Coffee + Broadband + Productivity + “Knocking the Hustle” by Mark Anthony Neal

Coffee + Broadband + Productivity +  “Knocking the Hustle”by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Middle-of-the-afternoon, on an ungodly hot summer Friday in North Carolina, not too far from the so-called Research Triangle Park.  Headed to one of my regular coffee haunts, knowing well in advance that I would likely walk in, scan the space, and retreat back out into the heat, because there was no place to work.  
For more than twenty-years coffee shops have functioned as my mobile woodshed -- the places where I write, read, study, and increasingly do social media.  There are many idiosyncratic reasons why the work of my my mind, favors such spaces (as opposed to my campus office or my home), much of which having to do with the idea of the moveable mess (that you can simply pack and unpack into a computer bag), my affinity for natural light (fluorescent lights are an affront to my very being) and the ability to be “alone in public,” a vestige of being an only child.
When I wrote my dissertation in the mid-1990s on an early generation Toshiba laptop, there was virtually no one working like me in those spaces; such activity was unique enough that I can remember the stares that the Negro Breakfast Club used to get at the Wolf Road Starbucks in Albany, NY -- the club included University of Texas Professor and playwright Lisa Thompson and author Debra Dickerson -- as we sat there talking shop and getting our work in.
Fast forward to 2016, and the very spaces where I might have been sitting with no more than five or six folk punching the keys on macs even five years ago, are now overrun, with folks literally sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, and waging low-key warfare for the tables closest to electrical outlets.  Indeed, one of my spots, even posted a sign that one had to “buy” before they procured that prime space (and yes, I’m a habitual line-stepper.)
What gives?
The obvious change over the past decade has been the emergence of affordable broadband wi-fi, the quality of which at some coffee shops rivals that of elite universities and private corporations.  If you live in a college town,  you regularly witness the undergraduate and graduate students that colonize the local coffee shops, often to the dismay of shop owners, who will watch students buy a small cup of coffee and camp out for 10-hours, while bringing in food from somewhere else.  Another one of my regular spots doesn’t  have wi-fi for that very reason (and thank-God for mobile hotspots).
But the rather ordinary appearance of college students at your local coffee shop, obscures the fact that increasingly what one finds in such spaces are grown people, who are not just hanging out, but putting in real work, hustling, if you will.  In his new book Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, political scientist Lester K. Spence, notes to the extent that hustling -- acts of “getting over” on people and systems two generations ago -- is now a prominent metaphor for thinking about productivity in contemporary America; “the hustler is now someone who consistently works.” (2)
The figure of the hustler and the act of hustling signals one of the paradoxes of this moment, which despite record levels of productivity by American workers, and record profits among corporations, inequality has increased (the redistribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest) and wages have, to use Spence’s term ‘flatlined.”  As Spence writes, “Even as people are expected to be more and more productive, and...increasingly place more and more expectations upon themselves to be productive, the money they make as a result of that productivity flatlines, largely because of the way government ability to regulate business have been cut.” (13)
While this Neoliberal Turn, as Spence describes it, is also impacted by the degree to which technology and globalization have created contexts for higher profitability, it also highlights the role of “human capital” as an “individual trait.” This produces a belief, born out of the idea of the of the Hip-Hop Hustler -- the title of Spence’s book is inspired by Jay Z’s classic  “Can’t Knock the Hustle” from his debut Reasonable Doubt -- where workers envision themselves as entrepreneurial spirits, or as Jay Z once famously opined “I not a businessman, I’m a business, man”
As witnessed on any given day, at any given coffee shop in America, there is this belief in the entrepreneurial dream -- middle managers, programmers, intellectual and legal professionals, and the like, believing they are working for themselves because of the relative control they have over their time, but without the equitable sharing of the profits generated by their labor -- as we work ourselves to death to the aroma of coffee and waffles and access to strong connectivity.
I now often find myself waking up at the crack of dawn, even on weekends, so that I am one the first people at my coffee shops of choice, zoning in on that prime outlet space and the promise of being productive.
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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press, 2016).  He is the host of the weekly video podcast Left of Black and curator of NewBlackMan (In Exile).  Neal is Professor of African + African-American Studies and Professor of English at Duke University.