Everyone should regularly reevaluate their relationships with technology. Data is constantly being collected around us; most modern technology packages surveillance and marketing research as fun toys and convenient tools. Conglomerate mergers, as well as lack of competition and regulation, have created a very small market with a loose, subpar standard of user data privacy.
That goes for the largest technology companies as well as smaller companies like library vendors. Digital privacy violations more adversely affect economically and socially disadvantaged groups. For example, identity theft is painful for everyone but can devastate the lives of low-income people who lack the resources to deal with its fallout.
Additionally, personal and behavioral data sets collected by third-party technology companies are frequently treated as commodities. We say privacy is a core value, but when libraries partner with third parties that share data that may later be used to deport people from the US—do we really want to contribute to that?
Misuse of data sets has the potential to further fuel data-driven discrimination that disproportionately affects marginalized groups. Biased historical practices, embedded in these numbers, created the status quo that allows black and brown communities to be over-policed today and continually put at a disadvantage. As libraries seek to improve their services or secure funding, they may feel pressured to collect data in-house to make a persuasive case. However, such data must be collected critically, especially that pertaining to underrepresented communities.
Many times, data collection can put the privacy of these groups at higher risk simply by exposing a lack of representation, making individuals identifiable. To protect vulnerable populations, libraries must ensure that data is collected ethically, stored securely, and anonymized.
Or consider not collecting patron data at all. Data is constantly being breached and compromised. For example, ransomware attacks on libraries and government systems are increasingly common, and even big corporations are being hacked.
Yes, technology connects us to people and resources, but unmediated technology implementation upholds the status quo and hurts the most marginalized. We can acknowledge how pervasive technology has become while rejecting the trend of constant surveillance that harms the communities we serve.
Although libraries were beginning to open, some people were hesitant about using these public spaces. Trust in libraries needed to be generated all over again.
Schools in the UK have never been closed. They have remained open either with a smaller number of key workers and vulnerable students or with their full cohort split into bubbles. However, school libraries certainly have been, and many still are, closed.
In most schools this is imparted via library lessons, which are currently not happening, so the challenge will be how to reach out to students. Another theme that was raised throughout the webinar was technology. This means being attuned to what your community needs.
Post-Covid this may require an audit to see if these have now changed. UK school librarians were very quick to move online last March, setting up collaborative spaces, providing digital services and working with teaching staff.
Case studies of what they achieved can be found on the Great School Libraries website and I know that some are planning on continuing with these initiatives. As soon as the emperor moved, law, order and good administration collapsed. This is probably why the Emperors in the 4th century were constantly on the move …. The trend among historians I read in graduate school was to push the Renaissance back earlier and earlier, but not to deny that there were losses requiring a renaissance.
If the U. The Pax Romana was also real or was it? Environmental pressure—rising seas, desertification, natural disasters—is probably already driving and will continue driving government dysfunction, while government dysfunction accelerates environmental degradation.
I am not entirely despairing. No one in the s would have dreamed that crime in the U. Maybe major technological breakthrough or an ice age will save us from global warming. The new print issue of the magazine has a short thought-experiment article , by me, on what happened after the fall of the Roman empire. The Eastern empire, based in Constantinople, had many more centuries to run. Over to the readers:. In my article I quoted Philip Zelikow, of the University of Virginia, on the difference between national-level and local officials.
At the state, local, and regional level, Zelikow said, elected and career officials have no choice but to work together and actually solve problems.
My grandparents came here with nothing. I am grateful, and feel a responsibility to give back. Your essay, comparing our federal state to Rome in its age of decline, strikes a chord, and in doing so fills me with an undeniable melancholy.
From a history professor of my own Boomer generation:. I have been thinking about that [Roman] period quite a bit lately, as we see the collapse of societal norms and the failure of many central governments to actually govern. I see the present as actually more in parallel to the fall of the republic in the first century B.
At that time, the empire had begun to take form, with vast amounts of wealth pouring into the center, but mainly enriching the senatorial oligarchs. The men who had fought the wars were forced off their land, which came to be farmed on vast plantations by slaves. The new global order failed the yeomen, mainly because the rich, who controlled the government, refused to relinquish any of their wealth to help the impoverished citizens. They engaged in wars with each other, mobilizing personal armies, and violence came to be used as a means of government with leaders of each side being killed by mobs, culminating in the death of Julius Caesar.
The society had become so divided that in the end, the only way to govern was by autocratic rule: Augustus. I fear that we are near that point, and that a demagogue will arise who has more shrewdness than our current demagogue-wannabe.
Trump has blazed the pathway that others can well follow. Think if Huey Long had been successful in the s. Populism can cut both ways; call them national populism and social populism …. We are seeing the breakdown of liberal democracy across the world, as happened in the s.
It was finally restored after a decade of slaughter. It may not be restored again. At the least, something new has to take form, and that will not come from our generation. Mainly, they wanted to share in the wealthy and stable Roman society, get a bit of land for their people, and be secure from tribes like the Huns on the other side of the border.
They knew Rome very well; many of their leaders had been leaders in the Roman armies, and many were Roman citizens. The Vandals were not really that vandalous …. In the same way, people are now migrating en masse into Europe and the U. Climate change plays a significant role in driving people out of their homelands, and that will only become worse over time.
Another factor, of course, is Western as well as internecine wars think Iraq and Syria , and Western support of brutal governments Central America. But the influx of a mass of outsiders into the Roman empire especially the western part did ultimately lead to the breakdown of the wealth and stability they had come for.
There were many reasons for this, including intertribal battling among the newcomers and the disappearance of the Roman legions as a controlling force, but there was a continuing social disintegration and insecurity. The stable Roman civitas crumbled, quickly in some places Britain and more slowly in others Gaul.
Mass immigration creates nationalist anger, which is fuel for nationalist demagogues. As the Roman society disintegrated, government did become ever more localized. That worked for a while in some places like France , but in time trade shrank, education declined, government services passed away, and instability increased. One could imagine some parts of the U. Infrastructure would fall apart, as it did in post-Roman Europe. More people would flow across unpoliced borders, adding to the disruption and to the reactions.
This would not play well in a society as well armed as the U. Even in our own long lives, can we know what history might see as having passed in our lifetimes, perhaps that we are now at the transition from the year Modern Age into what-we-do-not-know as John Lukacs has written?
Life went on, as for the frog in boiling water whom you have analyzed …. Several hundred years after the fall of Rome, new forms and new states began to take shape amid the ruins, and by the 12th century, western Europe was again thriving. But it was a long and difficult time between the fall of the empire and the rise of Europe.
I would not wish that on my children and grandchildren, or on theirs. The long-term results of the failure of governance we are living through will be regrettable, though perhaps as necessary as the Dark Ages. What seems more likely to me to occur over the next 50 years, and something that I oppose, is a rift, with sovereign-individual stance married to the corporatization of society ….
Instead of citizenship being based on contiguous borders, our lives are bounded by what membership card s we carry. I can go to an Amazon condominium after buying dinner at Whole Foods paid for by my Amazon coins via my Kindle and travel in my Amazon car ad infinitum. And if I am a Sapphire member, better deals as I jump from location to location but stay in the Amazon or Apple or Goggle or Facebook or whatever bubble. Blade Runner marries Brave New World. Finally, on the question of if this time is different compared with other times due to change!
Yes and no. I believe that in past periods, starting around , in these early periods, the degree of change was much greater than now. But the pace of change does seem to be much faster and disconcerting for all generations. This deserves further explanation, but who has the time to read, let alone write …? Another academic writes in a message I am substantially boiling down :. Given what is already well known about how the U.
For the past 70 years, young generations of Americans have been told that they ought to be living better than their parents. That was fine for the Boomers and for Gen Xers, but this is clearly not the case for Millennials. So we were lied to. Big surprise. So were the generations who fought for and against Prohibition, slavery, and Unionization and for Odoacer as well, arguably.
Why else would according to the U. The point is that we should never underestimate the power of ideology to bind people to a common cause, whether in the fifth century, the 11th century, or the 21st century. Ultimately, we as historians dismiss the significance of religion and collective conviction at our own peril.
With the rapid adoption of Christian laws and social structures throughout the Roman empire during and after the fourth century, the rigid laws fossilized a system of landowners fief holders and land workers peasants. The road to serfdom is something that ever since Hayek has been capitalized by the likes of Ayn Rand and her disciples, but it truly begins with the rules that one class lives by and another class lives above.
When ideology is co-opted by the elites to perpetuate their children to inherit their elite status whether we call it aristocracy or meritocracy , we return to the so-called Dark Ages. And it is the only actually reliable guide to studying the past that we have ever truly innovated since the time of Marcus Aurelius. For some, this is a reality. I read stories about the homeless problem in major U. I read daily how Big Tech companies are continuing to mislead the American public about how they monitor and police speech and content their employees regard as offensive, and God knows what with our personal information ….
We now live in a world where we can get anything we want, at any time of the day. Nearly all buildings and houses have central air-conditioning. Transportation is readily available for everyone. Murder rates are at all-time lows. Netflix programming has people indulging on their couches more than ever. And we have room to complain that America sucks? One of the reasons the Roman empire fell was not because of physical overextension by the state which is true , but by its people taking for granted what the Roman empire had done for the modern world ….
Is it any coincidence many of the founding era sought to emulate Roman law and antiquity as they established the republican virtues and culture of the s to the s?
And the ensuing years of lies, mismanaged wars, and bank bailouts; an incoherent foreign policy over multiple administrations; and now the rise of brash and offensive populism in both ideological camps have Americans feeling more anxious than ever ….
Perhaps we should be devoting much more to teaching civics again, and appreciating the separation of powers, appreciating why men like James Madison, George Mason, John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington matter so much that it is in our individual interest to be informed of who they were and what they did to establish the freedoms we often take for granted.
We should be embracing the fact that the Continental Army of was color-blind; that it stood about one-fifth African American at the Siege of Yorktown is extraordinary. Or that women and some African Americans were voting in New Jersey prior to …. It is from my longtime friend Eric Schnurer , who has worked in and written extensively including for The Atlantic about governance at all levels, from the local to the global.
What follows is a long but highly condensed version of his note. I would direct your attention to the place where he ends his argument: Local innovation is important now, and always has been. Over to Schnurer. I read with interest your piece on the fall of the Roman empire … in part because of the fact that you were really discussing a number of contemporary issues of obvious interest to me. The real question: Where is America headed? Seeing the world through a distorted 20th-century lens.
This is a warping effect that the civil-rights and Vietnam eras, with a dose of coming-right-after-the-FDR- era, has had on our understanding of U. Brown v. Board took 40 years of small litigation steps—not to mention dramatic changes throughout society, including the integration of the armed forces during and after WWII, just as the massive mobilizations of the peasantry in the Napoleonic Wars led eventually to the democratization of Europe.
The big events are the capstones—they are always driven and made possible by small-scale, localized innovations that eventually flow together into what is by then an inevitable deluge. The enlightening place to look is always local. The way to make a contribution is to go start a school that works, or a neighborhood organization that solves a problem …. There may very well be a largely recognizable U. But do you know a single person who would rather be living in the 13th century than today?
But the point of the piece was to suggest that maybe Americans should shift the way they talked and thought about the Roman Empire as a metaphor for this country. For as long as there has been an American republic, some Americans have worried about its impending Roman-style decline and fall.
I said: What about the time after Rome fell? What could we learn by imagining ourselves in our version of the Dark Ages—with a failed system of central governance, and life going on at the duchy-by-duchy, monastery-by-monastery level, which for us would mean cities, states, and regions? Oh my, you dove into a nasty controversy here. I know you are on a pitch about the renewal of our country at the local level.
I think that is wishful thinking, but whatever. But the Roman example is a doleful one. They became poorer, less secure, and less literate. One key observation: in the 4th century, an impoverished Italian shepherd ate his dinner on imported tableware, drank imported wine and seasoned his salad with imported oil. In the 6th century, the proudest possessions of kings were fancy safety pins, and their palaces were wooden halls with thatched roofs. In the years of the Empire, Rome imported so much olive oil that the 53 million decommissioned amphorae now form the hill of Monte Testaccio.
In the eighth, kings made do with whatever the local brewers could manage, and poured for their guests from decorated beakers made next door. In the fourth century, Romans built the Old St. The junk was nicer than anything money could buy. And they built S. Agnese fuori-le-mura, which is the size of a nice house. A Pompeiian perfume-seller left us long brothel graffiti as a tribute to a lovely evening. Lots of poor people left us graffiti.
Charlemagne never quite managed to learn to write. To the best of my knowledge, we know too little about what happened to North Africa in this era. In the second century, North Africa was a real economic powerhouse and a huge food exporter. The irrigation system was wrecked in battles over tax cuts for wealthy estate-owners, and that was that.
It was an ecological disaster that made the Western Empire unsupportable. Yes, there were bright spots—Lindesfarne, Kells, Aachen, Kyev—but they were bright in contrast to the prevailing misery. Find out what communities want from us and provide that service. Another thread was making libraries more accessible and welcoming to more members of the community:. Everyone needs help but no one wants to ask, myself included.
I have been impressed by the reference training I have seen at my library in order to better help people access information.
More of this would be great. Promote online services more. Promote the added value of professional. Many librarians also said that public libraries should partner more with other organizations and go out into the community to engage with new audiences:. We have to be extremely proactive and get out into our communities to show all the services we offer to support our communities. We can do all of this better together rather than trying to do it separately. There are thousands of people out there who have never been encouraged to use the library, who think it is just for scholars and computer users.
That is one of the biggest problems at my library. Along the same lines, several library staff members said that they felt the current layout of most libraries was an impediment to patrons, who are often confused by the Dewey Decimal system and may have difficulty finding or browsing for books:. Our goal is to make our resources easy to find.
Libraries need to look at modern ways to do that. Libraries should look at what barriers rules we have that impede the use of our resources. I have worked in a library with it and when it was new patrons thought it was a good thing. The more they had to use it the less they liked it and it was eventually changed back.
As a librarian, I love [the Dewey Decimal system] because I can find most any particular item right where it is supposed to be! But as a patron and a mom I find it cumbersome. We as library professionals need to focus on user experience as well.
When we asked library staff about the innovations and new services that they were most excited about, we received a range of responses. Having more digital materials available was high on the list, with many librarians said that they would love to have more e-books available, and also to offer more tablets and e-readers for checkout:.
I want a library where there is SO much to be found that it is a wonderful path of things to read and learn about! Money is the issue. Patrons hate the time it takes to authenticate for each database they want to explore. Netbooks, tablets and readers for checkout. And preloading them with hot books is a great idea. A method to provide e-books to the local community first before they are available throughout the whole county.
A better method for local stats regarding e-book usage. As far as I know we are the first library in the world to do this.
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