UR LOCAL CYBORG

thoughts on the election as an aspiring GLAM worker

6th Nov 2024


or: i’m just saving this here for the future me who has an MLIS and answers to things

Screenshot of an Instagram story that reads, "We are about to lose access to a lot of important information and resources, they WILL ban books. they WILL take down websites. they will do everything to try and silence us. hold this information close to your heart, save everything important on a hard drive, buy physical copies of books, and most importantly SPREAD IT. make zines, wheat paste fliers, share it with your friends and your community, keep this information accessible and try to spread it as much as you can. your future relies on us. don't let our knowledge burn."

I spent my college years reckoning with the thought of working for an institution. No way, I thought in freshman year; a military brat for the first half of my life, and sick of the rigidity of academia, I intended to go straight into the private sector. Maybe leave school in three years.

But I grew up in the belly of the beast, the cradle of the Nation’s Capital, and as I continued my studies I fell in begrudging love with the knowledge institutions I was surrounded by. The belt of universities, the white marble libraries, the boxes of zines in manila envelopes collected and cherished by the citizen archivists and former punk rockers that found their call in this machine. I bought anarchist patches and chipped in to mutual aid and frequented DIY spaces that exist in the cracks of crumbling social infrastructure, yet decided to be part of the concrete.

But it wasn’t the National Archives or the Smithsonian Museums or the Library of Congress that made me see value in institution. It was the city pool on a hot summer day. As I walked to the lockers, past the splash of laughing families and the lap swimmers’ spirited gasps and the maze of kids at the hot dog stand, I thought about the structures that hold down our everyday and realized someone’s got to maintain it.

One man in the White House will not inherently corrupt the decent people working to maintain local infrastructure—the lifeguards, the librarians. But can I, in good conscience, shake hands with curators who bleach their history white for fear of Black and Brown blood? Can I yield to powerful men who snatch books from public shelves that teach children how to articulate their autonomy? What does it mean to be an archivist under the administration of a felon who smuggles papers meant for public record into the authority of his private home?

“Nothing can get in the way of saving our democracy,” said President Biden when he left the race, “not even personal ambition.” It is indeed personal ambition, that I’ve been dazzled by prestigious institutions and their fancy machines. No, I am not abandoning my ambitions to be part of GLAM. No, of course I don’t believe that it will “save our democracy” to have one fewer librarian in the system. And no, just because the revulsion of the present moment manifested in this morning’s news, doesn’t mean that universities were not bombed, students were not tazed, libraries were not turned to rubble under the current administration. But with Trump’s re-election I am once again reminded that that to train for a career in an American institution is to prepare for a lifetime of fight.


← Back to all posts