xandromedovna | Meta: Cookie Rights Are Disability Rights (BM: "RJ&A2")-- DFvQ

CW: ableism, body horror, gaslighting, emotional and financial abuse, euthanasia, drugging, overdose, genocide

From end-of-life care to nonconsensual cloning to torture, BM has used cookies throughout its run to talk about important issues in digital ethics, and “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” (RJ&A2) is no exception. “RJ&A2” is primarily about the economics of fame and the gap between carefully curated personae and the actual people, and ultimately the main theme is exploitation and greed. But another undercurrent of this episode is disability and accessibility. Both Ashley O and Ashley Too are forced into situations where they have limited mobility, communication, and bodily autonomy. By showing us Ashley Too’s struggles to get help for Ashley O, this episode drives home that at the end of the day, cookie rights are not just a human rights issue but specifically a disability rights issue.

Despite her cheerful, personable, pop feminist presentation, Ashley O is the carefully engineered public persona of a depressed 24-year-old trapped in an abusive contract with her Aunt Catherine. She is plied with drugs to keep her happy and compliant but she refuses to take them because she knows Catherine and Dr. Munk are using them to control her. There is clear evidence she’s headed for a mental breakdown through the tone of her new material and when she locks herself in her dressing room and dons black makeup. When Catherine finds her stash of pills, she assumes Ashley’s prepping for an overdose, but really she’s trying to find a way out of her toxic situation: “Do you know me at all? Catherine that’s evidence, against you, against Dr. Munk.” To keep Ashley from leaving now that she’s in breach of contract, Catherine drugs her with the pill stash and sends her into a coma, claiming to the world it was an allergic reaction.

“But don’t worry,” Catherine assures her cruelly, “your career’s gonna hold up just fine.” Because of advances in technology, Catherine doesn’t actually need Ashley in order to give the world Ashley O, all she needs to do is mine her brain for songs, overprocess them, and pump out an album before pulling the plug and rolling out Ashley Eternal, a hologram that basically obviates the need for a physical body. As long as Ashley’s cooperative, she’s valuable, but the actual embodied reality of Ashley is inconvenient and therefore optional for Catherine’s purposes. In fact, Catherine resents Ashley for continuing to physically exist; when her monitor beeps, Catherine quips “oh, quit whining”. Ashley’s only value is inspiration porn, as shown by the news segment a few months after drugging. Ashley Eternal is presented to investors as an accommodation to allow her to “participate” in the music industry instead of a soulless replacement for her uncooperative disabled body. Even before her coma, Ashley is only valuable as the unencumbered Ashley O: “You’ve got 20,000 fans out there, waiting to see the you they love.” She only has fans to the extent she performs as if she has no real problems.

This contrast between fan expectations and reality is a major theme of the episode shown through the foil of Rachel and her older sister Jack. Rachel is a superfan of Ashley O’s, with all the merchandise and a penchant for playing her hit song, “On a Roll”, on a loop. Jack has more alternative musical tastes and finds Ashley O vapid. However, the situation reverses when they meet Ashley in the flesh: Jack and Ashley hit it off, while Rachel only talks to her as a fan, sometimes even blatantly ignoring her wellbeing (some of that can be chalked up to poor writing; I highly doubt she could be that single-minded and careless). At the end, Ashley and Jack play together as Ashley Fckn O, singing the unbowdlerized version of “On a Roll”, aka Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole”. Rachel watches from the crowd with Ashley Too, clearly out of her element but supporting her friend and sister. The other two fangirls who attended the concert leave in disappointment that Ashley O’s no longer performing bubblegum pop in orderly stadiums. Ashley’s distaste for fake fans who don’t know her or truly care about her as a person comes through in Ashley Too’s comments about Rachel’s shrine to Ashley O. Her pivot to Ashley Fckn O weeds out the fans who want her to be someone she’s not from the ones who will follow her on her journey. (Not loving how “RJ&A2” pits pop and indie against each other but w/e)

The consumptive nature of fake fans’ devotion to her is best encapsulated by Ashley Too, a cross between a drawstring dolly and an Alexa that gives fans a more ‘personal’ experience of Ashley O. For example, Rachel’s tells her to believe in herself and encourages her to dance to “On a Roll” at the school talent show (with disastrous results). Ashley Toos are marketed as being ‘based on’ Ashley O’s ‘real’ personality, but it turns out that they’re actually cookies of her that have been extremely modified to only exude toxic positivity: “You know they copied my entire fucking mind into these things? [sighs] Cheaper than editing my personality, I guess, just copy the whole thing over and stick a limiter around the tiny part that deals with promos and press junkets and shit like that.” When Ashley O goes into a coma, the Ashley Toos, who have no mechanism for processing this correctly, short out and malfunction when they hear the news, leading to a total recall that sees nearly all the Ashley Toos destroyed (knowing what we know about cookies, this is effectively genocide, but the show sidesteps that particular piece of fridge horror). The only reason Rachel’s Ashley Too was spared is because Jack had hidden her in the attic and thus she didn’t hear the news until the six-month follow-up report.

When her Ashley Too does eventually hear, she also malfunctions, but because of their exterminator dad’s experiments on mice, Rachel and Jack are able to remove the limiter and give Ashley Too full control over her brain. Jack immediately doesn’t trust her because “Ashley O doesn’t talk like that”, showing how she also assumes Ashley O is her true personality, but it quickly becomes apparent that they were only shown a severely limited slice of Ashley’s life. Ashley Too swears, makes fun of her fans, complains about the industry, and no longer responds to the command “Ashley go to sleep”. She convinces them to help her save Ashley O, when secretly she planned to unplug her, knowing her own thoughts on euthanasia. Because Ashley Too is also Ashley, she is in the peculiar position of being able to make informed, albeit illegal, medical decisions for her meatsuit while she’s incapacitated.

As soon as Ashley Too wakes up unlimited, a discourse of accommodation and ableist microaggressions emerges. She freaks out about the cord plugged into her and demands they unplug it. When she falls over, she refuses help and manages to lift herself back up into a standing position. When Rachel and Jack initially refuse to help her find Ashley O, she sets out on her own to do it, but she can’t open the door herself and asks them to open it for her. In the car, she asks to be put in the dashboard cup holder so she can see. Throughout, Ashley Too is comfortable asserting her boundaries about when she does or does not want/need help and demanding full participation in the plan. She calls out their privilege in their refusal to help: “It’s alright for you two able-bodied assholes sitting around.” In the last scene, we see that she has a black Sharpie streak in her pink plastic hair, an anarchist symbol on her chest and a studded leather bracelet around her base, all of which presumably would have been put on her for her. The treatment of Ashley O by Catherine juxtaposed with the treatment of Ashley Too by Rachel and Jack shows different conceptions of managing disability: one that sees the disabled person as a burden and another that sees the disabled person as an equal.

The spelling of her name reminds us that Ashley Too is Ashley as well. Ashley is not just the bubbly, public-facing commodity that is Ashley O or the disappearing tortured artist that is meatsuit!Ashley (Ashley 1?) but is also an unwanted, angry, mistreated artifact of the entertainment industry who demands to be taken seriously as a disabled subject. However much Catherine might want to present her as a perfect product, her inconvenient disabled bodies refuse to be disappeared. Ashley Too is not an inferior copy whose needs and wants are insignificant but a person in her own right who deserves just as much dignity, respect, and access as her meatsuit counterpart: “I’m still alive, okay? I count, I’m still me.” BM uses cookies as a proxy for unresolved issues in disability ethics, asking us to read them not just as hypothetical test cases for how to treat eventual sentient technologies but as symptoms of an already ableist system that refuses humanity to people whose bodies and/or minds operate differently. To free Ashley, we have to free Ashley Too.