Tech’s promise — and perils
If technology can cut through laborious business processes, imagine its impact on public agencies trafficking in scarce resources and essential services. Such is the promise of e-government advertised by neoliberal elites — policy wonks, politicians on the make, self-interested contractors and philanthro-capitalists: waste and inequity vanquished in the solvent of automation and big data. But what about those on the receiving end of this experiment in tech-powered polity?
In “Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor,” political science Professor Virginia Eubanks spotlights welfare applicants navigating computerization, the homeless seeking housing via a matching engine and parents coming under the algorithmic scrutiny of child protective services.
The 2006 automation of Indiana’s benefits agency supplanted a human-centered system with one rendering opaque yes/no verdicts on claimants’ eligibility. The answer, mostly, was no — 1 million-plus turned down for assistance during the system’s first two years of operation (more than half as many again as immediate pre-automation rates). Eubanks documents the human cost — the sick and vulnerable denied life-sustaining aid, often for oversights like missed signatures or documents misplaced by the contractor. So onerous is the process, a single mom can’t stomach applying for benefits she sorely needs.
In Los Angeles, online matchmaking proves an imperfect analogy for finding Skid Row residents accommodation. “Coordinated entry” streamlines a convoluted application process, but leaves deeper, structural causes of homelessness — housing stock shortfalls and recalcitrant landlords — untouched. Homelessness “is a carpentry problem,” observes UCLA law Professor Gary Blasi.
In Pittsburgh, Eubanks encounters “predictive risk modeling” to identify at-risk kids that, by counting families’ utilization of services against them, stigmatizes poverty, and discounts human judgment.
Eubanks views these flawed experiments as symptomatic of our frayed social contract. Collectively, they comprise a “digital poorhouse,” reprising age-old practices of “quarantining” the poor, subjecting them to demeaning tests of whether they’re “deserving.”
Eubanks is a deft, evocative writer, her language fresh and arresting, affixing images on the mind’s eye. And she gamely ventures questions programmers might pose as guiding principles for class-conscious software design: “Does the tool increase the self-determination and agency of the poor? Would the tool be tolerated if it was targeted at non-poor people?”
But “Automating Inequality” gets mired at times in its own heady metaphorizing.
The “digital poorhouse” basks queasily in the sepulchral glow of a grisly parade of horribles. Eugenicist Harry “Laughlin’s science of racial cleansing only scaled in Nazi Germany, and his plan for widespread sterilization of the ‘unfit’ fell out of favor after World War II,” writes Eubanks, adding apropos, “The digital poorhouse has much lower barriers to rapid expansion.”
And lumping disparate projects into a monolithic edifice arrayed against the poor seems to discount signal differences between them. Given the paramountcy of child safety, Pittsburgh’s algorithmic effort to pre-empt child abuse — the brainchild not of contractors peddling proprietary formulas but academics committed to transparency — surely warrants consideration.
Eubanks’ cogent, tightly argued analysis raises important questions, but it’s hard to reckon with them from behind a barricade.
Virtual reality is a technology apart, observes Jeremy Bailenson in “Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do,” his excellent primer on the subject. Its effects aren’t an amplification of existing technological capabilities, they’re orthogonal to them:
“VR engulfs us . ... We slide occluding goggles over our eyes and cover our ears with headphones, overriding our two primary sense systems . ... In more advanced VR we engage the body in the virtual experiences and create physical feedback from interactions with virtual objects. When this is done right, our brain becomes confused enough to treat these signals as reality.”
VR has been the subject of fervid prognostication before. In the early 1990s, the field was a fixture of nascent cyberculture. But it oversold and underdelivered, and became mostly “cloistered” in places like the one Bailenson runs — Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab — with the resources to run its dedicated hardware suites. Here, it was presided over by a priesthood of experts, directed toward esoteric uses and vouchsafed to the few — celebrities and scenesters granted personal demos. For most of us it was vaporware.
That changed with the release of cheap VR-light gizmos by Google and Samsung, and in 2016 the debut of the Oculus Rift, a rig retailing lab-caliber VR costing hundreds, not thousands, of dollars.
Hitherto, VR’s development had been sedate, incubated by universities. Now, “the most psychologically powerful medium in history is getting an alpha test on-the-fly ... in living rooms across the globe.”
Bailenson doesn’t dwell on the more benighted uses to which VR may be put — porn, disseminating ever more convincing fake news — beyond noting these perils will be weaponized by an unprecedentedly captivating medium.
Instead, he focuses on positive applications: kaleidoscopic educational scenarios that transport students on “VR field trips”; vivid evocations of refugee camps, ecosystems and war zones to open minds, prick consciences, incite action, engender empathy and heal broken minds.
Other uses are more workaday: fresh spins on VR’s original use case, exemplified by flight simulators, “to safely experience dangerous behaviors” — systems helping football quarterbacks rehearse plays without real-life linebackers bearing down on them.
Also striking: VR’s versatility. One program has users take a virtual buzz saw to pixelated trees to register the toll of our addiction to unrecycled
toilet tissue. Another projects 3D “photorealistic” renderings of our faces. The result promises to be far superior to grainy videoconferencing in obviating the need for face-to-face meetings, prospectively radically reducing global travel.
Per Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, VR’s “killer app” is social interaction, writes Bailenson. Instead of producing fantasy-addled isolates, it will bring us together. And reduce our carbon footprint.
Still, Bailenson is measured. Reckoning with a technology that represents a “difference ... of kind and not degree” entails determining how it’s used to best effect, not merely splicing it into existing media.
It promises to be a fascinating journey. “[W]ill a well-executed VR experience ever seem tired?” muses Bailenson. “It hasn’t for me in the past two decades.”
In “The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, From the Freemasons to Facebook,” historian Niall Ferguson reminds us the social network didn’t spring fully formed from the mind of Mark Zuckerberg; rather, it’s a persistent force in human affairs offering a novel lens on past and perplexing present.
Thus, Ferguson appears to reprise one of the more disreputable ideas in the intellectual marketplace: that shadowy cabals are at large, puppet masters jerking geopolitical marionette strings. Provocatively, he opens his account with the Illuminati, the clandestine 18th century society that in its esoteric symbology, sub-Masonic rituals, effusive ideals and obfuscatory ways reliably sets conspiracy theorists aquiver.
In fact, Ferguson debunks the notion the Illuminati was much more than a short-lived, hopelessly fractious and largely ineffectual sodality of the self-important. This doesn’t invalidate his broader thesis though. It formed part of a groundswell of social networks begotten by the printing press. Moreover, the Illuminati’s overblown reputation owes much to its demonization by authorities keen to cement their own power. History, Ferguson argues, is a product of the dialectic between corporate org chart-style hierarchies and networks — flat, more anarchic configurations of mutually interested individuals and groups. We’ve discounted the agency of the latter, he contends, because archives are mostly bequeathed to us by the former — institutions wielding topdown power.
Inflamed by the printed word, the 16th to 18th centuries marked a heyday for unruly networks, Ferguson writes, fomenting war and revolution. They were eclipsed in the 1800s though by the restoration of hierarchical power, exemplified by the 1815 Congress of Vienna, where the “great powers” hashed out a détente that largely kept the peace, in Europe at least, until the rupture of World War I.
With its flights of lateral thinking (dissolves from Ella Fitzgerald to the Mafia) and panoramic sweep, “The Square and the Tower” reads like the transcript of an Adam Curtis documentary — idiosyncratic, editorialized and filled with foreboding.
Ferguson drives toward an explication of our polarized present — in which networks of unprecedented reach have once more upended hierarchies.
Endlessly comparing contemporary populism to mid-20th century fascism, historical literacy wouldn’t go amiss among the commentariat, he writes. More analogous — with the internet as latter-day printing press — is that earlier “post-Gutenberg” acme of networks.
And the idea connective technology presages utopia doesn’t comport with his reading of history: “A more likely outcome is a repeat of the violent upheavals that ... plunged the last great Networked Age into the ... French Revolution.”
One doesn’t have to buy Ferguson’s dichotomy between “networked anarchy and world order” or prescription of a global compact to check “jihadism, criminality and cyber-vandalism, to say nothing of climate change,” to recognize the tension he describes.
“Silicon Valley prefers to lie low, and not only for fear of earthquakes,” he writes. “Its horizontal architecture reflects the reality that it is the most important hub of a global network: the world’s town square.”
But in Manhattan crouches its architectural antithesis: “that dark tower” bearing the name of its “absent owner” — monument to an “altogether different organizational tradition.”
Jeremy Bailenson focuses on virtual reality’s positive applications: kaleidoscopic educational scenarios; vivid evocations of refugee camps, ecosystems and war zones to open minds, prick consciences, incite action, engender empathy and heal broken minds.