I’m deliberately trying to do “retired guy” stuff. I’ve played bingo… perhaps for the first time since elementary school. I’ve started to go to the library.
When I was a wee lad, libraries were literally the the place they kept the knowledge.
If you didn’t want knowledge, you didn’t go there.
The library was a high end, Lisa Simpson and Mensa nerds, place. You had to get there, which usually (though not always) implied you had a car. Nobody went there to engage in group fun. There were no green haired harridans griping about capitalism. There were no homeless people (fuck it, I’m calling them bums, because bums is the word). Bums weren’t doing unholy things in the bathroom.
Librarians were cranky but also absolute bastions of learning. Card catalogs were less effective than a modern relational database but librarians loved it when you came to them with questions. Or at least they were nice about it.
Me: “I need to know what Hemingway was doing in Cuba and if this was before or after he wrote ‘The Sun Also Rises’.”
Librarian: “Glad you asked. Let’s check this book I noticed the last time some poor sap attended the same class taught by the same teacher.”
Everything was well lit, clean, and quiet. It was civilized; a refuge. A place so chill and boring as to drift into timeless mellow.
I fondly remember demographic bands ebbing and flowing. Children happily reading Cat in the Hat were the same age but not the same mentality as their “window licker” peers. To many kids, a trip to the library was a treat. Imagine that!
Then came little old ladies with knitting bags. They diligently ground through endless versions of “handsome cowboy and the school marm”. (Harlequin romances?) I’m not sure if this still happens. It was before plots about hunky vampires and wolfmen vying for the affection of vaguely undefined, possibly minor-age, girls. It feels like the age of “romantasy” readers is younger, but what do I know?
I was uncommon; young, male, broke, blue collar, literate, and trying to lever information into… something. I dredged through stacks for a Chilton’s Manual to keep my car running. (I was a shitty mechanic then too, but cars were simpler. I don’t know if Chilton’s still exist.)
My other purpose was school work. I wasn’t doing school work at school libraries because I actually learned shit… at least I learned as much as was possible. In general, nothing intelligent and minimal learning has ever happened at school (or college) library.
At the public library, I found the only word processor I could get my hands on. I monopolized it. Back then you could write a paper, on paper, with a pen; like a medieval monk. What kind of idiot would do that in the new world of word processing? The answer was “nearly everyone but me”.
I’d grind out a paper in half the time of peers using paper and pen, because word processors excel at their purpose. There were some logistic issues. The printer was always broke. I got good at fixing it. It was often out of paper. I brought my own paper. (It was tractor feed paper I’d “allegedly” stolen from some unattended secretary’s workstation.) It would be decades before electronic submission of papers. (I presume crappy student essays are now downloaded directly from the student’s AI to the teacher’s AI detector.)
I disciplined myself to do solid mechanical A-/B grade writing. No surprises. No deep thoughts. I tried (sometimes unsuccessfully) to avoid letting a teacher know I had wrongthink. (Did you suppose teachers being commie pinheads is new?)
Teachers back then (and I assume now) hammered into their students the idea of being a human meat-bot aggregator. Literally, our essays were akin to Large Language Models. If you have interesting things to say… don’t. Say what everyone else says. Never, ever, under any circumstances, spring original thought on a teacher!
To me, grades were vaguely irrelevant. In my eyes, one A meant you got the material, ten meant you could have (and should have!) taken more credits. (Especially in college; where every credit has a dollar cost!) Before grade inflation, I believed straight A students we’re just mid-level minds that could have gotten a B in twice as many credits. Maybe I was wrong? I also don’t know A means anything in 2026. I’m not sure the degree means anything. It’s not my world.
An aside:
Before bitching about AI, remember it’s just an LLM. People have been assigned the idea they should freak out are following orders. Who cares their opinion? The same A students I mocked decades ago with their bic pens and paper notebooks now think someone who is not them ought to control a machine lest it “outthink” them. In due time and they’ll go back to fretting over climate, or cholesterol, or my 3d printer, or whatever else they’re told to chatter about.
Technology changes things. That’s life. I don’t give a shit about a John Deere combine displacing armies of men with hand scythes in 1925. You’re not sad you’re not out there breaking a sweat in Kansas are you? Nobody gave a shit about robots welding car parts in the 1970s. Nobody cared about an ATM being a bank teller in 1990s. Nobody gives a shit about “AI” calculating the best fuel injection nozzle geometry; because that’s out of their realm of experience.
We’re just monkeys encountering a new thing.
I was once impressed at a microwave oven. AI won’t be an extinction level event anymore than the microwave was.
If the mind control tracking machine you carry in your pocket instructs you freak out try turning the phone off. What’s really happening is that the “AI bubble” is going to deflate. Nobody knows when, but it’ll happen. Before it happens, corporations that put all their chips on the table need regulatory capture. That offloads their risk. Agitating the easily agitated is a predictable and well used fiscal gambit.
LLMs only tell people what globs of text statistically stated, on average. Picture your dipshit cousin sitting on a barstool. He’s on his fourth light beer and talking about how the economy is really controlled by space lizards in Newark. He’s never been to Newark. Wherever he picked up his idea it’s probably virtual. Let’s say it’s Reddit. Your cousin amplified right back to the virtual world. Let’s say Facebook. Someone bounced it to X. And it goes round and round. The LLM digested all that crap. Just like your idiot cousin, the LLM has never physically been to Newark and it hasn’t seen a space lizard. That a lot of text was written about them does not make it true.
AI is always telling you exactly what a crowd of thousands would say. Aggregating is not thinking. Teachers trained students to do the same. Politicians trained it into voters.
People in groups don’t think, they’re just a mob. Five years ago they wanted to put me in a camp over a shot. In some places (I’m looking at you Australia) they really did put people in concentration camps. Now, they’re whining about “super intelligence”. Sure Jan. The thing that’s dangerous is stupid people following instructions and nothing more.
Anyway, back to my memories of libraries.
Back then I was jealous of retired guys leisurely going to the library. They would read the paper as if they didn’t give a shit about anything… because they didn’t. They’d read the paper for free; as if the $0.25 savings mattered, which it didn’t. Sometimes they’d have a cup of coffee, absolutely verboten yet carefully ignored. Nobody messes with an old man’s coffee, which is right and proper.
It was a long time ago.
Amid my piles of literature searches and Monday deadlines, I wanted to be like them. This summer, I ventured into the long abandoned world of a library.
First thing’s first; the reputation is tarnished. The internet makes libraries moot and Kindle holed them below the waterline. Also, city libraries have a reputation as open air zoos of creepy weirdos. The books are reputedly crap freaky leftoid librarians picked out of their progressive brain.
But I found a rural library. It’s tiny. It’s in the middle of nowhere. You need a car get to get there. It seems rather sane! It’s not as degraded as the rest of society. It’s politics free or at least the progressives are keeping it in their pants. They have some DVDs, which probably mystify the younger crowd and don’t appeal to me.
When I venture in there I feel like a man from a different time. I am.
Kindle changed my behavior and I have fewer dead tree books in my house than I once did. The library seems to have fewer physical books too. (I checked out an e-book from the library, which seems like a self-licking ice cream cone.)
There are still lots of kids. The kids seem as happy as ever. They have crayons (!). They were using them without the expected mishaps. That’s great!
There are computers. Why? For the six humans who still don’t have one? These machines were ignored. At least they aren’t being debased by weird bums surfing porn. (I think bums are now issued cell phones for that purpose?)
It was empty, but quiet, polite, and civilized. I see potential.
I was looking for a specific book. I expected they didn’t have it. They didn’t.
I got a library card, which required more ID than voting.
I immediately ordered some stuff from interlibrary loan. This didn’t annoy the librarian, nor did it impress her.
At home, I logged on to their “web presence”. This too reminded me of the past. Libraries were the first to embrace the burgeoning “internet”. Back when I had dial up modem I searched through my college’s online card catalog. I would come to the library with my desired books already selected.
When my special request book arrives I’ll get a text. When I get a text I’ll ride there on my obsolete motorcycle, walk in all armor clad like RoboCop, and walk out with a dead tree edition of a book I’ve already read.
There’s only one loss. I can’t be the old guy reading the paper. They have newspapers but what kind of lunatic reads them now? I stopped reading print newspapers sometime in the Obama administration. A habit I began as a paperboy with a bicycle died 20 years ago. I still miss it but it won’t come back. I outlived not just the media, but the concept .
Oh well, some things last and others don’t.
