COMPUTERS AND THE POOR: A BRAND NEW POVERTY (reprinted from _The CPSR Newsletter_, Fall, 1993) According to the 1993 U.S. Census report, released in early October, more Americans live in poverty than at any time since the early 1960's. In the 1980's, according to _Business Week_, U.S. companies poured $1 trillion into computer technology. Poverty and the computer revolution may seem at opposite poles of contemporary life. The pervasiveness of computers, though, links the two at many levels. The connection may be the more obvious interaction with the computerized welfare office, dealings with an increasingly computerized police force, or being left out of the "technology future" for want of a decent education or access to equipment. Or the connection may be the more subtle, but perhaps more profound, connecting tissue of computers and the economy. We are well underway in a radical reorganization of the world economy made possible by computer technology. The host of new technologies which are also bound up with this process -- digital telecommunication, biotechnology, new "smart" materials, robotics, high-speed transportation, etc. -- would not be possible without the capabilities of computers to analyze, sort, and process vast amounts of data. These technologies have made global production serving a global market possible, the nature of which the we have never before seen. It is feasible and economic to have design done in Silicon Valley, manufacturing done in Singapore or Ireland, and have the resulting products air-shipped to markets again thousands of miles away. Along with global production and global consumption, we also have a new global labor market. U.S. workers compete against Mexican or Thai or Russian workers for all kinds of jobs -- not just traditional manufacturing and agriculture jobs, but also software design and data analysis -- and capital enjoys remarkable fluidity as it seeks out the lowest costs and the highest returns. With networking, robotics, and information-based production, fewer people are needed to work in contemporary industry. New terms emerge in management-speak to accommodate the reorganization of production around the new technologies: the "virtual corporation" focuses on "core competencies", requiring a vastly reduced full- time workforce of "core staff." "Contingent workers", "consultants", and "independent contractors" absorb the shocks of economic expansion and contraction. The bastion of stable jobs, those Fortune 500 companies that could promise steady employment, generous benefits and a secure retirement are "restructuring," or "downsizing" at a dramatic pace. According to a recent _Harper's_ article, Fortune 500 companies have shed 4.4 million jobs over the past 14 years. Even the computer industry is not immune, as the implosion at IBM testifies -- since 1985, it has shrunk from 405,000 employees to 250,000. The global economic restructuring shows up as a declining wages for American workers (down 11% since 1970), with more people working at temporary jobs with fewer benefits. The economy is failing to create well-paying jobs for semi- and un-skilled workers. Parallel to this restructuring , we are witnessing a dramatic polarization of wealth and poverty in the U.S. And in the Third World, the situation is much, much more extreme. A BRAND NEW POVERTY It makes no sense to think about poverty today outside of these profound changes in the economy. Thomas Hirschl, a sociologist at Cornell University, argues that poverty in the 1990's has a distinctly different cast than poverty in the 1960's, when most of the government programs dealing with poverty were designed. In "Electronics, Permanent Unemployment and State Policy", Hirschl sees "a qualitative difference regarding the social dynamics associated with poverty in the contemporary United States." He proposes that "a new type of poverty will develop in response to the widespread use of labor-replacing electronic technology." People "caught up in this new type of poverty may ultimately form a new social class" that creates "qualitatively new challenges for state policy." Hirschl goes on to observe that we have moved past the "post- industrial" economy, and are now settling into a "post-service" economy. Labor-replacing technology, as it becomes more efficient and cheaper, invades the realm of service industries, across the board, from investment counseling to Taco Bells and cleaning services. So the pressure is on up and down the line, from executives to the least skilled clerk. We see not just "increases in the section of the economically marginalized population obtaining poverty or near-poverty incomes," but also a growth of even more unfortunates -- a "destitute, economically inactive population," writes Hirschl. "The theory of the post-service economy predicts that, over time, increasing numbers of workers will lose all economic connection to production , and join the ranks of the destitute... Attempts to secure economic resources directly from the post-service economy will be blocked by the state." PROFOUND CONSEQUENCES Short of some radical restructuring of society that accepts that work, as traditionally conceived, can no longer be the measure of how necessities will be distributed, the government's ability to respond is constricted. One growing trend has been to cut the poor loose, by cutting benefits and public services. Michigan completely eliminated its General Assistance (GA) program for indigent adults in 1991, and other states have considered similar steps. California has cut the welfare grant to families with children each year for the last three consecutive years, and in the most recent state budget, opened the door to counties dramatically reducing their GA programs. (GA is mandated by the state, but paid for and run by counties.) A totally marginalized population desperate to survive will do so by any means, whether legal, semi-legal or illegal. So police technology is enhanced, even militarized, to contain the social breakdown. It is foolish to consider the 1992 rebellion in Los Angeles apart from 100,000+ jobs lost in Los Angeles in the past three years. Or not to recognize the growth in prisons, prison technology (assembly line prison manufacture, automated prisons, high-tech ankle bracelets to track movement) and the prison population -- mostly a result of participating in one of the only viable job-schemes available to impoverished youth, illegal drug distribution -- as inextricably linked to the economy, and through the economy, to the technology revolution. The whole thing turns in and back on itself when the technology revolution is directly applied to tagging, tracking and tasering what can only be described as a social revolution. TIGHTENING THE SCREWS The police collection of massive databases in Los Angeles (150,000 files of mostly youth over the past five years) under the pretext of containing gangs is only possible via computer technology. In welfare offices in California, it is becoming increasingly common to electronically fingerprint welfare recipients. Los Angeles has been fingerprinting GA recipients since 1991, and has a pilot plan to extend the system to welfare mothers and their kids, adding 300,000 more sets of digital fingerprints to their files. That pilot program will likely be extended across the state, and since AFDC is a federally-mandated program, will quite likely be adopted nationally, unless public pressure stops it. San Francisco has a measure on the November ballot to give the green light to electronically fingerprint GA recipients there [Ed. note - the measure passed]. While social service agencies try to assure the public that this information will not be shared with police, California state law does provide a mechanism whereby police can obtain information on welfare clients; and nothing precludes confidentiality laws from being changed. Electronic fingerprints then become a common, unique digital link between welfare and police computer systems. Political support -- both for cutting government aid in a time of increasing need, and for extending the use of computer technology to tracking and controlling people -- is mobilized by fear of crime, and by the potent spectre of "welfare fraud." While the most callous could rationalize this use of technology by saying that "it won't happen to me", oftentimes the results do come back to haunt the rest of the population. For example, as Jeffrey Rothfeder describes in _Privacy for Sale_, computer-matching of databases, where government agencies go on data fishing expeditions by matching unrelated databases, gained a foothold in the late 1970's under the pretext of catching "welfare fraud." A House of Representatives staff member told Rothfeder that "anything that promises to catch welfare cheats doesn't get a lot of objections." After the precedent was set for welfare recipients, the use of matching was extended to other groups, and has subsequently been used on everyone who files a tax return. ABANDON ALL RIGHTS, YE WHO PASS THROUGH THESE GATES Privacy, as a right and privilege, is an unknown for people on welfare. As a condition of receiving assistance, recipients are required to sign forms that basically open their lives to the government. Bank accounts, homes, and personal history are open to welfare investigators on the lookout for "welfare fraud." While proposals to deliver welfare benefits electronically, via ATM cards, has some decided benefits for welfare recipients, including increased flexibility and security, it also poses serious risks. When food "stamps" are delivered electronically, for example, the potential for tracking purchases and comparing them with other welfare data becomes a possibility. (Never mind the headaches when the computer system goes down, as it did twice in Maryland's pilot program in May, 1992, meaning that food stamp recipients were unable to buy groceries.) Computers are more likely to be used, by the police or the welfare agency, _against_ a poor person; than they are to be used _by_ a poor person. The cost of the equipment, software and services is one obvious barrier. The limited access to computers in underfunded schools in poor neighborhoods is another. _Macworld_'s special education issue a few years ago dramatically pointed out the inequity by comparing a school in East Palo Alto ("a poor minority blip on Silicon Valley's wealthy white screen") and another in well-to-do Palo Alto, just a few miles away. The number of usable computers in the East Palo Alto school is one for every 60 students, as compared to one for every 9 students in the Palo Alto school. As government services have been reduced, the poor are most affected. The transformation of information into a commodity item over the past few decades has paralleled the defunding of public libraries, museums, schools, and other programs that delivered information and skills to people regardless of ability to pay. Once the barrier of an admission price is raised, those with no money are effectively excluded. Mike Davis, who has written extensively on social trends in Los Angeles, describes this process of a developing information apartheid in a remarkable essay "Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control, the Ecology of Fear": [T]he city redoubles itself through the complex architecture of its information and media networks. Perhaps 3-dimensional computer interfaces will allow [people] to stroll though this luminous geometry of this mnemonic city... If so, _urban cyberspace_ -- as the simulation of the city's information order -- will be experienced as even more segregated, and devoid of true public space, that the traditional built city. Southcentral L.A., for instance, is a data and media black hole, without local cable programming or links to major data systems. Just as it became a housing/jobs ghetto in the early twentieth century industrial city, it is now evolving into an _electronic ghetto_ within the emerging _information city_. WHAT CAN A PERSON DO Computer professionals are obviously concerned about these issues, as the impromptu gathering at 1992's SIGCHI, initiated by CPSR members, signifies. In the wake of the L.A. rebellion, several hundred people gathered to discuss the basic question, "what can I do?" There are both defensive and offensive steps that people could take. One step would be to place the same emphasis on challenging police technology as CPSR did for military technology (and in many cases, it's the same technology being turned home). Slowing the destruction of the information commons, by promoting the preservation of intellectual achievements as a public treasury will help ensure that people still have access to information. Otherwise, all information will disappear into "pay-per" private reserves, and those without resources will be effectively excluded from the information society. We need to promote equity of access to information. This includes work that's being done around civic networks (e.g., the Seattle Community Network and the host of FreeNets), equitable access to the Internet, access to education, extension of free public library services, and community-based computing. And why not begin to consider the distribution of basic computer technology to every household? We also need to support an international information infrastructure that serves the underdeveloped world, not exploits it. In the discussion of a national information infrastructure, it is critical that we don't lose sight of the needs of a population that, as one recent U.S. study indicated, does not have the math or reading skills to carry out basic daily activities like using a bus schedule. The national information infrastructure, now and in the future, rests on a foundation of education -- on the ability to acquire, process and generate information. Without ensuring basic educational skills for all, we will effectively relegate substantial sections of the population to barren information- Bantustans. Beyond this, a really visionary leap would be to take up the profound challenge of what technology makes possible, and to conceive of what kind of social order can make the optimum use of it for all. Crisis? Opportunity. Jim Davis Midwest Regional Director CPSR