For Slate, Jacob Brogan suggests that despite “shrinking book racks,” libraries play an important political and social role. This is particularly true in low-income areas, as libraries provide computer access for job searchers and entrepreneurs:
Libraries are powerful precisely because they’re spaces of potentiality. They are, as the Aspen report puts it, “platforms,” foundations on which many structures can be built. To speak of their future, then, should be to speak of a collective future, one from which none are excluded.
