Automating Inequality

Preview

Come on in, and let’s take an honest look at the hidden systems that decide who gets help, who gets watched, and who gets left out. Automating Inequality is a book about what happens when old prejudice gets dressed up in new technology and sold to us as progress. It asks a blunt, necessary question. What if the digital tools we are told will make public services smarter and fairer are actually doing the opposite for poor and working class people. What if databases, algorithms, and risk scores are not rescuing struggling families from bureaucratic harm, but deepening that harm while making it harder to see, challenge, or even name. Virginia Eubanks begins from a place many people in power rarely visit. She starts with the lived experience of people who rely on public systems to survive. Families who need food assistance. Mothers who need child care. People who need a safe place to sleep. Children who need protection. She shows that these are not abstract policy issues. They are deeply human stories shaped by hunger, housing instability, racism, disability, domestic violence, and poverty. Once we begin there, the book’s argument becomes impossible to ignore. The high tech tools used in public benefits, homelessness services, and child welfare are not appearing in a vacuum. They are being built on top of a long history of punishing the poor. The promise of automation sounds reasonable at first. More efficiency. Less fraud. Better decisions. Fewer human mistakes. But the book keeps pulling back the curtain. It shows how these systems often target the same people over and over, especially poor women, Black families, immigrants, disabled people, and communities already under intense surveillance. They turn everyday acts of survival into suspicious behavior. They collect enormous amounts of intimate information from people who have...