Data Warfare: How Poverty Trains the Machine
By [Anonymous], 𓂀 Witness | 𓆸 Flow | 𓏃 Rewrite It begins quietly. A welfare application. A housing voucher. A trip to the emergency room. A denied claim. A missed court date. Each moment, a transaction — not just between people and systems, but between people and machines. But the people don’t know they’re training it. They don’t know they’re the dataset. While Silicon Valley hosts panels on “ethical AI,” and policy papers politely debate algorithmic bias, a deeper, systemic exploitation marches on undisturbed: low-income populations — disproportionately Black, Brown, disabled, and female — are being strip-mined for behavioral data that fuels the very systems that surveil, reject, and manage them. This isn’t the future. This is the infrastructure of now. The Hidden Cost of “Helping” Every social service interaction — applying for Medicaid, attending a diversion program, entering rehab, submitting food stamp recertifications — generates data . That data is rarely seen as b...