A Global Guide to State-Sponsored Trolling

This week Refinery29, a lifestyle website for women, came crashing into the public consciousness via an unpleasant installment of its “Money Diaries” column. In it, a 21-year-old HR intern making $25 per hour gives us a blow-by-blow account of her financial life. She pays $2,100 a month for her share of an apartment in the West Village. She pays $23 for a goat cheese and avocado wrap. She goes to the Hamptons with her “girl squad” for a weekend of overpriced parties, but it ends up being a bust. “Finally we arrive at Sunset Beach,” she writes. “The water is rough, and we wish we hadn’t taken out the dingy [sic]. I would’ve much rather been on the big boat. All the rosé is gone by the time we raft up.”

How does the unnamed intern afford these expenses, all while going to college? Her rent, health insurance, phone bill, and entertainment subscriptions are all covered by her folks, who also pay for her college. Furthermore, as she writes, “On top of my intern salary, my parents give me a $800/month allowance, and my grandpa also wires me $300 every month (#blessed).”

The column has raised hackles, through a combination of the subject’s lack of self-awareness and her financial privilege, lightly worn. But our anger at the diarist disguises a deeper and more diffuse anger, over the way that companies like Refinery29 exploit a branded version of feminism to make money off us, the casual reader.

Refinery29 combines lifestyle content (fashion, skincare, diaries, work advice) with inspirational feminist sentiment and an embrace of queer identities. It also eases up the boundaries of journalism so that the lucrative world of marketing and PR and branding can seep in at the edges. The combination sits uneasily. The “MyIdentity” section, for example, currently leads with an article titled “How Fashion Helps These 3 People Express Pride [Paid Content].” It’s an ad for H&M, dressed up as an article about queer and trans people finding their voice through clothing. There’s also “The Old, Secret Style Language Of The LGTBQ+ Community,” a mere click away from an advertisement by Free People on what to wear to an outdoor summer concert.

As Digiday has reported, Refinery29’s employees freely hashtag products from sponsors on their personal accounts. The line between editorial and “editorial content” seems minimal to nonexistent. Per Digiday, Refinery29’s editorial teams both create branded content and work as influencers for brands on social media. The Refinery29 office hosts branded pop-up events and lectures. Readers don’t seem to mind. An agency source told Digiday: “It’s something we expect users to push back a little bit more on, and they don’t.”

But the Money Diaries column did get pushback. It made people wonder: Is this even real content? How stupid does Refinery29 think we are? As Gabby Noone has theorized on Twitter, there is a possibility that Refinery29 embedded sponsorships into “Money Diaries” columns, with one contributor suspiciously citing the services of a company called Thrive Market numerous times.

these are in 2 separate diaries, at no point does refinery29 disclose sponsorship but pic.twitter.com/iHPxlbOZk6

If that is the case—and this latest Money Diary certainly does feature a lot of brand namedropping—then the problem is not just the article, but the platform itself.

Or perhaps we should say that the problem is an entire industry. Women’s media has run on advertising dollars forever, after all. There exists not a single mainstream women’s magazine that does not rely on money from the fashion and beauty industries. Not Vogue, not Cosmopolitan. All these magazines compromise their editorial freedom to maintain relationships with their advertisers. Vogue cannot run a huge story criticizing a brand that advertises in its pages. This is an open secret in journalism, but one so old that people barely care.

Women’s media has also run on the first-personal travails of women. Though it sets a wildly different editorial tone, the Money Diaries invoke the ghost of xoJane, which exploited readers and writers alike by holding a “contest” for the best “It Happened To Me” first-person story. What happened was that it ran an endless stream of unpaid blog posts in which readers were invited to offer up their most traumatic experiences in return for zero dollars. The site came to represent the worst of the Personal Essay Industrial Complex, in which a publication creams the profits off women’s trauma, especially women of color, in the name of feminist solidarity.

The difference between today’s women’s media scam and yesterday’s is that the advertising is now hiding in “native” content, and the scummy clickbait is packaged better. Instead of sitting in a box next to a trashy article about celebrities, lucrative advertising these days lurks inside content that simulates ethical, feminist journalism.

The design of the new generation of moneyspinning sites is good. Glance at Bustle and you’ll miss the fact that it is a cynical enterprise. Since 2015, a large flurry of women’s lifestyle websites and newsletters has splattered the internet in response to digital media marketing trends. “This is a massive opportunity,” Bustle founder Bryan Goldberg (who recently purchased the archives of Gawker.com) told AdAge in 2016. “The pie is enormous ... We’ve been kind of wondering why more people haven’t been jumping into this demographic.” In the same article, Jonathan Adams, chief digital officer of Maxus Americas (now Wavemaker), said, “It’s a great time to be marketed to as a woman.”

Women’s media, as a result, has never been scammier. The product sold by Refinery29, Bustle, PopSugar, and TheSkimm is bad. I asked a group of women journalist friends to name the worst villains in the game off the top of their heads, and the answers flowed easily: the GirlBoss publishing platform, Babe.net, the Lily.

Once we had ads for shampoo—now we have sites pretending they aren’t secretly running a branding agency from inside their feminist publishing project. It’s like Coca-Cola trying to sell you self-care. Seen from its most depressing angle, the rise of these websites is part of a wider deterioration of choice, quality, and consciousness across the all media products branded “feminist.” It’s every woman in New York wearing the same mediocre makeup. It’s a co-working space that buys off its critics with free memberships in order to maintain its perfectly pink, girly, Teflon brand. It’s a quality outlet like The Cut running Sex Diaries, the lowest-hanging fruit in all the land.

If there is a takeaway from the storm in a gilded teacup that was the great Refinery29 scandal of July 2018, it must be that there is no ethical consumption of women’s media in an industry where feminism has become a product, and where your engagement with the product is exchanged for branding dollars. The “feminism” brand is making media stupider, its consumers less rather than more cynical. Save your outrage over $23 goat cheese wraps, and steer clear of clicking the ads.

A good rule of thumb in business, and in life generally, is that if you find yourself defending Holocaust deniers, you’ve probably taken a wrong turn somewhere. This week, Mark Zuckerberg found himself at the end of that particular cul de sac, while discussing Facebook’s struggles to counter conspiracy theories and fake news. “So I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive,” he told Recode’s Kara Swisher. “But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong—I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong. It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent.”

Zuckerberg quickly apologized for his comments, but they did not occur in isolation. The previous day, The Wall Street Journal reported that roughly half the outlets present at a recent meeting between Facebook and publishing executives were conservative outlets, some of which regularly traffic in propaganda and “breathless, bad faith partisan hype,” as BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith told Neil Patel of The Daily Caller, which was represented at the meeting. What Smith and HuffPost’s Lydia Polgreen had objected to was that Facebook was treating legitimate news organizations as the liberal equivalents of conservative rags like The Daily Caller.

Facebook, in other words, is fast falling into a false equivalence trap. In the worlds of television and newspapers, conservative media spun off into its own galaxy a long time ago. But Facebook is desperate to convince users and regulators that, in the age of the social network, conservative and liberal media can continue to co-exist. The problem is that no platform can host conservative media without ultimately being implicated in conspiracy theories, Holocaust denialism, or worse.

Facebook has a clear incentive for courting conservatives: It sees Republicans as crucial allies in the fight to avoid onerous regulation. The company can’t say that, however, so Zuckerberg was forced to make a tortured “free speech” argument that led him to a very strange place. Facebook’s line is that this unimaginably large platform has to be neutral. It cannot be the judge of whether, for instance, it is acceptable to deny the fact of the Holocaust.

The result of these logical gymnastics is untenable: To win points with Republicans in Congress, Facebook is courting crazies. Furthermore, by embracing the very people who make its platform toxic, it is going to alienate mainstream users and invite regulatory scrutiny from Democrats, who want to know why Facebook isn’t doing more to kick out sites like InfoWars.

This dynamic is playing out all over Silicon Valley. Ever since Facebook news “curators” admitted that they suppressed stories from sites like The Daily Caller in 2016, Republicans have argued that Big Tech is silencing conservative voices. As companies like Facebook and Google have grown more powerful, and as Republicans have sought to cast every debate about Silicon Valley in polarized terms, these arguments have grown louder. During Zuckerberg’s appearances before Congress in early April, for instance, many Republicans didn’t ask him about Cambridge Analytica, a Trump-affiliated firm that had improperly gained access to the private information of tens of millions of Facebook users. They asked him why the company was censoring conservatives like Diamond & Silk, the vloggers who regularly opened for Donald Trump at his 2016 campaign rallies.

Tech companies have responded by aggressively courting Republicans. Days after Zuckerberg testified before Congress, Facebook announced that it had commissioned the Heritage Foundation and former Senator Jon Kyl to conduct an audit of the company’s policies. Google has upped its engagement with Republicans, while Twitter executives have been spotted dining with high-profile conservatives in Washington, D.C.

There is, to be clear, no evidence that Facebook suppresses conservative voices. While one former contractor did tell Gizmodo in 2016 that the site’s curation of “trending topics” had a “chilling effect on conservative news,” these curators were attempting to enforce a set of journalistic standards. It should come as no surprise that articles from The New York Times routinely met those standards, whereas blog posts from The Gateway Pundit did not.

The reason why conservative blogs were blocked from the “trending” section was a bias towards hard news, which is in short supply on those blogs. They have pointed to declining traffic figures as evidence that Facebook is out to get them, but these are the result of wider changes that have diminished traffic to news outlets in general, including liberal ones like Slate.

At a Tuesday appearance by executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter before the House Judiciary Committee, Republican lawmakers brought up the “censorship” of Diamond & Silk and The Gateway Pundit, and actions supposedly taken against sites that expressed appreciation for Chick-fil-A and Catholicism. The executives apologized. They also hedged whenever they were asked about Alex Jones’s conspiracy website InfoWars. “If they posted sufficient content that it would violate our threshold, then the page would come down,” Facebook’s Monica Bickert said. “The threshold varies depending on the different types of violations.”

In casting anti-Semitic and hateful posts as a “free speech” issue, Zuckerberg and Facebook are dodging the real question, which is if it has a responsibility to ensure that its platform isn’t used to spread misinformation that can have horrible effects in the real world, as we saw in the U.S. election in 2016 and in Myanmar and India.

Tech companies face a choice. If they remove hatemongers and conspiracy theorists from their platforms, they invite the threat of regulation from Republicans; if they continue to embrace right-wingers, they invite a backlash from their users and the further threat of regulation from Democrats. For now, they’re opting to do the bare minimum in toxic clean-up in an effort to please Republicans. But they won’t be able to do the bare minimum for much longer.

One day in 2012, Aileen Rizo, a math consultant in the Fresno, California, education system, overheard a recently hired male colleague talking about his salary. Rizo was “floored,” she said, to learn that although she had the same job title as he did, was better educated, and had more experience, he was paid more. After asking around, Rizo learned that this was no coincidence: Several of her male colleagues were earning significantly more than her as well.

“I felt like I was part of a picture and someone cut me out of the picture,” she said, describing what it was like to realize she was being paid so much less. “It was almost surreal.”

Still, Rizo figured it was a mix-up that could be remedied. When she complained to Human Resources, though, she was told that the county had relied on her contract with her previous employer—she’d been a schoolteacher in Arizona—to set her pay. “I thought it was being used to confirm my employment and years of experience,” she said. “I didn’t know they were using the number for my salary.” When the county refused to change her pay, Rizo sued, saying the policy discriminated against women. In April 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against her, saying that companies could use prior salary to determine wages as long as it “was reasonable and effectuated a business policy.”

There is nothing new about using previous salary information to set pay. “That’s been around probably as long as the job interview,” said Deborah Vagins, a senior vice president at the American Association of University Women. In a survey earlier this year, 80 percent of hiring managers and recruiters said they relied on past salary to come up with an offer. It might seem like a neutral practice, but it can perpetuate the inequities that mean women and people of color are paid less, on average, than white men. Even women fresh out of college make less than their male peers in their first jobs. If future pay is based on previous earnings, then the original sin of an initial hire taints a woman’s entire working life. “If this disparity can begin from the moment you go to your first job, and it follows you throughout your career, it will never be rectified, and the wage gap itself will never be rectified,” the District of Columbia’s Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, a leading advocate to end the practice, told me.

The laws place the responsibility for ensuring fair pay where it belongs: not on women and people of color, but on the employers who perpetuate inequality.

Rizo wasn’t the first woman to challenge salary-history policies in court. In 2000, 37 female employees at Boeing’s Puget Sound headquarters filed a class action lawsuit against the company, alleging that its use of pay history to determine their salaries was among the factors that stopped them from advancing within the company. (Boeing settled the suit and agreed to use new methods to determine starting salaries.) Within the last few years, the issue has made its way into legislatures. In 2016, Massachusetts became the first state to forbid employers from requesting salary histories before they make an official job offer. Since then, Connecticut, Delaware, Oregon, Vermont, and Rizo’s home state of California have all passed similar laws, while versions have been introduced in Maine, New York, and Washington, D.C., New York City and Salt Lake City have passed their own bills. Major corporations have joined in: Amazon, American Express, Bank of America, Facebook, Google, Starbucks, and Wells Fargo have all announced that they will stop using prior pay to set compensation.

It has been illegal to pay women less than men since 1963. So are salary-history statutes and new hiring practices a solution to a problem that has already been solved? Far from it. Women who work full time still make, on average, 80 percent of what men make, and women of color make even less. It often falls to them to fix the gap by driving a harder bargain with their bosses and, if that fails, to sue employers if they aren’t paid fairly. Lawsuits take time and cost money, however, and women often lose. Salary-history bans, on the other hand, not only give them more power in a negotiation, they place the responsibility for ensuring fair pay where it belongs: not on women and people of color, but on the employers who perpetuate inequality.

This approach hasn’t always been successful. Illinois’s governor, Bruce Rauner, last summer vetoed a salary-history ban passed by the state legislature. In Philadelphia, the first city to pass a salary-history ban, a federal judge struck the law down because he said it violated employers’ First Amendment rights. Federal solutions, including proposed bills from Representative Norton, which she introduced in 2016 and again in 2017, and the oft-revisited Paycheck Fairness Act, have gone nowhere in Congress.

Critics, including commentators and academics, draw a parallel between salary-history bans and the shortcomings of laws that prevent employers from asking about criminal histories. Studies have shown that in places that have banned criminal history questions, employers may simply assume that all black men have records and end up offering them fewer jobs as a result. The concern is that companies will likewise undercut women in salary negotiations based on the assumption that they all earn low pay. One study found that women who refused to disclose their salary histories during the hiring process did indeed get lower offers than those who did.

But that study looked at a scenario where there was no ban in place. A recent field experiment found that employers who couldn’t see salary histories actually did more individualized research into candidates, and candidates were better able to bargain for higher starting salaries. This suggests that the value of preventing employers from asking about salary history extends beyond women and people of color. All workers are placed at a disadvantage when an employer knows what they are already willing to work for—in other words, how low they’ll go. Employers “can drive the [salary] conversation down,” said Hannah Riley Bowles, an expert in how gender influences pay negotiations at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The debate may be ongoing, but Rizo has won her argument. In April, the Ninth Circuit reversed its earlier decision. “Women are told they are not worth as much as men,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote. “Allowing prior salary to justify a wage differential perpetuates this message, entrenching in salary systems an obvious means of discrimination.” When Jerry Brown signed California’s Fair Pay Act into law in 2015, Rizo and her nine-month-old daughter were there with him. “Sometimes I think things are too hard and never going to change, but it did,” she said. Today, Rizo is running for the state legislature—against an incumbent who has voted against bills that would have forbidden employers from asking questions about salary history.

Last year, Missouri became the latest state to pass a so-called right-to-work law, which prohibits unions from collecting mandatory fees from employees of unionized workplaces. Then-Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, celebrated by holding multiple signing ceremonies, including one in an abandoned warehouse that he called “a far too familiar sight for many towns across Missouri.” But the party didn’t last long. In fact, the law never had a chance to go into effect. It was suspended after labor organizers and other opponents collected enough signatures to force a voter referendum.

A vote in favor of Proposition A, to be decided on August 7, would make Missouri the 28th state in the country with right-to-work laws, while a vote against would make it the first state to overturn right-to-work by referendum. The outcome has national implications not only for America’s labor movement, which is reeling from years of political and legal defeats (and a concomitant decline in membership), but for the likewise hobbled Democratic Party, which often relies on unions to drive voter turnout.

Proposition A comes on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last month in Janus v. AFSCME, which essentially applied right-to-work standards to public sector unions. Post-Janus, unions in Missouri face a double blow: If Proposition A passes in August, neither private nor public sector unions can collect fees from non-members, even though unions are legally obligated to represent all eligible workers in a unionized shop. That means tighter budgets for organizing and representing workers and for donating to the campaigns of allied politicians, which is a major reason conservative organizations like the National Right to Work Foundation and the Mercer Family Foundation have bankrolled legal challenges to the collection of union fees.

Greitens is no longer the governor of Missouri, having resigned in May amid scandal. But one of his last acts before leaving office was to move up the date for the right-to-work referendum from November to August. Republicans had called for the date change, on the basis that voter turnout would be lower in August—and thus Proposition A stands a better chance at passing thanks to motivated Republican voters. But despite this and the state’s conservative politics, there’s some evidence that unions can win their campaign. An April poll indicated a dead heat, but a July 10 poll published by The Missouri Times showed a sizable lead for the No campaign, which has outraised and outspent its opponents thanks to a significant investment by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and other unions.

“Once we knew it was going to pass the legislature, we were all very committed to trying to get this on the ballot and have the people of Missouri decide whether or not they believe that this was right for them,” said Derrick Osobase, a political and legislative director at the Communications Workers of America, which has been working closely with unions like the AFL-CIO and community groups like Jobs for Justice. “We really took things back to the basics of organizing, to move not only our members but to go big, and get swathes of the population to understand just how badly right-to-work would affect union workers as well as workers who are non-union.”

To get right-to-work on the ballot, unions and allied groups collected over 300,000 signatures in 2017. That’s roughly three times the minimum signatures currently required by the state. A spokesperson for We Are Missouri, the campaign to repeal right-to-work, said that more than 4,000 volunteers canvassed the state for signatures. Volunteers have been going door-to-door since then, too, including Alexis Straughter, a certified nursing assistant, SEIU member, and mother of two. “Right-to-work is basically an evil entity to me,” she said. “It proves the corporations and certain corrupt lawmakers don’t realize that Missouri was built on working families.”

If Missouri voters do decide that they don’t want right-to-work, it would be a rejection of decades of right-wing messaging that casts unions as greedy obstacles to job and wage growth. In pushing right-to-work laws, conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation have been clear about their ultimate goal: decimating unions. “Making union membership voluntary would save workers—and cost unions—a lot of money,” argued Heritage fellow James Sherk in 2011. “Losing 15 percent of their dues-paying members would cost private-sector New Hampshire unions $1.9 million a year. Right-to-work would similarly save private-sector workers in Indiana $18.4 million a year.”

In 2012, The Washington Post reported that while there’s some evidence right-to-work laws grow business, it’s not clear that workers benefit from it. “One careful study conducted by Hofstra’s Lonnie Stevans in 2007 found that right-to-work laws do help boost the number of businesses in a state—but the gains mostly went to owners, while average wages went down,” the Post stated. The Economic Policy Institute, which opposes right-to-work, directly attributes wage decline to right-to-work laws. “Wages are 3.1 percent lower in so-called ‘right to work’ states, for union and nonunion workers alike—after correctly accounting for differences in cost of living, demographics, and labor market characteristics,” EPI reported in 2017. (Sherk has acknowledged this, but chalks it up to a lower cost of living.)

Jake Rosenfeld, a professor of sociology at the Washington University of St. Louis, says it’s important to consider the historical context when determining right-to-work’s impact on wages. “Part of that problem is that most of the states that are right-to-work went right-to-work a long time ago, when it was legalized through the Taft-Hartley Act, which was before we had any good data to really track the effects,” he said, referring to the 1947 law that, among other things, allowed states to pass right-to-work laws. “In recent years, some of the states that have gone right to work—and I think Missouri would count among these—had already seen their union movements devastated. The right to work often is a lagging indicator of an already dramatically weakened union movement.”

The issue of wages may also go before Missouri voters this year, as a proposal to phase in a $12 minimum wage by 2023 is now in the signature verification process. If verified, it’ll appear on the general election ballot in November. Like Proposition A, a referendum on the minimum wage would be a referendum on the leadership of Missouri Republicans. In 2015, St. Louis passed a measure that would gradually raise the city’s minimum wage to $11 an hour. But the Republican-controlled legislature passed a bill in 2017 that prohibits cities from raising the minimum wage above the state’s threshold of $7.85 an hour; Greitens allowed the bill to become law without his signature. The same year, he signed a bill that would, according to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “prevent Missouri cities from requiring union-level wages in public construction projects.”

Straughter, who spoke out in favor of St. Louis’s short-lived $11 minimum wage in 2015, says she believes the fight to raise the minimum wage and the fight against right-to-work are “tremendously linked.” “They both play a big part in making sure that families are able to provide. Right-to-work isn’t going to help families or communities at all, and [a higher] minimum wage will.”

Even if a working-class Missourian gets a minimum wage job and works at least 40 hours a week, they aren’t guaranteed economic security. A 2018 report published by Missouri Community Action Network found that 14 percent of Missouri residents live under the federal poverty level, above the national average of 12.7 percent. The state’s minimum wage for 2018 is $7.85 an hour—but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates that a single parent of two children needs to make at least $26.96 an hour, full-time, to be able to support their family in Missouri. Meanwhile, the state has a food insecurity rate of 14.2 percent, as defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture; the national rate is 13 percent.

For Missouri’s workers of color, the combined consequences of a weakened labor movement and the Janus decision are set to be especially grave. Black workers are more likely to be unionized than white workers, and while unionization hasn’t closed the wealth gap, it has provided a necessary measure of economic security for workers of color. “Blacks and Latinos see greater wage premiums as a result of union membership than white workers and union membership does more to increase access to key employment benefits like health coverage and retirement plans for people of color than it does for whites,” Demos reported in 2016.

Janus v. AFCSME unfolded in courtrooms. Right-to-work winds through legislatures. But Missouri’s referendum places right-to-work in the center of the public square, where it will be decided by the workers it most immediately affects. Missouri voters can’t change Janus, but the referendum is an opportunity to shore up private sector unions and to protect organized labor itself from further attack. It could also be one move in a longer-running political strategy, as stronger union membership correlates with higher turnout for Democratic candidates.

Without a strong labor movement in America, Democrats will have a tougher time winning back control of Congress and the White House—and without such control, Democrats have no hope of checking right-to-work at the federal level, or of reversing the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Not only would that entrench Janus as a legal precedent, but it would likely herald even more anti-union rulings in the years and decades to come. Conservative groups are certainly planning on it.

About halfway through Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger & Me, which chronicles the industrial decline of Flint, Michigan, the filmmaker encounters a house with a sign in front that reads: “rabbits or bunnies, pets or meat.” In the next scene, the rabbit vendor explains that she uses her backyard hutch to supplement her income, which is sometimes as low as $10 to $15 a week. Then she beats a rabbit to death with a lead pipe. It is a shocking image and one that brought through the central question of the film: How is this possible in America?

Since 1989, the tragedy of Flint’s decline has been repeated in a number of Midwestern cities plagued with shrinking populations, opiate addiction, joblessness, and a pervasive feeling of hopelessness. Flint and nearby Detroit remain the worst-case scenarios of once-proud, unionized, and solidly middle class “motor cities” that have fallen into ruin. After the 2008 crisis, both had their local authority stripped away by the state of Michigan, with emergency managers replacing municipal governments. In Flint, the emergency manager terminated a water contract with the city of Detroit, preferring to draw water from the polluted Flint River and send it down aging pipes to city residents, 42 percent of whom live below the federal poverty line. Although federal laws mandate that water should be treated to prevent corrosion, Flint’s water went untreated. It contained between twice and ten times the Environmental Protection Agency’s action level of lead.

Anna Clark’s new book, The Poisoned City, chronicles the obfuscation and outright deception that occurred after this fateful decision, leading to the contamination of thousands of residents, which include children who may suffer lifelong harm. It powerfully examines how a city once known for its industrial output—which sent quality engineered products around the world—failed to keep up basic infrastructure and put lives in grave danger. Despite sitting 50 miles from the Great Lakes, which contain one-fifth of the world’s fresh water, the state of Michigan all but gave up on Flint, precipitating an entirely preventable environmental catastrophe.

The water crisis was partly caused by a spatial problem: The city’s footprint was too big for its contracting population. As residents moved elsewhere in search of opportunities, their former homes sometimes sat vacant. In time, the pipes under these houses began to decay both due to age but also because an over-extended infrastructure grid now lay dormant. The local government had a long time to address this and not only did nothing to help, but actively encouraged flight from the urban center. As Clark shows in admirable detail, General Motors built eight new plants in Genesee County between 1947 and 1960 while closing factories inside the city; the local government obliged them by building new roads to their factories and hooking up water and sewer connections, effectively participating in their own obsolescence.

Following the urban riots of the late 1960s, Flint’s population increasingly fled the city. Racial segregation was pronounced: Flint’s first black mayor, Floyd McCree, resigned in protest in 1968, just months after Martin Luther King was assassinated, when the city commission failed to adopt an ordinance outlawing housing discrimination. As the wealth gap between city and suburbs worsened, so did the quality of services. By 2011, when Flint was put under emergency management, Clark tells us its “infrastructure was in a death spiral. The water rates were expensive because the pipes were bad because vacancy rates were high because the city had been shrinking for so long.” Not surprisingly, the wealthier residents of Genesee County—unconstrained by emergency management—chose not to switch their water source to the Flint River, making lead exposure a problem in the poorer, more African American city but not in the surrounding suburbs.

Within Flint itself, water contamination affected the entire city, but it was more pronounced in the poorest neighborhoods. “People who lived on streets that were pockmarked with the most unoccupied homes and empty storefronts—that is, the poorest of them—generally had worse water,” Clark writes. “People who lived in denser areas were less likely to see, taste, or smell the same problems.” One of her most consistent points is that America’s infrastructure is indeed a national embarrassment, but the places where shame morphs into actual danger are predominantly poor and, often, disproportionately black and Latino. Not coincidentally, these places were not able to attract much interest from the government. In Flint, as in many other cities, problems that are regional in scale are too costly and complex to be handled at the local level but go unaddressed at the state level. Even when the state did step in—in this case, to appoint an emergency manager—their first priority was cost-cutting rather than long-term planning.

By the summer of 2014, the signs that something was badly wrong with Flint’s water were difficult to miss. State authorities, many of whom have since been convicted of criminal negligence, were hard-pressed to ignore foul-smelling tap water, and the residents’ troubling symptoms of rashes and hair loss. At first, they maintained that the quality of the new water source was fine; but they had only tested the water at the treatment plant, not in a home after it had been exposed to the miles of lead pipes that leached metal due to the more corrosive river water. The evidence grew nonetheless. In October 2014, a 1.2 million square foot GM factory switched from Flint River water to water from Lake Huron because the engines they were building had begun to rust. While concern for metal car components necessitated quick action, the people of Flint would not be helped for another year.

Clark shows that even when confronted with mounting evidence, the State of Michigan did its best to deny water quality problems; it even went so far as to attempt to discredit studies by a research team from Virginia Tech and an independent EPA official. A lack of transparency on public health issues in Michigan allowed this to continue even longer; in the state, the legislature and governor’s office are exempted from freedom of information requests. Beyond Michigan, there is a national sense that crises like Flint’s water poisoning are routinely kept under wraps in order to obscure the full picture of America’s failing infrastructure. The National Resources Defense Council reported in 2016 that 5,300 water systems violated federal lead rules. In Flint, when it came to basic harm reduction like purchasing water filters for homes at the beginning of the crisis, the Chicago office of the EPA thought “buying filters would not send a good message to all cities that properly manage their water and sewer fees.” Another EPA official added: “I don’t know if Flint is the kind of community we want to go out on a limb for.”

Environmental harm is not evenly distributed—nor is the loss of democratic control that residents suffer when emergency management is imposed up on them. Both are products of long neglect. The financial insolvency or deficits of cities like Flint were not often treated as the outcomes of structural problems—such as de-industrialization or state retrenchment—or of the mistakes of politicians in those places. Rather, they were blamed on the choices of local residents, portrayed as spendthrift and lazy. As such, emergency management was intended not just to fix the problems in these communities, but to punish the local residents too, ensuring—in the manner of 1990s welfare reform—that the poor receive only what they “deserve.” Emergency programs slashed public programs and sold off, privatized, or downgraded state assets like public housing, libraries, and, in this case, water infrastructure.

As Clark points out, living under this kind of government is not randomly assigned. After the 2008 financial crisis, the State of Michigan sent emergency managers to both Flint and Detroit, which are the state’s poorest and blackest cities. “If you lived in Michigan,” she writes, “there was a 10 percent chance that you lived under emergency management at some point between 2009 and 2016. If you were black, that possibility jumped to 50 percent.” While managers can potentially accomplish a great deal because they are given a mandate to make sweeping changes outside the messy political process, they more often than not act as outsiders who deliver painful, and often unjust, news. They slash pensions, close schools, sell parks, and delay cost-of-living raises. They accomplish downsizing and privatization in one fell swoop, and leave town for the next urban reorganization before any concrete data about the social and health effects of their efforts can be tabulated.

In the end, Flint’s river water did more than corrode the city’s pipes. It ate away at the already thin trust that existed between citizens and the government. What’s more, it cast doubt on state water scientists who not only failed to properly monitor Flint’s water but chalked up the personal experiences of citizens as worthless antidotes. Without faith in science or government, people living in vulnerable places are left on their own. Water infrastructure is left to rot; coastlines are unprotected from ferocious storms and a rise in sea levels; and renewable energy never gets invested in. The struggle between collective action and individual freedom has always been a hard sell in the United States, and, as Clark disturbingly illustrates, the future of Flint could look something like the past:

When it came to safe drinking water, then, people had to fend for themselves. It was a far cry from the spirit of collectivity that once built the infrastructure of American cities. It was more like the early days when citizens were expected to dig their own wells, even if they drained their neighbor’s well as they did so.

The Flint crisis is an important opportunity to ask how far punitive cost-cutting and privatization will go. Republicans, like Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, love to commend citizens on their resilience and ingenuity in the face of hardship. For many small-government, pro-business conservatives, there is always a way to do things that does not involve the state. But clean drinking water—the definition of an essential good—is still something the government needs to provide.