 Steven Walker (@swalker_7) via Twitter
Today: Writer and editor Maria Bustillos, and Colin McGowan, a writer living in Chicago.
Issue No. 143Fighting Words
Maria Bustillos Chats From Underground
Colin McGowan
Fighting WordsFollowing their eradication of the school’s gender studies program and their closure of its thirty-year-old student Gender and Diversity Center, the far right-wing trustees of New College in Sarasota, Florida kept right on going with their barbarian rampage last week, as the Gender and Diversity Center’s books on LGBTQ+ topics were dumped, yes, into a dumpster. The Gender and Diversity books were a student-curated collection, and not formally part of the library, but the books were dumped simultaneously with a culling of books from the main library. That gave New College president Richard Corcoran the opportunity to sneakily write, in a note to the campus community, “The administration at New College has never been involved in deciding which books are selected or deselected from the library’s collection”—conveniently omitting that the discarded LGBTQ+ books weren’t technically part of the library’s collection. In what appears to be related news, faculty board representative Amy Reid, former chair and founding director of the gender diversity program, announced on Thursday that she is taking a year-long leave of absence. On the service formerly known as Twitter, New College board member Chris Rufo gloatingly claimed responsibility for both the book dumping and the abolition of the gender studies program, explicitly linking the two. All this happened because in 2023 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis installed a herd of his prurient Republican creepo pals on the board of trustees of New College, including Rufo. That’s right, the guy who tweeted all that gross stuff about trans people two weeks ago—the guy who stoked the conflagration of outrage that resulted in the resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay!—was put in charge of a once-revered public liberal arts college in Florida, along with a few of his fellow creepos. More than a third of the faculty, about 40 professors, had quit within the year. “The fact that these books…were discarded in the dead of night, without transparency, and without giving students the opportunity to preserve them, should outrage every Floridian and every American who values democracy and free thought,” Bacardi Jackson of the Florida ACLU responded. The slow-motion intellectual demolition of New College is part of an escalating far-right campaign to inflict damage on educational institutions through book bans, board takeovers, and attacks on professors and curricula, all focused on curbing or reversing decades of progress on diversity, access, and freedom of thought. Earlier this month, books by Judy Blume, Margaret Atwood, Rupi Kaur, and Sarah J. Maas were ordered to be removed from every public school classroom and library in the state of Utah. A report published in March by the American Library Association showed a nearly twenty-fold increase in challenges to library books in the last three years. How to fight back? Through public accountability, through yelling, and through the development of better protections for libraries and their collections. There’s loads of video and detailed photos of the New College books in the dumpster, and some of the books were reportedly rescued by students and others. There are named witnesses who can produce this evidence, along with what I hope will be demands for accountability in the days to come. Reading about the book dump at New College freaked me out on this whole other level, too, because I am a longtime activist on behalf of digital libraries and archives. Ebooks can be destroyed much more quietly than paper books; invisibly, even. You can’t photograph ebooks that have been destroyed. You can’t pull them back out of the trash. But while those who control the servers that house digital library collections can and sometimes do vaporize them, vast quantities of digital records can also be copied and recopied and backed up in multiple spaces in ways that physical media cannot. For the future of libraries, the digitization of books can serve as both sword and shield. The fate of the New College library’s digital collections had gone unremarked in media reports, so I investigated a bit. In an email, New College comms director Nathan Hill told me that the “repurposing” of the space that previously held the Gender and Diversity Center had nothing to do with the library or its repository of digital collections, adding, “There are no plans to take down or remove anything from the repository at this time.”
Because the far right has gone clean off the rails in its campaign to destroy intellectual freedom, libraries—lots and lots of libraries—need to be able to own and secure their own collections. And it’s important that libraries own, rather than just license, their ebook collections, because then they can be stored locally, backed up, and archived, rather than potentially being subject to the control of a publisher or distributor or Ron DeSantis. This is part of the reason the Brick House cooperative is developing BRIET, an app that independent publishers can use to sell their ebooks to libraries, for keeps. The books a library owns are protected legally in a number of ways that rented materials are not. Copyrighted ebook files need extra safeguards against unlawful copying, and that requires a bit of extra tech. Nevertheless it is essential: ebooks are books, and they need to be protected the same way as paper books.
Last week the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced its own new program offering some 38,000 ebook titles for sale to libraries, representing about three percent of the 1.2 million books on offer in their partner organization, the Palace Marketplace. These ebooks are offered for sale in partnership with the Independent Publishers Group (IPG). Progress from our colleagues at DPLA in the direction of securing inalienable digital ownership rights for libraries is excellent news, and we were proud to present an update on BRIET alongside them at the recent Ebook Friday at the annual conference of the American Library Association. As these new projects come online, it’s important to keep our ultimate goal in view: to preserve for ebooks all the rights and protections afforded to paper library books, so that libraries will be able to own, preserve, and loan them freely. Micah May, Director of Ebook Services at DPLA, has generously answered some, but not all, of our questions about the condensed published terms of DPLA’s new ownership model. We look forward to continuing to examine and refine our ideas, working together to ensure, and to increase, library ownership of ebooks. Brick House, as an independent publisher, wholeheartedly offers and sells its own books to libraries through BRIET. The BRIET Bookmarket we’re building stocks ebooks from Hydra members who want libraries to loan and circulate their works, plus a whole vivid and brilliant world of amazing ebook titles from other independent publishers who likewise understand the stakes, including Punctum Books, Silver Sprocket, PM Press, and Sideshow Media Group. Participating BRIET publishers share a vision of wanting our ebooks to live and flow through libraries and schools. Years ago, you might have used a Xerox machine to make fuzzy greyish paper copies, page by page, of a rare book; today, the stolen PDF of a valuable book could potentially be copied and distributed to millions of people in a matter of minutes. Though we are slowly and carefully making use of reliable open source solutions, the endgame of translating protections for copyrighted ebooks directly into the digital environment is a little tricky. BRIET’s strategy, so far, is to connect only with independent publishers who (like us!) are willing to trust the libraries we work with to protect and loan our ebooks exactly the same way they always have with paper ones, loaning one book to one patron at a time. The preservation of a rich, healthy literary and academic culture relies directly on the true preservation of traditional library rights—and that means reestablishing trust between publishers, librarians, and readers, or else risk our civilization crumbling before the depredations of the barbarian hordes.
FLAMING SWORD OF JUSTICE Chad Millman, via Bloomberg Don't miss Hydra Tommy Craggs at Bloomberg, with a gorgeous, blistering report on the rise of “oily and unlovely” gambling-oriented sports media.
Chats From Underground HipHopSite dot com, via the Wayback Machine This story is part of The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past.
I grew up in a small town, in a development abutting a golf course. My dad watched CBS cop shows and my mom read Sue Grafton. The boys in the neighborhood, sons of nuke plant engineers and chain store franchisees, were targeting a kind of postwar, Life magazine–inflected success (AP calc classes, pilot licenses) or else ferally pissing away their privilege (drunk driving home from parties staged in sagging brown lakehouses). I was too dumb for the first thing and only dabbled in the latter, and anyway, neither appealed to me as a model for living. I held myself in the immense but vacant esteem of a teenager who had read exactly three difficult books. This was nothing like a worldview, a personality, or a plan. I just knew I wanted something other than what was right in front of me. Out in the paved Vegas desert, across the street from UNLV’s campus, there used to be a record store called HipHopSite, the brick-and-mortar outpost of a mostly online retail operation. It sold and shipped rap CDs, tapes, and records nationwide, specializing in “underground hip-hop.“ That is to say, loquacious art schoolers testing the load-bearing capacity of squirrelly jazz loops, nouveau traditionalists billing themselves as descendants of Big Daddy Kane and A Tribe Called Quest, rappers from Tribe and Kane’s era lingering like benevolent uncles at a kegger, neckbearded white guys doing white lines off The Anarchist Cookbook. Most of this music doesn’t hold up, but at the time it struck me as infinitely more interesting than what was on MTV, and what other kids listened to. HipHopSite had a blog with news and reviews, which I read every day. It also had an active forum community into which I disappeared for a few years, because nobody I knew in real life was aware that—[tightens backpack straps]—Murs from Living Legends and Slug from Atmosphere had collaborated on an album called Felt, or that Felt 2 had a July 2005 release date. The discourse on the HHS forums was unremarkable. A lot of hyperbole and backlash about new releases. A lot of tortured ranking of rappers by way of false metrics: lyricality: 4.5/5, flow: 4/5, mic presence: 4/5. What made a stronger impression on me were the fragments of other people’s lives percolating through the dismal arguments about Def Jux back-benchers. Among them, I learned that there is shit you can say from behind a screenname that you might not be willing to tell anyone else. You can construct an idea of yourself through extravagant lies. You can also be disgustingly honest. I assume we were all doing a mix of the two. Was this friendship, exactly? I don’t know, but I remember these people. Keef was a tornadic Londoner powered and ravaged by several competing habits, who was living in his wife’s parents’ basement. He would occasionally send me beats he made on his laptop, iterations of which would describe his journey on the night of their creation: “Stomp (couple beers),” “Stomp 2 (fucking drunk),” “Stomp 3 (into the hash now).” Isayu was from Oakland. Asked about his handle, he said that he identified intensely with Esau, the biblical character conned out of his birthright by his younger brother Jacob. He had discovered the story on his own, and so he didn’t know he was pronouncing Esau wrong: I-say-u. Nobody asked him what his brother had done, or whether Isayu had forgiven him. Benny was a Newton, Mass. kid, not much older than me, who DJed regularly at a couple Boston venues and got accepted into Emerson’s music program. He had mild Asperger’s that he said caused his eyelids to droop a bit, joked about it in a way that betrayed a certain insecurity. I thought everything he was doing sounded impossibly cool. HipHopSite’s Vegas storefront shuttered in 2007, and a year later, it stopped selling music entirely. In March 2015, the site shut down for good. Somewhere along this timeline, the forums went kaput. This escaped my notice; I had moved on by then. People still frequent internet forums organized around niche interests, as they did in the W. Bush era, whether on old forums like Usenet, Metafilter, and HackerNews, whose interfaces betray their age, on thriving subreddits, or in the comments at Defector. But the technology-powered social upheaval brought about by the simple act of strangers conversing online has gone largely unappreciated. At each stage of this rapid evolution, we've lacked the proper perspective. My parents didn't understand it as it was happening, because they didn't engage with it. I didn't either because I was very young and it was the water I was swimming in. Nobody, to my knowledge, clearly anticipated how the forum concept would marry with chat and news and search and modern forms of cynicism as social media became prominent, then dominant. "Society" unwittingly assumed new forms constructed from a new network of human connections across vast physical spaces. That awareness came for millions of people all at once; for me it came out of the HipHopSite forums. I took into early adulthood the knowledge that there were people, all fully complicated and real, who were living much differently from the ones I saw each day at school and around town. This is a simple and obvious thing, but it’s vital information when your notion of the world is a handful of gauzy assumptions, most of which you’ve picked up from movies and secondhand accounts of what somebody’s older brother is getting up to “down in New York.” The forums gave me hope. I started to think with greater clarity about where I might go and what I might do, after I left the place where I knew I didn’t belong.
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