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From Munchausen by Tiktok to wellness apps to online communities to AI, the DISCO Network explores the possibilities that technoskepticism can create.
This is a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies. Though refusal is an especially powerful mode—particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no—people of color and disabled people have long navigated the space between saying yes and saying no to the newest technologies. Technoskepticism relates some of these stories to reveal the possibilities skepticism can create.
The case for technoskepticism unfolds across three sections: the first focused on disability, the creative use of wellness apps, and the desire for diagnosis; the second on digital nostalgia and home for Black and Asian users who produced communities online before home pages gave way to profiles; and the third focused on the violence inherent in A.I.-generated Black bodies and the possibilities for Black style in the age of A.I. Acknowledging how the urge to refuse new technologies emerges from specific racialized histories, the authors also emphasize how care can look like an exuberant embrace of the new.
"Collaboratively written in a lucid and engaging style, Technoskepticism is a generous gift, a vital and solely needed offering to those of us who work, study, and live in and through our crisis-ridden present." —Kara Keeling, author of Queer Times, Black Futures
"Technoskepticism models the messiness and necessity of intellectual collaboration and nuance. Its multivocality incorporates details of specific digital cultures and evocative personal experiences, ultimately leading readers to make unexpected and powerful connections in how we might live and think between possibility and refusal." —Elizabeth Ellcessor, author of In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality
"Engaging and critically inspiring." —–Louise Amoore, author of Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others
"Critical for both the new and the seasoned researcher in the orbit of digital, media, technological, and communicative studies, the DISCO Network's first book prompts and offers thinking in multiplicities." —Kailyn Slater, Library Journal starred review
1. Desiring Diagnosis
2. Searching for Digital Wellness
3. Nostalgia Gone to Bits
4. The Longing for Home: Nostalgia for Digital Platforms
5. Blackness and AI
6. Playing with Black Style: ChatGPT and Black Aesthetics
Conclusion: Refusal
Coda: Aftercare
About the DISCO Network
Notes
Index