"The Wheelchair-to-Warfare Pipeline" w/ Liz Jackson and Rua Williams (04/11/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Liz Jackson and Rua Williams about the history and ongoing practice of design objects ostensibly created for accessibility being repurposed into tools of war.
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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
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Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:32
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So today, I have two really great guests joining me, who are probably the two most leading experts in how design relates to disability, and I'm so excited to speak to them about the enmeshment of assistive technology and weapons of war. They are Liz Jackson and Rua Williams, and together they authored a recent piece about disability and the military industrial complex in The New Republic called How Disabled People Get Exploited to Build the Technology of War. So first is Liz Jackson. Liz is a writer and independent scholar and is a founding member of the Disabled List, which is a disability-led critical design collective that advocates for structural changes to what design is, how it operates, and which problems it seeks to solve. Liz, welcome to the Death Panel. So great to have you on the show.
Liz Jackson 2:17
Thank you so much for having me, and for having us.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:19
And next is Rua Williams. Rua is an assistant professor in the user experience design program at Purdue University and a Just Tech fellow with the Social Science Research Council, where they are investigating disabled people's bodily autonomy and social agency through adaptive and assistive technologies. They study interactions between technology, design, computing, research practices, and disability justice. Rua, welcome to the Death Panel. So excited to talk to you today.
Rua Williams 2:46
Hello, thank you for having us. This is gonna be really fun.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:50
I'm very excited. Now, I mean, as I mentioned at the top, both of you are coming from a place of deep expertise when it comes to disability, design and technology. I've personally learned so much from you both over the years. And Liz and I have been friends for years now, too. And you wrote this piece together for The New Republic, again, called How Disabled People Get Exploited to Build the Technology of War, that not only talks about recent instances of this, but gets at the long and deep history of the imbrication of disability and warfare. And I've always wanted us to do an episode about this. And I've been meaning to ask you both on about some of the recent excellent work that you've been co-authoring. And this piece is such a great entry point for understanding what you call the wheelchair to warfare pipeline. So to start us off, can you give a brief overview of the main argument you're making in this piece and explain what this idea called the wheelchair to warfare pipeline is?
Liz Jackson 3:44
Yeah, I'm happy to. So this is Liz speaking again. You know, over the last few years, I started noticing this phenomenon where these obscure technologies were being developed, but then they would sort of magically disappear. And they were usually around disability innovation. They were rehabilitative in nature. And then all of a sudden, they would crop up again, but as a weapon of war. And so I started just writing out this term, the wheelchair to warfare pipeline. I happened to mention it in a piece that I'd written a few months back, and Frank Elavsky, who is a scholar that does a lot of work in this field, reached out and asked if I'd written anything further about it, and I hadn't. And so I took the opportunity to reach out to Rua, who has a really strong tech background, and we started engaging in a long term conversation that ultimately led to this piece.
Rua Williams 4:32
Yeah, and this is Rua again, and I can follow up on that, that in my own work, I've had this trouble where I noticed sort of unusual disability technology research. And then if you dig a little deeper, you find it's funded by the Department of Defense. And like there are some very obvious reasons why the Department of Defense would fund disability related research. One, veterans become disabled through service and also there's a lot of incentive for the Department of Defense to fund disability related research that supports families of veterans or service people.
But then there's also this weird aspect where the technology that they're researching might seem like it's for disability, but then it becomes extrapolated almost immediately into some kind of carceral or warmaking technology. And one example would be that there are studies about early detection of meltdowns in autistic children, that the researchers will actually provoke the children into a distressed state in order to get this sort of affective reading off of their -- their skin conductance, like how -- basically how stressed they are. And then you extrapolate that to we literally have internment camps on the border and there have been problems with having all these people in this tightly confined space. And this idea of being able to detect people getting too stressed out earlier, then you can further segregate them.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 5:59
I feel like that's a really great example of how this isn't just technology in terms of objects. It's also research methodologies, it's psychiatric paradigms, it's consumer objects. Yes, it's cutting edge prosthetics. There is, I think, a very broad range when we talk about assistive technology, you know, that's a term that between the three of us is totally something that we all understand. But, you know, this is a huge framework that encompasses not only a technology that's made to modify a person's body, like a prosthetic or an implant, but it's also modes and methods and technologies and techniques of care, or rehabilitation, as well as frameworks for approaching population control, right, and discursive control and policing, right? There is obviously a deep connection between so many different types of technology, and the industry of war.
But can you both speak to the kind of relationship that disability sort of specifically has here? You know, there is so much to dig into, and this article covers a lot and gets into some of the deeper history as well that I really want to get to. But it starts by talking about some of this cutting edge assistive technology that is in the more prosthetics arena. And you talk about, for example, things that have been in theory designed for disabled people, which have been developed through collaboration between the Pentagon or big tech companies like Microsoft, or through public or academic competitions that are sponsored by the Department of Defense or directly developed by defense contractors like Raytheon.
And again, you know, this is like a huge sort of category we're addressing here. And it's worth noting that, you know, very few disabled people writ large get access to these cutting edge assistive or accessible technologies. In studies you both discuss in this essay, these technologies always seem to be, in practice, more ubiquitous as tools of destruction, as you're both saying, in warfare. And this is, I think, where we should sort of start.
Could you talk about the so-called mad scientists of the Defense Department, and DARPA's revolutionizing prosthetics program, because I'd love it if you could both explain what these design initiatives and programs are. And then I'd love for us to also kind of get into what happens to these technologies, like the high end modular prosthetic limb called the LUKE Arm System.
Liz Jackson 8:21
Yeah. I mean, DARPA is just this absolutely fascinating beast. And it's -- I think a lot of people don't actually realize it exists. It is this mad science division of the Department of Defense. And from what I understand, they actually don't have a lot of people that they employ. Instead, what they do is they distribute money to universities, to Carnegie Mellon, MIT. And in those programs, the students and the faculty will develop products. And I think this was actually sort of what initially really drew me to the wheelchair to warfare pipeline was is, it's a lot easier for the government and institutions to give money to do things that feel good, such as develop technologies for disability, than it is for governments and institutions to give money to maim and kill people, right, like or create products that would maim and kill people. And so, you know, I think disability has always created this backdoor way in order to allocate this funding and get it to where it needs to be to develop many of these things. And where I sort of initially came into it was they have this M3 program. And within the M3 program, they were really focused on veterans, injured veterans that were coming back from war and how is it that we can create prosthetics for them so that they can live, you know, essentially, an abled life? And the interesting thing that's happened over the past few years is they've actually really shifted -- in the last few years of the program, they're actually -- I don't think that M3 is really doing these prosthetics anymore, but by the end of it, what they realized was is they could uncouple the prosthetics that they had developed for veterans that had come back from war, and they could actually use them as separate from the human. And so what happened was is these arm prosthetics were no longer being used as arms, but instead they were being used as devices that could go in and remove bombs from dangerous situations. And so they were no longer these human objects.
Rua Williams 10:15
And so in academia, DARPA is what we call like a high risk, high reward kind of funder. And so they're always looking for blue sky, big projects. And so there's even some amount of like a successful DARPA proposal includes a strong element of sci fi in a lot of ways. And so what happens is, many of the projects seem kind of speculative about like a future of technology that we don't quite have access to. And this kind of sanitizers the potential applications, right, because you're not directly thinking about what these technologies will be used for when the funding agency is technically the military. And what -- when you do have to make some sort of proposal about okay, well, what is the practical use case today, and so what happens is like continuing that sanitation is that well, it's for the benefit of disabled people. So there's a lot of drone research and that gets justified as like workforce opportunities for disabled people, particularly disabled veterans. And then these high end prosthetics are meant to be like that you can become injured in action, but still maintain your identity as a soldier. And then what happens though is that it's still more compelling of a use case for the military to use these things outside of the context of a disabled operator. So there's this like smokescreen of saying that this is for the benefit of enabling a disabled body that we disabled in war to continue to produce war. There's a slightly more contemporary example of a man who had a bilateral amputation and through the VA was given two prosthetic legs, which, you know, if you know anything about prosthetics, they can actually be extremely painful, even at the best of times. And so he was requesting a wheelchair that he could use, particularly in the home for when he didn't feel like suiting up, and they refused to give him the wheelchair. They said that, you know, he had the two legs, and that was -- it was basically like an enforcement of this vision of a rehabilitated soldier.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 12:19
Is it possible to get into sort of some of how these technologies work? Because I think one of the myths that we're up against, right, is that one, that this technology that's being developed is for disabled people, and it's for good, right, when, in fact, it's going to be reapplied, as we're saying. But I think that there's this other myth that we're always up against when we talk about disability and war, and also disability and accommodation and accessibility, which is that I think the way these things are often covered in the media makes it appear as if disabled people have access to tons of cutting edge technology, or that even like average prosthetics right, that those are accessible, which is a whole other conversation that you're kind of getting in actually pointing to this example of essentially the VA saying, you have the prosthetics, we don't need to pay for the wheelchair. It's an either/or situation. But more broadly, I think there is a misconception that we have done all these amazing sort of technological innovations such that the body is curable, the body is repairable to a state that we can destroy someone's body in an explosion, and they can become paralyzed. But with this brain chip, they'll still be able to fly a fighter jet. And that sort of myth of being able to return the body to this pre-impaired, pre-injured, pre-disabled state is very much, I think, propped up by the way these technologies are talked about. And I think that there's this assumption that people have their needs met. And this is part of also not just the pipeline of producing war machines and weapons, but that this is also in the pipeline of sort of explaining away why disabled people don't have accommodations and perpetuating the myth that they do. But I think part of it that's really important to sort of focus on is how some of these technologies work. So is it possible to get into some of the details of some of these "cutting edge" assistive technologies that we're talking about for folks who might not be familiar with these things?
Liz Jackson 14:23
Yeah. I think it's probably a good idea just to stick for now with the two products that came out of the revolutionising prosthetics program at DARPA, prior to DARPA uncoupling the arm from the human. And the first one is the LUKE Arm System, which it costs $250,000 and it is considered the world's most expensive prosthetic arm. And the other one is the modular prosthetic limb, which was really only intended to be a research tool. It wasn't actually intended for real world use. And so you have, right, this impossibly expensive arm and you have a research tool. And it gets countless press, right, there's -- if you look up either, you'll get tons of news articles lauding the sort of technological breakthrough that they each offer. I will note, sort of as a side note, that it was really interesting to kind of look through a lot of the LUKE Arm System photos, because it was typically a fairly strong man that was using it. And I did see one where a woman was using it, and she was using her other arm to prop it up. So it does also strike me as being very heavy. And so, right, these aren't actually objects that are intended for human use. And it does distract the conversation, and it does direct the conversation about how people are and are not getting their needs met. And I think this is that sort of techno-optimism that comes up a lot in fields of disability and design and disability and engineering and tech.
Rua Williams 15:49
And that idea about like the good intentions is something that you see a lot in academic research, which is that you have somebody who is a roboticist or a machine learning scientist or a data scientist, and they want to advance the state of their technology. But in order to get funding for that, you have kind of like two options, you have military funding, or you have this other application towards a potential future of disability where your disability is completely ameliorated by some kind of technological apparatus. And so you see many projects that are robotics for disability, where the researchers themselves don't really have any kind of relationship or even interest in the disability or disabled people themselves. It's they're roboticists. And so disability becomes this context in which anything that you make is unassailable and is like above any critique, because it's for the benefit of disabled people. But the actual practical end state of that research has nothing to do with something that could actually be integrated into somebody's life. And some of that is just because of the medical industrial complex, but most of it is just because it's completely impractical and divorced from any kind of disabled leadership or interest.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 17:03
Well, and the LUKE Arm System is named after Luke Skywalker, right? [laughter] I mean, this is inspired by Star Wars, by the arm that Luke Skywalker gets after his hand is cut off by Darth Vader, you know? Like the kind of corniness of this stuff and the mythology of the body that is really evident in the way these are designed, the questions that are asked, the way that it's talked about. I mean, the entire kind of framework presents an idea of disability as something that is curable, that I think often can help prop up especially the arguments that disabled people who are not walking around with Star Wars inspired prosthetics are somehow failing to access all of the things that they have in front of them that could help them. I mean, the amount of times that I am sent information from people who mean well, who are sending me, you know, oh, look at this groundbreaking eye transplant surgery, maybe this will cure you of your blindness. And I'm like, well, you know, I need a brain transplant. There's nothing wrong with my eyeballs, right? Like, there is a -- there is a kind of like disappointment that I'm always experiencing from people when they're like, oh, you can't be cured? Oh, oh, you know? And I think that the mythology of disability is very much shaped by how technologies of war have also sort of spoken about disability.
And Rua, you put it as a kind of science fiction, speculative, almost like genre requirement in the way that these things are proposed, for funding, and where the funding comes from, shapes the questions that are asked and sort of shapes what these things ultimately do once they're out in the world. You talk about something early on in the piece that I was wondering if you both could maybe contextualize and then expand on. You're talking about this kind of dual use design, assistive technology, like the LUKE Arm System that we've been talking about, first designed for accessibility, for a human operator, which not even the most well resourced amputees can get really access to. Then it's detached from the human operator, repurposed as a weapon of remote warfare, and then it finally sees widespread use. And this is the part that I'd love for you both to sort of walk through for listeners and then expand on. You both write that this, "Exemplifies an unacknowledged outcome of inclusive design's solve for one, expand to many mandate." So yeah, can you both expand on that and also get into what you mean here by the solve for one and expand to many mandate for folks who might be new to this subject, because this is such a crucial point that you both make.
Liz Jackson 19:50
Yeah. I think like the thing that I have spent years analyzing is really kind of corporate disability initiatives. And this piece is for me, at least -- I think it's probably different for Rua -- but this piece at its core is a critique of inclusive design. And essentially what inclusive design tells us is you design for one, right, and that one is the disabled person, and then you expand to many. And over the years, it's become increasingly obvious that when you expand to many, it ends up erasing the one. And then that object is made inaccessible to the one. I actually wrote a piece with Jaipreet Virdi a few years ago, when we were talking about the Nike Flyease shoe. And essentially what had happened was is the shoe was developed after this teenager had written to Nike and said that he wanted an easier shoe to put on. And so, right, that's the design for one, there's an easier shoe to put on. And then when Nike launches it, they initially launched it as this shoe for disabled people. But when the second iteration of the shoe comes out, the disabled person has been removed entirely from the marketing and instead, this is just an easier shoe to put on, period. And so what that led to was, right, so then, once you've erased the disabled person, the product is made inaccessible. When the shoe was finally made available for sale, it sold out within minutes. And by the end of the day, it was online for sale for like $3,000 on retail sites, right. And so, I've always -- I've always thought that this inclusive design, design for one, expand to many, was really the beginning of the conversation, and that it is a multi-pronged process. And so for many years, I thought, okay, well, then the disabled person is erased. And then the product is made inaccessible to the disabled person. And it was really through this wheelchair to warfare pipeline that I came to realize that there's actually an extra prong which is that the thing that was initially designed for the disabled person comes to actually harm the disabled person. And that's sort of the full cycle of inclusive design that nobody seems to want to acknowledge. So that's really kind of been where my thinking has been. And I think Rua's thinking is in sort of different places, and I really love kind of seeing how we come together on this to sort of tell a broader story about disability and tech.
Rua Williams 22:01
Yeah. So one of the problems with disability design in the corporate space is like making the business case. And so this design for one, expand to many is meant to make inclusive design solve the problem of having to argue for why it is that we need to pay attention to disabled bodies in design. And then, you know, so what happens is you get all excited about the fact that, oh, everybody benefits from curb cuts, then you immediately run away with that idea until it no longer actually serves the people that it was meant to. And I think that in the war case, there's this other kind of very disturbing and insidious kind of logic that if we can rehabilitate our soldiers, then we can rehabilitate our victims and therefore, make war a victimless crime. So that, you know, because when you -- when you kill people, they're kind of dead, and they become erased. But when you maim people, you have this sort of legible evidence of the harm that you have done in the landscape. And so if you can bomb somebody into oblivion, and then everybody who survived, you can sort of make them not disabled any more, then you can erase your war crimes.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 23:07
Yeah. No, I mean, and I think this is like especially poignant to think about when you consider, for example, how many people have been disabled by Israeli occupation in Gaza and the kinds of ways that care and surgery and even these kind of limited like mythological sort of fantasies of cure are withheld from people as a way of sort of reinforcing who's not even deserving enough to become like a cured, fixed disabled body. There's this example, Liz, that is a sort of story you've told many times, and I wonder if you'd be up for sort of getting into this briefly, even though it's not something that's really related to war, or really necessarily -- well, it's not mentioned in the piece, let's just say, but there's the story of the design of a really famous vegetable peeler. And I think this is a great example of kind of the ways that often we're interacting with these objects that are a product of this sort of broader inclusive design framework, and may not even be aware of it. So would you be down to get into the infamous OXO vegetable peeler for a second.
Liz Jackson 24:14
Yeah. And it's funny because I was actually talking with a friend about this yesterday. And I realized I wanted to kind of go back to Rua and say to them that I have this sort of evolution of it that I want to talk about, or write about at some point, and I haven't had the chance to yet. So it may end up actually kind of becoming a part of this story, which is how, Rua, I will tell you about the thing I wanted to tell you about. But yeah, so I -- up until COVID, I worked in an architecture firm in New York, and they were just kind enough to give me a desk space and I sat across from this guy that I love so much. His name is Tucker Viemeister. And I refer to him as the world's most industrial designer, because in OXO kitchen products, which are those sort of gummy kitchen tools that so many of us have in our homes, he actually -- he invented the grip. And so this one day, I asked him about the sort of apocryphal OXO story in which Sam Farber saw that his wife was having a hard time peeling a carrot, and so he decided he was going to make a better peeler for her to use. And what I said to Tucker was is I hear so much about Sam Farber, like, what can you tell me about Betsy? And he said to me, oh, did you know she was a designer? And I said, no, I did not.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 25:26
And she had MS, right, or --
Liz Jackson 25:28
I don't think she had MS, but she was disabled. And yeah, so I just called her up. I didn't even tell Tucker I was going to do it. And I asked her about it. And she said something along the lines to me of that she was going to go down in history as being Sam's lowly crippled wife, when it was actually her idea in the first place. And right, at the time, the story for me -- and this is still true, the story was disabled ideas kind of get taken up into these savior stories. But what I've come to fully understand is just how extractive inclusive design and these just disability design methodologies are. And it just -- it's the thing that fills me with rage every single day. I have this friend who was recently telling me about a conversation that she'd had in which she was talking to this guy, and the guy was talking to her about inclusive design, and he basically described the process as gently squeezing an orange, in that that's how you get the information is is you gently squeez the orange. And I've talked to Rua about this before, and what Rua said to me in response was, is that once an orange has been squeezed, you can't un-juice it, right? Like it's been juiced. And so you can see how disabled people come into these design processes through focus groups, and hackathons, and they have -- and it's happened to me, right, this is my own angst. We have big ideas, and we want to contribute, and we do in real time. And then those ideas are taken from us. And it has shown time and again to cause considerable harm. I think often of the Lego Braille bricks, right? Lego came out with this charity Braille brick, which were intended to teach blind kids how to read Braille. But they fail to acknowledge that a Braille brick set has existed in the form of Tack-Tiles since the 1980s, it's the family of a now blind man. So you see it time and again. The piece that Rua and I wrote before this was actually a piece about adaptive fashion. And I think adaptive fashion is really the space where a lot of these extractive processes get normalized and then get taken up in tech in egregious ways. Victoria's Secret recently came out with an adaptive undergarment line. But there are many disabled undergarment adaptive creators out there, and they're all gonna get squashed by this. And all it takes is for Victoria's Secret to decide that this wasn't financially viable for them and to close it. And so I just -- you know, and it's funny that I can sort of jump in one piece from like fashion and then the next thing, like Rua and I are talking about war, and it's all the same story.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 28:07
It is. I mean, nylon, t-shirts, these are all technologies that originated in the military industrial complex that we interact with every day, right? There are so many technologies that -- you know, this kind of connection between technology and warfare isn't unique to disability. There are many instances, as we're saying, where we're interacting with something that has a history of being a technology of war. Like just some examples of technology that originated in defense or weapons industry are things like GPS, right, like microwaves, the internet, duct tape, superglue, epi pens, canned food, nylon, as I said. Another really poignant example is basically what made contemporary camera shutters possible, called a rapatronic shutter. It makes high speed photography possible. And this has a history that's intertwined with the atomic bomb. Photographer Harold Edgerton was contracted to photograph the atomic bomb tests and he's the guy who took the picture, the famous photo of a bullet passing through an apple. And so to even be able to take the photos as precisely as they needed to be taken of the atomic bomb tests, Edgerton has to invent a new trigger and shutter system to take these pictures. And it turns out that the trigger he designs is actually way better and more precise than what they were planning to use and using in the bomb itself. And so they ended up using his trigger in the bomb too, because it's more accurate than what they were originally using. And Edgerton then founded a company called EG&G, which was still an active defense contractor up until a few years ago. What I think is kind of specific to the wheelchair to warfare pipeline, though, right, is that there isn't a kind of positive rebrand, right, to stories like superglue, duct tape, Edgerton's trigger, right, GPS, right? These are just, these are instances of technology and war and the imbrication of design and war. But when it comes to disability and the wheelchair to warfare pipeline, there's a kind of extra layer also, as you both are pointing to, that's put on top of it, where there's this goodwill, there's positive press, like pink washing, the charitable perception of disability and inclusive design, basically crip washes the military industrial complex. So I was wondering if you both could explain how that happens and break that out really technically, like talk about maybe the disability equality index and the ways that, functionally, this kind of narrative around cure and solving problems for disabled people and inclusive design, how this is used to crip wash companies like Raytheon.
Rua Williams 30:49
Yeah. I want to Liz to talk about the disability equality index, but first I wanted to jump in with there's this thing that happens that is much more evident, I think, in surveillance technologies than in some others, which is that there are things which no public would reasonably approve of, that as soon as you say it's for disabled people, they're all in. And so like an example of this is facial recognition -- ooh, scary. Facial recognition so that blind people can recognize their friends in public -- aww, hooray. Like, wait, what? And there's always this argument that like this technology is dangerous, but it's necessary for disabled inclusion, this idea that like we need these technologies that are like inarguably a bad idea, because there's some group of people for whom society is inaccessible without it, and no questioning of like what makes society inaccessible without this extremely terrifying technology is -- but that's that kind of washing phenomenon that you're talking about. There are things that most people would say, I absolutely do not want people walking around with facial recognition sensors on their heads. Oh, but when it's a blind person, like that's suddenly some kind of feel good story?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 32:02
Absolutely. And I mean, as a blind person, like I recognize my friends when they introduce themselves to me and say, hey, I'm here, what's up? You know, it's like these kinds of like conversations around is that even a useful problem to solve for a blind person, right, are never even on the table, because as you're saying, the primary point, or primary sort of principle and priority in design is often these applications of warfare, right? And it's either kind of something that's being taken from a disabled person and translated and appropriated, or in some ways it's being dressed up as relating to disability, right, but that's really kind of the secondary purpose actually.
Liz Jackson 32:47
Yeah. That's exactly it.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 32:49
Can you talk about the disability equality index, because part of it is these technologies themselves, but part of it is also the kind of inclusivity industry itself, which is a kind of parasitic consulting, or these groups that'll put out evaluations of whether or not companies are kind of hitting accessibility goals or doing things for disabled people, because there is a very complex and not very often discussed sort of establishment for crip washing things.
Liz Jackson 33:21
Yeah, you know, I think there's probably nothing that rankles me more than these orgs. I just -- they get under my skin. So there's -- a couple of years ago, I wrote this piece for The American Prospect and I asked, are advocates for corporate disability inclusion anti-worker? And that's actually what I sort of refer to these orgs as because I'm not entirely sure how else to explain them. They sort of operate under the guise that they're advocating for disability, but they're actually advocating for corporations, and they're all nonprofits. In the United States, we have Disability:IN. In the UK, there's the Valuable 500 and Purple Tuesday. In this piece specifically, we delved into Disability:IN. And they just, they -- they are shields is what they are, they're corporate shields. They will, a week after the Norfolk Southern train disaster, come out and say that the CEO of Norfolk Southern has signed a letter of disability inclusion, even though he just disabled, you know, countless people that live in Ohio.
But specifically with regard to this, what we realized was is that they have this disability equality index, and every year what they do is they rank the best places to work. And they have hundreds -- I think Disability:IN has up to 400 partners, who are also the ones that they're ranking. Like there's not really much of a difference between the people that they're ranking and the people that are their paid partners, which creates its own conflict of interest. But of the top 10 defense contractors in the United States last year, eight of them scored 100 out of 100 on the disability equality index. One of them was not on the index, I can't recall who it was off the top of my head. And then one, despite having scored 100 out of 100 the past, I think, like three or four years, ended up only scoring a 90 out of 100, which is quite shocking, because I think like 90% of the people on the index actually score 100 out of 100. It's a complete corporate washing scheme.
And so I was like, what -- like what would have caused their score to drop, right? Like, it isn't their passion for products that maim and kill, right? Because all the other defense contractors, that's not an issue for them. And then it's like eventually, you search enough and you bump into the thing, and you're like, this is the 10 point drop. And it happened to be that one woman sued them for disability discrimination like last year, and that was what caused their 10 point drop, right? So they can maim and kill millions of people, you know, on the other side of the planet, and all the while, all it takes is this one disabled person in the United States, which it is -- I'm very glad that she did sue them. It was a very appropriate lawsuit, but it just shows like how out of balance the scores are in what it is that they're actually weighing.
And I think it becomes more problematic, because when you go on the website, it isn't actually initially clear that what this score is pertaining to is disability employment. And so it comes across, and the way that the corporations use this is is that they are just simply approved of through this kind of validating source. You know, it's just, it's really interesting how different corporations use it to obscure the ways in which they disable people in the world.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 36:42
I mean, I think it might be good to get into maybe like a specific example that rounds out some of this framework of the wheelchair to warfare pipeline that you both have been laying out. Because as you're talking about, this is also -- it's not just like a media framework that we encounter. It's not just a funding framework for research and development. It's not just a marketing scheme, right? It's also a kind of corporate behavioral norm setting exercise, for lack of a better word. So what I'm saying is, let's talk about Microsoft for a second. In the piece, you both write that Microsoft sees itself as, "Uniquely equipped to provide corporate America with a blueprint for disability inclusion best practices." So can you talk about Microsoft's blueprint and their inclusive design toolkit, the kind of approach to co-creation strategies or gimmicks, and of course, we have to talk about the HoloLens and the ways that Xbox controllers have started out as these adaptive controllers that you see get all this attention for, you know, look at how wonderful this excessive design product is. And like, lo and behold, it's also used in like a custom Israeli tank designed to appeal to younger people, right. And, you know, the ways that Microsoft specifically both sort of sets corporate norms and then participates in the wheelchair to warfare pipeline is kind of so extreme that talking about them almost risks singling them out as a bad actor, but this is a really, really good example of what we're talking about here.
Liz Jackson 38:28
Yeah, I'll start -- how about I'll start with the blueprint part. So it actually links back to a piece from the early 2000s and Microsoft's response to the Americans with Disabilities Act, that even at that time, they found that they were uniquely equipped to -- or they believed that they were uniquely equipped to create a blueprint for disability inclusion. And so this isn't anything new, right? The Microsoft inclusive design toolkit has been around since 2015, 2016. But this is, right, the decades leading up to that. So this has really been been a large part of Microsoft's identity for decades now. And I ask -- I ask Rua about this often, like what is the point of making a toolkit or a playbook or a white paper or any sort of resource? And, you know, Rua -- I think Rua actually has a different take on this. But the thing that I sort of remember taking from those conversations is, is that it's a way for these companies to kind of put their stamp on the market. And Microsoft has very boldly positioned themselves as this corporate disability inclusion leader and millions of businesses have followed suit, and there has been no critical questioning of the claims that they make. And I want to add here before I kind of throw over to Rua, there is no evidence that inclusively designed products have ever succeeded beyond their hype. And the only way that these technologies do seem to be succeeding, and Rua can talk about this with the HoloLens, is by expanding them to warfare. And so I'll leave it at that.
Rua Williams 38:28
Yeah, so the HoloLens is an interesting kind of case study. And so firstly, it was this project that Microsoft started to kind of break into this idea of like cutting edge technology for consumer markets. They wanted to basically do a call back to the 90s and try to make VR cool again. And it's AR, but anyway, we can argue about that later. So it was really initially intended as sort of a consumer market gambit. But immediately, they found that there was much more interest, first of all, because of the price point, but also that there was just this sort of rousing interest from corporations, in the sense that this technology could be very useful in building information modeling, or manufacturing, or other kinds of places where somehow being able to visualize things in multiple fields of view would be useful. At the same time in the research world, the way that the HoloLens was being used was almost exclusively in disability. And so you had this idea like, okay, well now we have this toolkit for exploring different possible futures of disability access technology. So that was the -- that was the primary use case for it for in academia, there were some that were just on like the human factors of using augmented reality headsets.
But the funny thing about AR and VR is that we think of it in the consumer market as being something that was like a buzz in the 90s and then went away because it wasn't feasible, and came back now. And it's still not feasible, because nobody wants to wear that shit on your head. So like [laughter] nobody -- that's not a thing. And so, but VR and AR never died in military research. It has been a constant presence in the idea of not just military training, but also in advanced technologies and field operations, this idea of having heads up display. The whole phrase heads up display is literally about being able to have combat metrics displayed in the visor of a soldier on the field. And so that interest aspect of it never went away. And so there was always inherent in the HoloLens itself, this dual purpose, the ability to do research into disability access technologies, while also accelerating the heads up display research for the military. At the same time, I was at Grace Hopper in 2017, and this is a massive conference in computing that's meant to be like for women in computing, or whatever. And they have a lot of corporate -- like it's not really an academic conference. It's like a corporate conference. It's almost like a trade show. And I got invited to the Microsoft party for being rude in a QA session. You know, I was saucy about exploitation of disabled people during a VR session and so somebody from Microsoft surreptitiously gave me a ticket to their little party. And I go to their party and they have the HoloLens there, and they're putting the HoloLens on people. And they're -- it was really a covert training exercise, because to get the HoloLens to fit comfortably, there's like a specific way to do it.
And so they wanted to introduce the HoloLens to a bunch of young researchers so that they could like increase this idea that it is an effective, usable, comfortable tool, like but you have to put it on a specific way, right? But at this party, the HoloLens and the accessibility toolkit were presented almost as the same thing. Like it was the same representatives, like it was almost implied that it was the same team, although it wasn't really, but the materials were presented together. Like the accessibility toolkit and all of the graphics that they had developed for that toolkit were being presented alongside the HoloLens and within the HoloLens interface. So it was like kind of marriage of the concepts that, you know, effectively makes the use of the tool compelling in both the research and corporate sphere.
Rua Williams 40:48
And how are the HoloLenses used in military application? Can you give some examples of --
Rua Williams 44:21
So, yeah, no, I mean, so and this is true of almost any of these headsets is it's not really that they're actively used in the military necessarily, but they're used as proof of concept. And there are some cases where HoloLens or other kinds of VR headsets are being used in surgical training and also in military training. The hope is that eventually they work their ways into the helmets of soldiers and I -- there may be some amount of heads up display technology in existing helmets. I mean, it's definitely in some cockpits. It's not necessarily what we think of when we think of this like augmented reality overlay of our regular vision. But it's meant to be a speculative, like what if, what if we had, right, because you definitely can't actually wear the HoloLens into the field. It's not actually robust against the kind of movements that you would be making. Also, the field of view -- so the actual AR projection on the HoloLens is like 15 degrees, it's really small and weird. It's like having an overlay square, like rectangle over your vision and it doesn't encompass like your periphery at all. So it is something that is used in like training operations or in research about training operations, and there are speculations about what it would be like to have them in the field, but in practicality.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 45:47
Mhm. But there are examples of other things like the adaptive Xbox controllers, which do you actually have use, right? Can you talk about the controllers a little bit for folks who haven't heard about this.
Liz Jackson 46:01
I'd be happy to jump into this one. So the adaptive Xbox controller, there is no evidence yet that it is being used in the field, though there is multiple militaries and navies that are using Xbox controllers currently in warfare activities, whether it's a submarine that uses an Xbox controller, or the British military uses it in different vehicles. And I think the [IOF] also uses it as well. And there was this quote that we found and put in the article. So this is what we wrote in the piece, "The Israeli Defense Forces decided to use the 'friendly and familiar Microsoft Xbox controller' to create a 'specific user experience' for their young active duty troops. 'Any teen or 20-something who enters the hatch of the Carmel will likely feel familiar with the environment, thanks to video games.'"
Rua Williams 46:53
Yeah. And so the use case is real. It's important to think of -- to recognize that there's mandatory service in Israel, and it's quite young. And so there's this idea of making service compelling to a body of people that may not necessarily be interested in war, but also may not be thinking of their mandatory service as a mandatory participation in war, right? You have this kind of like, well how do we make -- how do we make mandatory service cool?
Rua Williams 46:53
Mhm, yeah. How do we rebrand genocide as --
Rua Williams 47:01
Yeah, I mean, we do it in the United States, too. We have commercials for joining the army that are using like Call of Duty footage.
Liz Jackson 47:30
Yeah. And like, I remember when we were kind of talking about the adaptive controller as being a drone controller in the piece, Rua was very fearful that we were gonna give Microsoft an idea. And I was like no, I'm like are you kidding, I'm like they already -- are you kidding, they already have this idea. Even if they don't know they have this idea, like they have this idea. And like, that's why we sort of did the deep history too, right, where we talk about both DARPA and Microsoft has this new cognition toolkit. They both use cooking as a proxy for understanding cognition. This is how -- and it was cooking that they used as sort of the first use case for the HoloLens, right, like --
Rua Williams 48:09
And that's funny, because cooking is also an activity that is often studied and practiced for early stage dementia.
Liz Jackson 48:17
Yeah, it's -- it all -- right, it all comes back to disability, right? Like, even if Microsoft doesn't realize that, or DARPA doesn't realize that this proxy that they're using is an inherently disabled proxy, right, because of its roots in occupational therapy and everything else, right, like they're still doing it, just as they may not realize that what they are working toward, by building an adaptive controller with veterans, is ultimately a weapon of war. They're already doing it, right?
Rua Williams 48:46
Yeah. So the thing about it is is these ideas that you could make a monetary case for the value of a human life or the cost/risk of a human life is baked into all of our research and marketing now. And so if you look through any paper about a technology for disability, it will often start with the cost of disability to society. And that cost calculation is dubious at best. But the function that it serves is to imply that a disabled person costs more than another person, and that this is a factor which makes them less worthy citizens, and therefore, in order to rehabilitate them into proper citizenship, weirdly, the answer is more expensive technology. And there's really no like internal reflection about okay, you start this paper with the idea that this person costs more money, and then you propose a technological solution that will also cost more money. It's a very bizarre sleight of hand where they don't acknowledge that they're making their case and then exacerbating that case in the same sentence basically.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 50:01
It's such an important point, because as we've been sort of alluding to this is not new and not just in terms of like, oh, we're talking way back to 1990s, or oh, we're talking way back to the beginning of the internet. This is, as you've just sort of pointed to and hinted at here, this really goes back to the idea of disability at core has a relation to the state and warfare. And I mean, this is also something we write about in Health Communism, we talk about the conceptualization of extractive abandonment, like the point of these sort of frameworks, right, is that disability is a raw resource from which defense companies and science departments and researchers and doctors and pharmaceutical companies and the list goes on and on and on, right, these are seen as resources. The point is not to get resources to disabled people, it's to make markets, right, and to support an industry around the sort of study, the measuring, the provisioning, the prosthetics, right, all of these kind of ways that we either modify, sort of, or attempt to cure or rehabilitate. And this is why in the book, when we write about extractive abandonment, we say that, like profit lives in these interstitial spaces between bodies, and in the counting and measuring of bodies, and then also in the creation and the destruction of bodies, and every moment where sort of capitalism touches illness, disease, disability, and death, right, is also part of that broad sort of relation of potential markets that are made around forces like debilitation. And part of the critique that I think you guys are really levying here is that the kind of wheelchair to warfare pipeline is less a pipeline as it is an ouroboros, right, where you have a kind of circular like creation of disability, creation of markets around disability solutionism, you know, you have crip washing and the kind of rehabilitation of the reputation of defense companies, and on and on and on and on the wheel sort of turns, right, and the snake eats its own tail. And, you know, this is a dynamic, this is how the wealth of nations are built, right. And war is ultimately not just a kind of geopolitical game of maiming and killing, but is also a vast industry that the state manages as closely as it manages its foreign relations.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 50:09
Can I just jump in here real quick, because that was actually what Rua was saying during the writing process was is that this isn't a pipeline, that this is an ouroboros. But for me --
Liz Jackson 52:34
I think we even made plans to get a shared tattoo of an ouroboros at some point.
Liz Jackson 52:49
We totally did. And I -- like I'm right now wondering, like, is -- was my sort of desire to write about this as a pipeline, because the way I saw it was is that yes, it is an ouroboros, but what inclusive design is creating is a pipeline, like in relationship to inclusive design, but --
Rua Williams 53:07
No, I mean, I think it's important to talk about it like a pipeline, because if you write an article for The New Republic about "the warfare ouroboros," right, you get slightly fewer readers.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 53:18
Yeah, I mean, there's a reason I didn't mention that at the top of the episode, right, you know, the pipeline shows us the priorities, the making of the markets, right. And, you know, the deeper analysis is how those markets and the problems they solve and the questions they ask just make more raw material for those markets at the end of the day? Well, I really appreciate the conversation. This has been so fun. And thank you both, obviously, for writing this piece, for the work that you both do, and for coming on today and taking the time.
Liz Jackson 53:49
Thank you so much for having me and for having us. And just love your take on this as well. And just thank you so much for receiving this work that Rua and I did so enthusiastically.
Rua Williams 54:00
Yes, thank you.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 54:01
Well, I think that is the perfect place to leave it for today. Again, the piece we discussed was from The New Republic, and is called How Disabled People Get Exploited to Build the Technology of War. We'll link to that in the episode description, of course.
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