Week11(4/3)
Automating Inequality (2018・Virginia Eubanks)
[Intro]
"What I found was stunning. Across the country, poor and working-class people aretargeted by new tools of digital poverty management and face life-threatening
consequences as a result"(p.16)
[Chapter1.FROM POORHOUSE TO DATABASE]
Social norm that attributes poverty to the responsibility of the individual,instead of a systematical issue in society, leads to the idea of obliteration
"The reality was that the poorhouse was an institution for producing fear, even for hastening
death. As social work historian Walter Trattner has written, elite Americans of the time “believed that poverty could, and should, be obliterated—in part, by allowing the poor to perish.” (p.22)
"Scientific charity argued for more rigorous, data-driven methods to separate the deserving poor from the undeserving. In-depth investigation was a mechanism of moral classification and social control. Each poor family became a “case” to be solved; in its early years, the Charity Organization Society even used city police officers to investigate applications for relief. Casework was born."(p.24)
The modern version of poorhouse, scientific charity.
"If the poorhouse was a machine that diverted the poor and working class from public resources, scientific charity was a technique of producing plausible deniability elites."(p.26)
"Elected officials and state bureaucrats, caught between increasingly stringent legal protections and demands to contain public assistance spending, performed a political sleight of hand. They commissioned expansive new technologies that promised to save money by distributing aid more efficiently. In fact, these technological systems acted like walls, standing between poor people and their legal rights. In this moment, the digital poorhouse was born."(p.33)
[Chapter2. AUTOMATING ELIGIBILITY IN THE HEARTLAND]
Dependency on automated system leads to lack of transparency because no one understands the back-end system once errors occurred."Private call center workers were not adequately trained to deal with the severity of challenges faced by callers, nor were they provided with sufficient information about applicable regulations. Advocates report call center operators bursting into tears on the phone"(p.46)
A controversial disconnect between caseworkers and those in needs.
"when clients called the 1-800 number, they always spoke to a new worker. Because the Daniels administration saw relationships between caseworkers and clients as invitations to fraud, the system was designed to sever those links."(p.48)
Risk of incorporating automated technology in public work-user friendliness- People doesn't have alternatives other than one option.
“I always copied my papers. I missed one question, and boom, they shut me off.”When we spoke in 2015, she remembered feeling completely alone in a life-threatening situation. “They didn’t give us enough information,”
(p.50)
[Chapter3.HIGH-TECH HOMELESSNESS IN THE CITY OF ANGELS]
"There was a mismatch between needs and resources: the crisis homeless got resources most appropriate for the chronically homeless; the chronically homeless got nothing at all."(p.78)
Lack of transparency and feedback lead to cynicism and hopelessness.
“There’s a lot of services out there where they will meet with you, ask you all of these questions, promise you something, and never come back,” says Richard Renteria. “So, they got all this information to create this database, talk about how many thousands of people are homeless, [but] never come back to serve them.”(p.91)
"The great majority of unhoused people in Los Angeles exist somewhere between the categories of chronic and crisis homelessness. Coordinated entry follows the resources: permanent supportive housing on one side of the spectrum rapid re-housing on the other. Barring a financial intervention that is an order of magnitude larger than Measures H and HHH, coordinated entry will fail the tens of thousands of unhoused who fall somewhere in the middle."(p.98)
"Coordinated entry is not just a system for managing information or matching demand to supply. It is a surveillance system for sorting and criminalizing the poor."(p.101)
"Surveillance is not only a means of watching or tracking, but it is also a mechanism for social sorting. Coordinated entry collects data tied to individual behavior, assesses vulnerability, and assigns different interventions based on that valuation."(p.101)
New surveillance
How it focus target: Finer sifting of data that already exists
Source of targetting: Data-driven
Metaphor: Spider in digital web
Old surveillance
How it focus target: Individualized attention
Source of targetting: Group-membership driven
Metaphor: Eye in the sky
It is often those who have power, that makes the system of triage.
"If homelessness is inevitable—like a disease or a natural disaster—then it is perfectly reasonable to use triage-oriented solutions that prioritize unhoused people for a chance at limited housing resources. But if homelessness is a human tragedy created by policy decisions and professional middle-class apathy, coordinated entry allows us to distance ourselves from the human impacts of our choice to not act decisively."(p.102)
If the stakeholders have conflicting value and goal, more information not necessary leads to a benefit for all. Rather, it is often the case that it wouldn't go to marginalized people.
"But, for better or worse, this is not how politics work. Political contests are more than informational; they are about values, group membership, and balancing conflicting interests."(p.103)
keyword
Digital poorhouse:Ways to rationalize and streamline benefits, but the real goal is what it has always been: to profile, police, and punish the poor.
scientific charity:
Gave me the impression that those who have power labels those who don't have power by use of science.
Questions
Do our pursuits for 'efficiency' always lead us to a common value in society?Do we have enough discussions or consensus before incorporating the efficiency?
Do people in the community feel safe and satisfied in this system?
Isn't that decision-making made dominantly by those who have power?