Andrew McLaughlin

Wild, I just discovered that a video exists of a 2012 keynote talk I did at the Library Technology Conference, which ran annually from 2009-2019, at Macalester College. It was a fantastic event — one of the most joyfully nerdy crowds I’ve ever encountered (and I’ve been to numerous IETF meetings, competed in several MIT Mystery Hunts, and even attended one ValleyCon, the annual fan festival hosted by Fargo’s own Red River Science Fiction and Fantasy Club, when I was around 14).

The talk itself now reads as a snapshot of tempered-but-not-yet-cynical Internet optimism circa 2012 — non-delusional, but overly positive about the macro benefits of disintermediation, decentralization, and lightly-moderated speech platforms, and blind to the coming tsunami of rancor, distortion and radicalization powered by attention-monetizing social media. The camera didn’t capture my visuals as I spoke, but the Prezi is still online here.

Keynote by Andrew McLaughlin at 2012 Library Technology Conference, Macalester College.

Librarians + technology = a personal nirvana. There is no more awesome set of people doing more important work than the librarians and their nerd allies at the bleeding edge of library tech -- they are engaged in an underappreciated struggle to work out how mankind is going to preserve, extend, share, and democratize the sum of human knowledge in our increasingly digital age. So I was really psyched to go a do a talk at the 2012 Library Technology Conference about the technological forces driving the great policy issues of our age, along with an argument about why and where the library community should be engaged. Bonus for me: The event was at Macalester College, where I spent my high school summers taking Russian while trying to look like something other than the huge dork I was.

Here's my keynote, "Fight for the Future: Libraries, Tech Policy, and the Fate of Human Knowledge."

Andrew McLaughlin @ Library Technology Conference 2012 from Library Technology Conference on Vimeo.

The Prezi is here.