Oct 1, 2024
I’ve been teaching disability studies and design for more than a decade, and Freddie DeBoer is right to repeatedly sound the alarm about the warped cultural incentives for questionable disability claims. It’s actually worth reading the comments there; the “on the one hand, on the other hand” quality of the discussion is a pretty close transcript of what’s ricocheting around my head when these stats come up.
I confess I didn’t see this countertrend in disability “rights” coming — this elite social status accorded to ever-more-refined diagnostics and disorders. A closer read of history might have prepped me better, but of the course the genuinely new variable has been the algorithm-led structure of social media: an openly wanton, experimental marketing of products that mine young people’s subjectivity and relationships for profit. The human drive for purpose and community is necessary and adaptive. The ersatz purpose-and-community on offer via metricized weak ties and virality is a pale simulacrum of the real thing, and it seems clear that the big platforms create more harm overall than good.
For the last month in my classroom, I have talked my students through the dynamics of bodies with machines under conditions of disability. Look for closures and openings, I tell them. Disability brings about barriers and hurdles — closures in human experience. It also brings the experience of dependence to the generative heart of remaking the built world, a set of openings as a cultural inheritance that shapes all of us. These days I also tie those themes to a wider discussion of the closures and openings made evident under technopoly: What is their own relationship to the digital workplace and its pervasive, liquid, always-on structure? What kinds of sociality are opened up in the apps, and what kinds are distorted or shut down?
They have plenty of insight for the mixed inheritance of social media. But I wonder if we’ll be able to walk all the way to the heart of the matter before the semester’s up.
Last week I sat in on a symposium of thinkers discussing the approaches in various global religious and wisdom traditions toward biotechnology. What do these traditions tell us about bodies, persons, the good, or right action that would shape the yes or no one might say to a given pursuit of biomedicine or technological intervention? One scholar summed up the challenge: the quest for biotechnology is to frame and address imperfection. What counts as imperfection, what are its sources, how much is too much? Is imperfection a problem to solve? A glitch in a body or a life that should, by rights, operate as smoothly and efficiently as machinery?
Like Joe Davis and others, I worry that all pathology, all the time both 1) makes rational sense with a mechanistic view of the human person and 2) is a profoundly impoverished view of human life. I think most young people (most people?) would resist the idea that a person is characterizable as a machine. But when pressed, most people cannot voice a coherent alternative picture. It’s no wonder we’re in deeply murky ethical territory in the realm of bioetchnology.
But the same is true for social media disability trends. I think the clamor among young people to gather diagnostic names for imperfection — every imperfection, from the clinically serious and undertreated to the elaborate neologisms for capturing ordinary variability and performed eccentricity — begs for more sustained philosophical inquiry. If bodily or cognitive imperfection is not merely a mechanical glitch, what is it? How do we countenance it, make meaning alongside it, make our uneasy peace with its inevitable arrival? Young people need our patient accompaniment to ask these questions. They’ve already been abandoned once to the algorithms. I won’t abandon them again with scorn.