Crisis narratives frame our response
Half the seats on many of the Titanic’s lifeboats were empty. The tragedy of the Titanic is an event retold over and over not only because the disaster of the unsinkable ship shocked the world, but also because "it didn't have to be that way." It didn't have to end with turning individuals away from half-empty lifeboats, but a constructed scarcity crisis meant that the loss of life was higher than it had to be. Since then, the very name of the Titanic carries connotations about hubris(too big to fail), human nature(women and children first except those in steerage), and constructed scarcity(not my boat, let's cast off).
"This is the thought experiment of a thousand sci-fi stories: When the chips are down, will your neighbors be your enemies or your saviors? When the ship sinks, should you take the lifeboat and row and row and row, because if you stop to fill the empty seats, someone’s gonna put a gun to your head, throw you in the sea, and give your seat to their pals?"
-Cory Doctorow, “The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories.” Slate Magazine. October 13, 2020.
Yet, "Stories of futures in which disaster strikes and we rise to the occasion are a vaccine against the virus of mistrust. Our disaster recovery is always fastest and smoothest when we work together, when every seat on every lifeboat is taken. " (Doctorow, C. “Disasters Don’t Have to End in Dystopias.” Wired, April 5, 2017. https://www.wired.com/2017/04/cory-doctorow-walkaway/.)
In this genealogy, we will examine the role of crises, scarcity narratives, and the power of "No."
As articulated by Bert Spector in Constructing Crises: Leaders, Crises, and Claims of Urgency (2019), crises are a powerful tool for leaders. These crises can be both real and constructed. Real crises look like natural disasters or a global pandemic, while constructed crises are often utilized to claim (or hold onto) power and resources, especially in an urgent or 'exceptional now' manner. Constructed crises tend to fall into different smaller narratives (such as "A once glorious kingdom under threat"), but can be utilized in conjunction with real crises to form a larger narrative. These can be employed for a wide-variety of reasons, but typically they manifest as calls for urgency, and always stem from the desire for power.
In librarianship, crises can be leveraged by administrators, politicians, and others to justify that "There just aren't the resources" [to make it safe, to make it efficient], or "there just isn't the time to wait![to listen to an specialist, or til we have enough people]." These scarcity narratives then become the backdrop libraries use for their rallying cry, boasting about their "ability to do more with less", while at the same time over-relying on librarians' self-sacrficie or resilience in the face of adversity ad nauseum. And while staying open during a pandemic, or persisting a repetitive manual task, or working people over-time without pay, or disincentivizing vacation may be stop-gaps in service of noble goals, they typically stem from a myth that resources are unusually scarce or that the matter at hand is more urgent than ever.
As you, dear reader, explore this project, we invite you to consider: How do I know if there actually IS a crises? Or if resources are, in fact, scarce? Of if there's one but not the other? How long should we do more with less? Is it ok to simply exist? Instead of demanding exceptional resilience in the face of adversity could we focus on surviving with some semblance of quality of life? In the words of Leah Zaidi, could we design our way out of a cyberpunk dystopia?
Zaidi, Leah. 2021. “Welcome to the Cyberpunk Dystopia.” Presented at the FITC Sessions, March 11. http://fitc.ca/event/cyberpunk/.
