The Loon hasn’t done one of these since the one for 2018. Quickly, let’s recap that one:

No-brainers

• Internet Service Providers will fire up the post-net-neutrality shenanigans engine. Correct.
• More peer-review scandals. Correct, and this was true well before the advent of AI faux-reviews. Coercive citation was and remains a common culprit.
• More sexual-harassment scandals in higher education. Correct, unfortunately.
• Germany stays the course against Elsevier. Half credit. Germany is hardly Elsevier’s biggest fan, but over eight years, tactics change, as they must.

Perhapses

• An “inclusive access” provider finds itself embroiled in scandal. Half credit. Most of them have vanished, and of those that remain, trade coverage has been less “scandal” and more “it turns out this is a terrible deal.” Which, of course, many librarians said from the start.
• A major figure in archives will be outed as (minimally; the accusation could well be even more serious) a serial sexual harasser. Half credit; Mark Greene surely did add to his milkshake-duck reputation for racism before his untimely passing. The Loon still knows of several archivists who deserve to be outed as serial sexual harassers, but they have not been.
• At least three new non-accredited master’s degrees will launch at schools with ALA-accredited library degrees. Correct, though in fairness, it’s been rather longer than a year.
• Another large library consortium (or national library system, in countries with such) starts a Germany-style play against Elsevier. Correct with bells on. “Transformative agreements” and “read-and-publish” agreements and “unbundling” are presently table stakes in e-resource negotiations with any major publisher, not just Elsevier.

Who knows? Not this Loon

• Beprexit. The Loon is honestly unsure. If there has been a recent market-share analysis of institutional-repository platforms, do please point her to it on Mastodon.
• Learning analytics vs. privacy. Learning analytics appears to have won, but the fight continues. The Loon knows of one or two solid victories for privacy.
• Blockchain bubbles. They keep popping and reinflating. It’s shameful, really.

Onward to 2026

No-brainers

• More AI-slop scandals in the scholarly literature. Obviously.
• More trumpeted triumphalist trials of generative AI for useful ends that fizzle on closer examination. Equally obviously. The Loon has encountered some evidence that this guano passes muster at journals because journal editors and peer reviewers want to rationalize their own use of generative AI. Such editors and reviewers should be ashamed of themselves on at least two levels.
• At least one more school or college that includes a library school will rebrand itself with “AI.” There have been at least two this year. The Loon will have more to say about this anon.
• Additional in-person LIS conferences fold. Partly this is travel woes; few places are anything like safe any more for too many people (and avians). Partly this is inclusion eradication efforts from the US federal government (and, it must be said, institutional capitulation to such efforts); any conference offering scholarships is at risk. Partly it is budgetary woes and inflation squeezing or outright eliminating professional-development budgets.

Perhapses

• At least one library- and/or archives-focused master’s program folds, possibly alongside the department offering it. For a department to fold instead of just the program, the Loon would bet it would not have an undergraduate or non-ALA-accredited program as a financial buffer. In other words, schools that obeyed many information professionals’ strident injunctions to do only library/archives education will be the first to fall. Congratulations, librarians and archivists. Well played.
• At least one big pig misses earnings estimates. The couch cushions are running all the way out of money, Big Deals are becoming endangered, and big pigs are engaged in more than enough AI-fueled shenanigans to shed a lot of their prestige sheen. None of this is slowing down.
• A major generative AI company goes down in flames. We can but hope. This will happen; the only questions are timing, inciting factors, and which one collapses first into the muck of its own empty guano.
• At least one major social-media platform will come out swinging against age verification. They seem not to have worked out that it’s an existential threat for them, relying for survival on low-friction UX as they do, but they will learn.

Who knows? Not this Loon

• The march of fascist authoritarianism. The Loon’s Boring Alter Ego is fighting against this, as she is able. Even if we all succeed, and our success is not by any means guaranteed, repair and shoring up defenses against another such will take a lifetime or more.
• The survival of government-backed information and memory organizations in the United States. We are under broad-based attack at all levels of government and citizenry. We continue to lose ground, in part because rather than defend us, concerned individuals and groups are trying to take over from us (spurred in no small part by the odious Brewster Kahle of the odious-but-presently-necessary Internet Archive). We are mostly duck-and-covering rather than resisting, nor are we meaningfully banding together in self-defense. All in all, the Loon is not encouraged.

On “School/College of AI”

What venal, amoral, witlessly shortsighted strutting cocks are these! (Gendered terminology used with intent.)

The closest the Loon can come to any vestige of charity for these birdbrains is to guess that this is a survival tactic in a severely funding-constrained environment. Whether courting big donors is sufficient justification for selling out your principled resisters—well, the Loon doesn’t think it is, but the Loon is known to be rather rigid.

The Loon offers her condolences to good people who have found themselves stuck in one of these organizations. She has the inside scoop on one such rebranding; she knows there was resistance, even stout resistance, but the fix was in. The moral injury those who resisted in vain are feeling is valid. The anger and fear are valid. Acute shame and embarrassment, perhaps less so—strutting cocks are not to be gainsaid in the present environment. (Vicarious embarrassment, however, is entirely valid, though its targets frankly do not deserve the attention.)

The key now is to plan to ensure that whoever made these decisions is held accountable for it after the bursting of the generative-AI bubble. Remove them from power. Tag them with the infamy they have earned for the rest of their careers.