Every year LSTS researchers review the books that have influenced the most their (academic) lives. Here are our books of 2018.
Eubanks, Virgina, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor With rising inequality almost everywhere, social justice became a trending topic in the digitization discourse, too. Other authors may be comfortable with reiterating resentments towards Silicon Valley’s superstar firms or leading ideological broad-brush attacks against capitalism as a whole. Political science professor Virginia Eubanks, on the other hand, dares to face the complex realities of data-driven inequality in person. Her brillant book Automating Inequality oscillates between political science and investigative journalism. It is mainly built on interviews with different stakeholders surrounding data-driven inequality. For example, it includes the uncanny story of welfare-recipient Dorothy Allen, who unveils to Eubanks how her caseworker routinely takes a look at the digitized purchase records of her food stamp card. By doing so, the state employee in fact just catches up with Amazon, but, of course, it is even more problematic if the state has this kind of knowledge. Further field research takes Eubanks to the US heartland, where she investigates the devastating effect of automatized decision making on Indiana’s welfare system, also from the perspective of outsourced caseworkers. The theory part, which builds on a lengthy genealogy of the “digital poorhouse” reaching back to the early 19th century, clearly isn’t the book’s strength. But overall it is a great reminder of how data-driven policies that may seem reasonable and efficient from the perspective of well-off policy makers produce a significant degree of damage on the other side of the social spectrum. Europe still seems far away from these dynamics. However, with digitization threatening especially untrained work, the efficient management of poverty is a growing sector everywhere in the developed world. And, ironically enough, it will take increasing digitization in order to manage this side effect of digitization. Johannes Thumfart