In March 2017, I was living and working in Boston but knew I had to return to DC to witness the long-delayed closure of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in support of its long-anticipated renovation. Librarians and patrons had kept me updated on the starts and stops in the renovation timeline. But a date had finally been set. I arrived on March 3, the day before the closure. Certain collections, offices, and technologies were being emptied out, but daily life continued apace. Everyone knew the library would reappear, but the uncertainty over when that would happen and what its new form would mean for this fixture of downtown DC meant there was an air of unease in the building, now interspersed with photographs of its 1972 grand opening. It all had the feeling of a funeral reception.
Patrons and librarians were going through the motions, but the building felt empty and no one was quite sure what to say to each other. I walked in just as four police officers were pulling a Black man, hands and ankles cuffed, surgical mask on his face, out of the front doors and into a squad car. He was wearing a t-shirt in the early spring cold. A patron explained to me that there had been a fight, but the front desk would only tell me he had been “disrupting the library.”
The Digital Commons filled up over the course of the afternoon. The Dream Lab’s glass cubicles remained empty. Handmade signs hung over submission boxes asked patrons to leave stories about the library. A couple of members of Mia’s crew were still hanging out, playing video games and cuddling. At the end of the day, a librarian announced, “The library is closing in thirty minutes. Your computers will shut off in twenty minutes. The library will reopen at 9:30 tomorrow and then close at 5:30 for a long time.” A sleeper next to me perked up and asked: “It’s closing?” His neighbor and I walked him through it. Shortly, the police entered and repeated the same announcement a little louder. Librarians had flyers ready for homeless patrons, mapping out the various churches and shelters downtown in which people could find refuge while MLK was closed, as well as the branch libraries that were a good walk or a short bus ride away.
The flyers noted that DC’s Department of Human Services (DHS) was expanding services at the Adams Place Day Center, opened in 2015, and adding drop-in hours and computers to replicate the MLK experience. A new shuttle would take shelter residents there, or to the intersection of Minnesota Avenue and Benning Road NE, where an employment center, a health clinic, and a branch library were clustered together. Neither option was as centrally located as MLK. Adams Place was on the northeast edge of DC, on a strip of road where the city government pushed loud or hazardous businesses. The Minnesota and Benning NE intersection was in a majority-Black neighborhood east of the river that was only beginning to feel the disruption of gentrification. There was nothing like the restaurants, stores, museums, and businesses surrounding MLK. To their credit, librarians, at the urging of patrons and community groups, had mobilized to make patrons aware of nearby resources. But librarian Eugene said they were frustrated with the lack of planning on the city’s side, where DHS seemed to realize the crisis of effectively closing a hundred-person day shelter a little too late. It remained to be seen whether other branches, especially nearby Shaw, were prepared for the new patrons they would receive.
I returned on closing day, walking through front doors now covered with renderings of the future library. Librarians offered tea and snacks. Patrons took selfies in front of the mural of Dr. King. Parents still went to story time. Rules of behavior were still posted next to every elevator. Police still rapped their knuckles on the table next to sleepers. Upstairs, across from adult services, there was a big handmade map of DC that asked patrons to write what they wanted out of the city’s future. “Less gentrification” was biggest. Nothing was written on the neighborhoods east of the river besides “better schools.” Disabled patrons were getting every last minute of use out of the Adaptive Services Lab. Down in the Digital Commons, I said hello to Eugene, who would now start working in the DC Jail. A police officer walked up to the librarians’ desk. The librarian said, “It’s about to close.” The cop replied, “Can’t come soon enough.” Someone was watching porn in the back row, recording it on his phone for later. People kept up their routines.
Outside, a protest against the lack of a real closure plan was kicking off. The Friends of the Library were joined by a handful of homeless patrons. A dozen people carried signs reading “We Are Human” or “What Would MLK Say?” They shouted for the TV cameras and sang together. Inside, twenty minutes before closure, staff were placing labels on every piece of furniture. They unplugged unoccupied computers and packed them away as patrons one seat over watched YouTube. Librarians took selfies at the desk together as the clock hit 5:30 p.m.
Homeless activist Cameron sang “Auld Lang Syne” in a soulful baritone. Police had no patience for ceremony, tapping seated patrons as they reminded them, “Excuse me, we’re closing.” People exiting joined the protest, now chanting “MLK! What would he say? Don’t erase our public space.” Cameron spoke with reporters, reiterating what he had told me: Everyone wants a renovation, but patrons also need services, and they don’t need them on the city’s edge. I walked by the Digital Commons the next morning, looking in through the glass walls that faced the Mather Studios condominiums. The computers were all packed up. The lab was empty. Four men were sleeping out front.
To close this investigation, I want to reflect on the power of the access doctrine to overrule these moments of resistance. Understanding this structural power may suggest new political strategies to combat it. Chapter 1 explored the access doctrine’s birth in the neoliberal revolution, and the following chapters revealed how it is reproduced at the organizational level through bootstrapping. But the access doctrine clearly continues to play a larger structural role, enrolling people, resources, and organizations in an extensive project to redefine what the good life is and how to get it. It is a massive shift in the mode of social reproduction.
Making the problem of poverty a problem of technology changed how we understand the entire labor market, our navigation of it, and the reward from it—for employed, unemployed, and underemployed alike. Most accounts of the information economy focus on changes in the mode of production—the nature of work, what commodities are produced and where. And indeed, chapter 2, on startups and the perpetual pivot, is part of this genre. But what I hope I have shown through a subsequent focus on schools and libraries that see startups as a model is that there has been just as large a change in the mode of social reproduction, the differentiated process of making people for a particular political-economic moment. The access doctrine garners consent to this change, and the sacrifices it requires.
This new mode of social reproduction was not inevitable. It was man-made. Clinton (2000a) said, in his final State of the Union and the first of the new millennium, “We have built a new economy. And our economic revolution has been matched by a revival of the American spirit.” The New Economy was built on services and software, measured in GDP growth. The “revival of the American spirit,” the president said, was built on personal responsibility and measured in reduced crime, reduced teen pregnancy, and “welfare rolls cut in half to their lowest levels in 30 years.”1 Along with the New Economy, then, came new ways of acting on crime, children, the disabled, and the unemployed; and beyond these were changes, unmentioned in Clinton’s speech, wrought by the neoliberal revolution in domains such as education, healthcare, and eldercare (Bezanson 2006). A shift in the mode of production required a concomitant shift in the mode of social reproduction. The access doctrine is an important part of this project. Understanding its role in social reproduction is an important first step in any attempt to act on that sphere of the political economy and, perhaps, rebuild it in a shape more conducive to human flourishing.
It is worth reviewing how we got here. This book explored how the problem of poverty is transformed into a problem of technology and how the organizations addressing the problem are themselves transformed in the process. This problem is relayed in hopeful terms as a digital divide: the gap between high-skilled professionals with access to personal computing resources and those without such access, a gap resolved by sending the resources and skills common on one side over to those on the other side so that the divided can become more like the connected. This access doctrine emerged from 1990s Clinton-era neoliberalism, when the persistent poverty visible within the New Economy was reframed as a lack of opportunities for competition. The access doctrine made it seem as though such opportunities were available to all via the internet, and thus any individual economic struggles were just that—and never the fault of deindustrialization, capital flight, stagnant wages, or a shrunken, punitive welfare state. This was part of the neoliberal revolution, wherein American political institutions redefined citizenship around market fitness and charged the state with either ensuring opportunities for competition and broad participation in them or policing those who could not or would not compete so as to preserve the smooth functioning of markets. The threat of punishment, of course, fell most heavily on the working and workless poor, particularly Black Americans.
This story about how poverty works is not absorbed via political pronouncement. It is reproduced daily as a means of understanding the problem and acting on it. Neoliberal urban development provides the stage for this project. It solves the problem of development through the digital divide and related projects like education reform, soliciting outside capital and outside talent to resolve the skills gaps present in the locals. The geography of the city is remade to support these moves, and institutions for keeping citizens alive and teaching them how to make a living are remade in the image of these largely White outsiders on the “right” side of the digital divide.
In startups, rapid personal and organizational change in an environment of economic uncertainty—the pivot—is essential for the internal and external legitimacy of the firm. In the library, this story prompts wide-scale reconsideration of the spirit and structure of the organization. Rebuilding the library as a training center for knowledge work earns political and financial support and makes the poverty, particularly homelessness, it is confronted with as one of the last public spaces in the city knowable and actionable. I called this process of constant reform in pursuit of the social mobility mission bootstrapping. We also saw it happen at W. E. B. Du Bois Public Charter High School. There, a conflict emerged. The school was dedicated to a particular set of social justice values, but its survival depended on demonstrating its success in human capital enhancement via high test scores and graduation rates. As graduation approached for the first senior class, the school’s data infrastructure, ultimately controlled not by students or teachers but by administrators, was used to subvert those values and support a narrower, professionalizing vision of education.
These were the concrete institutional changes that came of reproducing the hope in personal computing and the internet. This bootstrapping had three primary causes. First, demographic similarities across largely White professionals grants faith in the power of skills training because it appears to work for them. Second, professional networks help train these workers in these organizational models and the ideas supporting them, and bridging organizations that connect these fields highlight startups as models and entrepreneurs as leaders. Finally, given the overwhelming uncertainty that comes from confronting a persistent problem like urban poverty, the comparative and highly visible success presented by startups provides a clear script for the organizations charged by the state with managing that poverty.
But schools and libraries cannot pivot like startups. They do not have the resources or flexibility. Much of their success or failure is beyond their control, and the bootstrapping project is itself constrained by an older, competing institutional culture based in public service—a resource for teachers, librarians, students, and patrons to drawn on in the hopes of preserving an ideal space for collective welfare. But people are being left behind, and so bootstrapping continues even as it fails on its own terms—often marginalizing the people those changes were meant to serve. Those homeless patrons, for example, who the library sought to empower through the Digital Commons are refused the safe space they need because sleeping does not fit the mission. The mission secures the organization, and so it must be preserved at all costs.
This organizational frenzy has its putative base in the problem of the digital divide, a technological instantiation of the skills gap narrative: technological advancement means American employers are short of the skilled workers—software developers in the narrow sense, STEM practitioners in broader narratives—they need, and so those on the fringes of the labor market can guarantee high wages and serve regional and national interests by training up. Learning to code serves not just your career, but regional and national economies. Skill matters for success in the labor market. But precisely what skill is and whether technological advancement (in the abstract or in the actually existing labor market) demands more or less of it is a matter of much debate. This is in part because, in practice, skill is often a proxy for workplace power: the ability of organized workers to claim their expertise, or the ability of employers to pay women and people of color less for the same tasks.2
The present study sidestepped the issue of whether these skills are actually in demand in the labor market and whether Du Bois or MLK are providing them: I simply have no data on the occupational successes or failures of my students or patrons in the years following their time in these places, nor would my ethnographic methods be suitable to answering the question of whether their learning experiences paid off in terms of higher salaries and greater job satisfaction relative to similar people who did not have those experiences. I cannot assess the success of the school or library on those terms. But, importantly, neither can the vast majority of schools and libraries—and yet they still bootstrap in the hopes of producing these results. More proximate measures, such as test scores, are adopted in part because they cannot observe their students’ or patrons’ labor market outcomes or change quickly enough to suit employer demands, demands that often differ and conflict across time, space, sector, and position in the business cycle.
The very fact that someone like the executive director of DCPL would fight hard to reframe libraries as “engines of human capital” (Martell 2016) shows that the meaning of skill is not a simple result of technological change. Rather, there is an ongoing, high-level political fight to redefine not just what skills are, but where and how you get them. To return to a question posed in the introduction, why would schools and libraries take on a training mission they cannot fully assess and for which they are not adequately prepared? A training mission that seems to exist in large part because employers, the parties who best know their own needs after all, are less and less interested in handling on-the-job training themselves (Cappelli 2015).
Bootstrapping regularly fails on its own terms because the institutions it targets are not made for the task. And yet they still clamor to complete the task, in part because doing so bears fruit at an organizational level. This dynamic is a symptom of a new mode of social reproduction, wherein no one is ever truly on the outside of the labor market, but constantly searching for the skills, technologies, and opportunities that will help them move through it. This is a feature, not a bug, in neoliberal urban development. The access doctrine is reproduced by institutions of social reproduction—those spaces that do the work of making capitalist subjects—and it garners consent to these structural changes occurring within and beyond them.
This is insidious work because the ideal subject these institutions are redesigned to reproduce is an entrepreneur who has no need of these institutions; they can learn by themselves, work by themselves, start a tech company and weather extreme economic uncertainty by themselves. Institutions of social reproduction participate in this process because it provides short-term security. To chart a new path that resolves the crisis of care and builds power within institutions of social reproduction, helping professionals within these spaces will need to betray the class they share with tech professionals and struggle alongside patrons and students, rather than seeking to save them.
A New Mode of Social Reproduction
Whether private households or public schools, the places that make people occupy a contradictory space within capitalism (Bhattacharya 2020). At a local level, their work need not turn a profit and so they can be refuges from the violence of market competition. On the other hand, their work is violently conditioned by those same market imperatives. Households run on hard-won wages, schools and libraries on taxes that must be fought for—and the women’s work that largely keeps both spaces running is ruthlessly devalued, to zero in the case of household labor that is not commodified in the form of nannies, cleaners, and so on.
The inputs to households and institutions also emerge from the market and are subject to its vagaries. The price and quality of food varies like any commodity, but you need dinner to work the next day. A day care needs supplies for its children, and if it cannot afford them, then teachers may well pay for them themselves. Outputs are similarly conditioned. These spaces must produce not people in general but workers under capitalism specifically—and a whole host of attitudes, values, and behaviors are required of those people if they hope to survive.
At a structural level, capital requires socially reproductive labor to maintain its own circulation. Capital cannot make people, but its need for more and different labor power is balanced by an impulse to disinvest from the costs of social reproduction and disrupt or abandon the spaces of solidarity and community that are grown therein (Katz 2001). Fraser (2016) argues that this latter dynamic creates a “crisis of care” in each capitalist epoch. Our current crisis is marked by the state’s retreat from the responsibilities of care and the stagnation of wages for much of the working class, leading to a “dualized organization of social reproduction, commodified for those who can pay for it, privatized for those who cannot—all glossed by the even more modern ideal of the ‘two-earner family.’”
I would add that the state has not so much retreated from care but shifted those capacities into punishment (Gilmore 2007)—particularly for the racialized working class—and that this is complemented by capital’s retreat from providing training within the firm. Capital has shifted the burden of skills training onto individuals so that they must now have all the skills necessary to succeed at jobs they do not yet have. This shifting of the burden of risk and the duty of care from the state and corporations and onto individuals also appears in other domains, such as retirement planning (Hacker 2019). To carry the burden of skills training, individuals take on the burden of debt, access to which is also racially differentiated, in order to pay for college or coding boot camps (Cottom 2017; Seamster and Charron-Chénier 2017). If they are on the fringes of the labor market, they are forced to enter a constant cycle of job search, job applications, and skills training; this is the replacement of welfare with workfare (Peck 2001). Police and prisons handle those individuals who will not or cannot shoulder these burdens.
For the institutions that make people, this burden shift looks somewhat different. Particularly during the postrecession years that were the focus of this study, the state retreated from consistent funding of social reproduction. The available tax base shrunk. Even outside of recessions it is now difficult for municipal politicians to justify tax hikes that they feel might weaken their position in an environment of intensive inter-regional competition, what Harvey (1989) called entrepreneurial urbanism. But, as we have seen, in this moment of fiscal retreat and despite their own weakened resource base, places like schools and libraries jump into the breach. These organizations are eager to take on the skills-training burden and assist individuals with the risk shift because they are themselves at risk and they hope this will provide some security.
The ideal economic model for individuals at this juncture is the tech entrepreneur, just as the ideal model for organizations is the tech startup. “Every day is a school day” was the mantra at InCrowd during my time there. The ideal entrepreneur is a “roaming autodidact” (Cottom 2016) who seeks out the unlimited educational opportunities available on the internet. They are self-sufficient, not reliant on institutions of social reproduction. The myth of the self-taught, college-dropout billionaire is a powerful one, though it runs against actual data about the importance of educational credentials in the tech sector (Weber 2016). The ideal entrepreneur keeps training throughout the life course. It is as an investment in their own future, where the career direction and location might change at any moment (Neff 2012). The ideal entrepreneur is a young White male who not only lacks any responsibility to care for others, but also has his own care needs commodified, provided either by an on-demand delivery app or by his workplace.
The contemporary shift in the mode of social reproduction is based on making more of these ideal entrepreneurs, not necessarily because we need them but because they supposedly thrive in an environment of privatized care and general macroeconomic uncertainty. The access doctrine secures consent to this crisis of care and this atmosphere of uncertainty. By turning the problem of poverty into a problem of technology, economic security becomes a matter of getting the right tools and the right skills. Individuals must seek out these resources themselves, and institutions can only survive by assisting them.
While these messages dominate our popular culture, consent is not secured through propaganda. It should be apparent throughout this ethnography that no one involved in bootstrapping their organization was tricked, nor were they attempting to trick the people they served. The function of the access doctrine, then, is not just in its ability to persuade the masses but in its ability to mobilize different classes and different institutions into a new hegemonic bloc. Hegemony, Gramsci reminds us, is the substitution of one class’s interest for the rest of a society’s, secured through alliances with and concessions to other classes. Ford’s five-dollars-a-day wage is the classic example here: high for its time, but necessary to guarantee participation in the violent grind of the assembly line.3 This helps to explain why bootstrapping institutions are so eager to take part in a project that so often does not meet the real needs of the people they serve, if it does not directly harm them, and which, over the long term, supports an entrepreneurial vision of economic life in which they themselves are unnecessary.
This project secures a place for schools and libraries in contemporary capitalism, even if that means an alliance with the politicians and entrepreneurs who previously called these places outdated and unnecessary. This is why DC Public Library shared the stage with the DC Chamber of Commerce at the digital divide event in chapter 1, or why startup leaders were on center stage for the Education Innovation Summit in chapter 5. It is the high-level version of why MLK’s illustrations of its future included a picture of a TED Talk and why it practiced that future by kicking out sleepers. The state plays a leading role in coordinating this project, assuming that what is best for tech is best for the city. City leaders wagered that an influx of wealthy White migrants would uncouple DC’s economic fortunes from those of the federal government.
Besides changing the composition of DC’s workforce, tech’s hegemony and all those new (mostly White) people support residential and commercial real estate development. Part of the brilliance of the creative class development strategy (Florida 2004) comes from the fact that creative workers in startups require very little fixed capital, so introducing housing and services that cater to this class is framed as an investment in the sector’s productive capacity. When the class you are building a city for can work anywhere with their laptops, the normal violence of gentrification—the replacement of affordable housing with luxury condominiums, of local businesses with expensive national chains—can be understood as an industrial development strategy.
Not only were DC’s startups concentrated in increasingly expensive, gentrifying areas, but the city events promoting DC Tech were often hosted in new spaces looking for tenants. This might look like Vincent Gray’s Digital DC Thank You at the O Street Condominiums, just about to open, or the Entrepalooza startup fair, housed in a massive, vacant commercial space, a Borders bookstore before the chain went bankrupt. This is the work it takes to make “The Internet: Your Future Depends on It” hegemonic.
Actually Existing Ideal Workers
But of course, every institution has a human face. Startups, libraries, and schools are nothing without techies, librarians, and teachers. The hegemonic bloc that implements the access doctrine is formed in part by an alliance between these groups, who appear to form a class at the center of new modes of production and social reproduction. Throughout this study, I have remarked on the similarities among these different groups. They were often White newcomers to the city, with similar workstyles and a professional commitment to their craft. Uncertainty pervaded their work lives, but there was a meritocratic faith in their ability to join with their skilled colleagues and overcome it. They represented the leading edge of a new city. From a thousand-foot view, this looks like a unified set of White professionals remaking DC in their image—and remaking the people in it as well; recall student Irene’s observation that Du Bois was “so good at trying to prep us to be like preppy White folk.”
But there are important differences within this class. Up until now, I have largely used digital professionals to describe these people and what they do, designating the subset of teachers and librarians helping professionals. A class, however, is not a static set of demographics or tasks, but a historically specific set of relationships with both capital and other classes (Gunn 1987; Thompson 1991).The terms “digital professional” is sufficient as a description of an ideal type: a self-directed employee or entrepreneur whose work tools are information technology and whose work tasks are the production and circulation of immaterial commodities (e.g., software, blueprints, financial products; see, e.g., Drucker 1999; Hardt 2005). It is insufficient for the purposes of describing an actually existing class and the schisms within it, much less its relationship to other classes and the broader mode of production. An older idea, that of the professional-managerial class (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1977, 2013), helps fill the gap.
The idea of the middle class has always been a powerful one in the United States, in part because it is so underdefined as to include everyone but the poorest and richest Americans. But the Ehrenreichs observed a very real class in formation throughout the twentieth century, beginning in the progressive era and taking a leftist turn in the campus revolts of the 1960s. Over the course of the nineteenth century, it had become clear that the work of managing people, information, and technology within complex, globe-spanning firms could no longer be left to individual entrepreneurs. Similarly, from capital’s perspective, the multiethnic, multiracial mass of proletarians living and working together in US cities at the turn of the twentieth century demanded a new set of professionals who could enforce broad standards of health, education, and American culture—work often funded in the progressive era by both the state and those same industrial capitalists (e.g., Carnegie, Rockefeller). People would not become workers on their own.
This is the work of the professional-managerial class: reproducing capitalist culture and inter- and intra-class relations. That work happens either inside firms, through direct management or the implementation of technologies and techniques that maintain the shape of the firm, or outside of firms, through the work of social reproduction. One half of this class, represented by InCrowd, provides products and services. The other half, represented by MLK and Du Bois, provides care. This class does not own the means of production and so has an antagonistic relationship with the capitalists who control its livelihood; but it also has an antagonistic relationship with the working class it molds to fit the mode of production. Think of the tension not just between shift manager or human resources and a regular employee, but the relationship between social workers and their clients. Frequently, these relationships are racialized, such that Whites, especially Protestants from Northern and Central Europe in the progressive era, were managing ethnic Whites and non-Whites. This class depends upon education to advance and frequently organizes not in unions but via professional associations.
Observing this class’s ascent to political power in 1983, Darity noted that the new US political economy required not just the substitution of heavy industry for services, but new institutions of governance—some educative, some carceral—that would clarify the relationship between those at the center of the economy and those at the margins. He predicted that the working and workless poor, disproportionately Black, would need to be trained or contained, with ever more creative solutions revealing the unchanging fact of persistent poverty in the information economy: “If the managerial society finds any use for its outcasts or undesirables, it will be as objects of experiment. On those who do not matter, there is a willingness to try anything” (59). Both Du Bois and MLK testify to this ongoing experimentation in the face of structural marginalization. As did librarian Grant’s admission that he often felt there was little they could offer homeless patrons besides entertainment. This shows that that training and containment, the school and the prison, are not binary choices for managing surplus populations, but an institutional continuum through which the professional-managerial class, either in their jobs or in the policies that emerge from their coalitions, sort through the real people who make up the stubborn fact of persistent, racialized poverty. Where neoconservatives expressed this in starkly violent terms—wars on crime or drugs—the innovation of the Atari Democrats was to offer the access doctrine as a hopeful story that could take the working and workless poor from one end of the continuum to the other.
This political position is in no way inevitable. Owing to their liminal class location, the professional-managerial class has the potential to split with the capitalists. This may happen by choice, as with the campus revolts, environmental movements, and antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s.4 This may happen because of an assault by capital; deskilling within the firm and austerity outside it quickly removes the privileges of professionalism. Since the 2008 recession, corporate deskilling and state austerity have engendered a great deal of downward mobility in the professional-managerial class. These status-threatened professionals and their déclassé children have powered such movements as Occupy and the post-2016 boom in the Democratic Socialists of America (Press 2019; Winant 2019). But the growth of such a movement is never guaranteed, much less its success, and hard limits are placed on those that do emerge because the structural function of this class is to reproduce the social relationships required by capitalism, and this function grants real advantages over other workers.
The persistence of the access doctrine, the organizational changes it wreaks through bootstrapping, and its role in neoliberal urban development is secured through an alliance between the two sections of the professional-managerial class: those reproducing capitalist relations within the firm (tech workers at InCrowd) and those doing the work of social reproduction outside the market (helping professionals at MLK and Du Bois). Capitalists cannot simply speak hegemony into being. Remaking a city in tech’s image requires both an influx of new tech workers from the outside (InCrowd workers, in this book), and the transformation of the existing populace in support of this new project (the teachers and librarians). Startup workers pursued this project inside their firms and, through their products, for other firms. InCrowd’s engineers, perhaps more so than their coworkers in other units, were conscious of their class position because they built the software caterers used. Paul noted in one team meeting, immediately after the company as a whole had met to hear updates about its financials, that “we are in the business of firing people [specifically food service staff], that’s what ‘we help your company be more efficient’ means.” A much more hopeful evangelism suffused DC tech, especially in incubators like 1776, in order to make a place for the sector in the city.
As we saw, the helping professionals at Du Bois and MLK were more ambiguous about their class position. Unlike techies, their work required regular interaction with the city’s working and workless poor. Like techies, they were mission driven—both because the survival of their organizations depended on enthusiastically bootstrapping and because they were themselves committed to a public service role. And that public service role was increasingly under attack: recall Amanda’s exhaustion and the Du Bois employees who quit mid-year, or the stress librarians felt in trying to fulfill tasks better left to a social worker when none were forthcoming. The city built in tech’s image places great strain on their workplaces. The tools built by tech (e.g., SchoolForce) restructure their jobs, undercutting the autonomy that draws people to these professions in the name of greater transparency.
New threats come clothed in the hope the access doctrine invests in their mission. In the summer of 2020, DCPL proudly shared praise of the new MLK from the Washington Post’s architecture critic. Under a headline reading “America’s libraries are essential now—and this beautifully renovated one in Washington gives us hope,” he extolled the light, airy building’s potential to fulfill the promises the welfare state made to its citizens, especially those Black Americans excluded at the welfare state’s genesis (Kennicott 2020). But at that time, Eugene, now in a leadership position in the librarians’ union, was negotiating with management to preserve his profession’s place in that hopeful future. He was not optimistic: “The deskilling of first-floor staff is pretty close to complete; there will not be any librarians or library associates working in non-supervisory jobs on the first floor.” Despite sharing a lifestyle and a race-class position, there is, then, intraclass antagonism between the helpers and the tech workers. In the sphere of social reproduction, their institutions mandate an interclass antagonism between these professionals and the people they purportedly serve. Homeless patrons with nowhere else to go were dismissed from the library for sleeping. Black and Latinx students were molded into a particular shape. There were also individual moments of compassion and camaraderie that strayed from this bootstrapping script, often based on an older public service institutional culture. Librarian Grant did everything he could for “computer man” Shawn. Clara taught her students to do countergentrification action research and helped with logistics for their Black Lives Matter walkout. But these moments are not a movement that will undo the common sense of the access doctrine.
Such a movement will require a broad, organized assault on the neoliberal political apparatus. Had I the recipe for such a program, I would gladly share it—but that is beyond both my ken and the remit of this book. However, I am confident that our cities can be if not remade, at least equalized, and the bootstrapping cycle broken by the people within these institutions. It will require a split within the professional-managerial class. Helping professionals must break against the tech workers with whom they shared college dorms and now share apartment buildings. Instead they must organize at the point of reproduction in solidarity with their patrons and students, based on the recognition that both helper and helped share an interest in preserving the institutions of public service threatened by the access doctrine.
Strategically, both sides need each other. The helping professionals are few in number, and state and capital can easily paint their protests as dereliction of sacred duties (e.g., “strikes hurt kids”). They need support from the communities they serve in order to stand up to this political pressure. On the other hand, students, patrons, and their communities have numbers but lack the strategic position within the mode of reproduction that helpers’ work provides. A protest in support of library patrons is one thing, but a library shut down by its workers is another thing entirely—revealing just how much the city relies on these institutions to function and the sort of power these professionals have. This work is already happening across the country.
The protest over MLK’s closing was too little, too late. Homeless patrons like Cameron had a tremendous amount of political literacy but were, collectively, demobilized by the daily assaults of urban poverty. They did not have a long-standing relationship with the Friends of the Library—the “nice White people” Grant felt he had to shield from patrons—and while the Friends worked hard, they did not occupy any sort of strategic position within the library that could challenge its decisions. Librarians largely did not participate because they had a job to do.
Centers of social reproduction like those studied here are not victims of neoliberal reform but sites of struggle in which countermovements can be built. Schools and libraries and places like them bring together in one building a professional-managerial class under pressure to meet their metrics, students and patrons competing for their own futures, and parents and community members who rely on these sites for childcare, food, bureaucratic assistance, adult education, and, of course, free Wi-Fi. Workplace conflicts here intersect with broader community conflicts over gentrification, policing, and the provision of public resources. Workers in these institutions are, like many helping professionals, under assault. But unlike those members of the professional-managerial class who are isolated from the working class they manage, teachers, librarians, and the like are, in the course of their everyday duties, directly confronted with the dual assault on both their own organizations and the livelihoods of the people they serve. In this book, that class consciousness has led to, at best, ambiguity. But other schools, libraries, and cities are possible.
The crisis of care Fraser (2016) identifies has recently prompted an organizing wave in social reproduction sectors, where the rallying cry is often a variation on that of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU): “Our working conditions are students’ learning conditions” (Uetricht 2014). This political philosophy unites the professional-managerial class running the school with students and neighbors, and it has ensured that the string of teachers’ strikes that began with the CTU and has since extended across the United States has enjoyed broad popular support (Blanchard 2018). These struggles make clear that the push for, for example, high-stakes testing diminishes not only educators’ autonomy, but that of their students. Teachers in Los Angeles went on strike not only because of budget cuts that were crowding their classrooms or curtailing their health insurance, but for an end to random searches of students of color by school security officers (Henwood 2019).
The power of these strikes lays not only in the interracial, interclass alliances, but in how they lay bare what Katz (1998) calls the “hidden city of social reproduction”: the care of teaching, helping, nursing, and so on that makes capital accumulation possible, but which is at best neglected by capital and at worst sabotaged by it. As United Teachers of Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl put it, “The reason they’re driving privatization so hard is because we know they can’t offshore. They can’t move the hospital to China. They can’t move the school to Myanmar or to China, so instead, the neoliberals have set out to decimate the teachers’ unions” (Henwood 2019). The neoliberal assault on these institutions underlines their strategic importance.
Schools and hospitals are perhaps the most advanced sites of struggle in this framework. But librarians have organized with and for their patrons to demand better and could well do so again. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as public sector unionism grew in the United States, a series of strike actions gripped public libraries across the country as librarians fought for better wages and hours but also expanded services and control over them (Chaplan 1976; see also McCartin 2006). A picture from the picket line of a 1968 strike by Contra Costa County librarians in California shows three bespectacled White women sternly regarding the camera; a placard on the middle woman’s lap reads, “My loyalties are to PEOPLE, not institutions” (AFSCME 1968). In 2016, Emily Drabinski, a librarian at Long Island University, led the university’s faculty and staff through a lockout but only emerged victorious because students organized in solidarity. “They’ve tried to put a wall between us and the students, but it hasn’t worked, because it’s hard to be on anybody’s side but ours in this,” she said. “They fucked with the wrong students” (Bonhomme 2016).
This sort of social justice unionism faces incredible barriers. Organizing with the community in which you are based is a strength, but it requires negotiating the unequal power relations that structure interactions between the often White, female, and middle-class helping professionals and their often poor or working-class patrons and students of color. Recall for example the sticker system Rachel developed to privately divide gold-star patrons using the library correctly from those who were not, those she called “dumb as paint.” Or Sam’s uneasiness with the White savior mission he saw in TFA. These divisions become common sense through a combination of racialized professional identity and organizational strain. A great deal of work is required to overcome them.
Even empathy with those on the other side of the digital divide is insufficient. The helping professions base their daily reproduction of capitalist relations in personal benevolence for those on the other side of various racial economic divides. Ceding control to the divided, organizing together to run the institutions democratically, is something else entirely. But this is what is necessary to stop the endless training treadmill and build spaces that build power for threatened professionals and the working and workless poor alike. What could our schools and libraries do if they did not have to try to be startups? Could DCPL offer credit union services in neighborhoods without retail banking? What if it really was a safe space for people to sleep? Could Du Bois add to its weekend test-prep and college application programs further adult education services for parents learning English? Could these progressive schools become bulwarks against police violence instead of teaching students their rights on one day and searching students like Martin for pot on another?
The seeds for something different are there. Amanda was the OWL at Du Bois because students treasured her classroom as a safe space; they would learn to code in class but could talk about their home lives after class. Homeless activist Cameron was especially disappointed in how the city handled MLK’s closure because he saw so much promise within the library, a different vision of solidarity. The late Pamela Stovall, former associate director of DCPL and subordinate to Reyes-Gavilan’s predecessor Ginnie Cooper, was a powerful figure for him in this regard. Years earlier, she had joined Cameron and his colleagues in a prayer circle at the old First Congregational building. They told her they felt abandoned by their city. So Stovall kickstarted a program at MLK called “Your Story Has a Home Here,” where teenaged patrons were trained to conduct oral history interviews with homeless patrons. Photos and excerpts were displayed throughout the library, and some are still accessible online. In “Your Story Has a Home Here,” Cameron saw solidarity and recognition.
When Shawn told me “I was always a computer man,” he was emphasizing exactly this sort of recognition, of the creation of community bonds that do not necessarily fit the helper-helped dichotomy. “I was always a computer man” is a signal that he could take what he needed from both the ideal bootstrapping library that provided those computers and the ideal public service library that provided a refuge, overlapping as they did in the actually existing library building, and craft a secure space for himself amid the rest of his life’s uncertainty.
He and Ebony worked hard to find that security in computer labs all over the city and were pushed out of some of them by library police. But in MLK they found a space they could fit to their needs and friends who supported them in it. Sometimes staff, like Grant, supported them too, but the bootstrapping project narrowed the sort of assistance they could provide and overrode individual voluntarism. For Shawn’s political vision—a computer lab that is always secure, always supportive, even if you’re unproductive—to be generalized, collective action at the point of reproduction is necessary. The access doctrine makes libraries that do not support this insecure. So they must be remade.
The protests by the Friends of the Library and Cameron and his colleagues over the library’s closure lacked the sort of force that would make the city notice. The sort of solidarity necessary to create the alliances that power truly disruptive actions takes a long time to build. Many librarians and homeless patrons were suspicious of the Friends. Librarians had worked hard to direct patrons to resources they could seek after the closure, but the momentum of the new library had built very literal divisions—like the glass walls of the Dream Lab that guarded renovation planning meetings—between the two groups. The work librarians had to do to keep the library going was not the work many wanted to do to support the homeless patrons they saw all day, every day. But recent strike actions show that this need not be the case. Solidarity can be built, and it can win.
This vision of organizing the community at the point of reproduction may, in contrast to the preceding chapters, seem downright antitechnological. But particular implementations of information technology have started these fights, and different implementations could win them. The library computer queue or the SchoolForce student data system had particular values about how the institution works built into them, reproducing the social relations of the bootstrapping space even before any librarian or teacher intervened (Winner 1980). Similar technological projects have kicked off the social reproduction strike wave reviewed earlier. Notably, one of the last straws for West Virginia teachers was a proposed requirement that they wear Fitbit devices at work in order to collect movement data that would determine the cost of their health insurance premiums (Boothe 2018).
Different visions of how information technology can work and for whom are already visible. A whole new set of digital literacies were needed to connect teenagers, librarians, and the homeless in the “Your Story Has a Home Here” project. However, it must always be remembered that these are not just tools, amenable to any use. Reversing or reworking the logic of bootstrapping will inevitably require restructuring both the technological infrastructure undergirding these organizations and the institutional culture driving their curricula.
This must be a democratic project because, as we saw at both MLK and Du Bois, control over these systems is not evenly distributed. But I believe the seeds within these places can, with care and struggle, expand and transform the space around them. For those helping professionals interested in working with their community to build technologies that build power, it is worth remembering that techniques of participatory design were not always the broad rubric we know today: focus grouping and codesigning new tools for particular contexts to best serve particular constituents. One origin story for this design methodology comes from efforts to build workplace power: Scandinavian trade unionists working together to increase their understanding of workplace technology relative to their managers’ and intervene in new technological implementations before they were set in stone (Asaro 2000; Beck 2002). The experience of redesigning institutional technologies can be a space of solidarity. How could, for example, the queue at MLK be redesigned to reflect how long it actually takes to fill out a job application? How could teachers and students work together to rebuild SchoolForce in a way that supports Du Bois’s racial justice values, rather than its metric-chasing mission?
At a structural level, the drive to bootstrap comes in large part from the limited options neoliberal urban development lays on the table. Teachers and librarians empathized with the people they served and hoped for all sorts of solutions to their problems. But human capital enhancement was what was on offer, in large part because that kept the organization alive. This recalls earlier moments of political struggle in DC and similar cities. Urban politicians, largely Black, sought out a variety of political solutions to the crime wave that began in the 1960s and subsided in the 1990s. But social programs that would assuage the social dislocations behind crime were too expensive for cash-strapped cities and unsupported by state and federal politicians interested only in punishment. And so police and prisons were the solutions chosen (Forman 2017).
This cycle need not repeat. Teachers organizing with their students and neighbors in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles show us that budgets can change, new services can be added, and new institutional scripts written. A new kind of democratic public service organization can be built for a more just economy, and the failed cycles of bootstrapping can be left behind.
That which emerged from struggle can be changed by it. If nothing else, I hope I’ve shown that the story driving so much of our thinking about poverty—“The Internet: Your Future Depends on It”—did not appear out of thin air. It had to be told over and over, reinforced through web filters, progress reports, and planning documents. We built these coping strategies to make overwhelming economic inequality sensible and navigable. But if access today means, fundamentally, an opportunity to compete, then an alternative should not be so hard to imagine. Because if the world as it currently exists is one where we must be granted the tools necessary to strive for excellence, to innovate beyond our current dire straits, to outcompete inequality, then surely another world is possible where innovation is boring and excellence is unnecessary because the good life is ordinary. What would we compete for if so many would not starve for losing? There is so much work we have to do.
1. The crime rate certainly did begin to drop precipitously in the United States in the 1990s, but it did so throughout the world. So though the US carceral state played some role in lowering the crime rate by caging the working and workless poor—who, by virtue of the limited opportunities for the good life that result from their labor market marginalization and the limited social services available in racially segregated areas, were more likely to both commit crimes and be arrested for them (Gilmore 2007)—this can hardly be the entire story. Testing seventeen different hypotheses from deleading gasoline to legalizing abortion, Farrell, Tilley, and Tseloni (2014) find that the only one that does not fail evidence-based standardized tests is the so-called security hypothesis: opportunity to commit property crimes in particular was reduced via better security systems in cars, homes, and businesses. The cause of the crime drop remains a matter of much debate, but what is clear is that the US federal government cannot take credit for it. Reductions in teenage pregnancies in the 1990s are easy to explain through increased access to family planning services, though in recent years the weak labor market (few jobs, low wages, or both) also seems to explain much of it (Kearney and Levine 2015). The reduction in welfare rolls is explained largely in the literature review on labor market boundary institutions in chapter 1: there was a multidecade effort to reduce the amount and availability of unemployment benefits, food stamps, and disability assistance that, in the 1990s, coincided with a strong labor market.
None of this is to disprove Clinton’s, or my, point that the mode of social reproduction really was remade during the neoliberal revolution. Many new prisons were built and filled. Standardized testing and charter schools changed public education. Clinton really did “end welfare as we know it.” But we cannot simply take elites at their word, especially when it is framed in such neutral terms, evacuated of political conflict. And there is no simple utilitarian calculus whereby new policy measures, especially those introduced by the federal government in a federalist system, generate a few new points, or not, of increase in prosocial outcomes. Indeed, one result of the neoliberal revolution is this understanding of policy not as a realm of collective struggle but as a series of dials turned up or down to produce measurable effects in discrete, unconnected individuals. The deeper effect, and, frequently, the real goal, of these reforms is to make new kinds of people with new attitudes, habits, and relationships to the institutions in their lives. I follow Wacquant (2009) in viewing many of these welfare state reforms as attempts to increase the labor market flexibility of the working and workless poor, disciplining them to accept low-wage service work and constant retraining and job search.
2. Although the empirical debate has greatly developed, the overall conceptual issues have not changed much in the past few decades, in part because defining skill is not a politically neutral affair—and, as Cappelli (2015) points out, employers are loathe to provide outside observers with detailed data on work tasks. For an overview of these conceptual issues, each article in Work and Occupations 17 (4), particularly Attewell 1990 and Steinberg 1990, is invaluable.
3. “Hegemony here is born in the factory and requires for its exercise only a minute quantity of professional and political intermediaries” (Gramsci 2000, 278–279). This does not mean that the political and cultural superstructure is mechanically determined by the economic base. For Marx, the base is not the assembly line but the whole apparatus for reproducing capital and the workers it needs; and though the base limits the shape of and outcomes from the superstructure, it cannot hold its own shape without the support of particular legal, political, and cultural regimes (see Marx 1990, chapter 14, fn. 5, for the original theorization; see Williams 1973 for its most complete elaboration). For Gramsci, Fordism required Americanism, which meant “a particular social structure (or at least a determined intention to create it) and a certain type of state … the liberal state, not in the sense of free-trade liberalism or of effective political liberty, but in the more fundamental sense of free initiative and of economic individualism” (285). The baseline assumption here is that people are intelligent, creative political actors and their cooperation in a project that might not be in some of their interests must be secured via an appeal to some other of them.
4. This is not to say that these movements were wholly professional ones. They were not, despite the mythology around revanchist working-class protests like the 1970 Hard Hat Riot, wherein construction workers attacked Vietnam War protestors. See Windham 2017 for a critical reassessment of the relationship between the working class of the late 1960s and 1970s and these movements.