Imagining new contexts is an excellent way to capture the role of information in topics familiar to me. This article considers start-up founder Adam Neuman, The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and William Burrough’s cut-up film “Towers Open Fire,” a person, place, and thing that pre-date my information science career. Put in the context of information science, all three encounters have taken on new meanings.
By Jack O’Malley
Person: Adam Neumann
Adam Neumann was the CEO of WeWork. “Was,” is the word that hints at a fascinating business case that has recently evolved into a character study. As The New York Times summarizes, WeWork’s fall from a $47 billion private valuation to $7 billion after a botched IPO, which failed partly due to concerning revelations about Nuemann, “came with an even more astonishing exit package for Mr. Neumann: The 40-year-old could receive more than $1 billion after selling his shares to SoftBank and collecting a $185 million consulting fee.”1 A more critical article in The Atlantic paints a more vivid picture, writing that WeWork’s failure “has established Adam Neumann, who escaped from the wreckage a billionaire, as a figure of almost mythical monstrousness—like some capitalist chimera of Midas and Houdini.”2
In a way, observers have invested themselves in classifying Neumann. Everyone wants to answer the question “where does he fit in our understanding of American business?” Yet, stories like these two gloss over the business itself, which employs thousands of employees and serves hundreds of thousands of tenants (or members). The obsession with Nuemann follows a classic error of thinking, which assumes a singular case has more to tell us than the norm. The space Neumann literally takes up in the news crowds out reporting about the fate of those who outnumber Adam Neumann by the hundreds of thousands. Even The Atlantic has trouble imagining creatively who WeWork might be for. “Most modern workers deal with the supply, transport, marketing, sale or investment of stuff,” they write, acknowledging the social force that made WeWork popular.3
Of course, many modern workers don’t sit at a computer. In the eighteen months that I was employed by WeWork, most of the WeWork staff at any given location were people of color making an hourly wage in exchange for manual labor. “Stuff” is often the labor of others. Inventing categories for Adam Neumann seems somehow to have erased many others.
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
The Beinecke at Yale holds some incredible relics: James Baldwin’s papers, over 700 Japanese manuscripts, the Lewis and Clark exhibition maps, and (I once a heard a rumor) William Howard Taft’s trousers. These objects have real power that might convince you that Benjamin’s “aura” really does exist. Incredibly, if you request it, you can touch them. As a student, I thought the chance to be so close to knowledge was simply a privilege; coming to believe it is a right brought me to library science. I highly recommend a trip!
The university keeps this unique space open to the general public and accepts requests from all researches interested in accessing the stacks. In fact, the librarians do almost everything short of handing out flyers on the corner to invite people to see their collection. They admirably emphasize diversity in their holdings, hold readings and award prizes, give tours, and display their most recognizable objects, like the Gutenberg Bible. Still, in the best way, it feels most true to stay that the librarians and curators just want everyone to stand closer to the books.4
“Towers Open Fire”
Best described as “really funky,” this William Burrough’s movie explores the theory of “cut ups” in a series of random images, not all pictorial, and a voiceover. The climactic moment … I won’t spoil! Watch it, show your friends, and see if you all agree on the climax. Burroughs argued that, although the arrangement is random, “in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite.”5 In its own way, the rapid cutting internalizes user theory. Burroughs was emphatic about the egalitarian nature of the cut ups. I love it because the movie does not do any of the work we expect from a typical movie. In fact, it can feel like watching the movie is the only way to summarize it. Just as it doesn’t do any work, it doesn’t tolerate miscommunication, and the only assumption it makes about a user is that they hit play.
A few years ago, finding “Towers Open Fire” on YouTube made me feel that, yes, information truly is free! That excitement has given way, however, to anxiety about the long term preservation of the film. For instance, an Italian language film clip channel posted the video above, and, while I appreciate that I could find Burroughs work with a simple search, I do not want to trust a semi-anonymous YouTube user. In addition to concern for long-term preservation of what might look like nine minutes of b-roll, I’ve come to recognize another problem too. If there are preserved copies, why aren’t they as accessible as the one on YouTube?
End Notes
1 Amy Chozick, “Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up,” The New York Times, November 2, 2019, sec. Business, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/02/business/adam-neumann-wework-exit-package.html.
2 Derek Thompson, “WeWork’s Adam Neumann Is the Most Talented Grifter of Our Time,” The Atlantic, October 25, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/how-weworks-adam-neumann-became-billionaire/600607/.
3 Thompson, “WeWork’s Adam Neumann Is the Most Talented Grifter of Our Time.”
4 “History and Architecture,” Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, December 20, 2018, https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/about/history-and-architecture.
5 William Burroughs, “The Cut Up Method,” Accessed November 5, 2019, https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/burroughs-cutup.html.