This is not an email I ever expected to receive or send.

... growing relations away from toxic and hateful ones. This configuration requires that we acknowledge our role in oppression. We must abolish our internal metaeugenic logics, our ideologies of replacement, and our fascist alienation and domination as a part of this revolution.

Instead, it is necessary to understand that while our current relations are ones of alienation and subjugation, they are still relations. We are not tasked with building relations where there previously were none, but with forging new relations, healing relations, and...

We often talk about human relationships as a way out of dystopia (Hayes and Kaba 2023; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018; 2022), and I believe that, firmly. However, we sometimes interpret our social problems as stemming from absences of relation, from which relation will save us.

... but because the structures of oppression are human. This revelation is not cause for despair but for hope and for action. Fundamentally, oppression is about human relationships — specifically toxic ones, neglectful ones, and domineering ones.

Sometimes, it can feel as though the structures of oppression are fractally distributed in never-ending spirals (Williams 2021). These structures become legible at every layer of our sociotechnical world...

Disabled articulations, our sociotechnical assemblages, chart a new future for us all by undermining what we believe is possible in the present. This book has been an exercise in working my own way out of hopelessness.

With every breath, disabled people write a disabled future, one in which we all belong, regardless of the circumstances of our births or the collisions of our fragile flesh with a harsh and sometimes toxic earth.

The chapters of this book describe technological projects that enact eugenics through medical exclusion, educational exclusion, employment exclusion, and incarceration which produce layers of stratification and removal of disabled and oppressed people from public life.

Disabled people know how to live in a world that wishes we would die. Technology has long been in the business of writing disabled and otherwise oppressed people out of the future.

“[W]e owe it to ourselves to name the world we cannot live without, even as we diagnose the world we cannot live within.” (Benjamin 2022, 279) “[T]ransformative change happens when we are willing to build the things that we know must exist.” (Hayes and Kaba 2023, 13)

Furthermore, I have named this book “Disabling Intelligences” because the concept of intelligence is inextricable from the heart of eugenics and must be dismantled as a socially constructed, metrically derived, and algorithmically upheld category of oppression.

This book is titled “Disabling Intelligences” for many reasons. First, because so-called “AI” is built from historical commitments to the excision of disability from the classification of humanity. https://t.co/6MwHRRMHkl

I wonder if this person knows their mean email started a chain reaction that led to me writing a book

Readers will come away from this text equipped with a clarity of perception and "a Just AI toolkit" for evaluating and resisting metaeugenics in technology.

My intention is to provide readers with encouragement and empowerment through concrete actions that readers can take in their day to day, online, educational, and professional lives.

Our collective belief in our own inadequacy is required to sustain the AI project—a metaeugenic worship of intelligence and a belief that most people do not possess enough of it.

A history of raced and gendered labor, combined with industrialization and the “Ghost Work” of the digital era have produced an Ideology of Replacement that promises the elimination of inconvenience without any concept of the human cost of convenience.

The desire for AI has been expressed as “taking away the tasks we hate.” But who designates contemptable tasks? And what does our contempt for this work say about how we regard the people who do it?

The promised product, sometimes medical devices which users have become dependent on, is then abandoned and the resources rolled into some other venture. Are we willing to bet it all on a project which has repeatedly broken its promises?

Entrepreneurial culture has become an elite gambling scheme—any proposed product or service promised by startups is often a cover for extracting user data which is then sold as a speculative revenue prospect.