Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.94 (949 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B0739MF8VF |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 297 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-01-06 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
. She is the author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Today, she is a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a Fellow at New America. For two decades, Eubanks has worked in community technology and economic justice movements. Virginia Eubanks i
From single mothers on welfare, to homeless individuals on the streets, to parents suspected of child neglect, the 'digital poorhouse,' as Eubanks calls it, increasingly extends its web of surveillance from classifying to predicting the poor and their behavior, not so much to aid as to manage, discipline and punish them for the poverty society imposes on them. Read this book and join with Eubanks in pushing back against the surveillance state and the injustice it sustains." Sanford Schram, Professor of Political Science, Hunter College, CUNY; Professor of Sociology, CU
While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. In the tradition of The New Jim Crow and $2 a Day, a powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination.The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the st