to Twitter. I have as much of a love/hate relationship with social media as the next person, but I think there is an undeniable amount of fantastic knowledge you can pick up from Twitter. Speaking only for myself, Twitter has helped me find professional development workshops, calls for papers, interesting conferences, and a good sounding board for “Has anyone ever….?” questions.
The free-for-all nature of Twitter is part of why it’s an environment so prone to hostility, but the fact that it isn’t a walled garden also helps make it a very interdisciplinary experience. I’ve discovered the work of a lot of environmental studies people through it that otherwise would have been far more difficult to find via other avenues. Social media deservedly gets a lot of flak for enabling a build-your-own-echo-chamber space. At the same time, I don’t think Twitter gets enough credit for fostering the ability to easily find voices you might not normally encounter. My work has been undeniably improved by listening to many voices on Twitter from marginalized groups that often are not represented in peer-reviewed publications, as conference headliners, etc.
Because Facebook is a walled garden, it lacks both the best-of and worst-of Twitter experiences. And I think the jury is still out on mastodon – I have an account on scholar.social, and there are a few archivists there, but it doesn’t yet feel like a critical mass.
My favorite resources: I know there are a lot of archivists and archival organizations active on Facebook, but for my money (well, time) Twitter is where I’ve gotten the most value. Almost all of the bloggers mentioned above are active or semi-active on Twitter, and are great people to follow. If you’re not currently active on archivist Twitter and want to give it a try, I think a good time to dive in is during conferences, when you can use conference hashtags to quickly identify interesting users. Some archivists on Twitter only talk about archives, some talk mostly about their personal interests, and others fall somewhere in the middle. Lots of people maintain lists of archivists on Twitter (like Kate Theimer’s list) which is a quick way to follow lots of users at once.
Podcasts
Why you should pay attention to it: Alright, let me say out of the gate that this is a thin area at the moment, and I really hope we start seeing more archives podcasts. There is a lot to be said for non-textual mediums as sources of learning new things. At MAC 2017, there was a great session about podcasting, though it was more of a “archives doing podcasts about their holdings” than an “archivists doing podcasts about the profession” vibe.
What are my favorite resources: It’s no longer active, but there was a good podcast running for a brief period between 2013-2014 called More Podcast Less Process. Lost in the Stacks is a radio show hosted by librarians and archivists from the Georgia Tech Library, and they also distribute the show as a podcast. There are rumors that the reviews folks over at American Archivist are working on a podcast, and I am super pumped to see what they come up with.
What’s Next?
I have a long wish list for the archivist information & professional discourse ecosystem. Who knows if it will all ever be realized, but it’s fun to speculate. Look for that in Part 3!
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