'Working Body': Interrogating and Reimagining The
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The ‘Working Body’: Interrogating and Reimagining the Productivist Impulses of Transhumanism through Crip-Centered Speculative Design Franchesca Spektor and Sarah Fox Abstract: Appeals to ‘nature’ have historically led to normative claims about who is rendered valuable. These understandings elevate a universal, working body (read able-bodied, white, producing capital) that design and disability studies scholar Aimi Hamraie argues ‘has served as a template […] for centuries’ (2017: 20), becoming reified through our architectural, political, and technological infrastructures. Using the framing of the cyborg, we explore how contemporary assistive technologies have the potential to both reproduce and trouble such normative claims. The modern transhumanism movement imagines cyborg bodies as self-contained and invincible, championing assistive technologies that seek to assimilate disabled people towards ever-increasing standards of independent productivity and connecting worth with the body’s capacity for labor. In contrast, disability justice communities see all bodies as inherently worthy and situated within a network of care-relationships. Rather than being invincible, the cripborg’s relationship with technology is complicated by the ever-present functional and financial constraints of their assistive devices. Despite these lived experiences, the expertise and agency of disabled activist communities is rarely engaged throughout the design process. In this article, we use speculative design techniques to reimagine assistive technologies with members of disability communities, resulting in three fictional design proposals. The first is a manual for a malfunctioning exoskeleton, meant to fill in the gaps where corporate planned obsolescence and black-boxed design delimit repair and maintenance. The second is a zine instructing readers on how to build their own intimate prosthetics, emphasizing the need to design for pleasurable, embodied, and affective experience. The final design proposal is a city-owned fleet of assistive robots Somatechnics 10.3 (2020): 327–354 DOI: 10.3366/soma.2020.0326 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/soma Somatechnics meant to push people in manual wheelchairs up hills or carry loads for elderly people, an example of an environmental adaptation which explores the problems of automating care. With and through these design concepts, we begin to explore assistive devices that center the values of disability communities, using design proposals to co-imagine versions of a more crip-centered future. Keywords: transhumanism; disability justice; cyborg; speculative design; assistive technology. Introduction I (Spektor) sat down with prolific Bay Area disability activist and elder Corbett OToole at a cozy Berkeley, CA cafe, a tape recorder between us. Lifting a hand from her wheelchair’s joystick to take a sip of tea, OToole gave me an exasperated look. ‘I don’t give a shit about exoskeletons, if I can’t even get a robust health plan’, she asserted. Assistive technologies of the future are created for normative bodies, OToole explained. Even exoskeletons, she continued, are made within a height and weight range exclusive of many disabled people. Throughout our conversation, OToole channeled the collective frustration of disabled communities robbed of agency by engineers purporting to offer ‘innovative’ assistive solutions, yet refusing to include them in the design process. To remedy this, she concluded, designers must ensure the participation of those most impacted by their designs. Though the rhetoric of innovation may be seductive (and seemingly ubiquitous in the San Francisco Bay Area), leaders of the disability rights movement like OToole continually do the work of interrogating whose bodies are erased in such visions of the future. The myth of neutrality has long defined how tech is organised, and led to harm – from Kodak’s Shirley Card used to calibrate film to white skin tones (Del Barco 2014) to recognition systems which render Black and brown faces illegible (Algorithmic Justice League 2020). In these cases, a universal, working body (read able-bodied, white, producing capital) is the locus of consideration. Design and disability studies scholar Aimi Hamraie argues this body ‘has served as a template […] for centuries’ (2017: 20), becoming reified through our architectural, political, and technological infrastructures. Erasure from (increasingly digitalised) infrastructural systems disproportionately affects crip, fat, femme, queer, trans, Black, brown, immigrant, and poor communities (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018) – those who stand in contrast to the ‘unmarked’, white masculine body presumed to be the default user. In this article, we bring together modes of design inquiry and critical disability studies scholarship to examine how productive 328 The ‘Working Body’ imperatives creep into contemporary assistive technologies, interrogating how standards of normalcy might be shifted or queered. We draw on a series of interviews we conducted with Bay Area disabled activists as well as analysis of existing tech marketing materials to articulate new relationships to the ‘working body’, and argue for a rethinking of the ways in which technologists link labor with individual worth in product design. We argue for an approach to speculative design that images absent or under-considered narratives of the body within and around technology production (Rosner 2018; Bennett et al. 2019), using design fictions to co-imagine versions of a more crip-centered future with our interviewees. These transhumanist reimaginings are presented here in the form of three fictional design proposals: 1) a dystopian future, illustrated through a narrative featuring the breakdown of an exoskeleton; 2) an inverted future, depicted in the form of a tutorial instructing readers on how to build their own intimate prosthetics; 3) a speculative future, represented through a fleet of public wheelchair-assist robots. Rather than focus on specific technologies or capabilities, our work draws on disability studies to view the body as situated within a network of care and mutual aid. Related Work We engage with the ideological lineage of the transhumanism movement, putting the philosophy of technological enhancement in conversation with critical disability scholarship. Connecting the two discourses is the figure of the cyborg, which features prominently in the transhumanist enthusiasm to normalise disabled bodies. In turn, disability scholarship problematises the ‘technofix’, while still regarding the cyborg as a potentially liberatory figure. Transhumanism Once bound in science fiction, the modern vision of the cyborg – a techno-symbiosis between human and machine – now offers us unprecedented possibilities for human enhancement. This is, at least, according to the ideology of the transhumanist movement. Transhumanism is a loose international philosophy devoted to advancing the body and mind through biological transcendence, its most ardent supporters seek to create ‘posthuman beings […] liberated from disease and death’ (Duarte & Park 2014: 260). Evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley is credited as the founder of 329 Somatechnics transhumanism, first using the term for the title of an oft-cited 1957 article in which he argues for the improvement of the social condition through scientific exploration (Huxley 1968). Yet, the movement’s thematic origins trace back far earlier, propelled by the Enlightenment project of sapere aude (dare to know) and deep investment in the idea of a rational natural order (Frodeman 2019, Foucault 1984, Kant 1784). By the early twentieth century, this ‘daring’ led industrialising societies to increment previously fixed benchmarks of human evolution, while simultaneously elevating white, male, working bodies to the top. The desire to propel evolution thus remained a productivist enterprise, culminating in the eugenic push for species-wide betterment, the prospect of space colonisation, and science fiction exploring the role of bionics and cognitive enhancement in the production of life’s necessities (Bernal 1929). While the movement we now call transhumanism coalesced most directly from these twentieth century notions of progress, its broader ethos has continued to drive advancement in myriad fields and intellectual traditions, from the super exponential growth of genetic engineering, to artificial intelligence, robotics, and nanotechnology. According to the U.S. Transhumanist Party, cyborg implants should be used toward the optimisation of the human condition, and to ‘help disabled people live a life closer to normal or optimal’ (US Transhumanist Party 2020). The movement enthusiastically endorses the use of cybernetics upgrades towards disease immunity, brain-computer interfacing, super-strength, and even improved appearance. Under the expansion of transhumanist ideals, cyborg ‘optimisation’ can be located in a wide swath of contexts. Many industrial projects espouse the benefits of cyborgisation in clear capitalist terms, citing ‘higher levels of output, better quality and fewer errors, and capabilities that surpass human ability’ (McKinsey Global Institute 2016). In 2018, for instance, Amazon patented a wristband to track how warehouse workers handle packages and send haptic feedback to ‘nudge’ worker’s in order to streamline efficiency (Stubbs 2018). Car manufacturers are currently testing exoskeletons purportedly meant to help workers lift enormous weights without injury (Forbes 2019), while the US Defense Advanced Research