If you do not choose to log on and skill up and connect to this unlimited opportunity, then you are going to be a drag on national economic productivity, and you need to be contained by the carceral wing of the state.
SPEAKER_00Hello and welcome to Tech Won's Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Dan Green. Dan is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland's College of Information Studies and the author of The Promise of Access, Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope. Now, I have to say, I know I speak to a lot of authors on the show, but I really think that Dan's book is an essential read because it connects changes in the political economy of the United States, and certainly these changes also happened around the world as well, to the narratives that we have been sold about technology and how that changes the welfare state and the way that we understand poverty, inequality, social reproduction, and so many important aspects of society. Dan goes back to the Clinton administration and how that coincided with the growth of the internet. And Clinton was not only the democratic president that embraced neoliberal policy by slashing the welfare state and increasing the carceral state, but he also oversaw the privatization of the internet. And he used the internet as kind of the rhetorical tool to justify the changes that he was making to the welfare state and largely to the orientation of government to say that no longer were these social programs necessary to protect, you know, the poor, the unemployed, people like that. But now the opportunity and their redemption would come through technology. If only they had access to the internet and developed their digital skills, then they would be able to access a global labor market. And we might say pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And what Dan describes is important because he also shows how those changes to the political economy and to those narratives on the federal level not only were pushed out to other governments around the world, but also kind of filtered down into city governments and how they changed their governing practices to reorient around technology and to focus on those industries and those workers, but also to alter the public institutions that were supposed to serve, you know, everybody, or specifically, you know, the poor and the marginalized in particular, to change their kind of remit to serve these new technologically oriented ideas about how you lift people out of poverty and about how you address these social inequalities that I think we can see, you know, a couple decades on now, that they haven't solved these problems, but they have been very profitable for certain people, and they have really changed the orientation of the state in a way that I think is very fair to say is not positive and is not working for the people that it should be working for. So I was really happy to speak with Dan. I think you're really going to like this conversation. I highly recommend picking up his book. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find out more about that at HarbingerMediaNetwork.com. If you like this episode, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. And if you feel like you learn from these conversations, consider becoming a monthly supporter to support the work that I put into making each of these shows every single week. And if you want to do that, you can join supporters like Rich Thomas and Isaac Meckler by going to patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Dan, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much, Paris. Really happy to be here. Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you. And you know, obviously, I recently read your book, The Promise of Access, which I think is really fantastic and is a book that people should be picking up and reading and kind of understanding the implications of these policy changes that have happened over decades that we're going to be talking about today. And so the beginning of your book focuses on changes that took place in the political economy of the United States during the Clinton administration, and I guess a little bit before that as well. There are several aspects to this, but I wanted to focus on technology in the internet first. Around that time, there was a narrative of the internet as a means of promoting freedom and democracy and things like this. And I think a lot of people still hold on to those kind of libertarian-ish ideas when they think about the potential of the internet even today. But at the same time, administration officials were talking about it through a neoliberal economic lens and through the lens of state power. So can you talk a little bit about that divide and how the Clinton administration saw and positioned the internet?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a really good question, Paris. And I think like one of the core interventions that the book makes is to make sure that we always understand technology policy as a poverty policy, to never take um considerations about the economy as something that is separate from technological development. You know, technology is not an exogenous force that emerges from outside economics. So the Clinton administration, you know, really importantly was the first time that the Democrats were back in the White House since Jimmy Carter. And in the mid-70s in the US, as with pretty much the rest of the West, um, the wheels really fell off the economy. And, you know, there's there's a couple of events that kind of signaled this from you know, from leaving the gold standard to uh the kind of oil shock of OPEC to, I think for me, the most important event is Ford and uh financial elites just refusing to um fund New York City and allowing the city to go bankrupt. Um, but for whatever reason, the kind of economic compromise that was built post-war that allowed for you know big firms with a steady growth of employment, you know, a series of promotions that you would get over time, um, mostly nationally bounded in this kind of uh Keynesian value network where, you know, American companies were all feeding each other within the balance of the country, managed by this uh labor industry compromise. Uh, that wasn't working anymore. The profits that had emerged from that had kind of dried up. Everything was shaken up by these series of crises, um, as well as, you know, a series of revolts all over the world, um, not just uh anti-colonial revolts with folks in Africa and Latin America reclaiming their uh their land, but uh, you know, wide swathes of urban riots across France, the US, Canada, everywhere. And so a new uh kind of economic regime emerged that was built much more around um what David Harvey calls flexible accumulation, where um you see especially urban centers no longer kind of collaborating as uh different parts of the same value chain in uh in one country, but um competing with each other within one country. Um we see broad assault on unions, um, deindustrialization, and the replacement of those um well-paying, highly centralized jobs with service jobs, which are much more disperse, much less well-paying. At the same time, we also see um very importantly for economic policy, uh, the boom in the US in particular, but but also in the UK and France and Canada of the prison industry in a way that just had never been seen in really in human civilization. Um, and this is in part a response to political problems about what to do with these um civil rights and black power activists who have been challenging the state for so long, but also, frankly, about what to do with the um surplus populations of folks who simply do not have room for them in a deindustrialized economy. And for the Reagan Republicans who were really at the kind of the peak of their power in the post-70s and the 80s, um, this was not a particularly difficult question. You know, you you crushed the unions, um, you destroyed the welfare state, and you said, you know, if anyone is struggling, that's their fault. Um, we uh say that these, you know, especially racialized folks are um surplus to requirements. We don't need them, we'll lock them up. In order to regain the White House, the Clinton Democrats uh needed to tell a different story and importantly win a different political coalition over to their side because the post-war coalition with um northern industrial unions was largely starting to collapse. So, what they did at the top, at the kind of donor level, was reach out especially to tech in the 80s um through the Democratic Leadership Council, um, which Clinton and Gore were a big part of. This included people at MCI, at Apple, at Intel, um, who all became really important um coalitions of this new democratic um party uh that was nicknamed in the press the Atari Democrats. Tech was important to them because it required uh some research and development, you know, more than what the Republicans were giving out. It required a more um global outlook and required some investment in education and control over intellectual property, things that uh distinguished the Democrats from Republicans. At the same time, they recruited new voters who replaced the multiracial, um socially unionized working class of the Great Society and New Deal eras. These new voters were, you know, people like me. They were um white, highly educated professionals, often working in office parks in the suburbs rather than in cities. So places like Montgomery County, Maryland, um, Route 128 uh in Boston or Silicon Valley. And these folks were uh all about formal equality and equality of opportunity. Um, so you know, pushing very hard for like fair housing legislation, for example. But redistributive measures, especially those that affected them, um, they were very harshly against. So um two-way busing, for example, that would integrate their schools with urban schools, um, really not popular with this crowd of white professionals. Uh, they relied on education uh heavily and as a um a way to kind of move up the chain in their particular professions, uh, in tech, especially, but also, you know, things like accounting, consulting services. Uh, and so we're not unionized by and large. And the Clinton Coalition brought these two sides together, these new voters and the uh new industrial base, by telling a different story about the economy than what the Republicans were telling. And this focused on the internet. Because instead of you know looking at this problem of persistent poverty in a deindustrialized information economy and saying, well, you know, those people are surplus requirements. Clinton administration said, when we build out the internet and we ensure through, you know, through market means, but nonetheless ensure that everybody has access to the internet, that ensures that everyone has access to the global labor market. And no one will ever be outside of the economy because we are building this thing and commercializing this thing, what had previously been a relatively limited research network that will connect everyone to jobs that could be anywhere. And, you know, you so you see commercials in the 90s from some of these like main members of the coalition, especially MCI, where it's this famous commercial of like a young Anna Pacquin who, you know, going to play Gene Gray. Um, and she's standing in the middle of a desert and she's saying, you know, distance doesn't matter anymore. Um, there's no such thing as uh time, uh, race doesn't matter, gender doesn't matter, disability doesn't matter. We're all online, we're all on the internet. This is a much more hopeful story about the economy than the kind of like vengeful story that Republicans were telling. And it worked. You know, Clinton really sold himself in '92 as a whole new kind of politician, representing a whole new generation of voters who are coming into their own. Uh, and really kind of gave us the whole vibe of the 90s, which was, you know, we can do anything. Um, the old rules of the economy are gone, and we're connecting everything together. Um, so the internet for them, um, and Gore had been telling this story for you know more than a decade at this point, was not just some kind of um, you know, curiosity about RD that they were bringing to market. It was really integral to their entire message about what they were doing as economic managers and why they were superior to the Republicans. And it's what brought them back into power after many decades. It was really central to their mission.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's such a good description of what is going on in the Clinton administration and, you know, before it, for these shifts to happen that result in, you know, what you are describing in your book and what we're obviously going to dig into a little bit further. Um, before we discuss the implications of that, I just want to stick on this point just a little bit longer because, you know, obviously the policies of the Clinton administration with regard to the internet are around um the privatization of the internet and in particular the deregulation of telecommunications. And I feel like when we discuss that today, it feels like there's kind of an inevitability around that. Like naturally, the internet had to be privatized because this just had to happen. But in the book, you describe how this was kind of a break from some previous ways of regulating telecommunications in the United States and you reference AT ⁇ T in particular. So can you talk a little bit about that change in the government's orientation to telecommunications policy from one that saw it kind of as a public service, I guess, to something that needed to be distributed or provided through competitive markets?
SPEAKER_01The shift can seem quite subtle, in part because the administration, especially in 92, 93, is it goes back and forth in the language. But what you see over time is that the executive branch in particular, and then Congress through the 1996 Telecommunications Act, moves telecommunications away from a goal of universal service, you know, everyone gets what should be a relatively public good, um, to something like universal access. We've seen this a lot with healthcare debates recently. Um access then becomes the key word for this coalition. Um, but it's really in the internet that we start to see it first. And access really just means an opportunity for competition, a place where you can, if you fight hard enough, get the goods. So in the 20s and 30s, when it became clear that um telephone companies were not connecting to each other because they were competing, um, there was a lot of negotiations uh with the then emergent FTC and FCC to make sure that folks, especially in rural areas, were able to connect to this network. And the compromise that was eventually reached was that ATT, Mob Bell, um, would basically receive a government-approved monopoly. Um, this is distinct from what happened in, say, Britain, where there was like outright state ownership of like British telephone. Um, but nonetheless, you know, there was no trust busting until the 70s, really the 80s, of ATT because they exchanged that privilege for universal service, getting everyone onto the telephone line in the name of being able to access important information, you know, uh call for emergency assistance, that sort of thing. The internet could have been that. I don't go into this in the book as much, but I have a forthcoming article about um how most internet infrastructure is operated by commercial landlords about this transition. Uh, you know, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that IBM, who was really the biggest tech company of the 70s and 80s, um, could have been handed the whole of what was then the NFSNet, um, a research network that had taken over the civilian functions of ARPANET. But they made some kind of crucial business errors in that stage of like the early 90s when uh the internet was going to be deregulated. And so it was really thrown open to be a free-for-all. The idea was that the maximum amount of opportunity for competition would serve the maximum amount of people. This was then written into law most notably in 1996 with the um reform of the 1934 Telecommunications Act. Um, and you see, especially in Al Gore's speeches and his correspondence, he's really leading this within the initiative, um, that this uh goal of getting everything to everyone is slowly, slowly chipped away. And by 1996-97, it is replaced with a goal of opening maximum competition, not just in the US, but globally. So in the WTO, there are negotiations about extending internet access and funding internet build-out in post-Soviet states, but it's contingent on privatizing their state-run telecommunications infrastructure. The way this happens in the US is that all kinds of frictions that are introduced into telecommunications ownership in the previous regulatory regime are killed off. Um, so now uh you can have like cross-sector ownership, like a cable company can own a satellite company who can own a phone company and that kind of thing. And we uh kind of remove any kind of universal service requirements uh on the basis that the maximum amount of competition will deliver people the maximum amount of internet, um, and that the people in kind of choosing the best options for how to get online will then be able to find the best way to compete themselves in the global marketplace. Um, this uh is important to note, fails miserably, uh, and it is this kind of regulatory regime that gives the US um not only some of the slowest, but really the most expensive internet in the OECD. Uh we saw this in a really bad way during the pandemic. So in in my county, for example, which is a you know a relatively wealthy county um outside of DC, we had one choice of vendor to um provide hotspots to the thousands and thousands of kids that did not have consumer internet at home because it's incredibly expensive. Most Americans have one or maybe two choices for broadband. And in that kind of monopoly position, you can raise the cost as much as you want. So a bunch of people were already without internet. The pandemic hits, you have to do virtual learning. We have one vendor to choose from to provide people hotspots, and then it turns out half of those hotspots don't work and they have to be returned en Moss. And this is directly a result of the kind of free market ideology that the Clinton and Gore administration brought into internet regulation. Um, and it was really important throughout that that was a state project. This was not just kind of backing away, but actively selling off government assets to Sprint, MCI, AT ⁇ T, and so forth, um, and actively forcing other countries to follow the same so that American investors and American kind of soft power political missions could succeed elsewhere. It was really an important part of their national and global outlook.
SPEAKER_00I I want to get to the broader things that you discuss in the book, but I have one final question, and maybe you can give a quick answer and then we'll move on to the other points. But, you know, obviously what you're describing there is how the government goes from this position of wanting this universal service requirement to a policy that's focused on prioritizing competition. And I think in this moment, we're having this discussion about antitrust and you know the best way forward. And it seems like, you know, the arguments are that part of the reason that people are not having sufficient access to the internet and whatnot is because there's not enough competition. And because AT ⁇ T, Verizon, Comcast, these large telecommunications companies are controlling the market and have consolidated too much and are monopolies. And so I feel like what you're describing there gives us potentially a different way to look at the problem. So could you discuss that a little bit?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I hear what you're saying. And the the antitrust issue is extremely complicated. I won't, I won't pretend to be an expert, but I will say that we get to this realm of monopoly power through wide open competition. And this is fairly easy to expect. It's what you've seen in industry throughout the centuries, like this is like the classic kind of Marxian conclusion that you know capital tends to concentrate. When you throw open the floodgates and allow everyone to compete for everything for a major resource that tends towards natural monopolies because it's a you know fiber in the ground, what's going to happen over time is that the people with a greater amount of capital and the interest in specific regions are going to corner the market. You know, it's it's very hard to do a startup broadband supplier when someone like Comcast is already in the game. So we get to the state of zero competition today and the disservice that does to consumers by yesterday throwing open the doors to competition and allowing everyone to compete for everything. Specifically because we did not want to think about the internet as a public good.
SPEAKER_00As you were describing earlier, you know, you said that the approach to technology policy also really becomes poverty policy, right? The way that the administration wants to address poverty is not through a welfare state and social support programs and things like that, but through providing access to opportunities, to skills, to things like that through its telecommunications policy. Um as a result of that, you talk about an access doctrine that is kind of adopted by the Clinton administration and by the US federal government, and I'm sure other governments as well, um, and how that results in a digital divide where technological tools and digital Skills are supposed to allow people to bridge this divide. So can you talk a bit about the access doctrine and the implications of it and then who falls on which side of this digital divide and how they're supposed to cross it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, it's it's always going to be really important for me to say that even as I'm critiquing the way technology poverty and policy policy has been handled in the past, it's always important to say that these are very real inequalities. There are absolutely have always been people who have not been able to get internet access. And so to say that something like the digital divide was a constructed policy problem, built on specific terms and framed in specific ways, does not mean that the problem itself is false. We've just been talking about it the wrong way. So I'm part of the problem here, as are many other researchers in my field. You know, we have, since the Clinton administration coined that term digital divide, um, probably through an administration employee named Lloyd Morissette, although there's some debate in 95-96. Um, there have been people like me since then trying to measure who has what internet where, um, what they're making do with it, um, all for the reason of um, you know, first establishing these binaries between who's online and who's not, and then, you know, somewhat complicating that with saying, like, oh, okay, so who has what quality of connection, what kind of device, what they're succeeding from. And we keep doing this. But at the at the core has always remained this um framing of the problem that the Clinton administration gave us, which is, are you online or are you not? That's the thing that's going to determine your life chances in the information economy because that's what determines your access to the global labor market. And that's based in this idea that I call the access doctrine, which you know decrees that the problem of poverty can be solved through the provision of new technologies and new technical skills. You make sure that those people who are left out of the information economy are able to catch up and compete. And that, as I was talking about, is kind of there initially in 92, 93 when Clinton and Gore come into power, but it really comes into the fore when they start talking about this problem of the digital divide through these um famous falling through the net reports that begin in, I think, 1994. And, you know, they find that there, you know, and these are facts, that um black folks in central cities and especially native folks in rural areas are unsurprisingly much less likely to have internet access than white folks in the suburbs. You know, it's variegated by class, race, and geography. These reports grow in length over the next couple of years. Um, by the time the Bush administration comes around, 2001, the word digital divide is gone, but that same kind of hopeful framing remains. And these reports assert over and over that a modem connection is the thing that is going to get you a good job and economic opportunity in the 21st century. There's this, you know, always looking towards the 21st century in the 90s. And that's that's very real. But what a lot of technology scholarship fails to do is kind of ask, what else is going on at that moment? And so it's really important to track that at the exact same time that the Clinton administration is saying, hey, this is the solution to persistent poverty in the information economy. You know, you may be stuck in a dead-end job, you the plant may have left your town, you may be um struggling to get along on what meager welfare still exists. But as long as you can get online, it'll be fine. And at the same time the Democrats are doing this, they are filling our prisons in an unprecedented way. That is always a poverty policy. And they are, as Clinton said, destroying welfare or ending welfare as we know it. They're making it much more difficult to find respite from the labor market for parents, for disabled people, for people who have just lost their jobs through no fault of their own. Instead of having institutions that kind of protect you from the labor market in a moment of weakness, provide some funds so you can get back on your feet. The new poverty policies that started to roll out in the 70s, what we call workfare, says that everybody has to be in the labor market at all times. You have to be constantly looking for a job, skilling up and training. There is no outside. There's no break. This even filters down into education, where education starts increasingly to be more and more about workforce readiness. So the technology policy is not separate from this. It is an integral part to this. And it is through that opportunity presented by the internet that the Clinton administration is able to say everyone has access to global labor markets. If you do not choose to log on and skill up and connect to this unlimited opportunity, then you are going to be a drag on national economic productivity and you need to be contained by the carceral wing of the state. And it is in this way that this coalition presents kind of the left hand of neoliberalism, the friendly, hopeful story about anyone being able to do anything. And that is distinct from, but always in collaboration with the right hand, the punitive message that if you step out of line, you will find yourself in a cage. And both of those stories happen at the same time, and they are very much present in everyone's life as they struggle with poverty, even if they seem to sometimes be coming out of different politicians or different institutions.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. You know, I think that's such an important framing of it, and especially that divide, like the two different sides of the neoliberal policy and what is going on there and what they expect of people, and also how that transforms, you know, the services and the institutions that are available to people. And so in the book, you describe how this changes things on multiple levels. And so I wanted to start with, you know, on the higher scale of the city itself, because you talk about how there's a real transformation in urban policy and on the focus of the government of Washington, DC in particular, but I'm sure that this um also goes across many urban governments, not just in the United States, but in many other countries as well. So can you talk about that change to urban policy that comes as a result of this larger kind of neoliberal shift that you're describing?
SPEAKER_01Sure. So one of the kind of core operating principles of the book was that um, you know, people are smart, or at least they're not stupid. So if if you're getting a message from the top-down, from the federal government about the kind of new economic rules of the game, and if that message is not particularly borne out empirically, you know, it's uh often we see that um, you know, at the minimum, the story about STEM gaps and skills gap is more complicated than first presented. You know, most uh STEM majors are not working in STEM post-degree. Um, when we look at uh labor market returns over the life course, it's often critical thinking skills that receive the most wage payoffs compared to something like uh technical skills. Uh, we have seen like, you know, really terrible failures in um big training programs, particularly in the uh Reagan administration that tried to take um workers from uh deindustrialized towns and push them into more clerical jobs. We've seen a lot of failures like that. Uh and we've also seen, frankly, stagnant wages over the last couple of years, even as educational attainment has risen across the population. So it's at minimum the story that, you know, log on, skill up, you'll be fine, is more complicated than we've led to believe. Nonetheless, it remains the story that everyone has repeated all the time. And I don't think it's just sheer repetition that gets into people's heads. You have to be taught this lesson and you have to live this lesson. So, what I do in the book is after moving from this kind of um large-scale political economy of the late 20th century, I then move into the city of Washington, D.C. to show how this message gets built into our institutions that uh prepare people for the labor market or protect them from it. Places like libraries and schools. I also spend time um with startups who have become the kind of ideal organizational model that everyone else tries to be. The schools and libraries are trying to be like startups. Why is that? Why does that message of social mobility carry over from one domain to one very different one? In part, this is because that uh cities themselves are quite desperate. After being kind of cut out of the National Keynesian Value Network in the 70s, you know, most famously symbolized by New York City going bankrupt, the kind of center of Western capitalism, cities realized that they were in competition against each other. And this in itself is not terribly novel on my part. There have been a lot of good, especially geographers, who have shown that um cities are often competing to uh bring in kind of limited industrial resources downtown and to make their places, um make their cities sites of consumption and to encourage uh real estate development above all costs, um, since that's the kind of most um consistent, sticky investment that they can get, which then winds up uh driving out a lot of people who have lived there for years. And we have seen over and over again that especially when we're um hinging our future on tech, on luring in these new, um, what you know, like someone like Richard Florida would call creative workers, um, that often leads to a lot of um changes in the city that don't necessarily uh bear a lot of returns for everyone else's chances in the job market. What I wanted to do in the book was show how that uh hinging your hopes on recruiting these talented, largely white outsiders to save your city plays out for everybody else on the ground. You know, what does it do to our schools? What does it do to our libraries and places like that? So cities have uh done things like offer these like mac massive economic incentive packages, you know, we'll we'll pay for your first couple of years of rent or even like employee salaries or whatever, um, we'll lower your taxes if you move into specific areas, um, all that sort of stuff. Uh and in part because tech is, you know, relatively not uh, or at least small startups are relatively not capital intensive. They don't need a lot of heavy machinery or anything like that. The way the city actually changes to recruit these people is uh largely through what we would call gentrification. You know, you replace existing housing stock with luxury condominiums, um, you replace uh older businesses serving working class black and brown folks with newer, uh higher priced uh, especially national chains that people can recognize as they move from city to city. And there's a way that, you know, especially people like Richard, Florida, but really cities in general, can kind of um trick themselves into believing that this is an investment in productive capacity. You know, why by encouraging this kind of exclusive real estate development, we are building up our city as a site for industry because, you know, all these techies just work in their laptop at home or in the coffee shop anyway. When in fact, this is just the you know the same regular, degular kind of gentrification that we've seen for decades. The other things that cities will do is then try to reform the rest of the uh what we call like kind of social reproduction, the places outside of the labor market that prepare people for it. They reform those parts of the city to kind of transform existing members of the city to look more like these new white outsiders and to make the city itself look more welcoming. In part, this also happens because those new white outsiders are now important members of the city who start to serve on school boards or make grants or even run for office or at least donate to people's political campaigns. So places like uh schools begin to compete on startup models. That's really what charter schools are to fund a bunch of different experiments, much in the same way that venture capital works, on the hopes that uh one or two of them will bear returns measured in test scores. And we often find that business language is incredibly important into the way these places are managed and funded and taught, that technical skills are the focus of the most popular chart and far-reaching charter chains. We see in libraries that are desperate for funding and legitimacy, uh start to reach out for tech sector models for how they do business and start focusing more on digital skills training and technology provision, over and above the services that people are actually trying to receive when they go there. You know, things like I need healthcare signups, or even just I need a place to rest because there's no other public space in the city. So the city starts to make um lots of offers to outside businesses because the city is desperate and competing with other places for industrial capital. But the city also starts to remake itself, especially those institutions that prepare people for the job market in the image of the tech sector.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think everything you talked about there is important, but the transformation of the institutions is also incredibly important, like the institutions of what you call social reproduction, right? Which is a term that I think many people who are familiar with left-wing scholarship will be familiar with. Um but you talk about how these institutions have to bootstrap to remain relevant, right? And to try to emulate these kind of startup models for, you know, I guess a public institution, but that they struggle to do that because their um kind of goal or or what they're trying to do is very different from you know a startup or or some sort of private business. Um, and I think one of the pieces that stood out to me was how naturally these institutions have been starved of funding to a certain degree because of the cuts that have come with the neoliberal period and have thus had to seek out funding from other areas or to show that they are embracing this kind of model so that they can get funding. And, you know, naturally, one of the institutions or one of the places that these groups can get funding is from places like the Gates Foundation, which have a particular idea of what these institutions should be doing. So, can you talk about how these kind of um funding gaps and how this need to kind of bootstrap and show a different way of doing things that aligns with the tech model affects how these institutions work?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Yeah. So the overarching mission of the book is to answer the question, you know, why do we keep pursuing this particular strategy of economic development if the results aren't there? And, you know, why do we keep teaching people to log on and skill up, learn to code, or else? And I locate the answer in these sites of social reproduction, the places that, you know, don't make products but make people. Some of them are public, owned by the state, some of them are private. Um, some of them are in the home, the unwaged work of uh mostly mothers, but parents generally. And it is in those spaces, these institutions of social reproduction, that I found the answer. Because it's not that you, you know, when I spent you know three years hanging out in DC public libraries, that I would talk to librarians there and they'd say, Oh yeah, we're effectively the largest homeless shelter in the city. We're gonna solve that if we teach everyone C. No one actually believed that. What they did believe was that the library itself, um, and this was very true in DC in the early 2000s, um, was at risk of total collapse or privatization. School system in a similar state. And they knew that they were short on legitimacy, you know, politicians didn't believe in them. They were short on funding because of relentless budget cuts, um, especially during recessions. These places are really, really vulnerable because they rely on local property taxes and local sales taxes. They don't have a ton of federal funding. Um, and they were frankly overwhelmed. You know, as other places close, you know, clinics, community centers, stuff like that, um, all those other social problems end up coming on to schools and libraries and places like them. You know, it's it's very common to hear teachers talking about, like, you know, I'm a teacher, but I'm also a nurse, social worker, peer remediator, uh counselor, you know, all these other things because there's no other place to receive those services. So these institutions that face poverty head on then find that they have to tell a particular story about poverty. They have to engage in this kind of mythmaking in order to keep themselves alive. So when they start saying, yes, we are going to teach people to code, that is the thing that wins them legitimacy. Politicians start saying, like, hey, you know, you got something here. This sounds interesting and new. They win funding, like you say, from often from private foundations that are filling the gap left by tax cuts. Um, these foundations more than ever have a lot of tech sector influence, especially the Gates Foundation, you know, effectively runs education policy in the US just as much as the Department of Education does. Um, and they clarify their mission. So the example I often give is the library, who, you know, frankly, doesn't know what to do with folks who are sleeping there. It's a really difficult question because there's nowhere else to rest during the day in our swampy hundred-degree summer. There is no right to shelter for the homeless in that period. Most homeless shelters close during the day. There is really no real public space to speak of. You know, you got to pay to hang out at Starbucks or something. So a lot of people feel that, yeah, you know, let someone sleep, it's fine. But they're not using the resources, they might be blocking access to a computer, maybe the the donors or at least the people who show up at those community meetings don't like it because they're, you know, kind of busy bodies to show up to meetings, but it's a confusing thing. And the Access Doctrine provides clarity to that. It says, no, people are here to log on and skill up. So if you're not making use of these resources, you gotta go. And while that might tug at the heartstrings for you know individual service providers, that clarity is really, really helpful. So those are the kind of things that convince people to retell the story, and that's ultimately how the story continues to be reproduced. But like you said, ultimately schools and libraries can't be startups because they have um, you know, obviously a different level of funding, um, but also a fundamentally different mission. They, you know, ultimately must accept, usually, I mean it's different with charter schools, whoever walks in the door. They can't pivot in the middle of a year and suddenly become a business-to-business operation instead of a business-to-consumer operation in the way that startups do. They don't have that level of flexibility. And they're constrained by other stakeholders in a very different way. You know, they have to answer to politicians, um, to school boards, to funders, to students and teachers, to unions, in a way that startups simply don't. So they often find themselves running up against problems that they're unable to solve with these solutions that they've kind of bought off the shelf. You know, it's um in schools, for example, like we've known for years that like the majority of something like test scores is accounted for by non-school factors. You know, you give us like a kid's zip code and the neighborhood that they live in, the school that they attend. We can do a pretty good job of estimating their SAT scores because they're very much a function of household income. And there's just not much that a school can do about that. You know, a school can provide a safe space for a kid, it can do wonderful things. I'm a teacher because I believe in schools, but at the end of the day, there's also really important things about like, you know, how much food is in a kid's belly, whether they have internet at home, whether their parents are able to read at them, whether they have to work after school or not, whether they have activities in their neighborhood that the school can't control. So the school ends up putting all of its pressure on itself to kind of save these kids. The library puts all its pressure on itself in order to end homelessness in the book, you know, in part because the library that I'm talking about was desperately overdue for a major renovation and had to save itself. But they keep failing. You know, they can't live up to this mission that they've set before them, to this model of startup to success. And so they just start again. You know, bootstrapping is a never-ending cycle because when you fail, there's always another skills gap to worry about after that. There's always another programming language, another job challenge, something that you did wrong last time you could improve on next time. Um, ultimately, because the the thing that you're responding to isn't that skills gap. It's the fact that your institution might die and you need to do something to save it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's such an important point to make, right? About how these institutions change and how it's difficult for them to provide the services to achieve the mission that they're supposed to be carrying out when there are these other expectations that come from something like the access doctrine and this idea that technology is what is going to solve these issues when it's these other, you know, aspects of the social safety net or whatnot that are necessary, but that are not being provided by these larger kind of government structures. And I think what you're discussing there also shows how we think about people differently, right? And how we are supposed to act as individuals, how we're supposed to learn, how we're supposed to operate in society, in the labor market, et cetera, et cetera. And as I was reading your book, I was thinking about uh something I read in Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture, where he describes how the global business network, this consulting agency that was started by Stuart Brand, who, you know, also started the whole earth catalog, you know, tried to promote the idea that the way of working that was established in the consulting firm was something that should be rolled out to the rest of the economy and other workers, you know, something that is natural when you think about kind of the post industrial society, but naturally doesn't work for everybody, right? It might work for these really high paid consultants, but you can't have everybody like living in this insecure, precarious way. So, can you talk about how this kind of shift in the access doctrine then changes the idea of how we are all supposed to live and work?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that that's a really powerful point, Paris. And ultimately the way I approach that question is through hegemony. You know, there's this Marxist scholar, Antonio Gramsci, an activist who's um important in the Italian Communist Party and famously imprisoned by Mussolini, who's really important to my thinking in this book. And, you know, he's most famous, really, is a political theorist for explaining how coalitions come together to run a given society on a certain set of rules, making sure that everyone in a given society is pointed towards the same social ends, even when that path ultimately doesn't benefit them. Because what has happened is that a certain dominant class has universalized their interests such that everyone else is persuaded by hook or by crook to follow that model. And when, you know, when Stuart Brand or whoever is saying that this is the way that we need to do things, that's a fine invitation. But what we see in the Clinton administration or in municipal policy, um, later in the ethnographic portions of the book, um, when I'm when I'm interviewing people like that, is that that is not um entirely a process that people go along with willingly. You have to change how our schools are funded, how kids are tested, um, how labor market is presented to them, um, what they read, what they work on, where they're allowed to be, how they sit. All of these things have to change in order for people to realize that there's one way to be successful in this economy. And that is through this kind of uh nonstop training, this embrace of economic uncertainty that can work for certain people in certain places and startups, but simply does not apply to other kinds of work or other kinds of institutions just because they're different. And that universalization of class interest is exactly what I was describing when we were talking about the Clintons um putting together a new coalition to kind of ensure that they're uh had continued success in the information economy. It's taking these tech sector donors and financial sector donors, kind of um international-minded people at the very top, the kind of people giving money, um, even becoming politicians themselves, if we look at our governor of um Colorado, or at the bottom, you know, new voters and activists in the party, or these kind of tech sector or office park people. And their way of working or the way they uh they think the world should work, then becomes everybody else's way of doing it by remaking these institutions that prepare us for the labor market or help us when we're out of it, schools, libraries, that sort of thing. And at no point are people being tricked or fooled by some kind of propaganda. But if you're, you know, say some of the like the homeless folks they hung out with for a while in DC public libraries, they know that to receive help and to be recognized as worthy of service, you have to present yourself as in search of a new skill, constantly looking for a job. You can't just be expressing an interest in some kind of literature or a need of a space for rest. You need to present yourself as someone who wants to work and needs to work constantly, adding new skills. They have to mimic the kind of 18-hour workday of the startup that was down the street.
SPEAKER_00It's so like sad and frustrating to hear. Um but you know, obviously, what you're describing there and what you have described in these other ways that these policies and this kind of like economic orientation, the shift in the political economy has altered institutions and ways of governance on other levels, um, really suggests that you know what you're describing here with these changes through the Clinton period, through the access doctrine, the bootstrapping in these institutions is how capital reshapes society and the people within it to serve its goals and in particular its modes of accumulation, right? Um, and that's something that, you know, I've been recognizing recently as I've been reading more and more about these histories and these shifts in political economy, you know, over time. And I think for me, it also shows the difficulty of materially changing things for the better when the overarching structure is sending things in a in a particular direction and in a direction that I think we would consider is negative and not having the kind of social benefit that we would want to see. And so what are the implications of that when we think about how to challenge it?
SPEAKER_01So I think the basic core insight of really any kind of work of Marxist political economy is that you know it needn't have been thus if the world was built to be a specific way with a specific series of steps. I mean, this doesn't even have to be Marxism, it's just history really. Um then it can be rebuilt or deconstructed to be something different. You know, it wasn't inevitable. If we can show that specific people made specific decisions along the way, we can suggest that other decisions could be made, um, even if everyone is um you know ultimately responding to this like massive structural global condition of depressed prophets in the 1970s. There were other steps that we could have made. In the book specifically, I you know I close on an optimistic note, and I am hopeful. I am I am more hopeful now than I was 10 years ago. I'm I'm frankly more hopeful now, especially after seeing you know, arguably the largest uprising in American history last year than I than I was when I finished the book. Uh, and that's because like the core action of the book focuses on this universalization of class interest, that these um particular class of professionals, largely but not entirely white, um, became the center of liberal politics in the 1990s. And in the book, we see that happening both in the hyper-profitable sectors that are the center of so much media attention and startups, but also in those places that are um helping people try to catch up to that success with schools and libraries. So we have you know software developers on the one hand, but then teachers and librarians on the other. And often these people come from the same class, you know, good middle class families in the suburbs who, you know, went to decent schools, they all uh, you know, room together in college, they might um, you know, live in the same apartment building in DC, they might brunch at the same place or whatever, and you know, even as one side is paid much less than the other, they're there's similar people with similar ideas about how the world works. I consider myself part of that class. You know, that's that's part of my job in education, right? As I'm supposed to help people do what I did, you know, even as I know there's a ton of exogenous factors to my success that are about, you know, just sheer luck or birth or race or geography or whatever. You know, I went to school, I learned some skills, I got a good job, now I'm supposed to teach my students to do the same thing. But importantly, in institutions of social reproduction, those professionals are confronted with the people that they're managing. You know, there isn't a lot of contact at Uber, for example, between developers and drivers. You know, that's that's changing with some political action. But for the most part, the professionals in in tech who are designing systems that reproduce capital relations in the workplace, you know, tools of management, are not interacting with the people that ultimately they're uh displacing or automating or controlling or whatever. It's not their job. But teachers see their students every day, librarians see their patrons every day, they know that then when they're trying to reproduce a certain mindset, that they're gonna be confronted with those consequences immediately. And what that means is that there is a potential to see the kind of immediate stakes of the game and a solidarity because ultimately they're partners in these crumbling institutions. You know, the teachers realize that like their students are suffering just as much as them and they need help to get through this. So since 2012, at least, um, we've seen in the US a real turn in what is often called social justice unionism or community unionism, where um professionals in these spaces, especially schools, but historically um libraries here have had a you know serious political history in the US, and contemporarily there's a lot of great political action in libraries and in Canada specifically. You know, we've seen this turn where workers in these spaces try to unite with the people they serve. This is in part a defensive maneuver because the first thing that happens when teachers go on strike is that politicians say, Oh, you're hurting the kids. So you need to build alliances with kids and their parents in order to prevent that from happening. It's also uh in part to fight for common goals. Everyone wants a better workplace, you know, with air conditioning that actually works. And it's in part to build power that is, you know, persistent for a longer amount of time than just like whatever contract fight you need to give fight for a raise. You know, if you have roots not just in your workplace, but in your neighborhood with the parents who are sending kids to your school and who seek so many other services from the school for food, um, you know, translation, um, especially this past year for all sorts of other resources you might need at home, um then you're gonna have a pretty big bond of that school. So in Chicago, in the teachers' union there, we saw um the kind of radicals that took over CTU and the core caucus start to organize not just their members, but students and their families. They started to work with um bus drivers, security guards, and other kinds of public employees so that when when they went on strike, the entire city was behind them. And they won and they kept winning. That model worked and they beat Rahm Emanuel repeatedly. And it's that kind of action that I think offers hope. You know, and I tell a couple stories in the book about um kind of early roots of that action failing in DC because that solidarity hadn't been built, because the antagonism in the central library branch that I look at between uh patrons and librarians was, you know, was pretty intense over the years, so that when librarians um tried to provide services as the library closed and prevent patrons from being pushed out to the edge of the city, um, there just wasn't a lot of trust there. But the terrain is there, the opportunities are there, and we see them going off all over the country that these uh professionals start to organize with the people that they serve in a kind of a common vision for an institution that acts as a public good rather than an engine of competition that separates everyone from each other and acts in a in a vertical fashion. You know, so instead of this kind of paternal relationship where a librarian or a teacher tells this working class kid how to be in order to survive, they start looking at them as partners in the present, as people that are allied in the search for a just, equitable institution that treats them all like human beings, and they start to organize together. In teacher organizing, we often say that like my working conditions or my students' learning conditions. In Los Angeles, um, teachers uh there have been heavily involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, and so when they were fighting for their uh recent contract, uh they also uh fought for an end to um random searches of kids at their schools and um discriminatory disciplinary policies. And this wasn't just in like liberal strongholds like LA or Chicago. In 2018, these teacher strikes were in West Virginia and Arizona and Oklahoma, they were all over the place. So the ground is there and it is ripe. And I think that is that kind of horizontal solidarity between professionals and the people they serve that can really build power for the future and really change the whole economy. Um, schools and libraries aren't going to be outsourced. That stuff needs to stick around forever. And those are real community bastions that people love and care about. And it's a real space of strength that can offer a real substantial kind of hope for the future rather than this false hope that if we simply skill up, we'll be able to outcompete everyone else who is doing the exact same thing at the exact same time.
SPEAKER_00I love that. And I think that's an essential point, right? Those key public institutions are important places that people can organize around and find solidarity. Um, Dan, I have really appreciated this conversation, and I think your book makes such an important contribution to illustrating how these changes to political economy, to policies affect so much more in society and shape things to serve, you know, capital in these ways. So I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much, Paris. It was a pleasure.
SPEAKER_00Dan Green is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and the author of The Promise of Access, Technology Inequality and the Political Economy of Hope. You can follow Dan on Twitter at Green underscore DM. You can follow me at at ParisMarks, and you can follow the show at TechWon't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedia network.com. If you want to support the work that I put into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.