A Babel Fish Bookshelf
Labor and Digital Tracking
Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks
Happy day after labor day. If you’re sitting at a desk in your office, there’s a chance it was made by someone making two dollars an hour or less. Much less.
Of course, maybe you don’t have an office because you’re part of the majority of academic labor that is hired by the course or has a long-term non-permanent gig. But if you stop by, say, the Minnesota History Center or a major public university library to do some research, there’s a good chance you’re sitting at a table made by someone who’s incarcerated and paid far less than minimum wage.
If you watch California fires raging and feel for the heroic men and women on the front lines, carrying heavy equipment and wearing hot gear in 100-plus degree weather, bear in mind many of them are paid a dollar a day. They are incarcerated “volunteers.” This is part of what a national prison strike is about. You might have heard about it, but possibly not; it hasn’t gotten much coverage.
You could argue that prison industries are a good thing because incarcerated people learn skills and work habits. It’s too bad that when they’re released they often can’t get a job because they have a criminal record. They probably don’t even get a chance to discuss with a human being what they learned while working in prison because a computer system kicked their application to the bottom using an algorithm. Chances are another algorithm will send them back to prison if they fail to adhere to parole requirements, like failing to have a job or permanent address or ability to pay for their parole expenses.
As it happens, I just finished reading Automating Inequality How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks. I was especially curious about the algorithms used in social services, but it’s not just about technology, it’s a brilliant book about how we penalize poverty. It would make a great pairing with Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. Both books make it clear how badly shredded our social network is and how well hidden poverty is now that it’s treated as a personal failing rather than as a social issue we should solve because it’s bad for all of us, unnecessary in the richest nation on earth, and unjust.
Eubanks focuses her research in three locations: a failed approach to automate public benefits eligibility determination in Indiana that nevertheless managed to permanently remove many people eligible for benefits from getting help; an app for deciding who among the thousands of homeless in Los Angeles could get processed into housing; and a flawed system in Pennsylvania for deciding which children are at risk and should be removed from their homes. These attempts (with the exception of the first, which appears primarily a mean-spirited system for punishing the poor) are generally well-meant, but tackle the wrong problems. There’s a housing crisis in Los Angeles a