We’ve borne witness to myriad dehumanizing narratives about disabled, particularly neurodivergent, people as “useless eaters” (a Nazi term) and “degenerates” (in the United

McLain suggested that these types of cultural technologies, which are so radically different from the scientific approaches to autism research or the digital interventions into social skills, invite us to think differently about technologies for autism: My advice would be to find these autistic technologies, learn about how autistics use them, and

Eliminating disability, particularly congenital disability, was part of the “war against the

Not all autistic people have trouble with eye contact norms and expectations; eye contact is not a good or reliable indicator of who is autistic and who is not, but many do struggle with this completely arbitrary norm that so much is projected onto.

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.

Disability (a social category) isn’t a problem to be solved by technology. But MIT Media Lab’s Hugh Herr regularly says, “I don’t see disability, I see bad technology.”

The social model simply asks us to expand our ideas about disability: it pushes back against the knee-jerk assumption that disability is abnormal and that our bodies and minds should be normalized.

Today, many of our ideas about able-bodiedness and disability come from classifications based on who is suitable for plantation or factory work: we call people “disabled” when they can’t perform “normal” amounts of physical labor.

When people posit disability as a problem, they look for solutions. Disabled people can and do have problems, which sometimes include pain and dysfunction. 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.