In 2013, a series of posters started appearing across Washington, DC. Each one declared “The Internet: Your Future Depends on It,” next to a photo of a Black Washingtonian. “Sean earned an advanced certification in six months. Now he upgrades computer systems for the US Small Business Administration. He uses technology to help people start businesses. So can you.” They looked ahead to their new future, smiling. “Fabiane learned Microsoft Office in eight weeks and used her new skills to write, design, and publish her first book. She’s using technology to pursue her dreams. So can you.”
They told their stories about using digital training resources provided by Connect.DC—the DC municipal government’s technological assistance program—to get to that future. These skills and tools led to better jobs, ones in which you don’t work with your hands. “Selina’s computer certifications helped her get a job with the federal government—after spending 20 years as a beautician. She used technology to change careers.” The jobs were often in the federal government, which was not surprising. DC remains a company town in many ways. Federal employment is the foundation of the regional labor market (Office of Revenue Analysis 2017), and of the region’s Black middle class (Lacy 2007). But any regional labor market is vulnerable when it depends on a lone employer, especially one with a budget that’s constantly under attack. Unsurprisingly, the DC municipal government has long sought to lessen the city’s reliance on federal employment.
These posters built a link between individual skills training and the city’s economic growth. The rewards were bigger than any one person’s career. It was not just a matter of bringing single individuals across a digital divide, a gap between those who had internet access and the skills to use it and those who didn’t. The dream here was bigger: by changing their tools and skills, people could change the community in which they lived. “Marcus earned three computer certifications in less than a year. Now he works as a computer technician with the DC government. He uses technology to improve his city.”
Curiously, the internet itself wasn’t mentioned in these testimonies. No one was designing websites or setting up e-commerce portals. As a network of networks, the internet, in these posters, was so rhetorically expansive as to stand in for any digital technology (e.g., Microsoft Office) and any credential that evidences any digital skill (e.g., advanced certifications). The internet in “The Internet: Your Future Depends on It” is not a specific tool but a symbol of economic progress—the promised land you’ll reach with the right equipment and the right training.
The portraits were empowering. The people in it used technology; it didn’t use them. They were inviting. They shared successes and asked you to join them: “So can you.” Readers were told to “text LEARN to 83224 for information about free technology and job training.” The tools were there—you could even get them for free!—but time was of the essence. There is a familiar, attractive story here: learn to code, get online, secure your future. The question is: Why do we understand economic success and failure in these terms?
Across the city, people were grappling with this promise in different, more complicated ways. During the research for this book, I was lucky to meet Ebony and her boyfriend Shawn, Black Washingtonians in their early twenties.1 Generous, funny, and inseparable, they spent most of their days in the computer lab of the public library, first at the Northwest One branch and then, after an ugly confrontation with library police for “sleeping,” at the larger Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library—Central Library (MLK) a few blocks south. Ebony eventually went back to school for her GED. After classes ended for the day, she would return to the lab, hug Shawn, and catch up with the rest of their friends. Once the library closed, they often walked over to a nearby Subway restaurant—not to order a sandwich, but to sit outside and use the free internet for a few hours, browsing Facebook, watching cartoons, and reading before they returned to separate shelters for the night. Their friend Josie had a similar spot, an outlet above a Metro escalator where she could get Wi-Fi from the nearby basketball stadium. She could listen to music as the crowd of White suburbanites in town for the game walked around her.
For Ebony, Shawn, and Josie, the internet was certainly an important part of their everyday lives—but it wasn’t the promised land of the future. It was the terrain of the present. Shawn said that when he first lost housing after he and his father were evicted, “the library became my best friend.” It’s where he made friends, where he got online to chat or play games or follow the news coverage of the Occupy DC encampment he worked on. “I was always a computer man,” he told me.
There is a whole story in “I was always a computer man,” a story about Shawn’s hobbies, his friends, and the welfare state institutions through which he traveled. He was not left behind by technological or economic progress, as the posters might suggest. Rather, he used the PC and the institutions around the PC to build a rich and varied life and to claim space in a gentrified city increasingly hostile to the working and workless poor. Shawn was a “computer man,” an activist, a homeless man, a boyfriend, a library patron, an artist, and more. “I was always a computer man” is both a humble biographical fact and a political statement about the security he felt behind a screen in the library—where Shawn was welcomed without having to purchase anything, where he could find peace without having to prove his economic value. The PC was not a skills engine for him; it was one piece of a place-making project. While he spent most of his time at MLK, Shawn still claimed the Shaw branch as his own: “That’s my library.” The decision to move from one library to another was based on whether he felt those sorts of claims to public space were being respected by the institution.
“I was always a computer man” is a longstanding identity that supports a claim to public spaces and public resources that belong, or should belong, to everyone. Claiming these spaces and resources can be a great deal of work: Josie worked hard to find a Wi-Fi signal at night, and Ebony and Shawn made tough decisions about which libraries were safest for them. But they were owed these spaces in the present. Where they did not find welcome, they still made space for themselves.
“The Internet: Your Future Depends on It” is a different story. It has a different temporal orientation, rearranging present institutions based on a future threat to individuals. And it has a different calculus for social worth, arguing that your social value will diminish with your economic value. It is also a familiar story. Both liberal and conservative politicians have repeated it for decades now, updating it for the technology of the day in an attempt to persuade the public that their individual and collective economic futures depend on their access to the right skills and tools:
“The Internet: Your Future Depends on It” is then just one local example of a story that explains individual, regional, and national economic success as a product of information technology and the skills to use it. The DC city government’s message is part of this political common sense. Political common sense mixes factual claims with ideological ones. It is clear, for example, that finding a job without an internet connection and a PC is difficult; just try filling out an application to work for CVS, let alone using USAJobs, on your phone (Smith 2015). It is less clear that there are plenty of good tech jobs out there, just not enough coders to fill them. In the course of my research in DC Public Library (DCPL) branches, I met not just patrons like Ebony and Shawn but librarians like Becca or Grant who worked with them. These helping professionals readily acknowledged that economic reality is more complicated than political slogans might admit; getting online and learning to code won’t change the rest of the labor market by itself. But they and their organization still embraced these claims about the power of internet access and digital skills training. They had to try to help. The stakes were high. The future depended on it.
This book investigates 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. It asks how “The Internet: Your Future Depends on It” becomes common sense. And it asks what happens to people like Shawn, whose stories—“I’ve always been a computer man”—do not fit that common sense. Spending time with the people and places that act on poverty with technology, we can begin to understand the attraction of this simple, powerful story—even for those who know reality is more complicated. Indeed, as the skyrocketing inequality of the information economy has become harder and harder to ignore, “The Internet: Your Future Depends on It” has become more and more attractive.
I call this political common sense the access doctrine. The access doctrine decrees that the problem of poverty can be solved through the provision of new technologies and technical skills, giving those left out of the information economy the chance to catch up and compete. The access doctrine emerged from 1990s debates over the problem of persistent poverty in a globalizing, deindustrializing US economy whose most profitable frontier seemed to be based in using and producing information and communication technologies. Schools and libraries threatened by fiscal austerity or accusations of obsolescence embrace the access doctrine as their mission in order to restore their legitimacy, garner much-needed resources, and simplify the host of social problems with which they are confronted daily.
Common sense is never a totally coherent, factual account of the world. Nor is it a deception perpetrated by the ruling classes on the ruled (Gramsci 2000). Rather, common sense emerges organically from practical responses to real problems in the real world, crafted from the symbols and materials at hand. A world with clear and discomfiting divisions between ruler and ruled. A capitalist world, where the major institutions of social life necessarily reproduce these divisions, not in a mechanical fashion but because places like schools are built to last for generations and so must establish the normative outlines of the world they wish to make, and because they too must make sense of the mess of social life confronting them.
The access doctrine helps us make sense of the world—specifically, a city like so many others, where the technology sector expanded as part of a wave of post-2008 high-wage, White emigration, while Black unemployment remained persistently high, homelessness increased, and working-class wages barely budged. The access doctrine makes these problems appear natural and immutable, like an earthquake, and teaches individuals and organizations how to survive them. Our task then is to separate myth from fact, ground that precise mix of myth and fact in the historical process, and rearrange the incoherent story into a coherent explanation of how the world works, why it works that way, and why we believe otherwise.
The access doctrine offers clear solutions. But it is far from clear that consumer internet access, digital skills training, or skills training generally produce widespread economic mobility. To investigate the specific political utility of the access doctrine, we must first clarify the general problem it is trying to solve and whether previous attempts to solve that problem have succeeded.
In the 1990s, the story went that access to certain tools—an internet connection and a PC—would enable access to high-wage jobs. Today, it appears that the tools were easier to get than the jobs. Ultimately, we must reckon with the fact that as home internet access has reached a saturation point—though of course gaps still remain2—the economic lives of working Americans have either not improved or have worsened. Hourly wages have stagnated since the late 1970s, while productivity has continued to improve (Bivens et al. 2014).3 Indeed, from 2000 to 2013, the era wherein home internet access reached the saturation point, hourly wages for 30 percent of the workforce actually fell. The story is worse for workers with only a high school degree, but even college graduates have seen anemic wage growth. And while gender-based wage gaps have narrowed over the last forty years, race-based ones have been stubbornly persistent (Bivens et al. 2014; see also Akee, Jones, and Porter 2019; Autor and Dorn 2014; Duménil and Lévy 2015; Edelman 2013). This is hardly the picture we’d expect if internet access increased individual economic fitness.
But the access doctrine is expansive. As more consumers got online, the story changed: It was not just access to specific tools that were necessary for economic mobility, it was specific digital skills—the sort of things advertised in the Connect.DC posters. Shawn, this story would say, had access to the right tools, but not the right skills. This story is part of a wider genre that explains the relative poverty or economic inactivity of specific populations, regions, and countries through the skills individual workers possess. Chapter 1 will review how this problem became a problem, but for now it suffices to say that for much of the twentieth century, especially after the economic dislocations of the 1970s, representatives of business, education, and government have warned of impending or actual skills gaps (i.e., where the education system does not provide graduates with the skills businesses need) and the more specific problem of skills shortages (i.e., where US businesses cannot find a specific kind of worker—today, generally engineers and information technology professionals) (Cappelli 2015). The access doctrine emerged from these earlier frameworks, adding to them the new technologies and skills associated with the internet.
Skill is notoriously difficult to define and measure, so educational credentials and professional certifications are generally used as a proxy in the measurement of skills gaps or shortages; within firms, self-reported data on skills needs, rather than independent assessment, is the norm. The urgent problem of skills gaps and shortages is given historical weight through the invocation, typically by economists (e.g., Autor, Katz, and Krueger 1998; Goldin and Katz 2008; Krueger 1993; Tinbergen 1974), of skill-biased technological change (SBTC). Advocates for SBTC hold that the prevalence of technology—itself typically unmeasured and underdefined—increases in prevalence and complexity over time, and thus the demands for and wage returns of workers skilled in its design and use also rise over time. The vagueness of skill and technology are empirically troublesome but politically useful: a nebulous threat remains always on the economic horizon, explaining that those struggling today do so because they have not sufficiently upgraded—and that they must do so before tomorrow arrives. So while I present some objections to policies based on SBTC here, I do so knowing that, politically, it’s ultimately unfalsifiable. Even if today’s training regime does not work, new technologies will always arrive and, for those interested in shifting the risk of economic transition to individual workers, they will always demand new skills. The critiques presented here simply lay the groundwork for the later investigation of public service organizations animated by their faith in SBTC.
A theory of skill-biased technological change demands a policy of technological training. Unfortunately, the returns from dedicated, large-scale skills-training programs have been mixed at best. The largest such experiment was President Reagan’s replacement of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), which gave funds to local governments to provide full-time jobs to the poor and long-term unemployed, with the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA)—later transformed into the Workforce Investment Act (WIA). JTPA replaced CETA’s guaranteed jobs with training courses (Smothers 1981) and enrolled close to a million people during the Reagan and Bush administrations (Lafer 2002). It offered fast-track trade training in classrooms, supplemented by on-the-job training and job search assistance. The smaller Trade Adjustment Assistance program provided similar services for laid-off manufacturing workers.
In reviewing their results, Lafer (2002) found that these programs rarely covered more than 5 percent of the affected populations. The Labor Department’s own review of JTPA (Bloom et al. 1997), based on a two-and-half-year controlled experiment, found that only a quarter of JTPA’s participant categories saw relative income gains. The study found no effect on participants’ welfare benefits because the income gains were not enough to bring them above the federal poverty line. The impact of training on earnings remained small relative to the impact of gender (gender differences accounted for four times the earnings difference of training). Adult men and women participants saw small net gains to their earnings, while youth saw substantial losses, and the net social benefit (i.e., program cost relative to participant returns) largely zeroed out.
These interventions may have failed because they target the wrong skills. It is important to note that defining and measuring workers’ skills, and understanding what employers mean by skill, is quite hard: it can mean tasks or abilities, it can be rewarded or not, and sometimes it appears to be just be a proxy for race or gender (Attewell 1990; Steinberg 1990). Nonetheless, labor sociologists who attached occupational skill measurements to returns from the Current Population Survey in 1979–2010 found that it was analytic, critical thinking skills that produce the greatest wage payoffs—not the technical skills that are supposedly so in demand (Liu and Grusky 2013). Similar research, reviewing returns from the General Social Survey in 1972–2002, the period in which the access doctrine was born, found that overqualification (excess educational credentials relative to job tasks) increased substantially in the exact period when these credentials were supposed to be more in demand. Job satisfaction unsurprisingly fell during this time (Vaisey 2006). So not only has upskilling to meet the demands of skill-biased technological changed probably failed—or at least not worked as we were told it would—it has led to a rise in overqualification and job dissatisfaction.
Despite this, the push for technical skills training continues. In 2015, President Obama announced the $100 million TechHire initiative to provide grants to local public-private partnerships that would provide technological skills training. In announcing it, he warned of a crisis of national economic fitness: “If we’re not producing enough tech workers, over time that’s going to threaten our leadership in global innovation, which is the bread and butter of the 21st century economy” (Kuhnhenn 2015). That crisis was disputed within his own administration. That same year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS 2015a) released a report showing that because capital moves faster than the labor it employs, any skills gap is necessarily local and temporary—and that local oversupply of professionals with a particular skill set is as much a possibility as undersupply.
Nationally, one would expect the wages of degree earners in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to have boomed in times of high demand, like those Obama described. But median STEM wages have remained stable since 2000, and most STEM degree holders work in non-STEM fields—in part because firms are able to outsource high-skilled labor to low-wage workers through digital networks or import them through programs like the H-1B visa system (Charette 2013). The BLS (2015b) also found that the fields of projected high job growth in the next two decades are in low-wage service work like home health care and food preparation, not high-wage knowledge work. For most workers, the jobs of the future rely on catheters and cutting boards, work that requires no knowledge of Python or JavaScript and often no more than a high school education. Should this labor market mix remain stable, hypercompetition for a few high-wage jobs and overqualification for the remaining jobs will be the norm (Berghel 2014).
The geographic version of the skills gap argument holds that redesigning a particular region to court technical “creative class” emigres will create a rising tide that lifts all boats (Florida 2004). This, too, has been thoroughly contested. Critics identify the emigration of cosmopolitan, high-wage professionals into urban areas with rising inequality and the displacement of working-class residents of color (O’Callaghan 2010; Peck 2005, 2007). Economic incentives offered by states to the firms that might relocate, change the local skill mix, and move local economies up the value chain generally have the effect of increasing local inequality by allowing wealthy firms and individuals to keep revenue that would otherwise be taxed (Jansa 2020). And at a national level, no more prominent a figure than longtime chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, who perhaps more so than anyone else built the US information economy, admitted in 2007 that the main effect of importing skilled professionals is to “suppress the skilled-wage level” (Bloomberg News 2007).
There appears, then, to be a deeper problem than what skills we pick to measure and what returns they may or may not deliver to individuals, regions, and countries. The problem may be framing economic mobility—of individuals, cities, or countries—as a product of individual skills. Cappelli’s (2015) extensive research into the gap between the skills employers say they need and what they actually utilize shows this conceptual problem playing out on several levels. First, the problem differs depending on who you ask. Employers say they don’t have enough skilled workers. Professional associations of skilled workers say that the problem is in fact oversupply. Recruiters, brokering between the other two parties, say the missing ingredient isn’t certain skills but certain attitudes, such as conscientiousness. Second, employers change their skill requests based on fluctuations in the labor market, raising them when it’s loose and, when it’s tight, either lowering skill requirements or automating higher-skill tasks. Finally, employer complaints consistently focus on new labor market entrants—young, relatively lower-paid workers who make up a tiny minority of the total workforce. This seems to indicate an unwillingness to either train new workers or raise the wages of skilled veterans; unsurprisingly, lateral movement of mid-career workers between firms has increased since the 1970s (Cappelli 1999).
Regardless of the source of its conceptual confusion, the skills-gap narrative shifts the responsibility for training away from the business owners and toward young individuals at the beginning of their working lives, as well as toward the public institutions that train them: universities, community colleges, and local and state governments. Indeed, what little evidence we have suggests that employers today devote very little time to on-the-job training, relative to the postwar “golden era” of long-term, single-firm employment (Cappelli 2015). At the level of statecraft, placing a political priority on skills training is a positive, forward-looking way to justify cuts to unemployment insurance—because it’s unnecessary if there really are enough jobs available for the skilled—and the general shift of training burdens from firms to schools, libraries, and individuals. Whether or not skills training works as a solution to individual or regional economic immobility, it does work in the sense that places like schools and libraries and the people who staff them are reorganized to attack these new priorities.
So the evidence for the existence of a skills gap is at best mixed, as is the evidence of positive labor market returns, for individuals or regions, from attempts to skill up local workers or import new ones. But still, the hope survives. These problems are complex, but the access doctrine continues to make sense as a simple solution. It’s easy to see that in statements from President Obama, who insisted throughout his term that “in the new economy, computer science isn’t optional—it’s a basic skill” (Obama 2016). These sorts of warnings about the nationwide need for more computer scientists are common. They condense into a three-word incantation that insists on a surefire path to economic security and threatens obsolescence for the unskilled: “learn to code” (Miltner 2019; Williamson 2016).
“Learn to code” is a relatively recent creation of the access doctrine, decrying skills shortages in in software development. Decades prior to “learn to code,” Vice President Al Gore (1994c) warned of a future gulf between “information haves and information have-nots.” Both formulations understand poverty as a digital divide, itself a term that has waned in popularity even as the access doctrine has remained strong. Digital divide researchers have spent decades demonstrating that the problem is more complicated than a simple binary between haves and have-nots, coders and noncoders; getting people online or teaching them to code is not a shortcut to economic security (Gunkel 2003; Stevenson 2009). But we social scientists find ourselves confronting these simple binaries again and again. They persist, I argue, not because they accurately reflect the state of the world, but because they are politically useful.
Take Mia, for example, whose life conforms to no simple binary between information haves and have-nots. Friend to Shawn, Ebony, Josie, and nearly everyone else in MLK’s computer lab, Mia occupied a regular seat in the back rows of the Digital Commons, where she used her glitter-coated laptop, a twenty-fifth-birthday present from her grandmother, to search for permanent housing for herself and her mother, find work, rest between appointments, work on her manga, and watch movies and TV. In terms of teaching people how to phrase a Google search or look up the location and hours for a particular government office, she was as important to the library as any librarian. She was a helper too, not just someone who was helped, and her talents disrupted any idea of a stark digital divide between those with skills and access and those without.
Currently homeless, Mia struggled to secure a regular internet connection but knew one could usually be found at the library and had plenty of back-up locations at the ready. She was working toward a certification in medical billing at the University of the District of Columbia, but multiple disabilities and the daily disruptions of homelessness interrupted both education and job search. Her phone and laptop were always close to hand, but both regularly had their service disrupted or their physical casings damaged (Gonzales 2016).
“I’ve always been a big library person,” Mia told me, echoing Shawn’s claim that he’d “always been a computer man.” Digitally literate but still suffering from the high costs and daily stress of a gentrifying city, her life didn’t fit the access doctrine or, as we will see, the vision of the library remade to support the access doctrine. While digital divide research has increasingly reckoned with the complexity of digital experiences like Mia’s, this urgent belief in a gulf between the skilled and wired and the unskilled and unconnected persists in the media, in our politics, and in our institutions tasked with confronting poverty. The access doctrine could only understand Mia as someone to be helped. It could only offer tools and training in support. But she already had the tools and she was getting the training. What she needed at the time was a safe, permanent place for her and her mother to live.
The access doctrine has a political gravity that draws us all in, whether we embrace it or refute it. It has a quality of “magical thinking,” as Eubanks (2011) writes in her critique of “information poverty” approaches to education and economic development. For Eubanks, access is not a question of whether a skill or technology is present or absent, but a question of citizenship and the capacities for engagement in public life that emerge from a life under surveillance. She is right, of course, but the magical thinking persists and is seemingly immune to attempts, both empirical and conceptual, to debunk it.
State and local governments continue to bet on this magical thinking, despite the heavy burden it places on institutions ill-equipped to solve it. High schools and colleges, for example, have a hard time adjusting multiyear curricula to keep up with ever-changing employer demands, preparing adolescents who do not yet know who they are for a labor market that does not yet exist. But, as we will see in chapters 3 and 4, libraries and schools eagerly embrace this challenge, even if it is beyond their abilities. They do so because public service organizations are themselves under threat in an environment of overwhelming economic uncertainty and inequality. By turning the problem of poverty into a problem of technology, they reframe their own problems into something more manageable for their frontline staff and more legible to the politicians, donors, and others who might offer support. These institutions teach us how to survive, but their own survival hinges on reproducing the common sense of the access doctrine. That inter- and intraorganizational dynamic is the focus of this book.
So it seems technology provision and skills training don’t solve poverty or inequality—or at least the story is much more complicated than that. Why then do these solutions remain economic cure-alls, embraced across the political spectrum? Rather than trying to disprove this idea of a simple digital divide, this book offers an immanent critique of it, exploring first the historical origins of its premises and then how that logic is reproduced day to day, failing on its own terms, but surviving nonetheless. This simplicity is a feature, not a bug, offering tremendous utility to those who embrace it. The access doctrine pushes the institutions that manage the problem of poverty—here, schools and libraries—to bootstrap, remaking their identities and operations to support technology provision and skills training. Bootstrapping secures resources in periods of fiscal austerity and legitimacy in periods of political assault.
Like Eubanks, most of the teachers and librarians I speak with throughout this book know the real story is more complicated than any magical thinking might suggest. They know full well that the facts of poverty, racism, homelessness, and disability cannot be overcome with a laptop and a broadband connection. But this story is nonetheless attractive, because their jobs have only gotten harder and more complex in the last forty years. US taxpayer revolts, kicking off in California and spreading to other states since the 1970s, have been hard on public services like education (Archibald and Feldman 2006). This situation has only grown more dire since the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity implemented in its wake, particularly for public schools and public libraries—the two primary sites of investigation here.
While library visits surged with the unemployment rate, it took a decade for public library expenditures to return to their prerecession levels (Reid 2017). Three hundred thousand public school employees lost their jobs during the recession, and funding cuts exacerbated the inequality, growing for years, between rich and poor school districts—which also map well to majority-White and majority-non-White districts, respectively (Evans, Schwab, and Wagner 2019). Decisions about what to cut and how much to cut are of course always political decisions. US cities are particularly vulnerable to austerity measures implemented by state governments hundreds of miles away, state governments that may be hostile to cities’ unionized workers, non-white residents, and left-liberal voters (Peck 2012).
And of course, when budgets are tight, schools and libraries must do more with less. Teachers become therapists. Librarians become social workers. Their superiors must find a pitch that appeals to politicians and donors. In these moments, the examples set by the startups down the street, not to mention the stories repeated by presidents and philanthropists, become powerful sources of inspiration.
The stress of a deeply unequal political economy makes places that do the teaching and training more receptive to the access doctrine. Inequality is a feature of a capitalist economy, not a bug, and the access doctrine makes this inequality sensible and navigable. It explains why there is such a gulf between rich and poor, how the poor can find security, and what help they need to get there—all without disrupting the basic shape of these unequal social relations. This is a positive, creative role that cannot be dismissed as mere propaganda.
At the most basic level, the access doctrine helps an overwhelmed high school teacher manage their classroom because they have learned that the smartphone is a social distraction, while the laptop is a professional tool for education, and they should discipline their students accordingly. Places like schools and libraries that provide tools and skills gain purpose through the story of the digital divide and sister crises like the skills gap or the STEM gap. They accrue legitimacy and resources by restructuring themselves and their work on these terms. The hope that personal computing, the internet, and the skills to use them will power social mobility is the cultural glue holding a deeply unequal information economy together.4 That power resists refutation.
This hope in the power of technology to defeat poverty is first produced, and the concomitant crisis declared, by state institutions in the 1990s seeking to manage the national transition to an information economy and the persistent poverty within it. It is then repeated at the local level by public service organizations who are themselves under threat because it lends them purpose, clarity, and legitimacy. In the process, places like schools and libraries began to look more like tech startups.
I call this process of organizational restructuring prompted by the access doctrine bootstrapping: public service organizations, like schools and libraries, are overwhelmed by the scale of the problems facing them and find their resources and legitimacy under threat, so they turn toward technology provision and skills-training programs because these garner economic and political support and make the problems they face more manageable.5 This is the focus of the ethnographic fieldwork that makes up the bulk of this book. Because bootstrapping empowers public service organizations that manage the problem of poverty, it is a never-ending process. Any part of the organization’s identity, operations, and personnel are subject to revision. Paradoxically, it is precisely because the access doctrine presents such an urgent problem for these organizations that they will continue with new and different experiments in technology provision or skills training—even if those experiments do not benefit poor people. Those experiments serve the organization, even if they marginalize the people the organization serves. Bootstrapping becomes not just a series of changes but a new institutional culture, in conflict with older public service cultures.
When schools and libraries bootstrap, they are often inspired by the way technology startups pivot to new growth models. Although ultimately, they cannot pivot like startups because they have different goals, stakeholders, revenue streams, and responsibilities—which is why I mark their organizational restructuring with a different phrase. Take the W. E. B. Du Bois Public Charter High School, the focus of chapter 4, as an example. Individual teachers worked hard to invest everything they did with the school’s racial justice values—avoiding, for example, the “no-excuses” disciplinary measures common to other charters—but the school’s high standards and the high stakes attached to them meant everything was subject to revision, including those racial justice values.
Models from the tech sector were everywhere, encouraging a culture of constant experimentation. Like other charter schools, Du Bois received regular funding from philanthropies that supported new technologies and technological skills for students, and training for teachers and administrators that encouraged them to think like entrepreneurs. Members of the leadership team had previously spun out their own startup, and while I was there, Du Bois piloted a student data management platform called SchoolForce, modeled on the Salesforce customer relationship management platform used at startups like InCrowd, the focus of chapter 2.
But the school faced a complex set of problems it was fundamentally unequipped to solve: child poverty, homelessness, gentrification, police violence, broken labor markets. And law and convention limited the school’s flexibility in terms of when and how it admitted students or what benchmarks it had to reach to keep its charter. Still, the urgency of the access doctrine meant that there was no endpoint to organizational restructuring, no failure that could cause reconsideration of its mission. The school needed to keep transforming itself in order to transform its students. And as in MLK, the people the organization was built to serve were often sidelined in this process because bootstrapping kept the organization alive, securing much-needed resources and legitimacy.
Bootstrapping institutions reproduce the access doctrine and thus the idea of different sides of a digital divide, with one side in need of the other’s help, as part of their general task of reproducing people for capitalism. This is the work Marxist feminists term social reproduction. It is work that occurs every day, both for “free” in the home and for a wage in spaces that may not produce a profit themselves (schools, hospitals, churches). Without such work laborers would hardly remain alive, much less able to work, socialize, consume, and generally navigate the world around them. What Katz (2001) describes as the “reproduction of the labor force at a certain (and fluid) level of differentiation and expertise” requires a whole geography of sustenance, knitted together by state institutions and cultural forms, with the terms of reproduction set as a result of social struggle between communities and global capital. Capital requires these spaces to raise, train, and support workers but, because they do not produce a profit, continually seeks to disinvest from them. In startups, schools, and libraries, I reveal a contemporary struggle over whether and how people of all sorts should be transformed into tech entrepreneurs.
This dynamic has held for centuries, changing with the mode of production. Capital has always needed unwaged housework or waged schoolwork as much as it needed waged factory work or unwaged plantation work, and it is within this sphere that different social roles are created and reproduced. Capitalism’s birth centuries ago required the accumulation of differences among the working class so that, among other changes, social life and social roles were violently divided into private and public spheres (Dalla Costa and James 1975; Federici 2004; Fortunati 1995; Jackson 1940; Vogel 2013). Wage labor was undertaken by men in public and the care that prepared and repaired that laborer for work was done by women in the home; although women and children often continued to contribute, for much cheaper rates, at the factory or for free at home, and the lines drawn for White women were applied differently to Black women. In this model, the unpaid care work of women—whether at home or in the acts of care required to make any workplace run—and the sexist oppression of women is not outside or parallel to production for accumulation. Instead, this historical, never natural separation is crucial to the maintenance of capitalism as a system for the production of surplus value.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the working classes were largely divorced from the means of social reproduction and forced to rely on either the market, for commodities like food, or on racially segregated state institutions, for services like education (Mohandesi and Teitelman 2017). In the postwar era, an uneasy labor-capital alliance forced the state to take up a greater burden of social reproduction, creating, in an uneven manner across capitalist democracies, public rights to things like education, healthcare, and old-age pensions.
In the wake of the economic dislocations of the 1970s, the neoliberal state sloughed off these tasks and moved them into the market, where women of color frequently pick up the work of care that supports White professional women’s labor force participation, or back into the home for those who cannot afford to pay (Bakker 2007; Bezanson 2006; Parrenas 2012). The 2008 financial crisis accelerated this dynamic. State disinvestment from schools and libraries, largely staffed by women, placed increasing stress on these institutions. This stress leads them to bootstrap. Because these are the institutions that teach us how to make a living, these changes to schools and libraries reverberate across the rest of society. As institutions of social reproduction restructure around a new mission for their own sakes, they teach everyone they touch that their future depends on securing the right tools and skills.
I attend to the labor of social reproduction throughout this book: the undervalued work of care, often women’s work, that keeps people and institutions alive day to day and is so often left behind or forgotten in the masculinist drive for constant technological innovation. Social reproduction is not just a mechanical process of keeping people alive or training them in certain skills but, as Katz notes, the daily recreation of a set of cultural dispositions, a particular way of imagining the world of work, how it works, and what you are supposed to get out of it. It is the space in which we learn what the good life is and how to get there.
Within institutions of social reproduction, a culture of hope can bridge the gap between the inequity and conflict that surrounds them today and the justice they plan to enact tomorrow (Lashaw 2008). Hope can justify present disparities, or least mollify the people involved, by mobilizing a collective effort to address them. Like most US cities, DC is increasingly stratified by race and class and in the middle of major changes to its local labor market—all of which places great stress on its institutions of social reproduction. It is no surprise the access doctrine has taken root there.
It is easy to see the access doctrine’s appeal in contemporary DC: a technological and professional path beyond a long history of labor market segregation that today unevenly distributes the spoils of the information economy. This is particularly true during the period studied here: the recovery from the 2008 recession. Approximately seven hundred thousand people live in DC. Recent gentrification has reduced its long-standing Black majority to a plurality. The city government has long hoped to lessen the local labor market’s reliance on the federal government, the buildings and workers of which largely do not contribute to the city’s tax base. These political-economic dynamics provided fertile soil for the access doctrine. A brief survey of the city is necessary to understand why.
DC is divided into eight wards. Wards 7 and 8 are east of the Anacostia River, majority Black, and long bereft of the jobs and services available in majority-White wards. This segregation accompanies one of the nation’s most visible communities of Black professionals, historically concentrated in, but increasingly pushed out of, DC neighborhoods like Hillcrest (in Ward 7) and LeDroit Park (in Ward 1), as well as Prince George’s County, Maryland, which borders the eastern half of the city along Wards 5, 7, and 8. As the site of the federal government, DC was, for most of its history, governed by Congress without any representation in Congress—a dynamic represented on its license plates with the slogan “Taxation Without Representation.” In 1973, DC was granted home rule by Congress and began electing its own mayors and city councilmembers—although Congress still retained the power to block any law passed by the DC Council.
These may seem like unique circumstances, but just as most Washingtonians are regular working people, not politicians, these political dynamics are not qualitatively distinct from other cities. Rather, they are outsized manifestations of the city versus state conflicts that characterize most majority-non-White US metropolises—with Congress standing in for statehouses elsewhere.
Revenue has always been a problem for a city whose major employer and property owner, the federal government, is virtually recession-proof but does not pay taxes on its property, which makes up 50 percent of property in the city. The District is unable to levy commuter taxes against the 60 percent of its daily workforce that arrives from Maryland and Virginia and is ultimately able to tax only 34 percent of the income earned in its workplaces. This creates a structural imbalance in the annual budget, one that was estimated in a 2004 audit to be between $470 million and $1.143 billion (Office of the Chief Financial Officer 2004; for a broader overview, see Hyra and Prince 2016).
Decimated by White flight in the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s saw a commercial property boom in the city that never quite managed to reach its citizens, partly because many of the land sales either sold municipal tracts far below their worth or drastically discounted the price in anticipation of future sales tax revenues (Sherwood and Jaffe 2014).6 The city’s population reached a post-WWII low of 572,000 in 2000 as members of the Black middle class able to move did so (Bowser, De Witt, and Lee 2015).
The story began to change in 2008, as the worst economic downturn since the Depression gripped the majority of the country but largely missed DC and the surrounding suburbs. The federal government and associated contractors and nonprofits provided a base for this resilience, but the influx of new professionals—DC added nearly sixty-nine thousand people between 2008 and 2013 (Bowser, De Witt, and Lee 2015)—expanded beyond that to those working in education, hospitality, law, and technology (Dani 2013; Tavernise 2011). Although the private sector, including thousands of contractors who depend on the federal government, has always employed more people in DC than the public sector in the absolute, the 2008 recession marked a severe divergence in their relative growth rates, such that the overwhelming majority of job growth in DC after 2008 was in the private sector: 66,100 net new private sector jobs between January 2009 and March 2016 versus 4,000 of the same in the public sector (DMPED 2016).
The influx of new residents was raced and classed. It continued a trend begun under Anthony Williams’s tenure as mayor at the turn of the millennium, in which the majority of in-migrants were higher-income Whites and the majority of out-migrants were lower-income Blacks—though higher-income Black households were more likely to move out than higher-income White households (Sturtevant 2014). New housing construction in this period was overwhelmingly concentrated in high-cost condominiums, and between 2002 and 2013, DC lost half of its affordable housing stock (Rivers 2015). By 2011, Chocolate City, for the first time in fifty-one years, was no longer majority Black (Tavernise 2011).
Gains from the tide of high-wage White migration were unevenly distributed. Postrecession job growth was concentrated in low-wage sectors alongside some increases in high-wage sectors, with the middle largely dropping out. While middle- and high-wage jobs saw their pay grow between 2007 and 2013, low-wage earners in DC saw theirs shrink, and long-term unemployment for those with only a high school diploma drastically increased (Lazere and Guzman 2015). Median Black and Latinx wages rose ninety and thirty cents per hour, respectively, in the same period, while median White wages rose three dollars per hour. In 2015, DC had the highest Black unemployment rate in the nation at 13.6 percent—or 5.7 times the White unemployment rate (Wilson 2015).
In 2015, as my fieldwork ended, the top 10 percent of income earners in DC today made six times the bottom 10 percent, the highest disparity of any “state” (Giachetti 2015). This gulf emerged as the middle fell out of the local labor market after 2008, and especially after federal deficit-reduction measures began to take effect in 2011. A flood of young professionals entered the city and their wages rose, while low-wage service workers’ wages stagnated and the federal government—the employer buttressing the Black middle class in DC and its suburbs—shrank, in part by automating thousands of mid-level clerical positions dominated by Black women (Khimm 2014; Rein 2014). The uneven recovery did little to dispel the long-held conspiracy theory—“The Plan”—that White Washingtonians have been plotting to regain control of the municipal government and the city at large since home rule was granted in 1973 (Castaneda 2020).
The municipal government heavily courted these new, White, digital professionals and the firms employing them as the future of the city and as a way to create jobs and garner tax revenue without relying on the federal government. They seemed to represent a cohort whose digital skills, information-processing jobs, and geographically mobile careers would help separate the city from the old, broken industrial economy and a federal bureaucracy that was historically unresponsive and unreliable with respect to the needs of the city around it. Development then, for individuals, communities, and the whole region, depended on making those who had been left out of the information economy more like those on the leading edge of it. Their tools, skills, and habits had to spread, or DC would get left out. This is what seems to drive “The Internet: Your Future Depends on It.” This crisis and the proposed solutions to it are surely familiar to other cities in the United States attempting to create local jobs and grow the tax base, to reduce the reliance on commuters.
These political-economic dynamics place great pressure on schools and libraries and on the people who work in them or rely on them. Individuals reproduce the access doctrine as part of their jobs or as a means of securing recognition from institutions of social reproduction. Organizations reproduce the access doctrine to secure resources and legitimacy.
This mode of neoliberal urban development pursued in DC and similar cities is the structural context for these social dynamics, pressuring organizations to bootstrap. The municipal politicians and corporate leaders who manage urban economic development are themselves constrained by the movement of global capital (Tochterman 2012). For our purposes, it is important to mark out three tendencies of neoliberal urban development; the first two have been well-studied by urban geographers in particular, the third less so. They combine to create an urban political economy based on hope in technology and technologists.
First, largely White entrepreneurs are recruited from outside the city to relocate to it and invest in it. Second, the geography of the city is remade to entice, support, and reproduce these mobile professionals and their lifestyles, through the management of the process commonly described as gentrification (e.g., N. Smith 2002, 2005). And third, urban institutions of social reproduction are rebuilt in the image of the firms that will move to the city, so that the people enmeshed in these institutions will emerge from them as entrepreneurs able to work in those newly arrived firms or ones like them—or start their own. Providence comes from innovative outsiders and/or drastic change to who the natives are and how they live and work. Internal solutions to these dire straits that might allow locals to build a regional economy independent of, or at least a stronger bargainer against, global capital are largely rejected on the basis that they would frighten capital away. A host of political, economic, and cultural processes drive these phenomena; gentrification is occurring in different ways in different cities across the world. But the access doctrine is especially important insofar as local instances of neoliberal urban development rely on incentivizing tech companies to relocate, supporting private development that caters to tech workers’ lifestyles, and rebuilding public institutions in tech’s image.
Much of this hopeful shift in urban governance, where local providence depends on wealthy White outsiders, is captured in Harvey’s (1989) description of urban fortunes following the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s. This transition was marked mostly sharply by the near-bankruptcy of New York City in 1975, and then by a spate of downtown revitalization projects meant to drive White, monied consumers to shop there and producer services firms to relocate there, while heavily policing the Black and Latinx working and workless poor. Examples of such projects might include the Grand Central Partnership in New York, the Baltimore Inner Harbor, or, in DC, the MCI Center (later the Verizon Center, now Capital One Arena) and the Gallery Place development around it. Harvey names this trauma of urban abandonment followed by hopeful place-making as the shift from urban managerialism to urban entrepreneurialism.
Managerial modes of urban governance understood cities during and after World War II as outposts of the Keynesian welfare state. They were sites of industry with a diverse tax base and social services to match; many even engaged in direct job creation outside the municipal bureaucracy. The state-supported flight of the White middle class out of cities and the subsequent flight of industrial capital to the suburbs, the South, or overseas irrevocably changed this picture. Urban entrepreneurialism hangs a city’s fortunes on remaking its downtown as a site for consumption and entertainment on the one hand and the headquarters for firms engaged in information-processing tasks on the other.
There were two primary results. First, those who lived in the city were confronted by a bifurcated labor market between relatively well-paid office workers and relatively lower-paid service workers who prepared the former’s meals, clothes, and entertainment. This divide is often marked by race and immigration status. Second, those who ran the city found themselves no longer cooperating with other cities in different parts of the Keynesian industrial capitalist network (e.g., working at different parts of the national value chain or for different arms of the national state), but competing with other cities to create conditions favorable to increasingly mobile global capital.
This is the political-economic context in which the access doctrine takes root, not just as a strategy for individuals or organizations but as a philosophy of urban development that relies on upgrading the city and its citizens. The scope of this process is broader than the shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism as described by Harvey. Cities like DC are certainly rebuilt to beat out peers and attract outside investment that will revitalize housing, labor, and entertainment markets. But Harvey’s story is incomplete without an accounting of how the rest of the city, outside the offices of mayors or CEOs, experiences these changes, is taught to participate in them, and consents to them—or not. We must learn to hope in the power of technology and technologists to transform our cities.7
Hope here signals not just the goals of planners desperate for outside workers and outside capital, but the crucial role that reproducing that hope across the city plays in maintaining this system. Even and especially if that hope does not fit the lives of every person in the city, or every institution that cares for it. New strategies of capital accumulation require new modes of social reproduction. For city dwellers, changes in the local economy are often most keenly felt in this sphere: where they can afford to live, whether the neighborhood school stays open, how much public transportation costs. This is where urban citizens are enlisted in the project of building a new, entrepreneurial city.
To understand these urban and organizational dynamics, we must first understand their historical context. Chapter 1 reveals how the access doctrine turned the dire straits of persistent poverty in the neoliberal era into a hopeful, technological opportunity. The invention of the digital divide in the Clinton era provided a sense of mission and urgency to what otherwise appeared to be mere technology provision or skills training. This is where the charge to bootstrap comes from, and it is why the survival of public service organizations depends on their willingness to commit to the project. I show that the access doctrine was a project borne of a particular neoliberal coalition with particular race and class politics, popularly known as the Atari Democrats.
The remainder of the book explores those organizations mobilized by the access doctrine, which seek to close the digital divide. It is only at the level of everyday organizational life that we can see how the problem of poverty becomes a problem of technology—for whom, why, and with what results—and it is only by moving between organizations that we can understand the social and political networks that convince these places to bootstrap, rapidly remaking themselves to solve the crisis of the digital divide.
Where this introduction and chapter 1 focus on the structural scale of large political-economic changes, chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 focus on mesoscale organizational life.8 Beyond the particular dramas of InCrowd, MLK, and Du Bois, the bootstrapping process also provoked extensive debate over the nature and purpose of startups, schools, and libraries as social institutions.9 The conclusion reintegrates these different scales into a larger theory of the political-economic role of the access doctrine and how a new coalition could challenge it.
Where chapter 1 focuses on the access doctrine’s birth at the level of national politics, chapter 2 zooms in on startups, particularly one called InCrowd. Here we see the reproduction of the access doctrine within individual subjectivities and organizational philosophies through a case study of the “right” side of the digital divide. I explore the importance of the pivot to this culture: a moment of fundamental redirection in a firm’s purpose and operations. Over and above any particular product or skill, the ability to pivot is what grants the disparate corners of tech coherence as a sector and drives employee buy-in to a workstyle dominated by uncertainty.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on libraries and schools, respectively, and their attempts to bootstrap. They tell the story of urban institutions remaking themselves to look more like startups and remaking the people within them to look more like internet entrepreneurs. It is here that we see the bootstrapping process unfold and compare it with the role of the pivot in startup culture.10 This is a contested process. Older institutional cultures based in public service still motivate these organizations and their personnel, provoking resistance to organizational restructuring. And library patrons and high school students engage in their own place-making projects within these institutions, but on terms that do not conform to the terms of debates between White professionals over what role technology should play in helping the poor.
Chapter 3 focuses on the daily life of the computer labs in DC’s MLK central library branch, one of the last few safe public spaces for homeless Washingtonians. In their day-to-day work, the access doctrine provided librarians with a way to manage social pressures they were unequipped to solve and decide who is a “good” or “bad” library patron. Over the longer term, the library itself was remade into more and more of a skills-training center to secure a much-overdue renovation and justify its place in a changing city.
Chapter 4 explores a similar conflict between engrained values and a new mission in an entrepreneurial charter school. We enter W. E. B Du Bois Public Charter High School (a pseudonym), as its first senior class—the prototypes for Du Bois’s educational philosophy and innovative technology programs—begins its final year, school-issued laptops in hand. Up to this point, faculty had largely been able to reconcile the conflict between the school’s broad, racial justice values and its narrower mission: social mobility measured in test scores. But administrators grew alarmed as the seniors’ performance data rolled in, and as graduation approaches the school’s digital infrastructure was used to subvert its values to its mission. The imbalance of power in the school’s governance forces it to bootstrap.
Chapter 5 compares the school, library, and startup in order to explain why bootstrapping happens, why MLK and Du Bois begin to look more like InCrowd. The hope of the new MLK central library branch was invested in the glass-walled collaborative workspaces and makerspaces used by library visitors, in contrast to the quiet rows of the computer lab used by homeless patrons every day. Du Bois engaged in a constant series of data-prompted revisions to its mission and methods, attempting to pivot like a startup. I examine the threads that tie these sites together across the city—especially philanthropies and professional networks—and show how the idea of skills training and technology provision becomes sensible, logical, and urgent.
Hope powers change, but often fails in the attempt. Because of the outside stakeholders and historical constraints on the mission of these public institutions, they can never fully live up to the example set by their more nimble, private peers. The conclusion examines the failures of the bootstrapping model alongside the glimpses of political power we can see in how homeless library patrons or working-class high school students build their own places of support and relief within the larger organization. By understanding how this process fails and how people survive within it, we can begin to see political alternatives, potential coalitions that can organize at the point of social reproduction.
I conducted thousands of hours of ethnographic fieldwork between 2012 and 2015, in organizations and with people across DC, to examine how the access doctrine circulated among different people and organizations and motivated changes in their work and identity (Gowan 2010; Marcus 1995). I supplemented my participant-observation with interviews of fifty-five people, many repeated across several years. This proved especially useful for engaging startup workers and founders who were much less tied to any single workspace than teachers, librarians, patrons, or students (Hannerz 2003). I also amassed a collection of texts, ranging from political flyers to promotional materials to syllabi. Fieldwork began in the spring of 2012 and concluded in the summer of 2015, though I returned for follow-up interviews and site visits several times over the next three years—particularly to check on the library’s closure.
In my analysis, I approach these different data streams as ingredients in an institutional ethnography that is less about the story of individual people and more about the social relations within and between these different places (DeVault 2006; D. Smith 2005). I focus on mesoscale organizational life in part because that is, empirically, where the action was and, politically, because urban ethnography in the United States has a long history of scandalously objectifying the lifeways of the racialized poor through a focus on individual behaviors that then circulate beyond their original context (Gowan 2009, 2010; Rios 2015; Wilse 2015). I hope to avoid this dynamic by keeping the focus on, for example, the space of library, rather than the behaviors of individual homeless patrons in it.
I fit into each place differently. At InCrowd, I was a peer professional. In both MLK and Du Bois, there was an obvious power imbalance between myself and the people being served by the institution (students, patrons) and a just as obvious demographic and professional symmetry between me and the helping professionals serving them (librarians, teachers). This was visible in my dress, my Apple laptop and iPhone, my education, and my whiteness. That I was a former social worker helped me hold conversations about the difficulties of passing through the system, especially for patrons but also for several students who were in and out of shelters, but this was just another inequality; I have never slept rough. Insofar as I was not empowered to discipline anyone11 and was interested in learning about all the things one should not do in that space, I built rapport as a friendly outsider. Helping with homework or job applications helped build those relationships while leaving the power imbalance intact. A fair trade for entrée, but just as meaningful were long, meandering conversations about superhero movies or the hip-hop soap opera Empire.
Early thoughts on particular chapters were shared with key informants, who also gave feedback on chapter drafts over the years this project developed. Greater care was taken with portions of the manuscript describing students and homeless patrons, both in terms of seeking out their feedback and anonymizing their names and locations within the institution (i.e., people’s appearances, their usual seats). Despite this collaboration, this is by no means a collaborative ethnography in which informants coauthored the story (Lassiter 2005). The power relation between ethnographer and informant remained intact throughout. While I strive to treat their stories with respect, I have no pretensions regarding this book’s ability to “give back to” or “speak for” my informants, particularly students and patrons (TallBear 2014). Academics’ dissertations and first books have, by necessity, a limited reach, a specific vocabulary, and a lengthy incubation period—all of which circumscribes any political ambitions.
This is not cynicism. It is a recognition of my informants’ exceptional political literacy. They require no social scientific ventriloquism from me. Du Bois’s students organized a walkout against police violence while I was there. Some librarians lived in fear of the email campaigns that homeless patrons had launched against specific branches of the municipal government. Because of this, I do not consider my role here to be giving back to a specific culture, much less speaking for it. I merely hope to tell these stories fairly and frankly, explaining a process that has connected us all, in different ways and in different social locations, in the map of hope and inequality.
1. Any use of a first name is indicative of a pseudonym. Full names indicate that the person being discussed is a public figure and that any quotes from or descriptions of them are drawn from public events. The lone exception is Principal Carroll, a pseudonym that required a position.
2. During the period of fieldwork, 2012–2015, the percentage of US adults who reported using the internet regularly plateaued at 84 percent. Class-related gaps shrunk between 2000 and 2015, but households earning more than $70,000 annually are still more likely to be online than households earning $30,000 or less. Similarly, racial gaps exist but have decreased: 78 percent of Black Americans and 81 percent of Hispanics use the internet, compared to 85 percent of Whites and 97 percent of Asian Americans (Perrin and Duggan 2015). These measurements do not account for the quality of service or inequalities that exist in use or the rewards for use.
3. This too is complicated. Although productivity has continued to increase since the 1970s, the rate of growth has not come close to matching that of the postwar Keynesian golden age and has nearly stalled in the twenty-first century. This another instance in which it becomes clear that the “golden age,” the gains of which were of course unevenly divided by national and international expressions of racism, was an exception rather than the norm, and that the economic imaginaries built within it simply do not fit our present circumstances (Gordon 2016; see also Baily and Montalbano 2016; Benanav 2014).
4. In this vein, I draw inspiration from Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 2013), which demonstrated how an early 1970s English moral panic over a spike in muggings—vastly out of proportion to, and indeed actually preceding, any real rise in rates of street crime—was produced by the national government and reproduced by police, the judiciary, and the mass media as a way to manage social tensions produced by the collapse of the post-WWII economic boom and the welfare state that matured within it. Those tensions were pinned on a scapegoat: the urban Black youth who had been largely left out of that boom and were suffering most from the crisis of the 1970s.
5. Bootstrapping, as a process of organizational restructuring meant to fight poverty through technology, evokes both the American mythology of the self-made man and the technical process of restarting a computing system and loading successively more complex programs from a simple starting point.
6. See “Greed City,” chapter 8 in Sherwood and Jaffe 2014, for an account of the 1980s and 1990s commercial property boom in DC. The city was a major innovator in tax increment financing (TIF), using it for place-building projects such as Gallery Place, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the City Market at O Street, and the DC-USA mall. TIF pays for contemporary economic development initiatives through future, earmarked tax revenues produced in that area or by that development. Across the United States, it has become a key financial mechanism for neoliberal urban development. See Weber 2002 for a fuller description of this funding mechanism.
7. For criticisms of the role of hope in urban development not directly related to technology or the tech sector, see Anderson and Holden 2008 and Wolch 2007. Anderson and Holden describe hope as an affective infrastructure used to enroll Liverpudlians in their city’s urban renewal project, centered on the city’s 2008 designation as the European Capital of Culture. Wolch’s study of the Los Angeles River is an intervention into the climate of fear that dominates discussions of urban ecology, showing instead how human-nature collaborations can nurture a different kind of noncompetitive urban citizenship, built for the long term.
8. Following other ethnographic methodologists, such as Calarco (2018) and Glaeser (2005), I see the value in this inductive research method in its ability not to, as statistical methods do, generalize to a particular population, but instead to generalize to a particular social process. This is one reason that ethnographic contexts also become ethnographic genres: workplace ethnographies, school ethnographies, and so on. The other, less scientific advantage to this method is that done well, it tells good stories that can illuminate human affairs in a way numbers simply do not.
9. Unlike MLK, both InCrowd (and the other startup featured in chapter 2, Hearth) and Du Bois are pseudonyms. Minor details about the startups’ business models and the school’s location and appearance have been changed to support their anonymity.
10. I describe the two processes—pivoting within startups and bootstrapping within schools and libraries—with different names because, despite public service organizations’ attempts at mimicry, they have different motivations and different results owing to their different resources, personnel, and purposes. MLK and Du Bois might wish to remake themselves in the image of the startup I call InCrowd, for the sake of their own security, but they cannot.
11. Far from a disciplinary figure, I actually built rapport through my accidental habit of breaking the spaces’ rules—until I wised up. Like patrons, I brought food into the computer lab because I didn’t want to lose my seat. Like students, I broke the dress code several times because I really did like my new sneakers.