Life by Algorithms

How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World

Catherine Besteman, Hugh Gusterson, Catherine Besteman, Hugh Gusterson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226627564, 9780226627427
• eBook ISBN: 9780226627731
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Social Sciences

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

Notes

Introduction

1. Leon Wieseltier, “Among the Disrupted,” New York Times, January 18, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/books/review/among-the-disrupted.html?ref=todayspaper.

2. Paul Harris, “Widow Sues Wells Fargo Over Wrongful Foreclosure That Took Devastating Toll,” Guardian, May 23, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/may/23/widow-wells-fargo-wrongful-foreclosure.

3. For a critique of this requirement, see National Cyber Security Centre, “The Problems with Forcing Regular Password Expiry,” accessed July 5, 2018, https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/articles/problems-forcing-regular-password-expiry; and Brian Barrett, “Want Safer Passwords? Don’t Change Them So Often,” Wired (blog), Condé Nast, March 10, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/03/want-safer-passwords-dont-change-often/.

4. Max Weber, Economy and Society (1922; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 337. Foucault’s own thinking on bureaucratic processes and “governmentality” is found particularly in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York, Pantheon, 1977); Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–78 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); and Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–79 (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2008).

5. Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracies (New York: Berg, 1992), 4. Other important works on bureaucracy by anthropologists include Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Matthew Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press); and Nayanika Mathur, Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Delhi, India: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

6. Herzfeld, Social Production of Indifference, 5.

7. David Graeber, Utopia of Rules (New York: Melville House, 2015), 18, 21–22.

8. Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 41.

9. For the history of these developments, see Ronald E. Day, Indexing it All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

10. The literature on neoliberalism is enormous. For general accounts of its political economy, see Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Tejaswini Ganti, “Neoliberalism,” Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (2014): 89–104; Jacob Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Knopf, 1999); Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 2007); Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). More Foucauldian interpretations are provided by Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neolieralism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); and Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Ethnographic depictions of neoliberal society include Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman, The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Katherine Newman, Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

11. William Finnegan, “Easing the Rain,” New Yorker, April 8, 2002, https://web.archive.org/web/20070929151555/http://www.waterobservatory.org/library.cfm?refID=33711; Samuel Randalls, “Weather Profits: Weather Derivatives and the Commercialization of Meteorology,” Social Studies of Science 40, no. 5 (2010): 705–30; Katherine Harmon, “For Sale: Human Eggs Become a Research Commodity,” Scientific American, November 1, 2009, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/shelling-out-for-eggs/; Kalindi Vora, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

12. “Amazon Patents Wristband That Tracks Workers’ Movements.” Guardian, January 31, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/31/amazon-warehouse-wristband-tracking; Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?_r=0.

13. Bill McGee, “Do Travel Deals Change Based on Your Browsing History?” USA Today, April 3, 2013, https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/columnist/mcgee/2013/04/03/do-travel-deals-change-based-on-your-browsing-history/2021993/.

14. Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (London: Penguin, 2016), 6.

15. For a case that Michelle Rhee’s reforms demoralized teachers and principals and incited cheating to game the system, see Michael Joseloff, “The Education of Michelle Rhee,” PBS Frontline, January 8, 2013, 53:40, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/education-of-michelle-rhee/.

16. O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction, 91. See also Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (New York: St. Martin’s, 2018).

17. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Robohumans
• Categories
• Emotions
• Surveillance
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index