Notices by Eira Tansey (teammidwest@glammr.us)

I am saying this with my whole heart as a person who has made a significant commitment to professional association work (being on the Society of American Archivists council) but I am existentially concerned for the future of our professional associations as people want the benefits of strong leadership but shy away from getting in the trenches to do exactly the work we need. This gets at a lot of what I’ve been observing https://open.substack.com/pub/grouphug/p/we-dont-love-organizations-back?r=sx43&utm_medium=ios

Leftists in the United States have completely conflated institutional abandonment with a liberatory politics and I think this has been an absolutely fatal mistake. The right wing never gave up on institution building, and our failure to make the same commitments has put us arguably a generation and more behind fighting back against the right wing. We’ll miss these institutions when they’re gone.

You could listen to an egotistical California politician's podcast, OR you could listen to NO TIME FOR FEAR, an awesome podcast made by a Midwestern archivist about the history of the New Deal and the politicians of the 1930s who actually got a lot of important shit done (though not always without problems) https://notimeforfear.net/

the debate me/mansplaining/whatever the hell else energy a lot of folks engage in on the fediverse is so unbelievably obnoxious.

I know the geek social fallacies mean that we're never supposed to tell someone to STFU and stop being such an insufferable obnoxious loser, but sometimes I think some folks on here deserve exactly that. You respond with even any kind of pushback of like "hey man, do you realize what you're doing here?" and people absolutely melt down. Grow the hell up.

NO TIME FOR FEAR, my New Deal history podcast is live, baby!!!!! We might live in the dumbest timeline ever, but America did a lot of really good stuff nearly a century ago during the height of the Great Depression that we can use as a blueprint moving forward. It's still making its way into all of the podcast directories but is now available via Apple podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-time-for-fear/id1791957947 #history #podcast

pour one out for everyone doing volunteer service in your professional associations right now. This shit has always been hard, it's getting harder literally by the hour, and it's thankless work. At best you get to see the seeds you plant bloom years later, at worst people treat you like a punching bag for everything they don't like about the org.

None of this is to say that dues paying members shouldn't hold folks to high standards, but it is to note that many of us who do this volunteer service work have effectively taken on an entire additional unpaid job in which we're doing anywhere from an additional 5-20 hours of unpaid work a week because we believe so strongly in giving back to the networks and associations that helped us in our career.

The hostile takeover that appeared imminent less than two weeks ago at the National Archives appears to be going from bad to worse following the termination of Dr. Shogan. I've been receiving heartbreaking reports from friends who work at the National Archives in the last couple days about the cascading resignations and now, widespread terminations that are taking place across the agency.

Archivists, regardless of where we work, need to recognize that attacks on archivists who work for the federal government will not stop there. It is no accident that the billionaire interests now taking aim at federal archives also often have major recordkeeping scandals within their own business ventures and show little interest in understanding or promoting history.

As I've argued before, archives are foundational infrastructure for a democratic society. These wannabe dictators benefit from keeping us in a state of historical amnesia and without the accountability that good recordkeeping ensures.

Without archives, democracy is at imminent risk and the alarms are flashing bright red. Whether you are an archivist who works in the public or the private sector, an attack on the nation's largest employer of archivists is an attack on our entire profession. As the old union adage goes: An injury to one is an injury to all.

(There is a version of this that I have posted on LinkedIn and Facebook. Given my public visibility in the profession, I feel it's important to use the strongest language possible since I know a lot of people are undestandably afraid to speak openly about how dire things are. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eira-tansey-78592713_the-hostile-takeover-that-appeared-imminent-activity-7297726573980327936-Kh12?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAALOcZUB_t8jzeElLlNivO2DZqc5DD1Uiug)

For those with nonprofit board experience where the board has an additional executive committee made up of selected board members, I’d love to get some resources/your two cents about the division of duties between the board in general and the EC. Thanks in advance!

It's always a good time to cue up Jelly Roll Morton's iconic, nasty, and wildly horny song The Dirty Dozen, but especially lately since I'm so tired of America's neo-Puritans and neo-Prohibitionists. https://youtu.be/aRSMaKJySlY?feature=shared

Now I'm obsessed with knowing whether it was the WPA that helped get this song preserved (peep the WPA stamp on the lower right of Alan Lomax's catalog record) https://www.loc.gov/item/afc9999005.5949/

I'm so grateful for so many reasons that I got to live and work in New Orleans for several years, but one of them was really internalizing and learning the history that America has always been a funky, weird, and horny place and that any attempts to paint it otherwise are totally ahistorical at best, and often motivated by some really sinister politics at worst.

@slothrop I've been reading Gretchen Bakke's the Grid and it's blowing my mind

even though i've had my ham license for a while (which requires passing a test that gets into electrical theory), trying to wrap my brain around how the electrical grid works is always a mind-bending exercise (i find the concept of load balancing totally fascinating). This is such a helpful primer about why scientifically and economically, electricity is not like other consumer commodities https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/11/14/which-power-plant-does-my-electricity-come-from

I am intensely fascinated with the heirs of oil industry barons who have done an about face and have been thinking about this a lot again in the context of Getty, the climate crisis, and the LA fires. Anyway, the Rockefeller family heirs seemed to have set the standard but here is what another Getty heir has been doing https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/10/21/getty-oil-heiress-funds-climate-crisis-activism-just-stop-oil