This is the text of a short Ignite talk I gave at the Access Conference in 2016. Ignite format is 5 minutes with auto-advancing slides every 15 seconds, so that’s why it’s got the lack of detail it does. I might link to a video version of this talk at some point too, ’cause otherwise the mad prophet aspect might get a little lost. In the meantime, please enjoy.
Hi everyone. I’m J Jack Unrau.
I don’t code much but I spend loads of my time on a public library info desk doing community tech support and talking about digital privacy, which is what I’m here for today.
just a bunch of hilarious stuff
Having been a children’s librarian and radio-based reading advisor, I feel well-equipped to tell you a story about what it means to me to teach people how to deal with the cyberpunk dystopia we have the fortune to be living in.
libr*folk get people hacked
Do you remember 2013 when a huge list of IDs and passwords were stolen from Adobe, including all the accounts librarians had made people get so they could read Overdrive ebooks?
It was terrible explaining to people what happened, & not just because it was our fault.
inigo montoya line (not that bit, the other one)
Adobe was storing passwords in poorly encrypted fashion and transmitting them in cleartext.
Or plaintext.
Plaintext?
Shoot, which is for vim and which is about encryption again?
Anyway.
The words cleartext and plaintext got bandied about a bunch.
escape from efrafa
In the wake of this breach, our library’s agitated techy public services librarians, like Emily Orr, got a notification posted and warned people to change their passwords.
And then we fell down the rabbithole of translating what cleartext means to plainspoken people.
clarity
Because it’s kind of counter-intuitive.
We usually want people who aren’t making some artistic statement to be clear communicators.
We want to get to the point in 300 seconds.
We want to communicate plainly and simply.
We want to tell our stories so we’re understood.
the opposite of clarity
When we’re teaching encryption and security, though, we’re promoting the value of obfuscation and complication.
No matter how much we say “You don’t do this because you have something to hide! It’s not just for pornographers” it’s still weird.
library freedom project
Some smart public-oriented folk have been working on this education project: teaching people what it means to encrypt for your security and liberty.
Alison Macrina‘s founding work on the Library Freedom Project is hugely important and useful.
They are showing us a path to teach these skills to our users.
So what are we doing with those resources?
we do what we must because we can
I teach monthly classes on electronic privacy (that are sparsely attended).
In these sessions we talk about governments and corporations and other thieves, what they want with people’s data, things they will do to get it, and what people can do to try and protect themselves.
using tech better will save us!
I explain digital rights management to our senior citizens.
For Freedom to Read Week a teen and his mom and I built a Tor router from a Raspberry Pi.
I’m doing my part to inch people along the path to looking after their security, to knowing why transmitting in cleartext is so bad.
but it won’t
However, this is not a “we done good” story.
This is a story set in 2016, after all.
This is ending in an apocalyptic trash fire.
normalizing technocracy
The world we inhabit is one where you can have all sorts of digital freedom if you know how to code, navigate pirated media repositories, blocklist the cesspools of Twitter, or run a VPN around Netflix / a repressive regime.
everyone loves setec astronomy
This world is made for people like me.
Doing what I do makes me feel good about “fixing” our users.
I love my secret arcane knowledge and I love sharing that secret arcane knowledge to help technophobes understand what I love about these tools.
we don’t need more technologists
But that makes the story about people like us.
Our goal can’t be to make the public more like us.
Doing this education stuff feels more and more like sharing tips from the lucky times the techy scouts weren’t squashed by the giants out ravaging.
earning freedom is bullshit
Teaching special tech tricks to fix our special users – the ones who ask for the knowledge, come to the classes – that isn’t enough.
That lets things get worse and worse for those who have more important things to do than taking a class on Facebook privacy settings (like Facebook chatting with their kid three timezones away).
obliquity
I’m an info-desk librarian.
I love helping people directly.
Communicating clearly about this stuff to a few people at a time feels good, but isn’t efficient.
The **most important** thing I’ve done for our users is harass IT into installing Privacy Badger on our public computers.
can we build it?
Users need tools for a default experience that is better for them than what fresh surveillance machines from BestBuy can do.
Maybe with Calibre and DeDRM plugins and LibraryBoxen and VPNs and adblockers for everyone we could make libraries have people’s backs even if they have no tech skills.
probably not
I get that there are economic concerns and political concerns in libraries and society that have grim answers for “why don’t we just…?” kinds of questions.
They’re the giants trampling the countryside, the 6th and 7th suns, all that apocalyptic stuff we can’t affect while we scurry among the shitty policies.
we’re doomed. now what?
Roy Scranton wrote this essay last year about how we can’t look to technology or politics to save us from climate change and the end of western civilization.
We have to learn how to remember and let go.
For me, sharing stories is the remembering value we’re adding.
uplifting dénouement missing
I guess I’m just saying teaching digital privacy classes gives us and our users practice at sharing the ransomware folktales we’ll someday tell huddled round our trashcan fires.
Which wasn’t what I expected, but I think it still has value.
Thanks. No moral.
librarianaut 