My Nemesis Used To Be My Hero

Reflections on the beliefs that shape us, technoableism, and the Star Trek character I've had a change of heart about

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

The beliefs we hold leave their indelible mark on the way we interact with others and our environment.

For example, a drunk guy at a cookout once told a 7-year-old

Sean McMullin

that if you eat the white part of a watermelon, it'll give you diarrhea. He held onto that belief for more than 30 years, always being careful to avoid the white part of a slice of watermelon. Of course, this particular belief didn't impact Sean's quality of life.

But plenty of our beliefs do.

It's taken me many years to begin the process of deconstructing my beliefs about friendship. Almost every message we get about friendship—starting when we're just toddlers—is about how friends enrich our lives. Being a good friend and having many friends makes life better. I believed that to be a universal truth. So, I saw my own reality through that belief. And that reality looked incomplete and sad.

I've never had a big group of friends—instead, I can handle only one or two close relationships at a time. When I was younger, I blamed other people for this perceived deficit in my life. As I became an adult, I blamed myself—not having a gaggle of friends meant there was something wrong with me. Other people seemed to effortlessly juggle a circle of close friends, while I felt overwhelmed at the very idea of it.

When I asked my therapist about this a few years back, she put it this way—and this was perfect: “If you’re asking whether it’s normal, no. But if you’re asking whether it’s okay, yes, it’s totally fine.” That was exactly what I needed to know.

With care and attention, I've started to integrate a new belief into my autistic worldview: I don't need many relationships to be happy. Simple, right? But that original belief runs deep, and rooting it out is a challenge. It takes real effort to remind myself that what others might consider a "normal" amount of friends doesn't have to be my normal. That fewer friends doesn't mean a lower quality of life.

Beliefs about quality of life shape our quality of life.

Who gets to decide the relative quality of a life? Or what lives are worth living? And how do our beliefs about quality of life and worthiness impact the way interact with others and the way we treat ourselves?

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Before we jump into the rest of this reflection, I wanted to give you a heads-up that my new course, Rethink Work, starts February 22. That's a week from today! Today’s reflection is all about rethinking the beliefs that shape us—and that's exactly what this course is about, too. We'll take a close look at 8 beliefs about work (and life) that shape who we are and how we live.

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I was reminded of these questions in a startling way recently—during a repeat viewing of Star Trek: Nemesis.

Star Trek: Nemesis came out in late 2002. That means that I probably saw it in the weird little theater in my tiny college town. Shout out to the Allen Theatre in Annville, PA! But I don't have a distinct memory from that first viewing.

Or from any subsequent viewing, actually.

Nemesis, it should be said, is one of the lesser Star Trek movies. Rotten Tomatoes ranks it as the second worst—which I am inclined to agree with. But I would put the long, boring movie-length TNG episode Insurrection last, while RT puts it ahead of Nemesis.

I digress.

Okay, let me do a bit of brief scene-setting.

Nemesis features the usual TNG set of characters—plus a very young Tom Hardy as the bad guy.

The film opens with the wedding of Commander William Riker and Counselor Deanna Troi. It's been a long time coming. Captain Picard officiates, of course, and Lt. Commander Data provides some post-ceremony vocal entertainment. Before the crew can head off to Troi's homeworld for a traditional Betazed ceremony in the nude, the Enterprise is ordered to investigate some unusual sensor readings on a planet near the Romulan neutral zone.

On the planet, Picard and Data discover a dismantled android who looks exactly like Data. With help from Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge, the android is put back together and reactivated. The android introduces itself as B-4, and the crew surmises that B-4 is a punnily named prototype of Data. B-4's tech is significantly less complex than Data's, which makes it difficult to ascertain where B-4 came from or why it was on the planet.

Data decides to hook himself up to B-4 so he can essentially upgrade B-4's processing ability. At the same time, Data will upload his lifetime of memories and growth to B-4's neural net. Data wants B-4 to experience the world in the same way he does.

Data shows little regard for B-4's agency in this situation.

And by little, I mean none. Does B-4 want Data's memories? Does it even want to be upgraded? And does it even have the capacity to consent to such a procedure? Data, it seems, can't be bothered to consider these ethical and moral quandaries.

Data: “It is my belief that, with my memory engrams, he will be able to function as a more complete individual.”

La Forge: “An individual more like you, you mean?”

Data: “Yes.”

La Forge: “Maybe he’s not supposed to be like you, Data. Maybe he’s supposed to be exactly the way he is.”

Data: “That may be so. But I believe he should have the opportunity to explore his potential.”

Data aspires to be more human.

His aspiration is a recurring story in the TNG timeline—clear through to Picard. Data has said before that he’d gladly give up his superior strength, processing power, and stamina to be human. He sees himself as lacking the essential qualities of humanness and won't be satisfied until he fills up that human-shaped hole in his life. B-4 is even more lacking in this essential humanness as far as Data is concerned.

Put another way, Data sees B-4 through his own human-shaped hole. So B-4 isn’t only lacking humanness, it’s lacking an essential Dataness.

Data is always striving to be something other than he is—a “something” that he regards as more and better. Data wishes to be someone he cannot be. And, in turn, he wishes B-4 to be someone it cannot be.

Data displays an attitude of technoableism. Technoableism is what Ashley Shew, a scholar of disability studies and technology ethics, defines as:

…a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for. It’s a classic form of ableism—bias against disabled people, bias in favor of nondisabled ways of life. Technoableism is the use of technologies to reassert those biases, often under the guise of empowerment.

Star Trek is often lauded for its diversity—and rightly so when it comes to different races, both human and extraterrestrial. But its track record on disability isn't as reliable. In fact, one of the "features" of the Star Trek universe is that technology has advanced to the point that most impairments can be eliminated. Those that can't (like La Forge's blindness) are overcome through technology.

It's not that Star Trek is unaccommodating or hostile to its disabled characters—it's that there are no disabled characters. Or rather, it's that we can merrily assume there are no disabled characters. Disability is eliminated not through changing environmental and social access but by eliminating disabled people. Or, as Shew puts it, Star Trek depicts a "bias in favor of nondisabled ways of life."

In their analysis of the treatment of disability in Star Trek, Heather Harris writes that Star Trek “has had an ongoing issue of near-exclusively writing disabled characters who can function within general society without any accommodation from others.” However, they also cite an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “The Masterpiece Society” that tackles eugenics and ableism head-on.

Geordi: Sure. So, I guess if I had been conceived on your world, I wouldn't even be here now, would I?

Hannah: No.

Geordi: No, I'd've been terminated as a fertilized cell.

Hannah: It was the wish of our founders that no one had to suffer a life with disabilities.

Geordi: Who gave them the right to decide whether or not I should be here? Whether or not I might have something to contribute?

Here is La Forge playing the same role a decade earlier that he plays in Nemesis—questioning who gets to decide that a life is worth living. La Forge clearly doesn’t see his disability as suffering, but he is put opposite characters who do see disability as suffering.

What’s the problem?

Data believed his lack of humanity was a problem—so he was always in search of a solution. This, Shew explains, is at the heart of technoableism. Within a technoableist worldview, every deficit, impairment, or difference is a problem waiting for a technological solution. It's a hole waiting to be filled in with a miracle. Data eventually gets his emotion chip (although it doesn't go smoothly).

As a kid watching and relating to Data, I also learned a bias against disabled ways of life. I learned that it was better to strive to be like everyone else than to be myself. I learned that my useful quirks could be handy to have around but that, no matter how useful, those quirks would never buy me acceptance or belonging. If only I had my own emotion chip to install!

Data believes his life would be better if he were human. Just as so many non-disabled people assume life would be worse if they became disabled or chronically ill. I don't want to ignore the fact that many forms of disability do come with loss, trauma, and pain. However, it's one thing to deal with loss or treat pain and another thing to wish it all (including the disabled person) away.

Shew writes:

So many of our stories about technology and disability are about technologies as redemptive, as having the power to normalize disabled people, to make us “overcome” our disabilities.

When Data attempts the link with B-4, he erases the person B-4 has been to that point, which is to say that B-4 has not been Data to this point. But ideally, after the link, B-4 will be Data for all intents and purposes. B-4 will have overcome his not-Dataness.

This story regularly plays out in our self-judgment.

I reference Shew's work on technoableism because it shows just how harmful these judgments can be. However, this 'overcoming narrative' affects all of us—disabled or not—in a variety of ways. We learn from an early age that difference is something to be overcome through any means necessary. We learn to mask, to code switch, to change the size or shape of our bodies. We learn to speak like a news anchor, to color or process our hair, to dress in a way that signals we're like everybody else.

While we might not have someone else bypass our agency and link to our brain to perform an update, authority figures—from parents to teachers to bosses to politicians—regularly reminded us to "explore our potential" in a way that really means "our ability to assimilate." Our ideas of who to become, what to strive for, and how to conduct our lives are shaped by what others believe is a "more complete individual."

Resistance, in this case, is not futile. It's essential.

When we question the beliefs we've inherited about our differences, we learn to see our differences objectively rather than morally. We realize that we get to choose what we want to overcome instead of working on the list society handed to us. We catalyze a chain reaction that, little by little, makes more room in the world for people who live all sorts of different lives.

Over the last few years, I've started to see Data as a tragic character. The part of me that's working hard to accept and appreciate who I am desperately wants to see Data accept and appreciate who he is. He's not less than human. He's different from humans. While I’ll always be a Trekkie, watching Data has lost a lot of its appeal to me. I’d much rather engage with characters who don’t try to be something other than they are, like Martha Wells’s Murderbot.¹

Data's human-shaped hole at the center of his personality has been my human-shaped hole, too. I thought it was natural and virtuous to want to be something other than I am. For a long time, that hunger to be "other than I am" shaped my self-image and goaded my self-judgment. Wanting to be someone I am not had (has?) a significant impact on my quality of life. More than once, it's convinced me to go down courses of action that have left me anxious, depressed, nonspeaking, and metaphorically burnt to a crisp.

That's almost inevitable when we assume that certain identities are, without question, "bad-different" rather than "mere-different," to use philosopher Elizabeth Barnes' terminology.

As long as I believe myself, an autistic woman, as "bad-different," I'll keep pushing myself to overcome. But when my belief shifts, when I can stop trying to overcome and accept (even celebrate) my mere-difference as a perfectly good way of being, that's when I start to really live and explore my potential.

My potential isn't limited by how I'm wired; how I'm wired is my potential.

Otherwise, I'm just a bad copy of myself trying to avoid the autism-shaped hole in my life.

If you’re questioning your relationship with work but finding it difficult to make lasting changes, I’d love to help.

I’m committed to helping you confront and deconstruct big assumptions that compete with your good intentions. And that’s exactly what we’re doing in my new 8-week cohort-based course, Rethink Work.

We’ll examine the beliefs, stories, and systems that keep us hustling—even when it hurts—so you can make changes that last and create a more sustainable approach to work.

Paid subscribers can find their discount code here.

1. If any publication would like to commission an essay on why Murderbot is the autistic 1st-person narrator we need more of in the world, I’m available.