[09/22/17: This post has been updated with a transcript, courtesy of Open Transcripts]
Back on March 13th, 2017, I gave an invited guest lecture, titled:
TECHNOLOGY, DISABILITY, AND HUMAN AUGMENTATION
‘Please join Dr. Ariel Eisenberg’s seminar, “American Identities: Disability,” and [the] Interdisciplinary Studies Department for an hour-long conversation with Damien Williams on disability and the normalization of technology usage, “means-well” technological innovation, “inspiration porn,” and other topics related to disability and technology.’
It was kind of an extemporaneous riff on my piece “On the Ins and Outs of Human Augmentation,” and it gave me the opportunity to namedrop Ashley Shew, Natalie Kane, and Rose Eveleth.
The outline looked a little like this:
- Foucault and Normalization
- Tech and sociological pressures to adapt to the new
- Starts with Medical tech but applies Everywhere; Facebook, Phones, Etc.
- Tech and sociological pressures to adapt to the new
- Zoltan Istvan: In the Transhumanist Age, We Should Be Repairing Disabilities Not Sidewalks
- Exoskeletons rather than Infrastructure
- Istvan’s use of the phrase “Bandage Culture”
- Replies:
- Exoskeletons rather than Infrastructure
- All Lead To: Ashley Shew’s “Up-Standing Norms”
- Listening to the Needs and Desires of people with disabilities.
- See the story Shew tells about her engineering student, as related in the AFWTA Essay
- Inspiration Porn: What is cast by others as “Triumphing” over “Adversity” is simply adapting to new realities.
- Placing the burden on the disabled to be an “inspiration” is dehumanizing;
- means those who struggle “have no excuse;”
- creates conditions for a “who’s got it worse” competition
- Listening to the Needs and Desires of people with disabilities.
- John Locke‘s Empiricism: Primary and Secondary Qualities
- Primary qualities of biology and physiology lead to secondary qualities of society and culture
- Gives rise to Racism and Ableism, when it later combines with misapplied Darwinism to be about the “Right Kinds” of bodies and minds.
- Leads to Eugenics: Forced sterilization, medical murder, operating and experimenting on people without their knowledge or consent.
- “Fixing” people to make them “normal, again”
- Leads to Eugenics: Forced sterilization, medical murder, operating and experimenting on people without their knowledge or consent.
- Gives rise to Racism and Ableism, when it later combines with misapplied Darwinism to be about the “Right Kinds” of bodies and minds.
- Primary qualities of biology and physiology lead to secondary qualities of society and culture
- Natalie Kane‘s “Means Well Technology”
- Design that doesn’t take into account the way that people will actually live with and use new tech.
- The way tech normalizes is never precisely the way designers want it to
- William Gibson’s quote “The street finds its own uses for things.”
- The way tech normalizes is never precisely the way designers want it to
- Design that doesn’t take into account the way that people will actually live with and use new tech.
- Against Locke: Embrace Phenomenological Ethics and Epistemology (Feminist Epistemology and Ethics)
- Lived Experience and embodiment as crucial
- The interplay of Self and and Society
- Ship of Theseus: Identity, mind, extensions, and augmentations change how we think of ourselves and how society thinks of us
- See the story Shew tells about her friend with the hemipelvectomy, as related in the aforementioned AFWTA Essay
The whole thing went really well (though, thinking back, I’m not super pleased with my deployment of Dennett). Including Q&A, we got about an hour and forty minutes of audio, available at the embed and link above.
Also, I’m apparently the guy who starts off every talk with some variation on “This is a really convoluted interplay of ideas, but bear with me; it all comes together.”
The audio transcript is below the cut. Enjoy.
