kay slater

@kslater

information worker + critical scholar | DJ | research network @libraryfutures.bsky.social | AI + Planetary Justice Alliance | Chicago, of course views my own! letterboxd:

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kay slater@kslater· 18d

looking like

spongebob crying I Need It (spongebob sitting at red and white picnic table looking at water)

kay slater@kslater· 24d

we need a(n explicitly) homoerotic sequel to Bad Influence (1990)

Rob Lowe, white man with black hair and black collared shirt on left, with knife at his throat from James Spader, white man with blonde hair and glasses, also black shirt, on right

kay slater@kslater· Jul 13

Battistoni defines “market abjection” as those experiencing capitalism’s constitution of them (human + more-than-human life) as surplus; consequently depending on the “benevolence of their ‘fellow-citizens’ for survival,” therefore becoming “vulnerable to the arbitrary power of others.”

p. 198 of FREE GIFTS: CAPITALISM AND THE POLITICS OF NATURE (2025): “Many of the nonhumans that capital doesn't need are in a similar position: precarious, dependent, abject. To be of no interest to capital can be a blessing: bowhead whale populations rebounded in the Arctic, for example, when commercial whalers finally left them alone. But for many others-perhaps most-capital's disinterest is a death sentence. They are neither raw materia nor potential commodity, valuable neither in exchange nor as sources of rent This does not mean that they are useless to human beings: an estimated 70 percent of the global poor depend directly on wild species for subsistence, at least in part, meaning that they suffer most directly the loss of ecosystem services. Nearly everyone derives pleasure from unowned and unmanaged beings in some form or another. We all, as the very idea of ecosystem services makes clear, rely on them for basic survival. But however valuable these entities may be as means of subsistence, or aesthetic pleasure, or simply in their own right, they struggle to attract interest from the relevant parties: the private investors who can ensure their survival. They are exploited and even annihilated not by virtue of being incorporated into the market, as in the phenomenon that Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor describes as "predatory inclusion, buby being excluded from it. While this resembles the phenomenon that Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as "organized abandonment, wherein both capital and states disavow responsibility for land and labor, for the most part it is not actively organized or planned. It is a form of neglect stemming from disinterested exclusion, resulting in disorganized abandonment-another dimension of nonresponsibility under capitalism.
The problem, then, isn't what it's typically said to be: that capital is commodifying life itself or enclosing the last remaining commons.”

kay slater@kslater· Jul 12

celebrating 4 years with partner at the only event i would ever step into wrigley field for

picture of wrigley field red marquee that reads JOHN MULANEY MISTER WHATEVER SOLD OUT

kay slater@kslater· Jul 8

Fellow Authors: without any context, what's the first line of your current work in progress?

Sites of Power: Information Work &
Data Centers
• Introduction
Information work relies on a powerful complex ecology of work, institutions, and energy to access to digital and physical infrastructure. Data centers, fiber optic cables, electric generation plants, insulated buildings, computers and all of their internal components, chairs, floors, air conditioning, electrical outlets, and heat.
Workers who do the labor of producing and distributing electricity, city planners who permit where power lines are set into the ground, programmers and venture capitalists who create and fund the applications that require electricity access, utility analysts who measure and coordinate how much electrical power goes to which locality, contract data workers in the Global Majority who annotate, label, and train datasets, municipal trustees and volunteers who pass ordinances on intergovernmental agreements and tax levies, and those who fall under the large umbrella of information workers: library, archives, museum, and cultural heritage workers.
Each of these dynamics are energetic and consequential to one another (Pasek et al., 2023). We

kay slater@kslater· Jul 5

finding out about

kay slater@kslater· Jul 4

what an honor!

screenshot of push notification from bluesky listifications added to moderation list for being “wrong about VR, AI, Crypto, SmartGlasses, GLP1, NFTs, or Bitcoin”

kay slater@kslater· Jul 4

screaming

picture of ken burns transposed onto video cassette, yellow text captioned KEN BURNS NEEDS A NEW WAR

kay slater@kslater· Jun 29

surrounded by geniuses this weekend (@ezerrenner.bsky.social + Sarah Appedu) @ #ALAAC26

three people standing in front of red robot sculpture. person on left has blonde curly hair with glasses and pink shirt. person in middle has blonde curly hair straight hair, glasses and blue shirt. person on right has pulled back black curly hair and glasses with striped shirt

kay slater@kslater· Jun 27

1st day of #ALAAC26 — work (as a local does), right into on-panel @ New Members Round Table orientation (as local), met URL (now IRL) pals, listened to MSNOW host repeat back to us what our jobs are, Taqueria Los Comales, radical book buzz, home! see you tomorrow @ Pilsen Community Books @ 6pm!

sign that says UPCOMING EVENTS

of focus: 6.27 LIBRARYPUNK LIVE: CRITICAL AI TAKES TOO HOT FOR THE MAINSTAGE

kay slater@kslater· Jun 25

STS divas (of all genders) @ #ALAAC26… come find me for a treat

stickers of SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY in red on white background; text on bottom reads “MORE POLITICS FOR YOUR ARTIFACTS” in white on red background

kay slater@kslater· Jun 23

guys shh i’m pitching rn

picture of tv screen. baseball graphic says KAY

kay slater@kslater· Jun 22

you gotta love being in love

text between partners, blue text from sender reads “if there is any possible chance you could acquire a sweet treat on the way home….” with responding text in dark grey reading “Understood.” responding text was reacted to with a beautiful heart

kay slater@kslater· Jun 21

“Interior with View of Buildings,” Richard Diebenkorn, 1962–taken at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2024

Painting of partial interior view facing buildings, other partial interior view of chair (but where is chair? where is reflection?) in blues, oranges and whites; painting is oil on canvas. Painting is on white-tan gallery wall, with partial view of painting description on right

kay slater@kslater· Jun 20

now viewing

shot from SUMMERTIME (1955, dir. David Lean); Katherine Hepburn on left in tan collared dress, sunglasses, hair in bun sitting at cafe table in foreground, Rossano Brazzi on right in tan suit and yellow tie, sitting at cafe table in background yearning

kay slater@kslater· Jun 13

Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989) is on the Criterion Channel: www.criterionchannel.com/common-threa...

People in foreground standing in front of The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, which was laid in front of the White House, 1989

kay slater@kslater· Jun 7

at local library while on day off from work library to record podcast about library

white person within mac photo booth camera. person has long blonde hair with brown glasses, a black shirt, in front of a mic with filter and phone sticker that says “AVOID (AI) IDEOLOGY”

kay slater@kslater· Jun 6

made sticky toffee pudding

grey bowl-plate on marble countertop, within plate 6 pieces of sticky toffee pudding (muffins with toffee sauce and brown sugar on top)

kay slater@kslater· May 31

i’m not really trying to brag… but if i did

paperbacks of Duke University Press sale, from top to bottom:
Sarah Sharma, In The Meantime
Rahul Mukherjee, Radiant Infrastructures
Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format
Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages
Informatics of Domination anthology
Simone Browne, Dark Matters
Sean Cubitt, Finite Media
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past

kay slater@kslater· May 31

LIBRARYPUNK LIVE: Critical AI Takes Too Hot for the Mainstage! @librarypunk.bsky.social @pilsencommbooks.bsky.social 6/27 @ 6:30pm Sarah Appedu @kslater.bsky.social @ezerrenner.bsky.social ticket proceeds ➡️ IL Coalition on Immigrant & Refugee Rights RSVP: www.eventbrite.com/e/librarypun...

kay slater@kslater· May 26

maybe alienation? just read the introduction to Berlant’s ‘On the Inconvenience of Other People’ and this resonates with me more than neoliberal

$p. 26 of Lauren Berlant’s “On the Inconvenience of Other People,” 2022: “Alienation is a technical term for not being in control of the conditions of one's value or ownership of the products of one's labor. It is also an affective state that can be lived in many ways, from the negative sense of separateness from things to a range of feelings from rage to depression. It suggests subtraction, withdrawal, a distance. Yet if the a priori of alienation is the world's overcloseness, then alienation implies a style of response that manages the inconvenience of the world by creating a distance from within the space of relation: in Marxist technical terms, a way of rerouting the body's intimate labor for the value extraction of others. Capitalism fracks the sensorium.”$

kay slater@kslater· May 25

DESK SET comes to a neoliberal end: Bunny, head of reference, must be proven wrong by AI. like a sedative, it tries to ensure viewers that the answer to deskilling is not worker power, but to be useful to the machine, because those identified by management as useful to it will be fine—for now.

black and white shot with Richard, lab engineer he hired to replace the librarians, and Bunny, head librarian; lab engineer is freaking out screaming crying throwing up over how mean the librarians had been to her, when she’s the one responsible for pushing them out of work

aka every librarian advocating for AI really
upset when library workers don’t want to go anywhere near it

kay slater@kslater· May 25

it’s been a very movies-about-texts, movies-are-texts day in our house

kay slater@kslater· May 22

a great weekend to get into this

cover of Along the Archival Grain, Ann Laura Stoler

kay slater@kslater· May 22

meme of skeleton and text that says “ever since i was a child i wanted to have my data collected and stored by a third party”

kay slater@kslater· May 18

just some normal things said about tech-skeptic library workers in the 1960s. nothing to see here!

text from “Technological Change and the Professional: Neither Luddism nor Technocrat” by Philip H. Ennis (1962)

“There must be better ways than that. Finally there is the strength of being forewarned, for it will be recalled that the Luddites were hanged. The technocrats suffered a worse fate; they were soon forgotten.”

kay slater@kslater· May 11

US Labor Dept’s Make America AI Ready “offers common-sense advice” like never sharing “passwords, SSN, medical records, or confidential work data” like income, then leads users in exercises that ask users to “input some of these ‘never share’ types of data.” blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/05/05/m...

On Day 3, the course urges the user to input a photo, PDF or recording of their own voice.
On Day 4, it says that a “power move” is for users to “give AI your own data to work with,” including instructions to “paste your resume” and “share your monthly expenses.”
On Day 5, the course says that a good use case for AI is putting “medical symptoms” in to learn medical terms and prepare questions for a doctor.
On Day 6, it tells the user to share their address to find a restaurant near them.

kay slater@kslater· May 10

“You’re not gonna try to tell me you think you can [get] your way out of a criminal charge with an adding machine.”

still of The Trial (1962), dir. Orson Welles, ~50min in

kay slater@kslater· May 9

Letterboxd informed me that this time last year I tried to watch Cronenberg’s filmography ahead of The Shrouds. Over the course of weeks he began to infuriate me with an amazing ability to dream up cool ideas, only to execute them in the most boring way possible. Then, to my relief, I saw Sinners!

screenshot of letterboxd email, FLASHBACK: THIS WEEK A YEAR AGO, YOU LOGGED…
four posters, from left to right: Videodrome, The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers, Sinners

kay slater@kslater· May 9

ExLibris operates their own data centers in some places but contracts out to most others, & uses AWS as part of their cloud infrastructure. they have documentation on what happens if a major shutdown occurs, based on a few key assumptions….. knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Cross-Produc...