 Firstly, this presentation and the subsequent question and answer session are being live webcast and recorded for posterity, so just keep in mind as you participate in the discussion. Next week, we'll have another luncheon talk, February the 7th, here in Wasserstein, but on the second floor in Milstein, E.C. room. And that talk is bottom up constitutionalism, the case of net neutrality by Kristoff Greber, Berkman Klein faculty associate and professor at the University of Zurich. And the luncheon talk after that on February 14th, it would be hyperloop law, autonomy, infrastructure and transportation startups with the general council of hyperloop one, Marvin and Maury. And at this point, I will turn the microphone over to Mary Gray. Hey everybody, resist, resist. We are the people, people united cannot be defeated. It is my great pleasure to introduce you to Dan Green, our speaker today. He's my colleague at Microsoft Research. He's a postdoc with us this year on the job market, FYI. His work focuses on the future of work and its shadow unemployment. He's a former social worker and came to us from the American Studies program at University of Maryland. He's probably one of the most knowledgeable people I know about the history of labor and how it intersects with contemporary debates about what makes somebody skillful or unemployable or important. And I feel like his work is so necessary today. So please join me in welcoming Dan Green to the stage. And if – go ahead, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. Thank you. And a couple of reminders. This is recorded. There's a hashtag. You'll see on the board, BKC Harvard, if you'd like to shout out anything. And if you could hold your questions until the end of the presentation, that would be wonderful so that we can have them as part of a robust Q&A. Okay, with that. Thank you so much, Mary. Is that coming through? Microphone? No, not at all. Should we get to it? Yulu? There we go. I'm just tired. Good. Ish. Okay. Yeah, yeah, okay. Y'all have made your five calls today, right? Yeah. Yeah? If you don't know what I'm talking about, you go to fivecalls.org over here. You can get a script and who to call for both of your senators, your representative, and two fantastic executive branch people who surely, surely want to hear from you. Okay, so I'm going to talk for about 25 minutes, and we'll open it up for discussion. So thank you very much, Mary, for the very generous introduction. I'm Dan, and I'm a postdoctoral researcher with the social media collective at Microsoft Research. And I'm an ethnographer using the tools of cultural, organizational, and labor studies to explore how we learn how to work through information technology. So this talk in my current book project, tentatively titled The Promise of Access, Hope and Inequality in the Information Economy, is about how the problem of poverty becomes a problem of technology. Why we understand inequality in that frame and not others and how the push to learn to code or else changes what a school is for or what a library is for. Here I draw on three years of fieldwork and interviews of more than 70 entrepreneurs, service providers, patrons, and students to show how digital divide thinking emerges from concrete processes of organizational reform in an era of skyrocketing inequality. I spend time with Washington D.C.'s civic-minded startups, public libraries, and tech-focused charter schools, and I show how organizations feeling a resource crunch because of government austerity and the overwhelming problems of urban poverty, or a crisis in political legitimacy because who needs a school or a library now that everything's online, how they begin to focus their operations on the digital divide in order to resolve these external pressures. In the process, public institutions like schools and libraries begin to talk and walk more like startups, but ultimately this takes them away from their core social service mission. Today we'll spend most of our time talking about one institution given purpose and direction, but also riven by conflict and forced to depart from its mission through its embrace of this hopeful idea that structural poverty can be overcome with the right tools and the right skills. Namely, D.C.'s public libraries. To conclude, I'll map a new theoretical and empirical direction for digital divide studies and what I call technologies of inequality. So let's get started. So these posters started appearing on the D.C. subway system largely in those neighborhoods still majority black in 2013. Each one in the series declares the internet. Your future depends on it. Next to a photo of a working class black Washingtonian and their story about using the D.C. government's digital training resources to get a good office job, often after a career in the service industry. So one of them explicitly calls out, you know, I spent 20 years as a beautician, but now I'm at a desk. And then there's instructions to text for more details. So what I want to know is why does your future depend on the internet and not unions or Jesus or any of a thousand other frames that we could have? Why does this message matter? So I have a brief article in the International Journal of Communication that kind of traces the history of the idea of the digital divide. But it's enough for now to say that this idea kind of emerges within the Clinton administration in the 1990s. And it's fundamentally a deficit approach to inequality. It asks what poor people lack and how we can get it to them so that they stop being poor. There were of course many subsequent revisions to this idea in the literature focusing on spectrums of access or broader definitions of techno, social inclusion. But these revisions still largely retain that old binary at their core, just restated in more critical terms. And despite all these revisions, the really simple basic problematic binary between what Al Gore called information haves and information have nots remains a remarkably durable idea in all sorts of policy and social service circles. It just feels right to position economic transition as a natural disaster that only the highly skilled will survive. So we want to figure out why. This is generally framed, you know, like it's close cousin to STEM gap in terms of gaining access to the jobs of the future, even though we know, as this old BLS chart confirms, that the vast majority of new jobs being generated are in low wage service sectors where you don't need to learn to code. What I want to know then is why this particular frame for inequality, the idea of the digital divide and close cousins like the STEM gap or the skills gap seems so logical and sensible and resistant to critique. To do so, I focus on how our institutions are incentivized to buy into this approach and how they build it into their very everyday operations and their infrastructure. So let's talk about one specific important institution within the digital divide frame, the public library. So this subtitle is a quote from one of my librarians, Elena, explaining why she kicked people sleeping in the computer lab out of the library. So even though the library does much more than lend out books, its institutional mission is a matter of much debate in the internet era, given the easy availability of so many texts online and the drying up of public funds. We all know that everyone in this room as an expert knows the libraries are more necessary than ever, but we all know that we have to make that argument very often. Indeed, in 2004 there was a lot of talk in DC of radically downsizing the library system. So the system had been dealt a really public black eye in March of that year when a worm took down every single computer in the system for an entire month. Today, library officials talk about that as a sort of come to Jesus turnaround moment for the system when they realized how high the stakes were. The library system was, like most of DC public services, understaffed and underfunded victims of the austerity program that Anthony Williams had installed at Congress's behest. So as a comparison, in 1975 the DC public library system had 620 full-time employees working at 20 branches and 2004 when the worm hit they only had 430 employees working at 27 branches. So a hell of a lot of less people were covering more territory. The month-long computer outage was kind of the most visible sign of a system that was barely holding itself together. Fast forward to March of 2015 and I'm at the Martin Luther King Jr. Central Branch where I did most of my field work with Dave, the kind of mid-30s white man at the head of MLK's digital programming, Sheri, a mid-40s black woman, an upper-level administrator at MLK, and the friends of the library charity group, a group of middle and upper-class white retirees who lobby the library on policy changes, run literacy classes and book drives, and outside the library do a lot of, like, nimby campaigning against new housing construction. Throughout a presentation on the library's upcoming renovation, our backs were to these glass cubicles that separate the Dream Lab presentation space from the Digital Commons computer lab. The computer lab's 150 seats were full, as usual, and dominated by the city's homeless population. Mostly older black folks, more men than women, who walk over every day if they're not dropped off by the shelter shuttles that also do pick-up runs in the evening. Dave, eyes gleaming, asked if we'd like a tour of the new makerspace upstairs, a reclaimed meeting room intended as a preview of the fruits that the renovation would bear. So we walked past the librarian monitoring the worrying 3D printer through the Great Hall where a mural of Dr. King overlooked local internet entrepreneurs setting up hundreds of chairs for their monthly demo series, up two floors on the elevator, past one of the video visitation rooms for DC Jail, around the corner from the Black Studies Center, back into the cavernous stairwell that had been a gay cruising spot for much of the 80s, through some locked double doors, and into a sunny meeting room whose floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto a roof's crisp steakhouse. It was hard not to get caught up in Dave's hopeful G-wizery as he showed off the 3D printers, the laser cutters, the CNC fabrication machine, and the scattered laptops. Dave pitched the makerskills that the Fab Lab would teach as a new literacy for a new economy, something that could help defeat the STEM gap and provide the creative, technical workers he said were so desperately short on. Consumers would learn to maintain their devices and save the environment, and skilled techies would have a space to inspire underprivileged communities. One library friend pitched as a poetry lab to upgrade the arts for the 21st century. There was so much hope in that Fab Lab, much of it recycled from earlier pronouncements on the 3-year-old computer lab that seemed so very far away downstairs, where most patrons spent most of their time and which was itself a massive upgrade from the 14 Dells that had previously constituted the main computer lab of the Central Library branch of the nation's capital. There was so much pressure placed on those tools, that room, that library, and those librarians, even though it's now mostly used by library visitors rather than the homeless folks who are there all day every day. Just like the Dream Lab startup Space Downstairs. The Fab Lab offers a kind of reassuring vision of the future in a city where a flood of new tech workers post-recession have been accompanied by a housing crisis and a jobs crisis. According to the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, D.C. has seen a 29% rise in the number of homeless families, and a 12% rise in total homelessness since 2011, and an active policing policy that has 5% of the city in jail on probation or on parole. The top 10% of income earners in D.C. make six times the bottom 10% the highest disparity of any state, because the middle has largely fallen out of our local labor market since the recession. In a very real way, the post-Internet Library, the Internet Era Library, the tools and people meant to overcome the digital divide, this embodies a hope that these massive structural challenges can be overcome with the right tools and the right skills. Indeed, the institution is literally rebuilt around this discourse of hope, this responsibility for local development. So what I hope to show today by way of a deep dive into the everyday life of the urban public library is that the hope in personal computing to overcome poverty is not naturally occurring. It must be produced and maintained by specific institutions of the state and economic transition. D.C. Public Libraries produced this hope as a way of legitimating their existence in the Internet Era, and as a way to manage their role as one of the last remaining safe public places for marginalized city residents. They had a big job to do. For the library to maintain their hope in, quote, using the technology to improve lives, as librarian Grant put it to me, it must necessarily regulate or eliminate other potential plans for the library space. So how does this conflict over what the library is for, and by extension exactly what personal computing is for, manifest? So this is a joke that one of my librarians, April, regularly made with colleagues whenever they saw patrons engaged in self-talk, fighting with each other, watching porn, touching themselves as a partner, or bedding down for the night on a strip of cardboard in the reference section. She gives out imaginary stickers as she walks the library to patrons whom she thinks are using the space appropriately, inappropriately, or just wrong. And to me this is extraordinarily condescending, but it captures something really important. April has a master's degree. She's a middle-class white woman who recently moved to the city for a secure but stressful job. She can tell you how to verify Google results, do basic HTML, and find your nearest polling station come election time. She loves open access in Barack Obama. She's an ideal liberal knowledge worker, and her professional identity is informed by a series of confrontations with not that. Poor or working-class patrons with only a high school diploma, if that. Much younger or much older black and Latino patrons who have been priced out of D.C. housing. Patrons of mental illness. Patrons who mistake socialsecurity.com for socialsecurity.gov. These are her patrons, or customers, as she and most of her colleagues say. Like the public school or the clinic, the American public library system pursues a very liberal mission, open and accepting of all in search of self-improvement, in order to help those it serves assimilate into the norms and routines of the labor market and the local law and order regime. This has been true since at least the founding of the American Library Association in 1893. So most of my librarians describe their profession in class and gendered terms as a, quote, pink-collar one, with April calling them, quote, mavens of knowledge. And this is a very long tradition. White middle-class women in the progressive era 100 years ago worked as what they called readers' advisors, teaching immigrant patrons to move away from entertainment materials like dime novels and towards Anglo-American classics. And this would inculcate sufficient literacy to enter formal job and housing markets. This mission took on renewed importance when the Clinton administration birthed that kind of hopeful digital divide discourse in the 1990s, but also pushed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which gave the U.S. some of the slowest, most expensive internet in the developed world, and made libraries pretty much the only place you can get it for free. More generally, how many places are left in American cities where you can spend all day in a comfortable public space without buying anything, have a wealth of learning opportunities at your fingertips, and receive free guidance from people with advanced degrees? Library's pretty much it. But those present needs for a public space conflict with the institution's needs for a space oriented towards that hopeful future of personal computing. And this conflict pops up again and again within library computing, the rules for it, and the selection and training of library personnel. So there's a lot of things that you can do with a PC, obviously. At the library, this is largely directed towards the professional norms of white-collar knowledge work. For example, the librarian teaching intro to PC basics emphasizes both the skills of how to right or left click, excuse me, create folders, yada, yada, yada, but also concepts, the different names for a flash drive, how deletion works, what she calls, quote, the proper language of the industry, the things that prevent people from being embarrassed at a job interview. The civil service exam is a constant reference point in these intro level how to use a computer classes, even though most students won't be applying for these mid-level bureaucratic jobs. These values are also built into the lab's personal computers and vice versa. Patrons use their library card to sign up for a session at a central terminal and are then directed to a queue, displayed on a large screen, mounted over on the wall. So there are 70 PCs in MLK's four-year-old digital commons lab. In 2012, Elena, who you met earlier, who supervised the three-hour waits for 14 computers in the old popular services lab, told me that even triple the number of computers wouldn't be enough, and she was right, especially in DC's sweltering summers when, unlike winter, there is no right to shelter for the homeless. And there can still be an hour-long wait for a PC. The Faros login system not only manages the queue, it also allows librarians to monitor every session's activity from a central terminal and choose to end or extend the session. Patrons watching porn repeatedly may find a pop-up screen saying, please don't do that. They're not using the internet right. On the other hand, patrons who are working on a job application might ask the central desk for more time and have another half-hour tacked on. Staffing decisions are also key. Choosing the correct librarian, in turn, chooses the correct way of using the internet. This is, on the one hand, a long-term issue of the librarian pipeline. So a lot of the veteran librarians that I interviewed really regret the transformation of library schools into iSchools. And we see Becca's reading of the shift here while she was getting her master's in library science in 2000. It's kind of like the tragic downfall of the profession, in the face of technical over-service values. And she's probably the most junior librarian I know who still calls her patrons patrons rather than customers, and she's in her late 30s. And then there's a further filtering at the local level in the hiring of librarians. So Eugene, a mid-20s white librarian, explained to me here that the Digital Commons is 70 computers. It's Adobe Creative Suite. It's 3D printer and book printer, as well as the Dream Labs glassed and closed conference rooms owned out to local startups. All this is incomplete without a group of librarians who are younger, hipper, whiter, and more tech-savvy than the branch's veterans. Their enthusiastic startup aesthetic is essential to the space. What Eugene called himself and his colleagues, the hipster contingent, performs the hope that kind of links personal computing with social mobility. They've been the source of a lot of debate in the librarian's union because a large number of veteran black librarians were fired right before the hipster contingent was hired and the Digital Commons opened. But this story is incomplete because the library has, you know, the specific form for personal computing, the specific organizational structure. You know, it's individualized into long rows of PCs or desks with plugs, transparent with glass cubicles and open air. Everyone at a PC is staring back at the glass cubicles where startups are working. But what we might conceptualize is the kind of powerful downward pressure of an institution's production of space is always, to a greater or lesser degree, resisted or reconfigured by people within it. So patrons have agency, obviously. First, I want to talk for a little bit about how homeless patrons, the kind of vast majority of regular library users at the computer lab, adapt to the library's organization of space, and then I want to explore how they craft new places kind of separate and distinct from that. So patrons are well aware that librarians are happy to help fill out social services forms for food stamps, affordable housing, et cetera, and they pick particular librarians for good reputation for this or that. Most patrons also acknowledge that something like porn is doing the library wrong, most of it's filtered after all, but that they can get away with it with a little bit of work. You know, you choose the right site that hasn't been blocked yet, you switch between windows when a cop or a librarian walks behind you, you nonetheless keep hardcore porn open in a wide open room with 150 people in it. I never visited the library without seeing at least two screens covered in porn. And this takes a whole heck of a lot of skill that we should recognize. There's an enormous amount of literacy to be able to navigate these systems. It also is a tacit recognition over years of interaction of an unresolved ideological conflict within most librarians. So as Rachel explains here, librarians want to preserve the professionalism of the public access point and its hopeful future orientation towards KnowledgePork. After all, you wouldn't watch porn at the office, I hope. But they also want to preserve the library's historically liberal orientation towards the free flow of information. This conflict between institutional professionalism and personal liberalism extends to other areas, but porn is really the first example of doing the library wrong that everyone I interview jumps to just as job applications is the first example of doing the library right that everyone I interview jumps to. I see a similar pattern in patron interactions of the police who roam the library branches, hand on their pistol, five or six on duty at a time in MLK. They're walkie-talkie the loudest thing in a quiet room. They have a control room upstairs to review their camera network. They're allowed to touch patrons where librarians are not. They tend to enforce norms for sleeping drugs, fights, phones, theft, exposure, rather than personal computing proper. Unless a librarian calls them in to act as the kind of conservative right-hand sternly enforcing liberal left-hands rules. This happens all day. Mia, Ebony, Josie, and Terrell are part of an incredibly generous welcoming crew of homeless black youth that I spent a lot of the three years of my fieldwork hanging out with, mostly in the digital commons, but also in classes, standing in line for the bus or charity food, texting each other, whatever. And any day, they're not at a day program for a clinic or a visit with social services, which is often because being poor is an expensive, time-consuming way to live. They're at the library. But they only ended up at MLK in early 2014 because they moved from branch to branch, fleeing cops who hassled them for sleeping at a computer desk or talking too loudly on the phone. Finally, patrons adapt to institutional form not just through human-to-human interaction, but through human-computer interaction. So they have a whole slew of strategies to get around this login system. So Mia, before she was gifted a used laptop, would email whatever she was working on to herself before her session ended, run back and grab Josie's library card, and start a new computer session as soon as possible. And she told me it's not like you could complete something like a housing application in an hour, even if the librarians are super nice and give you another 20 minutes. But patrons don't just adapt. They also carve out their own places, distinct from the library's production of its space as a training center for knowledge work. Some of these must be suppressed. Others can be incorporated into the library's hopeful vision of entrepreneurial personal computing. So there's a lot of play places in the digital comments. What my field notes always call noisy corner is a group of tables and chairs with no desktop PCs. And for 2013, much of 2014, it was especially after school let out, just taken up by super loud card games, mostly Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh. Friends met there every day and cheered each other on like any other sporting event. But that's not using the library right. You wouldn't do that in the office. So one of the hip new librarians, Jeffrey Mohawk, mechanics overalls, invited a friend of his who lives in the suburb outside the city to drive in on weekends and organize official Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh leagues with jackets and badges and tournaments in the Glaston Dream Lab space that's occupied by startups during the week. Problem solved. There's also a lot of collaboration here. Even as personal computing in the digital commons is designed as a fairly solitary experience. You have long rows of dels all facing the same direction. Kind of like a lecture hall. Collaboration is obviously encouraged in the glass cubicles in the back of the room where startups work and are quite loud despite it being a library. And then there's a lot of analog entrepreneurship among patrons. So drug sales, usually synthetic weed or crack cocaine, which the police cracked down on quite hard, unsurprisingly. There's a team of kind of Craigslist pyramid schemers on their phones at the PC. There's also oil men, black Muslim men with little vials of fragrance either in belts on their chest or in these little wooden racks that they carry around. They hang out before rush hour, pour over their phones, kind of map out the neighborhoods where they're going to sell oil. Cops mostly leave them alone. There's a vibrant repairs culture too where people trade peripherals or give each other tips for speeding up that used laptop or downloading anime. Everyone comes to Mia for this. But there's also analog work like how to fill out social services forms for maximum benefits or like, you know, which exact bureaucrat to see at which exact office. But probably the most important use of the library space, especially for the homeless community, remember last truly public space in D.C., is as a space for rest. A place to check email between dishwasher shifts to stop after your day program because most shelters kick you out during the day to sit and rest and, yes, sleep. Because it's 100 degrees out in our swampy summer and neither shelter beds nor the sewer grates above the subway stop next to MLK or quiet comfortable spaces at night and because many psych meds are strong sedatives. And while similar to the porn issue, librarians are kind of conflicted on this. The fact is that you can't sleep at your PC at the office so you can't sleep in the computer lab. So they patrol knocking on the desk of people dozing off, calling the police if they don't respond. So we've seen that this kind of hope in the entrepreneurial value of personal computing, that this future orientation of public institutions towards knowledge work is not naturally occurring. It has to be produced and the production of that space involves the regulation of emergent places that diverge from the institution's plans. The library is perhaps the easiest site in which to witness this dynamic because it is literally being rebuilt, starting any day now, as the slogan goes to become a new transformative space rather than the old transactional one. This three-year, $208 million renovation project requires, as Grant tells me here, admitting that the contemporary computer lab has failed and that it needs to be taken apart and put back together again. The homeless patrons watching YouTube or dozing off in the back do not fit the hope of the digital commons or the fab lab upstairs and so those rest places, collaboration places and playplaces that patrons built will be physically segregated from the startup workspaces, the seminar spaces and the transformative technologies on the heart of the new library. So zooming back out, we see that the hopeful mission of digital uplift kind of raised the library's status in the eyes of local politicians and community leaders like the friends. It secures this much needed renovation. It provides a way to make the overwhelming problem of urban homelessness much more simple and actionable. So at the most micro level, when the library is the only public place in the city, it's a really difficult decision as to whether to kick out a homeless patron or elsewhere else to go. You know, watching YouTube all day. It's a very tough decision for people that are really passionate about their job. But the hope within the internet, your future depends on it, makes that decision much easier. YouTube isn't job applications or a code academy, so you gotta go. So kind of given the power and the repetition of this hopeful binary between information haves and haves nots, given how it keeps stymying our critical thinking, given how it keeps rewiring our institutions in a way that against their best efforts and best intentions ends up defeating their core mission, should we even be focusing on the digital divide at all? And I say yes. We should accept with revisions. But we need to turn the digital divide research project away from a distributionist focus on deficits, on what poor people lack that makes them keep being poor. And towards a relational focus on technologies that institutionalize inequality, on relationships between wealth and poverty, labor management, et cetera, et cetera. From descriptions of who has what to investigations and explanations for how digital tools help management break labor or maintain the wealth gap between white and non-white households. We need a gestalt shift in our thinking that approaches inequality not as a bug, but as a feature of contemporary capitalism. Rather than asking what will correct the deficits of the digitally divided, we should see how these divides between strata are technologically reinforced and reproduced. I call this critical turn in digital divide studies, technologies of inequality. And there are some brilliant scholars that are already pushing digital divide studies in this direction and away from counting the number of computers, phones, and skills that poor people have. So Amy Gonzalez at Indiana is doing really fantastic interview-based work on poor families' relationships to their phones and computers. She finds that low-income users' personal digital tech is marked by cycles of what she calls dependable instability. Things break, service goes out, signal drops in the library, the Starbucks, or your best bets for internet. Maintenance is a lot of work, and the phone and the laptop in this perspective becomes a nexus for all other sorts of social issues. Who has access to a bank account? Who has the politics of public access? How long can you stay there? All of that is distilled in this broken phone. And this turn informs my own thinking on my next project, on technologies used to hire, fire, and manage the labor market. And this begins with a collaboration with current Berkman fellow of FOMA Junwa. Together we're researching the history and design of online job applications and their implications for managerial behavior and employment discrimination. So according to Deloitte, 60 to 70% of job applicants go through online applications with personality questionnaires like this every year, asking how you feel if someone stole from you or whether in school you're one of the best students, yada, yada, yada. In 2011, CVS settled out of court in Rhode Island for a discrimination suit against them for their use of personality questionnaires because we suspect they're an ADA violation. Kroger is undergoing a similar suit. Plaintiff Kyle Beam accuses them of filtering applicants for personality disorders. These applications integrate scheduling software, skill and personality assessments, and background and credit checks. It's where the expectations of the labor market are set for employees, employers, and the unemployed. It's early days yet, but if FOMA and I are starting to see these technological intermediaries to figure things. First, even though they're advertised as automating hiring, they're not so much automating hiring as automating rejection. So systems like Unicrew's HirePro automatically coal red light applicants provide warnings about yellow light applicants and provide suggested interview questions for green light applicants based on their results in the personality and skill assessments. And then the decision on whether to hire them or not. Second, vendors of these systems position them as key ingredients in the corporate dream of a lean, on-demand workforce, having only the number of employees you need right now with exactly the skills you demand of them and nothing else. And the language of this and their SEC disclosures and their brochures and the materials they send their clients, this precedes what we think of in terms of terms of an Uber or whatever by at least a decade, if not more. Like this is around in the mid-90s. So to conclude, that's where we're going next with this technologies and equality project exploring how the relationship between labor and management changes when rejection is automated and hiring is kind of de-skilled and centralized. It's the next step in my study of what I call the future of unemployment of which the current book project is certainly a part. So as I conclude, I got some questions for you guys about my current and future work in a discussion we might have here about this approach. So for the future, what other mundane technologies kind of capture these important institutional dynamics and stratification effects? Where in your own research do you see something like a broken pay-as-you-go phone that captures these dynamics or an online job application? For the present, what other public institutions, besides schools and libraries, are involved in turning the problem of poverty into a problem of technology? Many of you are working in places like this. Where do you see these kind of institutional reforms taking place? And for the past, are there historical analogs to the contemporary focus on learning to code for the jobs of the future? Other moments in history were the assumption that changing jobseekers' skills would change the quality or quantity of jobs available. What's the longer history here? Those are the questions I want to talk about with you guys. Thank you very much for having me today. I look forward to the discussion. We have a mic going around, so just raise your hands and let Rip. We ask you to speak into the microphone just so we get it on the recording. Hi, Merrill Alper, faculty associate here at Berkman and professor at Northeastern University. Thank you for the talk. The posters from the get-go really compelling physical material that sets in motion your overall narrative. I want to ask a little bit about this is like the class question, what do you mean by technology? Specifically related to what it sounded like you were describing were techniques of inequality, not necessarily technologies, so ways of doing the computer right or ways of doing the computer wrong. People learn techniques via technologies, but there's an embodied practice of how one sits, how one doesn't. And so where techniques and technologies are they the same to you or are they different and how that fits into the construction and the reproduction of structural inequality. Do we want to stack them or do one by one? We'll just go. Okay, so I will take the cop out on the class question by saying both. And I think like, you know, the kind of like, you know, social construction and technology approach, you know, you're laying in winter or whatever. You know, there are certain values and practices and ways of doing things that are built into these machines. And I think the clearest example of that within this portion of the ethnography is the kind of login system for personal computing where it has certain values of surveillance that people are very familiar with if they've been involved in the social service system for many years. It has certain values of regulating what is a productive or unproductive use of the computer. Libraries if they want to receive federal funding much must install some sort of filtering system as part of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Children's Internet Protection Act. You know, that time magazine thing with the kid going that thing. So I think a lot of these values are embedded in the system. To point elsewhere in the ethnography I spent a lot of time with STEM focused charter schools. The one I was with the kind of student data system was called School Force. It was not just modeled on Salesforce. It was built from Salesforce code. And this gave teachers and administrators a particular relationship to managing student data and enhancing productivity that was quite similar to customer relationship management. To return to the future project like in the online job application stuff one thing if Oma and I are doing is just like applying to a bunch of jobs. You know and one thing we see especially in detail is that you move through your work history pretty quickly you know the personality question might take a little while but the thing they're super interested in the thing that takes five screens to do and has a million options and forces you to have your signature on is scheduling. Like they really want to demand this like wide open schedule about where you'll be able to fit into certain slots. So I think that it within it holds certain values about what they imagine their workforce to be. So the cop out is always you know dialectics or whatever we want to call it. Who else? Hi my name is Diane Williams. I'm a computer scientist and tech entrepreneur. I want to say I've been a volunteer for this will be the beginning of my six year being a substitute volunteer at the Harvard Square homeless shelter. Awesome. And which it's a happy accident. I wish I'd done it years before. And I think they've had a fairly high success as a student run facility. They've had a very high success rate of getting people out of homelessness. Because they have three computers there but they're not allowed to watch porn. They can listen to all the music they want but they cannot watch porn. They they specifically sit down like like case by case basis for those that want to help. And there are many of them especially when I do the overnight shifts when I have to wake somebody up at 4.35 in the morning because they have to like get their coffee because they run their way to a job. And many of people I will see for a while and then I don't see them anymore and I go oh I miss Paul and then I go no that's a good thing. So it's not here. So it's like wow this is working so it's a very rewarding experience. And I was just looking now because recently they're looking for volunteers for resource advocates for people to sit down with them on a case by case. Some people have really immediate needs you know the ones that have like mental issues that's a separate thing but the ones who just need nearly like workforce employment development. I was just sitting here as you were talking about who is supporting the you have you sort of have to look at your constituency. If there are a lot of unemployed people in your space to say hmm maybe one of some of the friends of the library can volunteer to do because we have to we have to get them out at 8 in the morning. They come from 7 in the night to 8 in the morning because the church you know you have to clean it and you know people have to go to school and work so there's no coverage and maybe on Christmas and certain holidays that's when they can stay all day. What I'm trying to say is when we're forced to not that we want to but we're forced to have them go out to the day maybe have a continuation of what the shelters do you know using technology using it but they also need for those who need help so like you say that people are just sleeping or just watching porn that's a very negative representation of the homeless population because it's quite diverse. I could not agree more about that. I spent much of my time in grad school or before grad school and during the beginning of grad school doing re-entry services for folks that have been in hospital or in prison for a long time and were often homeless so I was helping folks get a job get a housing and that's what made me interested in this work. One of the things that I really get out of what you're saying is that kind of similar to Meryl's question you build a space with specific values in it and then you act on it. 100%. I think there are important moves forward that library systems are making and more library systems can make that are very much in that spirit. I will put a caveat on that before I say that in that people are homeless because they don't have houses and the overwhelming problem of homelessness in Boston and Washington D.C. is a crisis of affordable housing. We should do as much kind of restorative interventions as we can but if we are not making housing cheaper it's just not going to solve the problem. This is why D.C. has seen this really crazy thing that I have never heard of in any other city were family homelessness skyrocketed. Individual homelessness crept up but not nearly at the level of family homelessness and it was often these working moms who have two or three kids and can't get childcare or work but to qualify for childcare they need to be in stable housing and there's this bureaucratic loop where everyone gets caught. There's the overarching structure of there's not enough housing. Regarding building a space with a different set of values in it I could not agree with that more and I think that some library systems like particularly San Francisco are really really good at this and I want to say either Seattle or Portland have hired a series of social workers that work on the floor both training librarians and hooking people up with specific social services they have started to use the library because they know that's where people are at as a home base for other social services like the health department or like workforce training organizations and the community government that sort of thing but there can be some tension there because you know some of the suggestions were made to do that in DC and some of the older librarians I talked to were kind of resistant to that because it's not what a library is for in their training in the classic MLS some of the younger librarians were a little more excited about it and would push people to get in there was some really interesting stuff with sign ups for the ACA that was built out of the library that was really strong the horror of DC families not being able to visit their incarcerated relatives in person providing a free video visitation within DC library is a fantastic alternative within those structural constraints but they kind of pushed back on stuff like having more social services in there they hired a social worker partly in response to the condo building across the street starting to complain about homeless people hanging out outside the library but most librarians have never met the social worker you know she mostly works upstairs and does policy stuff so I think like these like wrap around services that you're talking about on a very small scale at your local clinic can absolutely totally happen within libraries and I very much hope that more people are following the kind of San Francisco model thanks for leading this talk it's really great and interesting what's your name? I'm Kira it's me Kira I started the talk by showing some statistics that alluded to the fact that the fastest growing industries in the US are creating roles that are not necessarily related to technological literacy or know-how and and the throughout your talk sort of threaded some ideas that there's this match here between both the aims of you know of the programs these libraries are running and and the needs of the population also attitudes and sort of racial divides as well in terms of what should be used for what people should be learning about and I just wanted to get a little more information from you about how that fits in some of these roles as all industries become more technology focused will have an element of computer and technological literacy to them but I'd love to hear you speak more on that and also in relation to the work that you mentioned that you're doing now on job seeking sure thank you for that and I think this is the big structural issue that I'm concerned with and all of my projects is like what what makes someone employable and I think you're exactly right to say that there is some amount of digital literacy that is useful if not required in every single one of these jobs so my wife is an RN over at BMC and as part of her union honestly she is like trains a lot of the other nurses in just how to use the new tech that they get into so that absolutely totally happens I think when you know President Obama gets on stage got on stage and talked about like the jobs of the future filling the STEM gap provided the skilled workers that we need this is absolutely not that is technical people writing code for consumer technology in the public imagination but you know B2B obviously would no one would sniff that so I think there's a disconnect between the discourse of what we need and the reality of how the labor market is actually growing this points to in the long term a stark bifurcation in the labor market between a small number of highly skilled knowledge workers in finance, tech that kind of stuff and a very large number of service workers making crap money servicing the lifestyles of those folks Boston is a very stark example of this you all had a dining workers strike what two months ago so there's that disconnect there there is a kind of like overarching theorization of that disconnect that floats around some particularly Marxist circles that all these like learn to code initiatives every one lap to per child in all of our schools replacing language requirements of computer language requirements all this is just a way to increase the supply of skilled labor such that we drive down wages we just have too many people for jobs and now programmers become much cheaper I think that may be like an after effect of some of these institutional dynamics but I am always very suspicious of like large top down ideological or economicistic drivers for these things so in the book project I kind of explain this as a process of institutional reform that relates very closely to what you said about the racial divide between skilled knowledge workers working in helping professions like librarianship and majority black and Latino homeless patrons hanging out all day at the library because there is no other public space available and I think that for my librarians for my teachers that I interviewed absolutely for my civic minded start up types that I interviewed probably for most people in this room the idea that you go to school good skills and get a good job it's true, like it worked like that is true it is true of you me, my friends like that is true it is true in our social circles it is grossly unrepresentative of the overall population like the, so I am in the what is it the 29 to 38 census cohort I won't the most dominant educational experience in my census cohort is not college it is some college like that is a third it is people who start but don't finish and then completing college or not attending college at all are about equal so I think what happens is that we end up making policy and redesigning our institutions around our own experiences around the things that worked for us but that just doesn't change the number of jobs that exist out there or how well they pay or how cheap housing is just a comment on that it's interesting because you have this I experienced within my own experience I had all these skills going into college but as a first generation student I didn't have the network so is there in this perception shift that you call for I am also Cassandra I am Canada at the Extension School so is there it seems like the one-on-one training that you get on a computer experience is really isolated so that if you are going to network to get a job yet there is no collaborative spaces like is there any integration of that social experience in these technological skills or is the focus on coders and tech skills very there is just a disconnect is there any integration of the reality of what it actually takes to get a job in training in these programs and is the attitude of librarians who have to suddenly deal with social services or this population a reflection of a changing demographic or their own bias into what the perfect patron looks like it's two separate questions it's a comment and a question comment in the form of an extended essay no I do the same thing so let's talk a little bit about how they get there to that isolating skills training experience then we'll talk about how we get out of it so how do we get there is partly through another process of organizational reform in sociology we call this institutional isomorphism the process by which organizations engaged in similar ventures come to look and act a lot like one of the channels by which libraries and schools start acting more like startups are these networking and professionalization ventures that train them and spread ideas and show what the model for a good employee and a good outreach looks like so in education that's stuff like TFA so even for teachers that I interviewed and followed around who were not working at a charter school and had some Teach for America experience in their back lots of them did but even those who did not have Teach for America experience regularly attended Teach for America workshops Teach for America funded galas Teach for America grant initiatives in association with the Gates Foundation or whoever these kind of professional networks where I have similar people together and help reproduce similar ideas in similar ways and I don't think this is a I have strong disagreements of TFA but I don't think at the level of organizing these events to like train teachers is in any way kind of a nefarious thing the problem of teaching at like a high school that I was at the problem of working in a library that is effectively the largest homeless shelter in the city is overwhelming it is a really tough job and when you have overwhelming demands you look for solutions and there are a lot of powerful networks TFA I would say the iSchools consortium involved in librarianship training the Gates Foundation involved in grant making that help provide examples and outlets by which these overwhelming problems can be made a little more sensible and a little more actionable and that helps make the problem a little more simple as far as how we get out of that and go into making a more social experience in the library for skills training in MLK that was like totally possible it was lurking around the edges in something like the fabrication lab or in something like the like a repairs lab they started to do now and then like those were social spaces where people could hang out and get their hands dirty it ended up not it ended up not being attended by the folks who use the library every day it ended up being attended by folks who were on the email list and come to the library after work in their suit and do that kind of stuff and I'm not I'm not entirely sure why that is I think it's a possibility that just wasn't capitalized on part of it may be just like the interactions that the majority of patrons have with the librarians are in that more solitary non-conversational space so they're not expecting to get anything different there is often a confrontational relationship, especially with the police there is a sense that certain rooms in the library are for certain people and not others there's literally a glass wall between the computers which are quiet and the collaboration space for startups which is loud and they can see each other all day so some of those values are kind of built into there it's a possibility and I'm sure just as there are libraries that are doing social services better there are places that are doing skills training in a more professionalized, networked way whether or not that solves this problem of not having enough good jobs to go around that's another question but it's a challenge it's a big challenge I pre-empted the mic I stole it from her I just wanted to follow up from hers as well I think what I'd like to get at is more the existential question of what the purpose of the libraries is you've given us a lot of really compelling examples of things that really go beyond the realm of workforce development in general and you've been citing a lot of trends pointing to the broader economic trends that make this less of an intractable problem so part one is should we just be focusing on labor market preparation as the core mission driver of the libraries part two, if that's the case how would you like to see the technology narrative switched? We've seen that this is a mismatch pointing to other people's works who've also problematized this idea of the digital divide, Virginia U-Banks thinking about the ways that low wage work is already very much tied to technology work along with those other bigger things Tyler Cowan, the big 20-80% divide of the economy in general should we be looking at broader social safety net questions as opposed to and it's the technological role core role that plays more broadly how do you want to recast the technology and workforce mission? Should libraries be solely focused on workforce training? No okay, next question I didn't know but so I don't say that out of spite for their mission but just because the skills training doesn't solve this it doesn't matter how skilled you are if there's no jobs for you to apply to so for that bear reason I would hope that a lot of our institutions move away from the skills training myth and a lot of other people talk about this kind of stuff in different settings Tresi Cotm's wonderful new book, Lower Ed talks about this in terms of the education gospel the idea that if you keep getting degrees you will kind of stack up into success so no, I don't think that's the way to go just because it doesn't solve this problem I do think that there are ways to better integrate tech into social services at the library because if there are some training changes so most of my younger librarians who had been trained in high schools said they felt like completely unprepared for the portions of their job that were effectively social work because they had been largely trained on the more technical aspects of their job this is one reason I would love to work in an high school is to do helping skills training like how to ask a good question that kind of stuff but I think if we change the training we can start changing that a little bit I think if we accept libraries as community centers which is easy to say in theory but harder to do because you got to come down to making decisions about how many books are we going to have what is this room for how many are people out to sleep here overnight it's easy to say in theory harder to do in practice tech return to Merrill's question ends up tying a lot of these values together so one really hopeful thing that I saw at MLK was I helped out with their design for the new 311 system that the city was making and which the library kind of became a hub for and this was like a phone tree or a website that you would navigate through and say a problem you were having I am about to be homeless I need a lawyer for X my landlord is doing Y and you would be directed to the right social service agency based on that kind of stuff so I am excited for that kind of thing and I think libraries in general are extraordinarily well positioned and in many ways already do act as community centers that link people to other kind of social services so the big overarching problem is still that but I think there are a lot of ways to eat around the edges in terms of redesign an interest of time can we stack those last two questions Hi thanks for your presentation I am totally on board with your suggestion of reframing the way we're talking about tech and taking a more critical posture to how it reinforces inequalities and so I'm curious what you would say the upshot of that is in terms of sort of the substantive or pedagogical services that libraries offer and so in particular do you think that what tools are going to dismantle that house is teaching someone a code academy like technocratic self-congratulation that's not going to do anything and how would you reformulate that to make it genuinely empowering or maybe it doesn't need reformulation and so that's all to presume maybe that's something libraries are supposed to provide too so I'd be curious basically wherever you want to run with that one so okay no we're not going to go for it great hey Dan my name is Colin Reinsmith I'm a professor in school of library and information science at Simmons College and a faculty associate here at the Berkman Klein Center you've hit on many pain points I should say in my field so I appreciate that because it's super productive and I really appreciate that so I'm going to throw two quick questions at you in fact that you identified the agency of patrons and I would love to hear more about how that might be a starting point for informing our field on the one hand and also curious to know sort of your message for those who are funding the field also who are I would argue putting a lot of pressure on libraries for this change and wondering as a path forward you know what you would say about that yeah I'm going to try to answer that instead of going into that I think I can do this so the primary audience for my turn from digital divides technologies of inequality is people who study the digital divide and keep counting the number of computers that people have because I think that mostly the economists are taking our lunch like this big conversation that has been dominating a lot of the public sphere for the last since the recession on growing inequality what does it mean how can we solve inequality where is inequality where does it come from am I inequality like that is largely being tackled at the macro scale by people like Piketty which is super useful and very helpful but I think people who have this like intimate understanding of how the workforce is changing what our technologies how our technologies are involved in that how our technologies tie us to other institutions and other people we have like these great tools to be able to make better arguments about how inequality is happening and being reproduced so to go back to Amy Gonzalez's work the stuff about you know thinking about who uses prepaid phones and why is a really quick inroads to saying like oh look who doesn't have a bank account what can we do to help the unbanked as we call you know we we could have postal banking maybe we could have banks and libraries you know it's an inroad into that question where instead of like looking at symptoms we start to get more at the core of things so to that end and what happens in libraries I think the the question becomes not what do you do with that particular technology like the broken phone but how does it tie you to other institutions that are overseeing or reproducing this kind of skyrocketing inequality be they banks be they hospitals be they jobs whatever whatever and you use this broken phone or this online job application as a way to say okay what kind of conflicts are embedded in this kind of thing what does the patterns that I keep seeing and the use of this stuff tell me about how my city is changing or how social services are changing you start from the thing and you branch out to what it ties you to to your bank account to your employer to the system of background checks that screen out people with a record that kind of thing so you start from there and build networks outwards I want us to begin with the device rather than ending with the device so in terms of talking about the tech and moving away from that institutional reform what do patrons want and this is democracy right like we you know for now like libraries can do what we make them do these are community spaces that we can intervene in and talk about however what we know from long ethnographic studies of community meetings and I'm thinking particularly of the critiques of community policing like getting the police really involved in the community and you know coming around to the local neighborhood watch and stuff like that and talking to them is that those democratic habits and the time and availability and literacy to go to those meetings are concentrated in a very small slice of people this is part of the reason why community policing doesn't work because it just gets really rich people in neighborhoods start complaining about noisy kids so it is a democracy but we also need to inculcate democratic habits I think that this is kind of can be hard and overwhelming for librarians to have to deal with hundreds of people every day regularly talking to patrons is a good idea to something that should be constantly happening responding to patron needs and being willing to say that's something that I didn't know the library needed and I might not agree with what it's for if people need a place to eat at the library or need more bathrooms at the library people would appreciate having private rooms to talk with their jobs counselor at the library I think there needs to be a willingness to take those complaints very seriously even if they depart from our vision of what the library is for now the other challenge that you pointed to of course is that our vision of what the library is for is often set by people who don't work at the library especially these grant funding agencies that are responding to conditions of austerity and you know this is going to be my blunt Marxist side coming out but you know if we didn't need those grant agencies then they wouldn't be able to tell us what to do with our libraries so there's been a historic drop in public coffers since the early 2000s but especially reaching up after the recession and tax revenue has just dried up so if we start stealing more things from rich people and putting them in libraries then we don't need to ask rich people for their money very nicely and then do whatever they tell us to do with their libraries right, that would be democracy so there's a top level concern here that is not just specific to libraries but is specific to every social institution in particular schools share a lot of these same dynamics I think in terms of making the pitch to funders that's a macro level thing about how you talk to your state reps and stuff like that, you know, stay angry make your five calls but in terms of making the pitch to funders I would be interested in seeing more library agencies connect their patrons experience their patrons story to those funders having funders visit having patrons go to the pitches for grants and stuff like that it's a really hard thing because of all these democratic anti-democratic, democratic norms that dictate who gets in the room but I think if we start changing who gets in the room we can kind of break out of that bubble you know, like the the first question they always teach you in ethnography school is like who is in the room who is not in the room and who is in the room I think we just need to keep asking ourselves that in our school board meetings, our library meetings our grant funding meetings that kind of stuff and getting the sign so thank you guys so much this was really wonderful