Surreally enough, the current administration appears to have taken <\/span>intersectionality<\/span><\/i> to heart, albeit in the most perverse way possible: their assault on anti-racism efforts, trans rights, disability accessibility, and feminism\u2014and far more besides\u2014is not merely simultaneous but intertwined. It\u2019s almost darkly encouraging that a <\/span>presidential executive order<\/span><\/a> explicitly labels <\/span>accessibility<\/span><\/i>, alongside diversity, equity, and inclusion, as a dirty word\u2014because this coalescence in fact reflects a core <\/span>principle of Disability Justice: \u201cNo body or mind can be left behind.\u201d<\/span><\/a> To some, the ideological scuttling of accessibility might seem like a hastily slapped-on addition to the more conspicuous dismantling of DEI. But it may prove to be this administration\u2019s surest means for maximizing the delivery of financial devastation to vulnerable people. The clue is in the executive order itself: it frames the pushback against DEI and accessibility alike as a matter of eliminating <\/span>wastefulness<\/span><\/i>. Why stop at taking away educational training, jobs, and research when you can accelerate directly to taking away food, shelter, and medicine?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For disabled folks, being hailed as \u201cwasteful\u201d is the oldest play in the book. It\u2019s the ever-present throughline of <\/span>ableism<\/span><\/a>: the capacity for someone who isn\u2019t you to determine whether or not the value of your life exceeds the value of the resources that sustain your life. In other words: if the powers that be decide to evaluate your right to exist and determine that you fail to offer a suitable return on value, then you will be branded a burden. We exist within a political-economic system that is hellbent on designating vulnerable people as burdens\u2014as costs just waiting to be cut. To be certain, it\u2019s not just the <\/span>brazen Nazi salutes<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>talk of \u201cbad genes\u201d<\/span><\/a> that make this moment echo prior ones in which governments pursued fantasies of \u201cmaster plan\u201d efficiency, leaving (sending) the \u201cinefficient\u201d to die. But while Trump and Musk are by no means the origin of this outlook, they appear exceptionally eager to exploit it to their maximum advantage\u2014by giving the evergreen logic of human devaluation a fresh startup spin.<\/span><\/p>\n Startups are built on expendability. They cannot exist without it. For startup founders, embracing radical expendability is how they prove themselves: the image of a founder coming onto the scene, eager to deploy a radical, break-the-rules transformation of whatever came before, has become a defining trope of startup culture. <\/span>Crunch<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>grind<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>sleep under a desk<\/span><\/a>: startups ennoble the pairing of resource restriction with stretching workers beyond their limits, in turn producing a kind of glamorized template of \u201crugged masculinity\u201d for the wealthy nerd set. Even the startups themselves are considered eminently expendable. Yet startup captains don\u2019t go down with their ships; they sell, and start again. Because startups more often than not\u2014to an oft-cited tune of 90%\u2014end in failure, the preparedness to dump it all and pivot is necessarily <\/span>baked into the plan<\/span><\/a>. Significantly, neither startup founders nor venture capitalist investors are interested in improving the overall survival rates of startups as a whole. Instead, this high failure rate is the mechanism by which value is determined. While in most markets, competition refines, in startups it culls. So the fact that our government is emulating a startup means that resource allocation is being evaluated against the underlying logic of \u201csurvival of the fittest\u201d\u2014a eugenics logic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Eugenics is a word that many associate with \u201cextremes.\u201d It\u2019s often treated simultaneously as a grave matter <\/span>and<\/span><\/i> a relic of the past. But <\/span>it<\/span><\/a> never<\/span><\/a> left<\/span><\/a>. For disabled people, encountering eugenics can feel like playing whack-a-mole: it keeps resurfacing, over and over (<\/span>hello, COVID pandemic<\/span><\/a>), predictable in its constancy, even if the precise form it takes shifts with time. Once you begin to clock this routine presence, then the fact that startups adhere to and enshrine a logic of eugenics isn\u2019t especially unusual or surprising: those who frame the world in terms of \u201csurvival of the fittest\u201d never see it as just a metaphor. (And no, Musk\u2019s autism disclosure <\/span>does not exempt him<\/span><\/a> from fomenting eugenics thinking; on the contrary, he exemplifies what autistic activists and scholars have critically termed <\/span>\u201caspie supremacist\u201d behavior<\/span><\/a>.) While a proclivity for openly embracing eugenics has been quietly <\/span>growing<\/span><\/a> among Silicon Valley\u2019s wealthy elite, I\u2019m not just suggesting that startups are being helmed and <\/span>funded<\/span><\/a> by eugenicists; I\u2019m pointing out that the logic of eugenics is more or less \u201chard-wired\u201d into startups\u2014meaning that the people who amass wealth through them will already be primed to perceive the world in eugenics terms, and will take this logic\u2014the basis by which they attained (or more realistically: amplified) their power and wealth\u2014as self-evident truth.<\/span><\/p>\n This matters because when we use startups as a blueprint for remaking society, we aren\u2019t just borrowing their rhetoric of iconoclastic innovation. We\u2019re adopting a model that treats failure as a cleansing mechanism, that frames survival as proof of superiority, and that rewards those who claim to have \u201csolved\u201d complex problems\u2014whether or not they actually have. It\u2019s a system that demands radical oversimplification, and that insists on neat, scalable answers to problems that are anything but. And in the process, it inculcates the belief that ruthless elimination is not only necessary but virtuous.<\/span><\/p>\n If the idea that humanity must be saved from itself\u2014by an elite few, who in turn reserve \u201csalvation\u201d for some, not all\u2014was foundational to eugenics, then it\u2019s an idea that\u2019s now reached its zenith in the tech world. In the 1930s and 40s, the <\/span>LA Times<\/span><\/i> ran a weekly eugenics column\u2014<\/span>or per historian Alexandra Minna Stern, \u201cshilled for racist eugenics\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u2014that warned how the \u201cunfit,\u201d if allowed to reproduce, would \u201cwreck civilization\u201d itself. Like eugenicists before them, startup founders frequently position their work as an unquestioned instrument of social progress, or even a viable means of <\/span>utopia-building<\/span><\/a>. Not long ago, Musk declared, <\/span>\u201cIf Tesla fails, the human race is doomed.\u201d<\/span><\/a> It\u2019s mockable\u2014textbook main character energy\u2014but it also reflects a culture that not only tolerates such grandiosity from tech elites but actively encourages it. Indeed, the belief that possessing the power to enact widespread changes on behalf of others automatically confers the qualification to do so is deeply embedded in the way founders, funders, and even the public at large have come to regard the societal role of startups. Like eugenics before it, the \u201cstartupification\u201d of society affords a kind of \u201cpara-governance\u201d position.<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s an intriguing hypocrisy at the root of this, and it\u2019s where the eugenics logic that animates the startup world is most discernible. Arguably, the core hypocrisy of eugenics boils down to: wanting what\u2019s best for everyone for some of us. In other words, elites dictate the terms of supposed societal betterment on the basis that all will share in it, yet the entire point of eugenics is that many will, by design, <\/span>not<\/span><\/i> share in this common future. This contradiction might be familiar to those who recognize America\u2019s paradoxical relationship with class\u2014where we disdain such divides even as we idolize the very elites who perpetuate them. Yet the tech elite not only expect the world to fall in line and not question their benevolence or right to influence the world as they see fit\u2014they also need for us to regard them as meritocratic victors. They simultaneously stake their power in the belief that they are at once \u201cpredestined\u201d to lead\u2014discernible in the <\/span>increasingly common references to \u201chigh IQ\u201d among tech elites<\/span><\/a>, a perennial eugenic trope\u2014<\/span>and<\/span><\/i> necessarily self-made. This dynamic is so prevalent that it might not at first seem like a contradiction\u2014but consider the tinge of a working class stolen valor that accompanies bragging about \u201cthe grind,\u201d and how this sits at odds with the entitlement of \u201chigh IQ.\u201d If tech elites seem to resent having to justify why one \u201cproven\u201d skill set should extrapolate to expertise and of a wholly different domain, then perhaps it\u2019s because they no longer want to bother with having to buy into their own unconvincing self-made ethos. The social transformations that tech elite seek to deliver have become, once again, \u201cwhat\u2019s best for everyone for some of us.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This tension points back to the ways in which \u201cmerit\u201d itself is dubiously awarded in the startup realm. The appraisal of valuation, for instance, is exceedingly fuzzy, yet commands an almost unquestioned power belying that fuzziness\u2014something that the scandal of Theranos publicly pulled back the curtain on. Silicon Valley also has a <\/span>long tradition of disavowing the key role that government funding played in underwriting startup success from the start<\/span><\/a> (and <\/span>still<\/span><\/a>).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For all that the founders and followers of eugenics <\/span>believed<\/span><\/i> they\u2019d figured out how to steer human society to maximum achievement, their framework proved to be factually baseless, and relied on a vastly oversimplified conception of how genes work. Trump and Musk\u2019s steering of America in turn indicates a similarly inadequate grasp of real-world complexity. Curiously, during a White House press briefing in which he attempted to justify dismantling federal resources, Musk <\/span>referred to \u201cfeedback loops\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u2014a cybernetic concept. Cybernetics, from a Greek word meaning \u201cgovernor\u201d or \u201csteersman,\u201d and commonly glossed as the study of communication and control, is a mid-century framework for understanding systems through feedback and regulation, and it shaped much of the thinking that led to AI as we know it today. But if there\u2019s such a thing as Muskian cybernetics, then it\u2019s <\/span>bad<\/span><\/i> cybernetics: astonishingly reductive and fundamentally at odds with cybernetics\u2019 hallmark commitment to capturing, without eliding, complexity. Cybernetics emphasizes the need to carefully model reality before attempting to shape it. Musk, by contrast, seeks control without understanding.<\/span><\/p>\n Such folly aptly mirrors James C. Scott\u2019s account of German scientific foresters in his classic work <\/span>Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. <\/span><\/i>Though Scott doesn\u2019t once use the word \u201ccybernetics\u201d in this text, he documents instances of disastrous attempts to control systems without first comprehending them. The opening chapter portrays, with fairytale-like irony, a quest to maximize timber production by planting trees in tight, rigid rows, only to result in killing off the trees. In seeking to impose strict order, they failed to comprehend the very conditions of diversity that make forests thrive. The lesson isn\u2019t that ambitious, systemic undertakings are doomed to fail, but rather, that schemes built on willful ignorance are. Like those foresters, today\u2019s techno-elites pursue control while denying and discounting the complexity of the systems they seek to control. Such hubris isn\u2019t merely misguided\u2014it actively endangers our shared future.<\/span><\/p>\n Elon Musk seemingly prides himself on thinking about the future of human existence. Imagine having the scope and daringness to think on this scale\u2014only to be undone by an arrogance so profound that it allows you to believe you\u2019ve come to fully understand which qualities must be pruned and which nurtured in order for humanity to endure and flourish. Yet again, it\u2019s lining up trees, the forest itself be damned. It\u2019s not necessary to foresee everything in order to be capable of leaving space for that which you cannot know or anticipate. Why is this lesson so unlearnable to those who are ostensibly most concerned with the future?<\/span><\/p>\n Musk and his minions are attempting to enact solutions\u2014budget cuts and productivity expansion\u2014without adequately considering if these indeed \u201csolve\u201d the problems it most behooves humanity to solve. (And if it weren\u2019t Musk pushing this agenda, then sooner or later, another tech billionaire would be. As <\/span>journalist Kara Swisher aptly described a younger Musk<\/span><\/a>: \u201c<\/span>Silicon Valley has a million people like him.<\/span>\u201d) Such \u201csolutions\u201d actively circumscribe our future, and tether that future to assumptions that have not been adequately tested. The assumption that looms largest? That all of us and our needs\u2014like so many items to be stuffed into a suitcase (or spaceship), simply won\u2019t fit. And that to become future-fit, we must now make swift choices on what\u2014who\u2014 to jettison. But attempting to retrofit humanity for a narrowly imagined future is simply eugenics, rebranded. It\u2019s powered by a few people\u2019s certainty that care itself is an inherently scarce resource that not everyone can\u2014and therefore, should\u2014receive. But recalling that eugenics is not only morally repugnant and cruel, but has also proven, time and again, to be oversimplistic and unfounded, then it\u2019s worth asking: are our tech overlords, confident in their own fit survivorship, in fact failing to identify the right problem\u2014and in the process, chaining us all to a solution that is both asinine and catastrophic?<\/span><\/p>\n When disabled scholar, activist, and artist <\/span>Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about dreaming disability justice<\/span><\/a>, they show that \u201cdreaming\u201d isn\u2019t a powerless or apolitical act. Indeed, who better than those who intrinsically understand the harms of exclusion\u2014and <\/span>who know <\/span>productivity<\/span><\/i> is a game the house always wins<\/span><\/a>\u2014to compensate for our world\u2019s ongoing failure of collective imagination by positing a world where survival of the fittest is understood as a narrow, childish, and ultimately <\/span>baseless<\/span><\/i> fantasy of what success looks like? Those Musk would sooner cut out of humanity\u2019s future could even be the most valuable resource of all when it comes to ensuring a good future, because we tend to know how to ask better questions. Starting with: what would it take to create a world where care is so abundant that the notion of its scarcity becomes inconceivable?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Valerie Black is an anthropologist (PhD UC Berkeley) and disability studies scholar whose work examines the social and ethical dimensions of human-AI relationships, including AI mental health care in both the US and Japan. As a postdoctoral scholar at UCSF\u2019s Decision Lab, she serves as a Disability Justice-centered ethnographer and technology ethicist. Her research critically assesses the ways in which failure to center “nothing about us without us” across the development and use of novel technologies produces new forms of ableism.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nAbout<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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