Technoableism is a particular type of ableism, one that is highly visible in media and entertainment and omnipresent in the ways most people casually talk about technologies aimed at disability. Technologies for disability can never just be “tools that are useful sometimes,” in the phrasing of Jen Lee Reeves. Technoableism is a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for. It’s a classic form of ableism—bias against disabled people, bias in favor of nondisabled ways of life.3 Technoableism is the use of technologies to reassert those biases, often under the guise of empowerment.
Shew, Ashley. Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (pp. 7-8). W. W. Norton & Company.
Disabled people are often on the front lines of tech users; we are considered the first testing ground for new tech like exoskeletons, Closed Captioning, automatic door openers, text-to-voice and voice-to-text software, and more—tech that is then picked up by all. Yet we are usually left out of the conversations around tech for disability. There are ongoing calls for universal design, but this design employs and imagines our bodies (often as the basis for professional certification) while rarely (if ever) simply asking us what we need. “Engineering for good” labs design prosthetic hands without ever talking to hand amputees. The public is always ready to ask us why we don’t have whatever hot device has recently been hyped in a feel-good news story. While our lives are deeply entangled with technologies of all kinds (not just fancy ones: left-handed scissors or walkers or hearing aids are all disability technologies), disabled people are almost never included in discussions about what technology means and how it integrates into daily life, what it means to be human in our modern world. Sometimes technology is seen as redeeming our lives: nondisabled people believe—and expect us to believe—that technology will “solve” the problem of our disability and save us, or those like us, in the future. Yet these expectations often don’t match our circumstances. They confine us. When people assume that one device will “fix” us, they don’t pay attention to the host of other concerns around disability technology—the bad planning and design, the need for constant ongoing maintenance, the problem of money (Jill’s van, like a lot of disability tech, wasn’t paid for by insurance), and the staggering lack of social support for disability accommodations (Jill’s apartment managers, the police). These are all forms of ableism.
Shew, Ashley. Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (pp. 8-9). W. W. Norton & Company.
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 perfect in this universe of entropy and chaos, applied at the level of human bodies and ways of being. Technoableism is a specific strain or type of ableism, this deeply embedded force for valuing limited ways of being. Like ableism writ large, it informs how we understand and process the lives and stories of disabled people. It informs how we decide who is worthy, who is entitled or deserving, and what justice means when it comes to technology and intervention. It reveals itself in how we rank and value disabled people against each other, and how these values shape our institutions and infrastructure.
Shew, Ashley. Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (p. 9). W. W. Norton & Company.
The sharper end of technoableism is that, if one cannot measure up by technological means, then there are technological-eugenical means for “dealing with” the most unfortunate cases. Prosthetic legs, Prozac, pacemakers, ostomy bags, fidget spinners, heating pads, and wheelchairs are technologies for disability—and so are gas chambers, institutional confinement, and prenatal de-selection.
Shew, Ashley. Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (p. 10). W. W. Norton & Company.
We need to be wary of technoableism—technology development and marketing that makes it seem like disability is a big, bad thing that needs to be downplayed or eliminated. Most of our supposed experts about disability are nondisabled people, who don’t know what it’s like to be the object of ableism, of design made at you rather than for you, of future imaginings that snuff you out of existence, of scrutiny around every one of your choices, your behavior, and your being. This is why we need to look to intersectional, cross-disability communities for expertise—creative visions of a future that cuts no one out. We need to make the world more hospitable to more ways of being and existence—not just by heeding disabled expertise but by loosening our ideas about what “the right stuff” is and by insisting there is no wrong stuff. We should be actively anticipating all the stuff—and planning in a vein to mitigate damage already done in our disabled ecologies and prevent making our planet even more uninhabitable for some or for all.
Shew, Ashley. Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (pp. 130-131). W. W. Norton & Company.
