Excerpts from 'Against Technoableism'
by Ashley Shew
4-minute read
Quotes from the book that I find particularly interesting. I've taken all of them from its last chapter, 'Accessible Futures':
Technofuturists want to believe that in the future utopia there will be no disability. But despite eugenic and transhumanist imagination about perfecting human beings, about life extension, about regenerative medicine, about neural implants, and the merging of “man” and machine, the fact is that in the future, we can expect more disability, not less. We should expect both more ways to be disabled and more people existing with disabilities. The future is disabled.
The future is disabled for each individual. We can never have too many reminders that anyone who lives long enough can expect disability eventually; disability is a very normal and predictable part of the human experience.
The future is disabled for humanity writ large. As a species, we face environmental disaster, pollution, and climate change. Environmental racism has already wrought disproportionate damage to human health with our decisions about where to site environmental hazards like interstates, gas pipelines, landfills, and so on, and this will only get worse as the number of healthy, habitable locations is reduced by climate change. Pollution is increasing rates of environmentally produced disease and disability—higher levels and lower onset ages of different types of cancers, as well as rising rates of asthma, chemical sensitivities, and autoimmune disabilities, some of which can come from smog and conditions of poor air quality. Think about all the people along the West Coast who breathed in toxic smoke from wildfires for weeks on end in 2021: these kinds of environmental health hazards are only going to increase.
The future is disabled for the planet itself. Sunaura Taylor, a fellow disabled scholar who is an animal and environmental activist, writes powerfully of the “disabled ecologies” that constitute the landscapes we have impaired. Her case study is the Superfund site in Tucson, Arizona, which contaminated local groundwater and, forty years later, is still affecting the land and communities nearby. She thinks disabled people have important insight into how to live and age and exist with disabled ecologies. She reminds us that we can’t just get rid of our land, our environment. We have to learn how to live in a world we have disabled.
The future is disabled, cosmically. Even with hopeful futures like space travel and adventure, we can expect the production of disability. Space is already disabling for humans. Just as the built environment on Earth is not suited for disabled bodies, space as an environment is not suited to any human bodies. Every astronaut comes back from the low gravity of space with damage to their bones and eyes—and the longer they are off Earth’s surface, the worse the damage. Some things can be restored over time, but some changes are long-lasting. These realities are absent from futurist writing about technology, which is framed as simply magicking away the disabling effects of space travel.
This is why technofuturists’ discussions of “The End of Disability” are so silly. Disability isn’t ending; we’re going to see more and newer forms of disability in the future. This doesn’t mean that all medical projects aimed at treating disease and disability are unpromising. I certainly hope we will come up with better diagnosis and treatment for conditions like asthma and Lyme disease. But disability is multifaceted and a much larger category than can be covered by any simple case. No nondisabled person without experiential knowledge of disability and engagement with the disability community should be making claims or decisions about the future of disability and disabled people.
Because the future is disabled, working toward and planning for a future without disability, without disabled people, is a ridiculous prospect.
In 2018, Sheri Wells-Jensen, blind linguist, banjo player, and my Facebook friend, made “The Case for Disabled Astronauts” in Scientific American. She wrote about how useful it would be to have a totally blind crew member aboard. Spacesuits would need to be better designed to transmit tactile information, but a blind astronaut would be unaffected by dim or failed lighting or vision loss from smoke, able to respond unimpeded, unclouded, to such an emergency—Wells-Jensen refers to a problem on the Mir where they couldn’t find the fire extinguisher when the lights went out.
Recruiting for space has always held up certain bodies as better than others, in ways that don’t at all map onto what might actually work best.
Disabled people don’t have the same disadvantages in space that they may have here on Earth—especially if we work to avoid creating or re-creating disadvantages in how we build and plan for space.
In case you don’t know, it’s very difficult to poop in space—both in terms of physical properties and engineering-wise. Astronauts have to train to use specialized toilets (there is a whole toilet-engineering team with each space agency), and the toilets are finicky and have a history of breaking. Because pooping is so complicated, Mallory has suggested that NASA should only be recruiting people with ostomies—people who have openings in their abdomens (called stomas) to excrete waste using ostomy bags. All the engineering and work that currently goes into space toilets is only necessary because no one has an ostomy!
October 24, 2024 — 
October 25, 2024