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In this essay, we offer a prehistory of contemporary bubbles used in the mitigation of viruses, told through the late 1980s case of Eliana Martínez, an HIV-positive (HIV+) and developmentally disabled Puerto Rican child who was ordered to be confined to a glass chamber within her Florida classroom. Eliana’s mother, Rosa, challenged the use of this chamber as a reasonable disability accommodation in a high-profile lawsuit. We draw on disability studies, critical access studies, and a postcolonial critique to put forward a theory of the bubble as a “structure-within-a-structure”—a zone of limited, restricted, or filtered interaction with the broader social world. Eliana’s bubble demonstrates how institutional practices of accommodation can easily transform into techniques of containment, sanctioned to manage the “infectious subject” within institutions and systems. The bubble is a gathering of social forces and bodily relations. In Eliana’s case, it gathers the necropolitical arrangements of different populations, the coloniality of Puerto Rico, the innocence of childhood, the fatality of an AIDS diagnosis, and the politics of design and disability.

Disabled activists in the United States brought unique expertise to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s, including understanding social stigma and health as social justice issues and approaching information as a complex access problem. Disproportionately affected Deaf communities mounted a response that carefully blended face-to-face caring practices with mediated information by and for deaf people grappling with HIV. San Francisco’s Deaf AIDS Information Center (DAIC) advocated for wider access to Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) in the AIDS service sector while also marking this text and modem-based machine’s inadequacies as a substitute for the high-touch, one-to-one interpretive work needed by many ASL users. Crossovers among media, AIDS, and disability justice histories are underdocumented and risk seeming minor. Through our analysis of the DAIC, we argue that this intersection is key to advancing knowledge of how HIV left an imprint on emerging communication technologies and how sexuality and disability factor in technological cultures.

We speak to Dr Dylan Mulvin, Assistant Professor in LSE Department of Media and Communications, about his book Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In, which examines the ways in which proxies shape our lives, the histories of their production and how we delegate power to represent our world. You can visit the MIT Press website to purchase Proxies or download a free, open access copy.

We speak to Dr Dylan Mulvin, Assistant Professor in LSE Department of Media and Communications, about his book Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In, which examines the ways in which proxies shape our lives, the histories of their production and how we delegate power to represent our world.

How those with the power to design technology, in the very moment of design, are allowed to imagine who is included—and who is excluded—in the future. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Our world is built on an array of standards we are compelled to share. In Proxies, Dylan Mulvin examines how we arrive at those standards, asking, “To whom and to what do we delegate the power to stand in for the world?” Mulvin shows how those with the power to design technology, in the very moment of design, are allowed to imagine who is included—and who is excluded—in the future. For designers of technology, some bits of the world end up standing in for other bits, standards with which they build and calibrate. These “proxies” carry specific values, even as they disappear from view. Mulvin explores the ways technologies, standards, and infrastructures inescapably reflect the cultural milieus of their bureaucratic homes. Drawing on archival research, he investigates some of the basic building-blocks of our shared infrastructures. He tells the history of technology through the labor and communal practices of, among others, the people who clean kilograms to make the metric system run, the women who pose as test images, and the actors who embody disease and disability for medical students. Each case maps the ways standards and infrastructure rely on prototypical ideas of whiteness, able-bodiedness, and purity to control and contain the messiness of reality. Standards and infrastructures, Mulvin argues, shape and distort the possibilities of representation, the meaning of difference, and the levers of change and social justice.

In 1999 the United States Congress passed the Y2K Act, a major—but temporary— effort at reshaping American tort law. The Act strictly limited the scope and applicability of lawsuits related to liability for the Year 2000 Problem. This paper excavates the process that led to the Act, including its unlikely signature by President Clinton. The history presented here is based on a reconsideration of the Y2K crisis as a major episode in the history of computing. The Act, and the Y2K crisis more broadly, expose the complex interconnections of software, code, and law at the end of the 20th century, and, taken seriously, argue for the appreciation of the role of liability in the history of technology.

This paper argues that scholars of computing, networks, and infrastructures must reckon with the inseparability of “viral” discourses in the 1990s. This co-assembled history documents the reliance on viral analogies and explanations honed in the HIV/AIDS crisis and its massive loss of life, widespread institutional neglect, and comprehensive technological failures. As the 1990s marked a period of intense domestication of computing technologies in the global North, we document how public figures, computer experts, activists, academics, and artists used the intertwined discourses surrounding HIV and new computer technologies to explicate the risks of vulnerability in complex, networked systems. The efficacy of HIV as an analogy is visible in the circulation of viral concepts, fears surrounding interdependence, and emergent descriptions of precarity in the face of a widespread “infrastructure crisis.” Through an analysis of this decade, we show how HIV/AIDS discourses indelibly marked the domestication of computing, computer networks, and nested, digitized infrastructures.