Some proponents of technosolutionism strive toward a future that eradicates disabilities—defining such a future as bright, precisely because technology will have eradicated disabilities. This is an example of “erasure.” Within the context of disabled futures, “erasure” describes the ways in which the experiences, perspectives, and dreams that people with disabilities have for the future are frequently erased by technosolutionist narratives. (This includes the erasure of disabled narratives and experiences in general, but also especially where these intersect with other forms of oppression like racism, sexism, homophobia, or classism.) In Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (2023), Ashley Shew cites the example of various news stories ascribing to new prosthetic technologies the power to make people with disabilities “function like normal people should,” for instance:. “‘THE TECH GIVING PEOPLE POWER TO DEAL WITH DISABILITY’—BBC NEWS.” By underestimating the complexity of disabilities and the efficacy and universal applicability of accessibility technologies, such headlines suggest that disability can be and has been overcome—making it largely unnecessary to consider the needs and wishes people with disabilities might have for their own future.

Where disabled perspectives on these issues are erased from design processes, however, technosolutionist efforts frequently focus on surmounting one specific inaccessibility—for instance, by creating high-tech wheelchairs that can climb stairs—instead of designing environments with accessibility in mind. These efforts often turn out to be impractical or overly expensive and, therefore, unaffordable for most people with disabilities.

Such a focus on technosolutionist views of disabilities as conditions that can be overcome by the means of technological innovation exacerbates existing prejudices. Mainstream narratives understand disability as something that needs to be overcome or cured, and disabled people as hampered by their disabilities (as evidenced, for instance, by how cartoonists like Milt Priggee, Bob Englehart, and Manny Francisco imagined the death of reknowned physicist Stephen Hawking as a liberation from his wheelchair). Moreover, the voices of disabled people are already frequently erased in medical contexts. This form of erasure is especially prevalent for neurodivergent people, who face a number of barriers to adequate health care, including the problem of being seen as unable to assess their own situations and needs. Technosolutionist approaches to disability as something that can be eradicated through technological innovation exacerbate existing forms of erasure by promising a future without disabled people. Such a view disregards the necessity to design accessible environments for the benefit of everyone, not just people with disabilities. The environments in which humans live are often built without accessibility in mind, forcing parents, elderly people and delivery people to lug strollers, walkers, or packages up and down stairs, for instance. In particular, it disregards the fact that people with disabilities have frequently had to become experts in using a variety of technologies to manage their everyday lives. These uses often necessitate adaptive thinking, hacks, or workarounds, but these are not regarded as a form of expertise, because the creation of technologies geared specifically toward people with disabilities is almost always considered to be the domain of medical or technological experts.

Moreover, technosolutionist efforts geared at eradicating disability in the future have, historically, often included technological “solutions” for the eradication of people with disabilities (including eugenics and forced sterilization programs but also, more recently, CRISPR gene editing). Even today, medical discourses evidence a troubling tendency to veer toward the eugenic erasure of people with disabilities—as in the development of tools for prenatal selection—while downplaying the concerns of people with disabilities who fear that technosolutionist efforts geared toward eradicating disability in the future will invariably create further material and discursive barriers for people with disabilities in the present, as well as in the future. This is by no means a singular concern for people with disabilities. In fact, the erasure of disabled futures intersects with other forms of eradication and suppression of diverse futures, within the streamlined, profit-driven futures envisioned by corporations and states.

A focus on technosolutionist views of disabilities as conditions that can be overcome by the means of technological innovation exacerbates existing prejudices.

Technosolutionism is akin to technoableism, which Ashley Shew defines as a “belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for.” This stance depends upon, first and foremost, the erasure of disabled perspectives and experiences. Against Technoableism draws attention to how discussions around what the future might look like frequently revolve around the dreams of a relatively small set of technocrats and their capitalist interests. Shew discusses various ways that ableist assumptions exclude people with disabilities from being considered “experts” on their own situation and the technologies they use, echoing arguments made by intersectional feminist theorists who have drawn attention to the problematic privileging of certain historically cemented models of knowledge production. Against Technoableism situates the ways disability in general—and specific forms of physical disabilities and neurodivergence in particular—are discussed in contemporary culture within historical frameworks of erasure and exclusion, making a case for the many ways in which people with disabilities can shape accessible futures.

In six chapters, Shew gives an overview of disability discourses in the contemporary global North and, more specifically, her own US context. Shew argues that these discourses are dominated by specific mainstream media narratives, as well as the perspectives of medical and technological experts, rather than people with disabilities themselves. Shew predominantly draws on her own perspective as an amputee, a university lecturer, and a member of a specific disability community in most chapters. But she also includes blogs, social media posts, and other firsthand experiences of people with autism, rather than her own experience of neurodivergence after chemotherapy, which she describes as “chemobrain.”

Perhaps most importantly, the book situates current disability discourses in their historical contexts. This includes such diverse phenomena as the systematic eradication of neurodivergent people and other people with disabilities in Germany during the Holocaust, and the legacy of naming specific disabilities after the people who “discovered” them through often highly unethical experiments conducted on people with disabilities without their consent.

It is within this context—real attempts at eradicating people with disabilities in the past—that Against Technoableism grounds today’s technosolutionist dreams of erasing disability in the future. In so doing, the book highlights the very real dangers of discourses around disability that erase the perspectives of people with disabilities. This position is common for disability activism and frequently summarized as “nothing about us without us.” But Shew’s focus on technoableism also extends the argument into the future. In doing so, she draws on the work of disabled activists like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning, 2022) and artists and researchers like Sunaura Taylor (Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, 2024) who broaden the critical perspective of disability studies to include ecological concerns. Building on these perspectives, Shew argues that it is actually possible for us to imagine accessible futures, if we draw on the perspectives and highlight the inventiveness, resilience, and capacities of people with various disabilities. “HEARING STORIES FROM OTHERS’ perspectives,” Shew demands, “is fundamental to preparing for uncertain futures—and to have imagination about how the world could be, and could be different. Such stories should galvanize how we consider the future.”

As Shew argues, drawing on Piepzna-Samarsinha: “we can design more accessibly and can invite futures that enable more of us to live and thrive, by investing in infrastructure and programs and networks of care that ‘make sure we all make it.’” This program may seem utopian; indeed, Shew sometimes moves into the territory of speculative fiction, drawing on the work of Ursula K. Le Guin and evoking Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist vision of reaching for the stars. Even so, in the current moment of multiple, interconnected crises, this “disorientation” of culturally prominent technosolutionist narratives seems more necessary than ever.