The Information Wage

In 1971, planes carrying millions of financial and administrative records—order forms, charge slips, telephone system files, oil well logs—began arriving at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport. These paper records were then driven twenty-five minutes south to the Gila River Indian Reservation, home to the Pima and Maricopa nations, where, in the cafeteria of the reservation’s arts and craft center, dozens of employees, mostly Indigenous women, retyped them into computer-readable form. Few remember it anymore, but that cafeteria was the front line of the digital revolution.