“The victims, of course, feel differently. But the greatest number of them—the hourly workers and unemployed, the people dragging low credit scores through life—are poor. Prisoners are powerless. And in our society, where money buys influence, these WMD victims are nearly voiceless. Most are disenfranchised politically. Indeed, all too often the poor are blamed for their poverty, their bad schools, and the crime that afflicts their neighborhoods. That’s why few politicians even bother with antipoverty strategies. In the common view, the ills of poverty are more like a disease, and the effort—or at least the rhetoric—is to quarantine it and keep it from spreading to the middle class. We need to think about how we assign blame in modern life and how models exacerbate this cycle. But the poor are hardly the only victims of WMDs. Far from it. We’ve already seen how malevolent models can blacklist qualified job applicants and dock the pay of workers who don’t fit a corporation’s picture of ideal health. These WMDs hit the middle class as hard as anyone. Even the rich find themselves microtargeted by political models. And they scurry about as frantically as the rest of us to satisfy the remorseless WMD that rules college admissions and pollutes”