Automating Inequality

Virginia Eubanks spent years with the families most subjected to automated surveillance — women navigating the welfare system in Indiana, homeless people in Los Angeles tracked by coordinated assessment tools, families flagged by predictive child services algorithms in Pittsburgh. What she found is this: the surveillance state has always had a test population. The automated future being rolled out in tech circles was already being run on the poor — decades ago, with paper and punch cards. The cameras and algorithms just made it faster and more invisible. The least surprising thing about Flock Safety is that the cameras were never evenly distributed.