When Technology Becomes a Tool for Erasure

Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, built his life’s work on a single insight: technology is never neutral. Every system, every algorithm, every platform is designed — intentionally or not — to serve certain values over others. When those values are misaligned with human dignity, the technology becomes a tool of harm. The question he asks is always: who benefits, and who disappears?

On June 18, 2026, the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice — the OLC, the body that provides authoritative legal advice to the President and executive branch agencies — issued a memorandum that has received almost no mainstream attention. It is dense legal language, fifty pages of statutory interpretation and constitutional analysis. It does not look like a threat. It does not announce itself as one.

But it is.

The memorandum concludes that neither the Americans with Disabilities Act nor the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires states to provide community-based care for people with disabilities. It concludes that twenty-five years of federal regulations enforcing the right of disabled Americans to live in their communities — rather than in institutions — exceed the authority of the agencies that issued them. It recommends those regulations be rescinded.

In the language of Humane Technology: this memorandum is a system redesign. And the people it is designed to make invisible are among the most vulnerable human beings in this country — people who cannot always speak for themselves, who cannot always report what is done to them, and who depend on a fragile network of community-based services that this legal opinion threatens to dismantle.

This is the story of what that network looks like, what it costs when it is taken away, and why every family that has a disabled member — or loves someone who does — needs to understand what this memorandum means.

What the Olmstead Decision Actually Did

In 1999, the Supreme Court decided Olmstead v. L.C. The case involved two women with mental disabilities in Georgia who had been confined to a psychiatric institution even after their treating physicians determined that community-based care was appropriate for them. They sued, arguing that keeping them institutionalized against medical advice violated the ADA.

The Court agreed — narrowly, and with significant disagreement among the justices about the scope of the ruling. But the core holding was clear: unjustified institutionalization of people with disabilities is a form of discrimination. States cannot warehouse people with disabilities in institutions when community-based care is medically appropriate, when the person wants it, and when it can be reasonably provided.

That holding — combined with existing HHS and DOJ regulations requiring services to be provided “in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of a qualified person with a disability” — became the legal foundation for everything that followed: the expansion of Medicaid home and community-based waiver programs, the growth of community services boards, supported employment, group homes, day programs, therapeutic services, and the entire infrastructure of community integration that millions of disabled Americans and their families depend on today.

The Office of Legal Counsel memorandum argues that Olmstead was too narrowly decided to support that infrastructure. It argues that the regulations enforcing the integration mandate exceed statutory authority. It argues that states should only be required to avoid institutional treatment when disability is the sole motivating factor — a standard so low that budget pressures, staff shortages, and bed availability would all qualify as sufficient justification for institutionalization.

In plain language, it opens the door for states to send people back.

The Technology of Disappearance

Here is where Tristan Harris’s framework becomes essential.

Harris coined the term “human downgrading” to describe what happens when technology systematically weakens human capacity — not through a single dramatic act, but through accumulated design decisions that serve institutional interests over human ones. The attention economy doesn’t announce that it is making you lonelier, more anxious, and less able to focus. It just does it, decision by decision, incentive by incentive, until the cumulative effect becomes undeniable.

Policy works the same way.

No one is announcing a plan to reopen Willowbrook. No one is issuing a press release about sending disabled people back to institutions. What is happening is quieter and more insidious: a legal opinion issued to the White House Counsel’s Office that reinterprets the statutory foundation of 25 years of disability rights law. A memo that, if acted upon, gives states a legal roadmap to defund community-based waiver programs without federal consequence. A policy architecture is being redesigned, one legal conclusion at a time, in a direction that serves institutional and fiscal interests over human ones.

This is the technology of disappearance. And like all such technologies, it works best on people who cannot speak loudly enough to stop it.

What Willowbrook Taught Us — and What We Are Forgetting

For those who do not know, Willowbrook State School was a public institution on Staten Island, New York, built to house children and adults with intellectual disabilities. In 1965, Senator Robert Kennedy visited and called it a “snake pit.” In 1972, journalist Geraldo Rivera smuggled a camera inside and broadcast what he found to a national audience: severely disabled residents, many of them nonverbal, lying in their own waste. Staff ratios of one person to eighty residents. Children who could not speak, could not report what was happening to them, and could not leave.

The footage was not from a horror film. It was from a government-funded institution operating in plain sight.

Willowbrook was not unique. Pennhurst State School in Pennsylvania. Partlow State School in Alabama. Across the country, the pattern was the same: institutions built with the stated purpose of care had become places of warehousing, neglect, and systematic abuse — because the people inside them were, by definition, unable to advocate for themselves. They had no voice. They had no recourse. They disappeared.

The deinstitutionalization movement that followed — the legal and legislative architecture built over the next three decades — was America’s explicit response to what Willowbrook revealed. The ADA. The Rehabilitation Act. The Olmstead decision. The Medicaid waiver programs. All of it was built on a promise: never again.

The June 18 Office of Legal Counsel memorandum is a blueprint to break that promise.

It is worth noting that the memorandum itself acknowledges, in a footnote, that the rate of chronic homelessness increased by over 70% between 2018 and 2024 — and that 22% of people experiencing homelessness in 2024 had serious mental illness. This is the documented legacy of deinstitutionalization done badly, without adequate community support. The answer to that failure is not to reopen the institutions. The answer is to fund the community infrastructure that makes integration work. The OLC memorandum moves in precisely the wrong direction.

What Community Integration Actually Looks Like

Abstract policy arguments can be hard to hold. So let me make this concrete.

Consider a family with an adult disabled member — someone with epilepsy, severe neurological complications from early trauma, and no verbal speech. Someone who communicates through sign language and understands everything said around her. Someone who, when first brought home, was so withdrawn she barely engaged with the world at all. Over the years, through patient, specialized, community-based care — equine therapy, neurological rehabilitation, structured community activities, a fully trained service dog — she has built a life. She attends community centers. She rides horses. She has a dog who interrupts her episodes before they escalate. She is not cured. She is not independent in the conventional sense. But she is present, engaged, and home.

That life costs approximately $700 per month in community services board support — support that makes possible neurological therapy that would otherwise be unaffordable. It costs thousands more per year in equine therapy, paid entirely out of pocket by her family. It costs $17,500 for a fully trained service dog. It requires a Medicare Part D plan, a Medicaid waiver, and seizure-control medications that cost $3,500 per month — medications whose coverage depends on the stability of a Medicaid program whose legal foundation the Office of Legal Counsel memorandum now questions.

Without that network, the family would have to sell their home. Not because they have been irresponsible. Because the gap between what a severely disabled person requires to live safely in their community and what a single family can absorb without public support is not a gap — it is a chasm.

And here is what the Office of Legal Counsel memorandum misses entirely: every dollar invested in that community infrastructure is building something. The equine therapy is building her capacity to engage. Neurological rehabilitation involves rebuilding neural pathways. The service dog is reducing her emergency episodes. These are not holding patterns. They are trajectories. Community-based care does not just maintain — it develops. It grows in capacity. It reduces long-term dependency.

Institutions do not do this. They warehouse. And warehousing is expensive: community-based Medicaid waiver programs cost states 40 to 60 percent less per person than institutional placement. The Office of Legal Counsel memorandum is not a fiscal argument. It is a fiscal catastrophe dressed in legal language.

The Data System That Makes People Invisible

Here is the Humane Technology lens that ties all of this together.

One of the Center for Humane Technology’s core arguments about AI and data systems is that when you optimize a system for the wrong metrics, you don’t just get bad outcomes — you make certain people invisible. Engagement metrics make nuanced content invisible. Efficiency metrics make care and relationships invisible. Cost-per-unit metrics make long-term investment invisible.

The Office of Legal Counsel memorandum is the product of a policy system optimized for the wrong metrics. It is asking a narrow legal question — what do the statutes technically require? — When the right question is: what do we know about what actually works for human beings?

We know community-based care works better and costs less than institutionalization. We have fifty years of data. We have Willowbrook. We have the documented reduction in quality of life, independence, and dignity that institutionalization produces. We have the documented increase in abuse that happens when people who cannot speak are placed in settings where no one is accountable for listening to them.

But that data is not legible to a system optimized for statutory interpretation. The memorandum does not ask what is good for disabled people. It asks what states are legally required to do. And by reinterpreting that requirement downward, the human cost of that reinterpretation becomes invisible.

This is precisely the mechanism Harris describes: a system designed with certain values baked in, producing outcomes that serve those values — and making the people harmed by those outcomes disappear from the frame.

What You Can Do Right Now

This memorandum is not yet policy. It is a legal opinion issued to the White House Counsel’s Office — but legal opinions issued by the Office of Legal Counsel carry the force of executive branch guidance. They are used. They are acted upon. The window to respond is now, before HHS and DOJ rescind their integration regulations, before states begin defunding their waiver programs, before the infrastructure that took fifty years to build starts coming apart.

Contact your representatives. Use their official websites to send a message, or call their offices directly. Ask them to:

1. Publicly oppose the Office of Legal Counsel memorandum and call for it to be withdrawn
2. Cosponsor legislation codifying the ADA integration mandate into statute
3. Protect Medicaid waiver programs from budget reconciliation and block grant restructuring
4. Hold oversight hearings on the memorandum’s implications for the ADA and state waiver programs

Know your state’s waiver programs. Find out whether your state participates in Medicaid home and community-based services waivers — programs like Virginia’s CCC+ Waiver — and contact your state legislators to urge them to protect these programs regardless of federal policy changes.

Share this article. The memorandum has received almost no public attention. The families most affected by it are, by definition, often the least able to amplify the alarm. They need people who can speak to speak — loudly, specifically, and now.

Connect with disability rights organizations. The Arc (thearc.org), the National Disability Rights Network (ndrn.org), and your state’s Protection and Advocacy organization are already tracking this issue and can connect you with advocacy efforts in your area.

A Final Word on Humane Technology

Tristan Harris asks: what does it mean for technology to serve humanity rather than extract from it?

Policy is a technology. Legal interpretation is a technology. Medicaid waiver systems are a technology. Each of them can be designed to serve human flourishing — or to serve institutional efficiency at the expense of the most vulnerable people in the system.

The June 18 Office of Legal Counsel memorandum is a choice. It is a choice to reinterpret the law in a direction that makes it easier for states to institutionalize disabled people. It is a choice to prioritize a narrow reading of statutory text over fifty years of documented human cost. It is a choice to build policy toward disappearance rather than toward presence.

INCIID’s Humane Technology section exists because we believe that the principles Harris has articulated — dignity, alignment with human values, protection of human vulnerability, proactive change — apply not just to social media algorithms but to every system that shapes human lives. Policy shapes human lives. This memorandum shapes human lives.

The question is whether we will let it.

Nancy Hemenway is the Executive Director of INCIID (InterNational Council on Infertility Information Dissemination), a nonprofit serving the infertility, pregnancy loss, and family-building community since 1995. She is an advocate, activist, and family member of a disabled adult who depends on the community-based care infrastructure this memorandum threatens.

To read the full Office of Legal Counsel memorandum, download it here →

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