All in all: an amazing, disorienting, but ultimately validating trip. Many thanks to (in alphabetical order) Ozzie Chuba, Raphael Cohen, Sandra Eder, Jacob Gaboury, Elihu Gerson, Jeff Lockhart, Kate Metcalf, Jeff Nagy, Teddy Shusterman, Alex Torrez, Hannah Zeavin and many more for making it so.
]]>First-up, we have “The Life and Death of the Life and Death Committee” (25 September), over in the History department, which revisits the famous “God Squad” from early bioethics! As the blurb puts it:
The story of the Seattle Artificial Kidney Center’s “Life and Death Committee”, or “God Squad” - a lay panel tasked with deciding who received treatment, and correspondingly, lived and died - is a classic one within both the history of medicine and the history of bioethics. But much of what we know about it, how we conceptualize it, and correspondingly, the lessons we draw from it, is, Dr. Keyes argues, false. Drawing on newly-discovered archival resources, this talk revisits the shifting function and viability of the Life and Death Committee over time, demonstrating that its purpose was broader than often-conceived, and that its’ eventual fate calls into question many of the conclusions historians have drawn about it.
Then I’m giving a talk as part of a panel discussion at the Center for New Media (28 September) with the wonderful Jeff Nagy and Renée Cummings, where I apparently:
will ask what the history of computational psychiatry teaches us about the political economy of diagnostics. The role of AI in psychiatry is often framed as novel, and focused on improving efficiency and patient access to care. But neither is the case. AI has a long history in the upper echelons of psychiatry, as a field and a practice, and that history has consistently been entangled with broader political conflicts over who plays a role in shaping diagnosis and treatment., and under what conditions. Beginning with the start of computational diagnostics in the 1960s, he will trace out the history of how (and why) computational approaches to psychiatry have come in and out of vogue, arguing that the ultimate purpose of these diagnostic tools is to reshape the political economy of diagnosis and disability.
Both are going to be good fun; if you’re local, hope to see you there, and drop me a line if you want to say hi at any point that week (since I’ll be there the 23rd to the 30th).
]]>First, some publishing; a new piece of mine, covering Boston Gender Identity Services and titled “Clinics and Collectives”, is out in The Baffler. Extremely fun to write, thanks to a wonderful editor, and hopefully an enjoyable read, too.
Second, for those interested in doing their own work: some new archival collections! Many years ago (okay, about…three), I was doing my thing and reaching out to all and sundry who had any connection to the early clinics, and was lucky enough to reach out to the Pearson family - the kids of M. Joseph Pearson, the founding psych at the University of Michigan clinic. I asked if he’d left anything behind, and lo and behold, he had: research memos, correspondence, entire patient files, even. And after a bit of chatting back and forth, they donated it to the UMich archives for researchers!
That collection is now processed and available, as is the Os Keyes Collection (I didn’t name it), which features the oral histories I did with surviving clinic staff. Enjoy.
]]>What the fuck, as technologists, do we do right now?
There are a lot of answers to that question, which I provide, because, well, they’r perfectly good answers; you can try to be thoughtful about where you work, what you work on, and how, if you’re able to do so. You can work to smuggle the resources available to you in tech out to other spaces (Corinne and I wrote a whole book chapter about this). All of this is good and necessary and only partly sufficient, because approaching this moment “as technologists” is a trap.
It’s an attractive trap, to be sure. And it’s an understandable one. School and employment and society writ large encourage us to think of being technologists as the most important aspect of our identity, and our skillset - as part of encouraging us to think of technologists more broadly as the most important part of society (I once had a boss who opened the company wide all-hands meeting with “programmers are wizards” and it got worse from there). If you’re in a U.S. university to study computer science or UX design or anything in that range, you’ve made a commitment of tens of thousands of dollars to the idea and image of yourself “as a technologist”. So it stands to reason that’s a big part of the lens through which you would view the world, and select your responses to, well, Events.
And so when confronted with Events, and Horrors - particularly those enabled by the technology industry - it is entirely understandable that many of us ask, to be facile, for a second, whether there could be an app for (fixing) that. And if the answer is no - if our expertise as computer scientists, or data scientists, or designers, doesn’t obviously map on to solutions to the problem - we…freeze. Or, having framed ourselves as technologists first and foremost, guiltily declare the issue to be a matter of someone else’s expertise, and go in search of problems that fit ours. It’s part of why you have little unionisation within technology; organising is a matter of social expertise. It’s also part of why you have people trying to fix police brutality, or government transparency, with apps and websites; it’s what we know how to do.
But: we are not simply technologists. We are entire people, with other interests, lives, and forms of expertise. This expertise may not look like a degree: it’s often a matter of experience, or access. It’s knowing how to cook, or having a car, or access to a printer. It’s living in a particular neighbourhood, with an investment in local organising or elections. All of those are things we can contribute, right now.
Moreover, we are never just what we are right now. We are also who and what we choose to put the work into becoming. Part of the trap of thinking of ourselves as technologists, first and foremost, is not only that it stops us from taking action in other ways right now, but that it stops us from seeking to develop the ability to take other action; to flourish in other ways, that will provide more resources, more angles of contribution and attack, in the future. Doing so is…hard; I know that far, far too well. But it is also human. To expose ourselves to tasks we are not-good-at, or problems we do not have a familiar solution to. To see ourselves as more than the tools we have to hand, that we have internalised as our “thing”, and to ask what else we can do, or what else we could do, in the future.
Design that app, if an app is needed. Build that website, if a website helps. But if you find that it doesn’t - and you probably will - then cook. Clean. Drive someone somewhere. Show up to meetings. Organise your coworkers. Contribute in ways that build meaning beyond your degree, or your job. Because if people can only see themselves as their work, we’ve already lost an important part of the fight.
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