Flutterby™! : ShotSpotter and value extraction

Turning Death into a Commodity is about the ShotSpotter alleged gunshot detection and localization system, but...

The idea of extractive abandonment is a synthesis of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of “organized abandonment” and Marta Russell’s idea of the “money model of disability.” Gilmore theorizes “organized abandonment” as an intentional process under racial capitalism in which elected officials introduce neoliberal policies and orchestrate new patterns of governance by abdicating their responsibility for maintaining public goods. This pattern allows critical infrastructure and public programs to atrophy from consistent budget cuts and other degenerative policies over time. This willful disinvestment transforms and reorganizes the state and limits the ability of government agencies to deliver substantive social programs while manufacturing poverty, precarity, and vulnerability to premature death. The process of organized abandonment both creates and requires crises—like economic recessions or the persistent problem of gun violence—in order to exist and sustain itself.

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