Dataficação da pobreza: a centralidade do trabalho profissional em torno dos dados e informações sociais na Política de Assistência Social

Abstract

This work aims to reflect on the datafication of poverty from the perspective of Social Assistance Policy as a public responsibility of the State. We start from the premise that social work in the field of this social policy has been reduced to the procedures of registering social data through massive data production, raising concerns about the role of this Policy in society and the consequences of this data collection on the lives of the population using the programs, benefits, and services. Based on documentary and bibliographic research, we seek to analyze and problematize the quantification of life through the institution of instrumental logic as a premise for the rationalization of reality, reflecting on the current capitalist stage in its surveillance expression, where data has gained centrality as an asset for the production of value and surplus value in the context of neoliberalism, which drives the commodification of data and public information. We aimed to present the construction of Social Assistance Policy within the logic of the managerial Neoliberal State, where practices of business-like management of public social management have been observed. For the development of the qualitative research, we also conducted semi-structured interviews (script in Appendix 1) with six individuals working in data processing within the field of Social Assistance Policy, aiming to find clues about the transformations in work within this scope. We concluded that the datafication of poverty has become a function of this policy and that workers, with weak critical appropriation, increasingly fail to recognize the repercussions of information use on the lives of the population and their own lives, as their work has been reduced to data collection and organization. Based on the evidence raised by this thesis, it is estimated that there is a larger movement towards the implementation of digital automation systems in the field of Social Assistance Policy, which simultaneously advances in aspects such as transparency and information control, but also warns us of a growing process of commodification of public data for large market niches of behavior, taste, and custom surveillance of the segments of the Brazilian population most exposed to social inequalities. In summary, this thesis aims to offer ethical-political reflections that contribute to minimizing the side effects of the datafication of poverty, whether in relation to the market, access to social rights, and/or the protection of personal data