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

“The insurance company repeatedly told me that the problem was the result of a technical error, a few missing digits in a database. But that’s the thing about being targeted by an algorithm: you get a sense of a pattern in the digital noise, an electronic eye turned toward you, but you can’t put your finger on exactly what’s amiss.”

Eubanks’s personal anecdote reveals the deliberate obfuscation of health insurance companies. Confusion by design is a strategic quality of the welfare system, and this “electronic eye” in the digital noise calls back to the reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

“Like earlier technological innovations in poverty management, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the professional middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices: who gets food and who starves, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. We manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty.”

Eubanks argues that maintaining personal distance is a way to avoid contemplating labor history and welfare rights. In a world of limited and insufficient resources, humans would prefer to remain in ignorance rather than be forced to recognize the “inhuman choices” they must make.

“Though most poorhouse stays lasted less than a month, elderly and disabled inmates often stayed for decades. Death rates at some institutions neared 30 percent annually. Poorhouse proponents reasoned that the institution could provide care while instilling moral values of thrift and industry. The reality was that the poorhouse was an institution for producing fear, even for hastening death.”

The image of the poorhouse has the dramatic irony of attempting to be a moral “correction” in which conditions were anything but moral. The introduction of “thrift and industry” was merely a smokescreen to shift blame onto the poor, satiating middle class worries by contributing to the myth of the chronically and blameful poor.