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On Sunday, Palantir announced that the company, which counts Peter Thiel as its chairman, and is doing work for the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will have a “Neurodivergent Fellowship.” The X post sharing this news noticeably did not have captions, making it inaccessible for some disabled people.
Neurodivergent people face barriers when it comes to employment in all industries, due to biases about disability and failure to give adequate accommodations. Disabled people can also very much participate in technofascism and also lateral ableism of other disabled people—as I previously reported, Elon Musk is a very strong example of this—and this fellowship will do nothing to break down barriers that neurodivergent people face.
Virginia Tech professor Ashley Shew, author of Against Technoableism, noted to me that some disabled people being seen as better than other disabled people is not new. Hans Asperger, after all, chose which autistic people were worth saving and which children were sent to their death under the Nazi regime.
“Disabled people know keenly the dangers of surveillance technology, about what it means to be reduced to data and misread, and the societal impetus to scrutinize our lives and lived expertise,” Shew told me. “It’s a terrible shame that disability gets the most celebration and investment when it is coopted by corporate and industrial interests.”
“Being a disabled token for a morally questionable industry is by no means a step toward disability liberation or true inclusion of any sort, but rather leads us in the other direction,” Shew added.
University of North Carolina at Charlotte assistant professor Damien P. Williams, who researches how technologies are impacted by values, concurs with Shew that this fellowship is very harmful.
“A ‘neurodivergent fellowship’ at a corporation like Palantir isn’t meaningful inclusion or representation so much as it’s an exercise in having an often punitively surveilled population be complicit in making platforms of weaponized surveillance, to build and be the systems and tools of their own and others’ oppression,” Williams said.
Looking at how the job is described, Seton Hall University assistant professor Jess Rauchberg—who researches the cultural impacts of digital media technologies— finds that the fellowship dives into harmful tropes of neurodivergent people.
“Some of the language the job call uses about neurodivergent people as ‘able to see past performative ideologies’ reinforces really dangerous rhetoric that disabled people aren’t human,” Rauchberg told me. “It also presents neurodivergent people using the supercrip trope: that these are disabled people whose ‘savant’ status makes them not like other disabled people, especially intellectually and developmentally disabled people.”
Shew, in general, feels “pretty gross about most neurodiversity hiring programs.” Shew notes that these programs tend to misunderstand the neurodivergence umbrella and focus on autism.
“These programs are rarely about thinking bigger about how to include people with a range of disabilities and neurotypes in all places and still reify impairment models in how they describe the hired workers, which too easily results in situations where people hired in this model cannot meaningfully advance and are seen in specific and limiting ways,” Shew continued.
