Where Technically Wrong works by honing in on some of the companies most often associated with bias and abuse in tech, Virginia Eubanks’s forthcoming Automating Inequality succeeds by almost entirely ignoring them. Eubanks, a writer and professor at SUNY Albany, spent part of the past several years investigating different semi-automated systems that have been used to study the habits of poor Americans in three different states. Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration, for instance, booted more than a million people off welfare rolls over three years by interpreting small application mistakes, often beyond applicants’ control, as failures to cooperate. The city of Los Angeles uses a Coordinated Entry System (CES) to manage homelessness. The CES both uses an algorithm to compare how vulnerable different homeless people are, as well as requiring that homeless people allow their information to be used for seven years by more than 100 organizations, including law enforcement.

To call the stories and data Eubanks has collected infuriating feels like an understatement. In and around Pittsburgh, the county Office of Children, Youth and Families uses the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) for assessing the risk of childhood abuse and neglect through statistical modeling. This leads to disproportionate targeting of poor families because the data fed into the tool is what’s available, and that often comes from the public services and agencies that lower income families rely upon or have to deal with—public schools, the local housing authority, unemployment services, juvenile probation services, and the county police, to name just a few. The data from private services used by middle and upper class—schools, nannies, private mental health and drug treatment services, luxury rehab—simply isn’t available. AFST also tends to equate signs of poverty—such as being unable to afford a child’s medication, or neighbors complaining about a child playing unsupervised—with signs of risk of abuse, often ultimately creating more work for already beleaguered parents.

The grim reality is that quitting Facebook would only remove some small portion of the sway technological systems have over your life.

Eubanks has been covering this topic for several years, and she and a slew of others have pointed out that marginalized people are often the first to face experiments in assessment and punishment through technological tools. Sometimes these experiments are spontaneous and vigilante, as when neo-nazi trolls zero in on minorities on Twitter. Sometimes they have government sanction, when for instance single mothers are stripped of the benefits that are supposed to be a core part of a social safety net. What’s incisive about Automating Inequality is how it underscores the subtle ways technology is used to this end. If you start to talk about algorithms and their dangers with many in the United States at the moment you’ll probably end up talking about Facebook, Russia, and the 2016 election. But the grim reality is that quitting Facebook or divesting yourself of some other part of your web presence would only remove some small portion of the sway technological systems have over your life. Law enforcement might still use your friends’ social media accounts to surveil you, running photos through facial recognition. Or, a giant system for credit assessment—a system you can’t opt out of—could leak your information in a preventable breach.

Technology is increasingly built into every part of our lives, whether it’s the social media and apps that Wachter-Boetcher discusses, the social services Eubanks outlines, or the vast information systems hosted by Amazon Web Services or Google’s cloud computing efforts. Technically Wrong and Automating Inequality, as well as other books like them, are helpful not because they bring us any closer to pinning down the technology industry, but because they testify to just how ubiquitous it has become. It’s not sufficient to think of technology as an industry. It needs to be approached as a type of infrastructure flowing through many industries, and the public sector, with all that entails. The challenge now, these books propose, is finding how to make the tools and systems around us more equitable and democratic.