restructr!

wildunicornherd:

starblanketriverchild:

I can’t tell you how many times a day the question, “How can I make peace with my belief in sustainability, anarchy, and anti-capitalism when I am a disabled person who relies on petroleum-based products and the medical industry simply to survive?”. I realize that’s it’s only through class and national privilege that I’m even alive at the moment. However, it still hurts when my concerns about accessibility and inclusiveness in this post-society vision of the world are brushed off or responded to in a rather hostile way.

I’m rather exhausted with being condescended to by ‘perfectly’ healthy people that believe the disabled don’t fit into their picture of revolution. I don’t know how you can say you believe in liberty when you very willing espouse that certain types of people don’t deserve to live. I cannot hand craft my medical supplies out of wood, I will die if I don’t have them. I don’t have much choice in the matter.

Still, there are moments where I feel a tremendous amount of guilt for my existence being so heavily reliant on modern technology. I know it’s ridiculous, but I can’t help it. Can I even call myself a radical when it appears that the society we’re fighting for will not allow people like myself membership by unintentionally cutting off access to life-sustaining care?

I don’t know. Anyone have any thoughts?

SO MANY THOUGHTS!

I’m mentally ill and rely on medication to function. I’ll probably be switching to a medication that I think of as the spice from Dune—it’s not addictive, but it creates such a strong physical dependence that it’s extremely difficult (and hellishly painful) to stop taking.

A while back I was talking to some other people with disabilities on Twitter about the whole zombie apocalypse thing. And basically, if society collapsed, we’d be fucked. A lot of people who’re disabled or chronically ill can’t do the whole rugged survivalist or hippie commune in the woods thing, because we depend on this massive infrastructure that gives us assistive tech and drugs and social services and all that good shit. And sure the medical-industrial complex is fucked up (yes, even in Canada) and we depend on multinationals that exploit lots of other people and it’s not sustainable in the long term, but a lot of us need it, so if you’re going to tear it down you need to build something in its place.

I need a cyborg future where the augmented, artificial, tech-dependent, hybrid body isn’t seen as less human, as unnatural. (What the fuck does “natural” mean anyway? 99% of the time I see something praised as “natural” I’m all like LERN 2 SCIENCE or occasionally LERN 2 SOCIOLOGY.) I need an alien future where personhood doesn’t necessarily depend on having particular body parts or senses or chromosomes. Now, the cyborg future has its own problems. All that shiny chrome and circuitry…well, you know what they say about laws and sausages. I don’t really even know if it’s possible to create a livable society that isn’t Omelas when you get to the bottom of it. I think the best we can hope for is that we can find ways to get by that hurt each other a little less. That would be radical enough.

Then again I’m a hermit who doesn’t have any meatspace community, and I’m most emphatically not any of the leftist trifecta of ARTIST / ACTIVIST / ACADEMIC that confers ~respectability and Real True Radicalness™ *bites back frothing angry rant*, I’m just a fucking geek with no dog in this fight. So yeah…

This is why people need to learn science and history. Most of us would be dead without modern technology, including myself. People with disabilities, cis women, and trans people would suffer the most without this infrastructure.

Anyway, many or most of us are already cyborgs, but most of us without the chrome and circuitry. See also: 50 years of cyborgs at Geek Feminism.

(Source: reinventionoftheprintingpress)