Machines Against Progress? The Technological Development of Social Reproduction

• In Event: A History of Anti-Neoliberalism: US Developmentalism, and Neoliberalism Reconsidered 1970-2005

Abstract

The internal colony of the rural U.S. South was both the site of American neoliberalism’s incubation, cultivated through extensive experimentation, and imagined as the archetypal place for resistance to it. This paper examines the computerization of the welfare state in Mississippi in the 1970s and 1980s to locate neoliberalism, and attempts to resist it, in the literal technologies of policy administration. Doing so reveals three seemingly conflicting stories. First was a desire to build internal, state-specific, technical expertise to isolate the state from national corporations and shared information management approaches, most notably by rejecting the national dominance of IBM. The state legislature pushed to develop internal state capacity in information technology. The Mississippi Central Data Processing Authority which would mete out computer time and become an internal consulting firm, was designed as a counterweight to narratives of a universally networked world. Second was the articulated need to maintain a sufficient welfare state to sustain the seasonal agricultural economy during austerity measures like the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act. Computerized management systems held the perceived solution with promises of reducing caseworker discretion and hours worked, tightening control over welfare recipients, and, most impactfully, providing a cost offset by aggressively collecting funds from non-custodial parents. Third was the hope of liberal leaders that computerization could make welfare depoliticized—turning voters’ attention away from questions of race and rights. More than the economic style of reasoning which obscured the goal of equality, a technological logic guided the construction of a neoliberal state as the pragmatic solution. In isolation, each of these stories point to ambivalent regional compromises made with neoliberalism’s national rise. Together, they underscore the uncertain nature of policy implementation: where neoliberalism is both critiqued and sustained by the same mechanisms.

Author

• Marc Aidinoff, Harvard