Elisabeth R. Anker
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libankerdc.bsky.social
Elisabeth R. Anker
@libankerdc.bsky.social
8K followers 710 following 740 posts
Professor: Political Theory & American Culture
Author: UGLY FREEDOMS (Duke) & Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Promise of Freedom (Duke)
Coeditor: Theory&Event
Next Book: “Every Man a Sovereign”
Libby to my pals
Web: https://tinyurl.com/Elisabeth-Anker
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Reposted by Elisabeth R. Anker
hypervisible.blacksky.app
“AI views both suffering and care as computational problems.” 😮‍💨
We risk entering a perverse loop: machines are supplying the language with which patients relay their suffering, and doctors are using machines to record and respond to that suffering. This cultivates what psychologists call “cognitive miserliness”, or a tendency to default to the most readily available answer rather than engage in critical inquiry or self-reflection. By outsourcing thought, and ultimately the most intimate definitions of ourselves to AI, doctors and patients risk becoming yet further alienated from one another. In this trajectory we can see the evolution of what Michel Foucault described in The Birth of the Clinic as the “medical gaze” – the separation and isolation of the diseased body from the lived experience of the person and their social environment. Where the 19th-century gaze fragmented the patient into lesions and signs visible to the clinician, and the late 20th-century evidence-based gaze translated patients into odds ratios and treatment protocols, the 21st-century algorithmic gaze dissolves both patient and doctor alike into never-ending streams of automated data. AI views both suffering and care as computational problems.
November 9, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Reposted by Elisabeth R. Anker
hypervisible.blacksky.app
This connection isn’t articulated often enough.
That is why care has transformative power beyond health. To be truly listened to – to be recognized not as a case but as a person – can change not just how one experiences illness, but how one experiences oneself and the world. It can foster the capacity to care for others across differences, to resist hatred and violence, to build the fragile social ties upon which democracy depends. By contrast, when medicine is reduced to data and transactions, it not only fails patients and demoralizes doctors. It also degrades democracy itself. A system that alienates people in their moments of deepest vulnerability – bankrupting them, gaslighting them, leaving them unheard – breeds despair and rage. It creates the conditions in which authoritarians gain traction.
November 9, 2025 at 3:22 PM
Reposted by Elisabeth R. Anker
dkmarsh.bsky.social
"BILLIONAIRES FOR BREAKFAST" in bold orange caps on a blue background—font and colors are those used by the Mamdani campaign.
November 8, 2025 at 5:58 PM