DISMANTLING THE DIGITAL POORHOUSE
On March 31, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his last Sunday sermon, “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. King declared that the world was undergoing a triple revolution: a technological revolution sparked by automation and “cybernation,” a revolution in warfare triggered by nuclear weapons, and a human rights revolution inspired by anticolonial struggles for freedom across the globe. Though technological innovation was bringing the world a sense of “geographical oneness,” he preached, our ethical commitment to each other was not keeping pace. “Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood,” he said. “But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this.… We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
In the twenty-first century, we have accomplished the geographical oneness King prophesized. But we continue to fall far short of achieving the ethical growth he envisioned. He called for the immediate eradication of the national disease of racial injustice. He called on us to “rid our nation and the world of poverty.” He warned the complacent that social movements would soon be offering them a wake-up call for the revolution.
“We are coming to Washington in a Poor People’s Campaign,” he concluded. “We read one day, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ … We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago.”
King was assassinated four days later in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was supporting striking African American sanitation workers.
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The Poor People’s Campaign carried forward after King’s death, but it did not have the outcomes he had anticipated. The campaign enjoyed a budget of one million dollars, the participation of a broad coalition of poor people’s groups across color lines, and high profile supporters such as Coretta Scott King and Harry Belafonte. Nine major caravans from across the country—including New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Selma, and most famously, a mule train that departed from Marks, Mississippi—arrived in Washington, DC, without major incident. They had a clear, if ambitious, agenda: to engage waves of America’s poorest people in militant nonviolent action in the capitol until they secured a federal commitment to pass an economic and social Bill of Rights.
But the campaign also faced extraordinary challenges. King’s assassination left the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) riven with internecine fighting, and divided in its commitment to eradicating poverty. The urban insurrections taking place across the country in the wake of King’s death intensified a siege mentality among professional middle-class whites, and the backlash against the civil rights movement intensified.
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI took particular interest in the campaign, mounting a counterinsurgency effort against the 3,000 poor people living in a “Resurrection City” they built on the National Mall. According to Gerald McKnight’s 1998 book, The Last Crusade, the camp was subject to around-the-clock surveillance not only by the FBI, but by US Army Intelligence, Border Patrol, National Park Police, and the Metropolitan Police Department. Paid informants from the Interdivisional Intelligence Unit of the Justice Department and COINTELPRO agents infiltrated the encampment, fomenting violence and dissent. The tiny city’s phones were tapped and its radio transmissions were intercepted to identify “criminals and terrorists.”
The campaign was also undermined by SCLC leaders’ unacknowledged gender and class prejudice. The group routinely deemphasized the important role of welfare rights leaders—mostly poor Black women—in building the national network of organizations that made the campaign possible. Famously, this led Johnnie Tillmon to chastise Dr. King for asking for the National Welfare Rights Organization’s support when he didn’t know much about welfare issues.
As journalists Mary Lynn and Nick Kotz recount in their 1977 book, A Passion for Equality, when King seemed confused by pointed questions from welfare rights leaders in a 1968 Chicago planning meeting, Johnnie Tillmon gently said, “You know, Dr. King, if you don’t know about these questions, you should say you don’t know.” To his credit, King replied, “You’re right, Mrs. Tillmon. We don’t know anything about welfare. We are here to learn.”1
This attitude of humility didn’t survive King’s assassination. When SCLC leadership arrived in Washington, they stayed at a nearby motel rather than join protestors in Resurrection City. No cooking facilities were planned for the encampment. While SCLC staff ate hot meals, the rank and file had to make do with weeks of donuts, cereal, and baloney and cheese sandwiches. Sanitation and security were inadequate, and what they once called the City of Hope eventually sank under the weight of weeks of rain and mud, unmet material needs, and interpersonal violence. According to McKnight, SCLC leadership was relieved when the federal government bulldozed Resurrection City six weeks into the occupation.
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The Poor People’s Campaign is one of our nation’s great unfinished journeys. Its aspirations are as pressing today as they were 50 years ago. But the digital poorhouse presents new challenges that King failed to envision. We are at a momentous crossroads. Across the country, the technological revolution King described is poised to gut the promise of the ethical revolution for which he yearned, organized, and fought.
Despite our unparalleled communications capabilities, we are in the midst of a violent retrenchment on equity and pluralism. Rather than achieving a basic standard of “jobs and income now” for all, we face economic inequity of history-shattering proportions. Our failure as a nation to rise to King’s 1968 invitation to eradicate racism and eliminate poverty has produced a generation of astonishing, sophisticated technologies that automate discrimination and deepen inequality.
But there is nothing inevitable about this outcome. We can dismantle the digital poorhouse.
It will take more than high-tech tweaks to bring down the institutions we have built to profile, police, and punish the poor. It will take profound changes to culture, politics, and personal ethics.
The most important step in dismantling the digital poorhouse is changing how we think, talk, and feel about poverty. As counterintuitive as it may sound, the best cure for the misuse of big data is telling better stories. But our vision has been radically limited by the narrow frame that has evolved for talking about poor and working-class people. Journalist Monica Potts suggests that we can only tolerate illustrations of suffering, litanies of misery, or morality plays of bad choices and their consequences. It is as if telling stories of economic hardship allows only two lessons, she writes: “‘You should feel sorry for the poor’ or ‘You shouldn’t.’”2
Further limiting our vision is the narrative that the poor are a people apart. The insistence that there is a “culture of poverty” takes on the character of a bizarre and delusional mantra when we understand that poverty is a majority experience in the United States. This is not to say that those who are born in poverty do not face special challenges in escaping it. They do. The best single predictor of adult poverty in America is if you were born poor, because poverty impacts the quality of your education, the resources in your neighborhood, your exposure to violence and trauma, and your health. This is also not to say that everyone experiences poverty in the same way. Racial inequality and discrimination, gendered expectations of caregiving, chronic health problems, mental illness, physical disability, and the extra hurdles faced by undocumented migrants and those with criminal records can combine to make poverty more likely and more difficult to escape.
But poverty is not an island; it is a borderland. There’s quite a lot of movement in the economic fringes, especially across the fuzzy boundary between the poor and the working class. Those who live in the economic borderlands are pitted against one another by policies that squeeze every possible dime from the wallets of the working class at the same time that they cut social programs for the poor and absolve the professional middle class and wealthy of their social obligations. There is a lot of self-blame and horizontal violence in the borderlands, but there is also a lot of shared experience. The first challenge we face in dismantling the digital poorhouse is building empathy and understanding among poor and working-class people in order to forge winning political coalitions.
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The good news is that this mission is already well under way. Broad-based inclusive movements to end poverty, led by the poor, have been on the rise in the United States for two decades. The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC), for example, was born out of a New Freedom Bus tour organized in June 1998 to showcase the devastating impacts of welfare reform. The organizations hosting the tour formed PPEHRC under the leadership of welfare rights activist Cheri Honkala a few months later. For PPEHRC, redefining poverty and expanding the union of those who see themselves as poor is central to its goal to “build a movement to unite the poor across color lines.”
If you lack even one of the economic rights promised by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—including health care, housing, a living-wage job, and quality education—PPEHRC counts you among the poor. The redefinition is tactical, an attempt to help poor and working-class people see themselves reflected in each others’ experiences. The movement engages in a wide array of strategies, from building tent cities and reoccupying abandoned “human rights houses” to direct action marches and documenting economic human rights abuses. But storytelling is central to their work.
For example, in 2013, the PPEHRC held a World Court of Women on poverty in Philadelphia. The World Courts of Women are public hearings that draw attention to violence against women, including violations of our basic human rights. They create a space for ordinary people to deliver testimony over the course of several days, and a panel of jurors listens, reflects, and gathers evidence to hold governments and corporations accountable for human rights abuses.
Over three days, about 100 attendees from the eastern states shared space and told stories. “This is a sacred space, a place where we listen to people who have been made invisible, who have been disappeared, who have been made to feel worthless,” Honkala said on the first day. “Listening to the voices of those who have been told to be quiet and to disappear is incredibly important, strategic, and vital. It’s not just a nice thing to do. Or a morally correct thing to do. It’s a winning thing to do. It’s a transforming thing to do. It’s a changing-the-world thing to do.”
Such sustained, practiced empathy can change the “us/them” to a “we,” without obscuring the real differences in our experiences and life chances. The righteous anger that wells up when we recognize our common suffering is an earthshaking, structure-tumbling, visionary force.
The PPEHRC was recently joined in their work by the New Poor People’s Campaign, a coalition of religious, civil rights, and economic justice activists and organizers committed to addressing the massive human suffering and oppression caused by poverty and racism. Like PPEHRC, storytelling through Truth Commissions has been central to their strategy.
And yet, justice requires more than truth-telling. It requires mobilizing grassroots power to disrupt the status quo. Today’s poor people’s movement struggles to build a truly interracial, cross-class movement led by the poor themselves, just like the Poor People’s Campaign 50 years ago. Those organizations genuinely led by poor and working people face unique difficulties attracting resources, because foundations rarely trust that the poor can manage money. They are often marginalized in progressive coalitions that include professional middle-class activists because their language and behavior do not always fit prevailing norms of movement culture. Their actions and policy recommendations are rarely reported in the mainstream media. Those organizations led by the professional middle class on behalf of the poor, on the other hand, are more successful in attracting funding, progressive allies, and public attention. But they are often disconnected from the radical analysis and boundless energy of poor and working-class communities.
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In February 1968, King and other members of the SCLC drafted a letter to President Johnson and the Congress making their demands for an economic and social Bill of Rights clear. “We do not come here to ask for charity,” they wrote, “We demand justice.… We speak as black men and women on behalf of black men and women. But the rights we insist upon do not apply only to our own people. They are, as this nation has proclaimed, but not practiced … the rights of all men.” They then laid out six fundamental rights required for all Americans to achieve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These included:
1. The right of every employable citizen to a decent job.
2. The right of every citizen to a minimum income.
3. The right of a decent house and the free choice of neighborhood.
4. The right to an adequate education.
5. The right to participate in the decision-making process.
6. The right to the full benefits of modern science in health care.
To fund their ambitious agenda, the SCLC demanded that the Johnson administration immediately withdraw from Vietnam, create a domestic Marshall Plan dedicating 3 percent of the Gross National Product to building affordable housing, and pass a peacetime GI Bill to support higher education or vocational schooling for millions of poor youth.
“With these rights,” they concluded, “the United States could, by the two hundredth anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, take giant steps towards redeeming the American dream.” In a letter to supporters, King warned that the Poor People’s Campaign was America’s “last chance” to arouse its “conscience toward constructive democratic change.”3
Instead, by 1976, the digital poorhouse had emerged and a movement to restrict the rights of poor families was sweeping the country. The combination of more restrictive rules, faster processing, less human discretion, and more complete surveillance shredded our already inadequate social safety net. The Congress used the cost of the war in Vietnam to rationalize dismantling War on Poverty programs. The peacetime GI Bill, public service jobs, and minimum guaranteed income called for by the Poor People’s Campaign never materialized.
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Today, these goals still sometimes feel hopelessly out of reach. But if we are serious about dismantling the digital poorhouse—and ending poverty—we could do worse than to start with this list of 50-year-old demands. Certainly, creating enough adequately paying jobs would eliminate much of the cyclical use of public programs that occurs when working-class people—and even some in the professional middle class—dip below the poverty line and into the densest web of the digital poorhouse. But, as Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer point out in $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, work doesn’t always work for everyone. “We need a program that can provide a temporary cash cushion,” they write, “because no matter what strategies we implement, work … will sometimes fail.”4
In the face of fears that automation promises a jobless future, a cash assistance plan, the universal basic income (UBI) is enjoying a resurgence. Experiments in UBI are currently being conducted in Finland and in Ontario, Canada. In May 2017, Hawaii adopted a bill declaring that “all families … deserve basic financial security” and began to explore instituting a UBI. High-tech entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, believe that a UBI will provide a cushion allowing everyone to innovate and try new ideas.
UBI plans usually offer between $8,000 and $12,000 a year. In principle, a UBI would be truly universal—offered to every citizen—but in political practice, guaranteed adequate income programs tend to be offered to those who are unemployed or who fall below a minimum income line. They offer unconditional cash: those who receive a UBI are allowed to work, and can spend or save their allotment however they want. Supporters, who span political ideology, say that basic incomes compensate for wage stagnation, shrink welfare bureaucracies, protect against economic shocks, and allow low-wage workers to supplement their earnings. They also allow for basic human dignity: no drug testing, scrutiny of your parenting, or financial surveillance. Unconditional cash assumes that poor and working-class people know best how to spend their money and care for their families.
But, as the welfare rights movement learned when their adequate income plan went up against Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, a UBI is not a panacea. It can be seen as a bribe encouraging poor and working-class people to accept political, social, and workforce exclusion. The income in these plans is usually so low that, even combined with low-wage work, families would find it difficult to build financial stability for the next generation. It might weaken wages for others, or allow companies to engage in ever-more precarious and exploitative employment arrangements. It could be presented as a wholesale replacement or privatization of the social welfare state, making it more difficult to access subsidized housing, medical care, nutritional assistance, childcare, or job training.
Nevertheless, a UBI might be a great first step in dismantling the digital poorhouse. Freed from the mandate to find fraud, divert the “undeserving,” produce sanctionable offenses, and perform triage in an atmosphere of constant scarcity, the punitive machinery of the digital poorhouse would certainly be seen for what it is: an overly elaborate technological infrastructure that wastes time, resources, and human potential.
Making public assistance less punitive and more generous would also ameliorate many of the problems in homeless services and child protective services that I’ve described. According to Gale Holland of the Los Angeles Times, 13,000 people on public assistance fall into homelessness every month in Los Angeles County because benefits are both inadequate and too hard to keep.5 A guaranteed economic cushion would likely eliminate many of the 2.6 million child maltreatment cases that stem from neglect rather than abuse every year.
Many UBI advocates, including Martin Luther King, Jr., have argued that a guaranteed income is not a substitute for a vigorous social welfare state. A system of non-punitive cash assistance might help dismantle the digital poorhouse, but it will not end poverty.
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Changing cultural understandings and political responses to poverty will be difficult, abiding work. It is unlikely that technological development will slow down to wait for our new stories and visions to emerge. In the meantime, we need to develop basic technological design principles to minimize harm.
At lectures, conferences, and gatherings, I am often approached by engineers or data scientists who want to talk about the economic and social implications of their designs. I tell them to do a quick “gut check” by answering two questions:
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?
Not one of the technologies I describe in this book rises to this feeble standard. We must demand more.
As we create a new national narrative and politics of poverty, we must also begin dismantling the digital poorhouse. It will require flexing our imaginations and asking entirely different kinds of questions: How would a data-based system work if it was meant to encourage poor and working-class people to use resources to meet their needs in their own ways? What would decision-making systems that see poor people, families, and neighborhoods as infinitely valuable and innovative look like? It will also require sharpening our skills: high-tech tools that protect human rights and strengthen human capacity are more difficult to build than those that do not.
Think of the principles of non-harm, below, as a first draft of a Hippocratic oath for the data scientists, systems engineers, hackers, and administrative officials of the new millennium.
Oath of Non-Harm for an Age of Big Data
I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability, the following covenant:
I will respect all people for their integrity and wisdom, understanding that they are experts in their own lives, and will gladly share with them all the benefits of my knowledge.
I will use my skills and resources to create bridges for human potential, not barriers. I will create tools that remove obstacles between resources and the people who need them.
I will not use my technical knowledge to compound the disadvantage created by historic patterns of racism, classism, able-ism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, religious intolerance, and other forms of oppression.
I will design with history in mind. To ignore a four-century-long pattern of punishing the poor is to be complicit in the “unintended” but terribly predictable consequences that arise when equity and good intentions are assumed as initial conditions.
I will integrate systems for the needs of people, not data. I will choose system integration as a mechanism to attain human needs, not to facilitate ubiquitous surveillance.
I will not collect data for data’s sake, nor keep it just because I can.
When informed consent and design convenience come into conflict, informed consent will always prevail.
I will design no data-based system that overturns an established legal right of the poor.
I will remember that the technologies I design are not aimed at data points, probabilities, or patterns, but at human beings.
It is possible that the digital poorhouse will prove so isolating and stigmatizing that it will undercut our common aspirations. But it could also have the opposite effect. The ubiquity of its high-tech tools could allow us to see how our struggles, hopes, and dreams are linked together. It might create unlikely allies, as it did in Indiana, when the automation experiment ravaged welfare recipients, state caseworkers, nonprofit organizations, and local governments alike. Its web could draw us together. But it won’t happen by accident. As Dr. King reminds us, “Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.”6 The digital poorhouse must be met with organized and visible resistance.
The most inspiring social movements of the past decade have begun to address classism and poverty, but they have failed to recognize the role of the digital poorhouse in perpetuating economic violence. Occupy Wall Street brought crucial attention to the grotesque expansion of wealth among the 1 percent. But the big tent of the 99 percent obscured very real differences in the life chances of the professional middle class, the working class, and the poor. The movement built momentum for higher minimum wages and debt forgiveness but remained largely silent on public services. And while the unhoused often became part of Occupy encampments, the movement struggled to embrace their leadership and center their issues.
The affirmation of all Black lives at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement has helped to bridge class divides and to mobilize an extraordinary cross-section of people to fight against police brutality, end mass incarceration, and build strong and loving communities. The movement’s founders, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors, are clear that the movement condemns all state violence, not just police violence. As part of its reparations platform, The Movement for Black Lives—a collective of 50 organizations including the Black Lives Matter Network—calls for the establishment of an unconditional and guaranteed minimum livable income for all Black people.
But despite the expansive view of Black Lives Matter, the interventions that have attracted the most public attention have been those focused on violence committed against Black bodies, minds, and souls by the criminal justice system. Similar surveillance of brutality and dehumanization in public assistance, homeless services, and child protective services must take their rightful place at the center of our social justice work. As my colleague, Mariella Saba of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, always reminds me: it’s vital to keep our eyes on the badge. But the culture of policing wears many uniforms.
And the state doesn’t require a cop to kill a person.
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The digital poorhouse kills people. The majority of them are women, children, the mentally ill, the disabled, and the elderly. Many are poor and working-class people of color. Many others are poor and working-class whites. Addressing the digital poorhouse can help progressive social movements shift attention from “the police” to the processes of policing.
Policing is broader than law enforcement: it includes all the processes by which we maintain order, regulate lives, and press people into boxes so they will fit our unjust society. The county poorhouse was an extrajudicial institution, built to imprison those who were not guilty of any crime. Scientific charity policed the lives of poor and working-class people for two generations, with brutal results. Today, the digital poorhouse uses its high-tech tools to infer and predict: to police events that haven’t even happened yet.
In my most pessimistic moments, I fear that we are winning the fight against mass incarceration at just the historical moment when the digital poorhouse makes the physical institution of the prison less necessary. Corporations already anticipate the immense cost savings of building a digital prison state without walls. A 2012 Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu report titled Public Sector, Disrupted, for example, sees “transforming criminal justice with electronic monitoring” as an “opportunity for disruptive innovation” in government services.
A graphic brings their point home. On the left side is a stick figure behind prison bars. In the middle, there is an equal sign. On the right, there are five and a half stick figures wearing electronic ankle bracelets. The violence of the digital poorhouse is less direct than police brutality, its operation harder to see. But we must resist its moralizing classifications. We must resist its erasure of history, context, and structure.
Exposing the violence of the digital poorhouse will require a great deal of courage. The poor and working class will have to stand in the truth of their experiences, recognizing commonalities and building on differences to create unshakable coalitions. Because race has for so many years been central to dividing us, a first order of business will be to expand and nurture the antiracist capacity of poor people’s movements. But it will be equally important to confront the deep classism of many progressive organizations. A true revolution will start where people are. It will engage them in terms of their basic material needs: safety, shelter, wellness, food, and family. And it will honor poor and working-class people’s deep knowledge, strength, and capacity for leadership.
At the same time, the professional middle class and wealthy will have to acknowledge the immense suffering economic inequity causes, recognize their culpability, and reassess their role in creating a more just world. This is doubly true for technology professionals who hold immense resources, including specialized knowledge, tools, time, and money. Though they may have been unwitting participants in its construction, they must bend their tools toward dismantling the digital poorhouse.
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In his March 31, 1968, sermon, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called those who would be “conscientious objector[s] in the war against poverty” to a moral reckoning. In his ringing voice, he stood in the nation’s capitol and intoned,
This is the question facing America. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. America has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor.
One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power.
It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, “That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me.” That’s the question facing America today.
Fifty years later, King’s question has become only more urgent. He did not foresee that the very technological wonders he extolled might be turned against the poor. Our ethical evolution still lags behind our technological revolutions. But more importantly, because the nation failed to address King’s most crucial challenges—dismantling racism and ending poverty—the digital revolution has warped to fit the shape of our still-inequitable world.
We, too, will stand in the eyes of justice and talk of what we’ve done. We have programmed bots to converse like humans. We have built cars that drive themselves. We even have apps that allow us to document police abuse and mobilize protest.
The God of history is still saying, “That is not enough!”