Youβre reading The Messy Middle β weekly deep dives on leadership, startups, identity, politics, and how we stay sane and think about it all.
ποΈ The Library: A Radical Place
I needed a place to work yesterday with a private room and fast internet, so for the first time in years, I did something radical: I went to the library.
I'm visiting my in-laws in Grand Rapids for the week. I'd never been to this library before, but the second I walked in, I felt like I was home. It smelled like summer break (in a good way), the layout was intuitive, kids were hunting for their summer reading books, college students were camped out with highlighters, and adults wandered the stacks without urgency.
It made me wonder: is the sameness libraries on purpose? And in today's political climate, where public institutions are under attack and the very idea of shared resources feels contested, I found myself wondering: if libraries didn't already exist, would we be allowed to build them?
Libraries symbolize a shared set of values: access, knowledge, public good; a place that exists to give people what they need to think well. You don't need a subscription or an $8 latte to get the wifi code. There's no algorithm deciding what you should do next. There's you, your brain, stacks of books, and a couple of rooms to focus.
I sat down, opened my laptop, and got more done in three hours than I had all week. During part of that time, I started researching how libraries came about in the US.
Here's what I learned...
π Libraries Were Pre-Tech Tech
When public libraries became widespread in the late 1800s, they were framed as radical, free access to information for everyone, regardless of class or education level. The idea that knowledge shouldn't be reserved for people who could afford it was genuinely controversial.
Segregationist leaders targeted libraries specifically because they understood what was at stake: free access to information is an organizing tool. Control the library, control the narrative. The library kept its promise eventually, but only because people fought, at a very real cost, to make it true.
The debate 100 years ago was was never whether to have libraries, it was fueled by who got to come in, who controlled what was on the shelves, and who had to risk their safety to sit down and read.
π± The AI Debate: Similar But Different
Sound familiar? AI was positioned to the public as a free resource, just like libraries. But within months, the model changed: ChatGPT introduced a subscription, then Claude, then countless more.
And now the very internet that taught us to use AI for everything is raging against it.
And this isn't hitting everyone equally. A UC Riverside study found that nine out of the ten counties most affected by AI and data center expansion are low-income communities with predominantly Black populations. Elon Musk's xAI built its Colossus supercomputer in Boxtown, a majority-Black neighborhood in South Memphis founded by former slaves. People are calling it "digital redlining," the same playbook, a different century. The communities that were denied access to libraries are now having data centers dropped in their backyards to power the AI the rest of us are debating on the internet. β
The consolidation of AI into a handful of powerful companies, the environmental cost, the very real risk of people outsourcing their thinking to a chatbot and calling it productivity, all of it is worth being angry and concerned about.
π§ Are We In...A Situationship?!
The AI debate gets flattened into two camps: the evangelists and the refusers. But I keep wondering, is refusal even a feasible strategy? Or does opting out just mean getting left behind?
Are we in a situation-ship with AI? Not quite ready to commit, but not quite ready to call it quits?
I think there's a version of AI that helps cure diseases, gets clean water to communities that don't have it, closes educational gaps that have existed for generations. If that version is possible, and I think it is, the question isn't just what we're against, but also, what kind of world are we fighting for?
As leaders, we are on the precipice of the greatest question of our generation: what does it look like to use this tool intentionally, in service of something bigger than productivity?
Getting there requires genuine discernment, knowing when AI supports your thinking and when it replaces it, when it extends access and when it consolidates power, when it's worth the cost and when the cost is being paid by someone who never got a say. Our goal should be to come out of this era having thought more, not less; and to ask whose interests are actually being served, and how we change that.
β I'd love to hear: What are you using AI to build...and for whom? Reply to this email to start a dialogue.
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