Toward a Mindful Digital Welfare State
This project is a collaboration between Postdoctoral Scholar Ranjit Singh and Research Analyst Emnet Tafesse with the AI on the Ground Initiative at Data & Society.
“As humankind moves, perhaps inexorably, towards the digital welfare future, it needs to alter course significantly and rapidly to avoid stumbling, zombie-like, into a digital welfare dystopia.” –The report of the Special rapporteur, Philip Alston, on extreme poverty and human rights to the United Nations.
Presented to the General Assembly of the United Nations in October 2019, Alston’s report is a scathing critique of the increasing appropriation of digital practices in organizing delivery of state welfare services across the world. It raises pertinent questions around the imperatives that drive how the digital welfare state is constituted, and how surveillance is operationalized under the guise of providing social security. A poignant aspect of Alston’s critique centers on the mindless appropriation of data-driven technologies; countries across the world have seemingly behaved like zombies when buying into the imperatives of preventing fraud, and of efficient targeting when providing welfare services to the most vulnerable and disadvantaged among their citizen population.
This is the starting point for our collaborative research project at Data & Society: What does mindful appropriation of digital technologies in the provision of welfare services look like? How do different countries take into account the conditions for, and consequences of “infrastructuring” digital technologies in their practices of delivering welfare?
In 2022, we will expand this research by publishing a series of reflections that make sense of novel investments in the datafication of statecraft, especially the work of bureaucracies in providing services to citizens. By mindful appropriation, we mean an ongoing accounting of how digital technologies mediate state-citizen relations, and the affordances as well as the limits of these technologies in the management and provision of welfare services at the scale of any country’s population.
This includes, but is not limited to, resolving problems of:
- determining the nature and extent of digitalization and platformization of identity required to support welfare services.
- bureaucratizing eligibility and associated metrics, and mechanisms of targeting specific vulnerable and disadvantaged populations through citizen data.
- choosing between in-kind or cash-based or tax-deduction/credit-based welfare entitlements, and “infrastructuring” their respective logistics, often through neoliberal arrangements of public-private partnerships.
- grounding expectations of digital literacy and the lived experience navigating access to and exclusions from welfare services among citizens.
- sustaining communicative channels of sociality that beneficiaries are often required to enact with intermediaries, support networks, and street-level bureaucrats, who support them in processes of claiming welfare when digital technologies fail.
- mapping the role of international aid agencies and the global geopolitics of aid as it relates to organizing welfare services in a particular country.
- establishing an ecosystem of rights and obligations for citizens, and a corresponding set of responsibilities and due process procedures on the part of state bureaucrats as conditions of securing welfare.
Despite the similarities in the digital welfare programs appropriated by different countries, they are not the same. Each country has its own unique sociocultural, technical, regulatory, legal, and market contingencies. Over the course of the year 2022, we will invite researchers, activists, investigative journalists, and thinkers who focus on emerging conditions of digital organization of welfare services in different parts of the world to write about their own takes on the mindful appropriation of digital technologies for welfare distribution, and/or narrate a field story or “parable,” as we have come to call it, that drives their research.
Geoffrey Bowker, infrastructure studies scholar, once argued that:
“All the business advantages of being able to process huge amounts of data should not be traced back in time to the computer (which its advocates have claimed to be the source of this new ability), but to changes in bureaucratic organization which in turn made the computer possible.” (Bowker 1994, 235)
While the use of computers is one plausible explanation for the proliferation of data processing in organizations, investigating changes in organizational work practices that preceded or accompanied computers can also illuminate the history of data revolution within organizations. A comprehensive picture of the meaning and lived experience of the digital welfare state is outside the scope of our endeavor, but by engaging with experts in the field we hope to explore the unique contingencies of particular countries that not only have their own histories of administering welfare, but are also experimenting with the appropriation of digital technologies in welfare distribution. These deeper dives help us explore how mindful appropriation of digital technologies requires an awareness of the existing infrastructural conditions and work practices that make such appropriation possible in the first place.
After all, the digital welfare state is only possible when there is a welfare state in the first place.
References:
Bowker, Geoffrey C. 1994. “Information Mythology: The World of/as Information.” In Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, edited by Lisa Bud-Frierman, 231–47. London: Routledge.
To date, the Toward a Mindful Digital Welfare State series includes:
- Between Belonging and Individuating: Data, Identification, Diaspora by Emnet Tafesse
- Good Welfare, Bad Platforms? by Silvia Masiero
- Critical Digital Education for All! by Soledad Magnone
- Code as Policy by Rajesh Veeraraghavan
- Identifying Beneficiaries in Ghana’s Donor-Oriented Welfare State by Alena Thiel
- Datafying Children by Grace Mutung’u
