This is a post whose seeds have been bouncing around in my head for years. I always intended to write it up and publish it on Cohost, and so the twilight of that storied website seems like as good a forcing function as any.

In this post, I seek to understand and explain the pervasive phenomenon of COVID denialism from the perspecitve of disability justice, specifically as someone who remains extremely cautious and anticipates doing so indefinitely. It's not intended to excuse this behavior—denialism is actively harmful to everyone the denialist interacts with and fundamentally eugenicist in effect whether or not in intention. But understanding and even empathizing with people who believe falsehoods and do harm can be valuable, especially when they make up such a huge portion of the world and for many of us are inescapably part of our networks and communities.

COVID in the Social Model of Disability

The first crucial thing to understand is that, if you're at least on board with the basic idea that COVID denialism is a pervasive problem, COVID-19 has already disabled you. Even if it didn't give you long-term side effects, even if you're lucky enough never to have caught it, you have been disabled by it. Or to be more precise: you're disabled with respect to COVID-19. The specific agent of your disability is the society that subjects you to snide remarks and outright harassment for wearing a mask, that closes off opportunities for social interaction and employment to you, that makes it impossible for you to exist within it without putting your health at risk.

This is an analysis based on the social model of disability, a major branch of disability theory that emphasizes the way disability is created by a society's failure to provide accommodations for certain bodies and minds rather than intrinsic aspects of those bodies and minds themselves. To use a lightly clichéd example: my severe nearsightedness doesn't function as a disability, because I exist in a society^[1] that accepts it as "normal" and provides easy access to socially unremarkable assistive devices (glasses), or even invisible assistive devices (contacts) if I so choose. But my sleep disorder is a disability—society doesn't consider it "normal" in the same way, and so it's seen as my personal failure and I have to work to make sure it doesn't affect my relationships^[2] or employability.

Using this model, if you exist in a society that has accepted the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 as normal, the attempt to avoid catching this disease is itself a disability. Society is organized to systematically deny accommodations like mask mandates, sanitizing ventilation^[3], lockdowns and contact tracing, and free access to vaccines, prophylatics, tests, treatments, and protective equipment. Depending on the specific activity and your risk tolerance, public existence while taking reasonable COVID precautions ranges from requiring serious equipment and preparation to being outright impossible. Even if your body isn't any different than it was in 2019, you…

Once I add the ability to embed arbitrary blog posts from other blogs on here it's over. I'm gonna be reblogging like a wild animal. Y'all are gonna have your eyes blown clean outta your heads.

I love that people are thinking about how to make chunks of the web reusable in standalone contexts, but I really truly deeply with that all the solutions like htmx and web components weren't so hopelessly intrinsically tied to JavaScript. I cut my teeth on the ideals of the semantic web and I strongly believe that a web page should be fundamentally usable with JavaScript disabled. For highly interactive applications I concede this as a lost cause, but it breaks my heart to think that personal websites and blogs, which are essentially plain hypertext, are being built on technologies that simply can't work without scripting.

I added the ability to automatically pull down and embed Cohost posts. I just paste the URL on its own line and my automation takes care of the rest (checking it in so it doesn't need to make a separate request each time the build runs). Hopefully this will be the first of many sites I do that with: I want to see if I can integrate the notion of the Tumblr-style "reblog" with a more traditional site-specific blog structure.

In celebration, please enjoy a post I still think back on and chuckle:

Look, I know only a handful of people actually experienced this first-hand^[1]. But I think it's worth remembering anyway, because it set the stage for everything that came after. We^[2] joined because we wanted to support our pals and we hoped this could one day really become our fourth website. But we quickly realized that we were actually using Cohost as social media. Most of us came from Twitter—it was still Twitter at the time!—and it was immediately viscerally clear that Cohost was better.

It had so few features at the time, no one had made any tools for it, and the stylesheets would just refuse to load with distressing frequency. But the posts kept rolling in, jokes and essays and so so much marveling at the unforseen positive effects of not having numbers anymore. I really think this early era both established the culture of the site and helped people understand how and why to spread the word among those who would appreciate it.

You might say "there weren't enough of those in the end", but I didn't think that's right. I really think given another five years of runway and maybe a payment processor with its head less to its ass, Cohost could have become sustainable. It's not for everyone, but the people it's for love it with a burning passion. These past few weeks have demonstrated that in spades.

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1. think I read 50 somewhere but I wouldn't swear to the accuracy of that ↩︎

2. Maybe other people feeling differently, but this is based on my memory of what people were saying at the time ↩︎

I've finally become sick enough of Firefox's horseshit that I've begun using LibreWolf. turns out it's pretty nice! you can even set it up to sync with your Firefox settings without much trouble

this thing has comments now! click through to a post to see 'em. maybe say hey

On a site that I've seen described as "a retirement home for the greatest posters of our generation"^[1], there's only shitpost that truly shook it to its foundations. It's not my favorite @willow post, it's the only post that went so viral on here that it seemed like the entire website was riffing on it for days afterwards. (not to mention permanently altering my vocabulary). You know it, you love it^[2], it's the obituary for Ryan Reynolds:

It's actually kind of shocking to me that the phrase "he is only carbon now" doesn't appear as such in the original post, because that's how I (mis)quote it constantly all the time.

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1. I am at best paraphrasing the quote and at worst lying completely about ever hearting it ↩︎

2. Or perhaps you are obscurely baffled by it, or even furious at it. I don't know the inner workings of your soul ↩︎