How Our Days Became Numbered

Bouk, Dan

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226259208.001.0001

Cited by 126 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…First, in the same fashion that Bloch and Parry discuss the embeddedness of money in society, we view algorithms as something more than yet another external technology that somehow disrupts a social system. Instead, we underscore the ways in which algorithmic operations derive from certain historical and cultural registers of calculation and prediction (Bouk 2015;Lauer 2017;Daston 2013;Guyer 2007). Second, Bloch and Parry identify a tendency to fetishize money.…”

Section: The Emerging Field Of Critical Algorithm Studiesmentioning

confidence: 90%

Assessing Creditworthiness in the Age of Big Data

Hohnen¹,

Ulfstjerne

Krabbe

2021

JEA

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The purpose of this article is twofold: first, we show how algorithms have become increasingly central to financial credit scoring; second, we draw on this to further develop the anthropological study of algorithmic governance. As such, we describe the literature on credit scoring and then discuss ethnographic examples from two regulatory and commercial contexts: the US and Denmark. From these empirical cases, we carve out main developments of algorithmic governance in credit scoring and elucidate social and cultural logics behind algorithmic governance tools. Our analytical framework builds on critical algorithm studies and anthropological studies where money and payment infrastructures are viewed as embedded in their specific cultural contexts (Bloch and Parry 1989; Maurer 2015). The comparative analysis shows how algorithmic credit scoring takes different forms hence raising different issues in the two cases. Danish banks seem to have developed a system of intensive, yet hidden credit scoring based on surveillance and harvesting of behavioural data, which, however, due to GDPR takes place in restricted silos. Credit scores are hidden to customers, and therefore there has been virtually no public debate regarding the algorithmic models behind scores. In the US, fewer legal restrictions on data trading combined with both widespread and visible credit scoring has led to the development of a credit data market and widespread use of credit scoring by ‘affiliation’ on the one hand, but also to increasing public and political critique on scoring models on the other.

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Section: The Emerging Field Of Critical Algorithm Studiesmentioning

confidence: 90%

Assessing Creditworthiness in the Age of Big Data

Hohnen¹,

Ulfstjerne

Krabbe

2021

JEA

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“…New death startups are partnering with insurance companies and employers, with the notion that workers will be more productive if they contemplate their own mortality. What I call "responsible death" is tied to larger risk management trends around corporate wellness, mindful labor, and workplace productivity (Gregg, 2018;Schüll 2016) and to much longer pernicious histories connecting the valuation of human life to metrics (Bouk 2015;Zelizer 1979;Wernimont 2019).…”

Section: Hustling After Death: Covid-19 and Platform Necropoliticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Death Depends on Networked Information

Wernimont

Kneese²,

Sutherland

et al. 2021

SPIR

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One of the founding stories of the United States centers on Patrick Henry’s 1775 declaration “give me liberty, or give me death” on the floor of the Second Virginia Convention where war with Britain was being debated (Cohen, 1981). A similar sentiment is part of several national origin stories including the 1320 Declaration of Scottish Independence, which may have been an inspiration for Henry, and Greece’s national motto of “Liberty or Death,” which was the rallying cry in the 1820 Greek War of Independence. In each instance the suggestion is that independence will be achieved either through successful revolution or death. But in our modern networked cultures, what kind of independence can be found in death? This panel takes up the AoIR 2021 Independence theme by considering how our information and communication technologies are entangled with the end of human life, both at individual and community levels. Our case studies focus primarily on the United States and is deeply invested in considering practices that are evolving in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the long epidemic of police killings of people of color in the U.S. In each of these long events, we are witnessing a myriad of efforts to collect mortality data and render it in ways that make sense of scales of loss. But questions about digital afterlives, networked and remixed loss, and proprietary control over digital remains complicates the foundational narratives of liberty through death and enrolls our dead in practices of nation formation even when those very lives were rendered expendable by the nation-state. At the same time, these practices are an important part of the problematic narrative that nothing dies on the internet, where deaths can circulate as undead memes and commodified data streams. The papers on this panel examine the intersection of data management and speculative death (life insurance, mortality tables, pandemic statistics, counting the dead or potential dead) and death care management (personal digital archives, maintenance work, kinship ties, digital estate planning/mortuary rites, memorialization). As interdisciplinary scholars from Library and Information Science, Science and Technology Studies, and media history, we interrogate the historical, sociotechnical, and cultural aspects of sorting and caring for the dead through networked information. How are people, institutions, and infrastructures working to make sense of and account for the dead on both individual and collective scales? In what ways do histories of racialized and gendered surveillance and violence impact the treatment of the dead when it comes to both digital and physical remains? Major digital platforms and tech companies are increasingly at the center of memorialization and mourning practices, both building on and transforming the ways that these longer histories inform mortuary politics. All four papers show how institutions and individuals are using digital media and networked information— from mortality data and barcodes affixed to coffins to social media memorials and crowdfunding platforms—to assess, track, memorialize, and otherwise manage the dead. We pay particularly close attention to the ways that race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and citizenship affect how the dead are counted and remembered. We trace the history of technologies used to assess risk and manage mortality, comparing recent COVID-19 related developments to previous crises or pandemics and to longer histories of deathcare management as data management, including the history of the life insurance industry, mortality tables, and surveillance, from chattel slavery to contemporary predictive policing. In the 21st century the majority of these practices have transitioned to online and networked spaces, even as they continue to create social networks of information and ritual. Despite digital technologies being offered as a “solution” to the problem of death, our disparate case studies show how digital systems tend to reinforce existing structural inequalities, thereby troubling any sense that independence from violent social formations exists even in death. Cohen, Charles (October 1981). "The 'Liberty or Death' Speech: A Note on Religion and Revolutionary Rhetoric". The William and Mary Quarterly. 38 (4): 702–717.

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“…Here statisticians had the advantage of several decades' worth of increasingly sophisticated techniques developed by life insurance companies-pioneers in combating adverse selection and moral hazard through actuarial science. 30 Entering data into the actuarial model was a labor-intensive process. Farm-level yield data gathered by county supervisors of the AAA program were hand-transcribed into "summaries-of-performance" tables that were then transmitted to state-level offices for careful auditing (Figures 2 and 3).…”

Section: From Confronting Uncertainty To Managing Riskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crop Insurance and the New Deal Roots of Agricultural Financialization in the United States

Hamilton¹

2020

Enterp. Soc.

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A range of private and public institutions emerged in the United States in the years before and after the Great Depression to help farmers confront the inherent uncertainty of agricultural production and marketing. This included a government-owned and operated insurance enterprise offering “all-risk” coverage to American farmers beginning in 1938. Crop insurance, initially developed as a social insurance program, was beset by pervasive problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. As managers and policy makers responded to those problems from the 1940s on, they reshaped federal crop insurance in ways that increasingly made the scheme a lever of financialization, a means of disciplining individual farmers to think of farming in abstract terms of risk management. Crop insurance became intertwined with important changes in the economic context of agriculture by the 1960s, including the emergence of the “technological treadmill,” permanently embedding financialized risk management into the political economy of American agriculture.

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How Our Days Became Numbered

Cited by 126 publications

References 0 publications

Assessing Creditworthiness in the Age of Big Data

Assessing Creditworthiness in the Age of Big Data

When Death Depends on Networked Information

Crop Insurance and the New Deal Roots of Agricultural Financialization in the United States

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