The Universal Fix: Computing Pacification in Times of Crisis
Creators: name: Salman, Cengiz
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Digital Studies
subject: Science and Technology Studies
subject: Critical Race Theory
subject: Critical Political Economy
subject: Technofix
subject: American and Canadian Studies
subject: Humanities (General)
subject: Communications
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities
subject: Social Sciences

description: Since the 1960s, state and corporate actors have strategically delegated the responsibility of solving social problems to algorithms, big data, and AI to calm social turbulence in periods of crisis and uncertainty. The Universal Fix: Computing Pacification in Times of Crisis examines a series of computer-based interventions, which it refers to as technofixes, that are designed to mitigate insecurities affecting prevailing practices of mass incarceration, neoliberal governance, sustainable development, and global financialization. Through case studies such as the COMPAS recidivism algorithm, Michigan's unemployment insurance management system, UN climate models, and Meta's Free Basics platform, this dissertation argues that technofixes are instruments of political pacification. It analyzes the construction, implementation, and consequences of technofixes to demonstrate how they work to deflect criticism of dominant political and economic institutions and preserve intersecting systems of power. It brings digital studies, science and technology studies, critical political economy, and critical race theory into conversation to show how technofixes reinforce and multiply social inequalities that are immanent to systemic racism, capitalism, and imperialism. Across its chapters, this dissertation relies on humanities methods, including textual analysis, symptomatic reading, and media archaeology, to investigate an archive of government contracts and reports, promotional materials, scientific research papers, and historical documents to uncover different techniques through which technofixes preserve extant institutional arrangements. Chapter One argues that technofixes depoliticize racism by appearing as scientifically objective and automatic solutions for addressing crises in the US prison industrial complex. I make this argument through a close reading of two objects: nuclear physicist Alvin M. Weinberg’s writings on air conditioning as a solution to Black uprisings in the 1960s and the COMPAS recidivism algorithm as a solution to racist sentencing disparities today. Chapter Two explores how politicians and bureaucrats have used privately-owned automated computer systems as solutions to administrative burdens in managing unemployment insurance programs. It uses the story of Michigan’s MiDAS system, which falsely accused more than 44,000 former unemployment claimants of fraud, to show how the neoliberal state uses debt to punish the poor and compel them into accepting precarious employment and poor working conditions. Chapter Three studies how the UN uses Integrated Assessment Models to validate the idea that global capitalism and liberal democracy can successfully combat climate change without sacrificing economic growth. In this chapter, pacification takes the form of an ideological circumscription that disarms skepticism by making existing political visions and climate policies appear more plausible than alternative action. Chapter Four focuses on Meta’s Free Basics, an app that provides free internet access to people throughout the global south, as an imperial project for monopolizing new users and the data they produce. It argues that the platform helps Meta assuage its investors' concerns over the viability of the company’s existing business model. The Universal Fix demonstrates how technofixes are seductive because they work to improve social life without radical transformation to systems of power, knowledge production, and representation that drive inequalities in wealth, privilege, and influence. This dissertation intervenes in debates about algorithmic bias and discrimination by describing how pervasive technological problems are the consequences of political projects designed to conserve existing arrangements of power by pacifying opposition in moments of real and perceived crisis.