The issue is that these harmful technologies aren’t going to materialize in the real world unless they can be used to police, maim, and kill. They will never be *just* a disability object. From @fractalecho.bsky.social and my Wheelchair to Welfare pipeline piece. newrepublic.com/article/1793...

One time I submitted an assignment on time while my husband and I both had norovirus and weirdly that did not make me think that other people should have to do that.

I'm with "ban the pervert glasses" not "the glasses are bad at reading but they said sorry and I believe my glasses."

It's academic year 2020 6-7

This has been on backorder for weeks, but finally arrived. Excited to get digging into @fractalecho.bsky.social 's book. Now I get to learn what parts of my own book I don't have to write.

What advice do you have for southerners? Like Virginia gives a fuck what you think in fucking Nebraska on how they should handle the homegrown white supremacy borne of centuries they deal with. You think southerners are some babies waiting for y’all superior knowledge of the path they should take?

I don't make any money from sales of my book and the publisher can't seem to tell me how many it's sold. But I've advertised it basically myself here and linked in and it's definitely reached people well beyond my usual networks and led to some really wonderful experiences!

🥺🥹🥰

I may not have a gender but my labor sure does.

Having just worked with this text for a class and having heard Williams speak on it, this is a recc.

I would rather have a migraine than be itchy I am extremely weak to itchy. Being itchy is my man flu. Anyway I have poison ivy. *I have chronic migraine I am not exaggerating.

"You hear theyre using chickens as camera gimbals now?" "What?" "Chickens. Strap a camera onto their head. No shake. Chicken camera gimbals"

One year ago today I submitted my finished manuscript to my editor. Every day the book remains relevant gives me psychic damage. It is my goal to become irrelevant. If my work becomes irrelevant it means we've changed. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

it's always exciting to start a new book. this week we're (gently!) starting "Disabling Intelligences" by @fractalecho.bsky.social. if you haven't bought the book yet, there's still time to order it; we're starting with the preface, and thinking about what we anticipate and hope to learn about.

One of many morals of this story is that one of the things these bots are doing to you is they give you an answer to the question you asked and don't know how to help you discover if you're asking the wrong question.

If you just told the class you asked chat GPT to explain a formula to you, do not then mansplain matrix math to me when I tell you you are using the formula wrong. A thread in which I invite people to mock me for ALSO being wrong.

I'm really glad that Palantir's mask off evil is finally getting wider play, but I sigh when folks start saying "THEY'RE ALL OVER THE NHS!' Because my cousin and his colleagues have been trying to warn both the public & Westminster for OVER a decade about these bastards. Have a 🧵

A culture of violation of consent is rife in the tech world, a place where you can't "opt out" of being data mined, where you're surveilled and abused with advertising and the entire model is built on holding your attention captive.

Excitement at the #CHI2026 keynote squashed. Spectacular research on bionics.. but can't afford an artist to make a handful of concept images – AI slop.

I'm starting to believe that people who schedule a lot of meetings do it not because meetings are useful, but because they are entertaining. I feel like I'm at the fucking circus.

For that example about blindness. I've actively not been able to get any of the assistive tech I need funded through any of the funding sources that I'm supposed to get it from in the last 8 months because of the assumption that I can just use AI to do everything if I can't see it.

Where as a society are we investing our resources if the labor of caring for and accommodating disabled bodies is labour worth automating? This is the insidious ableism in the rhetoric of pro-AI apologists who hide behind positive disability principles.

Very unimpressed by pop neurodiversity influencers and their AI apologia. More bullshit claiming that anti-AI stances are classist and ableist and racist. Meanwhile, AI is built on exploited black labor, kills disabled people every day, disposesses the working class, and drinks all our water.

Hard to come up with a less compelling pitch than “substack for chatbots.”

Come join @civicsoftech.bsky.social's May book club on Wed, May 20, at 7pm ET. I'll be leading a discussion of @fractalecho.bsky.social's Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We Are Wrong About AI - and Dr. Williams is joining too! Register at: www.civicsoftechnology.org/book-clubs

It's really something special when my friends, colleagues, and people I admire offer praise for my book. But when people I absolutely did not know at all tell the internet that they love my book? That's wild.

This looks eye opening

It's me and that damn book again umd.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

We're so proud to announce the inaugural Wagner Arts Fellowship with Wagner Foundation. This award recognizes mid-career visual artists in Boston. The awardees are L'Merchie Frazier, Daniela Rivera and Wen-ti Tsen. www.unitedstatesartists.org/perspectives...

Just a reminder that I wrote a book on AI and Eugenics. It's short. Fairly cheap. And sometimes funny. No reason. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

It's ALIVE!!! dsq-sds.org/article/id/6...

I’ve had this debate in class with STEM students before. They NEED to believe that eugenics and scientific racism etc are things of the past and are ‘pseudosciences’ because ‘science is objective’ and the ‘scientific method defends from bias.’ It’s a dangerous way to think.

The fact that race science and eugenics are inextricable from this technology is also why its makers and sellers and pushers do not want you looking too deep into its histories and/or consequences, why they shout you down so hard, why they demonize critics.

@disabilitystor1.bsky.social my darling how I wish your DMs were own right now lmao

When historians etc use the phrase, they’re not saying these ideas have scientific value, far from it. These ideas ARE part of the broader history of science and if we frame it as ‘not science,’ it only will perpetuate the uncritical notion that ‘Science’ would never produce such ideas.

We've got to be able to hold two things in our minds at once: a lot of science can be good and helpful and used for antiracism, and also we are always discovering new ways that every single scientific tool can be biased.

You're getting tangled in a variation of the "just world" fallacy, assuming that if you rigorously adhere to the scientific method, you'll be safe from accidentally doing a racism. But you're not - the entire history of science and the enlightenment is tangled with racism.

Galton's eugenics should be understood through the lens of race, class, gender AND disability: the latter especially so, given how the gAI industry uses #DisabilityAsDiversion (@fractalecho.bsky.social) to bypass and short circuit legitimate critiques.

A review of my book! (there are better ones but this one makes me laugh.)

For the people erecting these data centers, poisoning Black people is a fun bonus on the way to building their ai god.

I wonder if when I do Q And A there are people in the audience screaming internally about how annoying I am.

The thing about systemic discrimination is that the system... Is people.

I am 40 years old but There. Is. A. BUMP. In. My. SOCK.

Currently reading "Disabling Intelligences" by Rua M. Williams @fractalecho.bsky.social in the UCGIS Humans and Geospatial AI Book Club. I should have read this one sooner!

…I've said it so many fucking times, now, but I'll say it again, that it's really fucking messed up that all of these conversations seek to apply to fucking LLMs a standard of personhood we still don't consistently and meaningfully apply to other fucking humans.

So… I've been writing for about 18 years on the idea that if you somehow manage to make meaningfully conscious machine minds & then you treat them as tools, then you're enslaving those minds, and that's pretty messed up. And this ties into something else I've re-upped recently: LLMs can't say "No."

"For many, it has become a magic box: problem + AI = profit." "There is a lot of effort spent in making systems more fair, without ever asking if the system itself is fundamentally designed to cause harm, whether it's egalitarian about it or not." communities.springernature.com/amp/posts/di...

Under no circumstances should we allow OpenAI to become the self-authorized educational research evidenve source that it is trying to be. Vendors must not be research authorities. openai.com/index/unders...

In comments of the quoted thread, @fractalecho.bsky.social says: "In my book I call this the Disability Diversion where all criticism of techno fascism is deflected with appeals to technosaviorism." "Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI" by Rua M. Williams

The Autistic People of Color Fund is hosting their 1st virtual political education workshop on AI, eugenics, and disability, on March 10th at 6pm EST, with @fractalecho.bsky.social & @lydiaxzbrown.com as a fundraiser, so please consider supporting them, if able! 🫂 www.eventbrite.com/e/the-apoc-f...