Against Technoableism Quotes

“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.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“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. There are significant social differences between those who acquire disability in old age and those of us who arrive there much younger or are born disabled. We are often pitted against one another for what is seen as limited service/funding/care, and we experience different social biases and expectations. Yet we are all part of the larger disability community, whether we like it or not.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“The views on technology we get from listening to disabled people often look very different from those of people educated in the medical and "helping" professions.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“Disabled people can and do have problems . . . However, many of our problems are social, structural, and practical problems that stem from the idea that disabled people are fundamentally flawed, unworthy of inclusion, broken or inadequate. That is ableist thinking.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“Twain literally means “in different directions, apart, asunder.” Use of the prefix in this way has given us perfectly good words like “discern,” “discuss,” “dismiss,” “dissent” and “distill.” When used in this way being disabled does not suggest a lack of anything—including ability, except perhaps to the uninformed or willfully ignorant.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“From 1939 to 1941, the T4 program gave a group of medical professionals the power to identify patients for “euthanasia” (mercy killing) who were deemed unfit. The first targets were children and adults with cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, and other disabilities from birth, followed by adults with chronic illnesses, mental-health issues, and non-German criminals. After lethal injection and starvation were decided to be inefficient, Nazis introduced the use of gas chambers disguised as showers. Often, families had no knowledge of what really happened to their institutionalized loved ones; they were told their family members had died of pneumonia and been cremated. Whole mental-health institutions were processed and killed, their friends and families given lies about outbreaks of illness.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“Disabled people know what it’s like to exist and persist, even in the wake of attempted elimination, trauma, and grief.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. . . . Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, unpredictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?” “That we shall die.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“The future is disabled, through emerging and new diseases.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“The”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“change who you are or the world will hate you.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“Neurodivergent people may feel physical pain and exhaustion from masking or from trying to process information given in tricky formats (as when someone with an audio-processing disorder or tinnitus tries to work with spoken information).”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“compliance with social norms is usually intended for the comfort of the nondisabled.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“brains work differently, whether the difference is in how we process information, read, react to sensory stimuli, or think. The term neurodiversity was coined by autistic researcher Judy Singer in 1998 and was originally conceived in relation to autistic brains. As professor Nick Walker has described it, the idea that “there is one ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ type of brain or mind, or one ‘right’ style of neurocognitive functioning, is a culturally constructed fiction, no more valid (and no more conducive to a healthy society or to the overall well-being of humanity) than the idea that there is one ‘normal’ or ‘right’ ethnicity, gender, or culture.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“Technology cannot transcend the meat sack; the body is still there, still felt, still handled, enduring. But technology—and the normative ideas of what it means to have the correct body or mind—increasingly separates our selves from the bodies with which we encounter the world.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“For leg amputees and many others who may use leg orthotics, walkers, scooters, and other mobility equipment to ambulate, the pressure to walk and to walk well is no joke, so deeply embedded are notions of fitness and vigor to being a good citizen and person. I think everyone has some internalized ableism surrounding walking—it’s one of the difficult things for amputees to root out of their own heads and for people to address in their own impressions about the competency and respectability of others.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“prosthetics don’t make everything perfect. . . . Prosthetics aren’t a solution. . . . I believe in the use of prosthetics as a tool. 3D printed hands and arms are very cool. But they don’t change everything in the life of a limb different child.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“Our bodies change, and so does the fit of our devices.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“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 out your existence, of scrutiny around every one of your choices, your behavior, your being.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“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.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“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.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“The fact is that in the future, we can expect more disability, not less. Disability is a very normal and predictable part of the human experience.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“Don't be neutral; the "neutral" medical position on so many things has justified our exclusion and incarceration, and the "neutral" social view makes us into unfortunate charity cases rather than fully human beings.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“There's an expectation that disabled bodies and minds call for amelioration, for fixing, for specific types or care. But these imagined calls rarely center disabled people's experiences and desires. We rarely recognize disabled expertise about what works and what doesn't, and what good approaches to tech and disability look like for disabled people.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“Disability . . .is actually a historical concept that developed relative to work, employment, and education. Historical and social factors underpin how disability is defined and how people are grouped.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“Ableism is bias or discrimination against disabled people or stigma against the status of disability - a bias toward nondisabled lives and ways of being.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“Technoableism is a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we strive for. It's a classic form of ableism. Technoableism is the use of technology to reassert those biases that favor nondisabled ways of life.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“Please! Before you question or comment to an amputee why that person you casually run into at the grocery store or other public place isn’t wearing their leg (or have one at all), or why they aren’t doing certain activities, realize that they may be living a normal, realistic existence in a media-ridden society.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“During the Decolonizing Mars event, as we sat in a smaller group discussion circle, I learned that short women with larger thighs do better at not passing out when they pull high numbers of g’s as fighter pilots; their brains are closer to their hearts, so the additional blood flow helps them remain conscious, and their larger butts/ thighs seem to absorb some impact.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement