I work in a restaurant, an industry with a lot of smoke and mirrors.
If you’re not familiar with how food gets from the menu to your mouth, your server rings it up and a ticket is spit out to the kitchen. An expeditor (expo) snatches it up and calls it to the line cooks. When it’s ready, either a server or a food runner (or in a pinch, said expo or manager) briskly brings you your piping plate.
One restaurant I worked in tried to install monitors in the kitchen so that an expo would be unnecessary. I’ve seen this in fast food places but it’s not typical in most other dining atmospheres. In theory, the kitchen would be more or less self-sufficient (and the at-times tense divide between the front and back of the house would be further deepened, but that’s a bigger fish to fry). The kitchen was largely comprised of Haitian immigrants able to speak English but not read it, so as you might guess this backfired miserably. I was not there when they ripped the monitors out but I like to imagine they took them out back and destroyed them à la Office Space.
In her article, Brandt shared the story of Dwayne Lowery, an advocate for union workers who was more or less pushed out of his job by changes in representation and processes of negotiation. The author speaks often about the economic worth of literacy. Sponsorship is dependent on the benefit to both parties.
Jobs would have been consolidated or eliminated by the implementation of the monitors in the scenario above. In a perfect world, the line cooks would have learned to read, but it would be limited to “med-rare hanger steak ON FLY” or “gluten allergy no breading”–words and phrases that benefit the business more so than the individual due to their specificity. The expo would be out of work or would need to fulfill a different need or definition of literacy as defined by the restaurant to stay relevant.
Brandt makes it clear that there are boons and banes to sponsored literacy. It can lead many to (transferable) skills and knowledge, but as is often the case in capitalism, for one person to win someone else has to lose.
The interesting thing to me is that often when people think about literacy and technology (often the combination of the two), they don’t think about the pitfalls that can befall those affected by it. Society more often valorizes knowledge without thinking about the real world implications as your story points out. To me, it brings up several issues that often get pushed aside or ignored in favor of a capitalist society. These issues, presented in the form of questions, ask what use is knowledge to people who can’t use it later on? Do people only gain knowledge for economic benefit? If you pursue literacy and knowledge for the gain of others, does that strip you of your agency?