Tag: glitch

People tend to want to fix, to solve, to make better. This is a human aspect, but one that requires people first to identify a problem, or find a flaw. This has led to great accomplishments, innovations, and advances in technology. Wonder after wonder at the hands of people.

At the hands of people…

But not all people have hands.

Not all people can see, or hear, or walk, or talk, or…

People have fantastic and amazing abilities. They though, are not their abilities. 

Yet people are defined by their abilities, and by the accomplishments their abilities bring forth.

People obsess over this idea of productivity and fixate on achievement.

It’s a race that must be won.

A race where to not be first means to be forgotten. Where if you don’t win you’re a loser, an outcast, a reject. Defective. A less-than. A glitch.

And people have become so very good at seeing differences as wrong or bad. As abnormal. 

Different is frightening and anything different is a threat.

And so people work to solve the problem. To fix the glitches. People want to make the problem go away. Make it inconsequential. Invisible. So they don’t have to be scared.

But what happens when people identify a person as the problem?

What happens when we identify someone as the problem?

Well, we shift uncomfortably and then identify lack of access as what needs fixed.

And the solution is technology. And, we get to feel better. We high-five and clap each other on the back. We praise the technology that has opened doors and broken barriers. And technology has done that. 

But it isn’t enough.

It doesn’t address what we choose to ignore. That lack of access is not the underlying problem.

We ignore that the person who has the concern or problem isn’t leading the conversation. That we need to be invited into the conversation by them. That we need to listen to their experience.

Instead we close the gate and deny access, perpetuating the underlying problem.

Focusing on lack of access as the problem in regard to disability results in doing to and doing for, with technology as the tool. From a psychological stand, doing to and doing for both send a message that the person is less than, incapable, or incompetent.

Focusing on lack of access as the problem regarding disability sends the message that the person is incapable and technology is the savior.

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Doing to and doing for continue the kind of thinking that leads to oppression and suppression. It leads to ablebodied privilege and associated rhetoric. Bonnie Tucker talked about reading into phrases like giving a voice to the voiceless and giving hope to the hopeless. These phrases ring of good intention and sound sweet, but the core of the phrases are bitter. They label the object of the sentence as voiceless and hopeless.

It may be better to say…return the voice to those who have had it stolen. But this still seems to have a privilege angle. 

And we do this. Regardless of our status or our position. Regardless of how “woke” we proclaim to be. We identify those who we can deem less-than and prop up our position in relation to them. 

We give lip service to tolerance but we continue to do to others. We talk about acceptance but we continue to do for others. 

But we can change this. Elise Roy in her Ted Talk discussed moving from a frame of increasing tolerance to a frame of becoming an alchemist or magician focused on the real problem. I felt this was similar to Justin Hodgson’s idea of being a tinkerer and engaging a willingness to play. Both talk about the willingness to fail and fail often. To essentially fail forward.

Roy hints the best approach is what I understood to be a “beginners mind” common in dialogues on mindfulness and meditation. Practices that can help us to loosen our egos and what Roy calls premade solutions. 

These premade solutions are the ones Tucker discusses as part of the technocapital disability rhetoric, which mistakes fixing access with addressing the civil rights and social justice issues present in society.

Roy and Hodgson’s ideas of becoming alchemists and tinkerers are much better positioned to foster a doing with approach that can begin to address those issues Tucker identified.

And I think another entity needs to be included into the dynamic. Technology itself can be part of the process rather than seen merely as a tool or as a means to an end.

Hodgson proposed the interaction between humans and technology is collaborative. Each is affected and changed by the interaction. Adopting a design thinking approach including technology as a partner, could have an impressive result. One allowing us to “look sideways,” as Warren Berger might say, at the social problems we continue to face despite all our success in improving access.