Below is a glimpse of what my unplugged life looks like, including some exclusive photos of my family’s new(ish) puppy!

I highly encourage everyone to find a moment to step away from their keyboard and toward something as serene as my experience here on the coast of Georgia. Also, if you’re looking for a sign to take a vacation, this is it.

Both sides of my family had a profound impact on me. They showed me that a wide network can be a living, breathing infrastructure. Most importantly, they taught me that even when you are upset with one another, moving on and maintaining that network is more valuable than being “right” in isolation.

I’ve been thinking about this family history a lot lately because, as my daughter gets older, I see my small nuclear family taking on the same living infrastructure. Just this morning, my husband and daughter took over some of my usual morning tasks because we were running behind.

My daily support structures mirror a realization I’ve had through writing this Substack: the ideas I share and talk through with all of you are rarely mine and mine alone. They belong to a network of individuals who help shape the ideas I write down, and I cannot, nor would I want to, take credit for all of them. This realization highlights a fundamental tension between how knowledge is actually created—in a web—and how it is often rewarded—as a solo performance.

The Myth of the Lone Expert

In academic, technology, and administrative circles, there is a persistent, ego-driven tendency to amplify one’s own voice while tamping down the voices of others. In higher education, we see this in the tenure and promotion system, which often forces individuals to worry about whose idea is “the best”. In open source, we see this in the elevation of a single developer who gets elevated into the role of benevolent dictator for life.

The idea of a Lone Expert poses a risk to communities. When a leader acts as if their knowledge is singular, they signal that feedback is unwelcome. For a colleague or junior staff member with an alternative viewpoint, approaching them with ideas or critiques is a high-risk maneuver. If the person at the top doesn’t acknowledge feedback or credit others’ ideas, the network stops being a public square for discussion and debate, striving to become the best version of itself, and instead becomes a hierarchy of silence.

Breaking this silence requires a different kind of leadership—one that views admitting ignorance or error as a strength rather than a weakness. Dismantling this hierarchy requires a radical shift in leadership values; it moves us away from performative certainty and toward an environment where admitting ignorance is viewed as an asset. In my own leadership, I’ve found that being willing to say “I don’t know” or “I was wrong” is actually a requirement for a healthy organization. If a leader is infallible, they aren’t a collaborator; they are an obstacle. By modeling vulnerability, we lower the risk of participation for everyone, allowing the network to reward the free exchange of ideas.

Did something I said spark an idea?

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This concept of the Lone Expert also appears in conversations about how we think. In a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show (gift link), Michael Pollan discussed the difference between “spotlight consciousness”—the narrow, goal-directed focus we use to get through a to-do list—and “lantern consciousness,” the expansive, 360-degree awareness we see in a child. I believe the Lone Expert model is a form of spotlight consciousness; it reduces the flow of ideas to a trickle, keeping a single ego productive.

“The Social is Epistemic”

In Mark Coeckelbergh’s Why AI Undermines Democracy and What To Do About It, he argues that democracy is built on a “social-epistemic basis”—it relies on knowledge, social relations, and trust. Hannah Arendt famously noted that totalitarian systems thrive by isolating individuals from one another and removing them from the public square. Pollan uses this warning to remind us of the dangers of such disconnection.

One of the most eloquent defenses of why networks of ideas matter comes from Lauren Pressley, who recently reflected on social epistemology over on LinkedIn. Drawing on the work of Margaret Egan and Jesse Shera from the 1950s, Pressley argues that knowledge is not produced by individual minds in isolation and then deposited into libraries for safekeeping. Instead, she argues that knowledge is produced through systems of validation, circulation, and critique.

Pressley describes the library not as an “information warehouse”—a place where pre-existing knowledge is stored—but as a social epistemic infrastructure. Using a brilliant metaphor, she suggests:

“The road doesn’t move the car. But without it, the car doesn’t go anywhere useful. The library is the road. But it might be even more accurate to say it’s the whole Department of Transportation, responsible not just for the surface you drive on but for whether the road reaches your neighborhood at all.”

When we treat ideas as the private property of a Lone Expert, we treat knowledge like an item in a warehouse. As Pressley notes, “The social is epistemic.” The network isn’t just a support system for the knowledge; it is a constituent part of the knowledge itself.

When we fixate on the Lone Expert, we effectively erase the living infrastructure that sustains the work. As I’ve navigated my own career, I’ve realized that behind every successful presentation or innovative project is a partner who picked up extra work at home, a manager who (hopefully) cleared the path for the employee, or a team of colleagues who picked up the slack so that their colleague could shine.

In her essay “The Librarians Are Not Okay” explores how passion workers are ground into a “fine pulp of self” by a system that expects them to absorb responsibilities once held by multiple people.

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The Librarians Are Not Okay

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4 years ago · 156 likes · 26 comments · Anne Helen Petersen

When we fail to credit the network, we are being dishonest about the labor required to do the work. The Lone Expert is often just the person whose network is working the hardest to keep the lights on.

The Democratic Act of Connection

This refusal to acknowledge the network is an attempt to make the labor of the “we” invisible in favor of the status of the “I.” I felt this acutely recently when an administrator told me that I was too technical, a tactic designed to silence expertise that doesn’t fit a predetermined narrative.

This is a classic example of enclosure. By using status or domain expertise to dismiss critiques, authority figures privatize the public square of shared ideas. They build a fence around the network, claiming a monopoly on understanding in order to bypass the messy, collaborative friction that true knowledge requires.

When faced with individuals who try to fence off knowledge and ideas, my response is one of radical generosity. The way we generate ideas and build our professional networks reflects how we value and treat one another. By refusing to work in a silo and instead choosing to elevate my network’s ideas publicly, I am helping transform those private ego-driven enclosures back into a public square where debate and the circulation of ideas improve and enhance everyone’s ideas.

This requires us to consider what Pollan calls our “Consciousness Hygiene.” We, of course, need to be mindful of who and what we allow into our network. You don’t want to follow everyone on social media and assume they’re all experts, but at the same time, you do want to cultivate a network of individuals you trust and who provide the “friction” necessary to make your ideas more resilient.

This week, my own “lantern consciousness” was five specific people: Rachel Frick, Kate Silton, Evviva Weinraub Lajoie, Arran Griffiths, and Tim Shearer. I had conversations with each of them about our ideas, what we’re reading, and frameworks that made my ideas better. Without the five of them, the ideas in this post would not exist in this form. They didn’t just support me; they challenged me and reminded me that the conversations that we have together make a difference. This week, they were my guardrails, ensuring that my ideas and understanding remain part of a vibrant, shared space rather than a solitary echo chamber.

As Lauren Pressley says in her piece, the current moment doesn’t ask libraries to become something new; it asks them to be more fully what Shera and Egan described seven decades ago: a robust epistemic infrastructure. The road matters more now that the vehicles are faster and harder to steer.

If we want to resist the erosion of knowledge, we have to start by being honest about how our ideas come into being. We have to give credit where credit is due—to the thinkers like Lauren Pressley who point us toward intellectual frameworks, to the partners picking up the slack at home, and the friends who tell us “yes, and” when we talk about our challenges and ideas. Trying to be the Lone Expert is a burnout trap. Creating your own intellectual commons is like lashing together a bunch of sticks to create a life raft. When we put them together, we find the camaraderie and pure chaos I found at Christmas Eve dinner with my mom’s family or get-togethers with my dad’s many siblings. And because of these experiences, I will reject the ego of the Lone Expert and choose the life raft that is the network of ideas.

If you have ideas, please reach out. I’d love to hear what you are thinking or what you'd like me to write about next. Don’t believe me? Well, then you might want to scroll back up and read this post again. :)

Last August, I spent a day in Lower Manhattan at a workshop that felt like a glimpse into the big picture of how we produce knowledge today. Hosted by Ithaka S+R and the Apereo Foundation, the Sustaining Open Source Software in the Research Enterprise (SOSSRE) workshop brought together about 40 of us—a mix of open-source lifers, university administrators, research software engineers (RSEs), and funders. For many of us, it was a rare opportunity to engage with one another outside our typical silos, and it served as a powerful reminder that the people who make open source work come from incredibly diverse professional and personal backgrounds.

The goal of the workshop was ambitious: to stop talking about open-source sustainability as an abstract problem and start finding practical, scalable solutions for the software that powers modern research.

As the formal report released today points out, we’ve spent the last twenty years normalizing Open Access publishing and the last ten years making data sharing a standard practice. Yet, the code, standards, and technology that gather, generate, and validate that research are often left out of the conversation.

The Day’s Structure

The day started with an opening plenary that, to my delight, included all women, except for the moderator:

• Patrick Masson, Executive Director, The Apereo Foundation (moderator)

• Cat Allman, VP, Open Source, Digital Science

• Dr. Karmen Condic-Jurkic, Executive Director, Open Molecular Software Foundation

• Clare Dillon, Community Lead, CURIOSS

• Dr. Allison Randal, Senior Researcher, Capabilities Limited

During the conversation, Cat Allman (who, like me, likes to craft with yarn during meetings) offered a metaphor that underscored why we need a nuanced approach to OSS: some software is built to be a hammer, a tool meant to be shared, reused, and passed down. But some research software is legit a Q-tip, purpose-built for a single person or a specific, one-off problem. As Cat noted:

Definitely the best quote from the whole workshop.

We spent the rest of the morning defining the challenges across four dimensions:

• Motivational: Why do people do this work (and how do we keep them doing it)?

• Infrastructural: How do we fund and maintain the “invisible” utilities of the digital age?

• Archival: How do we ensure code is citable and preserved as part of the scholarly record?

• Relational: How do we manage the communities and people behind the code?

In the afternoon, we transitioned from high-level definitions to actionable solutions. The group distilled the morning’s discussions into five specific, high-priority challenges that we then “solved” through a series of lightning rounds and mock grant proposals:

• Defining the Value Proposition: How do we convince universities that prioritizing open-source research software (OSRS) is central to their mission?

• Tracking Usage: How can we accurately identify who is using—or could be using—an OSRS product when the current ecosystem is so frictionless (and therefore invisible)?

• Overcoming Cultural Barriers: How do we shift researcher culture to value “openness” and software maintenance as much as traditional publications?

• Assigning Responsibility: Who should actually be responsible for sustaining this code—the project team, the institution, or the broader research enterprise?

• Identifying Extra-Institutional Support: What kind of external leadership, policy, or funding models are needed to shore up the entire ecosystem?

It was energizing and a reminder of the communal solutions we can identify by diversifying our viewpoints and forcing ourselves to move past “this is hard” to “here is how we fix it.”

My Takeaways vs. The Report

Last August, I shared four key takeaways from the workshop. Reading the formal report today, I was glad to see I wasn’t the only one who found those takeaways valuable. Here is how my original takeaways compare to the report’s deeper analysis.

Takeaway #1: Open Source Software is More Than Code

My Original Thought: We need to stop framing sustainability as just a “developer happiness” problem. It takes an entire ecosystem—quality assurance, product managers, designers, and administrators—to make software thrive.

The Report’s Finding & Recommendation: The report focuses on Relational Sustainability, which emphasizes the management of people and communities. It highlights the routine tasks (maintenance, documentation, and coordination) that often get overlooked because they aren’t enjoyable for volunteers or profitable for researchers. To address this gap, the report directly tackles the afternoon challenges of Overcoming Cultural Barriers and Assigning Responsibility by proposing a systems approach that leverages student labor across various disciplines—not just in CS but also in art, marketing, and business—to meet the non-technical labor needs of software development. Additionally, it recommends that institutions professionalize roles such as Community Managers and Research Software Engineers (RSEs) by establishing stable, secure career paths. It also urges funders to explicitly approve grants for these non-technical roles and calls on scholarly societies to build communities of practice that provide peer support for those managing the social complexities of software leadership. Finally, the report specifically suggests that libraries should take the lead in holding and indexing archives of retired OSRS projects, ensuring they remain part of the citable scholarly record even after the community no longer exists.

Takeaway #2: Open Source is Not a Monolith

My Original Thought: Open source is a patchwork of sub-communities with different norms. What works for a repository system like Fedora might not work for a learning management system like Sakai.

The Report’s Finding & Recommendation: At its heart, Motivational Sustainability focuses on the incentives that drive or stall software production. By distinguishing between foundational “hammer” tools and niche, purpose-built “Q-tip” projects, the report calls for a new standard in OSRS classification. This right-sizing approach helps us normalize the retirement and archiving of software that has served its purpose. Crucially, the report highlights a Value Proposition Paradox: projects often need high adoption to attract investment, but they need investment to reach that level of adoption. To break this Catch-22, the report recommends that funders create distinct funding tracks—offering maintenance-only support for critical but non-innovative foundational tools, while providing separate pathways for experimental research code. This also ensures support aligns with a project’s actual function. The report also introduces “Software Nutrition Labels” or “Badging” to help users evaluate project health at a glance. The idea is that these labels or badges would help address trust and adoption by serving as a form of due diligence for institutional IT departments that are often hesitant to install OSRS because they don’t know how to assess its reliability relative to commercial products. This idea mirrors the classification system Nadia Asparouhova discusses in her book, Working In Public: The making and maintenance of open source software. For those looking for a starting point for creating something like this, check out the badges at Project Type Badges.

Takeaway #3: Mapping the Connections Matters

My Original Thought: Much of our infrastructure is invisible. We rely on standards and shared dependencies that we don’t appreciate until they break.

The Report’s Finding & Recommendation: The report highlights a responsibility gap where administrators often don’t know about this software, let alone which software their researchers rely on. To fix this, the report recommends addressing the challenges of Tracking Usage and Identifying Extra-Institutional Support. One way of doing this might be to appoint a central coordinator to promote open-source and manage institutional policy. However, the report acknowledges that university-level support isn’t always enough. It points to the German Sovereign Tech Agency, which treats open-source software as a matter of national security and public infrastructure, as a successful extra-institutional model for funding the standards and shared utilities that the entire sector depends on. By treating OSRS as public infrastructure, we can move beyond guesswork and conduct stress tests on critical dependencies using tools such as knowledge graphs (e.g., OpenAlex or Dimensions) and IOI’s Infra Finder, ensuring that institutional policy is backed by data. Notably, IOI is already advancing this effort by visualizing overlaps in governance and project dependencies, helping to uncover the hidden networks behind our digital infrastructure.

Takeaway #4: Software is Research (and should be treated like it)

My Original Thought: Libraries have led the way in open access and data sharing, but we’ve dropped the ball on software. We need to treat code as a first-class research output.

The Report’s Finding & Recommendation: This finding centers on Archival Sustainability and serves as the ultimate answer to Overcoming Cultural Barriers and Defining the Value Proposition. The report asserts that software is integral to the scientific method and that reproducibility is compromised without it. To bridge this gap, the report recommends that academic departments update Tenure and Promotion guidelines to formally recognize and reward software development and maintenance as legitimate scholarly contributions. Beyond the institution, the report notes that scholarly societies and publishers bear a significant responsibility for advancing software citation standards alongside article citations. This includes a call for societies to lead joint task forces that redefine what “scholarly contribution” means across disciplines, and for publishers to mandate that code authors receive formal credit in the scholarly record, ensuring software is preserved as a permanent part of it.

Would you love to continue the conversation? Send me a message!

Sustaining the Future

Coming back to these takeaways nearly a year later feels like a return to my own professional origins. While much of my recent writing has focused on the fast-moving (and often opaque) world of AI, this report is a reminder that the “shiny” new tools we obsess over are only as reliable as the open-source foundations on which they are built.

The SOSSRE workshop was a rare moment where the “invisible” people who keep our research infrastructure running were made visible to one another. But as the report makes clear, visibility isn’t enough because the sustainability of critical software is often left to chance, individual heroism, or precarious grant cycles.

The release of this report moves the needle from awareness to accountability. We now have concrete suggestions for next steps that involve every level of the research enterprise.

As I look at my own work, I feel extremely validated. We’re long past due; the research enterprise must formally recognize that software is a foundational and valuable part of scholarship. While mapping our dependencies and professionalizing these roles is significant work, they are a necessary evolution. After seeing the diverse expertise in that room in Lower Manhattan, I’m confident that the communal solutions are within reach, provided higher education, funders, and other organizations adjacent to higher education find the courage to fund and prioritize them.

I encourage you to read the full report here and consider: who at your institution is responsible for the research software you rely on? If you don’t know the answer, that’s exactly where the work begins.

First, science and innovation should push humanity forward without being hijacked by hubris and greed. I’ve personally chosen to opt out of the “cult of personality” that often dominates the tech world, preferring to support companies that value innovation over ego. This personal ethic even informs my daily tools; it’s why I eventually moved from OpenAI to Gemini, seeking a path that feels less like an egocentric power grab. Sam Altman himself once famously said:

To me, Google feels like a corporation selling a product, not a person selling a religion. I don’t want to join a religion; I want to use a tool.

Second, making knowledge accessible to people is far more vital than almost any other human endeavor. We understand who we are by learning where we came from, which is why I prioritize supporting the institutions that facilitate that journey. As Hannah Arendt has said:

This is why I believe so firmly in supporting unbiased journalism—subscribing to newspapers for the hard news they report rather than the opinions they curate. It’s why I donate to PBS and keep it as my default station; just tonight, I found myself captivated by a NOVA episode on Pompeii. Things like this constantly remind me that educating oneself is the ultimate path to freedom. As Arendt reminds us in the quote above, this is precisely why tyranny always seeks to suppress facts first: it knows that an informed public is one that cannot be easily controlled.

The Cobbler’s Rule: Institutional Neutrality

Lately, however, I’ve been thinking about a third core belief: the boundaries of corporate and institutional identity. I am beginning to believe that institutions should step back from taking political or ideological stances unless those stances are directly tied to their core mission. As a die-hard believer in Democratic Socialism, I initially found this a contradiction. How can I advocate for a collective, value-driven society while simultaneously calling for institutional silence? But a (former?) libertarian might have changed my mind.

In his book The Seven Rules of Trust, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales argues that to build institutions that last, you must “Create a Clear Purpose” (Rule 3). He talks extensively in the book about how sometimes the facts speak for themselves; they are so damning that it doesn’t require you to take a side.

An interview with Jimmy Wales on the Open To Debate Podcast

To illustrate this, here’s a simple analogy: if a chef is anti-crepe, that’s a professional choice; if a cobbler takes that same stance, it’s just noise that chips away at the trust customers place in his ability to fix shoes. When your purpose is to create food, being anti-crepe makes sense, but a cobbler doesn’t need to weigh in on that debate. This does not, in my view, prevent individuals from championing positive initiatives within these organizations. Rather, it prevents institutions from adopting person-like characteristics by claiming a right to free speech.

This brings us to a difficult tension in the library world. Librarians love neutrality, yet we often feel a moral pull to protect our collections from the ever-hungry machines of those who seek to exploit them. When we allow ideological trends to steer our mandate, we violate Rule 6: “Be Independent.” We risk moving from being facilitators of discovery into moral arbiters of how knowledge should be consumed. While individuals may advocate for change, the institution must remain a reliable, neutral service provider.

For me, a democratic socialist, this neutrality isn’t a lack of conviction; it’s a commitment to ensuring that public infrastructure remains a stable resource for everyone, rather than a megaphone for the group currently holding power. More importantly, it prevents institutions from making ideological justifications for why another community or group must do something (e.g., “Deposit with us! We know how to take care of the stuff.” with the underlying text being that you don’t). Ideological justifications are the same type of justifications colonialists made, which ultimately led to the erasure of indigenous knowledge and the establishment of institutional racism.

The False Promise of Control

This tension between neutrality and protection is exactly why I found myself professionally at odds with the recently posted UVA Archival AI Protocol. While the protocol frames itself as a practical standard, it reads more like a manifesto for digital isolationism. Its core rule—no access without control—relies on a “Principle of Reversibility” borrowed from physical conservation.

In libraries and museums, you don’t perform a repair on an object that can’t be undone. But applying that logic to AI model weights doesn’t make sense. As recently argued for the Authors Alliance, knowledge institutions are being sold a “false promise of control.” However, while Hansen’s critique focuses on the legal fictions created by these frameworks, my concern as a technologist is with the technical ones. I spent months looking for ways to safeguard our collections from large AI companies, but ultimately, I’ve come to realize that once you see something on the internet, it becomes really hard to unsee it.

Remember that an AI model is a mathematical engine that predicts the next most likely token in a sequence. Once a collection is used to adjust those millions of parameters, that information is baked into the model’s understanding. You cannot simply reach in and pluck a specific fact out of the weights without retraining the entire system. Furthermore, most companies rely on WARCs (Web ARChive files) to train models, which, in digital preservation parlance, are considered immutable. While you can technically rewrite a WARC to create a new object, it is labor-intensive, which is why (I would imagine) that neither AI companies nor aggregators like Common Crawl are doing it.

By demanding a “Right to Stop” or a “Right to Decommission” that is technically impossible to enforce, frameworks like UVA’s force stewards to become gatekeepers of a barricade that has already been breached. When we promise a level of control that doesn’t exist—much like the EU’s “right to be forgotten”—we do the world a disservice.

The Beginning of the Governance Pipeline: Creator Consent

This brings us back to the concept of governance. Wikipedia defines it as:

I’ve argued before that openness without governance leads to exploitation. But I like to think of governance not just as one thing, but a pipeline through which decisions move.

The beginning of the pipeline is the conversation we have with creators. Some might argue that granting creators too much control creates an administrative red tape that kills “Open Access.” I disagree. I believe stewardship requires a higher duty of care. As Taylor Swift once noted in an interview:

In other words, the music is a mirror reflecting the listener’s life; once it is out in the world, it changes for better or worse. Creators deserve to know exactly what that means for their work—how it might be morphed or monetized—so they can make an informed choice for how to make it available.

Our role as stewards is to provide total transparency, even if that honesty means they choose not to entrust us with their work. If we can’t offer guarantees that their style or persona won’t be mimicked by a generative agent, we have an ethical obligation to say so. This is a trust-building exercise, not an administrative burden. If the pipeline for materials dries up because we refuse to lie about the “reversibility” of the internet, then that is the price of our integrity.

The Other End of the Governance Pipeline: Infrastructure Costs

On the other end of the pipeline, it is our responsibility to ensure that what we hold remains accessible. This is where my objections to billion-dollar AI companies come in. They are no longer just looking for content; they are using the library as their permanent storage. The reality is that harvesting bots are rarely polite. They do not merely index our collections and depart; they return in relentless cycles, scouring our servers to capture every minor update. I have spent many late nights alongside my team battling ByteDance crawlers that hit our catalog so aggressively they triggered a full-scale application outage. This behavior is, in practice, a denial-of-service attack against the human users we serve. We are being forced to subsidize the computing costs and staff hours required just to keep our digital doors open. As these bot attacks multiply and our expenses mount, we face a future where we may no longer have the capacity to ingest new content. Meanwhile, these multi-billion-dollar entities continue to treat libraries as their own free, permanent storage facility, taking everything while contributing nothing to the infrastructure they exhaust.1

The internet is still trying to figure out which of the two paths it wants to take: the walled garden of CAPTCHA and logins, or a web specifically for bots like the one Wikipedia has built. I still want to build a parallel infrastructure for bots, but let’s be honest: it costs money and time, and there is no guarantee bots will use it. I’ve been thinking that the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) might actually be the ideal parallel infrastructure for this—a structured, versioned, and machine-parsable way to present our collections as data without bringing our human-facing apps to their knees. Maybe that’s a post for a future date…

In the meantime, until the companies harvesting our data are willing to fund that infrastructure, we must act to protect it. This is why I am currently evaluating solutions like Cloudflare for my institution (if you don’t know, Cloudflare has a pay-per-crawl beta running). It isn’t about setting up toll gates or ideologically blocking companies; this solution would impose a digital maintenance fee. Just as libraries have historically charged for photocopies to cover labor and materials, we must seek reasonable remuneration for the infrastructure that supports massive AI crawling.

Reclaiming Stewardship: A Path Forward

Ultimately, stewardship in the AI era is not about building walls to hide from technology; it is about building the necessary infrastructure to survive it. If we allow ourselves to be seduced by the false promise of control offered by frameworks like the UVA one, we risk becoming irrelevant gatekeepers of empty buildings. If we allow our systems to be overwhelmed by AI bots without compensation, we risk a total collapse of the digital public square.

I’ve said before that “open by default” isn’t the way we should go anymore. We must move beyond the binary of open or closed and embrace a model of “openness with intention”. This means being honest with our creators about how the digital record can be used, and being firm with commercial entities about the cost of maintaining those collections they wish to harvest. It means recognizing that our core purpose—facilitating the human journey of education—is what deserves our protection, not an ideological attachment to neutrality that erodes our very mission.

As always, I’m curious to hear your thoughts. How do we reconcile the ‘Cobbler’s Rule’ of institutional neutrality with the necessity of a digital maintenance fee for multi-billion-dollar AI entities? Is seeking reasonable remuneration for using our infrastructure an act of necessary stewardship, or does it risk a fundamental betrayal of our commitment to open access? I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments below.

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Thanks for reading! This is the last post in my “The Great Rupture in Trust” series. If you missed the earlier parts, you can explore them here:

• Part 1: The End of the Rules-Based Order

• Part 2: The Digital Mirage

• Part 3: The Active Work of Repair (this post)

Over the course of this series, we have explored the collapse of the systems we once naively relied upon. In Part 1, we looked at the macro crisis—the end of the international rules-based order and the rise of transactional, strongman geopolitics. In Part 2, we examined the “Digital Mirage” — how the tech industry’s AI bubble is eroding our shared reality and harvesting information without our consent.

If you are feeling a bit overwhelmed by all of this (and well, the world), just a reminder that it is the natural response to a systemic breakdown. We are living through a profound rupture in the infrastructure of trust. But I don’t want to leave you in a pit of despair.

In psychology, there is a concept known as “Rupture and Repair.“ In any relationship, ruptures (moments of disconnection, betrayal, or conflict) are inevitable. A relationship’s survival doesn’t depend on preventing ruptures, but rather on its capacity to repair them. A bond that survives a rupture and undergoes the active, intentional work of repair actually emerges stronger and more resilient than a relationship that doesn’t.

Which is to say, we can no longer afford naive trust in major world powers (i.e., the global hegemons or huge tech companies in Silicon Valley). The rupture has happened and will continue to expand. But I don’t think we should wait to begin repairing. Instead, we must do the active work of repairing ourselves and our relationships with each other. Doing this work requires effort and a decision to rebuild trust from the bottom up.

In the comments section of last week’s post, Nate Angell brought up a brilliant point. He noted that his and Anna’s goal of renaming AI hallucinations to “mirages” wasn’t just to swap out a word, but to encourage practices for developing our own “intellectual sovereignty.” It’s about a healthy questioning of the frameworks we were handed by these governments and companies.

To achieve that intellectual sovereignty, we must band together—economically, technologically, and socially—to create new, resilient pockets of trust. Here are the three levers I believe we can pull to make that happen.

The Consumer Lever: Voting with Dollars

When we look at the macro-geopolitical landscape, it is easy to feel entirely powerless. The decisions that disrupt global supply chains or erode democratic norms are made in rooms we don’t have access to, and for many, the traditional voting booth feels increasingly disconnected from immediate accountability.

Because of this powerlessness, we are seeing a surge in the public using the one lever they still control: their wallets.

This tactic isn’t new. The Montgomery bus boycotts of the 1950s were a consumer boycott. Because Black citizens made up over 70% of the city’s bus riders, the 381-day refusal to ride severely affected the Montgomery public transit system’s revenue, costing the company between 30,000 and 40,000 fares each day. It was one of the most well-known moments when citizens wielded their collective economic power to starve an unjust system of its profits, demanding change and enforcing accountability when traditional political avenues were closed off to them.

Today, recent large-scale consumer boycotts targeting massive brands like Target and Starbucks are modern symptoms of this same underlying dynamic. As highlighted in a recent PBS NewsHour report, regardless of the specific political catalyst behind any given boycott, the underlying mechanism is the same. Voting with dollars is a crude but incredibly immediate way for the public to fight back against the “weaponized interdependence” we discussed in Part 1.

By strategically withdrawing capital, ordinary people are reminding corporations that their operating license still depends fundamentally on the trust and goodwill of the public.

The Technological Lever: Rescuing Our Content

If the consumer lever is about accountability, the technological lever is about preservation.

In Part 2, we talked about the “AI tax”—the infrastructure costs website owners are forced to pay so that large technology corporations can harvest content for free. In an environment where facts are constantly under threat—whether from AI “mirages” or state-sponsored suppression—we can no longer rely on centralized authorities to act as the infallible stewards of our history.

For a long time, libraries and universities have assumed that federal infrastructure was a safe bet, asking faculty to deposit their research data and publications in subject-specific repositories funded by the U.S. government or societies largely supported by different funders or grants. But as the current administration and the necessity of the Data Rescue Project have taught us, we can no longer blindly rely on the government to maintain these critical tools.

We have already seen alarming examples of governments hiding basic facts or deleting reliable historical resources. Recently, the CIA removed the World Factbook for dozens of countries, effectively erasing a globally relied-upon baseline of data. In an increasingly autocratic global state that does not value reality, centralized state archives become vulnerabilities rather than resources.

Building trust today means recognizing that we cannot outsource preservation to centralized entities. Instead, we need to turn to smaller, more locally based communities that are invested in the content we seek to preserve. By changing our practices, we are actively working to repair trust with communities, ensuring that the next generation has a verified foundation of facts to build upon. Shifting our trust from distant federal institutions to local, invested communities is essential, which brings us perfectly to our final lever.

The Community Lever: The Coalition of the Middle

In Part 1, we discussed Mark Carney’s Davos speech, where he argued that “middle powers” like Canada must band together to survive the clash of global hegemons. To repair the fabric of our society, we must apply this exact concept to the local, individual level.

Autocracy and monopolies thrive on isolation. As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat points out, authoritarianism succeeds by destroying horizontal trust—the trust citizens have in one another. That destruction leaves individuals feeling alienated and desperate, forcing them to rely on vertical trust in a strongman or a centralized power.

But the threat we face isn’t just a traditional political strongman. In a recent interview on The Opinions podcast, Senator Bernie Sanders was asked why his current messaging focuses on “Fighting Oligarchy” rather than just fighting authoritarianism. His response was telling: “Obviously, I work day and night trying to defeat this guy’s efforts to move us to an authoritarian society. I think the two go hand in glove, by the way.”

He is exactly right. We are rapidly moving toward what Danielle Allen, writing in The Atlantic, describes as a form of “techno-feudalism.” We are yielding our sovereignty to a technology oligarchy that views democratic self-governance as an obsolete nuisance. This new breed of oligarchs prefers a world run like a for-profit joint-stock corporation, where citizens are treated merely as consumers, subscribers, or data points to be harvested.

When the forces of oligarchy and authoritarianism seek to destroy, community building becomes our ultimate act of societal relational repair. But we shouldn’t be aiming to build huge, unwieldy networks. We must prioritize smaller communities. It is within these localized, human-scale spaces that genuine, horizontal trust can actually take root and be sustained, allowing us to exist outside of this techno-feudal system.

Prioritizing small communities doesn’t mean retreating into isolated silos. A true “Coalition of the Middle” requires building robust relationships between these groups. We must start seeing ourselves as representatives of our communities, actively reaching out to other communities to figure out how we can share resources and advance our common goals. By prioritizing marginalized communities, forming local cooperatives, investing in small [fill-in-the-blank], and supporting open or community-governed technology, we actively heal the horizontal, person-to-person trust that the “Great Rupture” broke.

As I wrote in The Cost of Open by Default, we must stop being passive consumers waiting to be saved by the next election or the next technology, and start acting like engaged citizens.

Pockets of High-Trust

We cannot wait for the “rules-based order” to return, nor can we expect Big Tech to self-regulate. We have to build pockets of high-trust—both digital and physical—from the bottom up.

Just as a relationship that survives a rupture and undergoes repair is stronger than one never tested, these new pockets of infrastructure won’t just be a return to the old normal. They will be a vastly superior, more resilient version of society because trust will be something we actively architect, verify, and maintain within our own communities.

Thanks for reading! This concludes “The Great Rupture in Trust” series. If you missed the earlier parts, you can explore them here:

• Part 1: The End of the Rules-Based Order

• Part 2: The Digital Mirage

• Part 3: The Active Work of Repair (this post)

References

Below are a list of items that I utilized while writing the entire series.

Allen, Danielle. “The Problem With $TRUMP.” Ideas. The Atlantic, January 29, 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/trump-meme-coin/681452/.

Angell, Nate. “Are We Tripping? The Mirage of AI Hallucinations.” Ideas. Nate Angell, February 13, 2025. https://xolotl.org/are-we-tripping/.

Appelbaum, Binyamin. “Economists Clash on Theory, but Will Still Share the Nobel.” Business. The New York Times, October 14, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/business/3-american-professors-awarded-nobel-in-economic-sciences.html.

Applebaum, Anne. “Defund Science, Distort Culture, Mock Education.” The Atlantic, January 23, 2026. https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/01/reality-reshaped/685289/.

Applebaum, Anne, host. Reality Reshaped. Autocracy in America. January 23, 2026. https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/01/reality-reshaped/685289/.

Basilion, Sarah. “The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Pieces of History, November 23, 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/20241123150734/https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2015/11/30/the-montgomery-bus-boycott/.

Carney, Mark. “‘Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path’ Prime Minister Carney Addresses the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting.” In World Economic Forum. January 20, 2026. https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/speeches/2026/01/20/principled-and-pragmatic-canadas-path-prime-minister-carney-addresses.

“CIA Terminates Its World Factbook | CNN.” Accessed March 5, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/us/cia-world-factbook-countries-cec.

Data Rescue Project. “About Data Rescue Project.” February 10, 2025. https://www.datarescueproject.org/about-data-rescue-project/.

Greenwood, Robin, Andrei Shleifer, and Yang You. “Bubbles for Fama.” Journal of Financial Economics 131, no. 1 (2019): 20–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2018.09.002.

Havel, Vaclav. “The Power of the Powerless.” The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, n.d. Accessed March 5, 2026. https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23.

Klein, Ezra, host. The Most Important Foreign Policy Speech in Years. Produced by Jack McCordick. The Ezra Klein Show. January 27, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-henry-farrell.html.

Merchant, Brian. “AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All.” Tags. Wired, October 27, 2025. https://www.wired.com/story/ai-bubble-will-burst/.

Metz, Rosalyn. “The Cost of Open by Default in the AI Era.” Substack newsletter. The Digital Shift, January 30, 2026. https://rosalynmetz.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-open-by-default-in-the?utm_medium=web.

Mills, Anna, and Nate Angell. “Are We Tripping? The Mirage of AI Hallucinations.” SSRN Scholarly Paper No. 5127162. Social Science Research Network, February 6, 2025. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5127162.

NBC News. “The AI Boom’s Reliance on Circular Deals Is Raising Fears of a Bubble.” October 6, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/openai-nvidia-amd-deals-risks-rcna234806.

PBS News Hour Classroom. “Why Target Is Being Boycotted, and How the Company Has Responded.” August 25, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/classroom/daily-news-lessons/2025/08/pastor-leading-target-boycott-on-its-impact-and-the-retailers-response.

Roose, Kevin, Casey Newton, Rachel Cohn, et al., hosts. Is This an A.I. Bubble? + Meta’s Missing Morals + TikTok Shock Slop. August 22, 2025.

“Rupture and Repair | Psychology Today.” Accessed February 28, 2026. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/emotion-information/202001/rupture-and-repair.

“Rupture and Repair | Psychology Today.” Accessed March 5, 2026. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/emotion-information/202001/rupture-and-repair.

Sanders, Bernie, David Leonhardt, and Jillian Weinberger. “Opinion | Bernie Sanders: ‘There Ain’t Much of a Democratic Party.’” November 3, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/opinion/bernie-sanders-oligarchs-americas-story.html.

Stix, Gary. “The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts.” Scientific American, July 1, 2009. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-of-economic-bubbles/.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott (U.S. National Park Service). n.d. Accessed March 5, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/articles/montgomery-bus-boycott.htm.

Wikipedia. “Ruth Ben-Ghiat.” February 13, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ruth_Ben-Ghiat&oldid=1338178784.

World Economic Forum. Special Address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada | World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026. 2026. 33:11.

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I am drawing here on the work of Nate Angell and Anna Mills, who argue that we should stop using the term hallucination to describe AI errors. To say AI hallucinates is to anthropomorphize it. Instead, they propose we all use the term “mirage.” Just as a desert mirage is a real physical phenomenon, an AI mirage is a predictable artifact of how these systems generate content.

This shift in language is vital because it changes where we place responsibility. If we call it a hallucination, we are essentially waiting for AI companies to find a cure for the machine. But if we recognize it as a mirage, the burden shifts to us. It requires us to develop the ability to recognize the shimmer of a statistical guess rather than mistaking it for a reliable point of truth. We have to stop being thirsty travelers in the desert who believe everything we see.

Thanks for reading! This post is part of my series, The Great Rupture in Trust, where I’m exploring how the collapse of global and digital infrastructure is forcing us to rethink how we connect, protect our information, and rebuild community. You can explore the rest of the series here:

• Part 1: The End of the Rules-Based Order

• Part 2: The Digital Mirage (this post)

• Part 3: The Active Work of Repair

The Economics of Bubbles

While the mirage describes the nature of the output, the engine driving its rapid adoption is a classic speculative surge—the kind of “bubble” that historically appears whenever a new technology promises to reshape the world.

But fun fact, the very idea of a bubble is a source of debate in economic circles. Nobel laureate Eugene Fama, for instance, has expressed his skepticism toward the term. In an interview with The New York Times following his 2013 Nobel win, he argued that market price swings are generally efficient reflections of changing intrinsic value. From Fama’s perspective, what we call a bubble is just a myth we invent after a crash to explain away a perfectly rational response to new information.

However, recent academic work has begun to challenge this skepticism with empirical data. In their 2018 paper, “Bubbles for Fama,” researchers Robin Greenwood, Andrei Shleifer, and Yang You analyzed a century of market data and found that the probability of a burst increases significantly when high price growth is accompanied by high volatility and a surge in new stock issuance.

Their approach is further refined by Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch in their book, Bubbles and Crashes, which focuses specifically on technology bubbles. They identify four core elements that create the perfect storm for the bubble to burst:

1. Uncertainty (about the technology’s ultimate value),

2. Pure Plays (companies focused solely on the new tech1),

3. Novice Investors (drawn in by the hype), and

4. Powerful Narratives (promising a world-changing revolution).

When these four elements come together, they sever the connection between a technology’s market price and its actual usefulness.

Is AI the Ultimate Bubble?

As a technologist who has watched several “next big things” (remember Second Life?) sputter into non-existence, I’ve learned that hype cycles are very real. A recent WIRED analysis categorized the current AI surge as the “Platonic ideal” of a tech bubble, citing it as a perfect 8 out of 8 on the Goldfarb and Kirsch risk scale.

Much like the early pioneers of broadcast radio that Goldfarb and Kirsch discuss in their book, we have been told the value of AI is obvious: it will solve climate change and cure cancer! Yet sustainable business models remain elusive for the industry, and these giant companies are burning through billions of dollars, with costs so high that they effectively lose money every time you enter a prompt into a system. And yet, the powerful narratives these companies have created have successfully drowned out any necessary precautions.

But the most insidious danger here is that the products we are being sold are nothing more than massive autocomplete engines.2 AI prioritizes sounding authoritative and confident over being factually correct. In their rush to dominate the market, the companies producing these technologies end up hiding their extractive nature behind the noble-sounding label of “innovation.” Our personal data, creative work, and history are being harvested without permission. They are turning our lives into raw material for a corporate product.

The trust between the technology’s creator and the user is fundamentally broken.

The Necessity of Digital Sovereignty

If we can’t trust the technology any more than we can trust the countries of the world, we find ourselves in a dangerous situation. This is where the concept of digital sovereignty moves from a boring policy term to a necessity for survival.

As I’ve written before, the open mantra that libraries, cultural heritage organizations, and even the internet have long lived by is falling apart. Anyone running a website today is being forced to pay a literal “AI tax.” When thousands of AI bots scrape a website to train their models, they consume that site’s bandwidth and server power. This effectively forces the website owner to pay the infrastructure bills so AI companies can harvest content for free.3

This is why Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech resonated so deeply with me. When you’re living in a digital mirage, strategic autonomy means that middle powers (or, in my case, individual communities) must secure their data, just like a nation secures its borders. Digital sovereignty is the realization that if you don’t own the infrastructure, you don’t own your history.

The Information Exit

So here we are, stuck in a “Digital Mirage.” We have been sold the promise of superintelligence, but when we get to it, all we find is extractive practices and a fractured shared reality. When we can no longer distinguish between a verifiable fact and a convincing statistical shimmer on the horizon, our shared reality evaporates.

We cannot wait for AI companies to self-regulate, nor can we wait for countries to create legislation. If trust is infrastructure, then how do we build systems that don’t rely on hegemons?

Next week, in the final part of this series, “The Active Work of Repair,” we will look at how we move from being passive passengers in this rupture to becoming the architects of our own high-trust infrastructure. We will explore how to band together—as a “Coalition of the Middle”—to rebuild trust from the bottom up.

In the mean time….

For centuries, society has operated under an implicit social and political contract (well, hello, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; I thought I would never use you again). We naively believed in a “rules-based order.” We assumed that international trade, diplomatic norms, and basic democratic principles were guardrails the world could count on. But what we are witnessing right now is the collapse of trust.

Thanks for reading! This post is part of my series, The Great Rupture in Trust, where I’m exploring how the collapse of global and digital infrastructure is forcing us to rethink how we connect, protect our information, and rebuild community. You can explore the rest of the series here:

• Part 1: The End of the Rules-Based Order (this post)

• Part 2: The Digital Mirage

• Part 3: The Active Work of Repair

Trust, as it turns out, is not just a warm sentiment (as I’ve written about before). It is scaffolding that allows economies to function, people to invest in technological advancement, communities to thrive, and nations to cooperate. And right now, trust is falling apart, and institutions and people are grasping for power and imposing self-isolation.

To understand how to fix it, we first have to take a step back and look at the macro crisis we are in with a clear head, which is anything but easy to do. But, over the course of this series, which I’m calling “The Great Rupture in Trust,” I will look at why trust is failing, how that shows up in our lives, particularly in technology and information ecosystems, and what we can do to repair it.

Geopolitics Without Rules

Let’s start by looking at the immediate geopolitical topics dominating the headlines. Following the recent World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, the international community is still reeling from U.S. leaders’ speeches that once again called for the seizure of sovereign territories, such as Greenland (I apologize to anyone from Greenland on behalf of all U.S. citizens everywhere). For some in the international community, this felt like a fever dream, but for those of us living in (or next to) the U.S., it felt like old hat. Add in the ongoing and failed weaponization of tariffs against allies (again, I apologize to anyone from Canada on behalf of all U.S. citizens everywhere) and you get, well, the current world order.

This behavior perfectly illustrates a concept political scientist Henry Farrell1 recently discussed on The Ezra Klein Show (gift link): “weaponized interdependence.” For years, we naively assumed that global economic integration would deter conflict. We built global supply chains and financial systems, believing that the world’s police (the U.S.) would use this power for good. What we are all finding out now is that those very networks of integration are now (and have always been) used as leverage against those who don’t fall into line.

Farrell points to the global financial system as the ultimate example. Because the U.S. dollar is THE currency of the global economy, almost every international bank must maintain relationships with U.S. institutions to clear transactions. This allows the United States to turn the entire global banking system into a mechanism of power. The example Farrell gives is when the U.S. ratcheted up pressure on Iran, Iranian banks were abruptly cut off from the system, leaving the country unable to get paid for its oil and forcing it to barter for basic goods like grain and zippers.

Which brings us back to the mood at Davos. What we witnessed was geopolitics without rules. In this new world order, sovereign territories are treated as assets to be acquired in hostile corporate takeovers, and economic partnerships are built on leverage. Davos was a blaring signal to the rest of the world that international relations are governed by whoever happens to hold the biggest stick. And if you hadn’t heard, the U.S. has the biggest stick.

Time to Take Down the Sign

This isn’t just a temporary disruption. In his address at Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney explicitly named what we are experiencing. He didn’t call it a transition: he called it a rupture.

There is a vital difference between these two things. A transition is something you plan for—it’s an orderly migration from one version of software to another. A rupture is the 2024 CrowdStrike incident. It was messy and destructive, and no one got to opt out.

Carney, a former central banker, is perhaps the last person you’d expect to deliver a speech that sounds like a manifesto. But he argued that the “pleasant fiction” of the rules-based international order is over. He used the Václav Havel metaphor of the greengrocer—the shopkeeper who puts a “Workers of the world, unite!” sign in his window not because he believes it, but to signal compliance and avoid trouble. Carney accused us all of “living within a lie,” performing the rituals of a global order that we privately know to be false.

While this rules-based order provided vital public goods—open sea lanes, a stable financial system, and collective security—the hegemons always exempted themselves when it suited them. But we have reached a point where integration is a source of subordination rather than mutual benefit.

This brings us to the concept of middle powers. Carney argued that intermediate powers like Canada are not powerless. Instead, they must move away from old, comfortable assumptions to build sovereignty that can withstand the pressure of the hegemons.

In many ways, this is a metaphor for all of us. Just as Canada is a “middle power” caught between global hegemons, we as individuals are “middle powers” caught between the predatory practices of Big Tech and the encroachment of autocracy. Our old assumptions about the open web being a utopia are no longer true. This idea of the middle powers banding together to create a third path is the seed of how we might begin to architect our own pathways for trust.

Autocracy and the COVID Hangover

But before we start to build that pathway, we have to ask ourselves how the infrastructure of global trust rotted so quickly. To be fair, it didn’t happen overnight.

The decay of trust was undeniably creeping in long before 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic acted as a massive accelerant. The sheer necessity of lockdowns and isolation widened cracks that already existed, damaging our connections to neighbors, local communities, and shared institutions. We became physically and psychologically disconnected from one another at an unprecedented speed.

In a recent interview on the podcast Autocracy in America, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat brilliantly articulated how isolation provides the perfect fertile ground for authoritarianism. Autocracy thrives precisely by dismantling horizontal trust (the trust citizens have in each other). Once you sever the ties that bind people together, you create a vacuum, a process COVID put into overdrive. That vacuum is then filled by vertical trust—an enforced loyalty to a single leader or state apparatus. When we lose our grip on each other, we reach for a strongman to steady us.

The Illusion of Stability

We can no longer afford the pleasant fiction that the old world is coming back. The trust that held the geopolitical order together is gone, leaving us in a landscape defined by who has the power.

But if we can’t trust the systems that move our money and define our borders, we are forced to rely on the systems that move our information—our digital eyes and ears. The problem, as we’ll see, is that those systems are currently built on a foundation of sand, too.

Next week, in Part 2, we will explore the “Digital Mirage”: the impending burst of the AI bubble (this bit is for you, Todd!), the fight for digital sovereignty, and how the collapse of shared reality is forcing us to rethink where we store our lives.

If you have other ideas or topics you’d like me to cover, please comment below.

As a parent, these milestones usually trigger a sentimental look backward. But this week, as I sat in my living room, the only thing I could focus on was the sound of the refrigerator. It was making that little ding that tells you you’ve left the door open too long. Thanks to a recent software update (yes, it gets software updates, which drives my husband mad), we can now lengthen the time between when the door is opened and when the ding goes off (I submitted this as a feature request!).

It’s a small change, but the sound just now triggered a realization: my daughter lives in a world where even the appliances require an understanding of networked technology. She wears a smartwatch; she uses AI tools to create cute manga pictures that she then traces and colors in; she exists in a digital fluidity that is invisible to her because she has never known a world without it.

And yet, looking at her education over the last decade, I see a huge void. In schools, we teach English, math, and science, and she’s lucky enough to be in a district with a STEM class, but we have completely ignored the architecture of the world she actually inhabits. There is nothing that helps her understand the internet, how it was formed and grew into the “world” we see it to be today. Nothing that teaches her how software is “made”. We are teaching her how to be a passenger in a vehicle that is driving faster and faster, but we aren’t teaching her how the engine works or how to check whether the brakes are cut.

Collective Inaction

In my own profession, libraries and cultural heritage, we are guilty of a similar kind of sleepwalking. As I explored in my recent five-part series, Encountering Collapse, we often cling to the myths of neutrality and openness rather than confronting the power dynamics encoded in our technology. This avoidance seems to be recurring in how cultural heritage organizations respond to AI, too. I see constant suggestions that our challenges are merely “collective action problems.” The sentiment is always: If we just work together, we can solve this.

But too often, this “collective action” is just us talking to ourselves. We treat every technological shift as an administrative problem to be solved by better coordination between libraries. We convince ourselves that if we just build the right consortium, we can manage the change. But this internal focus, or professional navel-gazing if you will, distracts us from the reality that individuals and communities are being exploited right now, regardless of how well our committees are organized.

I just finished Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, which uses the meteoric rise of OpenAI as the narrative backbone to trace the physical and human footprint of artificial intelligence. She reveals the resource extraction and labor exploitation that AI companies use in their race to the top. Hao uses examples from around the globe to show how the AI industry replicates the extractive techniques of the colonial empires of the past (or present?). In the process, she reveals the hidden costs and the powerful forces behind the technology.

After reading it, I realized that my faith in “nice” solutions has been completely dismantled. The “Plundered Earth” chapter was particularly eye-opening. In it, Hao details how companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google have extracted labor, water, power, and minerals from economically disadvantaged countries, just as the colonial powers that preceded them did. She describes a pattern of taking advantage of these communities, stripping them of their land and their sovereignty, while simultaneously releasing press releases about how they are improving them. Individually, these facts weren’t new, but seeing them woven together into a single narrative felt truly overwhelming.

That being said, the final chapter offers a glimmer of hope. In it, Hao profiles Peter Lucas Jones and his work in training AI to understand te reo Māori. Reading this brought me right back to his closing keynote at iPRES 2025. There, he argued powerfully that AI can be done right if we center it on indigenous knowledge and community control. I walked away from that keynote feeling like there might be a path forward. Finding him in Hao’s epilogue only validated that feeling: his work is a concrete example of how we can push back.

But we in the cultural heritage space must be careful because that path isn’t the “collective action” we usually talk about. In libraries and museums, we are so focused on building consortia and large-scale “collaborations” that we miss our role as stewards of the collections of individuals and communities. That isn’t to say these organizations are all bad; we are a community too, and we have needs and wants where collective action may work — open source being one example. But our focus should always be on the individuals and communities we serve and support.

Instead of building more collective action programs and partnerships amongst libraries, we need to focus on supporting the collective action of the communities whose collections we steward. We need to educate them on what we do, the challenges we face in stewarding collections, what makes AI possible (data, labor, energy), and our place in that conversation as cultural heritage organizations. Only by building trust with communities can we effectively engage in collective action, because we must understand the individuals and communities whose needs we seek to meet.

Reclaiming Sovereignty

This brings me to the word we don’t say enough in the United States, but really need to: Sovereignty.

In his speech at Davos, Mark Carney spoke about why sovereignty is critical in a fragmented, unpredictable world. He argued that we can no longer rely on the old rules or benevolent global systems to protect us; instead, we must actively build “strategic autonomy” — the capacity to govern our own futures, resources, and infrastructure without being at the mercy of extractive external powers.

While he was speaking to world leaders, he was also speaking to me, and to you. In the digital age, the communities we serve act as micro-nations. Just as a nation must secure its borders and resources to maintain independence, communities must secure their data and intellectual output to maintain theirs.

For cultural heritage organizations, this means ensuring the communities we partner with retain the ability to understand and make decisions about their own history, data, and knowledge. When we collect their stories but fail to educate them about how the digital landscape works — how technology, and AI in particular, works, and how companies harvest, annotate, and exploit this data to train algorithms and AI models —we are actively participating in stripping them of their sovereignty. We cannot simply archive their past; we must ask them what they need to build their capacity and strategic autonomy. If we don’t, we are enabling those who seek to take away their sovereignty.

The ding of the fridge is no longer just a noise in the kitchen; it is a signal. It’s a reminder that the world has changed, and we have been too slow to keep up.

It is easy to feel defeated by the scale of what Hao describes in Empire of AI. The extraction of resources and the erosion of privacy feel like unstoppable forces. But looking at my daughter, I realize that we don’t have the luxury of defeat. Pessimism might be an honest place to start, but it cannot be where we finish.

We have to move beyond the comforting illusion that simply “collaborating” will save us. We need to do the harder work of building strategic autonomy, both for the communities we serve in our libraries and for the children we raise in our homes.

We need to stop treating technology as magic and start teaching it as machinery. We need to show them the engine, explain the fuel, and warn them about the brakes. We need to stop raising them to be passive users of an empire they don’t understand, and start training them to be sovereign rulers of their own digital lives.

As a technologist, my perspective on openness is rooted in the daily realities of managing systems and protecting the cultural heritage artifacts entrusted to libraries and museums. While the open web has brought incredible progress, we are now facing four distinct pressures that make me question where we draw the line:

1. The Intellectual Harvest of Cultural Heritage: AI companies are no longer just looking for content; they are harvesting the intellectual frameworks we’ve spent decades building. As I’ve noted before, AI companies are not only focused on crawling and harvesting authors’ content. They are also interested in financial gain from the curation carried out by cultural heritage organizations over thousands of years, as well as in the frameworks we have built to describe, relate, and explain the content.

2. The Infrastructure Tax: Scraping bots aren’t always polite. Ironically, while I was drafting this post, my team was battling ByteDance servers crawling our catalog. Ultimately, the bots on ByteDance’s servers caused a full application outage. I’ve said before that these outages constitute a denial-of-service attack against our human users. Anyone running cultural heritage infrastructure on the web is essentially being forced to pay an infrastructure tax (computing costs plus staff time) to keep our digital doors open.

3. The Harvesting of Physical Collections: Recently, the Google Books Library Project has been reinvigorated, and rest assured, it has been reaching out to large research libraries to identify books that they haven’t scanned yet. My understanding is that some libraries have successfully negotiated one-time payments from Google, but in my opinion, this approach is short-sighted. Libraries either forget or don’t understand that these companies don’t just “read” the data once. They revisit it every time they build a new model, effectively getting a perpetual license to our libraries for a one-time entry fee.

4. The Erosion of Trust: Our entire model of stewardship relies on trust. When a donor, writer, or artist hands over their life’s work, they expect libraries and museums to serve as protectors of their works. Currently, we cannot provide them with any true guarantees that their materials won’t be ingested, synthesized, and commodified by AI companies. If we can’t offer guarantees, the pipeline for materials may dry up, and the cultures we seek to document and preserve may be poorer for it.

This last point—the fragile relationship between the donor, the library or museum, and the technology—is exactly what I want to dig into today.

Contractual Barriers to Donor Deposits

I recently reviewed a donor contract that really put point 4 above into focus for me.

Below is a summarized and reworded version of the language I reviewed, based on information from the Author’s Guild, the Society of Authors, and the Australian Society of Authors websites.

Organizations must safeguard materials against their use for:

• Generative AI Development: Training, fine-tuning, or otherwise developing generative artificial intelligence models.

• Mimicry of Authors: Creating outputs such as chatbots, conversational agents, or other simulated responses that emulate, mimic, or synthesize the author’s literary voice, style, or persona.

• Derivative Works: Using the materials to enable the generation of new expressive works that are derived from or substantially similar to the materials.

I should also say that the contract includes positive language allowing us to use AI for internal purposes, such as OCR and metadata creation. But as a technologist, my first read had me concerned that the language creates a significant implementation challenge.

How do technologists adhere to these terms in a world where the internet is essentially an open buffet of content?

The End of Public Availability?

To ensure absolute compliance with the terms outlined above, I see only two things my team can implement to safeguard the materials. And guess what, neither of them feels open:

1. Removing the content from the public internet entirely. I’ve had extensive conversations with my team about our current application that would serve up the material in question, and they are confident that our technical blocks prevent the vast majority of automated crawlers from downloading our materials. I’ve even verified that our content is successfully hidden from the Wayback Machine (which, fun fact, uses data from Common Crawl, which I’ve mentioned before in relation to AI). However, “automated” is the keyword there. If an AI company is motivated enough, it can simply pay humans to build targeted scrapers (there’s a subReddit for that) or maybe vibe code something to bypass these blocks. If the content is on the open web, a determined actor with enough resources will eventually get it.

2. Requiring a legal waiver from every single user. This type of action is a direct response to the shifting legal ground around “meaningful consent.” For years, a case called hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corporation, 17-16783 (via Courtlistener.com), served as the north star for scrapers; it essentially held that content on the public web could be harvested without legal repercussions. But that legacy has shifted since the AI boom began; courts have started to emphasize that institutions must take “sufficient” and “affirmative steps” to signal that bots are unwelcome. A simple robots.txt file (historically used as a “please don’t” sign) can be easily ignored and is not a legally binding barrier. Without an explicit, user-facing legal waiver that forces a visitor to agree to terms, AI companies can continue to hide behind the ambiguity of public access to claim they have a website’s consent.

This feels like a step backward for cultural heritage institutions. We spent decades trying to tear down the walled gardens around content and criticizing publishers for locking away knowledge. Now, the predatory nature of AI scraping is forcing us to build our own walls.

But maybe there is a middle path? I’ve previously written about emerging standards such as Really Simple Licensing (RSL) and Web Bot Auth. These protocols aim to move beyond the binary of open or blocked by creating enforceable, machine-actionable methods to prohibit bots (or make them pay) from using content on the open web. If one of these standards prevails, we might eventually be able to offer openness with intention, allowing authenticated, responsible crawlers while enforcing the strict prohibitions required by our donors.

Until then, we are essentially waiting for the final word from the landmark lawsuit The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation, 1:23-cv-11195 (via Courtlistener.com). The Times is suing OpenAI/Microsoft, claiming that millions of its articles were used without permission to train AI models, essentially “free-riding” (a common term in the open source universe) on its massive investment in journalism to create a product that now directly competes for its audience’s attention without driving views (and therefore preventing revenue generation through ad dollars).

As of early 2026, the discovery phase has already proven that “regurgitation” (where an AI outputs copyrighted content word-for-word) is a documented reality of generative AI chatbots. This challenges the industry’s defense that AI training is a “transformative” fair use that doesn’t harm the original market. Until the legal dust settles, though, the only way to adhere to the terms I described above may be to keep it under lock and key.

Technical Sufficiency vs. Legal Reality

When I meet with General Counsel next month, I’ll ask: What does “sufficient protection” mean for the university? How much risk is the institution willing to take with our current infrastructure and legal agreements adhering to these terms? What must my team implement to meet the legal thresholds still being established? If a donor is highly litigious, will our “best effort” be enough? Or are we entering an era where high-value digital collections must be siloed behind click-through agreements or worse, stored away never to see the digital light of day?

As always, I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Are we being too protective, or are we the only ones taking the stewardship part of our job seriously?

My connection with Katherine Skinner spans at least 15 years, though for much of that time, I admired her from a distance. I had heard of her accomplishments long before I had the opportunity to cross paths with her. It wasn’t until my former boss at Stanford, Tom Cramer, suggested we connect that the bridge was finally built. When I first started my current position, I found myself literally sifting through the history of her tenure at Emory while cleaning out old files, piecing together how she got her start.

As my own interest in open infrastructure has grown, I’ve had increasing opportunities to interact with Katherine, both personally and professionally. I sincerely appreciate her contributions to our community and, most recently, her work at Invest in Open Infrastructure—so much so that while preparing my recent keynote for iPRES, I made a point of citing her extensive work on community building. As part of that, I decided to reach out and interview her to learn more from her. I also thought it would be a great complement to the talk I was creating (and knew I would post for all of you). Throughout the interview, you’ll hear why Katherine has influenced my work. Which is to say, if you haven’t had the chance to engage with Katherine, you are in for a real treat.

In this conversation, we peel back the layers of “sustainability”—a buzzword we all use but rarely define with the rigor Katherine brings. We discuss the fragility of institutional support, the dangerous “anti-profit” bias in libraries, and why she believes the scarcity of funding in our field is actually an illusion. Katherine’s provides an unvarnished wisdom that I admire greatly. She is a truth-teller in a field that often prefers politeness, and as you’ll read, she’s done apologizing for it.

The Fragility of Institutions

We began by discussing the origins of Educopia and the MetaArchive Cooperative. Katherine’s experience in building these communities serves as a masterclass in risk management: she realized early on that even the most supportive institutions are subject to the whims of administrative turnover. That realization—that “permanent” is a myth—became the bedrock of her philosophy on infrastructure.

RM: I’m very curious about your writing on funding and sustainability. You’ve called it an “illusion” that there isn’t enough money to support open infrastructure. What lived experience led you to that conclusion?

KS: Sustainability, and fiscal sustainability specifically, was always on my mind. When I entered this field around 2000, my first projects focused on archives, OAI-PMH, and building federated collections. But the question that dogged me was: Then what? How do we make sure that these digital records persist?

By 2006, Martin Halbert—who was running library systems at Emory—came to me and said, “We need to found a non-profit.” At the time, we needed a neutral space for a digital preservation network we’d founded (MetaArchive) as well as other community activities hosted and facilitated by our team at Emory, but that we didn’t want to “own” or “control”; we believed these initiatives didn’t really belong to any one institution. We felt that associating with a single institution would be too much of a failure point.

At first, I tried to stand in the way. We were both working on our dissertations at the time and managing about $6 million in grants. I told Martin to go away until we turned in our dissertations. He said, “No, I don’t think we can wait.” So, 19 years ago, Martin talked me into it, and we founded Educopia.

Here’s the thing—and I think I can safely talk about this now—we had perfect support at Emory. I couldn’t have asked for any library to be a better home for multi-institutional collaborative work. But Martin’s point was that libraries are the custodians of long-term memory; we aren’t equipped to manage the business infrastructure needed to maintain it. Emory shouldn’t be in charge of the future of a digital preservation network. That is never going to be Emory’s aim, despite all the supporters we had in the university’s administration at the time. From the get-go, Educopia was a sustainability plan for many of the projects we were working on.

But within a year of founding Educopia, the whole system at Emory started to change, from the Provost down. We lost all of that support apparatus at once. The folks who came in were not nearly as enamored with what we were doing. In the end, Emory was the first one to drop out of MetaArchive.

So, not only did we create a map for fiscal sustainability and governance continuity, but it really, really came true that we needed Educopia for business infrastructure. It left a deep impression on me. You can’t take sustainability for granted. The fragility of the open infrastructure systems we build is often hinged on academic institutions. Some argue that because universities have lasted for centuries, they are a safe bet. But right now? Not a great bet. Not when fiscal models are being upended.

RM: That really speaks to the illusion of stability we often have. You mentioned earlier that there is enough money, but it’s not being used correctly. Can you expand on that?

KS: I started my “Emperor’s New Clothes” series privately in a notebook back in 2016. It was just all the things that I had heard through my project work that frustrated me.

While there has always been enough money in the system to create the open infrastructures we need, there hasn’t been enough to simply replicate the same functions everywhere. We don’t have the money for personality-driven projects, or for one little clique that wants to make it “their way,” so they fork off and do their own thing. The amount of money we’ve had in the system has sometimes let us do foolish things. We’ve had the freedom to do that—money from grants, as well as the volunteer time people had the bandwidth to provide.

Watching that evaporate... well, you gotta find a silver lining. It makes us realize that we’ve been in this age of experimentation, and that it’s been great. We’ve created standards and protocols. But now, we should make some choices. And let’s do that as a field. Let’s not have Funder X decide this program needs to go, while Funder Y pushes another one. We’ve got to find a better way to choose what we genuinely want to work with in the long term. Otherwise, we won’t have any open options because they can’t compete with proprietary solutions. And then we all lose.

Market Failures

Katherine is a self-described truth-teller, and nowhere was this more apparent than in our discussion of the Digital Preservation Network (DPN). As she recounted her experience consulting for the project, her voice offered me a retrospective clarity. DPN wasn’t a story about failed technology; it was a story about ignoring market realities in favor of complex, theoretical constructs.

RM: It reminds me of one of the first open projects I was part of—DPN. I feel like I’ve been in so many meetings and on so many grants where we keep reusing the same technology, but the sustainability piece never gets addressed.

KS: Oh, DPN. I lived through that catastrophic reinvention. Steve Morales hired me as a consultant from Educopia back then. I’m a truth-teller, so I told him, “Your people sent you to me because I’m not gonna mince words.”

Steve was convinced there was a market for digital preservation. And I kept saying, “There is no market. We are trying to build a market for digital preservation, but what you are building is a Byzantine project the community can’t afford.”

He’d say, “I’m getting $20,000 a year from all these institutions. I’ve got a market. It’s secure.” I worked with him for less than a year because he wouldn’t take any of the advice I was giving. I had to cut my losses because he wasn’t interested in what I was telling him.

But you’re right about the replication; DPN itself was similar to other distributed digital preservation services that already existed because the personalities involved thought they needed to build it anew. We have to stop doing that. We have to map our way to success in a changing world.

Risk management requires recognizing that most open infrastructures—whether housed in an academic institution or a non-profit—are operating below their revenue needs. Universities, grant funds, or government funds subsidize them, but this has long been invisible to decision-makers. People thought, “LOCKSS? Stanford is taking care of that. Internet Archive? Other institutions are paying for that, so it’s permanent.”

But none of this is permanent infrastructure. Somebody has to be managing the books behind the scenes. Somebody has to manage community governance. Or else that infrastructure isn’t open or stable and becomes a liability rather than a building block.

Mapping the Landscape: From 2.5% to Infra Finder

Next, Katherine and I pivoted to her current work with IOI. Katherine explained the evolution of Infra Finder, a tool designed to bring transparency to this opaque ecosystem. There was a palpable sense of relief in her voice when she described helping to create a public resource that empowers decision-makers.

RM: I’m curious about the work you’re doing at IOI now, specifically Infra Finder and the granting programs. How do those initiatives help solve these “emperor’s new clothes” problems you’ve identified?

KS: My own role in helping to create Infra Finder actually dates back to a small Mellon-funded grant where we tried to map the scholarly communication landscape. I brought ten years of consulting experience to that project. I had worked with clients whose stories were so much worse than Educopia’s—they put our struggles in perspective.

I realized that the open infrastructure people thought was orchestrated and building toward a crescendo was actually floundering. Everybody was just barely staying alive. I wanted to examine the business and governance practices of these projects to better understand them. I’m a sociologist; I want to see the other elements, not just the code.

We put together an abhorrently long survey that people only suffered to answer because they were my friends. But they answered it confidentially. So then I was stuck with a whole lot of information I couldn’t talk about—the number of groups that didn’t have a budget or anything resembling budget-to-actuals. The number of groups that gave me a list of funders, and I’d have to remind them, “You also got funding from X,” and they’d say, “Oh, that’s right, we did.” They weren’t keeping written records, and it was genuinely scary.

Infra Finder has been influenced by that. IOI created it to bring more visibility to open infrastructures in our field. We needed a neutral space that could look across all these different infrastructures and projects to help organizations using the infrastructure see what was working and what needed work, not just technologically but also from business and community angles. It is designed to help those trying to invest in or adopt infrastructure understand what they are actually getting into.

We now have 134 infrastructures in Infra Finder. We can start looking across the body of data. What are the trends? What are the funding patterns over time? Which of these still has a founder twenty years in, who is holding onto the reins—and is that good or bad?

We need that information to make informed decisions about how to consolidate this vast range of work we’ve built into something we can afford to manage. And I use the word “consolidate,” knowing it’s a loaded term. I’m talking about consolidation with a little “c”—where the community chooses it, where we mindfully decide which of these things serves the purpose well, and how we put more resources behind those few things rather than spreading them thin.

Industry Models: Lessons from Women’s Music

This section was a fascinating detour into Katherine’s academic roots. When I asked her about fostering community, she drew a brilliant parallel between open infrastructure and the “separatist” economies of the women’s movement in the 20th century. It was an excellent metaphor for how marginalized groups build power and how staying on the margins for too long can be a risk in and of itself.

RM: You mentioned your background in sociology. I recently listened to the What Now Podcast, where Trevor Noah interviewed Bernie Sanders, who talked about sponsoring dances and basketball games in Vermont because you need to foster community before you can have political engagement. What do you wish we could promote more of within our community?

KS: My graduate work was on the music industry—specifically the interplay between social movements and new genres. For me, it was the Indigo Girls and Tracy Chapman in my childhood. They made it to Top 40 radio, and it was like, Oh my god, there are lesbians in the world! I’m gonna survive this!

I got to dig into how the women’s movement fostered community through music stages and festivals like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival1. There was a sense of autonomy and a “separatist industry.” It resonates with what we are dealing with in open infrastructure right now. We are trying to build something autonomous.

In the women’s movement, it wasn’t that everyone went into a separatist industry—Ladyslipper Music wasn’t the only distributor people used. But the lesbian-feminist movement laid a strong, separatist foundation through bookstores, record labels, and distribution channels by and for women who weren’t being served by the mainstream industry players. You get these stories of empowerment that are both connected to the industry and separate enough from it that they are controlled by a kind of communal sense. People embraced Ani DiFranco and her Righteous Babes label in part because of all it signified politically and economically. There’s a community around her. Ditto for the Indigo Girls, and for some civil rights activists who wound up making music and impacting the development of both musical movements and actual genres. These genres come into interplay with the industry in these really interesting ways.

I think some of what we’re watching happen within our own profession is similar. What we are involved in—this whole open space—is a social movement. Understanding how these networks and communities function is inextricably linked to knowing how to consolidate infrastructure. You don’t want to break the bonds that have been created, but you also don’t want 16 different networks to try to build the same thing. Sometimes resource scarcity can fuel the construction of common pathways. That’s what (I hope) we can see open infrastructure operationalize instead of continuing to sprawl. It has to be something that happens through extensive knowledge exchange, pushing people toward shared norms, just like those early movements did.

The Non-Commercial Trap

From the sociology of music, Katherine pivoted to the complex economics of our field. She challenged the industry’s binary thinking—open vs. commercial—with the nuance of someone who has seen “good” commercial players and “bad” non-profits. Her argument is clear: an organization’s tax status is not a proxy for its values.

RM: That idea of a separatist industry is so interesting. Can you say more about how that translates to the business side of our industry? We often have this hard line in libraries where “commercial” equals bad.

KS: The notion that “open” is inherently non-commercial is a misconception. You absolutely can be commercial and open, and that can be a genuinely radical approach. We see this with examples like RSpace, a commercial company that embraced open practices and continues to operate successfully. This interplay is essential because, regardless of our preferences, we are operating within a capitalist society. The challenge lies in how we build within these existing structures, embed our values in what we create, and use that as leverage to change the mainstream industry.

A core driver of my career has been to incentivize both commercial and non-commercial players to improve their practices. One way to do this is by making their business models more visible. For instance, if an organization claims to be “open” and has open content, we must ask: what happens if the platform fails? Can anyone retrieve that content and act on it? This is where a focus on open infrastructure becomes necessary.

Another common misconception is that open source isn’t commercial. In the hospital industry, a significant portion of open-source activity is commercial. We need to borrow from other industries and explore different models. An unfortunate, somewhat well-earned vilification has made it difficult for open infrastructures that originated in academia to explore various business and governance models, such as co-ops.

I believe the co-op structure, in which a set of institutions co-invests and profits roll back to shareholders, offers one underutilized, powerful, sustainable alternative. This approach is not about suddenly becoming “profit-minded,” but about being business-minded enough to ensure you have sufficient resources to avoid constantly falling into technical debt, which is crucial in the tech industry.

The “anti-profit” stance prevalent in some parts of our values space is deeply problematic. It’s an unexamined assumption that profit is the problem. In reality, certain types of profit are an issue, but we must remember that a non-profit designation is just a tax status; you can have bad non-profits. This rigid thinking, in which certain “illusions” such as “non-commercial equals good” cannot be questioned, hinders our ability to grow.

Two illusions holding back the open infrastructure space are the unquestioning resistance to consolidation and mergers, and the simplistic view that non-commercial is somehow inherently blessed. We need a thoughtful reimagining of what these terms truly mean, how they function, and what we might be holding ourselves back from achieving because of them.

My Takeaway

My conversation with Katherine Skinner was a powerful reinforcement of a core belief I’ve held for a long time: sustainability is not a destination or a passive state of being; it is an active, often tricky, and complex series of choices. This realization moves us beyond the comfortable fantasy that continued existence is an inherent right simply because our mission is noble.

True sustainability demands constant, critical evaluation and the courage to make hard decisions. We see this in major organizational inflection points—the “leap moment” when an entire community decides to embrace evolution, as we witnessed in the significant effort required for the Fedora migration, or the equally difficult but necessary strategic decision to sunset a beloved but ultimately redundant or resource-draining tool. These moments are defined by intentional action, not inertia.

We must fundamentally change our mindset and move beyond the persistent illusion that funding will magically appear just because our cause is just or our intentions are good. Hope is not a budget line item. As Katherine so eloquently summarized, our path forward requires a shift in strategy: we have to stop reinventing the wheel and instead start building a vehicle we can actually afford to drive and maintain. This means prioritizing shared infrastructure, investing in collaborative, scalable solutions, and accepting that pursuing bespoke, duplicated systems is a luxury we can no longer afford. The future of our work depends on making fiscally responsible, strategic choices today that prioritize long-term resilience over short-term comfort.

Thanks for reading! This post is part of my iPRES keynote series, in which I examine the hidden political and cultural structures of our systems. You can explore the rest of the series here:

• Part 1: Encountering Collapse

• Part 2: The Myth of Neutrality

• Part 3: Community as Backbone

• Part 4: The Limits of Openness

• Part 5: Collapse as Opportunity (this post)

Encountering collapse exposes the values embedded in the ecosystem, whether intentionally, as we saw in the keynote from the Honourable Simon Kofe, Minister for Transport, Energy, Communications and Innovation, Government of Tuvalu or unintentionally, as we are seeing in some open source communities (see Ruby on Rails and Ruby Gems for a dramatic view of collapse) — revealing where we have failed. Yet collapse also creates the space for reconfiguration. As Taveras-Dalmau and Katherine Skinner suggest, these moments are not endpoints but thresholds for something new. Each collapse is a chance to encounter the future differently. We can rebuild ecosystems and ground them in our values, as we saw in Minister Kofe’s talk about a digital nation. And in doing so, we can create renewal.

As an American, this topic is near and dear to my heart. I’m convinced that we are heading toward the collapse of our country. I’m anxiously waiting for us to get to year four of the current administration’s tenure. I’m already thinking—and have been for a year now, actually a year ago today — what my country will look like when all of this is over. How will it be rebuilt to ensure that the values that the majority of Americans hold dear continue to live and thrive?

Taveras-Dalmau et al.’s From Paradigm Blindness to Paradigm Shift?

In “From Paradigm Blindness to Paradigm Shift?” Taveras-Dalmau and her coauthors describe paradigm shifts as cyclical: ideas solidify into unquestioned truths, contradictions accumulate, and the structure can no longer hold, ultimately collapsing. The authors call this “paradigm blindness”—our tendency to stay loyal to the familiar even as it fails us.

But the authors also remind us that collapse isn’t the end of a system— it’s also a clearing point when old frameworks lose their grip and new ones begin to surface. It’s the moment when we finally see the ecosystem clearly for everything that it is. In their view, regeneration occurs when that blindness lifts: a new way of seeing that reorients ecosystems toward interdependence rather than exploitation.

What gives me hope in their analysis and the story we heard yesterday is that regeneration doesn’t emerge despite failure—it appears because of it. Out of that exhaustion to preserve the familiar, new patterns emerge: movements centered on collaboration, local knowledge, and care for place. The authors’ Regenerative Paradigm Map captures this perfectly, showing us how ideas, practices, and values that evolve in the spaces collapse leave behind.

However, the authors also warn that regeneration can fall into the same trap as the ecosystems it seeks to replace. The moment it becomes ideology—when we stop questioning its limits—it loses its regenerative capacity. Renewal depends on staying open, adaptive, and willing to confront the discomfort of unmaking what no longer serves.

Katherine Skinner and The Red Queen’s Race

In Katherine Skinner’s “The Red Queen’s Race,” Skinner suggests what the ecosystem should look like for libraries. Skinner argues that academy-owned and academy-governed infrastructures for scholarly communication are trapped in an exhausting cycle of underfunding, fragmentation, and short-term survival strategies that prevent long-term sustainability. They are “running as fast as they can just to stay in place.” (a reference to Alice in Wonderland for those of you that might not be familiar). She identifies seven interlocking causes for this “Red Queen’s race”:

• Chronic underfunding and burnout;

• Prioritization of innovation over maintenance;

• Internal competition for limited resources;

• Fleeting institutional attention;

• Weak business and leadership training;

• Poor assessment and accountability mechanisms; and

• A lack of shared understanding of the total cost of scholarly communication.

Together, these structural weaknesses create a cycle in which open, community-based initiatives must constantly reinvent themselves to remain visible and relevant, yet rarely achieve the financial or organizational stability needed for durability.

In The Red Queen’s Race, Skinner critiques the way academic culture rewards novelty over maintenance, leading to open infrastructure communities that continually chase new grants, features, or recognition rather than investing in the slow, collaborative labor of stability. This imbalance places immense pressure on the people and organizations responsible for maintenance. The absence of shared assessment, funding coordination, and leadership development further weakens these communities. What ultimately falters is not code or hardware, but trust, cooperation, and the social contracts that allow distributed actors to share responsibility for open infrastructure.

Finally, Skinner’s call for collective action situates resilience squarely within networks of relationships. She argues that the future of scholarly infrastructure depends on aligning communities, pooling resources, and establishing governance systems that reinforce mutual support. Her vision is to build interdependent communities capable of sustaining infrastructure through shared investment and stewardship. In this sense, the article strongly supports the idea that open infrastructure should be more than a single community; it should be an ecosystem of communities.

Conclusion

I know you’re probably expecting a story like the previous posts, but this time I’d like to ask you some questions, hoping that together we can create a new story.

How do we, as a community, encounter collapse?

Higher education, scholarly communication, and cultural heritage are undervalued in present-day society. We’ve been working tirelessly to convince the world that preserving truth, memory, and our collective cultural heritage is important. It’s almost humorous how many times I’ve had conversations with people who had this brilliant idea to preserve something or build some technology, only for me to point out to them that someone in libraries or museums has already done it.

So, what if we stopped? What if we changed the way we encounter one another and our profession? What if we tried something new? What if we started by designing our own ending? If we could tear down the organizations that we have built, what would we want to get rid of? How would we reimagine our profession and our organizations? By following the pattern of emergence and regeneration, could we encounter collapse not from a place of fear, but a place of excitement and anticipation? What would it mean to design endings that invite both encounter and renewal?

References

Skinner, Katherine. “Why Are So Many Scholarly Communication Infrastructure Providers Running a Red Queen’s Race?” Educopia, July 23, 2019. https://educopia.org/blog/why-are-so-many-scholarly-communication-infrastructure-providers-running-a-red-queens-race/.

Taveras-Dalmau, Vanessa, Susanne Becken, and Ross Westoby. “From Paradigm Blindness to Paradigm Shift? An Integrative Review and Critical Analysis of the Regenerative Paradigm.” Ambio, ahead of print, September 12, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-025-02232-7.

You can also watch my speech directly via YouTube:

Thanks for reading! This post is part of my iPRES keynote series, in which I examine the hidden political and cultural structures of our systems. You can explore the rest of the series here:

• Part 1: Encountering Collapse

• Part 2: The Myth of Neutrality

• Part 3: Community as Backbone

• Part 4: The Limits of Openness (this post)

• Part 5: Collapse as Opportunity

Libraries often talk about openness as a core tenet of our belief system. For many organizations, making knowledge publicly available isn’t a question; we just do it. But we have embedded openness into our core belief system, leaving the idea without governance. And unfortunately, this can lead to exploitation. Transparency and access must be balanced with consent and collective accountability.

The AI era has revealed the challenges associated with openness. What was intended to democratize knowledge—such as “open access” and “open source”—now risks benefiting exploitative companies that are far from neutral, as I mentioned earlier. Libraries need to evolve from being “open by default” to being “open with thoughtfulness.” This entails creating environments in which agreement, governance, and collaboration guide participation. Genuine openness supports the commons through shared responsibility, rather than through indiscriminate exposure.

Katherine Skinner, The Emperor’s New Clothes

In “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, Katherine Skinner reminds us that openness, on its own, is not a virtue. Without governance—without the frameworks that create accountability—openness quickly turns into exploitation. She calls out the illusions we’ve built around open infrastructure, around progress, and equity. What we call “open” often masks hidden hierarchies, unpaid labor, and decisions made behind closed doors.

Skinner’s analysis of funding patterns exposes how this imbalance plays out. We celebrate grant announcements and new features, but rarely question how the underlying infrastructure stays afloat—or who is asked to hold it up. As she points out, most funding goes toward visible innovation rather than the invisible work of maintenance and community building. That’s the paradox of our current ecosystem: it rewards novelty while depleting the ecosystem that makes openness possible in the first place. It treats shared infrastructure like a free beer rather than a free puppy. In reality, many open projects operate in silos, competing for scarce funds and attention while exhausting the people who keep them running.

The alternative Skinner sketches are less about control and more about stewardship. She points to models like HathiTrust that build openness through shared governance and pooled investment. These ecosystems don’t confuse access with equity; instead, they recognize that sustainable openness requires structure and agreement. In Skinner’s framing, governance keeps communities from burning out or being exploited. If we want openness to endure, we have to treat it as a relationship to be tended, not a product to be consumed.

For a long time, we treated openness as an unqualified good—a moral stance that needed no further justification. But the last few years have shown me that sharing alone doesn’t guarantee equity or sustainability. For me, the ideals of openness have collided with reality. The systems that promise collaboration and shared progress can, without governance, reproduce the same hierarchies they were meant to dismantle.

Nadia Asparouhova, Roads and Bridges

We’ve long celebrated transparency and access as the cornerstones of innovation, but in “Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure”, Asparouhova forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that open infrastructure often disguises exploitation. The open-source ecosystems she describes in Roads and Bridges are built by maintainers who are underpaid (if they are paid at all), overextended, and largely unseen. Meanwhile, the companies and institutions that rely on their work reap the rewards. What we call “freedom” in open infrastructure often hides structural neglect. The same openness that powers collaboration also permits exploitation when recognition and consent aren’t part of the equation.

Asparouhova’s core insight is that digital infrastructure, like physical infrastructure, requires maintenance, governance, and long-term investment to remain functional. Yet, unlike roads or utilities, open-source projects lack coordinated stewardship; they are maintained by small, often unpaid communities or individuals. And to make matters worse, economic incentives, venture capital interests, and cultural norms in software development have created a system in which vast social and commercial value is extracted from the unpaid labor of maintainers. Essentially, “openness” becomes a convenient moral cover for the asymmetries baked into the digital economy. Her framing of maintainers as the “unseen labor” of the internet exposes how open infrastructures reproduce the same inequities we claim to transcend by participating in these communities. It’s not a failure of individuals but of a system that celebrates contribution without ever building structures to acknowledge and value the labor that goes into contribution.

The call that emerges from Roads and Bridges is for a new kind of openness—one that balances labor with acknowledgment. Asparouhova asks us to stop equating open infrastructure with virtue and start designing for durability. We need funding models that honor maintenance, institutions that share responsibility, and communities that consent to the load they carry. In other words, the future of openness depends on re-centering the value of labor. If exploitation is what happens when openness runs without governance, then sustainability — real, long-term sustainability — begins when we practice openness while valuing the labor that helps us create it.

Story Time: The impact of AI on Labor

At Emory, we’ve spent years building digital collections and open-access repositories using various open-source infrastructure. But in early to mid-2024, I started noticing more outages across all our systems. We observed a substantial increase in web traffic. It wasn’t from students or researchers, but from obscure devices, and the traffic volume appeared unrealistic. Over and over, thousands of hits, all targeting our digital collections, open-access repository, and catalog.

At first, I thought it was me. Around that time, I assumed responsibility for managing the team responsible for on-call work after a manager left my team. I thought, well, maybe this is normal, and I’ve been oblivious to what is happening. But then, at a conference, a colleague from another institution had to step out of a session because their catalog was down, and we (administrators tasked with overseeing library infrastructure) all remarked that this was happening to many of us recently. I even had a vendor mention they had to increase their security spending because they were constantly under attack. Eventually, I realized that the situation was neither an attack nor a result of my obliviousness; it was simply AI training traffic. I’ve mentioned all of this before, so I will spare you the details, but if you’re new here, you can read all about it in a previous Substack post I wrote.

But the story doesn’t stop there. AI companies already have access to our content in other ways. In this video, I’m showing OpenAI’s chat interface; you can see it retrieving information and images from my institution’s digital collections. How did it get this access? Much of our content is available in the Common Crawl dataset, a massive web scrape that many AI companies use to train their models. So, of course, they have our content—and they are using it to generate information about our collections right now.

Update

A few months ago, after I began drafting this keynote but before I delivered it, I received an email from Google Books asking whether Emory University would like to join the project. I didn’t have the opportunity to discuss this with our University Librarian until December, but in the interim, Google released Gemini 4.

Upon its release, industry experts immediately touted Gemini 4 as one of the best models on the market, and OpenAI saw a significant drop in revenue as users canceled their ChatGPT subscriptions in favor of Gemini (myself included). Watching this unfold, I was reminded of that email from the Google Books project. I began to realize that Gemini’s performance wasn’t magic; it was high-quality data the company had acquired nearly 21 years earlier via the Google Books project.

But the Google Books project isn’t the only high-quality data the company has at its fingertips. Around the same time I received the Google Books inquiry, librarians across the community reported that representatives from Google Scholar were contacting libraries and vendors to ensure Google could easily crawl and index our scholarly repositories. It appears that Google was having difficulty crawling and indexing content in these repositories due to the aforementioned AI bot attacks. For context, most of these repositories contain theses, dissertations, preprints, and open-access journal articles from major research institutions worldwide.

While I don’t have definitive proof that Google is using data from Google Books or Google Scholar to train Gemin, I suspect Google long ago learned the lesson many other AI companies are now fully grasping: the quality of your data dictates the quality of your output. Or in other words, high-quality training data will create a high-quality AI model.

During a recent presentation to library staff—a talk much like this one—an audience member posed a fantastic and challenging question to me: “Why should we care?”

The answer is simple: these companies profit from, and will continue to benefit from, the labor that cultural heritage and knowledge workers have performed for centuries. While I have heard that some libraries have received one-time monetary reimbursements for some of this data, the data these companies acquire from libraries and museums is not a single-use asset; it is revisited, re-leveraged, and re-exploited whenever a company begins training its next AI model.

In addition to exploiting unseen labor in collecting, curating, describing, and maintaining these collections, their online activity to collect our data increases our infrastructure costs. For anyone familiar with technology, you’ll know that the majority of today’s infrastructure is cloud-based and billed using a per-use model. Increased usage directly translates to a higher bill. The more AI companies crawl our websites, the more our costs rise. These problems are not limited to cultural heritage organizations. Read the Docs and Wikipedia are also facing similar challenges.

At some point, something’s got to give.

Conclusion

What does responsible openness look like in a world focused on exploitation? I have extensively discussed labor and its devaluation. We need to return to our roots and reflect on why we valued openness and on our goals for it. In a world where most internet traffic is bots, does it still make sense to keep our materials openly available? If we aim to be ethical in our sharing—meaning we don’t want to provide people’s content to billion-dollar companies so they can become trillion-dollar corporations—who should we focus on, and what changes need to be made to make that possible?

How do we balance the desire to share information with the responsibility to protect it? At Emory, we have collections that focus on the Black experience in America. However, as a predominantly white institution, I personally question whether or not we are best equipped to understand how that content should be protected.

And even for the communities we are equipped to protect, such as our own, we’re struggling to engage in meaningful conversations around how much of our content we should share openly with billion-dollar companies. I also recognize that I am not in the majority on this issue and that restricting access is a radical concept for our profession. Still, I wish I saw more of these conversations in our ecosystem because I fear that our unwillingness to reevaluate this core tenet may lead to our eventual collapse.

References

Asparouhova, Nadia. Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure. Ford Foundation, 2016. https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-reports/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/.

Holscher, Eric. “AI Crawlers Need to Be More Respectful.” Read the Docs, July 25, 2024. https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse/.

Mueller, Birgit, Chris Danis, Wikimedia Foundation, and Giuseppe Lavagetto, Wikimedia Foundation. “How Crawlers Impact the Operations of the Wikimedia Projects.” Diff, April 1, 2025. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/.

Skinner, Katherine. “The Emperor’s New Clothes: Common Myths Hindering Open Infrastructure.” Invest in Open Infrastructure, October 29, 2024. https://investinopen.org/blog/the-emperors-new-clothes-common-myths-hindering-open-infrastructure/.

Thanks for reading! This post is part of my iPRES keynote series, in which I examine the hidden political and cultural structures of our systems. You can explore the rest of the series here:

• Part 1: Encountering Collapse

• Part 2: The Myth of Neutrality

• Part 3: Community as Backbone (this post)

• Part 4: The Limits of Openness

• Part 5: Collapse as Opportunity

We have discussed the myth of infrastructure’s neutrality. If that is true, what does it mean for the communities surrounding the infrastructure we have developed?

Resilience is not inherent in technologies—it derives from the people who maintain them and the activities they undertake to ensure it. Open infrastructure communities emerge when individuals encounter like-minded peers and form communities on the premise that, together, they will share responsibility for the ecosystem. Technology may provide the scaffolding for why communities come together, but without the relational bonds that sustain it, even the most advanced technologies can falter.

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons

Elinor Ostrom’s book, Governing the Commons, offers insights particularly relevant to today’s digital world. Through her research on fisheries, forests, and irrigation networks, Ostrom illustrates that communities can effectively manage common-pool resources. Common-pool resources are defined as shared resources that are both non-excludable—meaning it is difficult to prevent individuals from using them—and rivalrous—indicating that one person’s use of the resource reduces its availability for others. Before Ostrom’s work, scholars generally believed that such resources could be managed only by private companies or by publicly governed local or state authorities. Ostrom revealed a third approach: community governance.

What came out of Governing the Commons was Ostrom’s eight design principles:

1. Clearly defined boundaries - The community must have clear boundaries, both in terms of who has the right to use the resource and in what the resource encompasses. This prevents free-riding and ensures accountability among participants.

2. Rules matched to local needs and conditions - The laws governing use of the commons (e.g., how much each person can take, when, and how) should reflect local realities rather than being imposed externally. Context-specific rules create legitimacy and adaptability.

3. Collective-choice arrangements - Those affected by the rules should have a voice in shaping them. When users participate in decision-making, they are more likely to comply with and enforce shared agreements.

4. Monitoring - Community members—or trusted, accountable monitors—must keep track of resource conditions and usage. Transparency and local oversight discourage overuse and foster trust.

5. Graduated sanctions - Violations should be met with proportionate, escalating responses—ranging from mild warnings to more substantial penalties for repeat offenses—rather than immediate exclusion or punishment. This preserves social cohesion while maintaining accountability.

6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms - Accessible, low-cost ways to resolve disputes are essential. Unresolved conflicts erode trust and weaken collective governance.

7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize - External authorities (e.g., governments) must respect the community’s right to create and enforce its own rules. Without this autonomy, local governance collapses under outside interference.

8. Nested enterprises - For large or complex ecosystems, governance should operate in multiple, interconnected layers—from local to regional to global. These “nested” structures distribute responsibility and enhance resilience.

These design principles became a mechanism for building trust among communities seeking to govern common-pool resources.

Ostrom’s framework offers valuable insights for open infrastructure, which many argue is non-excludable and rivalrous. Her design principles mirror the challenges open infrastructure communities face when managing shared software and standards. Ostrom believed that common-pool resources are strengthened when the people who depend on them invest in one another.

In our ecosystem, communities that prioritize relationships are the ones that maintain robust, healthy technology. No software, metadata schema, or protocol can thrive without the active involvement of the community that uses it. Ultimately, “Governing the Commons” encourages us to view all infrastructures as living entities that can only flourish when people are dedicated to the continuous work of building them.

As a postscript, toward the end of Ostrom’s career, she began to engage more actively with the scholarly communications community by attending symposiums and workshops, as well as co-editing the book Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. Her contributions are also significant to Nadia Asparouhova’s work on open infrastructure.

So Ostrom’s eight design principles help us see how a community might govern itself, but let’s discuss how Wheatley and Frieze talk about how communities form.

Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze, Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale

Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, in their work “Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale”, argue that lasting and large-scale social change does not come from top-down control or mass mobilization. Instead, it arises from the self-organizing dynamics of living ecosystems. According to Wheatley and Frieze, local initiatives connect to form networks, which then evolve into communities of practice. This process ultimately leads to the creation of new ecosystems of influence through emergence—the phenomenon where new and complex properties or behaviors develop from the interactions of simpler components within an ecosystem.

Instead of striving for critical mass—the idea that widespread adoption follows once enough individuals are persuaded to join together—change agents should cultivate connections among people who share a common cause. These relationships generate shared learning, trust, and mutual commitment, which are necessary for transformation.

Their model of emergence mirrors what happens when a single piece of software, written by someone to solve a problem, matures into something more. At first, people connect out of shared curiosity or frustration. Over time, those relationships evolve into communities where people experiment together, share lessons learned, and begin to shape standards and software. That’s when software becomes open infrastructure—the community around it becomes strong enough to sustain it. Technology provides the scaffolding, but people supply the structure’s integrity.

What Wheatley and Frieze make clear is that resilience shows up when relationships do. When local, scattered efforts begin to connect, something larger takes shape—something with its own momentum. The technology may change over time, but the relationships that hold the work together are what needs to endure.

Story Time: Fedora & OCFL

When I think about community-led open infrastructure as a vital foundation, I can’t help but think of Fedora and OCFL. For decades, Fedora has been a constant presence in the open-source infrastructure ecosystem. If you are unfamiliar with Fedora, I’ve already written extensively about it on this Substack.

In short, the release of Fedora 4, intended to modernize the infrastructure with linked data and a new architecture/storage model, failed to meet the community’s needs. The arduous migration from Fedora 3 led many institutions to remain on the older, eventually unsupported version, placing significant strain on those without the resources to undertake the migration. Tensions and waning confidence grew within the community. For a time, some of us on the Fedora governance committee, including me as chair, feared the project might not survive.

That sense of near-death became a catalyst for change. During the 2017 Fedora/Samvera Camp in Oxford, UK, Andrew Hankinson and Andrew Woods began discussing the problem in depth. They drafted an initial proposal that directly addressed the challenges the Fedora community had been raising and also addressed broader problems facing all repositories since the advent of digital preservation. Later that year, a longer discussion paper circulated, incorporating extensive community comments that further refined the idea. From these efforts, the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) emerged in 2017 as a shared framework to ensure long-term durability and consistent storage across repositories. An editorial board was formed at the end of 2017, and Andrew Hankinson, Andrew Woods, Neil Jefferies, Julian Morley, Simeon Warner, and I developed the specification by drawing on our collective expertise in storage architecture, repository development, and digital preservation. OCFL 1.0 was officially released in July 2020 and has become a recognized standard for managing digital objects worldwide.

While OCFL solved the technical problem of opaque storage, its deeper value for Fedora was providing the stability needed to rebuild community trust. Fedora’s governance acknowledged past mistakes and committed to transparency with its community. It also secured a grant to address migration challenges, allowing the community to rediscover Fedora’s purpose of preserving both digital objects and the relationships that enable them.

In retrospect, the most significant achievement wasn’t just the technical success of the OCFL Editors but the Fedora community’s dedication to mending relationships. Fedora exemplifies open infrastructure that prioritizes nurturing human connections.

Conclusion

Governance, according to Ostrom’s framework, provides the foundation for the emergence described by Wheatley and Frieze. It creates a trust-based structure that fosters collaboration and creativity. By clearly defining boundaries, responsibilities, and accountability mechanisms, governance stabilizes relationships, enabling new connections to form. In this way, effective governance does not stifle innovation; instead, it provides the necessary structure for it to thrive. This shared sense of agency builds legitimacy and fosters a sense of belonging, allowing small, local efforts to connect and scale rather than fragment.

At the same time, governance ensures that systems remain adaptable. When people have the autonomy to adapt rules to local communities, the system as a whole becomes better able to learn and respond to change. This adaptability fuels emergence: small experiments ripple through the network, creating new patterns of collaboration. In short, governance creates the clarity and accountability that allow communities to move from coordination to emergence.

In this light, the story of open infrastructure isn’t about technology at all—it’s about the communities that choose relationships over innovation. Encounters among people, ideas, and shared purpose constitute the real infrastructure.

Communities enable the creation of infrastructure, but our values shape it. As a profession, we commit each day to making knowledge freely accessible to all. However, when this commitment becomes routine, or we share information without considering our motivations, we risk confusing the democratization of information with the potential exposure of the communities we serve.

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Canto Classics. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Wheatley, Margaret, and Deborah Frieze. “Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale.” The Berkana Institute, 2006. https://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/using-emergence.pdf.

With the holiday season officially upon us, I am going to take a short break from publishing new posts to recharge and step away from the screen (I’m currently catching up on PBS Masterpiece’s Miss Scarlet and working on my advent calendar from The Woobles). I will be back in the New Year, refreshed and ready to dive back in. When I return in January, we will pick up right where we left off, starting with the next installment of my iPRES conference keynote series (read the first and second posts to catch up).

Until then, I want to wish you and yours a warm and happy holiday season. Thank you again for your support, your engagement, and for following along. It means more to me than I can say. See you in the New Year!

These conversations brought me back to a piece of writing I cut from a previous post. At the time, I wasn’t quite comfortable sharing it because it felt like a non-sequitur. But as I listened to colleagues at various institutions this week grapple with the realities of non-profit leadership, the long-term viability of the organizations we rely on, and the specific obligations of fiduciary trust, I realized that leaving it behind in what is essentially the trash bin wasn’t helpful. The issues I was seeing in this non-sequitur are even more relevant today than they were two weeks ago.

At the same time, I was thinking back on a presentation I gave with Karen Estlund at CNI several years ago. In that presentation, we discussed understanding and evaluating economic models of open digital infrastructure and services, comparing them with commercial infrastructure and services. We provided an overview of nonprofit and commercial business models, examined the roles of fiscal sponsors, governance, and communities in nonprofit evaluation, and discussed how to measure sustainability, evaluate risk, and determine when to exit projects/services. In that presentation’s Q&A, I remember leaning heavily into APTrust, an organization that has done real work to build transparency into its organizational structures.

So for this post, I am revisiting a critique of OCLC and pairing it with new thoughts on an organization that is getting it right: APTrust. These two examples, side by side, offer a contrast that clarifies precisely what we should be asking of the organizations we fund and who support the cultural heritage space.

When Community Yields to Revenue

I’ve been thinking about governance in the context of non-profits that are sunsetting services or communities. In my view, OCLC has started to outgrow its nonprofit roots, (something no one should be surprised to hear from me). For decades, OCLC balanced product development with a robust research arm. This research arm of OCLC pioneered projects in metadata, interoperability, and library innovation. Their work has benefited the profession at large in truly profound ways.

However, if you look at the staffing data for the OCLC Research Team over the last five years, the trend has been a steady decline in headcount, with the most significant decline occurring in the past year. A review of some of OCLC’s web content related to research reinforces this: the volume of research-related blog posts has declined, and notable figures who led influential work on library collaboration and collections have either departed or been laid off, leaving vital projects unfinished.

Using organizational charts from 2018 and 2021 I was able to find online and OCLC’s own website (I used preserved copies in the Wayback Machine), it appears that the research teams included staff dedicated to Research Insights, Web Junction, and the OCLC RLP. These organizations within OCLC ensured that their relationship to the community was a two-way street.

A review of the current Research Team directory reveals a troubling problem: OCLC appears to have no staff dedicated to the OCLC RLP, even though it is a collaboration of research libraries that pay OCLC to advance research in the field.

This raises a serious fiduciary question. If member institutions are contributing funding to a partnership or collaboration, but the organization running it isn’t reinvesting that money in that partnership, then what exactly are we paying for? And what is an organization’s fiduciary responsibility to its constituents to maintain the services of that organization?

Building Trust by Planning for the End

If we want to see what good governance looks like—governance that actually respects the cooperative part of the equation—we should look at the Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust).

To be clear, APTrust isn’t perfect. No consortium is. But the work they have done to build a governance structure that genuinely serves its membership is a model that the rest of the field should study closely. A significant part of this shift is due to the current Executive Director, Nathan Tallman.

I have a specific vantage point on this. Before Nathan served as Executive Director, he and I were the two Advisory Committee liaisons to the APTrust Governing Board. In that role, I observed him demonstrate a level of tenacity on governance issues that I learned a great deal from. Nathan holds a business degree, and you can see that influence in how he approaches the organization. He understands that for a non-profit to be truly sustainable, it doesn’t just need a mission statement; it requires a business continuity plan that accounts for the unthinkable.

Under his leadership, and building on the work of directors before him, APTrust has taken the step of publicly answering the questions most organizations avoid: What happens if we fail? What happens if our host institution can no longer support us?

You can see this plainly in their policy documentation. Their Succession Policy is a detailed, operational workflow rather than a vague promise. It explicitly outlines a plan for “orderly dissolution” and the disposition of assets. It empowers the Governing Board to transition operations to a new host entity if the University of Virginia (the current host) can no longer fulfill that role.

Crucially, it goes a step further. The Reserve Fund policy ensures APTrust has the funds necessary for an 18-month wind-down period, allowing a depositor to assume direct management of their digital content in the cloud. Essentially, APTrust has engineered an exit strategy for its members that doesn’t rely on the organization’s survival.

This is what fiduciary responsibility looks like in practice. It is the acknowledgement that the data or service is more important than the organization housing it. By openly documenting these “worst-case scenarios,” APTrust has strengthened its position. They have built trust by admitting they are mortal.

When I look at the landscape of library infrastructure today, that kind of honesty is incredibly valuable and something we should demand from every organization seeking our funding.

Conclusion

The story of the OCLC RLP and APTrust’s governance is a litmus test for the entire library non-profit ecosystem. One illustrates what happens when the cooperative spirit yields, leaving contributing partners with diminishing returns on the organization they funded. The other demonstrates that authentic leadership in the non-profit sector means designing for survival, failure, and, most importantly, the perpetual safety of the community’s work, even if the organization itself ceases to exist.

The lesson is that we must stop funding organizational opacity and start demanding transparency. Fiduciary responsibility extends far beyond current financial health; it requires a documented, actionable plan for the end. By choosing to support organizations like APTrust, which are honest about their limitations and build a reliable exit strategy for their members, we ensure that the “stuff” is always prioritized over the organization housing it.

Thanks for reading! This post is part of my iPRES keynote series, in which I examine the hidden political and cultural structures of our systems. You can explore the rest of the series here:

• Part 1: Encountering Collapse

• Part 2: The Myth of Neutrality (this post)

• Part 3: Community as Backbone

• Part 4: The Limits of Openness

• Part 5: Collapse as Opportunity

To encounter the idea that infrastructure is never neutral is to face the uncomfortable truth that our systems reflect our own choices and values. Every line of code, every metadata schema, and every protocol or policy conveys the infrastructure’s values. The components of infrastructure determine who gets to participate and whose history is preserved. The idea of neutrality, in this context, is a myth that enables those in power to ignore their privilege.

To assert that our infrastructures are neutral is to deny our influence on how knowledge circulates and is preserved. Encountering this reality enables us to reclaim infrastructure as a political system—one that must maintain not only data but also the capacity for community memory and trust.

Before we turn to Hannah Arendt’s ideas, it’s worth pausing to consider the question: If infrastructure determines what is visible and what is forgotten, then it also shapes how truth circulates.

Hannah Arendt, Home to Roost (1975)

Now, if you don’t know who Hannah Arendt is, she was a German-born American political theorist and philosopher, best known for her work on totalitarianism and evil. Forced to flee Nazi Germany as a Jewish refugee during World War II, her experiences heavily influenced her most famous books, including The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she coined the phrase “the banality of evil”. Her work examines power, authority, and the human condition, and I first learned about her in college when I took a class called “Evil” (no joke).

In Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address, Arendt argues that the political, moral, and institutional crises facing the United States in the 1970s —specifically the Vietnam War and Watergate —were not isolated incidents. Instead, they were the cumulative result of a more profound corruption of political reality, which placed greater emphasis on image-making and denial. Now I know what you’re thinking, “what does this have to do with infrastructure not being neutral,” but stay with me here, I promise I’m going somewhere.

Arendt argues that the strife we saw in the United States in the 1970s was driven by the rise of “public relations” as a mode of governance. Now, I’m sure you’re not all aficionados of public relations. You might not know that the public relations field can be traced to Freud, whose nephew, Edward Bernays, pioneered the profession in the 1920s as a way to link products to emotions (The Century of the Self - Part 1). Many of the concepts behind public relations were based on Freud’s ideas about manipulating the masses.

In Arendt’s reading, the Vietnam War exposed how deeply image-making redefined the US. The war wasn’t fought for territory or freedom, but to preserve America’s image as “the mightiest power on earth.” That pursuit hollowed out the government’s moral judgment. It turned the machinery of war—the bureaucracy, the media, the data pipelines of “progress reports” and body counts—into an infrastructure of denial designed to maintain the war’s credibility. By replacing truth and understanding with image, the US government allowed citizens to become alienated from one another and from the shared reality that sustained political life.

In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Hannah Arendt identified a different form of infrastructural power: the power to forget. For those who may not know, Watergate started on June 17, 1972, when individuals associated with Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign were caught burglarizing the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., and planting listening devices there.

The calls for “amnesty” and “moving on” for those convicted of the Watergate scandal were, in her view, ways to bury evidence and avoid a collective reckoning. Arendt discusses this in detail in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. For Arendt, forgetting served to maintain order through selective memory.

Arendt’s warning about the erosion of truth feels eerily contemporary. Our modern media, driven by social media algorithms, decides what is discussed and what is obscured. The infrastructure that shapes our digital lives doesn’t just transmit information; it defines what we recognize as trustworthy. And that brings us to the World Economic Forum’s work on digital trust, which tries to codify the very values Arendt saw slipping away. If Arendt exposed the moral failure of governance, the WEF attempts to rebuild trust through design.

World Economic Forum, Earning Digital Trust (2022)

Like Arendt, the World Economic Forum’s report, Earning Digital Trust, emphasizes that infrastructure is never neutral. Every technology decision reflects the values that are prioritized and those that are overlooked. The report urges all leaders—not just those in technology—to “decide and act for digital trust.” It acknowledges that trust is not solely a product of innovation but is also shaped by the organization’s governance choices.

But the WEF framework, as comprehensive as it is, risks giving the impression that trust can be engineered through structure and compliance. What has become increasingly clear, however, is that trust is not only something we build into technology; it is something we choose to practice. When we decide what counts as secure, who has access, and how data moves, we’re not just engineering infrastructure — we’re engineering trust.

The report also surfaces that when oversight is absent, power consolidates. We especially see this in the United States, where technology regulation has been sparse at the national level, ultimately allowing power to consolidate into a handful of companies — namely, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta.

But when technologies are designed with clear accountability, power dynamics shift, and individuals and communities regain agency. What the report calls “inclusive, ethical, and responsible use” is, in fact, an argument for rebalancing power to create space for the eight dimensions—cybersecurity, safety, transparency, interoperability, auditability, redressability, fairness, and privacy—that the report identifies as necessary to build trust. Neutrality, in this view, is not possible because choosing to build infrastructure without valuing these eight dimensions is in and of itself a political stance.

The Digital Trust Framework reflects the political influences embedded in our technologies while outlining a path toward infrastructures that prioritize accountability and inclusion. In essence, it highlights that every aspect of the digital world involves a moral choice about the future we wish to create.

When I first wrote this talk, I didn’t include examples, and I became highly aware that I might put all of you to sleep. So I’ve built into every section what I’m affectionately calling story time, because a good story always keeps people awake -- so let’s dive into the first good story.

Story Time: AGI is Anything But Neutral

Some of you, if not all of you, likely know that AI is scraping content on the internet; a big part of this is that AI companies need the content to help develop large language models -- the type of AI most companies are focusing on. I have a slide here that briefly shows how LLMs work and why these companies need so much content. I’m not going to go into detail, but if you’re curious to learn more, I have some references at the end of this presentation that explain how LLMs work. Suffice it to say, LLMs are, for all intents and purposes, a statistical model, so the more data they have, the more accurate they will be in predicting the text to output.

Numerous organizations are developing large language models (LLMs) with the express goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). If you’re not familiar with AGI, it can be defined as:

“AI systems that match or exceed the human brain in terms of complexity and speed, capable of acquiring, manipulating, and reasoning with general knowledge...” (“A Short History of AI”)

You will frequently hear many organizations assert that AGI benefits humanity. In one statement, OpenAI remarked that:

“If AGI is successfully achieved, this technology has the potential to enhance humanity by increasing abundance, accelerating the global economy, and assisting in the uncovering of new scientific insights that expand the boundaries of what is possible.” (Planning for AGI and Beyond)

But what does all of this truly mean? As someone tired of hearing about AI, I honestly didn’t care and just turned a blind eye to the whole thing.

And then, one day, while I was sitting in my car in a parking lot (why I can’t remember, but I’m a mom and we like to hide in our cars), I came across an Instagram Reel about something called the TESCREAL Bundle. I’ll be honest, I thought this was one of those weird social media conspiracies. So, because I’m a librarian, I looked for more on the topic (never believe everything you see on social media, folks).

And that’s when I discovered Dr. Gebru and Dr. Torres’ paper in the journal First Monday (Gebru and Torres). In the article, they posit that AGI is not a neutral technological movement but rather a revival of eugenic, colonial, and supremacist worldviews. I was floored. The philosophies that make up TESCREAL (a term they coined) are Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularity, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. These intertwined belief systems perpetuate hierarchies of human value, positioning wealthy technologists as moral stewards of humanity’s future while obscuring the social, political, and ecological harms their technologies cause in the present.

I knew many of the people involved in pursuing AGI seemed to know each other and had questionable ethics — Peter Thiel and Elon Musk had worked together on PayPal, for example. Initially, I dismissed the connections — Silicon Valley is a small community. However, as I examined the philosophies and key players discussed in the paper, I began to see that they were all interconnected.

Drs. Gebru and Torres reminded me that when I hear promises of abundance, progress, and salvation through technology, I should pause and ask: whose abundance? Whose progress? Whose salvation?

These same questions bring us back to the foundations of our own work. The same dynamics that shape AGI also shape the infrastructures on which we depend every day. Cultural heritage technologies are not immune to these logics of power; they, too, reflect choices about whose knowledge is preserved, prioritized, and made visible.

Conclusion

Recognizing that infrastructure is never neutral invites us into a deeper encounter with the technologies we have built — asking not only what kind of world they sustain but also what kind of world we create through them. This encounter compels us to confront how truth, memory, and values are encoded into infrastructure.

If neutrality is a myth, then how do we make our values visible in the infrastructures we design? To build infrastructure with integrity means acknowledging that every technical decision carries weight. It means refusing the comfort of apolitical progress and encountering the discomfort of accountability. Our challenge is not simply to preserve bits, but to preserve the capacity for truth and collective memory in technologies that increasingly flatten, filter, and forget. The question is no longer whether technology will shape the future — it’s whether we’ll have the courage to shape it with intention.

Thanks for reading! This post is part of my iPRES keynote series, where I’m exploring the hidden political and cultural structures of our systems. You can explore the rest of the series here:

• Part 1: Encountering Collapse (this post)

• Part 2: The Myth of Neutrality

• Part 3: Community as Backbone

• Part 4: The Limits of Openness

• Part 5: Collapse as Opportunity

The iPRES 2025 conference was built around three guiding themes: Haerenga (Journey), Tūhono (Connect), and Tūtaki (Encounter). While other keynotes explored the journeys we take and the connections we forge, my talk was anchored in Tūtaki. It’s a powerful word that centers on disruption, meeting, and reevaluation. It asks us to look at what is right in front of us and see it for what it truly is.

In our field, what is often right in front of us is infrastructure. We treat it as stable, neutral, and purely technical. We act as if the servers, standards, and software we rely on are objective tools. But if you’ve followed my writing here—especially my recent series, The Ecosystem of Possible Futures—you know that I believe infrastructure is never just technical.

In many societies, infrastructure (and I mean all infrastructure, really) has consistently reflected and reinforced deeper civic structures: community, accountability, and shared responsibility. But today, those structures are eroding globally. What happens when community is no longer a given? When open infrastructure is exploited? When does resilience become a human challenge rather than a technical one?

In this series, I want to examine four arguments through the lens of Tūtaki. I want us to encounter the infrastructure we build not as neutral pipes, but as political and cultural acts.

My Lens: Politics, Philosophy, and Place

Before we dive into the arguments, I want to reintroduce the perspective I bring to this conversation. For those who have been reading The Digital Shift for a while, you know that my background isn’t typical for a technologist.

I am a political science major and a self-confessed political philosophy junkie. In college, while others were studying engineering or literature, I was reading Leviathan and Two Treatises of Government (and some of you from college know I was doing other things, but let’s not talk about that). I was fascinated by how societies structure power and why some governments endure while others unravel. I don’t look at open source communities and see code; I see governance systems, social contracts, and the messy reality of collective action.

But beyond my education, my perspective is shaped by place. I am American, which is important to note given that my audience was largely international, and I have spent most of my life in the Southern United States. That part of my identity frames how I see the world. For those of you who aren’t American, the South is a place that is often forced to name uncomfortable truths—about history, about racism, and about power within those frames. That regional legacy has taught me that we cannot build a better future by ignoring the past. We have to be willing to say the quiet parts out loud.

That is the energy I bring to open infrastructure. I’ve spent my career in communities like Moodle, OCFL, and Samvera. I’ve seen them at their best, inspiring, collaborative, and transformative. And I’ve seen them at their worst, messy, exclusionary, and fragile.

It is through this mix of political theory and lived experience that I approach the question of infrastructure.

The Series Ahead

Over the next few weeks, we will examine our infrastructure through four distinct arguments.

1. Infrastructure Is Never Neutral

We will start by challenging the comforting myth that our systems are objective. We’ll look at how every line of code and every metadata standard encodes power, prioritizing specific interests while rendering others invisible. We’ll draw on Hannah Arendt and the World Economic Forum to understand how “neutrality” often serves as a disguise for power.

2. Community Is the Backbone of Ecosystems

We often focus on the durability of our storage or the elegance of our code, but resilience is not inherent in technology. It comes from the people who maintain it. We’ll explore the work of Elinor Ostrom to see how relationships, not software, are the proper primary system we need to preserve.

3. Openness Has Limits

This might be the most uncomfortable argument for us to grapple with. Libraries are “open by default,” but in an age of extractive AI and surveillance capitalism, unexamined openness can lead to exploitation. We’ll look at real-world examples, including recent incidents involving AI scrapers in the cultural heritage space, to ask what “open with thoughtfulness” might look like.

4. Collapse Is Opportunity

Finally, we will reframe how we think about failure. We often view the collapse of a project or a system as a disaster. But what if we viewed collapse as a “clearing point” or a moment when the blindfold slips and new systems of meaning can emerge? We’ll discuss how to design for endings that invite renewal.

Let’s Get Interactive

In my previous series, we looked at trust as a practice, which hopefully you aren’t sick of reading about. This time, I want to ask you to think about the politics of that practice.

I’m excited to go on this journey with you. It won’t always be comfortable, but then again, encountering the truth rarely is. But by recognizing these patterns, we can create the conditions for a more resilient, connected, and hopeful future.

See you next week for Part 2: The Myth of Neutrality.

The Spark: When Outage Met Curiosity

When people ask how I got interested in AI, I usually say it wasn’t because I was looking for it—it’s because AI came looking for me. That moment became the hook for everything that followed.

At Emory, my team had been building open digital collections and repositories for years, proud of our work as a public good. But in the spring of 2024, strange outages and unusual web traffic revealed that our infrastructure had caught the attention of something new: AI bots hungry for data.

We were noticing an uptick in web traffic. And it wasn’t from students or researchers; there just aren’t enough people in the Emory Community to use our infrastructure at the rate the data showed. One thing we noticed was that the traffic was coming from obscure devices, and the volume seemed unrealistic when we dug into it. Over and over. Thousands of hits, all targeting our digital collections, our open-access repository, and our catalog.

At first, I thought it was me. Around that time, I took over managing the team responsible for on-call support and infrastructure support (servers, databases, etc.) after a manager left my team. I thought, maybe this is normal, and I’ve been oblivious to what was happening.

But then, in May, at a conference, a colleague at another institution had to step out of a session because their catalog was down. The remaining AULs for technology reported struggling with similar outages. A couple of months later, a vendor mentioned they had to increase their security spending because they were constantly under “attack” as well.

When we realized what was happening, we started investigating the IP addresses and user agents engaging with this malicious behavior and discovered that the IPs were tied to AI companies. My team eventually set up CAPTCHA, firewalls, and monitoring alarms, which allowed us to be warned and better block these bad actors. We realized we weren’t dealing with an attack, and I wasn’t being oblivious. It was AI bots scraping our content for their companies’ training models.

That was the moment my curiosity led me down a path of exploration. I realized that libraries had inadvertently crossed into a new territory where their openness was leading to the exploitation of content.

The Wake-Up Call

Around the same time, I attended a Fedora Governance Committee meeting where others were noticing similar issues. The Fedora Community Manager, Arran Griffith, created a space for us to discuss how the software might help. It quickly became clear that the problem extended far beyond Fedora.

Arran began inviting people from other communities to collaborate, and the group has since grown. We now host regular Solutions Showcases for technology professionals focused on bot blocking and related topics.

A few of us also presented a panel at the Fall CNI Member meeting to share what we’d learned. Many attendees approached us afterward, relieved to find they weren’t alone in facing these attacks.

Learning that bots had surpassed human activity online was the turning point. I began to wonder: if openness now fuels corporate harvesting and AI training, what does ethical access look like? Are we building systems for humans, or merely for the bots? And, most importantly, who gets to decide — the institutions that steward knowledge, or the companies that can afford to harvest it?

If you’re like me and prefer watching content, you can view the recording of the session I gave with my colleague Arran Griffith for the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL).

In this presentation, we dove deeper into the technical specifics and the community response to bot attacks.

The Shift: When AI Changed The Focus

As we started monitoring this traffic more closely, I noticed an interesting pattern. The AI systems were moving away from our special collections repository — the one full of images — and focusing almost entirely on our catalog and our open-access repository. And then I had my next ah-ha moment.

Image generation models had matured. They didn’t need our pictures anymore. Now, they wanted our metadata and the university’s research. AI companies were now focusing on the intellectual frameworks and knowledge ecosystems that libraries and universities had built. The descriptions, relationships, and categorizations we carefully created in libraries over thousands of years were being harvested, tested, and monetized by giant technology companies worth billions.

Next, I noticed that conversations about AI accuracy were dominating the hype cycle. They were talking about creating links to content to prove that what it outputted made sense. By the time I made the connection, the Wiley/Perplexity deal had been announced. If you aren’t familiar, this deal enables institutions that have an institutional subscription to Perplexity and Wiley to access Wiley journals via Perplexity, meaning that the chatbot could easily generate text based on the content in Wiley’s journals. For authors and libraries, this matters because it blurs the boundary between fair use and commercial reuse, raising questions about consent, citation, and ownership of scholarly work.

But it doesn’t stop there; AI companies already have access to our content and can display it to their users. In the video below, I’m showing you OpenAI’s chat interface so that you can easily see how it pulls up information and images from my institution’s digital and digitized collections.

How did it get this access? Well, a lot of our content is available in the Common Crawl dataset, which many AI companies use for training their models (you can check if your website is in the dataset via the Common Crawl Index Server) If you ask ChatGPT, it will side-step the question and say that it doesn’t know if it used Common Crawl, but if you read any of the legal filings between OpenAI and the NYTimes, you’ll see that OpenAI did use the dataset. So, of course, it has our content, and of course, it can output this information about Emory’s collections.

The Mirror: When Technology Reflects Power

My background in political philosophy has taught me to see how power hides inside systems. When I look at AI today, I recognize familiar patterns: centralized control, opaque decisions, and ideological visions dressed up as ‘progress.’

One afternoon, while sitting in my car scrolling Instagram (as one does), I stumbled across a Reel about something called the TESCREAL Bundle. I assumed it was satire—until curiosity won out. I soon found Dr. Timnit Gebru and Emile Torres’s paper, “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence”. Reading it, I realized these weren’t just eccentric fringe ideas; they revealed a worldview shaping many of AI’s most powerful players.

Tracing the networks among Silicon Valley figures — Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and others — I saw how shared ideology underpins the same companies shaping our digital landscape. Over the past year, those connections have become more visible, as influential tech leaders speak more openly about longtermism, transhumanism, and market absolutism. What once felt like quirky personality politics now reads as a coherent ideology—one that libraries, as stewards of human knowledge, must learn to recognize and challenge.

Over the past year, we’ve seen more individuals in Silicon Valley openly display oligarchic tendencies. Figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and others are doing less to hide their beliefs behind their corporations and are more willing to speak out. Today, as I observe the power structures in Silicon Valley, I notice the companies are becoming increasingly problematic; it feels like we can’t escape these harmful belief systems.

The Invitation: What We Need to Talk About Today

I’m not here to deliver conclusions but to open a conversation. To encourage us to think about what responsibilities and choices we face as technology reshapes our field. Around the world, people are debating ideas like digital sovereignty, regenerative economic theory, and ethical divestment from exploitative systems and companies. My goal here is to explore these issues together rather than prescribe specific actions.

So here are a few I’d like to put on the table:

1. If AI depends on our openness, how do we ensure that openness doesn’t lead to exploitation and that our users stay prioritized?

2. How can we build trust in our own systems and with our users when AI serves as both our partner and our adversary?

3. Should we all, including the US, pay more attention to the concept of digital sovereignty — the idea that we should invest in infrastructure not controlled by big technology conglomerates in the US — than we have so far?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these topics. Please feel free to reach out via direct message or put your thoughts in the comments below.

Oh, and yes! I went to New Zealand to speak at iPRES (the international digital preservation conference) in Wellington. What an experience that was! The same friend who pointed out that Mercury was in retrograde also said I time-traveled because of the trip. I left New Zealand at 2:30 PM on Wednesday and landed back in Atlanta at 3:30 PM on the same Wednesday, even though the trip took 20 hours. Basically, I experienced Wednesday twice, which is weird.

Now that I’m over the jet lag (and a little poorer, because of all that home repair), I’m excited to share my thoughts on the happenings over the last month and what I’ve been contemplating lately.

Contemplations on the Shift

There are a couple of topics I wish I could have shared or discussed over the past month.

The AI, Cultural Heritage, and Common Crawl

While preparing for my talk at iPRES, I realized that the ship has already sailed when it comes to thinking about what comes next for cultural heritage, education organizations, and AI. Major AI corporations have already acquired and monetized the digital collections and content for cultural heritage organizations. While we attempt to reshape the landscape, significant changes have already taken place, making that nearly impossible. To me, this suggests that our efforts to influence what’s next may be too late.

One slide in my presentation featured a video of how OpenAI is using my university’s collections.

In the video, you can see me prompting ChatGPT with a couple of questions about my university’s collections. OpenAI, via an incognito window, while I’m not logged in, provides me with a ton of information about the collections and even individual objects.

And by the way, most (if not all) libraries, galleries, and museums are available in LLMs like ChatGPT, CoPilot, Claude, and Gemini. If you’re unsure about any of this, ask one of these models what it knows about your library’s special collections or open access scholarship and see what it responds.

So how is it that all these LLMs have managed to get our content? Enter Common Crawl. If you haven’t heard of Common Crawl, it’s a non-profit organization that maintains a massive, open repository of web crawl data, which provides (for free) petabytes of internet content. This archive serves as a foundational dataset for training Large Language Models (LLMs) and conducting internet-wide research. A staff member at the Common Crawl has connections to the GLAM sector because Common Crawl uses a file format called WARCs.

The WARC specification was developed in 2008 and is generally recognized by libraries as THE standard for web archiving. It was created by John A. Kunze (formerly of the California Digital Library), Allan Arvidson (National Library of Sweden), Gordon Mohr (formerly of the Internet Archive), and Michael Stack (Internet Archive), and is based on the Arc File Format, which Mike Burner and Brewster Kahle developed at the Internet Archive. So basically, libraries developed it to archive the web, and Common Crawl uses it to crawl the internet. Makes sense, and that sounds great (in theory, but you know, communism is also great in theory; less so in practice).

The morning I was to give my talk, The Atlantic published an insightful article about Common Crawl and its connection to major AI companies. The story also points out that Common Crawl is now benefiting from major AI companies that are donating hundreds of thousands to the organization, presumably to ensure its continued work. But as far as I know, none of the companies (including Common Crawl) donate to the individuals who created the WARC standard, or the organizations that paid them to develop it, or even to ISO, which currently maintains the standard. I would love to hear that I’m wrong, though, so message me if you know otherwise.

I won’t even begin to describe how bad Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, comes across in the article; you don’t have to read very far in the above-linked article to see that for yourself. Oh, and if you want to see if Common Crawl crawls your site, all you need to do is search in its index for your site’s URL.

Of course, if you don’t want your content in LLMs, you could ask Common Crawl to remove your site from their crawls and their historic WARC files; however, the story also alludes to the fact that Common Crawl might be lying about taking content out of historic WARC files. Not a good look to say the least.

The Need for Nuance and New Models

This pervasive issue of content being monetized by parties other than the content creators creates the sense that we’ve lost control of our content. Ultimately, this has led to a fair amount of hostility toward certain vendors, particularly in the cultural heritage space, and the overall anti-corporate climate we live in. I’ll be honest, sometimes that climate can be a bit overwhelming. At the same time, I can’t say I blame folks, and I’m DEFINITELY NOT suggesting we should be pro-corporation. Maybe one day I’ll give you a list of the corporations I’ve stopped engaging with, but today is not that day.

However, I do think there’s a clear difference between the different types of corporations, their roles in an ecosystem, and the technology they produce. Over the last month or so, I’ve begun to disentangle how I see these various facets of technology corporations in particular. This is why I’ve been following OpenAI’s transition from a non-profit to a for-profit organization so closely.

If you haven’t been following this story, let me provide you with a brief recap. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit research lab dedicated to developing safe artificial general intelligence. Since then, OpenAI has restructured its operations first by creating a for-profit subsidiary in 2019, which limited the amount of money investors could earn on their investment. In October of this year, OpenAI converted the for-profit subsidiary into a Public Benefit Corporation (OpenAI Group PBC) and the non-profit entity into the OpenAI Foundation. This latest transition enables the new PBC to raise unlimited investment while also requiring them to balance three things: stockholder interests, the best interests of those impacted by the company, and a specific public benefit (the pursuit of safe AGI). Most importantly, the non-profit entity retains control of and a significant stake in the company’s commercial pursuits, which is supposed to ensure it remains aligned with the non-profit’s mission.

I’ve been considering how this shift might also benefit the cultural heritage and education sectors. In our field, we tend to favor creating non-profit organizations, specifically 501(c)(3)s. We really do love them, and often dedicate decades to building and improving these organizations. Given the latest with OpenAI, I’ve been thinking about whether a similar approach could work for the non-profits we already have. I may explore this idea further as my thoughts evolve. Still, for now, it’s enough to suggest that many organizations could benefit from exploring what it would mean to become a public benefit corporation rather than a traditional non-profit. And why stop there? Perhaps society as a whole should also consider this shift. We, (society), don’t frequently question our legal structures or consider what they should look like or evolve into to fit the changing landscape.

These questions about shifting models and trust — trusting corporations, leaders, professions, and technology — were swirling in my mind as I flew to Wellington, New Zealand. The iPRES conference featured three powerful keynotes (or four, if you count mine) that forced me to re-examine these critical societal issues, particularly how they connect to the ways cultural heritage organizations preserve content, artifacts, and society. The conference offered an opportunity to delve into corporate trust, digital sovereignty, and the role of technology.

iPRES 2025 Recap

I was one of four keynote speakers at iPRES. What follows is a quick rundown of the main conference themes, a recap of all the keynote speakers, and my own takeaways from the conference.

Tuvalu: The Digital Nation

The first keynote speaker was Simon Kofe, the Minister for Transport, Energy, Communications, and Innovation for the Government of Tuvalu. If you don’t know anything about Tuvalu, they are a tiny Pacific island nation comprising nine low-lying atolls (a ring-shaped coral reef, island, or series of islets that encircles a central lagoon) that faces an existential threat from rising sea levels, which could render it uninhabitable within the coming decades. The atolls cover about 10 square miles and are on average about 2 m above sea level; their highest point is around 4.5-4.6 m, which is roughly 15 ft. This means that climate change is affecting the island nation in ways most people on the planet aren’t.

When Simon first described the situation, it prompted me to ask (in my head, of course) some crucial questions about the country’s existence.

• What would happen if sea levels rise to the point where people can no longer live there?

• If it’s submerged, will the space still be considered a sovereign land?

• Will the people of Tuvalu still be considered citizens of Tuvalu if the land no longer exists?

These are the questions that Simon Kofe and the rest of the Tuvalu government are grappling with. In response to this climate crisis, the government has launched a “digital nation” initiative to constitutionally assert its statehood in perpetuity and create a virtual twin of the nation in order to preserve its history, culture, and sovereignty even if its physical territory is lost. They are also making sure their government is digital-first so that, as a nation, it can continue to exist long after the sea takes their land.

When you think about it, this is a mind-blowing concept to wrestle with. Most governments have always existed because of the land they “own”. What happens when your land is taken from you by the environment rather than a conqueror? Do you still exist?

Tuvalu has two things going for it that many other countries don’t.

First, they own all the .tv domains. So every time someone or something buys a .tv domain, they’re supporting the nation of Tuvalu. Sure, that may sound like a weird thing for me to bring up, but .tv domains generate millions of dollars for Tuvalu each year. So, friends, go out and buy the .tv domain and support Tuvalu!

The second thing they have going for them is their relationship with Australia. The Falepili Union, a landmark bilateral treaty signed in 2023 between Tuvalu and Australia, establishes the world’s first “climate mobility” framework. The agreement is a trade: in exchange for Australia gaining the right to veto Tuvalu’s security agreements with other nations, Tuvalu receives several benefits. These benefits include an annual special visa for 280 Tuvaluans to migrate to Australia and receive full rights within the country (thus avoiding the “climate refugee” status), a commitment from Australia to defend Tuvalu against military aggression, disasters, and pandemics, and Australia’s recognition of Tuvalu’s statehood and sovereignty indefinitely, even if the country’s land becomes fully submerged.

Simon’s talk raised fundamental questions for me: How do we keep a people’s culture, heritage, government, identity, and continuity alive in today’s world? The main hurdle isn’t just archiving photographs, maps, government documents, or other historical records; it’s about preserving the heart of a society even as it changes. Preservation has to move past just the physical and include digital memory, social connection, and the core principles that define who we are as a people. This means we need a big-picture view, recognizing that culture, history, mores, and politics aren’t separate things — they’re a tightly woven fabric we have to protect for future generations.

Migrating a Government in Crisis

During the conference dinner at The Beehive, the common name for the Executive wing of parliament, Liam Maxwell, the Director of International Central Government at Amazon Web Services, gave a short talk about his work with the Ukrainian government. AWS and the Ukrainian government worked together to migrate Ukraine’s infrastructure to the cloud around the time Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. They completed that migration in just three months. Today, AWS hosts over 10 petabytes of data for various Ukrainian ministries, universities, and K-12 schools, as well as dozens of private-sector companies on behalf of Ukraine.

When you think about migrating anything, it usually takes much longer than three months. One bank actually migrated all its infrastructure to AWS in 43 days, which I find incredible. I can’t even get my organization to agree on what we’re doing in three months, let alone 43 days to migrate everything.

Liam’s talk was brief but impactful, touching on many of the themes Simon discussed. Once again, I found myself asking, what is essential? What are you trying to preserve, how are you trying to preserve it, and what is the most important part of what you want to keep?

Revitalizing Indigenous Language through Digital Sovereignty

Peter-Lucas Jones, a leader in Māori language revitalization, delivered the final keynote. Peter-Lucas doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, but he was named to the TIME100 in AI list for 2024.

If you’re not familiar with the Māori, they are the indigenous people of New Zealand with a language of the same name. Peter-Lucas discussed Indigenous Digital Sovereignty, which is defined as the exclusive right of Indigenous peoples to govern, manage, and control their own data and digital infrastructure. This idea might be new to many American readers, but digital sovereignty is actually a significant global discussion. Much of the conversation stems from concerns other countries have about the risks posed by US tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, as well as the general direction of the US government.

In addition to being a big advocate for Indigenous Digital Sovereignty, Peter-Lucas is developing several applications and tools to help preserve the Māori language for future generations. Listening to Peter-Lucas discuss his goals and watching a demo of his app, which automatically translates Māori into on-screen subtitles, was exciting. He confidently did a live demonstration, something I would never attempt in a million years, and I was amazed by what he and his team have accomplished.

What really stood out in Peter-Lucas’s talk was his genuine dedication to the values he talked about. As an Indigenous man, he wasn’t just talking the talk; he was actively working to preserve his language and build the technology to ensure it lives on forever.

My Own Keynote

The last talk I’ll recap for you is mine, and to be clear, I don’t have a Wikipedia page and I’ve never been named to a TIME 100 list. Yes, I too was wondering why me. But I digress. I’ll do a quick recap of my presentation, since I’ll likely post a more extended version in the coming week or so.

In my keynote, I explored the conference theme of Tūtaki (Encounter).

In the first section, I challenged the assumption that our technical systems are stable or neutral, arguing instead that they encode power and prioritize specific interests. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy about the erosion of truth, I talked about how our technical choices are, in fact, moral decisions that determine whose history is preserved and whose is excluded. I contend that we must stop viewing neutrality as a virtue and instead recognize that we are engineering relationships and trust when we preserve content.

Next, I explored the idea that community supports our ecosystems, arguing that the resilience of any system depends on the relationships that sustain it rather than on the technology itself. I applied Elinor Ostrom’s principles of governing the commons (I know you’re shocked) to show how shared governance and mutual responsibility are essential for managing open infrastructure rather than top-down control. And I illustrated all of this with the story of the Fedora Commons community’s recovery from the Fedora 4 migration crisis, demonstrating that true sustainability comes when we treat relationships as the primary system to maintain.

In the third section, I interrogated our profession’s devotion to openness, arguing that without governance, openness inevitably leads to exploitation. Drawing on Katherine Skinner and Nadia Asparouhova, I critique how “open by default” models often mask the extraction of unpaid labor and data by commercial entities, turning our democratization efforts into pipelines for corporate profit. Ultimately, I warn that openness without governance leads to exploitation.

Finally, I invited the audience to encounter “collapse” not as a failure but as a necessary threshold for renewal. Drawing on Margaret Wheatley’s work on emergence, I suggest that institutional or technological breakdown creates space for us to reorganize and rebuild ecosystems based on interdependence rather than control. The talk concluded by asking the community to intentionally design for these endings, using them as opportunities to regenerate a profession that is more resilient, connected, and aligned with our shared values.

My Takeaways

Throughout all of these talks, I began thinking about how the cultural heritage and higher education sectors need to confront the reality of collapse, because whether we like it or not, it’s coming. The core challenge is not how to respond to “what is next,” but to anticipate and plan for “what comes after next.” We must consider the actions and ideas necessary today to build a future that extends beyond tomorrow.

Engaging with this work requires an uncomfortable confrontation with the past—how we reached our current state—and a critical reflection on what we should have done differently. This self-assessment is vital, as it prepares us to undertake the necessary work to actively fight for the world we aspire to create.

Thanks for reading! This post is part of my WOLFcon plenary series, where I’m exploring how we design trust into the open infrastructure that connects us. You can explore the rest of the series here:

Part 1: The Ecosystem of Possible Futures
Part 2: Governance as Trust
Part 3: Technology as Trust
Part 4: Stewardship as Trust
Part 5: Which Ecosystem Do We Want? (this post)

At WOLFCon, I invited the room to imagine three possible futures for our open infrastructure ecosystems: Monoculture, Collapse, and Resilience. But one quadrant of that map was left unexplored; in fact, my editor (aka my husband) put that as a note on the final draft of my speech, and I chose to ignore it. The longer I sat with that gap, though, the more it felt like an omission worth correcting.

So, in this final post in the WOLFCon series, I want to give readers who weren’t there a glimpse into what those conversations revealed about the state of our open infrastructure today. In this piece, I aim to complete the map by outlining four potential futures for trust in our infrastructure, enabling us to make better-informed decisions as we observe events in the world around us.

Why Scenario Planning?

If you haven’t yet engaged in scenario planning it’s a way of thinking about possibility. It is a tool for exploring the future through our imaginations before we stumble into it unprepared. Instead of asking “What will happen?”, it asks, “What could happen AND what would we do if it did?”1

The method is deceptively simple: pick two critical uncertainties that shape your system or worldview and set them as perpendicular axes. Then imagine what the world might look like in each resulting quadrant. What emerges is a deeper understanding of the tensions that define the choices we have in front of us.

What kind of future are we building, even when we’re not paying attention?

Perhaps most importantly, scenario planning gives us language to discuss risk without resorting to panic, and ambition without naivety. It’s a structured way of asking hard questions before reality forces our hand.

Defining the Axes of Our Futures

Two forces shaped almost everything I’ve written about in this series: who controls the infrastructure and how well the infrastructure is cared for.

Axis One: Structure of Control. The first axis stretches from centralized control to distributed governance. At one end lie vendor monopolies that are tidy, efficient, and brittle. At the other end are federated, community-driven systems that are slower, messier, but alive with pluralism. Neither extreme is entirely safe. Centralization breeds dependency and weakens community agency. Pure decentralization risks the “too many captains, not enough crew” problem. This axis asks us to consider “Who gets to decide, and how do those decisions shape trust?”

Axis Two: Capacity for Care. The second axis runs from sustained stewardship to erosion and burnout. This dimension isn’t about who owns the infrastructure, but whether anyone is still around to maintain it. Sustained stewardship looks like reliable governance meetings, funded maintainers, and precise documentation—the quiet, invisible work that keeps trust alive. Erosion, by contrast, begins quietly. It appears to include unanswered emails, unmerged pull requests, and ignored enhancement requests. Along this axis, the question isn’t “Who controls the system?” but “Who still cares for it?”

When you combine these two forces—control and care—you get a map of our possible futures. Each quadrant tells a different story of how trust can flourish, erode, or fracture.

Scenario 1: Monoculture

Imagine a world where a single vendor owns every tool in the ecosystem. At first, this feels efficient. You only have one contract to negotiate, one account manager, and one help desk number. For your staff, this may even feel like a relief — less time juggling multiple systems. But slowly, innovation dries up. You can’t move data between systems because portability was designed out. You notice that when bugs are fixed, it’s not because the community asked for them, but because the vendor prioritized the clients who pay the most.

This is what I mean by monoculture. A commons gets fenced off, repackaged, and resold. We already see glimpses of this in cases like OCLC’s claims around metadata ownership. In this scenario, the commons shrinks until it is no longer recognizable. The danger of a monoculture is that the strength you see is actually brittle, not resilient.

And even worse, monoculture strips away governance as trust. Communities no longer have the opportunity to decide how rules evolve, what problems are prioritized, or how labor is recognized. Decision-making is outsourced, and the community’s voice disappears.

Scenario 2: Collapse

Now imagine the opposite: not one dominant vendor, but too many projects. Communities are stretched thin. Volunteers are exhausted. A maintainer you’ve relied on for years finally burns out and steps away. Grant funding has run dry, and no one has the bandwidth to take on the work.

Collapse doesn’t just mean missing maintainers; it means you can no longer trust technology to function reliably. This is where technology as trust breaks down: when updates stall, vulnerabilities aren’t patched, or when roadmaps go dark. Without ongoing care, the mechanical trust in the system evaporates.

And unfortunately, collapse doesn’t look like a tidy ending. It is chaos. People and institutions scramble to recover what they can of their former selves. And once again, all this has human costs: the technologists who kept things running are left demoralized, sometimes even leaving the profession entirely.

And to make matters worse, a collapse isn’t sudden but a slow erosion over time. It looks like a mailing list that grows quiet. A roadmap that never gets updated. Pull requests that go unmerged by the maintainer. By the time people notice, it’s often too late. Collapse is easier to prevent than to recover from; that’s why stewardship and sustainable funding matter so much.

Scenario 3: Resilience

But there is another future we can choose. Imagine an ecosystem where many projects thrive together, like a biodiverse forest. No single project dominates. Instead, each one is interdependent on the others. Governance is seen as an act of care, not just bureaucracy. Technologists are recognized as professionals whose work is essential to trust. Funders don’t just invest in shiny new launches; they support maintenance, repair, and the long, slow work of sustainability.

Communities don’t just create new tools; they sustain them, nurture them, and build the conditions where interdependence becomes resilience. The forest thrives not because it is neat, but because it is diverse, cared for, and renewed over time.

We already have glimpses of this. Fedora survived by implementing OCFL. Blacklight continues to thrive because technologists and librarians contribute code and documentation in a steady, distributed way. Valkey emerged when Redis fractured, proving that communities can choose governance they trust. These are seeds of resilience.

And practically, this scenario is within reach. We know what it takes: diversified funding models, inclusive governance practices, and recognition that maintenance is not “overhead” but essential labor. We also know that resilient diversity is cultivated through the choices we make in contracts, in community governance, and in how we show up. None of that happens by accident.

Scenario 4: Fracture

Now imagine a world where openness endures, but coordination doesn’t. There’s no monopoly or single vendor claiming ownership of the infrastructure. The licenses are permissive, the repositories are open, and the meetings are public. On the surface, it appears to be the ideal: freedom through decentralization. But beneath that surface, the connective tissue between communities is thin.

Governance begins to break down. No one intends any harm; the issue is that too many groups are working independently, leaving little time for communication. As a result, decisions tend to multiply rather than converge, leading to roadmaps that aren’t in alignment with the organizations using the infrastructure. Ultimately, the phrase “community-driven” turns into a slogan without an effective mechanism to support it. Every project emphasizes the importance of autonomy, but only a few invest in aligning their efforts in a way that keeps everyone on the same page.

As time goes on, the technology itself begins to falter. Standards diverge, causing code libraries that once functioned seamlessly across different infrastructures to suddenly stop working. While the code itself remains open, the interoperability that once made this openness so effective starts to diminish. What was once a unified infrastructure transforms into a disjointed collection of uncoordinated efforts.

Finally, the stewardship of open infrastructure begins to slow down. Maintainers become weary of endless coordination calls, and funding is stretched thin across too many initiatives. Each project still exists, but collectively, the ecosystem starts to fade.

A fractured commons is a landscape that seems open but lacks coherence. It hasn’t been enclosed; instead, it’s overgrazed like the fields Ostrom describes in Governing the Commons. Trust is diluted across many channels, losing its effectiveness. Ironically, many believe they are protecting the commons, but without shared governance, independence can lead to isolation and performative openness. We see signs of this in open infrastructure that fails to interoperate and in duplicative systems built from similar codebases, resulting from an ecosystem that can no longer act effectively.

Closing Call to Action

The poll reminds us: the future of trustworthy infrastructure isn’t something we inherit. It’s something we build. The choice is ours. We can make the future we want:

• By funding maintainers, not just new launches. (Stewardship)

• By contributing code, documentation, or testing to open infrastructure. (Technology)

• By advocating for open infrastructure in our contracts. (Governance)

• By showing up in governance meetings and not leaving the work to a handful of volunteers. (Governance)

• By mentoring new contributors, so that the next generation is ready to step in. (Stewardship & Technology)

• By reminding colleagues that open infrastructure is labor, not magic. (Stewardship)

Each of these small actions is a seed. One seed doesn’t change a forest. But many seeds, planted together, create an ecosystem that lasts. That is how we move toward resilience.

And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you all this, but the work is not glamorous. None of us is going to become billionaires. The work doesn’t make headlines. But it does make the future possible. When you choose to fund maintenance, you’re preventing collapse. When you push for open infrastructure, you’re resisting monoculture. When you mentor a newcomer, you’re investing in resilience. When you contribute a bug fix or documentation update, you’re helping an open infrastructure endure. These acts may seem small in the moment, but they accumulate over time. They shape the future far more than any single presentation or strategy document ever could.

Here’s my request: please don’t let this series end here. Share your thoughts in the comments below. What do you observe in your own ecosystem? What risks seem urgent? What possibilities excite you? Ultimately, no single person writes the future in a post on Substack any more than they do from a podium at a conference. It is the communities and the conversations they generate that shape our future. effectively.

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