Decommodified Fetish: A Leftist Library Project

Free stuff, free stuff, free stuff

In our upcoming issue, librarians in the Baltimore public library system describe being everything for everyone all the time: social workers, amateur EMTs, college counselors, free speech defenders. So how about asking not what your library can do for you, but what you can do for your library — and signing up for For the People: A Leftist Library Project. Their newsletter is a handbook for joining the left flank of local library politics, with news roundups and how-tos and action items. They’re also recruiting people to collect data on elected library positions nationwide, and candidates to run for them.

Recently, thanks to their links, I read up on the scourge of prison library censorship. There’s a company called the Keefe Group, a subsidiary of Advanced Technologies Group, that has a $76 million contract with the Bureau of Prisons to provide tablets to incarcerated people. The reading materials the company offers – often for a fee borne by the incarcerated or their loved ones – are largely public domain materials from sites like Project Gutenberg (free stuff, indeed.) Tablets are replacing paper in jails and prisons for both entertainment and correspondence. The argument is that mail is a conduit for contraband, but how convenient that tablets make money for the institutions and their contractors, too! (Read Sarah Stillman’s reporting on how tablet-based video calls have become so lucrative that jails are doing away with in-person visitation.) Prison Banned Books week is leading a push to bring local library catalog access to jails, as San Francisco has. ––Cora Currier