By Liz Jackson and Rua Williams

‘Labs Suck’ is written primarily in Liz’s voice – though it was written in collaboration with Rua. The ‘My Lab sucks’ section (immediately after the intro) is written entirely by Rua and is in their voice. 

In 2019, I was invited to tour Verizon’s Accessibility Lab. Located inside the telecom giant’s New York Corporate Headquarters, it signaled a furtherance of Verizon’s stated “commitment to accessibility.” The lab featured a slew of accessibility related devices, dongles, and if I’m recalling correctly, a two-way mirror. I was caught off guard by the myriad objects on display to simulate disability while also feeling like I, myself, was on display in their simulation. Unsure of how to act under such circumstances, I found myself making a mockery of one particularly egregious pair of blindness simulation goggles. 

In the days that followed, I recall having compunctions about my rambunctious behavior. The folks who invited me in for the tour were proud of their lab, but it was stale. Visitors entered through an unassuming door that could have led to a broom closet. And during my stint as the lab’s visitor, I couldn’t help but wonder, “ok, now what?” Verizon heralds the “industry leading,” lab as a “show place” for “different companies and advocacy groups to visit,” though whatever happens afterwards remains unknown. 

Microsoft similarly hypes their Inclusive Design Lab as a site for invitation: "Approximately 2,000 people [...] have made a pilgrimage to the renovated space” in the year since it opened. This includes “representatives from Amazon, HBO, Nike, and T-Mobile.” Further, “It welcomed designer Tommy Hilfiger and the musician Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam. It received government officials from Australia, Germany, Japan, and Singapore.” If it is meant to be a pilgrimage, who is meant to be the pilgrim, and what is meant to be holy? 

While “employees still treat the lab as a pass-through to the cafeteria, Microsoft is taking this moment to firmly establish itself as the corporate leader in the rapidly expanding space of inclusive design.” The deployment of labs as HQ visitor attractions is a reflection of their capacity to house and commodify ill gotten gains. In a corporate headquarters, access to labs has historically been highly restrictive, yet these semi-public spectacles are mausoleums to corporate performativity and monuments to broken promises.

These labs are an extension of humanities labs that absorb and distort the righteous ideals of change movements in exchange for funding, prestige, authority, and safety in a regime of precarity. They recall a question that cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek asked in Violence: “What if the true evil of our societies [lies in our] attempts to extricate ourselves from [capitalist dynamics] — all the while profiting — by carving out self-enclosed communal spaces?”

Unlike the traditional chemistry or physics lab, which churns the material resources it takes in through a continuous recombinant generation of knowledge and waste, the humanities lab must draw on its only resource -- human ideas. This lab legitimates and upholds its authority by curating the displacement of its constant supply of informants as well as our dispossession of attribution.

When the lab’s champions are confronted with their parasitism, they sequester inward and upwards as a shield against critique. What began through the co-optation of community-led change movements inevitably turns it into a mausoleum for the end of the world. The lab is a model of knowledge production which requires extraction to function. Put simply -- Labs Suck.

My Lab sucks

I have often said “I hated computer scientists so much I became one.” And while this quip is meant to get a chuckle, the reality of my spite-driven career trajectory is that I am often shunted into the gray spaces between my personal ethics and what is institutionally required. For example, while having a “mid dissertation crisis” is widely regarded as a “canon event,” my crisis came from the evidence-based conviction that it was not possible to design an ethical technology-driven intervention for autism and yet being required by my program to … program… a thing… that does … a thing… to people. Fortunately, spite, for me, is an inexhaustible resource, and I was finally able to reorient the target of my intervention to be on the discipline itself, rather than its subjects.

But not all of my ethical conundra have been so easy to resolve. For one, I maintain my ethical position as a certified AI hater and conscientious objector to generative AI use. Yet this position prohibits me from certain empirical work which could validate my position to those who find it baseless and absurd. In other conundra, I have failed entirely at conscientious objection – As a disability studies and science & technology studies scholar, I can operate fully as an autonomous author with no need of a lab. As an HCI researcher, I am wholly illegitimate without one.

Before I had even moved into my office on Purdue’s campus I had emails from prospective students “applying” to “work” in my “lab.” I found it viscerally unnerving. I feel strongly that a “lab” - whatever it is - should not be a place of “business” but a space of mentorship and learning in relation. I wanted people to want to learn with me, not work for me.

I did not want a lab. A lab is a named entity. Once you give something a name, it requires constant feeding to maintain its legitimacy. A lab is nothing if it has no students to work in it and no experiments to run within it. A lab is certainly nothing without funding. For without funding, it cannot have equipment, students, or human subjects. But without a lab, you are not allowed to have space. If you want desks for your students to sit at and cabinets for your equipment to lay in waiting for a human subject, then you have to have space, so you have to have a lab, so you have to have a name, so that you can apply for funding, so that you can buy your gadgets and pay your students and compensate your human subjects. 

I sat on the need to “name” my lab for over two years post graduation. A facebook post from 6 months post graduation shows I had already expressed the possibility of “CoLiberation Lab” but found it “too cringey.” My facebook friends responded with various labia puns. A Facebook post from 2022 shows me considering the Counterventions Collective vs. CoLiberation Lab. Everyone preferred the lab, even the labia jokers from a year and a half prior.

Counterventions is a term that came out of my dissertation work – a kind of research method, or orientation, that flips the target of intervention from the disabled body to those that regard the disabled body as a problem, including the researchers themselves. It is a critical reflexive method that attempts to walk researchers through a process of critiquing their prior work and arriving at a new orientation with a sense of excitement rather than a reactionary and impotent sense of guilt. I imagined a Collective because I do not believe in making carbon copies of myself through my mentorship of graduate students. I imagine students engaging in a passionate parallel play, strengthening each other while pursuing their own unique interests and goals. But more than this, I imagined other “labs” taking up the pursuit of counterventional methods, wherein we might form a collective - a network. Yeah. I guess a damn rhizome. You caught me. Cringey indeed.

But I felt announcing a collective was too presumptuous. Like an organization naming itself international and containing only Americans.

I was turning “CoLiberation Lab” about in my mind because it would satisfy the institutional hunger for a “lab” while also foregrounding a commitment – Collective Liberation is Principle 10 in the 10 Principles of Disability Justice. I had also written about fostering a Co-Liberative Consciousness in computing undergraduate students as a kind of inoculation against the value-warping realities of “the job market.” I wanted it to be impossible to forget that my goal is a transformation of academic practice which enables both large and small movements of liberation for all people oppressed by ableism and the Gordian knot of -isms. A lofty, conceited, self-righteous goal probably. But I am nothing if not earnest.

But the Lab haunts me now. I feel the constant pull. I fear that creating a lab, and then trying to have that lab be “a thing” incentivizes extractive behavior. Once a Lab is established, you need the Lab to produce knowledge, and produce innovation, and produce good press. The only thing worse than having no lab is having a dead one. The lab cries out – Feed me, Seymore. Build more artifacts, run more experiments, recruit more “subjects,” write more papers, turn your papers into smaller papers… More! More! I’m so hungry. 

Labs conceal the humans that compose them. A Lab implies a larger number of invisible people that, through their hypothetical numbers, become incapable of being held culpable. If the Lab is branded as “good,” any action by those humans becomes the actions of the Lab, and thus “good.” 

If any work I do becomes the work of the CoLiberation Lab, I worry about the obscuration this enables. Any community-led work becomes the knowledge production of the lab and not the people I tried to redistribute resources to. There are many things I have done that I have not written about because I am terrified that the stories I have collected might be turned into something grotesque like “The CoLiberation Lab Anthology” that people buy from a publisher and escalate my citation counts while the people in the stories are still starving. In the rest of this piece, Liz will reflect on some of her experiences, and the experiences of others, being sucked dry by labs.

Labs for Liberation sucks

Labs for Liberation is a colablablaboration between Vanderbilt University’s Critical Design Lab and the Digital Apothecary Lab at Northwestern University. In 2023, it received a half million dollars to “reimagine [...] the humanities lab as spaces for collaboration, theory-building, and world-building.” But this is exactly what humanities labs were designed to do and have done for decades. According to humanities laboratory ethnographer Urszula Pawlicka-Deger:

“the laboratory works as a driving force to develop a new model of the humanities based on collaboration, partnership, interdisciplinarity, situated practices, technology-based research, and alternative empirical education.”

Why did Labs for Liberation receive such a large sum of money to reimagine the humanities lab into the very essence of what it already does? One possibility is donor cultivation. The Mellon Foundation has developed a reputation for funding humanities projects, and has even been critiqued for compelling applicants to tack “social-justice jargon” onto their proposals. But Mellon’s website lists Innovative Programming as the very first item under “Who We Support.” 

Innovation, and not humanities or social justice work, is the through line of the Mellon dynasty, which is why it seems useful to trace the Mellon Foundation back to its namesake. As the United States Treasury Secretary under three presidents, Andrew Mellon was “the most powerful private banker in the country in […] the most powerful public office in the country” during the years leading up and through the Great Depression. While he didn’t create trickle-down economics, his “central tenet of slashing taxes on the wealthy and business to spur growth” was a progenitor for its logic.

He was ultimately forced to resign from his post for “using his control of banks and corporations to lie about his income” for the purposes of tax evasion. The Mellon Foundation, and every other beneficiary of his ill gotten gains are “living proof of the triumph of tax avoidance and the durability of dynastic fortunes.”

Andrew Mellon was also one of the “great inheretors” of the Mellon family fortune. His father, Thomas Mellon was the founder of Mellon Financial, “which was once one of the world's largest money management firms” during the “mass production revolution” at the turn of the 20th century. The family's “shrewd investments always put them on the cutting edge of technology during a period of mass industrialization: an easy formula for unimaginable riches.” According to Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy:

“Inventors and scientists were bringing an unending stream of inventions and improvements to daily life. But it was the financiers, not the inventors, who governed this system, choosing how these inventions were unleashed and enduring that it would be centralized powerful corporations that controlled them.”

This is very similar to my experience of humanities labs. Though instead of governing inventions through the redistribution of credit, clout, legitimacy and authority, labs also suck the life out of ideas they’re trying to harvest. 

In 2025, Labs for Liberation invited me to participate in their summer lecture series. They wanted me to speak alongside someone I had blocked years prior on social media. I blocked this person after noticing a pattern of surveillance and extraction. At the time, I had a little ritual: I would search terms on Twitter that were a focus in my work; particularly ‘inclusive design’. I would occasionally come across a Tweet that exhibited the exploitative world view I was invested in exposing. The posts I found had little to no engagement, and after I would dunk on them, I’d get a few dozen likes if I was lucky. 

My delight in this ritual turned to frustration as I started noticing, sometimes moments after posting, that someone with a much larger following than mine would post the Tweet I had unearthed, but with her own quip. Even though a simple hat tip [h/t] to the original source’s handle was customary, I never got one. In fact, she demonstrated a complete lack of engagement with my posts that seemed impossible given the consistent pattern of her scraping my quote tweets for her own content. This person is who Labs for Liberation wanted me to be in conversation with, yet she had already demonstrated a complete lack of desire to converse with me in the public forum. The unspoken contradiction contributed to my feeling that they wanted my work, but they didn’t want me. 

I’m not entirely sure why Labs for Liberation approached me in the first place; I don’t have a particularly good track record when it comes to institutional flattery. I relinquished a five figure grant from a family philanthropy that also was named after a greedy patriarch, because its legalese undermined its promises. I have since settled comfortably into a low paying, but stable job that slows the pace of my writing while granting me the freedom to reflect on the forces that have constrained my thinking.

There’s a part of me that wonders how the conversation played out when my name was brought up for this panel. The theme of the lecture – Design Friction and Access Washing – resembles presentations I have given in the past about “Honoring the Friction of Disability.” Was this another instance of them wanting my work, but not wanting me?

I hadn’t heard the term Design Friction before, though I was familiar with an adjacent term – Access Friction – which has been incorrectly attributed to me on many occasions. I, in turn, have either correctly or incorrectly attributed ‘Access Friction’ to Lichen Hamraie, the director within the Critical Design Lab who approached me about the Labs for Liberation lecture. 

Given this background, I assumed they had the chops to navigate friction with something resembling an ethical fluency. So, I told Labs for Liberation about my boundary with the individual they invited me to present alongside, imagining I’d get a response that reflected Critical Design Lab’s stated use of “digital media and social practice” to “craft [...] methods for [...] accountability.” But that’s not what happened. Instead, they replaced me with the director of another lab named Sara Hendren, who they thanked “for supporting the early dreaming of this summer institute almost a decade ago.”

adaptation + ability group sucks

Ten years ago, I similarly admired Hendren, though having untethered myself from a culture that cast her as an authority, it now feels possible to return to what I couldn’t convey at the time. I now find meaning in pulling the stray threads of a history that wasn’t captured by the establishment.

Like so many of the mother figureheads that Rua and I have written about, Hendren has worked to “parlay a single, attention grabbing moment into a lifetime of repute.” Hendren’s involvement in the Accessible Icon – the forward leaning, active seeming wheelchair user that has quickly come to usurp the International Symbol of Access — made her into an accessible icon icon. 

As such, “15 years of the Accessible Icon Project, looking back” became the theme and title of her Labs for Liberation lecture on access washing and design friction. During her presentation, Hendren named a wide range of influences on her work, including collaborators Brian Glenney and Tim Ferguson Sauder. She credited her “son Graham who has Down Syndrome” who “woke [her] up to disability matters for the first time.” She described the work of Suzanne Koefoed — creator of the International Symbol of Access — as “a profound idea.” She also rattled off various high profile inspirations to her, such as Oliver Sacks, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Wendy Jacob.

The focus on individuals who have shaped her work makes the omission of an artist named Brendan Murphy all the more noteworthy. As a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati 1994, Murphy “envisioned and designed a new wheelchair accessibility symbol.”

Not only did his “updated pictogram” precede the Accessible Icon by decades, it was also “adopted by the city of San Antonio and Williams College, and such retailers as REI and Wal-Mart Stores.” Murphy’s commitment to the proliferation of his Access Symbol is the reason why Hendren eventually stumbled upon her legacy. In her Labs for Liberation lecture, Hendren mentions her discovery of the Access Symbol in the briefest possible terms, simply saying it was something she “saw at MoMA,” as though she encountered an object without origin, in the wild, and in dire need of a colonizer. 

Embedded in Hendren’s treatment of Murphy is a dynamic that Rua and I have experienced on far too many occasions, in which a gatekeeper falsely bestows recognition upon someone in order to exert their own dominance and authority over a topic. Our working term for this is obscuration, and it tends to occur outside of what typically counts as citation, such as in speeches and interviews. By either failing to name the individual at all or by citing a person while simultaneously being responsible for excluding them from the conversation, the gatekeeper establishes themselves as the arbitrator of relevance, relegating their target, without which their own work could not exist, into obscurity.

After Hendren posted Murphy’s Access Symbol on her blog all those 15 years ago, she and Glenney “exchanged some comments towards creating our own symbol that was publicly accessible, and began working on design and implementation in 2010.” Their exchange of comments can be found in an Internet Archive of Hendren’s deleted blog posts. On December 29, 2009, Glenney wrote: 

“I suggest a tagging run of these. We create the signage and “replace” old signs. I think there should be a unique sign for wheelchair parking though. One that signifies the unique situation of having a “disabled” driver. I’ll start doing parking lots once you get a good design Sara! What would be best is an “overlay” design, that makes use of the passive wheelchair image but makes it active. Something like (but not like) a steering wheel placed in front of the arms of the figure.”

Hendren responded, writing “This is a great idea, Glenney. And perfect to do a replicable overlay. Going near the top of my list for the coming months.” Hendren’s first attempt at “a unique sign” overlaid a nearly identical replica of Murphy’s forward leaning concept onto the ISA. 

After a few iterations, Hendren and Glenney had their prototype printed onto “hyperstatic static window decals” and slapped them up on “disability signs around the greater Boston area in 2011.” Soon after, a Boston Globe reporter named Billy Baker took notice of the “street art project” and made Sara Hendren the face of his profile on a “new icon” — was the icon the design or was it her? 

Not only did Baker fail to mention that Murphy was the source of Hendren’s thinking, he also described Glenney as “a former graffiti artist who collaborated with Hendren on the project” rather than it being his idea to take Murphy’s work. In the wake of the Boston Globe profile, Glenney’s colleague at Gordon College, graphic designer Tim Ferguson Sauder, helped “to adapt the icon for use as a stencil and to meet ISO design standards.” No longer interested in merely “framing this work as a street art campaign,” Hendren and Glenney shifted their strategy “away from a guerrilla campaign towards more institutionalized activism.” ‘Institutionalized’ is quite the word choice, and one which seems less innocent given what happened next.

“With the symbol finalized, the task turned to getting it out there in the world.” Jeff Gentry, Communications Director at Triangle, Inc. – the largest sheltered workshop in Massachusetts – approached Hendren, hoping to collaborate in some way. Gentry was navigating a delicate situation at Triangle, and a progressive decoy would offer him institutional capital that would be useful for work he would embark on the following year. As Gentry wrote on his Substack: 

I joined Triangle in 2007 and starting in 2013 I worked to help guide the organization through the closing of their two sheltered workshops [...] to ensure that as many clients as possible would transition from sub-minimum paying sheltered work to competitive or supported employment opportunities in the community that paid minimum wage or higher.

Hendren’s 2012 description of Triangle as a “progressive non-profit that supports and advocates for people with disabilities in really novel ways,” omitted the pittance disabled workers were being paid by what she described as the organization’s “innovative jobs development program.” Even though “the 45-year-old nonprofit” wouldn’t “surrender its federal and state certifications that allow it to pay workers with disabilities less than minimum wage,” until the Summer of 2016, Hendren concluded “it’s astounding what they do.”

With their mutual admiration firmly established, Hendren now had a location to showcase the finalized logo — the parking lot of Triangle’s Malden, Massachusetts headquarters. This is where volunteers gathered and “launched the Accessible Icon Project,” — it now had a name. And a new owner — a rudimentary marketing website for the signage states “The Accessible Icon is owned by Triangle, Inc.” To commence the new venture, attendees spray painted the Accessible Icon onto parking spots. 

Afterwards, the Mayor showed up to a ceremony celebrating the newly minted parking lot and declared that Malden “would be the first city to officially adopt the new symbol.” Triangle also introduced Hendren and Glenney to “corporate partners like Clark’s and Talbots, both of whom were eager to update their own facilities.” 

I measure portrayals of success under capitalism by who and what a person was willing to sacrifice during a certain place and time. This is a story about Hendren burying the Accessible Icon’s forebear who “always faced a problem getting his symbol adopted,” when she could have contributed her passion for “visual material culture” to his hard fought efforts. 

But this isn’t the design friction and access washing Hendren described in her Labs for Liberation lecture. Instead, she treated the lecture’s theme as a talking point, and described shortening her reflections on the Accessible Icon “in order to make room for, yeah, criticism.” With the time Hendren made for design friction, she described it in accessibility terms, as a situation that arises when something doesn’t work for a particular user. 

But, this is the primary definition of access friction — rather than design friction. So why would Hendren apply the most common meaning of access friction to the entirety of friction that arises in design? 

Literary theorist Terry Eagleton has written about a rhetorical tactic he calls ideological enunciation, which makes something true in what it affirms but false in what it excludes. According to Eagleton, such ideological enunciation is “powered by an ulterior motive bound up with the legitimation of certain interests in a power struggle.” 

As someone who has experienced a form of design friction that occurs in processes rather than products, I can’t help but consider how many of the circumstances that worked to Hendren’s benefit would have been used to exploit her were she disabled. If I had been in her position at the time, my ideas would have been diminished as the requests of a user and I would have been thanked for my feedback. 

As such, my work has evolved to interrogate who gets to be a designer and who is relegated to the role of user. If Labs for Liberation would have done their advertised accountability work and made my presentation possible, I would have discussed design friction as a disruption to what is assumed by those who operate from a position of — or in service to — power. For me, design friction is a battle over who gets to benefit from their contributions. 

By using accessibility to suppress a broader critique of power in her “Design Friction and Access Washing” lecture, Hendren managed to access wash design friction. In many ways, this is a testament to her immersion in a colonial humanities culture. And the hypocrisy of this lies with Labs for Liberation, because they introduced Hendren by claiming “we cannot forget the too often invisibleized logics of settler colonialism,” while existing scholarship on decolonizing the humanities “warn[s] us against the use of overly narrow definitions.”

Seven years earlier - in 2018, Hamraie featured Hendren on the first episode of their podcast “about the politics of accessible and critical design.” Hendren was introduced as “one of [Hamraie’s] oldest friends and colleagues in disability studies, and she’s also the person who first taught [them] about critical design.”

In my purview, marrying the words critical and design could prompt a robust conversation that conveys a sense of urgency around the asymmetries that disabled designers encounter in our professional lives while making amends with the person you erased and replaced. But, Hendren made it clear those topics were outside the parameters of critical design’s jurisdiction when she situated it purely in “the realm of use.” Why is this something that happens in the humanities - that academics use their power to narrow the definition of broad terms in ways that maintain their authority? Oh. 

During the interview, Hendren made two confessions, admitting she’s “been guilty of working in an ahistorical way […] because [she] was so focused on the making, and the doing.” She finished off her train of thought by asking “how do I actually acknowledge the lineage that this lives in?”

A cursory search on MoMA’s website for Accessible Icon returned a growing record of it being displayed in their collection. When I conducted the same search for Access Symbol, it yielded a result… for the Accessible Icon. And nothing came back when I tried to find Brendan Murphy. We are inching closer to a decade since Hendren posed her rhetorical acknowledging a lineage question on Hamraie’s podcast… maybe she could start here, considering this is where it all began. 

In the wake of her newfound notoriety for being the icon behind the Accessible Icon, Hendren finished grad school and started a lab called adaptation + ability group at Olin College. A lab with an icon hit the Mellon foundation’s sweet spot, because they reached out to her “on their own initiative,” telling her, "folks said that we should come to visit you because there's a kind of approach to what you do that's in line with what we're trying to do in arts education and the things we support.”

In 2017, Hendren took a 3-year “leave from teaching” as a result of a $900,000 grant she secured from the Mellon Foundation. She has discussed two programs this grant was earmarked to cover. The cornerstone involved “fellowships for engineering students to go to internships in the summer in arts venues” which included a metal lab and a sustainable fashion and textiles lab. 

The other part, she said to Hamraie during the 2018 interview, is “what you and I are doing,” which involves “gathering counterparts, people who we know are like-minded and like-hearted in this work to come to campus and for us to convene, and kind of affinity finding, and consensus building.”

Disability Culture Lab sucks

When Andrew Mellon resigned his role as Secretary of Treasury in February of 1932, it further justified Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign strategy of “a new deal for the American people.” That November, FDR was elected in a landslide. By 1934, the economic surpluses of Mellon’s tenure “had turned into massive deficits.” It became clear to Roosevelt that the revenue system he had inherited had “done little to prevent an unjust concentration of wealth and economic power” and something needed to be done. 

That something became the Revenue Act of 1935, and directly reversed Mellon’s low-tax, pro-business policies by raising federal income taxes on high-income earners and corporations. In response, another industrialist — Henry Ford and his son Edsel Ford — created the Ford Foundation as a tax shelter to protect the family’s assets. In the near century of its existence, the Ford Foundation has grown into a “multi-billion dollar granting agency whose capital base was derived from dividends from Ford Motor Co. shares.” 

As “the Foundation’s income grew alongside racial unrest in the US,” administrators developed a strategy of co-opting members of the Black political elite through grants and fellowships, allowing the Black elite to anoint themselves as both experts on and leaders of the Black community.” As a result, the Ford Foundation “effectively neutralized insurgent, autonomous, grass-roots movements.”

This can be found in an analysis of Robert L Allen’s “classic treatise” on the Ford Foundation – A Black Awakening in Capitalist America. In 1969, Allen surfaced how “the [Ford] Foundation has become a major social institution, dedicated to preserving social stability,” because “stability and capitalist development are essential to the tranquil internal growth and external expansion of the American empire.”

On May 12, 2026, a Ford Foundation headline “Announce[d] More Than $18 Million in New Grants to Shape AI for the Public Good” as part of Humanity AI “a collaborative philanthropic initiative dedicated to ensuring artificial intelligence (AI) serves the public good.” Two days later, Ford’s stock reached a four year high after announcing it “launched an energy storage business to provide big batteries for AI hyperscalers and data centers.” As a result, after operating as a major automotive stock for 70 years, $F was suddenly being traded as a speculative AI stock. The 21% run yielded dividends, but not without great risk to everything Ford continues to touch.

This history is useful when analyzing a recent blog post, in which Lori McGlinchey, Director of Technology and Society at the Ford Foundation, invoked the assassination of Martin Luther King in order to promote the Foundation’s AI programming. McGlinchey quoted an “undelivered address by Dr. King,” that Coretta Scott King carried out; “Our machines have grown so large that we have become so small [...] we no longer ask for what purpose they are made.” McGlinchey used this anecdote to contest “a small group of powerful people [who tell us] that AI is an inevitable force.” 

While MLK and AI may seem like a strange equivocation to make, the Ford Foundation has a history of drawing on their support of Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign as a hallmark of their civil rights portfolio. This is what Darren Walker did on the eve of departing his position as the 10th president of the Ford Foundation. As Harvard’s “fourth annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. commemorative lecturer” he described feeling “profoundly moved, overwhelmed with awe, to reflect on my moment at this podium—my moment at a pulpit where Dr. King preached” before giving the most mind bogglingly generic speech philanthropic money could possibly buy. 

During an era in which students from the left are risking suspension, expulsion, arrest, and deportation to protest genocide and authoritarians from the right are freezing research funding “to gain control of academic decision-making,” the most courageous position Walker could muster is that the holocaust is bad and civil rights are good. He hammered his point home by rattling off Elite Capture’s greatest hits — co-opted Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and of course Elie Wiesel quotes. Essentially, these operate as “a corollary to Godwin's law where instead of comparing the opposing side to Hitler, one side ends up comparing itself to Martin Luther King.”

But even Martin Luther King can’t hold up to comparisons to Martin Luther King. According to Allen, King’s belief “that the [liberal] establishment could be pushed and pressured” to “back the Negro struggle” made him into a a “reluctant accomplice of the white power structure.” King wound up in Allen’s analysis, because he was navigating tension about the way his calls for nonviolent action were being contrasted with “the threatening rebelliousness of the black masses.” A Black Awakening in Capitalist America was actually written to document the Ford Foundation’s efforts “to channel and control the black liberation movement.” Allen showed how King’s Poor People’s Campaign created an opportunity for the Ford Foundation to penetrate the revered figure.

The Ford Foundation’s special relationship with King was and remains predatory. McGlinchey undermined King’s belief that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism” when she concluded that “an AI agenda by the people [...] would promote genuine competition, including the participation of non-proprietary and open-source models in the market.” 

Ford’s involvement in “Humanity AI, a $500 million five-year initiative dedicated to making sure people have a stake in the future of artificial intelligence (AI)” harnesses the great deception of inclusion discourse – wherein corporations expand who thinks they have a seat at the table while maintaining authority at the table’s head. Ford Motor Company is scheming to profit from the AI boom while the Ford Foundation is working to ensure the populace doesn’t, thus helping to facilitate the largest transfer of wealth in human history. 

Politicians have already begun debating how to respond if/when the AI bubble bursts. Representative Ocasio-Cortez testified “we should not be entertaining a bailout of these corporations.” Only 16% of Americans believe AI will have a positive impact on society and it increasingly seems like the only thing most people want from AI is for it to go away. Yet, Humanity AI is insisting “people are demanding a stake in how AI shows up in our future.” Are “ten of the nation’s most dynamic foundations” distorting the will of the populace to “prevent public outrage from reaching the critical mass necessary for structural reforms”?

The Ford Foundation is contesting that “AI is an inevitable force” while also strategizing its future. This tactic, which the Ford Foundation established in the 60s to “work both sides of the street,” was the result of its sixth president, McGeorge Bundy, who “nurtured a keen appreciation for the complexities involved in political manipulation and the seemingly contradictory policies which often must be pursued simultaneously in order to obtain a given end.” 

The Ford Foundation leverages its strategic investments to ensnare grant recipients into its market driven priorities. Disability Culture Lab [DCL] readily obliged when its Founder and Executive Director Meier Galblum Haigh took over a podcast called Grantmakers in the Arts to have a conversation with Kenya Rankin, the lab’s Managing Director and AI Lead. Rankin attempted to appeal to AI skeptics by criticizing “big tech companies that sit behind these models that people are pushing at us all the time, where they quite frankly ignore the existing laws,” while Galblum Haigh expressed interest in “organizing money around AI.” Bundy would be proud.

Rankin, who serves as Disability Culture Lab’s AI Lead, came from Mozilla Foundation, and its single largest funder (by a long shot) is the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation is also a major funder of the Grantmakers in the Arts podcast that platformed this conversation. 

While at least half of Disability Culture Lab’s board has previously received money from the Ford Foundation, the Ford Foundation is not mentioned in a single Disability Culture Lab bio. One of DCL’s Senior Advisors is a Ford Foundation + Mellon Foundation #DisabilityFutures fellow, and coincidentally, Disability Culture Lab received a 2025 Ford Foundation + Mellon Foundation Disability Futures Fellow Nominated Award “as a result of an anonymous nomination process by artists who have received a 2020-2024 Disability Futures Fellowship.” 

How is this any different than the secretive Chorus Creator Incubator Program “aimed at bolstering Democratic messaging on the internet” that Taylor Lorenz investigated in 2025? The non-profit structure of such a scheme allows moneyed institutions to evade public disclosures around spending that restrict the levels of influence they wish to exert. As Elizabeth Dubois, author of Influencers and Elections: The many roles content creators play noted in Lorenz’ article, “Sometimes it is actually clear that influencers are being used to, for example, evade spending limits.” Chorus exists to “build new infrastructure to fund independent progressive voices online at scale.”’

Meier Galblum Haigh similarly identified an “infrastructure gap” after they “talked to just dozens of leaders.” Just like Chorus, Disability Culture Lab created Disability Rising Fellowship, which is essentially a casting call for influencers who are expected “to build public media profiles to shift narratives and culture around disability and other critical social justice issues of our time.” In return, fellows “receive high-level coaching and training in media interviewing, opinion writing, storytelling, digital strategy, and narrative strategy. They will also receive support from media relations and PR strategies to ensure their expertise moves from idea to impact.” 

As Renée DiResta, author of Invisible Rulers describes, influencers that “are tightly aligned with a power center or political party” are new propagandists. They “develop deep ties to audiences as accessible individuals,” [and] their content serves to advance the ideological aims of the faction.” 

Disability Culture Lab is essentially a propaganda arm of “the most important, though least publicized, organization manipulating the militant black movement”. The lab’s leadership consists of – as Barbadian cultural critic George Lemming detailed “leaders or potential leaders of different organizations” who “had read the literature is the Left” and had been “conferred the privilege to interpret and explain this text for others.” They would evangelize “in great expositions of developments that were taking place,” but “the people that they were addressing and whom they assumed that they were the natural leaders of” had “absolutely no interest whatsoever.” He equated it to “a schoolmaster bringing some kind of gospel to you for the first time and asking you also to accept that gospel as your own.” This is probably why these labs get so little social media engagement on their posts. 

The late Guyanese social, political, and gender rights activist, Andaiye described “the promise of power, rather than power itself, that was enough to corrupt. The betrayal is signaled long before it's committed.” The lab’s social media is littered with swag, including a Cure Ableism tote and an oppression is disabling unisex tee, but scroll to the very bottom of their consulting page, and:

“We provide crisis prevention, analysis, and support. Our team has deep experience preventing and managing crises for national politicians, prominent nonprofits, and established leaders. We’re here if you need us.” Disability Culture Lab has the gall to claim status as “the first-ever nonprofit disability media and narrative lab rooted in disability justice,” while laundering the reputation of, well… 

One t-shirt on the Disability Culture Lab webstore proclaims “Crips Against Fascism,” but Hitler “once indicated his desire to help ‘Heinrich Ford’ become ‘the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America.’” Ford is the “only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf,” probably because Hitler used Ford’s assembly line to increase the efficiency of killing in Nazi concentration camps. But would anyone buy “Disability Culture Lab is Selling This Lousy Swag to Supplement Fascist Funding” tote bag? 

Andaiye also understood “those we nurture and sacrifice into power help not us, but our enemies.” The Ford Foundation recently promoted Rebecca Cokley to the position of “inaugural program director of its U.S. Disability Rights program” due to her “intentional collaboration with the disability field.” The Foundation credits her with “moving more than $100 million directly to disability rights and justice movements.” It’s hard to underestimate her influence over Disability Culture Lab, especially considering one particular board member, Rebecca Valla considers Cokley a dear friend. At what point do intentional collaborations become corrupted by cliquishness?

Disability Culture Lab claims their “mission is to shift the narrative on disability from fear and pity to solidarity and liberation,” though liberalism would have been a more accurate word. As Moataz Salim – the Palestinian student who was arrested in 2024 for his participation in the encampments of George Washington University  – asked in Against the Co-Opting and Commodification of Liberation: 

“Do these words cost the speaker anything in the eyes of institutions eager to maintain the status quo? Is there any “rhetorical advancement” that results from these words? Does it name the full enemy? Does it defend the people whom “polite society” has marked untouchable?” 

—

As I was fact checking this piece on October 1, 2026, I came across a Yahoo News Singapore headline about a “North Star Memo” that Disability Culture Lab had just uploaded to its website. Clicking through, I realized this was the byproduct of an embarrassingly coordinated move, in which disability influencer Keely Cat-Wells hit publish on a pre-prepared Forbes Contributor blog post promoting the document once it went live. What I bumped into l was some sort of venture capital graveyard ecosystem that Disability Culture Lab’s North Star Memo was now flowing through. 

Rua and I have previously written about the Forbes Contributor program, because it’s a sketchy blogging platform for grifters masquerading as a legit business news site. Forbes once had to remove one of their contributors for failing to disclose conflicts of interest after our investigation into his antics. As such, it comes as no surprise to us that two and a half months before Cat-Wells wrote about Disability Culture Lab’s North Star Memo, she heralded the Ford Foundation as a funder that is “Getting It Right.”

While the North Star Memo generically described billionaires as a problem affecting disabled people, it didn’t disclose that it was funded by billionaires. The Memo — and Cat-Wells subsequent copy-paste write-up of it — locates black knowledge, language, and ideas under the jurisdiction and authority of Disability Culture Lab’s white founder. 

This might come down to a philosophical difference about how best to use one's whiteness. My approach is to embrace the uncomfortable work of authoring problems. Rua and I have been self-publishing our writing with the aim of resourcing the individuals and organizations that Disability Culture Lab relies on to convince billionaire funders that they’re building communications infrastructure. We have learned that if the work is useful enough, it will reach the readers who need it. Anyone who resorts to fake press isn’t interested in resourcing, they’re building a case that they should be resourced.

Disability Culture Lab promoted Cat-Well’s Forbes blog post on its Instagram page, describing it as a Forbes article, conveniently omitting it was published on the contributor column. Leroy Moore, one of the co-founders of Sins Invalid — which is listed as a signatory to the North Star Memo — commented “I hope you say that [the Political] model [of Disability] started in Zimbabwe!” Moore has appropriately become a pariah due to his toxicity toward black women. He has also continued working to hold those in power accountable, and I have wondered how those in power have steered his exile to their advantage, trusting few will take his ongoing activism seriously. 

As such, Galblum Haigh responded in a way that proved to be misleading, commenting “Yes! This model builds on their incredible work, as mentioned in this article, and more formally linked in our deeper explainer of the process + model on Disability Culture Currents,” which is an “online opinion and personal essay publication” on the Disability Culture Lab website. 

I was surprised that I had missed how the Political Model of Disability had originated elsewhere — notably the Global South — during my read of the North Star Memo. But, when I went back to find it, not only could Zimbabwe not be found, but the four other models of disability that were mentioned were hyperlinked to a source citation. There was only one disability model that was not hyperlinked, which had caused me — during my initial and uninformed read of this product they have put their questionable resources behind — to believe the Political Model of Disability had originated at Disability Culture Lab. This is how labs suck. 

Open Style Lab sucks 

Growing up, my parents instilled in me a love of sport. I don’t think it was anything they set out to do, but my understanding of justice and injustice through the frame of sport is an extension of their reactions to whatever game they happened to be watching at the time. As a result, and I have written about this before, I found myself utterly compelled by the National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston case that was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court in 2021.

At stake was the future of the term student-athlete, which was developed by Walter Byers, the original Executive Director of the NCAA. The hyphen in student-athlete was created to be a loophole, used to skirt the “dreaded notion that NCAA athletes could be identified as employees by state industrial commissions and the courts.” 

Before I realized lawyers were debating the legality of the NCAA’s hyphenated status, I was growing frustrated with the usage of hyphens amongst advocates for corporate disability inclusion. User-expert, co-creator, and co-designer designations are now wielded by corporate and institutional powers to lure under-resourced disabled research subjects into disclosing valuable information. Whatever falls after the hyphen is virtually uncompensated, though those in charge may attempt to mask their racket with insufficient remuneration, often in the form of what I call grift cards, doled out (or raffled off) in $25 increments. 

The disabled victims of these schemes risk discovering they have been stripped of agency over valuable ideas they have been repositioned as recipients and users of. These ideas may have taken a lifetime to glean but only moments to confide. Whatever follows co- really just means opted by resourced individuals who get credit for innovating the ideas they stole from their hyphenated informants.  

One particular organization, Open Style Lab, took hyphen status to a whole new level by drawing a distinction between the “designers, engineers and occupational therapists [who] conceive and build accessible wearables” and the disabled “co-collaborators” who were positioned as users. 

A collaboration is a partnership. A co-collaboration introduces hierarchy where none should exist. Creating a hyphen status out of collaboration fundamentally warps the egalitarian ideal into an absurd expression of late stage capitalism. Under what other circumstance could this term possibly arise, but when someone uses it to undermine another person’s contributions?

Lately, it seems, Open Style Lab has abandoned co-collaborators for Disabled Expert Fellows, though clarification about how they differ gets lost in their publication of jargon-filled slop: 

“Through transformative co-design with Disabled Expert Fellows with accessibility at the forefront, fellows become empowered as thought-leaders in the design space with Open Style Lab, equipped with tools for design thinking, storytelling, and innovative technology to create lasting, scalable impact!”

(Those certainly are all words.)

The OSL Fellowship Program operates more like a factory than a lab, churning out cohort after cohort, on the prowl for ways to make “private property out of what was once human knowledge.” This is something Matthew Cole, author of Unpaid describes as “wage theft evolving.” 

Acceptance into the cohort is contingent on a “Fellow Packet” that contains a stack of seven contracts that fellows must sign to formalize their involvement in the program. It's a breathtaking read, structured to ensure Open Style Lab reaps all of the benefits but carries none of the burden. In the Program Liability Release, the fellow agrees “to assume all risks and responsibilities arising from or associated with [the fellowship].” In return, according to the Program Terms & Conditions, “any and all intellectual property arising out of 2026 Open Style Lab summer program shall belong exclusively to Open Style Lab.” The OSL Fellowship “onboarding documents” are a full throated embrace of “commercial contracts [as] instruments of conquest, colonization and commodification,” as professor Laleh Khalili explains in her book, Extractive Capitalism.

Throughout the ten week program, fellows must “dedicate approximately 8-10 hours per week on the project in addition to the evening calls and Saturday sessions.” Open Style Lab makes an allowance for one missed session due to personal conflict which requires two weeks notice, and one for an emergency, which “must be supported by written proof of documentation.” Failure to comply, and “your fellowship will be considered automatically terminated.” Open Style Lab bangs the gavel, “This condition is not negotiable.” These non-negotiable conditions are paradoxically incompatible with many forms of disabled and chronically ill life.

Fixed hours creates a proof point that Open Style Lab is systematizing the extraction of disability ingenuity. It matters not which bodyminds can comply, because “unpicking […] the social rules that shape how bodies are seen, heard, and included” only applies to the theme of the 2026 Summer Fellowship, which was formal wear, and not the format. The unfairness of their protectionism is compounded by their acknowledgement that “disabled people are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as their non-disabled peers.”

Eager, credulous students are particularly vulnerable to enlistment “as a willing accomplice in [their] own exploitation.” This verbiage is from Harry Braverman, author of Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Braverman writes about the antagonistic habituation of workers to capitalist modes of production. 

Because hurt people hurt people’s how it begins: teaching someone to justify the exploitation of others is much easier when it’s also happening to them. Open Style Lab pays no wages for the time, labor, and creative contributions of their fellows. The capture of disability ingenuity as an instrument of capital is most valuable as a marketing ploy – the production of marketing material parades their co-collaborators as evidence of community inclusion and absolves Open Style Lab of any accusation of exploitation. As such, fellows are required to sign off on “the use of [their] images, likeness, or personal information,” for which they also will “not receive any financial compensation or remuneration.” 

While fellows sign a “covenant not to sue,” the NDA establishes Open Style Lab’s right to sue signatories for “monetary damages, where ascertainable” due to the loss of “any data or information that had actual or potential commercial value to OSL.” The implication of this language is a right to search and seizure of a fellow’s data for any evidence of withheld design ideation. Open Style Lab owns your imaginary and your ass in exchange for a gilded cage. If we lived in a just world where social rules prevailed, the data and information that Open Style Lab is claiming ownership of would be shared by the individuals – past and present – who it derived from.

Simultaneous to this summer’s OSL fellowship, Open Style Lab also announced an AI Research Residency to ensure AI models are “shaped with Disabled people from the start.” Just as Disability Culture Lab’s approach to AI reflects the interests of its funders, Open Style Lab’s AI strategy mirrors Microsoft’s Responsible AI initiative, which centers the aggregation of “high-quality, disability representative data to help train AI systems.” 

Christina Mallon, Microsoft’s Head of Inclusive Design believes “AI will continue to play a vital role in bridging” something Microsoft and the World Bank have dubbed the disability divide in their call for “more data […] to get clarity on the degree to which persons with disabilities continue to be underserved.” Mallon brings Microsoft’s influence to her other role, as Open Style Lab’s Chief Brand Officer, which perceives “the inevitable implementations of Ai [as] passing by at a rate that risks reinforcing exclusion at scale, limiting independence for millions.”

This is happening under the backdrop of an internal Microsoft presentation that Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of Applied Science wrote in 2024, in which he described AI scraping as “the largest theft of labor in human history.” Surely, Microsoft’s AI For Good Lab, which was built “to help solve some of the world’s greatest challenges,” would lend its infinite resources to this “astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.” But instead of treating AI as an extraordinary threat, the AI For Good Lab works to capture any data that global theft may have missed. 

Pope Leo wrote in his Magnifica humanitas on AI, that “ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it.”

Such ethical discernment might consider whether underrepresentation creates a safeguard defense for uniquely surveilled populations. For example, Open Style Lab posted about an AI Virtual Measurement Tool called 3DLOOK in response to their question “how can Ai improve accessibility?”

3DLOOK brands itself as “the global leader in AI-first mobile body scanning and virtual fit solutions,” and offers two core products; FitXpress uses “body tracking for weight-loss and GLP-1 programs,” while Mobile Taylor is a “body scanning solution for made-to-measure apparel.” Open Style Lab believes 3DLOOK “could revolutionize the way we approach Adaptive Fashion, giving solutions for specific bodies, experiences, and circumstances.”

Like other seemingly innocuous consumer-targeting technologies, 3DLOOK poses subtle but significant risks for disabled and otherwise marginalized people. It may seem incomprehensible or conspiratorial to imagine that a body scanning technology designed to assess apparel fit could threaten a disabled person’s access to benefits, yet there is already precedent. Social media behavior has already been used to justify benefits denials. Purchasing behavior is easier to track and more closely linked to public perceptions of “worthiness.” Meanwhile, our adaptive equipment already reports our “adherence” behaviors to our insurers. CPAP machines tattle on you for lack of use. Robotic knees complain of your not getting enough steps. Medications report back if they have not been metabolized. 

3DLOOK could easily be deployed as a spy to report on disabled people’s weight-based behavior markers, to say nothing of the incidental capture of intimate details from private home settings. Yet 3DLOOK is imagined not as a thing which is used by disabled people on benefits, but as a luxury consumer customization tool for those disabled people wealthy enough to enjoy fashion. Chris Gillard describes this as “Luxury Surveillance” where the consumer class submits themselves to surveillance in the name of convenience without any regard for the fallout their choices will have for more vulnerable groups.

Given the incomprehensible risk that AI poses to exploited populations, it would seem the pursuit of protections would proceed any effort to ameliorate harmful exclusions. Being that it’s not the case, it’s worth considering whether the so-called exclusions are, in fact, causing the levels of harm they want the general public to believe. 

According to Open Style Lab, AI “systems are already repeating past accessibility failures” because “the first guidelines for internet accessibility were not available until 1999, 8 years after the web was publicized [emphasis ours, because it’s funny].” Their seemingly logical intervention of “practical standards [that will] help shape more inclusive and creative AI-driven fashion systems” relies on a false equivalency: The emergence of the internet wasn’t built on the extraction and degradation of so many things disabled people know and hold dear, such as our life hacks and our health insurance approvals for example.

There are two things about early guidelines for internet accessibility that feel important to point out: they were obvious and that’s because they were being advocated for. The implementation of those guidelines led to an outdated expression of inclusion where individuals who were previously excluded no longer were. But things evolved, and corporations wanted to seem both innovative and benevolent, so they began digging for new forms of accessibility to capitalize on. These corporations would include disabled users through surveys, focus groups, and hackathons. Instead of presenting prototypes to these newly hyphenated disabled user-experts for feedback, researchers would instead inquire about any needs or ideas they may have. And while corporations were calling this inclusion, it wasn’t. It was exploitation. 

Open Style Lab’s pursuit of AI standards for accessibility begins from that point of exploitation. Once the residency kicked off, Open Style Lab posted boldly “Win $100. TECH & DISABILITY RESEARCH SURVEY. AI & FASHION 2026.” Open Style Lab doesn’t clarify if the “LIVED EXPERIENCE WITH DISABILITY” that respondents “MUST HAVE” means they need to be disabled, but their “experiences and perspectives are critical to shaping meaningful and authentic research. We invite you to help advance this work by completing the survey.” 

After a few introductory questions about the respondents' relationship to technology, Open Style Lab cut to the chase; “If you could design a dream AI-powered tool for personal style, what features would it have and why?” This is data scraping disguised as inclusion. Terry Eagleton describes the coercive might of cultural hegemony as “a complex structure of social perception which ensures that the situation in which one social class has power over the others is either seen by most members of the society as ‘natural’, or not seen at all.”

A few months after the survey closed, Open Style Lab held their “very first In-Person session” where “participants” were “invited [...] to share with us their dream AI accessibility tools that would make fashion and styling easier while living with a Disability. We told them to dream big, and they delivered.”

Containers Suck

Back in 2015, I was accepted into the inaugural cohort of a short lived TED Residency. I was far too green to be even remotely effective in the activism I was writing passionately about. Regardless, I must have appealed to them in some regrettable way, because there I was. 

I remember snippets of my time there, though I have done my best to forget what I can. It was a traumatic experience, as I remain the only TED Resident that I’m aware of to get kicked out. I will admit, though, that my banishment from TED has become a source of pride.

During the prep process for our TED Talks, I remember being perplexed by their insistence that we use the timer on the TED website to rehearse. It was literally a stop watch timer, but in website form. When I mentioned my concern to another resident — that slow wifi would affect the accuracy of the timer — he tested it out. Lo and behold…

My curiosities about accuracy honed in on other things as well. In the kitchen, a supposedly real-time TED Talk view counter would climb endlessly into infinity — but it never changed speed. And when TED Resident talks were featured, the view count on the TED website would reach something like a million views that first day, but their real world experiences of that day never seemed particularly noteworthy. Was this why TED wasn’t uploading their features talks to YouTube? Were they fudging the numbers? 

I wasn’t particularly discreet about asking these questions. I have never been particularly shy about the questions I have. I remember when another resident invited me to a panel that featured the CEO of some perfume brand that I don’t care to recall. I went, because perfume gives me migraines and I was curious to ask her if she had ever considered making or selling scents that contained essential oils. After raising my hand and asking my question, her inner menace magically appeared; I think she said something along the lines of her perfumes being natural. It didn’t answer my question, so I kept the mic and I asked harder.

Either that night or the next day, Ruth Ann Harnisch, the billionaire philanthropist who was funding the TED Residency contacted me, demanding to know if I had sought permission from the TED Resident that had invited me to the panel to ask my question. It felt confusing to me, because I thought I was supposed to leverage the TED Residency to act in ways I was now being told were inappropriate. 

I’m no longer on Facebook, so I can’t remember the exact question I asked that led Ruth Ann to her breaking point, but if I recall correctly, TED had posted a listicle on top disability themed talks. I found many of them disturbing and I wanted to understand their selection process. The next day, I received an email from Ruth Ann, saying “You had to know that being critical of TED in public […] would end our association and that we will be warning others against working with you in the future.”

The formatting read like a Truth Social post with odd capitalization and paragraph breaks; “I helped you […] And you have repaid us with public cruelty.” The resolution she proposed was to “Disable your socials until you get the help you need to see what you have done. You are now a destructive force in a world you hoped to improve.”

Soon after receiving her email tell-off, my ex, Megan, texted me, imploring me to get Ruth Ann to stop contacting members of her board. Megan was a fundraiser for an organization that was — by all measures — completely divorced from TED circles. Despite separating, Megan and I have remained close; Ruth Ann knew this and must have felt the need to go for the jugular. I still don’t know what Ruth Ann’s emails contained, but one particular advisor to Megan’s organization described the message she received as one of the most unprofessional things she had ever experienced.

I was auditing the class of a woman I admired when this all went down, and when it got to be too much, I left sobbing. In the immediate aftermath, I confided in someone who had experienced something similar with Harnisch, and learned that I wasn’t the only one who had been left suicidal by her wrath — and that it wasn’t just us. 

For a decade, her email caused me to obsess about being bad — I so badly wanted to be good. But it’s a good that I now recognize in AI for Good, where good is only good when it benefits them. I am no longer a part of that world; I am gainfully employed by the Emergency Department of the only level one trauma center in a region I now call home. 

My hospital colleagues know I’m a writer. They have witnessed the painstaking work that has gone into this piece — and while they will celebrate its eventual publication with me, nobody has asked questions about it or asked to see it. One colleague knows I muckrake and jokes that at least I’m not buried in the basement where I now clock in and out every day — between the morgue and the elevator to the subbasement prison. 

I have one person I can think through these things with; my faraway friend Rua. This piece would not exist without them and without a stack of books by authors who have also left their chosen field so they could reflect on and write about it.  A few go-tos include The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, by waitress Tansy Hoskins, An Honest Living, by school bus driver Steven Salaita, and the indomitable Rachel Carson, “an outsider who had never been part of the scientific establishment [and] had no academic affiliation, no institutional voice.” She died in 1964, just 18 months after the publication of her expose Silent Spring. 

This piece has taken both a year and a decade to write. Sure, the type of research that goes into a body of work like this is grueling, but that’s not why. Through fits and starts, Rua has guided me to my liberation: It’s a perch from which I can articulate the thing that has far too long kept me frozen with a sense of urgency:  

Open Style Lab’s website signals a desire to “join forces with like-minded allies, educators, advocates, businesses and nonprofits around the world.” It’s no different than Sara Hendren’s use of Mellon money for “gathering counterparts, people who we know are like-minded and like-hearted […] to convene, and kind of affinity finding, and consensus building.” 

Humanity AI exists to “resourc[e] technologists, researchers, and advocates who are united by a shared vision of ensuring AI is a force for good.” And most recently, Disability Culture Lab’s North Star Memo was “the product of a year-long democratic visioning process in which Disability Culture Lab brought together nearly 50 disabled leaders and organizations from across the country around one question: how does the world work if we win? What emerged is a shared set of language, goals and priorities.” 

What does it mean to be like-minded when billionaires are pulling the strings? What does it take to reach consensus when future funding is at stake? And how can goals and priorities be shared when some are benefitting the most on the backs of those who are benefitting the least? 

The pressure to conform and the fear of consequences are real. The professor of the class I was auditing when shit hit the fan has gone on to publicly herald Harnisch. She’s not the only one; I continue to distance myself from women I once respected (I specifically say women, because I can’t recall meeting another queer person during my time in her orbit) because they celebrate her — and the checks she cuts — for a legacy of inclusion. 

Labs are containers. When someone creates a container to include you, they will inevitably use it to contain you once you stop serving their interests.