Death of the Public Library? Who Are Those Masked Men? And will AI Take my Job?

Occasionally, I do a blog that mostly draws from things I have read or listened to that week and which I found noteworthy. As another week draws to a close, here’s one of those.

I hope the headline “The Death of the Public Library” is hyperbole, but the issue it discusses is real, and real in Seattle. Many libraries have become de-facto homeless shelters. Meanwhile, library use has gone down while “incidents” in libraries have gone up. This is true at our local branch of the Seattle Public Library here in Ballard. At night people are camped outside the library under a portico (the city sends a clean-up crew most mornings). During the day much of the seating is occupied by homeless people who, yes, have a right to use the library, but not to use it as a shelter. My own usage of the Ballard library has gone down because of this, making me part of a national trend. Here’s an excerpt from an article by Zac Bissonnette:

“All over the country, libraries are seeing fewer visitors and more problems. Per-resident visits to public libraries fell by 56.6 percent in the 10 years ending in 2022. Meanwhile, a report from the Urban Libraries Council found that between 2019 and 2023, security incidents rose at its 115-member libraries, even as visits fell another 35 percent. It’s not a coincidence, of course, that visits are down while incidents are up.”

But apparently in the guild of librarians this is a taboo topic. The official word is that library usage decline owes to the internet and to people not reading books. But not everyone agrees. Still it’s risky to say so, as Bissonnette notes.

“Most librarians I spoke with were nervous about discussing these problems because they’ve seen the consequences of bucking the progressive tide that swept America’s libraries. Amanda Oliver, a former Washington, D.C. librarian, is the author of Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library, a book that describes the problems that come with the homeless takeover of the library. She told me, ‘I was only able to write this book because I was no longer a librarian.’”

My mother and sister were both librarians. I wonder what they would say, but sadly, I can’t ask them. For sure it’s a dilemma but I don’t think the answer is for libraries to forget their core mission and public or for librarians to morph into social workers and libraries into shelters.

ICE in Masks

The evolution of ICE into masked hombres is scary, dangerous and flat-out wrong. Two pieces came my way about this recently. One at the Substack site “Persuasion,” the second from Seattle Times columnist, Danny Westneat, on a recent raid in Seattle’s White Center neighborhood.

At Persuasion, Damon Linker writes that ICE is morphing into a national police force. He quotes the Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol: “Immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice. Now Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources—much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors Trump patronizes, but lots of [it is] to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens. The Miller-Trumpites are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants. They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.”

Case in point is Westneat’s column about the White Center raid by masked and not unidentified, but presumably, ICE agents. Of the masking and lack of identification Westneat writes: “The mask-wearing should be flat-out illegal for any law enforcement. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said ICE agents are masking up to protect themselves from a hostile public. But that’s what helmets are for. Masks are for hiding — from accountability, or from your own shame. If the cause is legal and righteous, then why cover up?”

More from Westneat: “The Trump administration demanded that universities ban the wearing of masks at student protests. ‘What do these people have to hide?’ Trump mocked the students. Meanwhile his immigration enforcers were copying the tactic . . . I would bet an immigration policy that we’re really proud of is one we could also show our faces for. Is that too much to ask? Also, how about we leave the food ladies of America alone.” (In White Seattle they arrested a woman known locally as “the food lady.” She was subsequently released.)

Getting to AI

Early in the week I grumped about how we’re getting AI like it or not. Arguably the more serious issue is AI’s current and anticipated impact on employment. It appears that what globalization did to blue-collar workers, AI may do to white-collar ones. So says both a Wall Street Journal podcast and one from Ezra Klein.

The WSJ podcast begins with a poignant interview with a discouraged recent college graduate who can’t find work despite careful preparation for the job market throughout her studies. In the Klein piece, which is primarily about what we’re now calling “The Attention Economy,”  much is also made of AI’s impact on Gen Z employment and — red flag — on the declining value of a college diploma.

I’d like to think that might lead to a resurgence of interest for college students studying the humanities rather than or in addition to computer science and related majors, but that is probably wishful thinking. Of late a college degree has been sold as the ticket to a good job and a high income, but that oft-stated promise is proving less reliable. Big corporations like Microsoft are turning to AI and reducing workforces. This could become a very big social issue, given what the globalization and its impact on working class people have wrought in our politics.