say eugenics, say it again
For individuals
This suggestion is to get comfortable and familiar with the concept of eugenics - a concept that holds a lot of information about cultural ideas of progress, the future, and the past. Eugenics is tightly tied to scientific racism, race science, racism, and casteism. If you're not familiar with that tie, then that's part of becoming familiar with the concept of eugenics, its history, how it manifests, and how it connects into the current moment.
Eugenics is a good word to start feeling in your mouth more often because it outlines our need to refuse it wholesale, and to refuse the idea that someone's value or worth is a function of their ability to be productive, to be independent, or to be convenient.
Talking about race and caste, and talking about disability, are generally zones of high discomfort without a lot of room to get things wrong. This isn't helpful to talking about them more. Anything we can each do on a personal level to move into more comfort talking about race and caste and talking about disability is going to get us to a better place with the use of computers. These suggestions for individuals (and all those that follow) are coming from a place of sharing things I'm always working on or through and getting wrong and updating and learning.
My experience with navigating the topic of disability and computers started in a narrow place of web accessibility: what does it mean for pages of the internet to be accessible to everyone. This slowly moved out into what an accessible presentation looks like (fonts, colours, etc.) and also what accessible service delivery looks like in a range of different public sector contexts - accessing a transit service, being supported when applying for benefits.
My experience with navigating the topic of race and caste and computers became explicit in discussions and work on internet access, policing technologies, city service provision, work culture at tech firms, data sovereignty, and more - whether in terms of literal access to the internet, access to city services, public funding for surveillance projects, or something else. In conversations about the smart city project in Toronto, many historical inequities were forced into the frame by thinkers and writers that had to show up and refuse the idea that there was any blank canvas undeveloped land in the city, explore how surveillance was embraced by those that felt safe under it, or that you could skip over existing inequities in service delivery and jump straight into the future while ignoring not only the past but the present as well.
Then specific incidents popped up when I started to practice more intentionally in terms of process accessibility. I once held an organizing meeting of volunteers and tried to navigate bringing supports in for a call for someone that was hearing impaired. It was an education unto itself. Recently I held a session about AI note-taking etiquette where I was being asked questions about the utility of AI for neurodivergent meeting attendees and I didn't feel like I had the handles for the question, but made a note to come back to it.
Now, hold onto this track of conversation, and return with me to the general realm of decision-making. Computers and automation are becoming involved in a lot of decision-making, and it's arguable that a decision is the unit of democracy. After working in and around democracy for a while now, I'm convinced that conversations about disability offer us some of the best possible ground for working on democracy because disability is all about pluralism. Pluralism is a method that operates counter to supremacy and hierarchy.
There is no one way of being disabled, and figuring out how to create conditions that support everyone trying to co-exist with disability has features of the same struggle in creating conditions to support everyone living well together. I am inelegantly collapsing discussion of race and racism and caste in this transition - inherent in this effort to engage with eugenics is to engage more carefully with scientific racism and racism and casteism writ large. There are many intersections of these topics that open up different approaches to thinking and talking about computer use, and they are foundational to better conversations and decisions.
I was once told that it was much better to try to engage with issues of disability than to wait until I had it perfect. This is the crux of this suggestion, and the major thing to think about and hold onto is that this suggestion is offered as a place of opportunity, not compliance.
There is a saying that if you don't design accessibility and inclusion into a process from the beginning, you can't really get there after. If you can begin to take on the need to think about how to talk about computer use from this angle, every time you do it, you'll probably begin to accelerate the quality and difficulty of the conversations. Which may not sound encouraging but it is.
At the end of it, ideas of progress and productivity and eugenics are the underpinning of dominant culture. To alter and shift the patterns of these ideas, we need to begin to at least shake off our fear and quiet about disability, about eugenics, and about race science and racism and casteism - and to not be so scared to get it wrong and hold it imperfectly. I'm doing it right now. In starting to get it wrong, at least somewhat carefully, with each other, more frequently, in smaller pieces, we grow much more of the space to get it different.