Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal

Forthcoming Stanford University Press in February 2025

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.

The DISCO Network on Technoskepticism

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    DISCO Network Panel: The Evolution of a Collective at Stony Brook University

    Catherine Knight Steele: I think when I'm explaining it to folks, it's such an experimental way of writing for many of us, some of us had not collaborated, I think, at all before in writing. Some had collaborated in smaller ways before, but this is the first time, and I think it's important, we wrote that first book, the first time any of us had written together, I think, right? We'd read each other's work before, but some of us had not collaborated in-person. One had not been in person before that one week. And we didn't do the kind of collaborative writing where it's okay, you take chapter one and I'll take chapter two, right? Or I'll work on this front part of the book. We'll work on the back. We were in a single document writing together, editing in real time, each other's work.

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    DISCO Network Live: Living Between Digital Optimism and Technoskepticism at Northwestern University

    Lisa Nakamura: So I think the experiment was to give people some space to explode the form of the single author book, because everybody has been in that place where you have to write something with incredibly high stakes. And it can be lonely and it often is limited by the perspective that one person can have. And it's a long, long, like really long term commitment. So doing a five day commitment with no prep and no work afterwards was just a radically different way to do scholarship.

    And it was a little painful, but in a way, extremely successful. We had a book that ranged over a longer historical period with way more kinds of examples than we could have had if we'd written on our own, but mainly it it capitalized on the ability that we had to produce something that was really multi voiced. The book is written in the first person plural, as a "we," but we had pull out sections that were more "I."

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    Building Digital Networks of Knowledge and Care: DISCO Scholars in Conversation

    Jeff Nagy: And we were writing in such a way where everyone sort of touched everything. So, at various points, the parts of the manuscript were just, you know, And you had to kind of say, like, not mine anymore. Someone else is going to take this over and do whatever it is they think needs to be done to it.

    Which for scholars in the humanities I think is a very anxiety inducing way to produce anything. I find it kind of fun.

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    DISCO Network Panel: From There to Here at University of Maryland College Park

    Remi Yergeau: Everybody has a personal presence in the book as well, like first person narrative, there are little vignettes and stories, which I also think heightens the accessibility of the book because there's a way in which the autobiographical is also animating the conversations that are happening and making it more material in terms of the stakes and the implications.

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    DISCO Network Panel - Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal

    Rianna Walcott: I think the book opens up a lot more questions than it closes as well, you know, like there's like so many points in the writing where we're asking these very open ended questions like, I don't think we like, I mean, specifically, like I'm definitely thinking about the black style chapter. We did not come to a conclusion about whether this was, you know, and also questions like, is this a good thing or a bad thing? That's not what we were getting at. Like, we weren't asking something as reductive as that.

    Again, it was about occupying this point in between optimism and refusal, this skepticism, right? This sort of like, we're kind of watching what happens and we're, we're, we're monitoring it, we're talking about it, but you know, some of us will use it, but we'll use it at our own pace and in our own ways, I think was a lot of what came, came through, you know?

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  • Technoskepticism

    Technoskepticism, co-written by an intergenerational group of 14 scholars at a five-day Book Jam intensive in summer 2023, argues for a critical position between possibility and refusal.

  • Our relationship with technology is often transactional, extractive, and exploitative, and this is especially true for people of color and disabled people. In this book we trace the lineages of contemporary A.I.-generated Black bodies that sing, speak, and speak back to (and of) us, algorithmically generated medical diagnoses that decide who or what is disabled and how we ought to be treated, and the uses of digital nostalgia to belatedly and selective re-member a platform history without people of color.

  • It might seem contrary, naive, or at worst straight up self-destructive for Black, disabled, Asian, and other people who’ve been on the wrong side of technology for so long to refuse to participate in what’s been called the Golden Age of A.I.. Refusal is an especially precious space of possibility, particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no, to evade, or to log off, people of color and disabled people have long navigated this space between saying yes and saying no to the newest technologies in ways that can empower and energize our awareness of the possibilities skepticism can create.

  • This monograph includes an immersive digital artwork entitled “Teknoskepticism Soundingboard: Observation of a Speculative Process” produced by Stephanie Dinkins and Josie Williams of the Future Histories Studio. Dinkins and Williams’ work addresses Blackness, A.I., and machine learning models and their piece walks the reader through a navigable virtual set of cabins containing images and sounds from our work co-authoring this book during a Book Sprint in the Pennsylvania Catskills in the summer of 2023. This piece provides a tactile and playful experience of collaboration across our similarities and differences.

Book Jam 2023