Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)

modern-day eugenics enrolls each of us in its blood-soaked imagination—asking us to shoulder social problems, inviting us to purchase an illusion of safety, making any demand for robust public investment in the goods, services, and infrastructure required for everyone to live well appear unimaginable.

“work-arounds” that might make life a bit easier for the individual wearing the suit but do nothing to challenge the harmful status quo.

Here we see how a white masculine imagination flattens social reality. Equal Opportunity Offense is the prime directive, and durable hierarchies are figments of others’ imagination.

The bench is a great metaphor for the spikes built into our institutions, while the foam-lined suit epitomizes how individuals are made responsible for being smarter, fitter, more suitable, to avoid harm. What, dear reader, are the foam suits you must wear to navigate hostile environments?

the designers refuse to acknowledge that the epithets, stereotypes, and abuse of some groups inside virtual worlds are buttressed, underwritten, and cosigned by policies and practices outside the game. Most importantly, the white masculine subjectivity is one that erases its own existence: “Going after everyone equally erases white masculinity’s po

the spiked bench—designed by German artist Fabian Brunsing—which required payment before the spikes would retract into the bench’s surface. The latter’s design invites us to think critically about the metering of social life, where only those who can pay are allowed to rest (or play). The spiked bench also highlights the eugenic imagination and all

The question we face now is whether we can imagine a world in which social acceptance does not rest on these kinds of judgments. You belong without having to show proof of your fitness or superiority.

This solidaristic imagination is born not of individualism, but of interdependence, what disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls inclusive world-building. “I am because we are, we are because I am,” goes the South African philosophy of ubuntu. This is more than “accommodating” people’s differences on the edges. It requires recogn

when computer scientists rely on their own limited intuitions to design systems, rather than engage theories that show how identities are “enacted, contextual, imaginative, and infrastructural,” they are likely to perpetuate patterns of discrimination and disenfranchisement.