For Tech to be equitable, the people must control it
by Alyxandra Goodwin and Jessica Quiason
Imagine this: You live in a world without physical prisons. You wake up and get ready for the day, latching on your wristband. You step outside and enter a self driving car which awaits you. Your wristband alerts you twice: once from your accountability partner recognizing that you are on your way to your responsibilities, and the second from your job recognizing you are on your way to work and will be on time today. You pass six more cameras, arrive at work, and your wristband alerts you of your time of arrival, tasks for the day, and the time you have to get them done. This may seem like a far off fantasy but this is our very near future. And our control of how it all rolls out is up to us.
The interconnectedness of wealth, data, and policing have made way for surveillance and monitoring to expand and evolve rapidly. We have seamlessly come into an age characterized by algorithmic management, which Data & Society defines as a “set of technological tools and techniques to remotely manage workforces, relying on data collection and surveillance of workers to enable automated or semi-automated decision-making”. Much of these new management strategies are applied to low wage work, which is disproportionately performed by black and brown people. Looking beyond employment, we can see the same threads of algorithmic management in the treatment of people who are incarcerated. Much of the same technology to track workers and consumers is also being used by the State to monitor and surveil black and brown incarcerated people. Algorithmic management marks a troublesome shift in how the tech elite and their financial backers exacerbate existing systems of oppression of people of color through a bolstering of the police state.
The roots of these innovations may go back further than you think. The first ankle monitors for incarcerated people were developed in the 1960s by two Harvard psychology students, with the purpose of monitoring young people in correctional facilities and encouraging them to show up to appointments on time. Since then, monitoring technology in prisons has evolved in disgusting ways: up until recently, Chicago’s Juvenile Probation Department was using ankle monitors that could listen and record conversations.
Similarly, smart wristbands in workplaces help managers track workers’ every movement with the power to discipline. Amazon in particular has used their distribution centers as testing grounds for increasingly invasive tracking technologies. In 2018, Amazon secured patents for tracking its distribution center workers with wristbands programmed to guide worker movements towards inventory bins and can give “haptic feedback” via vibrations if the worker is reaching for the wrong bin. It comes as no surprise that the corporation at the forefront of bringing these technologies to the workplace is one notorious for creating high-pressure environments and having punitive discipline policies in their distribution centers where the majority of workers are Black, Latinx, and Asian.
Currently, Amazon warehouse workers packing rates are closely monitored and when a worker is moving too slowly, they are automatically marked for warnings or termination. Amazon’s other low wage workers, like those at Whole Foods, are subjected to similar algorithms that grade workers based on stocking shelves and theft reporting and automatically mark certain workers for discipline. Automating the surveillance of people means that the people’s actions are being judged not by a human who can take into account the complex meaning of what makes a good citizen or a good worker, but by an equation that has limited and biased inputs and strict rules for output.
In addition to physical walls and bars, algorithms and tech create further barriers that dehumanize people of color, extract wealth from them and reduce them to mere inputs.
These trends are not just in corporations and prisons. The whole state relies upon expanding incarceration outside of the physical prison by monitoring and surveilling people. Examples of this activity are Palantir’s predictive policing tools used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); social media monitoring by Geofeedia and used by law enforcement; and risk assessment tools to “score” a person’s likelihood of committing a crime (championed by some as an alternative to cash bail). These tools mark a total convergence of technological advancement and state surveillance and violence.
In Carceral Capitalism, Jackie Wang discusses how capitalism is built on keeping people, particularly poor people of color, in “invisible boxes.” In addition to physical walls and bars, algorithms and tech create further barriers that dehumanize people of color, extract wealth from them and reduce them to mere inputs. This creates the world that the finance and tech CEOs (and their purchased politicians) would prefer — one in which they have control of the masses of workers and people of color.
To be clear, technology isn’t inherently bad by any stretch. You could imagine technological advances through tools and algorithmic management that track workplace safety with an eye to injuries and fatigue so that managers can craft better safety practices for all their workers with anonymized data ensuring no fear of reprisal. It would be absolutely thrilling to envision what technological advances could lead us to true abolition and community safety in a way that works for black and brown communities — thousands of abolitionists could bring creativity and excitement to such conversations!
However, like so many fights, the answer as to why these are not the innovations that are occurring can be explained by going up the food chain. At the top of the tech sector you see large corporations (whether they be tech or finance which backs them) who make all the decisions about what innovations to push forward and what to block. This reality of capitalism means that until individual people have control over these tools, they will always tend towards working against us and extracting wealth from black and brown folks. What we need is control of the tech sector in a way that gives voice to workers, incarcerated people and black and brown communities. Without such a seismic shift, communities will continue to feel pain.
