US librarians employed

Twitch's average concurrent viewership has risen as US librarians employed has declined, between 2017 and 2022, at a correlation of -0.967. The pairing has the clean feel of a generational morality tale: as America watched more strangers play video games, it employed fewer people to help it find books. The causation is not that simple. It is, however, that sad.

Twitch's average concurrent viewers grew from around 650,000 in 2017 to over 2.5 million by 2022, propelled by pandemic-era entrenchment and the platform's dominance in livestreaming. US librarian employment declined from roughly 141,000 to 131,000 in the same window, driven by public library budget cuts, school library consolidations, and a long-running shift in how information is accessed and organized. The two trends share no mechanism but sit on opposite sides of the same information environment: as online entertainment scaled, the traditional infrastructure of local information stewardship contracted. The streamer and the librarian serve similar functions in different economies.

Six years of inverse movement can describe two different ways of helping people find things, one expanding and one retreating. The chat and the library share a mission. Only one is funded.