there’s a problem with computer technology. Culturally. Ideologically. There’s a problem with the Internet. Largely designed by men from the developed world, it is built for men of the developed world. Men of science. Men of industry. Military men. Venture capitalists. Despite all the hype and hope about revolution and access and opportunity that these new technologies will provide us, they do not negate hierarchy, history, privilege, power. They reflect those. They channel it. They concentrate it, in new ways and in old.

Source: Men Explain Technology to Me: On Gender, Ed-Tech, and the Refusal to Be Silent

I updated “Wanted: psychologists, psychiatrists, neuropsychiatrists, and neurologists who…” with selections from ‘“Don’t Be Stupid, Be a Smarty”: Why Anti-Authoritarian Doctors Are So Rare’.

Anti-authoritarian patients should be especially concerned with psychiatrists and psychologists—even more so than with other doctors. While an authoritarian cardiothoracic surgeon may be an abusive jerk for a nursing staff, that surgeon can still effectively perform a necessary artery bypass for an anti-authoritarian patient. However, authoritarian psychiatrists and psychologists will always do damage to their anti-authoritarian patients.

Psychiatrists and psychologists are often unaware of the magnitude of their obedience, and so the anti-authoritarianism of their patients can create enormous anxiety and even shame for them with regard to their own excessive compliance. This anxiety and shame can fuel their psychopathologizing of any noncompliance that creates significant tension. Such tension includes an anti-authoritarian patient’s incensed reaction to illegitimate authority.

Anti-authoritarian helpers—far more commonly found in peer support—understand angry reactions to illegitimate authority, empathize with the pain fueling those reactions, and genuinely care about that pain. Having one’s behavior understood and pain cared about opens one up to dialogue as to how best to deal with one’s pain. Because anti-authoritarian mental health professionals are rare, angry anti-authoritarian patients will likely be “treated” by an authority who creates even more pain, which results in more self-destructiveness and violence.

It is certainly no accident that anti-authoritarian psychiatrists and psychologists are rare. Mainstream psychiatry and psychology meet the needs of the ruling power structure by pathologizing anger and depoliticizing malaise so as to maintain the status quo. In contrast, anti-authoritarians model and validate resisting illegitimate authority, and so anti-authoritarian professionals—be they teachers, clergy, psychiatrists, or psychologists—are not viewed kindly by the ruling power structure.

Source: “Don’t Be Stupid, Be a Smarty”: Why Anti-Authoritarian Doctors Are So Rare

I updated “Classroom UX: Designing for Pluralism” with a selection from “The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids”.

Parallel to the topic of who designs for children lies a bigger question: Do children need design at all? Or, rather, how might they be enabled to design the toys they need and experiences they desire for themselves? The act of making that designers find so satisfying is built into early childhood education, but as they grow, many children lose opportunities to create their own environment, bounded by a text-centric view of education and concerns for safety. Despite adults’ desire to create a safer, softer child-centric world, something got lost in translation. Jane Jacobs said, of the child in the designed-for-childhood environment: “Their homes and playgrounds, so orderly looking, so buffered from the muddled, messy intrusions of the great world, may accidentally be ideally planned for children to concentrate on television, but for too little else their hungry brains require.” Our built environment is making kids less healthy, less independent, and less imaginative. What those hungry brains require is freedom. Treating children as citizens, rather than as consumers, can break that pattern, creating a shared spatial economy centered on public education, recreation, and transportation safe and open for all. Tracing the design of childhood back to its nineteenth-century origins shows how we came to this place, but it also reveals the building blocks of resistance to fenced-in fun.

Source: Lange, Alexandra (2018-06-11T23:58:59). The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids (Kindle Locations 185-196). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

Drafts just moved to the “Backlog” folder. Maybe later:

  • Behaviorism and Shame
  • Every Day Coping: Belly Bags, Sensory Management, Cognitive Net, and First Order Retrievability
  • Hard Mode is My Norm: Gaming Accessibility and Community
  • Collaborative Morality, Psychological Safety, and Neurodiversity
  • Neurodiversity, Phones, and the Roach Motel Dark Pattern
  • That’s not my job: Medical ableism and sexism
  • Written Communication and HIPAA
  • Eye-reading and Anti-libraries
  • Education, Coercion, and Stress
  • A Racist Infusion: From Dixiecrat to Republican
  • Ableism and White Supremacy
  • Famous Autistics and the World Autism Made
  • Whiteness Told Me
  • Disability, Basic Income, and the Politics of Resentment
  • Getting Unstuck with Psychedelics
  • Autistic Me
  • Storytelling, Tropes, Media Literacy, and Inclusion
  • Classrooms, Zone Work, and Feeling Flow
  • Respecting Identity and Sensory Needs in the Deficit and Medical Models
  • Lurking, Neurodiversity, and Education
  • Psychological Safety and the Medical Model
  • Hacker Ethos: The Good Parts
  • Special Means Vulnerable to State Intervention
  • The Grading and Ranking of Children
  • The Misbehavior of Behaviorists

Had a nice chat this afternoon with Boston Children’s Hospital’s inpatient neuroscience folks on autism, the social model of disability, identity first language, and designing for pluralism. The best hospital onboarding I’ve experienced.