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On June 10, 2019, eight of the 12 branches of the Oakland Public Library (OPL) system closed due to the heat. Ocean air and the notoriously chilly fog usually blew from the Pacific Ocean, blanketing the San Francisco peninsula and stretching a cool breeze across the Bay to Oakland. Though increasingly unremarkable at a time of countless unprecedented weather events, the area was hit with a staggering heat wave.
When we walked into the West Oakland branch that morning and prepared to open, we could already feel it in the air. As the day crept along, so did the numbers on the thermometer we kept behind the front desk. Library policy required that we close the branch if it got above 87 degrees inside. Given the temperate summers, most of the Oakland Library branches didn’t have air conditioning units.
By mid-day patrons came in expecting a reprieve from the heat, only to find it stuffier inside. We ran all the box fans we had in the building. The windows stayed closed to keep the 100 degrees outside. When the temperature crept up to the limit, the Library Director sent out a notice to close the branches by mid-afternoon.
Where were people supposed to go? Around the neighborhood, there weren’t places people could go to stay cool without having to spend money. There were only a handful of small liquor stores you could duck into that even may not have air conditioning.
As we watched that thermometer, I kept thinking to myself: why is it that in Oakland, which sits right across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco — the heart of Silicon Valley innovation, capital, and wealth — people can’t even be shielded from extreme temperatures?
The climate crisis will act to further exacerbate social inequities. Everyone will be impacted, but people with the means are going to use those means to survive. Maybe they’ll even manage to live comfortably amidst disaster. Those powerless to change their circumstances — where they live, what and when they eat, how they feel — will be forced to survive increasingly desperate conditions. It’s hard to feel this truth without the facts of it being another headline. Another shard of a grim reality amidst a barrage of grim realities.
But having to close our doors that day made it feel real, like a hot breath blowing down my neck.
All my branch needed was central air conditioning. Maybe the bureaucracy of approving budgets and construction plans is some kind of non-trivial headache. But those are organizational problems. The technology isn’t complicated. We’ve long figured out how to change the temperature of indoor spaces.
What’s missing isn’t more digital innovation. What’s missing is priority — a priority to acknowledge and address the suffering that’s felt by those marginalized and stripped of their power, by people who are already barely able to survive. As we confront the climate crisis, there needs to be a reckoning about who’s continued to benefit from, or even enable, the institutions that destroy the planet. Instead of focusing merely on dismantling this system, putting time and energy towards enabling those who are intimately familiar with their *own* communities’ challenges to enact their own solutions. Instead of seeking to be saviors, to help give agency to people who’ve been historically stripped of it. That’s only possible if individuals, and the communities they represent, have meaningful control over the levers of power.
The Joy of Public Servitude
Have you loved a job so much that you gush to your friends about it? That when you think back on it, months and years later, your heart aches because nothing felt so good, so damn fulfilling? That’s how I feel about my time working at the Oakland Public Library.
Almost all the jobs I had before and after that have felt abstract, distant from people’s real problems. They’ve involved me having to convince myself that the work was important and that it was making an impact. When I’m theorizing and organizing for the “digital commons,” I constantly questioned myself if I was making the right kind of interventions. If the things I’m fighting for — platform co-operatives, community networks, digital research and cultural archives, Free and Open Source projects — will ever become so full-fledged as to help us confront the planetary crisis that lies ahead of us.
At the library, I wasn’t fighting for a future that I wanted to manifest, I was standing in it. All the books that passed through my hands, the kindergarteners that sang along with me during story time, the patrons who gleefully placed an item in front of me to be checked out. I’d never seen so many grateful people day to day, week to week. The high you get from helping someone find exactly what they were looking for, right there on the shelf (and they don’t need to pay for it because it’s already theirs!). There’s seriously nothing else like it.
In the United States, the state of public infrastructure is bleak. Public education is bleeding quality teachers — underpaid and reasonably terrified of shootings. Our public transport is a dysfunctional joke compared to other developed nations. Our most well-resourced public institution is largely constituted of apprehensive people trained to see anyone they approach as a potential threat, armed to the teeth to give them the option of murdering at will.
But the library? In this country, they’re oases in a desert of social infrastructure. In many regions they’re more than functional, people rely on them. It’s part of their routine. It’s a safe haven for anyone, literally anyone, to use.
Due to a predominant culture of glorifying individualism, private property, and personal liberty, people here decry being a cog in a machine. But being a part of a greater public collective is seriously underrated. It’s great to know what you have to do every day and not have to question the overall purpose: to help people find the information and resources that they need. It made it easy for me to care for everyone who walked through the door or called the landline. Giving people the tools to live their lives easier and better and having my skills and labor appreciated (and fairly compensated thanks to the union) is a kind of unadulterated joy I want everyone to experience.
There’s a quote by Cornel West: “Justice is what love looks like in public.” To riff on that, I think social infrastructure is what love looks like in public. It listens and responds to the needs of people. It’s a fabric that weaves people together towards a shared community thriving. If we’re to survive the worst of what’s to come, we need to build and embolden public systems of care.
But it’s not enough for such institutions to aim for goals or merely have the right intention. The institution itself needs to look after its own, to be its own microcosm of care that it radiates outward.