Yes, you are going crazy. We all are. And that’s great.
Daylight saving is quirky right? We shuffle the clock forward each year and wind it back an hour some months later and that’s it. No biggie. You’re the type to roll with the punches. You’re cool. You’re popular. You’re well-compensated. People listen to you.
No, you’re not. That’s never been you. You’re just pretending. You are dorky and unpopular.
You’re an airline timetable engineer. You co-ordinate jets across timezones: from this airport to that one. It’s an interesting gig or at least it has been until recently. Buggy new tech is making it hard. You met with Nico twice weekly to talk about such things. He had kind eyes and he was whip smart. But he left without notice last month and nobody’s replaced him. It’s eerie. Management won’t be drawn on it. His absence isolates you.
The clock is going back next weekend. The 2pm from Brisbane is a half hour flight. It lands in Coffs at 2:30pm on Friday. But come Monday it lands at 1:30pm!? It’s not just one flight that’s weird next week. They all change. They’re all weird. From cabin announcements to food deliveries to staff timetables to baggage to fuel, Everything shifts next week. Nothing’s automated. You are the automation. You’ll shift everything via twenty platforms. You don’t have a team. It’s just you. To everyone else, you’re just the weird little critter who manages “interstate scheduling logistics”. But nobody knows what that means, except you. And Nico.
Ok. You’ve done this plenty of times before. But something has changed this time. Something big. You won’t know how big until next week. Three companies interstate have shunted a couple of minor responsibilies onto you. They haven’t said as much. You see their sneaky charade when you log onto their platforms. Each has updated. It’s hidden in the updates.
You have no choice. This has to get done and you’re the only one who can do it. You got this. It takes you a day and a half of frenzy to sort it all out and at the end is pride and exhaustion. You did a thing. And hell, you’re getting paid. This is grand.
But next week rolls around and it your effort was for naught. The changes you made didn’t catch. Trucks all over the country are arriving an hour late. People are showing up for work an hour late. It’s colossal. What the hell happened?
One app talking to another app occasionally mistranslates. “Bugs”, we say, like the worst they can inflict is a little bite. Most of them die in Beta. Most of them. This one lived in the space between your Google Calendar, Enginly(TM) (a useful but unpopular app you installed last year and absolutely love), and ACalendar+ (your mobile calendar app). Ten people on earth were using all three. When news of the glitch and its consequences reaches the bowels of these companies, their legal department will instruct them to delete your user data.
From the outside it looks like you simply didn’t do the work. This is not the first time you’ve done shedloads of work and a tech glitch has erased it. Nor is the first time you’ll be disbelieved about that.
It’s 10:30am on Monday and you’re mulling over your predicament when a colleague crashes your reality:
“Where the fuck were you?”
You’re about to reply “where the fuck was I when?’” but your body’s sinking horror answers the question before you ask it — the meeting scheduled for eleven is already over because of the same bug. You’ve missed the most important meeting of the year so far. This is dread and shame and fear at once.
You’re the only person who didn’t show. This is not your first no-show. In fact, now that you’re feeling on edge you notice: you seem to have trouble with scheduling. Weird, cos that’s your job. Since you were migrated to tablets (for “intrafloor mobility”) you’ve felt chaotic and confused at most times. Particularly when it comes to digital meetings; not just scheduling, but when you’re there too:
Someone in the Zoom says “I’ll just change that for everybody” as they poke their screen. Heads nod and one enthusiastic type says “thanks Zoe, that’s great. Yep, got it”. You look at your screen, at the document that was being referenced moments ago, and nothing changes on it. You refresh it. Nothing. You think about speaking but there are twelve people in this meeting and everyone’s moved on.
You had a scheduling fuck-up the month before and you are the boy who cried wolf now and you can feel it. You email an apology for missing the meeting but nobody reads it. Without Nico to represent you, you’re just the weirdo in logistics who nobody likes and has caused the company’s biggest ever calamity. Your company loses clients left and right. Torsten, the new manager who gives you the ick but who everyone else fawns over, calls you to his office. The feeling’s mutual. He tells you how hard you’ve made his gig and puts you on notice.
Guess what: You are disabled. You always have been.
You have to notice it now. Why? Because it’s accelerating. No, not “the disability”. The thing that causes the disability is accelerating.
Technology is metastasizing
Right before our eyes, beneath our finger tips, inside our screens, companies are taking parts of our own cognition out of our hands and then serving it back to us distorted, broken, and useless. They’re fucking it up.
Next, they burn the evidence. Not maliciously. Not with intent. Hiding the violence is an evolved part of digital infrastructure, forged through digital development teams working with “legal”, with “finance”, with “management”. That’s what civil and criminal law will do to culture.
Digital ghosts of calamities like the one above are living now only in the bodies of their victims — you and me. This is what disability feels like. Though disability advocates and theorists will argue that disability is not a deficit or disorder, it actually is, but not in the way that we’d guess. Yes, disabled people are disabled in the first instance by technology and culture. But the repeated servings of disdain leave a residue of dread, of less-than, of expendability on the inside.
While digital infrastructure takes more and more of our attention and time, it pumps carbon into the atmostphere and genocide into those places it ravages for resources (Palestine, the Congo, etc…). At the same time it blames its failures on the people it most disables. Moreso over time.
This is why all of our struggles are connected. Not because “we all are one” or other Disney-pilled mantras. But because our enemies are one and the same ; the insatiable juggernaut of money, technology, capitalism and colonialism. It’s the culture, stupid. It’s the apex predator. We’re just it’s favourite meal.
There’s hope in noticing our disability. My hope (and hopefully yours too!) is that everybody might notice how utterly disabling technology has become:
- first by noticing their “personal” disabilities.
- then seeing that we’re all in that boat
- and finally, that that this is the whole point
When you see that the technology used to identify and shoot Palestinians at the border is the exact same technology, made by the exact same company, that identifies you at the checkout of your local supermarket, the system dissolves organically. Who gives the best part of themselves to their 9-to-5 when they know they’re being mined? Denial holds the whole charade together. Dissolve yours and we will dissolve the system together.
