Alexa, Disability, and the Politics of Things Not Apprehended Available to Purchase

This chapter considers how technologies like Amazon’s Alexa are imagined, designed, and realized through entanglements with surveillance culture, the politics of big data, and shifting modes of production, consumption, and disposal in neoliberal capitalism. Such technologies also reflect long entanglements with racialized and gendered labor, planetary degradation, and a deep cultural desire for technofixes that project disability-free futures. Yet they also offer new possibilities for disabled people, especially in terms of reorganizing the putatively private space of the home to expand other relational potentialities in and beyond this space. This chapter plumbs the idea of technocreep in this context, focusing simultaneously on the embodied creative labor required to make technologies like the Alexa speak to the lives, needs, and desires of disabled people in the United States, as well as on the larger affective politics of living and being with artificial intelligence.