It’s easy to think of technology as sterile, unfeeling and completely objective. Unfortunately, today’s digital systems are oftentimes automating in ways that negatively impact poor and working-class Americans most severely. In her new book, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, SUNY Albany professor of political science Virginia Eubanks tracks the insidious ways that our most cutting-edge digital tools track, investigate and punish the most economically vulnerable citizens. Automating Inequality is a timely and powerful portrait of how technology perpetuates inequality.
Eubanks, who is also the author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, has crafted a scholarly and startling portrait of Americans caught up in a system that regulates who is allowed to receive health care, food stamps or other vital resources. By moving fluidly from heart-wrenching stories of data-mining victims to a thorough explanation of predictive risk models and algorithms, this deeply researched account gives voice to the injustices that are behind the tracking of which neighborhoods get policed, what crimes end up being prosecuted and who is approved to receive housing assistance.
Eubanks will speak in the Milwaukee Public Library’s Richard E. and Lucile Krug Rare Books Room (814 W. Wisconsin Ave.) at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 5 in a free event co-sponsored by Boswell Book Co. and Community Advocates Public Policy Institute. Eubanks has studied technology for more than two decades and is a founding member of Our Data Bodies Project as well as a fellow at New America. Pre-registration is requested for this event.
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