Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (A Norton Short)

The social model simply asks us to expand our ideas about disability: it pushes back against the knee-jerk assumption that disability is abnormal and that our bodies and minds should be normalized.

Disability (a social category) isn’t a problem to be solved by technology. But MIT Media Lab’s Hugh Herr regularly says, “I don’t see disability, I see bad technology.”

The film Invitation to Dance is about disability activist Simi Linton, who is also a wheelchair dancer. Linton describes dance as “the expression of joy and freedom.”

IBM and the Nazis jointly designed, and IBM exclusively produced, technological solutions that enabled Hitler to accelerate and in many ways automate key aspects of his persecution of Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others the Nazis considered enemies. Custom-designed, IBM-produced punch cards, sorted by IBM machines leased to the Nazis

She should have exercised more!) and then denies proper access and care because they have a “lifestyle disease.” (Disgusting phrase.) This shows up around lung cancer (if you get a lung-cancer

Talila A. Lewis describes ableism as “[a] system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normality, intelligence, excellence, desirability, and productivity.” 4 Ableism is a system set in socially constructed norms. Ableism is more than just bias: it’s the entire idea that anything can or should be pe

Crip Camp, which was co-produced by the Obamas. Like “queer,” it has also been verbed, and is sometimes used to describe the process of disorienting and undoing ableist ideas and structures.

Few disabled people have just one disability. That’s important to note because most studies about disability want you to have just one—which means most studies about disability do not record our data with any fidelity.

You’ll recognize in this entry the tension between the medical model, in which disability is the problem, and the social model, in which the built environment is the problem. It’s very clear which model the tech world subscribes to, with its expensive, complex solutions to the “problem” of not being able to walk. I think often about how these techn