The well-meaning but ableistly named and themed web service, "Be My Eyes", allows sighted people to use smart phone audio video both to volunteer to do sight-oriented tasks for blind people and also to compound their ethical problems by supporting this terribly marketed service.

A protest and functional service should be arranged that allows for output rather than input so that blind people can distribute the process of being an ass and doing the things that asses do. So where before a blind person may only have been able to annoy people within ear and eye shot, now they will be able to annoy people worldwide in a matter of micro-seconds. Distributed asses could make fart sounds, be annoying, be stubborn, and defficate on demand and remotely.

Be my Ass!
-- JesusHChrist, Jan 21 2015

Be my Eyes http://www.bemyeyes.org
[JesusHChrist, Jan 21 2015]

//Ableist// //ethical problems//

...I don't get it. People volunteering to help. People with blindness or impairment can choose to, or alternatively, not to use this service.

Shirley ableist would be actively not catering for people with disabilities, rather than trying to help? Presumably there are circumstances where this assistance would be appreciated by all but the most militantly independent people? Should the government shut this service down because a small percentage of the beneficiaries have some issue with it?

I am Jack's weary sense of disillusionment at SJW bullshit.
-- Custardguts, Jan 21 2015


I'm going to blame this on someone else as the idea came out of a conversation and I don't really feel the indignance so I am not going to be able to defend it. I can tell you though that there is no problem with the functionality (which is great). It may be a little bit the concept which puts blind folks in the position of having to say, "please be my eyes", but it is probably more the squirrelly marketing with the bearded lumbersexual white male holding a woman's eyes over his face. And again I am having to guess here since it is not my home issue and I sm not an SJW, but I think there is some feeling that the marketing is trying to tap into the wrong market, that is white men who feel left out not only of the last 50 years of civil rights movements but also of the post-civil-rights trans* movement. Which is understandable from the perspective of how to get people involved because it is technology which has s diversity issue to begin with but maybe the feeling is that it could have been more by for and of the blind rather than so helperish.
-- JesusHChrist, Jan 21 2015


I'm bunning this just because I was previously unaware of the app.
-- RayfordSteele, Jan 21 2015


What [Ray...] said.

And I don't get what the problem is either

// the feeling is that it could have been more by for and of the blind rather than so helperish //

From the FAQ: " Our founder Hans Jørgen Wiberg, who is visually impaired himself... ". Though he is wearing glasses in his photo, so I don't know if he is "blind enough" to make your SJW friend feel that his motive was pure enough. Personally, it sounds like a good idea whether the founder was blind or not. The motives could be altruistic or opportunistic in either scenario, but that's hard to judge from a web site.

// there is some feeling that the marketing is trying to tap into the wrong market //

It sounds like a certain SJW is insulted for not feeling target by the marketing. The fact that this "slight" would be taken so badly as to cause them to attack the idea and inspire "protest web sites" seems to me that maybe the marketing was targeted correctly. Either that or maybe they didn't have a really large marketing budget and used the first couple models who volunteered to appear for free. Maybe they inadvertently targeting people who look similar to themselves. (See team photos on the "Press" page.) That is a natural tendency.
-- scad mientist, Jan 21 2015


There is something peculiar and problematic in the notion that we cannot point out that a person who cannot see might be helped by a person who can see. There is a flavor, a whiff, of banal evil in the thing. Reality is not a polite matter. We live and die biological specimens fucked by frailties and pathogens, fooled by weak minds and a weaker social structure. Lives marked by suffering and twisted by our own isolation in the ego. Then this "well meaning" profession of quibbling that so many people take up, with no intention of doing any better, or even any good at all.
-- WcW, Jan 22 2015



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