Material Entanglement and Technology Fetishism in Academic Libraries
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores technology fetishism in academic libraries as an irrational form of worship. Academic libraries participate in networks of prestige through their investments in technology and its fetishistic rhetoric. To counter the myth of technology as a neutral good, this article draws on contemporary fetishism theory and specifically the work of Bruno Latour to trace how technology is entangled with social relations and upholds hegemonic power. All technology is laden with human thought, feeling, and intent. However, Modern fetishes are dispersed into culture and obscure these entanglements, hiding materiality and obscuring the visibility of labour. This article considers library technology through the lens of fetishism, specifically considering the ways in which discovery layers shape research. Confronting fetishism enables academic library workers to reimagine more human-centered approaches to technology and to bring to light embedded whiteness and sexism in library practices. There is an urgent need to reconfigure our relationships with technology given its entanglement with research and the unexamined power that fetishism holds.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it