Social media, techno-mess, and imagining collective access
That we are in a mess is not new. We have always been in a mess, and we are in trouble. How then, might we find ways to survive when we are perpetually in crisis?
Survival, care, and kinship were among the animating desires that drove us to write Technoskepticism: Between Refusal and Possibility ». We, the DISCO Network, are an intergenerational group of scholars, artists, and technologists with abiding commitments to our communities, online and off. Our names are: David Adelman, André Brock, Aaron Dial, Stephanie Dinkins, Rayvon Fouché, Huan He, Jeff Nagy, Lisa Nakamura, Catherine Knight Steele, Rianna Walcott, Josie Williams, Kevin Winstead, M. Remi Yergeau, and Lida Zeitlin-Wu.
It is only early days in 2025, and we are waist-deep in techno-mess. TikTok was shuttered and now it’s not; the new administration in the US is gleeful about environmental rollbacks and resource-hungry AI rollouts (while instilling panic about the not so energy-hungry DeepSeek); transgender people are being legislated out of existence and represent a renewed open-season for harassment online. Crisis is abundant.
As these examples make clear, our relationship with technology is often transactional, extractive and exploitative, serving the interests of those in power. These fraught dynamics are routinely noted among people of color and disabled people, who are often adept users, designers, and critics of emerging technologies. In writing Technoskepticism, we felt compelled to narrate the agonizing choices that marginalized folks make, on the daily, when confronted with new technologies. We wanted to navigate the histories that have led us to these crises while also trying to imagine otherwise.
Memory has both pleasure and pain in it. These moments of joy and these moments of betrayal in our history are necessary for building possible futures. We traced lineages of contemporary AI-generated black bodies that sing, speak, and speak back to us. We considered what it might mean to let medical diagnoses proliferate, to claim disability community without any input from medical institutions. We reminisced about MySpace, Asian Avenue, and Black Planet.
So while it might seem contrary, naive, or at worst, straight up self destructive for Black, disabled, Asian, and other people who've been on the wrong side of technology for so long to refuse to participate in what's been called the golden age of AI, in this book, we argue for a critical position between 1) the possibility that the sort of outright techno-optimism that our culture so often presents to us is the correct attitude and 2) outright refusal.
In writing this book, we ask questions more than we provide compact, easy answers. Writing as a collective with a wide array of experiences and perspectives among us, we felt that giving definitive answers would be limiting. Instead, we wanted to engage in technoskeptical positionings through the very act of writing itself.
What we did
This book was drafted over a week’s time in rural Pennsylvania, where—in addition to musing about creepy investments in A.I. or what it means to consider dynamic tech shifts using a humanistic lens—we dealt with tick infestations and haunted cabins. But there were real joys in writing as a team of 14 authors in community together, and in real-time. As Lisa Nakamura noted, “I remember reading through drafts and seeing Remi or Catherine say something I wrote was good, and I would just feel the stab of pleasure. When you’ve been doing research for a long time, no one tells you your stuff is good anymore because they don’t think you need to hear it.” The process of living and working together, as Catherine Knight Steele put it, “removed that weightiness that comes with a lot of academic writing.”
is a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies.
The chapters in Technoskepticism largely cluster under three main conversations: diagnosis and wellness, nostalgia and home, and Black AI and style. The complimentary tick tweezers that adorned our cabins provided us an exigence for this first series of conversations, on health and what it means to be un/well. As we wrote the chapters on diagnosis and wellness, we were responding, in part, to panicked discourse on the self-diagnosis practices of social media users, as well as the barrage of wellness content we’d individually encountered online during the initial COVID-19 shutdowns.
On one level, we might think about diagnosis or wellness as attempts to fix disabled and chronically ill people. But on another level, there's a broad clinical recognition that current tools of diagnosis, regardless of what condition or disability experience we might think about, do not work, or need to somehow be fixed or become better unto themselves through the use of digital technology at scale. In other words, diagnosis isn't just about fixing disabled people, but fixing the process through which disabled people are identified. There’s a lot that’s at stake with (digital) diagnosis—accessing care and finding community, but also the real possibility of being violated and exploited. We wrestled with the idea of fixing fixing, and what it might mean to claim disability or un/wellness outside the contexts of clinical or institutional care.
People have become extremely technoskeptical about social media–meaning that they sometimes refuse it, sometimes they use it compulsively and reject and refuse its profit models and premises. In this section we go back to an earlier period–the 2010’s and before– when this wasn’t true in order to see how we got from there to here.
In the section entitled “Digital Nostalgia” we thought back through our personal histories as Internet users before Facebook. Though it is currently fashionable to criticize these apps as encouraging “brain rot,” groupthink, misinformation, and, just now, alliances with technofascism through their owners, we chose to focus on why these networks are remembered and misremembered the way they are. While on the one hand, the term “community” really did and still does describe some of what happens on, say, Meta we argue that women and people of color were the first users of networks that came before even Myspace. Our belated and selective memory of a platform history without people of color erased our own experiences of home, belonging, and connection on blogs, webrings, and profile pages that lacked live and algorithmically governed feeds.
We also examine the return of nostalgia for earlier digital culture on newer platforms, where young people who never used Myspace post about what a great time it was. We miss the ways that these early networks were also refuges from productivity that resonate differently for racialized folks. Part of our nostalgia is for the experience of “just being” online in the 2010’s and before without the need for or even possibility of working. This is an especially poignant kind of nostalgia for those of us who are Asian Americans because we struggle with a model minority identity. We miss that moment when the digital was a place to play rather than be surveilled, harvested, and bought and sold as data because that is permanently gone.
The third section's chapters “Blackness and A.I.” and “Playing With Black Style: ChatGPT and Black Aesthetics” speak to the evolving nature of artificial intelligence and the current administration's attack on DEIA initiatives. These chapters actively pivot away from focusing on the ways A.I. discriminates against Black people because this line of criticism can often concentrate more on technologies and less on Black life. In our desire to center lived experiences, we are much more interested and invested in explicating the creative intersections of technology and Black life than recounting the myriad ways technologies oppress black people. By orienting our work to focus on Black life, we center questions that ask whether or not large language models and image generators can participate in and recognize forms of Black play and creative expression intrinsic to Black style. In specific, we wanted to know if an A.I. could and would play the dozens with us? Not in a computational system way, but in a Black cultural way. We started by jailbreaking a GPT to see, with guardrails removed, if it would imitate not just Black speech but generate something more subtle: Blackness as a mode of seeing the world. We wanted to see if at this moment in the development of AI we could push it to do something transgressive, beyond its imperative, and beyond its libidinal capacity. What we experienced is most effectively summed up by how Kevin Winstead–the person who generated the title of our book–explains how the idea of technoskepticism arose from both historical exploitation and his own experiences: “At the core of that for me was my father. Who was coming out of a Black nationalist tradition and also is just like a grumpy old man these days. He's never rejected any of the technological advances that have been presented to him, but he has always rejected the manner in which they were delivered to him."
What would you like to do?
Would you like to write a 50,000-word book with many authors in just four or five days? We were supported in our undertaking through grant support from the Mellon foundation, as well as through the time and labor of our DISCO Network staff, Book Sprint facilitators, and access workers. But there can be many ways of imagining collective writing and collective access! If imagining this process is of interest to you, here are some recommendations from our experience writing Technoskepticism:
- It’s not possible to predict what your book will say, but it will have a lot of personality that comes from multiple voices and stories. Some of us are prose stylists, others view writing as a tool, but we were all able to insert our voices.
- Tensions and conflicts will arise in the process of writing. Allowing those to be rather than trying to resolve them can be productive. And as one of our authors noted, this is a particularly Black methodology for collaboration and suited our team and our project.
- Build in support and pleasure as a form of access. Our on-site staff members, Jennifer Eshelman and Evan Hoye, brought us pie and other treats at just the right time and it significantly affected our ability to focus.
- Use the book jam as a way to turn down the volume of expectations that haunts and hampers academic writing, especially book writing. Embrace the joy and fun of actually having the opportunity to sit and chat and think with others.
*Technoskepticism: Between Refusal and Possibility* explores the complexities of living in a world overwhelmed by technological crises. Written by the DISCO Network, a collective of scholars, artists, and technologists, the book addresses the tension between survival and technology’s extractive nature, particularly for marginalized communities. The authors reflect on the painful histories and hopeful futures shaped by technology, questioning the optimism often surrounding new advancements like AI. Through critical, collective storytelling, the book invites readers to reconsider their relationship with technology and envision alternative, more just futures.
Posted by: Koltuklu Merdiven Asansörü | March 9, 2025 at 08:27 AM
*Technoskepticism* is a thought-provoking exploration of the complex relationship between emerging technologies and human experiences. Written by a diverse team of 14 authors, the book reflects on the societal impacts of digital tools, particularly in the realms of health, nostalgia, and Black culture. The authors question the validity of digital diagnoses and the way technology intersects with wellness, pushing for a broader conversation around the limitations and ethical concerns of current systems. Additionally, they revisit the early days of the internet, emphasizing how platforms once offered a sense of community and belonging, particularly for marginalized groups. In its final sections, the book turns its focus to AI, specifically its relationship with Black creativity and culture, raising important questions about the capacity of AI to understand and replicate Black experiences. *Technoskepticism* invites readers to reconsider both the possibilities and dangers inherent in our ever-evolving digital landscape.
Posted by: Merdiven Asansörü | March 9, 2025 at 08:19 AM
*Technoskepticism* is a reflection on the intersection of new technologies and lived experiences, exploring both the potential and the refusal they inspire. Written collaboratively by 14 authors in a rural Pennsylvania cabin, the book delves into topics like wellness, digital nostalgia, and the role of AI in Black culture. The authors use their diverse perspectives to challenge the promises of technology, questioning how tools like AI can both empower and exploit marginalized communities. The book critiques not just the tech itself but also the structures that shape its development and deployment, urging readers to reconsider what it means to be “well” or “whole” in a digital age. Through personal stories and academic analysis, *Technoskepticism* emphasizes the need for a more humanistic approach to technology, rooted in history, creativity, and resistance.
Posted by: Engelli Asansörü | March 9, 2025 at 08:17 AM