Two employees at the East Lake County Library created a fictional
patron called Chuck Finley – entering fake driver’s license and address
details into the library system – and then used the account to check
out 2,361 books over nine months in 2016, in order to trick the system
into believing that the books they loved were being circulated to the
library’s patrons, thus rescuing the books from automated purges of
low-popularity titles.
Library branch supervisor George Dore was suspended for his role in the
episode; he said that he was trying to game the algorithm because he
knew that these books would come back into vogue and that his library
would have to spend extra money re-purchasing them later. He said that
other libraries were doing the same thing.
This is datification at its worst: as Cennydd Bowles writes, the pretense that the data can tell you what
to optimize as well as how to optimize it makes systems incoherent –
it’s the big data version of “teaching to the test.” The library wants
to be efficient at stocking books its patrons will enjoy, so it deploys
software to measure popularity, and raises the outcomes of those
measurements over the judgment of the skilled professionals who acquire
and recommend books, who work with patrons every day. Instead of being a
tool, the data becomes a straightjacket: in order to get the system to
admit the professional judgment of librarians, the librarians have to
manufacture data to put their thumbs on its scales. The point of the
library becomes moving books by volume (which is only one of the several
purposes of a library), and “the internal framing of users shifts.
Employees start to see their users not as raison d’être but as subjects,
as means to hit targets. People become masses, and in the vacuum of
values and vision, unethical design is the natural result. Anything that
moves the needle is fair game: no one is willing to argue with data.”
Software is not objective. The designers of the library’s software made a subjective
decision to take the measurements they are taking, and to respond to
them in the way they are responding to them. The librarians who’d use
the software are treated as adversaries, not allies – they are there to
be controlled by the software, not informed by it. Just like the nurses who assign junior staffers
to hit the spacebar at 10 second intervals to keep their terminals from
re-prompting them for a password, the librarians who could not override
the software by executive edict resorted to chicanery to get their jobs
done.
That’s the important takeaway here: these librarians didn’t monkeywrench
their software for personal gain. They did it because they wanted to
make the system better, to teach it how to weight the
circulation data to reflect the on-the-ground intelligence and
historical perspective they had on their libraries, their collections
and their patrons.
Science fiction has grappled with this exact problem in the past: Connie Willis’s 20-year-old classic novella Bellwether
features a patron (a social scientist who specializes in fads!) who
goes to the library every week to check out titles that she knows to be
out of vogue, but significant, to trick the library systems into
retaining them.
The problem here isn’t the collection of data: it’s the blind adherence
to data over human judgment, the use of data as a shackle rather than a
tool. As the article in the Orlando Sentinel hints, this is because
“money wars” have made enemies out of the city and its librarians – and
as this episode highlights, there is no good way to proceed amidst that
enmity. Just as treating teachers as lazy welfare bums who must be
measured with standardized tests has lowered educational
standards and driven out the best teachers, so will any other system
that treats employees as problems rather than solutions engender a
continuous, spiraling arms race that will never solve the problem.
The Hero’s we never knew existed. No. Seriously. Fuck the kind of Heroism that seeks recognition and acknowledgment (Much like…-Oh, I don’t know-… Law Enforcement?). True Hero’s are the ones doing what they do, KNOWING that no one will ever know their names or that they even exist. Doing what they do NOT for the accolades or cheers but because it’s the Right thing to do and doing it is Important. No medals, no Keys to the City, no parades, pictures, or newspaper articles. Just doing the Right Thing because it NEEDS to be done and then getting on with their lives. THAT is a Hero.
Mooncustafer 