Looking back on my life, I think the first time I encountered what it meant to be a user versus a non-user was in kindergarten. Not through technology, but through the legal system.
At the time, my parents were mobilizing to sue our local school district. My younger brother, Connor, has autism, diabetes, Addison’s disease, and Celiac disease. This cruel convergence of conditions shaped both his life, and mine, long before I had the language to understand what was happening or why it mattered. What I did understand, even then, was that my brother and I “simultaneously inhabit the same world…and a different one” (67).
That difference wasn’t just personal. It was structural. It revealed, very early on, how systems are designed, who they serve, and who they quietly leave out. When we talk about systems, whether technological, legal, or institutional, a user is typically imagined as someone who can access, navigate, and meaningfully engage with a system as it was designed to function. That sounds neutral. It isn’t.
Because alongside “users,” there are always non-users, and not all non-use is the same. As Wyatt outlines, there are resisters (those who do not want to engage), rejecters (those who stop voluntarily), the excluded (those who lack access), and the expelled (those who are pushed out involuntarily due to cost, accessibility, or failure of the system itself) (76). Connor exists squarely within this last category, though not by choice.
Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Connor was legally entitled to specific educational support that our school district failed to provide. Rather than accept inadequate services, my parents worked with lawyers to hold the district accountable. They ultimately secured the intensive therapy Connor needed, altering the trajectory of his life.
But through the lens of users versus non-users, the story looks different. Connor was a non-user of systems that claim universality. He was both excluded, lacking meaningful access due to the complexity and inaccessibility of the system, and expelled, pushed out when the system failed to uphold its own legal obligations. And yet, society labeling non-use as “a deviant and bizarre choice” (67) obscures what is actually happening. Connor did not opt out of these systems. The systems failed to include him.
And watching this unfold shaped me in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time. In response to the instability and unpredictability surrounding Connor’s needs, I became the stable one. The high-achieving, “easy” child who could move through systems without friction. What I was really learning, implicitly, was how to be a good user.
Not just someone who participates in systems, but someone who does so efficiently, predictably, and without resistance. I learned how to succeed in school, how to follow institutional expectations, and how to navigate structures in ways that would never require intervention. In other words, I was learning the “consumption” of these spaces.
And importantly, “the terms for this learning were not set” by schools or legal systems themselves, but by the realities of my brother’s needs and the ways my family had to adapt around them. My role became clear: I would be the “perfect user” of the systems he could not use.
And now I realize that for most of my life, I have been a user. If I’m being honest, there are very few spaces where I can clearly identify myself as a non-user. That absence, in itself, is telling. As a queer woman, I have, of course, experienced moments of exclusion, especially in gendered or heteronormative spaces. But I also recognize that as a white woman from a middle-class family, I have had significant privilege in navigating most systems. My parents became deeply familiar with legal and institutional structures through advocating for my brother, which, in turn, gave me an advantage.
For example, I attended a strong college preparatory high school. And now, I have attended Georgetown twice. The educational system has, fundamentally, worked for me. The same can be said for other systems: medical care, insurance, and mobility, just to name a few. I do not have a disability that complicates access to physical or institutional spaces. I can move through the world and through its systems relatively easily.
It’s tempting to think of exclusion as something that happens in clearly defined physical spaces: buildings without ramps, classrooms without accommodations, environments that visibly restrict access. But I think what this experience has shown me is that the more powerful “places” are the systems themselves.
As Blake Reid explains, we should understand infrastructures like the internet, and by extension educational, legal, and institutional systems, as a “place” (36). These are environments where access and participation are unevenly distributed, even if they don’t look like traditional spaces. And importantly, many of these spaces are “inextricably tied to” physical realities (37). That means the barriers someone faces in embodied life, like disability, are not solved by digital or institutional systems. They are reproduced. Connor didn’t just struggle in a classroom. He struggled within a system that was supposed to support him but was never truly built with him in mind.
What I remember most clearly from that time is watching my parents navigate systems that were constantly “overcompromising and underdelivering” (38). And it was exhausting. Because even when access technically exists, that doesn’t mean the system works. As Wyatt explains, “providing access may not be the sure, simple solution it appears” (73). Connor had access to education. He was enrolled. He was present. But the system still failed him in practice. We often treat access as the end goal, as if inclusion is achieved the moment someone is allowed in. But access without functionality, without adaptability, without real support, is not inclusion. It’s a form of participation that still leaves people behind.
And importantly, there are real examples where systems have shifted in meaningful ways. Public health policies around smoking are just one: “Tobacco control policies, including cigarette taxes, smoke-free air laws and cessation treatment policies, have substantially reduced smoking and smoking-attributable deaths.” Smoking was once ubiquitous, socially accepted, and even expected. But through structural interventions, legal restrictions, and cultural shifts, that norm changed.
And importantly, that change did not rely solely on individual behavior. It restructured the environment itself. A more direct parallel is the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990, which marked a significant shift by “shifting accessibility responsibility from deaf and hearing-impaired viewers to the consumer electronics industry” (38). Instead of expecting individuals to adapt to inaccessible systems, the burden was placed on the system to become accessible.
Right now, too often, the responsibility still falls on individuals like Connor and families like mine to fight for inclusion, to navigate systems that were never designed for them, to prove that they deserve access in the first place.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from growing up alongside Connor, it’s that being a “user” is not just about individual ability. It’s about whether a system was built with you in mind. And for a long time, I thought my role was to move through those systems as seamlessly as possible. To succeed within them. To not create friction.
But maybe the more important question is not how to be a better user. Maybe it’s how to build systems where fewer people are forced into being non-users in the first place. Because the difference between my brother and me was never just about our individual capacities. It was about the systems we were asked to navigate and who those systems were designed to serve.