U.S. institutions have been unhinged by Covid-19 pandemic. The corporate sector is using information technology (I.T.), or tech as its popularly known, to address the economic dislocations triggered by the health crisis. Tech, in effect, has emerged as the private sector’s go-to default option.
Innovations, efficiency, and economic growth are central pillars in the U.S. ideology of progress and “can-do pragmatism.” Corporate decision-makers – within a neoliberal and market-based environment – usually present tech as value free neutral instruments that foster economic growth and benefit the general population. A variant of this a-historical narrative is rolled out by a swath of influential Silicon Valley techno-apostles who posit that tech is a positive disruptor of legacy structures. In this optic, dismantling outdated vertical arrangements accelerates the growth of the post-industrial information economy. This simplistic technological determinism reinforces computer-based “a-political” tech solutions to complex devilish problems. Beyond standard rhetorical assertions of inclusion and diversity, the broader issue of class winners and losers is never directly addressed in mainstream narratives. Discussions of class are crowded out by overarching notions of techno-rational efficiency and economic growth.
I.T. are not free-floating instrumentalities. They are socio-political constructions that emerge from and reinforce dominant forms of authority, membership, and power. Clearly, the uses and allocations of tech resources are not equally distributed. Therefore, from an equity and social justice perspective, implementation of technical solutions and its negative impacts on the economically disenfranchised must be critically unpacked.
The Covid crisis initially triggered a residential outmigration of tech competent professionals from cities to outlying suburbs and low-density exurbs. Corporate pandemic employee strategies reinforced geographical reshuffling by supporting computerized home-based decentralized work, destabilizing high and low-end urban labor markets and hollowed out locally-based demand. Unemployment spillovers were compounded by the so-called “Great Resignation” which ripped through service and blue-collar sectors as labor disengaged from work. Non-professional labor shortages were “fixed” by replacing workers with technology. In the long-run this strategy systemically increased unemployment and destabilized working-class communities. In brief, automation of low-end work stabilized corporate profits, tightened control over labor, and decimated working-class local neighborhoods – many of them struggling immigrant enclaves. In this scenario, capital triumphed over labor.
Tech fixes in labor markets heightened existing socio-economic inequalities and geographical disparities. I.T. technification of work within cities and across metropolitan regions restructured land values and housing costs. Well paid professionals, with access to low interest mortgage loans, increased housing demand and costs in cities and outlying regions. Case in point, in 2021 home-price growth surged 18.8%. Thus, increasing urban gentrification and working-class expulsions, while also fostering the growth of exclusionary professional enclaves in select regional places. This mode of combined and unequal neoliberal economic growth – supported by public policies – further skewed pre-existing path dependent allocations of tech and economic resources, and deepened the spatial gap between the haves and have nots.
Up till now, the discussion merely skimmed the surface. Much remains to be said about the class-based information economy and the so-called redemptive lure of technocratic solutions. Along these lines, an upcoming column will delve into the “internet of things” and the growing corporate role in crafting smart city narratives and initiatives.
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Arturo-Ignacio Sánchez, Ph.D. is an urban planner and the former chairperson of the “Newest New Yorker Committee” of Community Board 3, Queens. He has taught at Barnard College, City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, Pratt Institute, and various Latin American universities.