Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

The majority of people in the US will encounter poverty at some point in their lives, needing food stamps, welfare, or some other public assistance. This chapter will “give a bird’s-eye view of how these tools work together to create a shadow institution for regulating the poor” (175).

Eubanks’s Indiana case study shows that automated public assistance is steering the poor away from assistance. The Daniels administration’s hostility to the poor was indiscriminate: “The automation’s effects touched six-year-old girls, nuns, and grandmothers hospitalized for heart failure” (179). The Indiana system perpetuates “a moral narrative that criminalizes most of the poor while providing life-saving resources to a lucky handful” (180).

The Los Angeles case study demonstrates that automated systems create a surveillance state around poverty by indiscriminately collecting, storing, and sharing data. For instance, information about the unhoused is kept for seven years, “and the Los Angeles Police Department can access it without a warrant. This is a recipe for law enforcement fishing expeditions” (180). This porous border between policing and assisting those without a home criminalizes poverty.

Finally, the Allegheny County case study illustrates that automation in governance makes the poor into second class citizens living in a totalitarian state with few rights: “The professional middle class would never tolerate the AFST evaluating their parenting. That it is deployed against those who have no choice but to comply is discriminatory, undemocratic, and unforgivable” (182).

Eubanks then connects the historical county poorhouse with her concept of the digital poorhouse, arguing that both work to alleviate professional middle class fears of falling into poverty by containing and segregating the poor. Rather than upholding US ideals of fairness and justice, white elites rely on automation to create the false moralizing principle that poverty is a choice, and that the poor thus do not deserve real aid. In response, our government funds automated systems that rely on “Surveillance and digital social sorting [to] drive us apart as smaller and smaller microgroups are targeted for different kinds of aggression and control” (184).

The digital poorhouse has several distinguishing characteristics. First is an anti-democratic lack of transparency: Complex software and algorithms, along with its confidential high-tech tools and databases, obfuscate the automated systems’ functionalities and methodology. Second, the digital poorhouse can be implemented over large areas rapidly at low cost; this means quick rollout without sufficient data about efficacy or precision. Once the systems have proliferated, it is almost impossible to adjust or remove them: “New technologies develop momentum as they are integrated into institutions. As they mature, they become increasingly difficult to challenge, redirect, or uproot” (187). This tendency towards entrenchment is the final characteristic: The digital poorhouse has no planned obsolescence or end-date. Data is stored forever, elevating “the risk of inappropriate disclosure and data breaches” (187) and taking away people’s right to redemption.

Eubanks argues that automated systems endanger all Americans, not just the poor. The next section of her book tries to persuade readers to “care about an invisible network that mostly acts to criminalize the poor” (189). The first reason for white middle-class professionals to pay attention to the digital poorhouse is self-preservational—on the one hand, a fall into poverty may befall anyone, and on the other hand, the existence of these systems makes them tempting for those in power: “A national catastrophe or a political regime change might justify the deployment of the digital poorhouse’s full surveillance capability across the class spectrum” (189).

We should also care because morally repugnant things are being done in our name; by ignoring injustice, we are spreading bias, misery, and hatred through our society: The digital poorhouse “compromises our national values: Liberty, Equity, [and] Inclusion” (194). The digital poorhouse restricts both the freedom from government interference in one’s life, and the freedom to act with self-determination and exert agency. It undercuts equity in two ways, preventing all from receiving equal treatment and equal value derived from common goods and political membership. Finally, it works against inclusion, barring individuals’ ability to thrive in their communities: Poor and working class people realize their decreased societal worth when they enter automated welfare systems that actively treat them differently.

Finally, we should care about automated inequality because only action can reduce the inequalities they create—and only those with resources and privilege have the political power to enact change. In 2012, “Economic inequality in the United States reached its highest level since 1928. A new class of the extreme poor, who live on less than $2 per day, has emerged. [We can] describe our moment, without hyperbole, as a second Gilded Age” (198).