librarypunk - 047 - The promise of access (and organizing) feat. Dan Greene

Episode Date: March 20, 2022

https://twitter.com/Greene_DM The Promise of Access | The MIT Press Link for articles, book talks, classes, etc: https://dmgreene.net   Tech won’t save us episode (especially the second half) https://overcast.fm/+ZpQDQrdL4 Logic article on The Access Doctrine: https://logicmag.io/distribution/the-access-doctrine/  

Let's see. I should have done the St. Patrick's Purim thing this week. Yeah, because I forgot what week it was. Yeah, I forgot what week it was last week. Yeah, and I live like an hour from Boston, so I'm like fucked. I'm Justin. I'm a Skalkanlcom library, and my pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library. My pronouns are they then. I'm Jay. I am an academic metadata and discovery librarian, and my pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest, would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, guys. I'm Dan Green. I'm an assistant professor of information studies at the University of Maryland.

My pronouns are he, him. Welcome. So happy to be here. Really appreciate you guys having me on. Super excited for you to be here. Yeah, I listened to your, um, is it Tech Won't Save Us episode while I was like fetzing around on the computer today. It was good. And I got my library to buy your book. So. Same thing. you the most important request you can ask. Yeah, I was like, hey, Catherine, can we buy this? And like two hours later, it's great. Yeah, so did I. With my tiny selector budget is mostly just like these books that I don't think anyone else is going to select. So it's like, okay, well, I'll do it. She actually asked me if I had recommendations for books about data privacy and stuff. So I just went on AK Press and like found anything that I could and stuff. So I'd

like send her a bunch of like, you know, radical stuff because that's all I could think of. But yeah, she actually wanted to put more in the collection that was about like data privacy issues and ethics and stuff. I was like, hell yeah. I will gladly find you books. Nice. I've discovered it's something of a cheat code where if you have a book that features librarians, then it turns out they're pretty willing to stock your book. Yeah, always look at the Zs in a library and just see like what librarians have been buying for themselves.

That's always a fun thing to do. I didn't have a segment this week, so we can go ahead and just jump into it. So, Dan, vote for Emily. Yes, I will also endorse that as my segment. Please vote for Emily to vote for Emily for president of ALA. That's a segment. Okay. Okay.

Or don't. Don't listen to us. I don't care what we think. Do whatever you want. Live your own damn lives. Stop listening to us for your opinions. You hogs. So you wrote a book called The Promise of Access, and I do not actually remember if there is a subtitle.

There is. It goes colon, technology, inequality, and the political economy of hope. As a person with a PhD, I am a contraction. obligated to put a colon in any title that I have. I always love, like, when I tell people my master thesis, I always do, like, you can't see me right now, but I, like, do my two fingers, like, in a piece sign, but, like, vertical, so it's like colon. You got to emphasize it.

So you do, like, a Sailor Moon face? This is what you do? You go colon. No, I do this. Oh. That's a little threatening. Silver Moon is amazing. Do listen to us about going to watch Sailor Moon.

That you have to do. That's a correct opinion. Not the crystal redraw. That was bad. Right. Yeah. Watch the original one. I need's animation was good.

So two of us were actually independently reading your book before you followed us on Twitter. And then I was like, oh, great. I can get the opportunity to have Dan on. I just see my opening for these things sometimes. And I heard you on The Tech Won't Save Us podcast a while back now. And I really enjoyed that that podcast. because it really got me thinking about how we have different models of organizing, especially with community and especially when you're a service industry worker,

where, you know, there's no factory you can lock people out of. You've got to kind of, especially if you're like a teacher or work with children or work with people's kids, even in universities, this still kind of happens. You're just like, look, it's good for you. It's good for us. It's good for your kids. So that's what I really wanted to dig into. But for the opening, I wanted you to sort of pitch the book.

to a librarian crowd and say, like, what's the pitch? What do you think library workers will get out of the book? That's great. I really appreciate the question because I think I am shocked that social scientists and honestly the left more broadly, whatever that means, don't take libraries seriously as sites of struggle. And it really is where a lot of the action is. And, you know, know, I could fill up the room I'm in right now with ethnographies of schools or hospitals or other kinds of workplaces, but, you know, it's much harder to find good critical writing about libraries. So there's one thing I wanted to provide here. So the promise of access is a book about how the problem of poverty became a problem of technology, how we all learned that we have

to learn to code or else. And there's been a lot of people much smarter than me that have debunked that claim and shown that, you know, obviously poverty is much more complicated than what kind of tools or skills people have. So, you know, really wonderful books by like Virginia Eubanks or Christo Sims, Morgan Ames on one laptop or child. But no matter how many times we debunk this story, it keeps coming back. It's got a life of its own. So instead of trying to show that poverty is more complicated than these, you know, silly binaries between people with access and people without, I wanted to explain why we keep telling that story. And the explanation I land on is primarily a story about institutions and institutions that face poverty every day and take care

of people as they exit the labor market or try to get back into it or prepare to go into it for the first time. And these are places like schools and libraries. So schools and libraries share a lot. especially insofar as the rest of the welfare state has been totally taken apart in the last 40 years. Our teachers and our public librarians in particular, although a lot of this I think applies to university librarians as well, depending on your geography. You know, they have not just done the jobs that's on their job description, but they've also had to be social worker, nurse, translator, health coach, job coach. all these things that, you know, people desperately need, but are not necessarily in the job description. You know, there's so much weight put on these institutions. And that also means that, like, the best course of action is sometimes unclear.

You know, the way I talked about this in libraries is that, you know, things like, are people allowed to sleep in the library? Or are you allowed to watch porn in the library? And, you know, there's a lot of disagreement over. that. There are really, especially in cities, the book is about Washington, D.C. There is really no real public space left. There's

nowhere you can hang out all day and not buy anything. So it seems, so many librarians take great pride in that. But on the other hand, you know, these places were overcrowded precisely because there's nowhere to go. And so sleepers may be using resources in space that other people don't want to use.

Same thing with porn. You know, if the library's mission is to provide access to things that people may not have access to elsewhere, I met plenty of librarians. They're like, you know, I mean, if it's not freaking anyone out directly next to the person, you're not exposing yourself, fine, whatever, go watch porn. And, you know, I spent a couple years at MLK library, the central branch of DC public libraries, and it was, you know, every single day I'm there. You'd find some dude watching porn or room with 150 other people. Probably has nowhere else to do it. But on the other hand, you know, that's not being productive. You wouldn't necessarily do that at the office.

So they have all of this pressure on them. These pressures of austerity, pressures of legitimacy, who needs the library if you've got Wikipedia, and these pressures about which way you're supposed to go in your mission. And those pressures mean that people are in search for a solution and they're going to search for models. And this model, what I call the access doctrine, you get the right tools, you get the right skills,

and you'll be safe in a really uncertain, risky economy. That starts to seem like a great idea. And it's not because every librarian or every teacher is tricked by this. They buy it wholesale. Everyone who works on a ground knows how complicated the problem of poverty is. You are, you know, librarians I work with and I'm a former social worker are effectively social workers. DC public libraries, especially the MLK Central Branch, became effectively the largest homeless day shelter in the city. They know how big the problem is and how serious the problem is.

but they are desperate for something that's going to bring resources to the space, legitimacy to the space, and some kind of clarity to their demands. And that's what the access doctrine provides. Because when you start to focus your mission around teaching people to code, giving them access to tech that can get them jobs, supposedly, then that's the sort of thing that donors and politicians look kindly on. So you might get resources. MLK Library started to shift its programming and got a long overdue renovation.

That was hundreds of millions of dollars. It provides political legitimacy. These places start to look like the future, things that other government agencies or private companies or, you know, NGOs might want to participate in. And it makes your job simpler. So that question about like, well, I don't know, who should sleep in the library? That becomes easy to answer. You wouldn't sleep at the office. That's not productive.

So kick somebody out. And over the years that I spent at MLK interviewing librarians and patrons. and patrons. We saw that as the library kind of embraced this vision of itself as a skills training center, there was less and less room for people to just hang out. You know, you would get kicked out if you were sleeping, police more hard if you were watching porn, snacks, those kind of things. So I traced these kind of influences across these different field sites and show how, like,

people and ideas and money move between the tech sector, education, and libraries and force them to adapt to this system. And that's my story for how this idea that we can solve poverty by teaching people to code, giving them the right tools and skills, that's where that idea comes from. It's not because any of us are tricked. It's because we have to tell that story in order to keep our institutions alive. As a matter of political organizing, what I'm trying to do here is explain how and why institutions function the way they do. that is kind of a level of analysis

above the motivations of individual participants and below the big structural stories about racial capitalism or something like that. These institutional policies about where the money goes, who gets which jobs, what our mission is. Those are the things where something like racial capitalism becomes a real active force in everyday people's lives and persists beyond the people who are currently in the institution.

You know, you could fire everybody in there, and these effects would still remain because the pressures on the institution remain the same. And I think that by exposing these kinds of pressure points, we start to learn how we might change them in the future. So if our training mechanisms and the kind of bridging organizations that connect schools to tech or business, things like TFA or the Brute Institute, are influencing places to embrace this mission, then those become targets politically.

And also by telling this story of how people get brought together into a mission that degrades all of their experiences, so patrons get less out of the library, workers get less out of their job. They're not there to, I'm going to go ahead and guess that none of you signed up as librarians to like, you know, punish people for sleeping or watching porn. That's like not why you got into the job.

right? I want them to watch porn. Exactly, right? That's your mission. Yeah, that's my mission. And, you know, when we realize that those things are degrading us both, we realize that our struggles are connected, that they intersect at these particular institutions. Teachers unions have a familiar line for this. You know, we say that my working conditions or my students' learning conditions. Our struggles are not the same. You know, we can have very different struggles, like the things that patrons need out of the library may be different from what the workers need out of the library. But nonetheless, they intersect that space, and thus they could build power with each other. And this is something that makes schools and libraries as these community sites, sites of what Marxist feminist called social reproduction, really, really special.

Because what's the first thing that the mayor, the superintendent, is going to say if teachers or librarians go on strike? You know, y'all are greedy. You're just trying to get more money, and it's hurting kids. So there's no way that you're going to win unless you have your patrons or students on your side. Or a big campaign of fuck them kids. We just all print that out and just start setting like all the trash cans on fire in the neighborhood. Yeah, I mean, it seemed to work okay for the Republicans sometimes. So, you know, it might be worth a shot.

I'm just saying do intryism in the Republicans. I'm telling you, vote red. Sure. Vote red. Fuck them kids. So you need them and they need you because while they have numbers, you know, obviously there's more patrons or more students or more family members than there are workers. The workers obviously occupy a strategic position there. You know, the library doesn't run without them.

The school doesn't run without them. So I hope that that kind of horizontal solidarity, I need you and you need me, that kind of thing can defeat the vertical paternal relationship. that run our schools and libraries right now. I have the knowledge and the tech in my head. Me, smart white guy, me give you code, you know, you survive. You know, you get to eat now. That's a transaction. You know, to really transform these spaces,

we need to have these kind of persistent, horizontal relationships with each other. We recognize that, you know, we're not the same. Our struggles are different, but we need each other. And that can sound kind of far-fetched, but it is, you know, it's something that has happened in libraries before, there was a big wave of library strikes when public sector unionism got legal in the U.S. And it's something that happens in schools, you know, all the time. You know, if you told me

10 years ago that we'd see a wave of teacher strikes across like Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, you know, I would ask me when you were smoking. Like it's like it is, it was really insane. And the, that shows that the appetite is there and that people are starting to realize that this kind of strategic value is there. So honestly, like, I, my pitch is that, I think if we are going to have a shot, not just as professionals in schools and libraries, but as a larger left, our Soviets are going to be in schools, in libraries, in hospitals, in clinics, in nursing homes, in these places that do social reproduction, that make people and bring together the struggle of workers with the community around them.

That's the pitch. The one time I don't have the Soviet National Anthem on my drops. Gender? What is this? Soviet Russia? Close enough. Yeah. Jay, you were wanting to jump in?

Yeah. So something you said so about like how we know that getting all the fancy Chinese might not be what our community needs, but we know that we might not be able to get money without them. Right. Like that's what funders and donors look at. And I feel like that is exactly what has happened in a lot of like humanities disciplines, especially English departments and universities. And I wish universities and public libraries would like talk more because I feel like there's Yeah, there's something there, especially because like state, you know, public universities have the public in them.

But anyway. And many state public university libraries are functionally public libraries. Yeah. They act that way. I know a, a woman who works at like a tribal college. library and that's like the only library around so that you know she also has to know how to do like children's programming like so this was one reason i was actually very like anti-digital humanities for years because i was like this is just like people aren't going to give us money unless there's

like code and software involved like you know what am i doing like because all i knew it was like it's like text mining hoddy trust like it was like stupid crap i didn't like care about i didn't know about all of the other, like, cool, like, critical and radical digital humanities that was happened. And Justin, I'm sure you have experienced the same thing in, like, history. So, yeah, it's like, I was at the University of Utah when they got their, like, Digital Matters Lab. And where I'm at now, our, you know, our dean is very, she really wants a Digital Humanities Lab when what the faculty ask for, like, on campus is, like, they just want, like, the tools. they don't need like a space to do it, right? Yeah, or like, you know, like working air conditioning or...

Right, yeah, like better bathrooms in the library, that would be nice. But yeah, so this sort of like wave of like, like, we know it's bullshit. Like, some of it can be really cool. Like, I'm not trying to, like, dis, like, cool tech stuff. I do the cool tech stuff too. I'm, like, working on, like, a digital scholarship project right now. But the sort of, like, having to be complicit in, like, this neoliberalism of, like, playing into this crap. I see it everywhere. It's not just like, oh, the innovation keyword right now

is makerspaces, so we have to get makerspaces kind of thing. So yeah, I wish there would be more love that like horizontal solidarity, not even just like within like public libraries and schools, but like with universities in those areas as well. Because I think there could be some really powerful work that happens there. And then my second point, so you're talking about how it's like, we know that this sort of like divide of you know how to do the code or you don't know how to do the code. Like it's more complicated than that, but it keeps popping up. And like you emphasize, like if you, you know, oh, if you just have the right tools, then you'll, you know, you'll be able to code your way out of poverty. Like I know that people who do similar jobs to me make $30,000 more than I do just because they have business analyst.

in their title and not metadata, whatever. And it was just reminding me of like, even when we know that that whole like, if you code yourself out of poverty thing, even if we know it's bullshit, we're still kind of giving legitimacy to the idea that like the tools themselves have meaning, even by like denouncing them.

Like, even by going like, oh, you don't need to, you know how to code. Like it's more complicated than that or whatever. still giving legitimacy to this idea of like it's the tool that matters and not like what you're trying to do with the tool. And so I think that maybe like reframing that whole discussion of like, oh, do you know Python or what is it that you want to do and can Python help you with that kind of mindset? This has been something I've been thinking about a lot this week, actually. But yeah, I don't know how that plays into it because it was like the whole like

techno fetishism and like, you know, the former hippies who turned into Steve Jobs kind of people. Yeah, for sure. No, no, no, I appreciate that. I mean, the book is intensely autobiographical. You know, I come from American cultural studies where, you know, we are often a clearinghouse for things like black studies and queer studies, labor studies on campus. And we have absolutely received those pressures where, you know, we're not going to get the money unless we are, you know, suddenly a media production department or something like that. And I now work at an I-school, which is an incredibly fun place to be where I work with lots of different kinds of people that all do different kinds of work.

But because it's a place that is kind of information and making itself, it is also the home to every single buzzword in the dictionary and plenty that I haven't heard of. So, yeah, I think and I hope that people see the relevancy outside of schools and libraries to many other kinds of institutions. I really take what you said about the giving agency to the tool because if the problem was as simple as getting rid of the tools or proving that they don't do what other people say they do, we would have won a long time ago.

That's not that hard. I mean, even just like basic kind of labor market predictions make this stuff pretty clear. They're just not enough coding jobs to go around. Most jobs that are getting produced, the next 10 years, just like the last 10 years, are in crap, low-wage jobs in food service and health. They mostly do not require a college degree. 20 years ago, they wouldn't have required a high school degree. If we're flooding the world with software developers, then all that's going to do is bring

down the average software developer wage. This is not a long-term solution. But ultimately, because of these institutional pressures, you know, the fact of public austerity, the fact that there really are not enough good jobs to go around, that makes this story really attractive no matter what. So it's ultimately impossible to disprove. So like, let's say we like convince everybody that there's not actually a gap for software developers right now, or there's not actually a STEM gap, which there is not, most people

of STEM degrees work outside of STEM. We, you know, companies provide these narratives in part to save money on training. Average time of training has gone through the floor, the way you get a promotion is by leaving the company now, and by lowering the cost of workers. This is always the justification for, like, H-1B visas. It's like, there's not enough scientists in America, so we need to, you know, recruit cheap people from abroad and then throw them out as soon as we're done with them. Let's say we convinced everyone that that was wrong.

The economy would still suck. Our public institutions would still have their budgets slashed constantly. And, you know, it would happen. Like, next year, there would be an augmented reality gap. And that's happening at my university right now. the Oculus guy bought us like a chunk of a new computer science building, and guess what? You know, we have a new augmented reality program to train the desperately needed augmented reality professionals of the future because, God, we are just not keeping up with the augmented reality

push in China or whatever. So it's going to keep happening. It's not going to stop. And that's why it's, I think, important to shift the conversation less from rebutting this to more about the kind of power that can hopefully stop it. And that is not to say that we throw away this tech in any way, but that we instead try to broaden our story of what it can be used for. Because I think one of the sad things is that, especially in public libraries and public schools, we end up limiting our imagination so much about what all of our cool tools can do. We don't get to play with fun. Yeah, exactly. We don't get to play.

And there's so much more we could be doing for ourselves, for our communities, if we weren't just focused on teaching people the things that they need to get a software developer job. Yeah, I was just thinking what you can do with the Oculus lab is, I just imagine that scene from the Simpsons where they, he's in. They're the garden simulator. No, no, no. It's the future of warfare is robots and your job will be to maintain those robots. I say you should do that and say, we need you in these virtual world jobs because the future is V-tuber, model artists and furry artists. and we need you to learn how to graft a parrot tits onto a raccoon in 3D.

More trans cat girls. You're joking, but everybody has a e-sports team now. So, you know, I think there's going to be plenty of trans cat girls at the NCAA e-sports tournament in 2035. My dad has half a million followers on TikTok. Good for him. Yeah, he's not like a trans cat girl v-tuber, At least I don't think so. Get him out.

Is my dad an egg? I don't think so. But yeah, like, he's, like, in his 50s, and he's, like, making it big on TikTok. It's the weirdest thing. Yeah, it's weird. That's weird. I know, right? Does he do the dances?

Is that why? No, he does a lot of, like, duets with, like, about political things. And then also, he's a, you know, he's a country musician and he's a really good singer and guitar player. And so he'll just, like, sing things and play his guitar and stuff. My wife's pretty on TikTok. I'm going to have to see if I can find him through her. I will send him to you. Nice.

I had to get off TikTok. It was ruining my brain. It's really good if you're hung over and can't do anything. Like, you can literally only do this motion. But like, other than that. It scares me. Like, I find it overwhelming. And I don't know how anyone keeps up with it.

Yeah. But I also was like, I was very scared the first time I saw like my little cousins. watching someone else play Minecraft on YouTube. So at this point, I'm just kind of aging into it. Yeah. But something you said in the book and just now was about, you know, skilling up at your own time and at your own expense. And this was also something you mentioned in terms of rejecting people from services

saying like, well, you need to be doing the startup culture. So you need to be, if you're on welfare, you need to be applying for benefits 14 hours a day. And like that's treat it like your day job. God. And I've said this before. I don't remember when this came up, but that's not a particularly liberatory vision for libraries, is that we will throw you back into capitalism. And kind of your thesis in the book is like there is no outside the labor force.

Everyone, because of the Clintons, like many of these problems can be traced back to them, no one is ever allowed to be outside the labor force. You are no longer unemployed. You are now like on work fair. You are going to interviews for jobs. You are like when I was unemployed, I didn't apply for unemployment because like I would have to have done all of this. Yeah, it's a ton of work.

It's so much work. And I was like, yeah. Professionals don't realize is just like being poor in America is a ton of work. So much work. Yeah, I went on unemployment. So when my previous position, I was in a residency. And so that's like a, it was like a two-year contract term. It's not like I got fired or anything.

knew when my job would end and my lease ended at the same time. But guess who didn't get a job offer in time? And so then I was applying for things and I didn't know that you had to apply to so many things per week, but it had to be like in your field. And it's like there's not

that many metadata jobs out there. There's just not. It was like the worst thing in the entire world. I hated it. And if you're in the wrong state, it's those same restrictions for food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, everything. I mean, I think, like, Justin, to your point, like, the real innovation, one of the things the book tries

to do is to tell us that, like, we have made a big mistake in talking about technology policy is somehow separate from poverty policy. And the, one of the big innovations that the Clinton administration did was to really kind of tell a much more hopeful story about poverty in the new economy. Because, you know, once the wheels fall off the bus in the 70s, you know, it's, we just have a bunch of people that do not fit in the new service-based economy. We have de-industrialized real hard. They're not enough good jobs to go around. And the Republicans have a very good, very racist answer for that, which is, you know, if you're not actively working, you know, lock them up. And that is satisfying, but it is not, it's a little contradictory, right?

Like, it kind of contradicts with mourning in America and all that. You know, on the one hand, you can get America's land of promise, you can get any job you want, anywhere you want, you just got to hustle for it. On the other hand, screw up once and we'll throw you in a cage. And the way the Clintons kind of navigated that, like Gore being really important here too, is to say that, look, we have the internet now. And wherever the internet touches, you have access to global labor markets. So wherever there's internet, there is jobs, because you will be able to compete with people in Europe and Africa and Latin America. And if you choose not to do that, they frame it as a choice, then you are a drag on local and national economic competitiveness.

And so you need to be contained. And so they start to talk about poverty policy as kind of like a triage kind of thing. And it's important that we recognize that they're like commercialization of the internet, all their big digital divide reports, the stuff that basically founds my field, all of that is happening at the same time as they're going on a prison building spree, as they're securing the border, as they're ending welfare as we know it. So I was kind of thinking about two things. First of, you know, the, if you're not working, we're going to throw you in a cage. And, you know, part of that is we're going to then force you to work while you're in that cage and pay, underpay you.

And basically, you know, that's where you're made in America label comes from, isn't from actual, you know, people happy at their jobs doing doing their work. It's from incarcerated people doing the work. So yeah, it's a whole loop there. But the other thing I wanted to ask is, like, in the notes here, we have universal service over, like, sort of the, like, moving towards universal access over universal service. And do you, like, do you think that we missed, like, the stop on the journey to be able to take, like, something like broadband and make it more of, like, a public utility as opposed to this commercial thing?

and like how, I don't know, would that be, would that have been better? Would that have been good? Would that have been like, you know, completely neutral to how things have like developed now? I was just kind of curious that your take on that, yeah, that idea. Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, like, first to the prison labor point, like, I'm sure that anyone here that works at a state university, like the likelihood is that all your furniture is made by prisoners. And that, that's a, that's a, crime, but it can also give us a kind of a skewed perspective on what daily life is like in prison. I think Ruthie Gilmore makes this point really well, and that like, you know, when you actually talk to people and lock up or after they get out, the overwhelming experience is inactivity and boredom and containment. Most people are not working most of the time in prison. It really, there are lots of reasons for our prison boom, but I cannot emphasize how much of it is to really contain the working and workless poor who otherwise have nowhere else to go. And I think Golden Gulag, Ruthie's book, is the best story about that.

As far as whether we miss the boat on a true utility, it's, you know, on the one hand, I'm a Marxist and I'd say like, well, you know, history happens in order. It happens for a reason. But I think like it's pretty obvious that other countries want a different way. And even within, you know, a fairly market-oriented version of capitalism. So in the book, the main comparison I do in the history chapter that tells the story of technology policy is poverty policies with Brazil. So when we were founding our kind of digital divide policy in the 90s and the early 2000s, Brazil and first and a fairly neoliberal government and then a more developmentalist government

and when Lula got in, were pursuing a much more kind of community-oriented digital divide policy that established community centers that had not just internet-connected computers, but a full kind of wraparound service model that people could go to. You know, you could register to vote, blah, blah, blah, blah. The real community spaces that were just kind of anchored by internet connections. I mean, in the U.S., we barely have internet cafes that the rest of the world had. But even in, like, more market-oriented economies in South Korea, in Western Europe, they beat the pants off of us in terms of how good our internet is.

We have some of the slowest, most expensive internet in the OECD. And it's entirely because we told this lie about how infrastructure gets built and how those markets get built. You get to, especially in Al Gore's stuff and in the FTC in their era, you start to really see them entirely rewrite the history of the telephone

and start to tell the history of the telephone as this like a magical market phenomenon that, you know, through the magic of competition, we made sure that everybody got a phone line and we're going to do that with the internet. And that's a lie. Like it's, you know, the phone in the U.S. was a state-sanctioned monopoly. You know, that was the whole reason to kind of set up the FCC originally was to say, like, look, we're going to give Bell a monopoly on all the phone lines, just promise us you're kind of trying to try to get it to everybody. Okay? And so what we do with the internet is to say that everybody must get online in order to compete, but also competition is the best way to extend it to everybody. So that moment where we say that this is

an essential public good is also the moment where we completely deregulate all telecom markets so that, you know, a cable company can buy a satellite company who can buy a TV company or whatever. And we get to the point where we are now where most people have like one, maybe two choices for consumer internet. This got really stark in the in the pandemic when, you know, in my county, there's probably 100,000 kids, 120,000 kids in Prince George's County public schools. And when we had to send everybody home, we recognized correctly that a lot of those kids don't have home internet. So we sent these hotspots. But because of monopoly, really only one person you get up the hotspots from. And guess what? Hot spots don't work. So you got to send them back.

and kids are without internet for weeks or months at a time. So we tell these lies about how infrastructure works in order to advance this kind of market-oriented vision and then it fails miserably on its own terms. So, you know, there are plenty of examples of places that have done it differently, both as developing economies and as more, you know, mature market economies.

But when you look at everything else, so history could have been different. But when you look at everything else the Clinton administration was doing at that time, it is hard to see that particular political coalition anchored by very much elites and tech and finance at the top and the so-called Atari Democrats, the new office park workers at the bottom. It's hard to believe that those people would have pursued the internet as a public utility. I think it is possible. Other places show us that it's possible, but it would have required a very different outcome in the class four. Yeah, this is something I wanted to ask you about, which was,

You were talking about how the Clinton administration onward, the Democrats have tried to organize around white-collar tech workers and have made them sort of the mobilizing base of their electoral strategy and thus, therefore, representing what they're interested in, which is, you know, I'm honestly surprised like Democrats didn't go full in on like Bitcoin and NFTs at this point. I think maybe they just forgot to do that. I think it's because the other half of their coalition is in finance, and Bitcoin and NFTs are not always beloved by the big banks. Gotcha. Even though the big banks and things are getting into it. Yeah, yeah, it depends on the bank. But what will happen as tech workers, as like everyone becomes a tech worker, then the field becomes proletarianized. And I had the example in the notes.

Every video game company moves headquarters every few years to a new city where developers have slightly lower wages. It doesn't matter the tax incentives. It doesn't matter the country. It doesn't matter the infrastructure. It's just how much is a game developer paid in a city? Let's find the lowest one. And then we're building a new office there. So San Francisco to Austin to Vancouver to Montreal.

Same for movie animators. Legions of these people. Every movie has CGI. There's tons of these artists out there. there and none of them are unionized. And that's why it's all CGI and not practical effects. Yes, right, right, right. Yeah.

So when, you know, what will happen then to that coalition, do you think? That's a really good question. And I think it comes down to like how you think about like class and what class is. You know, are the workers on mechanical turk who are getting paid pennies to decide whether this picture in a Google image is a bridge or a sand dune, you know, are they in tech? Yeah, I mean, they're obviously essential to the continuing existence of these giant software developing firms. But I think we often make a mistake in the U.S. of thinking about class in these broadly

like sociological terms as like distinct, like, chunks of people or even distinct individuals. You know, you work in hospitality, ergo you are a food service worker, ergo you are a lower class. Well, what if you manage the restaurant? What if you own the restaurant? You know, that kind of stuff. So instead of those kind of things, I always want to try to think of class inspired here by an old Martin's name Richard Gunn as a relationship. You know, you're somewhere in the labor capital relationship. So it's really about your relationship to other people inside and outside of work. And the simplest way to think about that is like, you know, are you given orders or you're taking orders? But in that kind of view, it's not people who work with computers that the Democrats have gone after.

It's a specific group of professionals who are very different from the New Deal coalition that was working class and, you know, to a degree multiracial. Not every part of the coalition liked each other, but it was a multiracial coalition. And the core of the Democratic Party these days, and this is very visible around the D.C. suburbs where I live, you could also look at suburbs around Boston, Jay or Silicon Valley, around Charlotte, or the Research Triangle. The class we're talking about here is not strictly like people who use computers, but people who are largely autonomous that usually choose their tasks. They gained their skills via formal education rather than any kind of apprenticeship program. They owe no fealty to unions. Their workplaces are largely non-union because they're white, because they're largely white, because they largely went to good schools because they largely have middle class jobs. They often have quite a lot of wealth.

They're largely homeowners. They live in the suburbs. They commute. These folks are all about equal protection under the law. you know, they never want housing discrimination, but redistributive measures that could upset them, you know, like building apartments in their neighborhood, doing two-way busing that integrates the schools. You know, that's beyond the pale. So it's, you know, it's these group of people who are, you know, what the Aaron Ricks called the professional managerial class,

that are designing the workplaces for other people that are making the tools, the policies, the ideas, the institutions that organize other people's work. Someone like me, like a teacher or like you guys in libraries, are very much part of that class too. But there's a lot of breakdowns in that class that are happening right now. I mean, the whole point of the NRX developing that PMC concept was to say like, well, you know, what has changed over time and what is happening in the future? So absolutely, a lot of these folks are being proletarianized right now. And that is, I think, I would credit that almost entirely with, like, the resurgence

in democratic socialism in the U.S., the DSA, and almost entirely with the Bernie Sanders campaign, is this group of people, you know, I'm going to guess, including me and you three, that will sometimes call like the downies, you know, people who are downwardly mobile with respect to their class position and who would have had a different class position a couple decades ago or maybe their parents are more secure than they were. But they have, you know, the archetypical examples here is someone with a, you know, master's degree who's working at Starbucks. And that's not any fault of them. It's just a shitty economy. But those folks have been slowly proletarianized. And the same thing has happened in our schools and libraries. Our

jobs have started to suck more. Where that fits into the class war is that I think me and you guys as teachers and librarians have a different relationship to the rest of the working class than those professionals who are in software development, who are in law or medicine or whatever. So the example I use in the book is that the startup that I spent a lot of time at to kind of understand this ideal type organization was in, they basically made catering software. Like, you know, it's just like for event planning kind of stuff. And they, all the software developers there were very honest about like, okay, our job is to automate

people's jobs away, like to, you know, make sure that like all of this can be set up by two people instead of 10 people. But the people that they're bossing around are out of remove, you know, they're far away. They'll never meet them. The people that I boss around in a classroom are right in front of me. The people that you guys boss around the library are right in front of you. And that means that you could decide to have a different relationship with them, you know, because they're right in front of you, because the stakes are right.

there, there is something that you could collaborate on, some sort of cross-class, cross-race, cross-profession, probably cross-geography, because you live in different places, relationship that is just not present for other people in your class. So that's why I always want to talk about classes, this kind of like richly textured thing that is not so much about your job classification, but like who you work with, how much power you have, who tells you what to do and whether you tell anybody else to do, that kind of thing. Yeah. And I can see that. And I, I've toyed with bringing up the our librarians, PMC's discourse before, but we never really had a reason to jump into it.

So I'm really glad you laid it out like that and it would give us something to maybe launch off of in the future when it comes up again. I would love to revisit it because I think it is, I have a zest for these debates that have gotten like totally mind-numbing on Twitter, but are actually like really important. Like emotional labor is the same way. everything's emotional labor right now, but it's a really important concept, you know, and it's really important to understand like when most of us, you know, are trying to make people smile for a living. Same thing with PMC. Absolutely driven into the ground on Twitter,

but like, you know, like you're saying, man, like there is a class of people whose jobs have progressively begun to suck, and we should be able to explain that historically. Yeah, and I like the way that you're framing class and stuff, because there's always these, like, bullshit discourse threads on Twitter where it's like about like who who gets to be a proletariat who gets to be who is bourgeois and it's like school teachers are bourgeois now and I'm like what?

It's like the new what's hot what's not list for 2022. Right, right. Because they because they're like not coal mining or something that that makes them the bourgeoisie. Yes. Unless you are picking the school. scraps of clothing off of dead people in the river Thames, you are not a proletariat. Right, exactly. If you make more than $50,000 a year, you are no longer proletariat, right? Like, be, you know, that kind of discourse. But, like, I think framing it not just as, like,

the type of labor you do, and not even just, I mean, not to be like, oh, the rich people are proletariat now, but, like, and not even necessarily, like, your income bracket, but, like, your relation in that system as like class and like putting it in context with everything else and not just where you are at that moment in time if I'm understanding what you're you're saying correctly. Yeah, totally. It's a hard thing to survey people about, you know, unless you're asking them like, you know, how much does your job suck?

Can you choose when you have a break? Like the whole like bullshit job, uh, concept too. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I had something in here about how. historical changes in office labor have been over the because of telecommunications. I don't remember where I read this, but someone was writing about how if you worked in an office

before like faxes, your work usually ended in the early afternoon because the mail came in the morning, you finished everything and then everything went to go out of the mail room at the end of the day. So like you were, I think that's why everyone was like in those old dramas, like, just drinking in the middle of the day. Because like they're done with work for the day. So you can just like take a two, two o'clock nap after you drink like your fifth whiskey in the office. And there's a bunch of other good jobs around because, you know, if you're a drunk who gets fired from this job, guess what? There's another good one down the street. Yeah. But since that way of labor has like changed and like you're always online, you can't, there's no factory to lock people out of.

So, like, even if you go on strike, it's like, you know, if you get an email at 430, you're expected to answer it until 5 p.m. Like, what would Roger and me look like today? Yeah, there's no outside of the workplace itself. So you have to do this community organizing, I think. That was just something I was, I think about a lot about how work culture has changed because of the internet, especially. Yeah, and I think, like, to Jay, what you were saying before, like, to understand, I would not lay that solely on the feet of the internet, but to say, like, okay, the internet emerged as part of the class war and is always going to be a part of the class war. So to what ends was that put, you know? And when economic growth is real low, when you're not getting enhanced productivity anywhere, like, which is what our economy has been pretty stagnant for about 40 years. What are you going to do? Yeah, you can't make people work better, produce more because it's, you know, it's service work.

It's hard to automate. And in general, we haven't really invented anything super productive in the last 30 years. So you just make them work more. You just like stretch their hours as far as you possibly can. And that was, I think one of the scarier things that I saw about schools and libraries adapting the model of startup culture. and the organizational structure of startup culture. So the school that I spent a year at that I called DeBoise in the book had a student behavior monitoring system

that was kind of the back end for everything, for discipline, for grades, for all that stuff. And it was called School Force. And all it was was just a skin on Salesforce, which is a customer relationship management software that the startup down the street that I had spent time at in crowd was using. And so they were directly using a tool that this basically catering company had been using to manage its sales to instead manage their students and teachers effectively because student data is always used to evaluate teachers. And that then leads to these kind of like always on work cultures both for students and teachers.

You know, there are plenty of charter schools that require teachers to give out their number to, students and to pick up the phone or answer that email at any time because we're all on it together and we're all family here, which is, of course, the exact same thing that startups say. So that's what I mean when this kind of work culture like degrades both the worker and the person that they're supposedly serving, you know, their students and their patrons. And I think like that gets real depressing real fast. I mean, the book is consciously written as a tragedy about a city that I deeply love. But I think like when one of the reasons that I try to say that everything is class war all the time

is because that makes it clear that none of this is inevitable. None of this has to be this way. It is just an outcome of that war at this particular stage, which means that if that war was waged differently, if perhaps we won it some of the time, it could be different. And I think libraries, perhaps above any other space in contemporary capitalism, you can see little glimpses of what it would look like if we won the class war, you know, where people are just allowed to chill, you know, where people come in with the absolute weirdest question that is not productive and which they're going to waste hours on, trying to figure out, like, what, I don't know, like, whether their grandpa was on the, you know, CCNY baseball team and 19 Diccad E2, it's beautiful that they can come to that space and do that. It is a really truly amazing thing that we can hold in common. I really loved what Emily said on your guys show a couple episodes ago or most recently where it's like, you know,

these are little glimpses of the world that we could have. And that's real. You know, and there are really are moments in my classroom that feel the same way. And so the job for workers and patrons here is to take over these places and grow those moments, not just within our institution, but once we've taken over those institutions, to use those as staging areas to take over everything else and to spread those little moments of uselessness, of play, of community, they should be everywhere. And I think we can be strongest in our schools and libraries. That's where we start. Great. I know you've got to go. So we always have our action-oriented question. Which I think you've mostly answered throughout our chat today.

But what should be the line libraries take when organizing with their communities? What should be the focus? What's our pitch to our communities? That's a really good question. I think, like, that's a thing. I mean, this is kind of a cop-out answer. But it's because even just the public libraries, extraordinarily different in different geographies.

It's going to really depend on your patrons. But what needs to happen is a version of what teachers say, which is my working conditions are your learning conditions. You know, my, I think like something along the lines of like, my workspace is your community space. You know, like when my job sucks, your community sucks. And that story has been told. I think like the campaign, the New Orleans librarian,

in New Orleans DSA ran to preserve library funding there was extraordinary in this regard. You know, if you guys don't know, there was basically a referendum on whether to eliminate, it's like a specific property tax that funds libraries, just classic austerity tactic. You know, if you want to make an institution easy to destroy, identify one single place where the money comes from. And so the mayor was like, well, you know, it's COVID. Like, we need to cut stuff. Hey, let's vote on it.

Do you guys want lower taxes? and in America, obviously you expect everyone to say, hell yeah, lower my taxes. But there was an incredible door-knocking campaign from DSA and library workers in New Orleans, and they beat it. They beat it handily because they told that story. These ghouls are trying to take away your community space,

and they're making my job suck for it. So I'm going to fight for you, but I need you to fight for me because there's only a couple of me, but there's a lot of you guys. So I think that's my pitch. I wonder, like, just that thought, because my previous library passed a levy pretty much on that line. Like, if you give us more money, we can pay the people that live in your communities more money. Basically, we can raise wages and reinstate, you know, cost of living and that kind of thing. And it worked.

But also, we had every library helping us with that campaign. And I, of course, wasn't privy to it, but I wonder how much that kind of line is, being used by every library who has seen a lot of success with this sort of thing. So instead of just necessarily levies, but also as community organizing. Yeah. I just really like that. It's important. And I think like as much as we can make, I mean, the thing about the community,

making it a community organizing pitch is that like it's a way to build power in the future because even if you win that, let's say you win that levy without having a conversation with anybody. Well, all right, you got your money. but what if they try to take it away next time? You don't have any new friends. If you make it a community organizing project and you're having that conversation with everybody

and they're getting them to come to the cookout, to come to the book sale, whatever, you've got a lot of new friends. So even if you lose, you're stronger than you were before. And if you win, you're definitely stronger. Great. Is there anything you wanted to plug or direct our listeners to before we go?

I really appreciate being able to to come on here and talk about the promise of access. I also adore talking about the promise of access with local libraries and classes. I'm doing a bunch of local library talks about in it. I've got one in like a local library system in Vermont in two weeks. So I'm always happy to come talk to people about this stuff. I'm really passionate about it. And the other thing I would say is vote Emily Drabinski for president of ALA, the class war candidate. And listen to this podcast while you're at work. Do some time theft. It'll be great. I just realized that dropped it didn't go through.

Yeah. Yeah. Still time. It's your time. It was stolen from you first. Steal it back. All right. Good night.