Weeks before the publication of Virginia Eubanks's new book Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, knowledgeable friends were already urging me to read it, which was a no-brainer, having followed Eubanks's work for years.Įubanks's work is a combination of technical analysis, ethical argument and thick, richly described ethnography, and it uses three different algorithmic systems to show how the false empiricism of service delivery through computerized triage and prediction is a means to harm, marginalize, and even kill the poorest among us.Įubanks's first testbed for this brand of algorithmic cruelty are the Indiana benefits system, where a collaboration between an ideology-driven Republican state government and an overpromising, underdelivering IBM resulted in a shambles that cost the poorest Hoosiers food security, housing, medical care - even their lives.
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