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Tropes about disability, stereotyped views and biased visions of what disabled life is, often occupy - haunt, maybe - the ways in which technologies related to disability are designed, marketed, and shared. Technology is then taken as a redemptive power for that which demanded an answer or solution or some means of address. There are two errors in our traditional narratives -- (1) we get stories about technology wrong, and (2) we get stories about disability wrong, both of these because of how we talk about disability technology. I’m interested in telling better stories about technology and disability, some of these in the service of better technology, better design -- but really in service of disability community and disabled flourishing. 

Abstract Philosophers often enroll disabled bodies and minds as objects of thought in their arguments from marginal cases and in thought experiments: for example, arguments for animal ethics use cognitively disabled people as a contrast case, and Merleau-Ponty uses a blind man with a cane as an exemplar of the relationship of technology to the human, of how technology mediates. However, these philosophers enroll disabled people without engaging significantly in any way with disabled people themselves. Instead, disabled people are treated in philosophy as literal objects—and in many cases, as less than human. (This sense of a categorical difference between disabled and nondisabled people is becoming especially clear during the Covid-19 pandemic, as I write this article.) Philosophical reflection thus makes assumptions—often wrong—about disabled people’s lives, experiences, and relationships to technology. Outside of philosophy as well as in, disabled people are not regarded as experts about our own experiences and lives; our testimony is paternalistically written over. We need better consideration of disabled people as people as we consider the future. Lack of disabled people’s points of view in philosophy colors—and sometimes invalidates—views of technological change.