Touch
You have to understand…
I see things all the time. A stream of visual phenomena, is constantly burned into my eyes. My mind creates dancing patterns on the screen, reacting to microscopic migraines. I’m behind a computer though. Its like im staring at a TV all day. I think of how this stupid thing makes me stare…
Theres no tactile connection outside of the one in my keys, so the world I live in is one focused in the eyes, in language…
I still kinda feel with a stupid gut feeling that an audio-visual world is incomplete, because without this touch there is a loss of vividness in everything. For blind people, touch is intimate. Even when you simulate blindness by staying in a dark room and allowing your eyes to black out, you can feel how touch reshapes the world around you. And I can only notice how that’s lost as I continue to write about it.
I talk a lot about writing in abstractions and overwriting things with their own image but it appears I’ve been doing the same for a while. In a way, I’ve been working on this blind accessibility project as a way to hold on to the rough ride I’ve had for so long. It feels like the only piece of me I have left, and I’m trying to pull the pieces together.
That isn’t to say that I’m disconnected from material reality. I have a close friend that I’ve been working with since 2013 who I have been working to try to pull him up from his current lows and beat downs. It’s so hard. Every time I talk to him its something new. He’s totally blind and the bullshit he has to deal with from the world pisses me off.
I hate how I’m a nobody… just a nothing in the eyes of most people. Isn’t being able to figure out how blind perception works through empirical interactions in 2013-2015 enough to show that I’m good enough for some people? I’m not asking for finality or a signifier of expertise, I’m asking for people to hear me and my friend’s struggle. I want to open that place up again. I hate the worship of PhDs and credentials its all fucking bullshit. None of these people actually sat down in front of a blind person and asked them how they felt. Or gave a shit about anything other than curing their blindness.
The cure for blindness, disability in general is worrying. Not because blind people shoulnd’t have the option to see, but because the idea of a cure is a commodity in of itself. People want cures so they can go back to work, go back to being a consumer, a laborer. They want to be able to see so they can “work and be independent”. And then there is also the heavy discrimination, the lack of awareness, the constant touching and stupid hurdles, completely in-range potential changes that are never addressed because the world had to be designed top down, with a brilliant planner telling everyone else how to live their lives.
The thing thats very frustrating about cure discussion is that disability is used as a means to shut other disabled people up. Cures are very controversial in some disability circles while highly desired in others. Opinions are mixed because bodies are mixed. Disability coalesces all of these complications into one subject that loses all of its internal integrity in the process. The cultural context of disability is often ignored, leading to frequent support of eugenics even from the inside - the disabled do the dirty work for the machine~!
Disability is of course, socially constructed from labor, and is defined relative to it in most contexts - this labor includes “self labor” as well such as self care… what this means is that disability doesn’t really exist in of itself but rather as an exclusion that is constantly being filled as labor accelerates to compensate for the heat loss of capitalism. One could think of it as an accumulating back log, code debt, that is caused by selecting laborers based on ability. The less jobs, the more automated the machines, the more removed the human, the more human bodies there are left behind in the wake.
Look, ma, its the Proletariat again…
LET ME IN
not going to lie. elitism is actually the thing that makes us stupid about this thing [data tracking online]. the suppression of basic understanding of privacy knowledge and its importance is what allows these machines to tick.
Facebook, twitter, amazon ect. do a lot of insideous things to make it a chore and most people arent willing to invest that, especially when they dont understand what’s at play. there are so many fucking tech assholes who are like…
“Damn why do people keep letting these companies win???” “The end user is a fucking moron and should just learn how to use CLI and use linux and suck my balls”
you would think that the “definition of insanity” would apply to these fucking morons who keep saying this since before I was fucking born…
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