Don’t serve me a hot dog and call it tube steak. We both know better.
If we think our role in a public library is to teach people to avoid technology, we’ve misunderstood the assignment.
Just read the TechCrunch piece about libraries hosting “avoiding AI” workshops for people fed up with Big Tech.
“Avoid AI” workshops aren’t acts of resistance. They’re performative theater. They let staff signal their disdain for Big Tech while conveniently ignoring the bigger threats:
A vastly larger surveillance apparatus that’s been colonizing our patrons’ lives for fifteen years: Chrome, Facebook, Instagram, Bluetooth beacons, WiFi tracking, location services, and the entire behavioral advertising economy. Fixating on ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini isn’t principle. It’s selective outrage dressed up as moral clarity.
I didn’t spend my career helping people avoid technology. I spent it helping them master it.
There’s a profound difference.
Teaching the avoidance of technology evolution is not a sustainable strategy. It’s a coping mechanism for people who would rather feel righteous than useful. The public doesn’t need community libraries leading them into a digital monastery. They need us to be ruthless, clear-eyed guides through an environment flooded with synthetic media, algorithmic manipulation, and tools that are getting more powerful by the month.
The real opportunity, the one we’re fumbling while we chase likes and retweets is to own the hardest, most necessary territory: AI literacy, deep digital privacy, information verification in an age of perfect fakes, and the ability to maintain personal agency when the machines are better at persuasion than most humans.
That’s a growing need, not a shrinking one. That’s work worthy of our institutions.
Instead, too many of my former colleagues have decided the populist, anti-AI stance is the safer, more virtuous lane. They’re not building relevance. They’re accelerating their own obsolescence with a smile, convinced their Luddite cosplay constitutes courage.
It doesn’t.
Libraries don’t survive by telling people the future is scary and they should hide from it. We survive by making people more capable in that future than they would be without us.
The profession needs to choose: Are we serious, or are we just another group of frightened knowledge workers performing moral superiority while the ground shifts beneath us?
The hot dog is NOT a steak. Call it what it is.
Keep pretending avoidance equals ethics, or get serious and teach people how AI is already being used to persuade, profile, and manipulate them, and how to push back with competence instead of fear.
It’s your choice now but it soon will be your patrons future.