ABOUT THIS BOOK
Computerized processes are everywhere in our society. They are the automated phone messaging systems that businesses use to screen calls; the link between student standardized test scores and public schools’ access to resources; the algorithms that regulate patient diagnoses and reimbursements to doctors. The storage, sorting, and analysis of massive amounts of information have enabled the automation of decision-making at an unprecedented level. Meanwhile, computers have offered a model of cognition that increasingly shapes our approach to the world. The proliferation of “roboprocesses” is the result, as editors Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson observe in this rich and wide-ranging volume, which features contributions from a distinguished cast of scholars in anthropology, communications, international studies, and political science.
Although automatic processes are designed to be engines of rational systems, the stories in Life by Algorithms reveal how they can in fact produce absurd, inflexible, or even dangerous outcomes. Joining the call for “algorithmic transparency,” the contributors bring exceptional sensitivity to everyday sociality into their critique to better understand how the perils of modern technology affect finance, medicine, education, housing, the workplace, food production, public space, and emotions—not as separate problems but as linked manifestations of a deeper defect in the fundamental ordering of our society.
Contributors
Catherine Besteman, Alex Blanchette, Robert W. Gehl, Hugh Gusterson, Catherine Lutz, Ann Lutz Fernandez, Joseph Masco, Sally Engle Merry, Keesha M. Middlemass, Noelle Stout, Susan J. Terrio
REVIEWS
“Life by Algorithms brings together a number of excellent scholars who study the growing impact of computerized algorithms on our lives. For anyone interested in computerized algorithms, this volume is a welcome and timely contribution to an important emerging field.”
— Eitan Y. Wilf, author of Creativity on Demand
“Compelling and original, this book examines several key issues that have previously failed to receive the serious intellectual rigor that they deserve. By focusing on many diverse domains of algorithmic implementation—from education to prisons, from the border to factory farming—Life by Algorithms gives readers an excellent and accessible overview of how the ‘algorithmic turn’ challenges many of our current understandings of the world.”
— John Cheney-Lippold, University of Michigan
“‘The Machine Stops,’ E. M. Forster’s 1909 science fiction story, tells the tale of a human society collapsing when the technology upon which it has become dependent fails. Think of Gusterson and Besteman’s volume as ‘The Machine Starts,’ a collection of unsettling ethnographic accounts of the rise of algorithmic governance, of a world in which machines automate structures of social inequality in the service of distracted corporate profit, overreaching militarism, and a globally attenuating commitment to democracy. A necessary and sobering call to arms.”
— Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“A fine array of instructive studies that amount to a beneficent algorithm for understanding our times.”
— Marshall Sahlins, emeritus, University of Chicago
“What can anthropology offer to contemporary debates about algorithms? Tackling the term in its broadest sense, this wide-ranging collection provides one answer: from finance to farming, from classrooms to courthouses, algorithms dehumanize, damage, and deskill the practices of everyday life. Life by Algorithms documents the calculative violence of bureaucratic rationality in its most recent computational form. For anthropological scholars of algorithmic systems, this book is sure to become an obligatory reference.”
— Nick Seaver, Tufts University
"Providing an excellent survey of the algorithmically managed life, each chapter of this edited volume shines light upon a particular aspect of certain more or less familiar roboprocesses to show how algorithms are remaking the world. Highly recommended."
— Choice
"Life by Algorithms is certainly an extremely topical book, which will be of interest to anyone studying the ways in which systems –bureaucratic and/or computerized –influence and mold human reality. . . . the book’s main argument is both necessary and supported with a wealth of poignant detail: our societies are increasingly governed and controlled by systems intentionally designed to be beyond oversight and out of our control. Maybe giving this phenomenona name will help in tackling it."
— Political and Legal Anthropology Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Robohumans - Hugh Gusterson
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226627731.003.0001
[algorithms;neoliberalism;inequality;bureaucracy;identity]
Roboprocesses are stylized or automated algorithms and protocols, heavily used by corporate and government bureaucracies, that sort people, shape behavior, and create internalized markers of identity in increasingly powerful ways in the United States and elsewhere. Examples include the FICO scores that determine consumers’ access to credit, standardized tests that mediate outcomes in the education system, sentencing protocols that strip judges of discretion to treat offendors as unique individuals, data aggregation programs used to predict everything from consumer purchases to crime hotspots, facebook formulae that determine which posts we see, and dating sites that algorithmize romantic attraction. Roboprocesses lie at the intersection of neoliberal capitalism, bureaucratization, and processes of computerization and automation. They are deeply bound to six contemporary social processes: deskilling in workplaces organized by algorithms and computer programs; worsening economic inequality; the rise of new corporate empires that commodify data; practices of standardization to which humans must adapt; new forms of pain, pleasure and identity as people internalize algorithmic rankings and reward systems; and new forms of agency as people learn how to game algorithmic systems. (pages 1 - 28)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1. Automated Expulsion in the U.S. Foreclosure Epidemic - Noelle Stout
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226627731.003.0002
[foreclosure crisis;mortgage assistance;corporate lenders;bureaucracy;United States]
In the wake of the 2008 U.S. foreclosure crisis, billions of dollars were funneled into hybrid federal-private mortgage assistance programs to prevent evictions. But between 2009 and 2015 corporate lenders failed to deliver on the promise of relief: over 70% of homeowners who applied to the programs were denied. Underlying this failure were the automated processes that determined whether a homeowner qualified to amend the terms of their mortgage. Drawing on long-term research among homeowners applying for mortgage assistance and the entry- and mid-level bank employees processing their appeals in California's Sacramento Valley, one of the hardest-hit regions in the nation, this chapter shows how the algorithms behind mortgage assistance decisions systematized, standardized, naturalized unprecedented rates of bank seizures. Along with the robo-signing scandal emerging in 2010 these seemingly apolitical automated techniques shaped the bureaucratic mechanisms of corporate banks, forcing millions of homeowners into mortgage default, all the while imbuing these processes with an illusory authority of objectivity that often defied common sense. New systems designed to maximize efficiency and thus profits for investors often introduced rampant errors, prevented humane decision making, and punished those homeowners who most qualified for mortgage assistance. (pages 31 - 43)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. Roboeducation - Anne Lutz Fernandez, Catherine Lutz
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226627731.003.0003
[No Child Left Behind;Race to the Top;standardized testing;scripted curriculum;teacher evaluation;privatization;opt-out movement;teacher strikes]
In this chapter, authors Fernandez and Lutz explain how the American education system is being warped by roboprocesses. They lay out how, encouraged by initiatives including No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, states have come to operate massive standardized testing regimes for evaluating students by machine and to automate the development and evaluation of teachers. The authors demonstrate the frequently absurd, dysfunctional and counterproductive outcomes of these processes as they dehumanize relationships between students, teachers, and administrators; produce anxiety and boredom in students; encourage cheating and force a standardized, scripted, and narrowed curriculum that deskills teachers as it strips them of their professional autonomy. Fernandez and Lutz warn that the roboprocesses that have infiltrated our schools encourage the shifting of tax dollars from teachers to corporations and enable the privatization of education, an essential public good. Still, they conclude, ongoing efforts by parents and educators to resist teaching and learning by algorithm, such as the opt-out movement and teacher strikes for increased education spending, provide hope that humans can wrest back control of how we educate our young people. (pages 44 - 58)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. Detention and Deportation of Minors in U.S. Immigration Custody - Susan J. Terrio
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226627731.003.0004
[immigration;detention;enforcement;undocumented;youth]
This chapter examines the robo-detention of undocumented immigrant youth who are apprehended and held in custody after entering the U.S. without authorization. When they are designated as unaccompanied alien children (UACs) these minors enter a highly bureaucratized system of border patrol stations, holding centers, federal facilities, and immigration courts. This system relies on a disjointed patchwork of federal laws, local ordinances, state-licensing mandates and computerized tracking systems. The chapter traces the effect of automated procedures that persistently align with gatekeeping functions of federal enforcement agencies. Rationalized procedures governing the detained children and youth are represented as lending consistency, objectivity and order to decision making. In reality, these procedures too often function unaccountably and at cross purposes to produce bad outcomes. They legitimate a process that prioritizes risk and security, not humanitarian, considerations. Even as federal agencies mandate protective child welfare practices, they use a detention model based on institutional confinement in closed facilities. The robo-processes at work limit transparency, enhance redundancy, and concentrate power in the hands of senior government administrators. The end result is to amplify punitive effects and to disempower a vulnerable population that the regulations were originally created to protect. (pages 59 - 76)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. A Felony Conviction as a Roboprocess - Keesha M. Middlemass
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226627731.003.0005
[prisoner reentry;felony;conviction;Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 (Brady Act);database management;net-widening]
Every year, approximately 750,000 adults are released from prison; prisoner reentry involves returning to the community and reintegrating successfully, but many former prisoners return to impoverished and disorganized urban neighborhoods, and face a number of challenges. The difficulties are compounded by advances in technology, integrated database management systems, and politicians passing laws outside of the criminal justice system that deny felons access to housing, jobs, education, and social welfare programs; thus, an increased number of adults are captured in an ever growing set of net-widening laws. Drawing from participant-observations and in-depth interviews, this chapter explores what it means to be a convicted felon and how the word felon becomes a permanent fixture of a person’s identity. Participants’ narratives demonstrate that the denial of rights through the use of automated criminal background checks, established by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 (Brady Act), and administrative roboprocesses reinforce racial and economic stratification. The net-widening effects are tough on criminals, but such laws simultaneously make it difficult for anyone convicted of a felony to lead a crime free life after completing their entire criminal sentence. Consequently, a convicted felon is unable to become a non-felon and reintegrate successfully. (pages 77 - 88)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Infinite Proliferation, or The Making of the Modern Runt - Alex Blanchette
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226627731.003.0006
[class;inequality;work;agriculture;animal welfare;ethics;genetics;United States]
This chapter examines how roboprocesses are bred into industrial animal genetics in the United States. It traces how quantitative benchmarking and scientific attempts to unendingly increase hog litter sizes have resulted in systematic injury to piglets through intrauterine growth retardation (or, runting). While most commentators frame these kinds of issues as isolated matters of animal well-being — the domain of animal welfare and ethics boards — this chapter instead illustrates how this kind of biological engineering also negatively affects the lives of human workers who are tasked with caring for these animals. In so doing, it discusses how industrial animal genetics simultaneously create, and are dependent on, novels forms of class inequality, hierarchy, and exploitation. While roboprocesses may be marked by the subordination of situational common sense to the logics of automation, modern runting also requires some workers to become hyper-situational: attuned to minute forms of difference and injury in pigs in order to keep them alive. In conclusion, the chapter suggests that workers — who know modern animals most intimately — should be given a say in defining what will count as “humane” agriculture. (pages 91 - 106)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. Emotional Roboprocesses - Robert W. Gehl
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226627731.003.0007
[emotion;marketing;surveillance;advertising;digitization;emotional roboprocesses]
This chapter discusses the use of emotions in marketing and advertising, especially contemporary digital marketing. Rather than view emotional roboprocesses as impersonal, bureaucratic machines, the chapter suggests we must question the quality of their highly personal relationships to people. We must ask how emotional roboprocesses seek to capture, reflect, and even structure our inner lives and subjectivities, and what effect this structuring has on how we think and view the world, especially in our capacity as hot, emotional human beings. The chapter traces the history of marketing and advertising and how these fields conceptualized and sought to commmand human emotion. It concludes with a discussion of three possible outcomes of emotional roboprocesses: the continued absurdity of machines trying to engage with humans on an emotional level; the hollowing out and complete digitization of human emotion; or how emotional manipulation will lead to a smoothly operating world full of love. (pages 107 - 122)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
7. Ubiquitous Surveillance - Joseph Masco
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226627731.003.0008
[Surveillance;Internet of Things;National Security Agency;DARPA;Data Mining;Social Media;Edward Snowden;Predictive Analytics]
This chapter tracks the expansion of digitalsurveillanceacross consumer activities, military actions, social media, and digital communications. It assesses a de facto commitment across corporations and state agencies to ubiquitous surveillance; that is, to real time collection of digital information and the production of large, permanent, ever-growing data sets subject to emerging and automated algorithmic assessment. Ubiquitous surveillance blurs distinctions between war and peace, intelligence and commerce, as well as public and private to an unprecedented degree. It also assumes that a full integration of data collection and data mining into everyday life is ultimately possible, encouraging the transformation of everyday objects, public spaces, expert encounters of every kind (medical, financial, communications), transportation systems, and commerce into connectible modes of surveillance. Tracking, observing, and screening, in other words, are becoming the basic tools of social institutions, making the individual less a citizen-subject than an informational node in an ever-emerging system of automated data collection and processing. Ultimately, this chapter argues that data collection is a critical terrain on which a new social contract is being forged in the 21st century. (pages 125 - 144)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
8. Controlling Numbers: How Quantification Shapes the World - Sally Engle Merry
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226627731.003.0009
[Indicators;Quantification;Development;Governance;Rule of law;Measurement;Slavery]
We are used to using numbers to describe economic processes and viewing them as authoritative and reliable descriptions of economic activity. They are routinely accepted as a reasonable basis for policy decisions. Statistics such as GDP (gross domestic product), the unemployment rate, and credit ratings for individuals and for securities are typically assumed to be objective and reasonable measures of economic activity. The development project is increasingly governed by a set of numerical goals, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), replaced in 2015 by a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Fukuda-Parr 2017). But this is only the tip of the iceberg in the role that quantification now plays in shaping the world we live in. Numerical measures, or indicators, are used as the basis for policy-making, governance, and myriad individual decisions such as where to invest funds, which college to attend, which teachers deserve raises, and which city is most livable. Indeed, our contemporary reliance on numerical data for life decisions is growing every day as an ever-widening range of experiences and dimensions of social life is converted into numbers. (pages 145 - 164)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Afterword - Catherine Besteman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226627731.003.0010
[Algorithms;Quantification;Automation]
The afterward to Life by Algorithms assesses the implications of a world of ubiquitous roboprocesses, or algorithmic ordering systems. In addition to their lack of transparency, accountability, and consent, and their reliance on secrecy, algorithmically based systems of quantification, ordering and automation have a massive reach and offer few opportunities for contestation. Algorithms fuel the spreading security state of constant surveillance and the neoliberal drive toward profitability. The consequences of roboprocesses include zombification, the transformation of citizen-subjects into consumer-subjects, the proliferation of secrecy that underwrites the rise of new institutions of wealth and power, expanding inequality, and the transformation of selfhood through algorithmic self-monitoring. The chapter concludes with some examples of new efforts toward algorithmic accountability. (pages 165 - 180)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
