At one point when Marcia had just left the room I turned to Andrew and asked, “So how’s your relationship with your unconscious?” He gestured, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, to the window. I thought for a moment and replied, “I’ve been told of of Native American men who would sit on the shore of a lake and watch the water and the sky, all day, for days on end.” At this he nodded vigorously and emphatically.

Here I want to make just a quick mention of a story I remember from when I was a child who read the World Book encyclopedia. This is about the chemist Kekulé who made the breakthrough discovery concerning the molecular structure of aromatic compounds and famously explained years later that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail.

So there’s our ouroboros from the masthead again. I actually count that as a coincidence here, the real point being that scientific discoveries do from time to time spring from the direction of the unconscious — and as it happens Shift Journal owes its existence to Andrew Lehman’s long-ago obsession with serpent mythology. This is a seemingly random fascination to begin with but one which ultimately led to his Orchestral Theory of Evolution. Stay with me here; we’re just a just a paragraph away from being back to autism and disability ….

The upshot then when one studies serpent/dragon mythology in historical context is not only that the ouroboros is a reference to cyclical time, to events having a way of coming back ’round again, but that serpent energy in general is female energy. Whether the story is St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland or the Knight in Shining Armor slaying the Angry Dragon, what’s being recalled — yea, though the victors who write the history books would have us believe it’s the victory of Good over Evil — what’s being recalled and commemorated is the succession of patriarchal social structure over matriarchal (and significantly for our purposes, more autism-friendly) social structure. Now I realize no one who dialed in today was braced for a lecture on superordinate gender-defined social structures, and I apologize for that. But I ask you, what is “the social model of disability” if not a critique of patriarchal values and a suggestion that another option we might consider, you know, is matriarchal values?

What Andrew Lehman’s work does then is provide a framework in which for one style of consciousness — the one out of which the social model has arguably come — autistic is inherently a legitimate way of being in the world. This is obviously not the default style of consciousness at the present time, and much to our frustration today this ouroboros swallows its tail in evolutionary time. It moves slowly, leaving us epically “Tired,” as Lydia Brown has recently reminded. It makes for a scale of change that’s difficult to see from the perspective of any individual lifespan, certainly unless one knows what to look for. But this is the larger, big-picture context Andrew Lehman’s work makes available to every contributor whose words appear at Shift Journal: just as our familiar serpent and dragon myths describe the previous “shift” as it plays out in Dreamtime, Shift Journal is documenting the leading edge of the current one as it plays out in real time.

So. To wrap up this section, something I’ve been curious about ever since I realized how my first obsession transformed from jazz music (for 11 years) to archetypal psychology (for 7 years) in the space of one electrifying paragraph in a Michael Ventura essay, is just how many seemingly random autistic serial obsessions are not at all unrelated and do succeed one another by way of such a spark, one you can actually watch as it flies along a perfectly logical but completely unforeseen path from the last obsession to the next. All as if there’s something else that remains unidentified, stringing together behind the scenes what are in fact related obsessions. Unlike with Kekulé, what happened in Andrew’s case is that once the serpent obsession had run its course, the fascinations which succeeded it involved his wondering whether humans, consciousness, and the prevailing neurology were or are objectively different under matriarchal social structures.

What followed was years of apprenticing himself to the science that concerns itself with that question. It’s work that deserves to be vetted by better-trained minds than are likely listening to me today. I’m telling the part of the story I feel competent to tell at the moment, but the science — along with a copiously referenced twelve-page bibliography — is there for anyone qualified to do peer review.

Theories of course are made of hypotheses and hypotheses must be testable in order to be science. One of the easiest ways to hook into that science sometimes even as a layperson is to look at what a theory predicts, and The Orchestral Theory of Evolution yields a long list of predictions as recorded in the book, 28 of which appear at Shift Journal in an early post titled Predictions.

One thing Andrew has been keenly aware of all along is that since Evolution, Autism, and Social Change is a cross-disciplinary work true peer review will have to come from more than one discipline. Whenever I think about that I’m reminded of the prediction I ran across years ago that we might expect future scientific breakthroughs to come from just such outsider discipline-hoppers because most scientific fields are now so mature that simply keeping up with the literature in one’s chosen field is a full time job, leaving little room for the necessary creative reflection and reverie. My impression is that this has not necessarily been borne out in general, but then it may be that there simply aren’t enough cross-disciplinary thinkers out there — let alone enough time for reflection and creative reverie.

That then is the story of the inception of Shift Journal. It began with an obsession with serpent and dragon mythology, and Shift is not the most significant, thoroughly developed, or potentially far-reaching piece of work to come out of the story.

Recently presented online as part of a webinar sponsored by Autism NOW and The Arc.

(part 3 and more to follow …)

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[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

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related: Evolution, Autism, and Social Change

related: Predictions

related: Why Serpents, Dragons, and Shift (part 1)

I like to tell people that Shift Journal “is a big-picture endeavor” in part because I’m a fan of dry understatement. When one reads those earliest entries at Shift, it turns out that that sweeping claim about genetic justice wasn’t the half of what was being introduced. There are after all eight category headings along the bottom of the masthead; besides the Autism heading there are those for The Internet, Society, Politics, Evolution, Art/Play/Myth, Language, and The Unconscious — and yet all these are intended to relate back in one way and another to autism. Shift was conceived by its founder to be a forum for big-picture discussion of autism’s role not only in contemporary society but in evolutionary time.

All appearances aside, Shift Journal is first and foremost The House That Andrew Lehman Built. Mr. Lehman owns a web design firm, Andrew Lehman Designs, which is where Shift Journal came together under his direction. At that time he had for twelve years also been a serious amateur evolutionary theorist, an auto-didact first teaching himself evolutionary biology, both its science and its history, as well as neuropsychology and parts of other fileds such as physical anthropology, and then sifting through endless scientific papers with what can accurately be called obsessive dedication. He corresponded with and received encouragement from academics such as Simon Baron-Cohen, and documented what occupied him in a series of blogs, most recently prior to Shift Journal at Neoteny.org. The culmination of all this came to be a new theory of evolution complementary to Darwinism, centered around heterochronic theory and the ebb and flow in human populations of neotenous characteristics such as autism. It describes how relative hormonal levels in the mothers’ blood across generations and in response to both short and long-term environmental factors actually orchestrates the distribution of neotenous traits across populations which in turn influences if not determines the social structure of human societies. For those and other reasons he came to call it The Orchestral Theory of Evolution.

Why exactly “Shift” then as the title of the site, as well as the significance of that ouroboros in the masthead is intimately tied into that dozen years of work that led up to its launch. The obvious question of course is why Andrew is not presenting with me today, and the answer is that he had a stroke in the spring of 2010, about seven months after we had launched, and just days after his work was published in book form as Evolution, Autism, and Social Change: A New Feminine Theory of Evolution That Explains Autism. While the stroke has not impaired his ability to comprehend spoken language, it has put him in the position of having to re-learn the skills of reading, writing and speaking. All this happened in the midst of brain surgery undertaken to head off the growing risk of an aneurysm, so it was something he both was and was not able to see coming.

Recently presented online as part of a webinar sponsored by Autism NOW and The Arc.

(part 2 and more to follow …)

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]
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related: Why Serpents, Dragons, and Shift (part 2)

Item

Once in the cockpit of his F-11F though, Peewee Cobb’s whole character changes. The instant his hands and feet are on the controls, he’s as fast as his aircraft and as powerful as its armament.  He has superb reactions and eyesight.  Is rated superior in rocketry and gunnery.  Can outfly anyone in his squadron, including the Lieutenant Commander who leads it.

Item:  An acquaintance reports that a woman he has worked with is in person quiet, charming, and sweet, yet also confusing.  Her signature quirk is a shrug which comes frequently but seems neither to punctuate anything in particular, nor to be in response to anyone or anything that’s been said.

Some of the work they’re involved in gets hashed out and coordinated not in person however but online, via text, in listserves.  “In a listserve,” her observer notes, “this woman is a predator that takes no prisoners.  The same person in a different medium becomes a different person.”  He interprets the shrug as “some sort of tip-of-the iceberg evidence of the turmoil underneath,” and goes on to speculate that without the “analog signal,” the nonverbal back-and-forth of which the shrug is a part, “Instead of the tip, we get the Iceberg Whole.”

Item:  Another woman, a friend of ten years, becomes my partner in a long-distance courtship which is conducted at first largely by email.  As would be expected, new dimensions of her personality become available to me, and yet in person some of them remain largely unavailable.  We recognize these dimensions as being a “text-only persona,” and speak of her as such.  This persona becomes a third person in our courtship, and later, in our marriage.

A decade on, we become part of a far-flung online posse that’s in touch throughout the day and finds the experience so valuable that it migrates to a new social software platform when the first becomes unreliable.  Occasional discussions arise around the novelty and the pleasure of relating to each other in real time, via text-only personae.  Some find socializing this way to be more compelling and rewarding than relationships away from the keyboard have been for them, ever.

For some, even “text-only persona” doesn’t seem adequate to describe the experience.  In part as an exercise in geek humor but also to some extent in earnest, the phrase “text-based life form” is floated as an alternative and retains some currency.  Many in this group identify in fact as misfits, but these are not underachievers.  They’re professionals, climbers and rising stars in their field, coalesced out of a pool of attendees and presenters at annual conferences.

These text-only personae and text-based life forms then, the unlikely inhabitants of the Iceberg Whole—have they been here, quiet beneath the surface, all along?  There’s now a means for them to converse with one another, at any rate, a means for forming communities and coming to self-awareness—for only the first time, arguably, since the invention of text 5,000 years ago.  Or were the Icebergs Whole present prior to the creation of the written word?  Were they perhaps responsible for the creation of the written word?  How about for the creation of the internet, this other-than-analog means of communication that’s bringing the written word on a par with the spoken word—in terms of interactivity and real-time involvement—for the first time, ever?

Sure, the first use of writing was for keeping tax records and warehouse inventories—much as the first use of computers and the internet was to facilitate the interests of the powerful.  Yet culturally, along with the rise of computers, we’ve seen such a turnaround in the fortunes of the “geek” that most people under forty have no awareness that as recently as the 1970’s, being labeled one was about as empowering as being outed as a homosexual in Eisenhower’s America.

And now?  Yea, though the verbally gifted, the extroverted, outgoing tips-of-the-icebergs have overrun Twitter and Facebook and the rest of the internet with incessant inane chattering, surely it’s still the geeks, the Aspergian Tribe, the text-based life forms who built the joint and maintain it, those who are native to it, sometimes more familiar with its hacks than with those of analog reality, who are the ones who need the internet’s other-than-analog means of expression in order to recognize one another, experience themselves as a community, and maintain this tide of good fortune so recently come their way.

He’s a cliché now but even three decades ago a shy, geeky, pencil-necked kid who turns predator when faced with a cockpit full of gauges, buttons, and switches was still little more than a figure of fun in a book about real men—at best only a bitter-comic promise of possibility.  Now we see he was a proto-video gamer, and millions of shy, awkward kids have not only torn up the scenery in first-person shooters from beyond Ensign Cobb’s wildest dreams; they’ve done so as part of a community—which as they transition into their working years forms the basis for a social network potentially every bit as useful as the sports- or fraternity-based Good Old Boys’ versions to which they might formerly have had limited access.

In doing so they are making good on their lineage—as a group—for perhaps the first time in human history.  The same goes for those leveraging their text-only personae for professional networking.  How far back this lineage goes is anybody’s guess; it may reach back well beyond the paleolithic.  It’s a point I keep coming back to, that these people represent the oldest and most secret of all secret societies; at least throughout recorded history, its members seem not to have even known one another.

While it’s always an iffy proposition to imagine that we, yes, we in our lifetimes, are straddling a cusp that marks an epochal change, it does seem that after what may have been millennia in complete or relative silence and isolation, the arrival of the internet may mark the beginning of a re-membering, a calling-home of the children for the sort of minds who brought it into being.

Such a homecoming could well take centuries more to play out, but something Icebergian may be rising.  Those who set their store by the tip-of-the-iceberg and the analog signal will find it easy to see this rising as some Rough Beast whose hour has come round at last; wars are fought over just such matters of perspective, and for those who are paying attention this war is already being waged—and on more than one front at that.  What we are likely to see most of, however, is more and more adults whose text-only personae have grown up with far more opportunities than ours did.  Where that leads us, we’ll just have to wait and see.

The Internet and the Iceberg Whole first appeared at Shift Journal on September 25, 2009.

One form of such an association has come to be called a ‘wiki.’ In the implementation of wiki projects one sees the result of a collaborative effort in which each participant was an independent agent. There are no deadlines(other than death itself), there are no mandatory office hours. One can contribute when they want, how they want, if they want.

In terms of accuracy and quality of content, wikis compare favorably against traditional encyclopedias. In terms of sheer volume, Wikis can cover a much larger variety of content than an encyclopedia ever could and keep constantly up to date all the while.

Such a high quality public resource results from the efforts of many individuals who never even meet one another. A wiki is a product of an environment with very low friction of association.

As such it enjoys certain advantages over a highly regulated structure:
-People acting on their own don’t have to be motivated or compelled in any way. None of the actors are formal associates in any way, thus there is no reason to try to ‘get the most’ out of the labor of each individual. If one lazy person leaves an article half complete, someone else will finish it. There is no urgency because such an organization passively collects contributions as a leaf collects rays from the sun.

-Those who contribute tend to do so in their area of expertise. Individuals know more about their strengths and their interests than any manager ever could. A non-interventionist system results in everyone working on what they’re best at, what they most enjoy. When personnel distribute themselves on tasks according to their interests and strengths, standards of quality are maximized. Not only is higher efficiency achieved, the cost of an authoritarian manager is eliminated.

The whole thing causes me to reflect.
It becomes necessary to have a hierarchy and highly specific goals with deadlines when running a business or a state.
But when organizations with the loosest of ties regularly churn out an outstanding free product I have to consider:
Compelling, allotting, scheduling, and assigning people to tasks while accounting for every second of available work time per employee is an extremely maintenance intensive process. At a certain point the cost of governing one’s employees must exceed the benefits of governing them.

Minimizing friction of association seems to be the obvious means of improving effectiveness.
A society or organization founded on compulsion and uniformity is still attractive because such an approach ensures a certain outcome. However, such a highly structured structured system must consume a large portion of its output just to keep itself running. Such a system has little potential to outperform what is expected of it. It performs very like a computer program, doing only exactly what it is told.

As for the possibility of a cohesive Subtle organization that minimizes friction of associaton, consider the attributes of Subtle persons.
They are:
-Knowledgeable, skilled, imaginative, critical thinkers.
-Introvert outcasts who have little stake in any existing order. This makes them highly versatile agents who can serve their function any place, any time, and under any circumstances.
-Highly accustomed to functioning as independent self-motivated agents. Minimal if any maintenance or supervision required.
-Highly desirous of a niche that satisfies their basic human need to belong.
-Often unemployed or unusually low in the employment hierarchy for their ability level. No one is presently making good use of their potential, nor is anyone likely to do so. They are lying around in a salvage yard, readily available to anyone who wants them.

The trick is finding them within the vast orthodoxies that have swallowed them up.(or in which they’ve hidden themselves!)

Zygmunt blogs at Kingdom of Introversion (and elsewhere).

Unity Without Uniformity: The Implications of Wikis appears here by permission.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/22/unity-without-uniformity-the-implications-of-wikis/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/19/autism-in-the-mirror/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/19/autism-in-the-mirror/#comments Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:36:55 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6589 Comedian Glen Wool, musing on the sacking of the middle classes and treasuries of the United States and other nations by the looting class, has suggested that newspapers be divided into just two sections:  one would remain known as “the business section,” while all the rest might now be best understood as “the consequences.”

Likewise, musing on the historic changes experienced by autistics over the past two decades, I would like to suggest that on the one hand we have the advent of the internet, and on the other we have the consequences — and that those consequences are more properly termed “neurodiversity.”

I began this week at Shift with a densely packed retort to an imagined attack, and the sinking realization that I’d actually boot-strapped myself into the middle of a heated, already in-progress conversation about neurodiversity — a heated conversation I’m just not much interested in having.  If you’ve not been keeping up, Autism & Oughtisms found itself in the middle of a skirmish last week and fired off a round without declaring exactly where it was aimed.  Hearing that musket ball whizzing over my head, I loaded up and traded a couple more volleys with A&O (at one point receiving marquee billing from @drbrocktagon; thanks Jon!) before we figured out what was going on.  And not that I don’t stand behind what I said, or that we don’t disagree thoroughly on certain matters.  For that matter, so far as I can tell I don’t much agree with anyone involved in this particular set-to.

But back to the treasuries and the banksters, it’s funny, in that I’m avidly following maybe a dozen writers online, both amateurs and professionals, regarding the ongoing transfer of wealth in the world — and am spoiling for a fight when it comes to that discussion — yet when it comes to intramural skirmishes regarding how we are to define neurodiversity, what it ought or ought not include or signify, or even when it comes to more organized efforts to establish brand neurodiversity — and I am acquainted with some of these people, and think well of them — I’m just not compelled to get involved.

Though it has its precedents in the labor, women’s, civil, and gay rights movements, I do have a sense that the neurodiversity movement is a new thing under the sun.  It may well be that those attached to those earlier efforts felt the same way, and in a sense they are all the same effort, but this one to me seems to have the deepest roots, both in time and in human consciousness, and thus came the longer way than the others to bask under that metaphorical sun.  If it’s here at all, it will have its own momentum; overt, high-energy efforts either on its behalf or against it don’t seem all that relevant.

As Thelonious Monk famously said “When asked where he thinks modern jazz is going … ‘I don’t know where it’s going.  Maybe it’s going to hell.  You can’t make anything go anywhere; it just happens.’” (Which is not to say he didn’t continue playing, and influencing other players …)

Less than a decade after that interview, the autonomy of the invisible suggested there by Monk was being formally explored in the writings of James Hillman, whose archetypal psychology informed some of the more outlandish claims I made in this space last Monday.  I keep coming back to the notion that Hillman’s work and neurodiversity have some surprising parallels.  As my interest in Hillman was first piqued by seeing his writing offered up as an analog for Thelonious Monk’s music, I’m reminded that they can each be disorienting to newcomers — as evidenced by A&O’s comment to me that as an atheist, she didn’t know what to make of the religious language I was using.

Hillman does use a lot of religious imagery, though mostly that of Classical Greece rather than of Christendom, and not because he’s a believer (far from it) but because why reinvent the wheel or let your atheism get in the way when the Greeks already did most of the ethnographic work of documenting the ghosts that haunt the human mind?  The signature feature here being the plural, the pantheon, the multiplicity of ghosts, of gods, the diversity in styles of consciousness recognized and celebrated in Greek thought.  And what do we have in neurodiversity but tentative steps toward the recognition and celebration of a corresponding diversity of styles of consciousness in the modern world?  Gods as styles of consciousness is Hillman’s formulation, but note the congruence here with autistic rock star economist Tyler Cowen’s apt phrase, “autistic cognitive style.”

Despite their not being identical, that Hillman and Cowen would come to such similar formulations is at least as remarkable and as significant, I suggest, as Kanner and Asperger each arriving independently at the word “autism.”

One might even entertain the thought — an act which we forget is distinct from “believing” — that something in the world is moving autonomously to bring this language to the surface just now,  just as that very autistic cognitive style has gone and created a mirror in which to at long, long, eons-long last, see and reflect back on itself.

A mirror we know as the internet.

[image via geograph/Creative Commons]

related:  Steve Silberman/Squidalicious:  Disability rights/neurodiversity advocates should be fighting ignorance, not each other.

related:  Response to A&O’s reply re: “Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn” and the definition of Neurodiversity

related:  Reply to “Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn” re the definition of Neurodiversity

related:  Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn: On “Pinning Down” Neurodiversity

related:  Acceptance of Diversity within Neurodiversity (?)

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/19/autism-in-the-mirror/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/05/a-quicky-on-the-internet-and-asd-how-something-rotten-lead-me-to-something-beautiful/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/05/a-quicky-on-the-internet-and-asd-how-something-rotten-lead-me-to-something-beautiful/#comments Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:00:54 +0000 Guest http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6437 Because the awareness and (arguably accordingly) the numbers of autism, are on the rise, and yet it still remains mysterious and misunderstood, “autism” is an easy term to toss around when you want to sensationalize your latest cause. Whether its cell-phone towers or immunizations, polluted environments or plastic food containers, why not scare everyone by saying it causes autism, then dare them to disprove it when you haven’t provided proof of your claim in the first place. What a fun game for us all to play. Such a popular game. So I shouldn’t have been surprised to see someone claiming – without any research or explanation to back it up – that autism might be caused by the internet too.

It’s an easy claim for me (or you, or anyone with a few brain cells to rub together), to attack. You could try to point out that the rise in autism numbers has a rather vast number of other far-better-documented-and-explained causes. You could point out that newborns and toddlers with autism haven’t had internet access. You could talk about how autism is present in Amish populations too, and that there are many known genetic causes of autism.

No doubt all such claims can be (will be) met with the reply that “ah, but you see, at least some of autism is being caused by the internet…” (That should sound familiar; you’ll hear the same claims about some autism is being caused by cell-phone towers, plastics exposure, etc blah etc.) You still need proof though. Can they show you a single case where someone who clearly did not have autism, came to have autism after the thing in question, and explain scientifically how that change came about (controlling for correlation versus causation for instance).

Anyway, I thought about writing a lengthy post attacking the claim properly – lots of reading lots of opinions and research – and began with your typical Google search. I waded my way through various off-topic and silly pieces, and then came across something very long, but also very beautiful, about the relationship between autism and the internet. It shared some things I was already aware of, such as how the internet can help autistic people express themselves without the challenges and confusions of facial expressions and body language. But it went well beyond that. It made the eye-opening connection between the way we understand the internet, and the way an autistic mind interacts with and makes sense of the world. It explained how the internet can be viewed like Braille for an autistic person. It shared the wonder and acceptance of many autistic people when they can use the internet to finally connect with others like themselves, gaining a sense of community and enhanced sense of self-worth.

It is a wonderful piece of writing. And I wouldn’t have discovered it if I hadn’t been motivated to do a general search with the aim of exploring the (apparently completely unfounded) claim that the internet can cause autism. And so, though I don’t have time to do a properly researched and better written post about autism and the internet, I can at least direct you towards someone who understands and celebrates – rather than attacks – the beautiful relationship between the internet and autism.

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The something rotten: Susan Greenfield: Living online is changing our brains

The something beautiful: “Autism and the Internet” or “It’s the Wiring, Stupid”, by Harvey Blume.

A quicky on the internet and ASD; how something rotten led me to something beautiful, originally at Autism and Oughtisms, appears here by permission.

[image via Wikimedia Commons]

related:  An open letter to Baroness Susan Greenfield

related:  The Internet and the Iceberg Whole

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/05/a-quicky-on-the-internet-and-asd-how-something-rotten-lead-me-to-something-beautiful/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/06/13/greetings-members-of-nato-we-are-anonymous/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/06/13/greetings-members-of-nato-we-are-anonymous/#comments Mon, 13 Jun 2011 07:06:44 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=5933 What follows here is to be read in the light of an earlier entry that looked at conflicts between autistic and corporate culture, An Autistic Ethos: It’s All About Respect.  In that post, it was suggested that “… the occasion of the IT department may well be the first in modern history where those with an autistic cognitive style have been able to wield any sort of collective power, to control access to a resource that is increasingly critical to those who in turn control money and power, and to develop a culture on a scale that remains consistently identifiable across time and geography.  These traits arguably make it a new thing under the sun ….”

In Anonymous, we see what I propose is another variation on an autistic ethos, as implemented by Information Technologists set free from workplace priorities and acting in a manner even more “independent of the organizational chart” than that discussed last year.  This tendency to organize and — given the opportunity — act independently of a hierarchy which otherwise renders them effectively disabled is I suggest now as I did earlier, “every bit as much an autistic ethos as it is an IT ethos.  The only significant difference is that unlike autistic people in general, IT pros occupy a position of power from which consequences fall upon those who fail to respect that ethos …”

Speaking of the IT “pro,” it has been noted by Wendell Berry that the word “professional” came into our language along with the Industrial Revolution and the attendant necessity of separating love from work.  Its opposite, “amateur,” has love right at its etymological root.  Autistic, autistic Thomas Jefferson for instance is remembered for organizing independently of the hierarchy, in the service of an ethos he was determined to see respected, and he did so not with ruthless professionalism but as a labor of love.  Jefferson was an amateur.  With that in mind, I give you the amateur IT group known as Anonymous:

In a recent publication, you have singled out Anonymous as a threat to “government and the people”.  You have also alleged that secrecy is a ‘necessary evil’ and that transparency is not always the right way forward.

Anonymous would like to remind you that the government and the people are, contrary to the supposed foundations of “democracy”, distinct entities with often conflicting goals and desires.  It is Anonymous’ position that when there is a conflict of interest between the government and the people, it is the people’s will which must take priority.  The only threat transparency poses to government is to threaten government’s ability to act in a manner which the people would disagree with, without having to face democratic consequences and accountability for such behavior.  Your own report cites a perfect example of this, the Anonymous attack on HBGary.  Whether HBGary were acting in the cause of security or military gain is irrelevant – their actions were illegal and morally reprehensible.  Anonymous does not accept that the government and/or the military has the right to be above the law and to use the phony cliche of “national security” to justify illegal and deceptive activities.  If the government must break the rules, they must also be willing to accept the democratic consequences of this at the ballot box.  We do not accept the current status quo whereby a government can tell one story to the people and another in private. Dishonesty and secrecy totally undermine the concept of self rule.  How can the people judge for whom to vote unless they are fully aware of what policies said politicians are actually pursuing?

When a government is elected, it is said to “represent” the nation it governs.  This essentially means that the actions of a government are not the actions of the people in government, but are actions taken on behalf of every citizen in that country.  It is unacceptable to have a situation in which the people are, in many cases, totally and utterly unaware of what is being said and done on their behalf – behind closed doors.

Anonymous and WikiLeaks are distinct entities.  The actions of Anonymous were not aided or even requested by WikiLeaks.  However, Anonymous and WikiLeaks do share one common attribute:  They are no threat to any organization – unless that organization is doing something wrong and attempting to get away with it.

We do not wish to threaten anybody’s way of life.  We do not wish to dictate anything to anybody.  We do not wish to terrorize any nation.

We merely wish to remove power from vested interests and return it to the people – who, in a democracy, it should never have been taken from in the first place.

The government makes the law.  This does not give them the right to break it.  If the government was doing nothing underhand or illegal, there would be nothing “embarrassing” about Wikileaks revelations, nor would there have been any scandal emanating from HBGary.  The resulting scandals were not a result of Anonymous’ or Wikileaks’ revelations, they were the result of the CONTENT of those revelations.  And responsibility for that content can be laid solely at the doorstep of policymakers who, like any corrupt entity, naively believed that they were above the law and that they would not be caught.

A lot of government and corporate comment has been dedicated to “how we can avoid a similar leak in the future”.  Such advice ranges from better security, to lower levels of clearance, from harsher penalties for whistleblowers, to censorship of the press.

Our message is simple:  Do not lie to the people and you won’t have to worry about your lies being exposed.  Do not make corrupt deals and you won’t have to worry about your corruption being laid bare.  Do not break the rules and you won’t have to worry about getting in trouble for it.

Do not attempt to repair your two faces by concealing one of them.  Instead, try having only one face – an honest, open and democratic one.

You know you do not fear us because we are a threat to society.  You fear us because we are a threat to the established hierarchy.  Anonymous has proven over the last several years that a hierarchy is not necessary in order to achieve great progress – perhaps what you truly fear in us, is the realization of your own irrelevance in an age which has outgrown its reliance on you.  Your true terror is not in a collective of activists, but in the fact that you and everything you stand for have, by the changing tides and the advancement of technology, are now surplus to requirements.

Finally, do not make the mistake of challenging Anonymous.  Do not make the mistake of believing you can behead a headless snake.  If you slice off one head of Hydra, ten more heads will grow in its place.  If you cut down one Anon, ten more will join us purely out of anger at your trampling of dissent.

Your only chance of defeating the movement which binds all of us is to accept it.  This is no longer your world. It is our world – the people’s world.

We are Anonymous.

We are legion.

We do not forgive.

We do not forget.

Expect us…

related:  When Engineers Lie

related: An Autistic Ethos: It’s All About Respect

related:  From Lulz to Labor Unions: The Evolution of Anonymous

related:  If Not Us, Then Who?

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/06/13/greetings-members-of-nato-we-are-anonymous/feed/ 3 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/05/26/were-back-housekeeping/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/05/26/were-back-housekeeping/#comments Thu, 26 May 2011 19:46:45 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=5821 Servers placated; more better backups in place.

For those of you who caught the alternate-reality/time-travel sidetrip to the Shift Journal of 2005, no charge.

Regular posting will resume tomorrow.

Someone comes along who offers sympathy, concern, and just a few helpful suggestions for how the group might get along better. Using the familiar in-group buzzwords, the person appears genuine and friendly. It doesn’t take long before most people are convinced of the sincerity of these new efforts to build respect and trust within the community, while also reaching out to the enemy camp. After all, perhaps the group’s opponents just need a more understanding approach. Compromises start being made. There’s less conflict, but the original positions are no longer asserted as strongly as they once were.

After a while the community discovers that it was all a pretense—that the wonderful new broad-minded leader they’d come to trust was in the other camp all along, intentionally deceiving them. Maybe a message gets forwarded that was meant to stay private, or the person makes the mistake of letting things slip in an intemperate blog post or two. The people of the community feel outraged, wondering how they can ever trust anyone again after such a betrayal.

In Dan Haggard’s review of the movie The Social Network, which Mark Stairwalt discussed in his post two weeks ago, a provocative question is raised: Have today’s social and technological changes put us at risk of destroying authentic intimacy in our relationships? Haggard addresses the manipulation of social symbols:

“You are authentic when you don’t adopt signals that imply you to be something that you are not. With respect to the notion of intimacy, one is authentic when one actually is offering sincere intimacy…

The fact that there is no easy signalling process for intimacy doesn’t stop humans from trying to use it anyway. It’s natural to think that they would. Achieving that high level of trust is of immense value and benefit. If you can gain that trust on the cheap – if you can just insert a symbol that your target interprets as a signal of intimacy, then you gain a lot for little cost.”

In the modern world, marketing professionals perform detailed analyses of social signals and how they can be deployed to gain the public’s confidence. The public, in turn, has become increasingly suspicious of such trickery. Does this mean we’re doomed to end up in a world where none of us can ever trust one another or show our true selves?

I don’t foresee such a dismal future, for a number of reasons. First of all, there’s certainly nothing new about false friends. They’ve been around since antiquity, when Brutus assassinated his good friend Julius Caesar and the once-faithful disciple Judas handed over Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. It’s likely that people in ancient times, who lived in close-knit family groups and knew their neighbors well, considered such acts of betrayal to be far more horrific than we can imagine. Yet they remained able to form close bonds with one another, and society endured.

Long ago, social signals were much simpler than they are today. Everyone had their place and knew exactly what it was. To look authentic, one didn’t have to do much more than to meet the expectations for how a member of one’s social class ought to behave. That left room for all kinds of trickery. Cultural stories were simpler as well, making it easy for kings and warlords to convince their subjects that they had the divine favor of the gods, or some other convenient mythos. Although they didn’t have advanced technology, they could gain people’s confidence very effectively without it.

While it’s true that the Internet makes it easier to target false symbols at specific groups and subgroups, the flip side is that it’s also much easier to expose such fakery. When the evidence turns up in an e-mail or on a website, it’s all over the world instantly. Yes, it’s possible that the manipulations enabled by modern technology may cause us to lose trust in one another, leading to the dismal future envisioned in Haggard’s article. But there’s an equally plausible argument to be made that we are heading toward a future where everyone will have to be their authentic selves at all times because deception will have become nearly impossible.

I must have hit at least three occasions in our conversation where I tried to say “autism” but she saw it coming, and cut me off at every pass. She replaced it with “I see.” Where I said “I’ve been homeschooling because the school wasn’t prepared to work with Simon’s au-,” “I see, I see,” she interjected hastily. She also replaced it with “oh yeah” as in “We don’t feel Simon needs to be cured of his au-” “Oh yeah, yeah” she interrupted me nervously. Awkward silences and fidgeting ensued.

You almost have to read Caitlin’s entire description in order to believe it.  From a certain distance, this woman’s antics might be quite entertaining, and while Caitlin certainly managed to make lemonade out of her neighbor’s lemons, it’s hard to know whether to be amused or depressed by the whole thing.  We all know scores of people who deny the presence and reality of autism, perhaps not so literally in clear-cut cases such as with Caitlin’s son, but definitely in more insidious ways all across the spectrum, and certainly in terms of how that spectrum extends back across history, and remains woven into society.  Autism has been here all along – both more close-by and more far-flung than we think.

But then this is how most humans react – with denial – apparently, when that which has been “hidden” in plain sight all over the land suddenly shows up in the neighbor’s backyard, or in polite conversation – or on the teevy news shows.  Given that this entry is fourth in a series that examines parallels between the public dramas of Wikileaks and Autism, by hidden in plain sight I mean the unrecognized capabilities inherent in file-sharing technology and the people involved in the recent diplomatic cable leak (they’d been there “all along,” for several years at least), and also the unrecognized capabilities for meaningful autistic life lived within the context of loving families, lives capable not only of facing the public world but contributing to it, often to a disproportinate extent.

“… both depressing and amusing” at any rate was how Techdirt’s Mike Masnick described the scene as last month’s Wikileaks drama wound down for a Christmas break, his having watched “the federal government react to Wikileaks with some of the dumbest policy decisions possible.”  Just for an exercise in compare and contrast with Caitlin’s Very Determined Neighbor, let’s look at some of the stories Masnick had posted over the previous three weeks:

State Department Telling Students Who Apply For Jobs That If They Mention Wikileaks On Twitter, They Won’t Be Hired

How Denial Works: Library Of Congress Blocks Wikileaks

The More Some Try To Kill Wikileaks, The More It Spreads

State Department, Once Again, Asks Wikileaks To ‘Return’ Leaked Cables

How Political Pundits Get Confused When They Don’t Understand That Wikileaks Is Distributed

Click on any one of the above.  Masnick’s concise, with a sharp eye for comedic absurdity; he won’t waste your time. In the post from December 21 in which he makes the “both depressing and amusing” remark, he writes

According to some reports, the federal government is reaching out to security firms to see if they can build a system to block all access to Wikileaks content from within the federal government’s computer system. One company asked about this notes that it’s different than what they normally do, which is focused on keeping documents in a network (too late for that), rather than architecting a system to keep documents out.

The family I grew up in was one generation away from a dairy and horse farm, and a phrase I heard a lot as a child was, “No sense closing the barn door after the horse has got out.”

In the interest then of being concise, maybe the best I can do for now is to suggest that autism may or not be a horse, but still … how you gonna keep a file down on the farm once it’s seen all them bright lights, found its own kind reflected in a mirror server, and danced in heels fire engine red on a tabletop ringed with awestruck, gape-jawed bittorrent trackers?  That’s one filly who won’t be returning to the barn … and likewise with us once mute, inglorious autistics whose network has grown along with the internet, bootstrapping ourselves into self-aware communities, discovering the strength in numbers which most everyone else has always been able to take for granted.

It’s worth mentioning too that all of the panic and hysteria back in December that drove the bureaucrats and pundits to call for measures as extreme as assassination for the demon Assange has now been walked back (here, here, and here; not that they’re not still after Julian, it’s just that he’s no longer being openly demonized).  It turns out the leaked diplomatic cables have presented no such threats to life, limb, or national security as had been claimed with dire assurances by many, many, Very Serious People.  We autistics of course have kept our arms crossed and our feet tapping impatiently, but have yet enjoyed only an unconvincing, grudging walkback of the demonization of autism from many Very Serious People within and without the autism community.  All while the panic, hysteria, and stigma remain.

For my money political blogger Michael J. Smith called this one correctly early on, back at the beginning of December.  I want to quote what he had to say there so that it can be read here in the context of neurodiversity and the relationship between autistics and society.

So: if the material that Wiki has Leaked is so anodyne — why are our lords and masters so furious about it becoming public? Are they just faking it? For some super-crafty reason of their own?

I don’t think so. I think they’re really pissed. And it’s not because the material in itself is so explosive. No. It’s just because they’ve been disobeyed.

Being obeyed is just the thing they must have. After all, there are more of us than there are of them. So docility, fearfulness, and compliance on our part is indispensable to our rulers. If they say something is secret, it must stay secret. If they say we have to take off our shoes, we have to take off our shoes.

My man Assange has shown them that it’s not so easy to control the horizontal, and the vertical. Bless him, and long may he live to drive them insane.

If they say something is shameful, a tragedy, pathological, it must stay shameful, a tragedy, pathological, never-to-be-spoken-of.  If they say we must look them in the eye, we must look them in the eye.  And so on.  All the more I can add is to ask you to go back and read Caitlin’s essay in its entirety – or at least her closing thoughts, which are themselves an encouragement to disobedience:

Every misunderstood, marginalized, oppressed group of people throughout history has faced this same challenge.  Stereotypes, fear, and pity suffocated them, demoralized them.  The reality is that nothing changes, until enough people join the rebellion.  And for those at the forefront of the movement, they risk losing the security of their child’s relative neurological anonymity, in order to secure a better future for our children collectively.

Ultimately, society cannot free our children from a cage of stigma.  Only we can do that.  We need to reject the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach and foster a movement that shifts autism into the mainstream.  And the only real way to do that—to achieve complete equality, complete awareness, and complete respect for our kids—is to be brave enough to say “autism” without the slightest hint of regret in our voice.

We need to say it first.  We need to say it loud.  We need to say it often.

It’s the only way.

related:  Be the Change: How to Shift Autism into the Mainstream

related (discussion in comments):  Allen Frances gave us the Asperger’s “epidemic” — just like Al Gore gave us the Internet

related: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back?

related:  Did the Autistic Cohort Beget Wikileaks?

Right at the heart of even the most literal, conservative view of autism, one which hews most strictly to the medical model with its tight focus on pathology and disability, we find that there are multiple recognized causes for autism.

Even in regard to the “pure” autism spectrum disorders which make up the vast majority of cases, there is no one gene recognized as the carrier or cause; there are several.  And with syndromic autism the list of causes, even leaving aside perennial favorites gluten and vaccines, is both long and quite specific.  In other words – and common as this knowledge may be, it is still not yet common enough to have penetrated our language and our imaginations – there is no fountainhead of autism, no single founding story or event.  Its very origins are multiple and diverse, and yet we commonly speak of and imagine it as one thing, and at that existing only in the here and now, or even only in childhood.

As Dr. James Copland puts it, “Asking ‘What causes ASD?’ is like asking ‘What causes fever?’”  Note that we have no foundations, no fund-raising, no research projects dedicated to curing or ending fever in our lifetimes.  The absurdity there is self-evident since every parent knows fever is a “single thing” only in the most superficial sense.  In fact if fever has a central cause, it would be the role it plays in the immune defense system.  While it’s not where I’m headed here, Andrew Lehman has written of autistics’ role as part of humankind’s self-regulating system, as canaries in the coal mine.  Where I am headed is that autism is no single thing but rather a distributed system, brought into being by many, perhaps mostly overlooked “parts,” the effects of which accompany us into adulthood as we breed, bleed, and feed into the rest of the cohort and the rest of society as the generations roll by – all with consequences we have only begun to imagine.

That’s one view that yields a picture of a distributed system, looking at what goes into or causes autism, or “where it comes from,” and in that last paragraph we moved from “inbound” autism, from what brings autism on to “outbound” autism, or those effects that the autistic cohort has on human society.  This is territory I’ve been visiting from the beginning here, maybe most directly in Autism as a Secret Society.  There are two aspects to this example.  One extends back into cultural history and evolutionary time, with the autistic cohort being viewed and valued differently according to the needs, challenges, and demographics of each place and age.  The other amounts to a single-moment snapshot of the broad cohort, a spectrum which encompasses those who are most challenged by syndromic autism as well as those who live and die with no one ever suspecting how the course of their lives had them swerving onto and off of the autistic rez the whole time.  This snapshot would include most of those whom today we typically segregate into the conceptual silos of geek, nerd, and introvert.

My premise all along – as reflected in the sidebar as well as many earlier entries – has been that autism is far-reaching in its social implications, and that its full presence and impact remain hidden in plain sight, unrecognized and uncredited.  I mean this in both of the senses I’ve just described, in terms of the role autism may have played in cultural innovation throughout history, pre-history, and evolutionary time, and also in terms of the present-day spectrum and contemporary culture.  Scratch an innovator in any field, I am suggesting, and underneath you are likely to find elements of autism such as tenacity of interest, or obsession; an inbuilt immunity to group-think; an ability to keep intimate track of the details while or perhaps by losing oneself in them; a failure to “know one’s place” in relation to commonly accepted authority; a perennially fresh eye applied to situations where “we’ve always done it this way.”

This too is autism, acting in the world as a distributed system, coming at society from many different angles and in many places, no more susceptible to the magic bullet of a cure than is creativity itself.  To insist on imagining it only as pathology or disability is to defame autism along with those who exhibit it.  Not every autistic is an innovator, obviously – any more than every genetic variation in any species confers an adaptive advantage.  But this may be how we move forward culturally; I’m certainly willing to argue that autism is one of the ways by which we progress and innovate as a species.  And again, the model here is not that of revelation from on high, of autism as some pure, central source from which New Ways are handed down to mankind.  And perhaps this is why we fail to see it for what it is.  Autism’s gift, again, is for a facility with the details; it meets with, treats with, and has truck with the devil in those details.  Its contributions comes from the bottom up, here and there, bubbling to the surface, sprouting through the cracks.

Then there is a third way in which I expect to refer to the autistic cohort as a distributed system in coming entries. This is to do with the sense in which we seem to have roused ourselves from stony sleep and brought ourselves to life as a self-aware community by creating the internet arguably in our own image.  I made mention of this back in December, and wrote about it as part of the email which landed me at Shift Journal; that section wound up as a post here.  The internet itself is of course an example par excellence of a distributed system, purposely created without a “head” so as to be all the more resilient and immune to decapitation.

I want to bring things full circle and finish up quickly here with a sidestep into whimsy.  You are likely familiar with the phrase “about as easy as herding cats.”  You may be familiar with the internet meme “all cats are autistic,” or the book All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome.  Consider that the challenges the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon have experienced – in trying to corral the leaked diplomatic cables, the people who’ve shared and read them, and the capabilities of the infrastructure that made it all possible – are challenges which can be aptly described as “about as easy as herding cats.”

Consider that these things may all be related.

related:  Which War Are We In: Good vs. Evil, or The One vs. The Many?

related:  Did the Autistic Cohort Beget Wikileaks?

related:  What’s So Funny About Wikileaks and Autism?

Given that I’m presiding over a site already dedicated in part to giving wider exposure to the writing of others, I’d like to respond in two ways to the award’s requirement that I recommend seven other blogs (for the requisite seven revealing personal details, please see Clay’s blog, here).

One, I would like to deputize readers the same way I generally deputize new contributors, who are asked to recommend other writers and specific posts that might be a good fit for the site. I’m especially interested in bloggers who are doing good work that may be overlooked because they have yet to establish themselves, and also the occasional big-picture gem that may wind up lost in the shuffle on what might usually be a more personal blog with a narrower focus.  Static Mama’s My Children Want You To Know was a good example of this sort of post.  Any and all relevant contributions, however, will be considered.  Shift’s generic contact address at any rate does pass through to a real inbox, and all suggestions are appreciated.

Two, I would like to use this entry to showcase the work of my colleague Andrew Lehman, founder of this site, and currently on extended leave from it.  These are the spaces in which Andrew worked out his ideas as they led to the eventual publication of his groundbreaking book, Evolution, Autism & Social Change, earlier this year.

• Human Evolution serves as a first landing page for Andrew’s work over the past twelve years, with sidebar links leading to more recently established blogs and specific essays.  Its centerpiece is a five-part paper, Human Evolution:  Evolution and the Structure of Health and Disease, headed by an explanatory video produced in February of this year.  While the name of the site may leave things somewhat unclear, the sidebar explains the contents as “Human evolution theory utilizing concepts of neoteny & female sexual selection.  An etiology of neuropsychological disorders such as autism and dyslexia, and the origin of left handedness.”

• Causes of Autism is another iteration of the site above, presenting yet more material focused more narrowly on the origins of autism, and featuring an early version of the theory which forms the backbone of Evolution, Autism & Social Change,

•  Neoteny, launched in April of 2008, has been Andrew’s primary working blog since that date; several of its entries were cross-posted here at Shift Journal.  Its full title being Neoteny, Autism, and Evolution: Social Transformation and Biological Evolution, the work documented on its pages fed directly into Evolution, Autism & Social Change, with sections of several posts appearing more or less intact in the book.

• Evolution, Autism & Social Change is available as a free pdf download as well as in a $10 paperback edition.  Further description of contents, as well as links to related videos can be found here.

• NeotenyOrg.  Earlier this year, Andrew was finding his legs as a video editor, enjoying a new medium in which to present his work. NeotenyOrg is the YouTube channel associated with the website Neoteny.

Value though is a relative matter, and those same contributors have by and by made it clear that a comments policy would be appreciated, especially if it were to relieve them of the need to be responsive to the sort of comments which have had their fifteen minutes of fame and more already.  It was recently pointed out to me in fact that there seems to be no more than ten or twelve longtime commenters responsible for most all of the concern trolling and nay-saying encountered on neurodiversity blogs.  While the argument for kicking them to the curb would be no different were their numbers far larger, this seems as good a time as any to let them go their way as we go ours.

Below, see Shift Journal’s comments guidelines, effective Labor Day weekend, 2010.  These will have a permanent home on their own page, linked to from the sidebar, and are subject to change as time and circumstances unfold.  In effect then this post stands as an archive version, as it will not be edited to reflect future changes.

We are at work here.  What that work may be will vary with when and who you are visiting, however workplace rules for visitors apply here as they do in the brick-and-mortar world.  It is commonly understood for instance that when visiting a brick-and-mortar workplace, one is not at liberty to pop into this or that office or cubicle in order to inform the occupants that they are not doin’ it right.  Such behavior might reasonably be met not with discussion, but with a call to building security and an armed escort to the parking lot; similarly inappropriate comments here will be removed from the premises by means of that virtual trap-door known as the delete button.  To the extent this is at all a departure from standard social media practices, it is aimed at supporting the notion that Shift Journal’s primary mission is reflective.

Readers and contributors alike are invited to reflect on the nature of autism past, present, and future; the opportunities here are for expanding and refining vision and perspective rather than restricting them. Contributors are well aware that there are raging controversies in the larger autism world.  Shift Journal seeks to occupy a position that is removed from the front lines of these controversies—a still, calm center or “safe space” where offense and defense are not vital concerns.  Friction will arise between contributors as it will at any workplace; however engaging with outside detractors is not a priority.  Autistic is assumed here to be a legitimate way to be in the world.  With this as a given, contributors can go on to craft and float ideas; to play with possibilities; to store and share language that can be carried into conflict, or used to build fresh understandings of autism in contexts other than—and larger than—the current “autism wars.”  Comments which further this mission are welcome; comments which detract from it are not so much unwelcome as they are irrelevant.

If there are truly egregious errors which must be called to our attention, visitors are invited—as one might do with a brick-and-mortar outfit—to use the contact form.  Genuinely constructive criticism, offered thus away from the grandstand view of the comments section, is much appreciated—and may result, even if we disagree, in a request for you to submit in publishable form.  Concern trolls and naysayers on the other hand—however well-intentioned—are encouraged to assert their relevance by the digital equivalent of picketing across the street.  Nothing, after all, would announce to the world that we’ve all arrived as would the establishment of counteringshiftjournal.com.  ;-)

(Thanks to Rob Beschizza and Ron Gruber—and commenters—in this post at Boing Boing for helping me to clarify my thoughts here.)

Present and future contributors are asked to consider that in coming months especially we may or may not see some extra-tempting softballs in the comments, which somehow just beg for a reply.  Be warned that if you get to them before I do, and you have chosen to reply, I may well delete your reply along with the comment which tempted you.  Just sayin’.

To illustrate how much flexibility a person with highly marketable skills might enjoy in balancing work and other life activities, the article gives the example of independent consultant Laura, a computer engineer:

Laura is a database whiz.  Companies hire her to wrangle their most gnarly data into streamlined structures.  If you’re lucky enough to engage Laura, she’ll assemble a handpicked team of programmers and descend on your office for up to six months.  She’ll then take your generous check back to her charming Jamaica Plain bungalow and set about finding novel ways to spend it.

She allows months to pass between projects — the paydays being ample enough to buy her as much downtime as she wants.  She has used this time, among other pursuits, to earn a pilot’s license, learn to scuba dive, and travel through Asia.

Although having that much free time may seem far out of reach to most of today’s cubicle dwellers, I expect that more of us will have such opportunities as the workforce continues to evolve toward specialized technical niches, with automation taking over much of the routine stuff.  The increase in productivity resulting from a better educated workforce and more efficient use of automation will mean a wealthier economy; and as workers develop extremely specialized skills, it will be much harder for companies to find people with the skills needed for a particular job, thus forcing wages significantly higher.  Even workers with less education will eventually start to earn better wages as today’s developing countries become fully industrialized, thus depriving the corporations of their usual supply of starving peasants to exploit.

In a post-consumer economy, what career fields might be expected to grow?  I mentioned one likely prospect in my previous post—green technology and other careers related to environmental protection and improvement.  Another area often discussed by Andrew Lehman is child care and education, at present woefully inadequate to meet the needs of many of our children.  As educators and child care professionals develop more expertise in identifying the practices that are best suited to teaching a neurologically diverse population, they will command higher salaries while also preparing our young people for successful lives.

In light of our aging population and the rapid pace of advances in medical science, we can also expect substantial growth in the fields of health care and nutrition, which I predict will become much more interrelated in the future.  When individual genome analysis becomes a routine matter, everyone from the youngest children to the oldest seniors may regularly receive prescriptions for both medications and foods compounded specifically for their genetic needs.  These will be obtained easily through one-stop shopping at the local supermarket, which, like most businesses, will have convenient delivery services available for the increasing number of people unable to drive because of age or disability.  Today’s mass-market pharmaceuticals and fast-food chains will disappear entirely, to be remembered as relics of a primitive past.

That leaves room to speculate on this question: What changes can we expect in the economy, which is now fueled to a great extent by consumer spending, as we make the transition to a future where information and creative works are freely shared and are a much more significant part of our lives?  Will corporate production come to a screeching halt for lack of consumers to buy mass-market goods, causing the modern economy to go into an irreversible collapse?

I don’t foresee such an apocalyptic scenario, in part because consumer spending really isn’t as essential as many people believe it to be.  To keep an economy going, two things are needed: Production and buyers.  It’s irrelevant, from the perspective of corporations and their workers, who buys what sort of products and what happens after they’re sold.  As history shows, corporations can stay in business and even make hefty profits in time of war, selling bombs and grenades and other stuff that’s shipped off to get blown up on the other side of the world.  The economy doesn’t depend on having enough sales of consumer goods specifically.  It just depends on having enough sales, period.

That is why, in talking about how to get the economy going again after the recession, some politicians such as President Obama have mentioned replacing the burst real estate bubble with a new focus on green technology.  The idea there isn’t to create a new speculative bubble, but to make the economy less vulnerable to slowdowns in consumer sales while also improving the environment and reducing the cost of energy.

Major changes in technology and social structure that displace large segments of the economy can be scary, but they always have been an inevitable part of progress.  Over the past century or so, as the workforce went from the family farm to the manufacturing plant and then to the office cubicle, many people worried that there wouldn’t be enough jobs for the displaced workers and that the economy would fall apart.  When motor vehicles replaced horses and mules, that put all the blacksmiths and carriage-makers out of work, but they soon learned new skills and found other jobs.

Many of the consumer goods and services that are now seen as essential to keeping the economy going weren’t even in existence a century ago, and they will have long since become obsolete by the end of this century.  Corporations will adjust to changing times, as they always do, finding something different to sell.  Those that are too poorly managed to make an effective transition will end up in that socially useful institution known as the bankruptcy court, where their lenders will pick their bones clean and then look around for other smarter companies to finance.  Capitalism can get along just fine regardless of whether the end user of a company’s products is a spoiled suburbanite on a credit card binge at the mall or an equatorial rainforest that’s being carefully restored by nonprofit groups; and if the latter becomes a more significant part of the economy, we’ll be creating a more beautiful and sustainable world.

I’ve waited twelve years now to see the word “autistic” begin to come out of the closet in the tech world, but your otherwise dead-on post the other day about “iPad Snivelers” was not exactly the coming-out party I’d had in mind.  I’ll get to the why of that.  First of all though, I’m a fan, a longtime daily reader going back well beyond the infamous TV-B-Gone prank of 2008 that made one of your colleagues persona non grata at the Consumer Electronics Show.  So I recognized the camaraderie and nodded in approval last month when Gizmodo went out of its way to offer coverage to companies who’d been kicked out of hotel rooms by CES officials at this year’s show.  I do get it; you guys are the rebel outsiders of gadget journalism, snarky prankster Robin Hoods, and not afraid to push limits.  While that’s part of why I’m a fan, it doesn’t mean you get to throw the word “autistic” around like it’s some sort of insightful insult and not hear about it in return.

I thought your piece—iPad Snivelers: put up or shut up—was on the whole exactly what needed to be said.  Gawd knows I love your way with sarcasm, and for all that you were out to kick ass and take names you also seemed to be trying hard to breathe life into a world we both care about deeply.

Two weeks ago I posted an entry which took as its starting point a PC Magazine article on the prospects for fans of Nokia’s N900 cell phone, the “ultimate hacker phone” which is in many ways the opposite of any gadget ever produced by Apple.  I did this, yes, on a site which concerns itself pretty much entirely with autism and social change.  The title of that post was Autism and The Hacker Manifesto; in it I invited readers to consider Lloyd Blankenship’s The Conscience of a Hacker as a reference point for the experience of being autistic.

Fact is, I am as sick of autistics and others reacting to autism (both the cognitive style and the official diagnosis) as if it were nothing but a kick in the teeth as you are of developers and tinkerers reacting to Apple products as if they were nothing but a kick in the teeth.  And the thing is, as you are right to imply, the overlap between these two worlds is significant.  You wrote:

But Apple is not the government. There’s no mandate to buy an Apple product except the call of excellence. And if you think the average persona on the street doesn’t recognize both the ups and downs of buying into an Apple ecosystem, you’re eyeing them with the typical nerd myopia, looking down your nose with the same autistic disdain you cultivated in high school. Turns out the internet you helped build as a sanctuary ended up a great place for normal folk, too.

Let me explain a few things here.

If myopia and misplaced disdain are ill-advised reactions, if they’re bad ways to react, then that’s all they are.  They’re just bad.  Bad for you, bad for me, bad for autistics and non-autistics alike.  There’s nothing special about autistic disdain and nothing typically nerdy about myopia; both are equal-opportunity shortcomings.  Since they are things we cultivate or engage in though, they’re fair game for criticism.  We can choose not to be myopic or disdainful.  We can’t choose not to be autistic, though many use up far more energy than most anyone ever realizes, working far harder than they should in order to hide, deny, and cover up their autism—because thanks to attitudes like yours, they feel they have no other choice.

So if there’s an autistic community in tech—or if tech itself is an autistic community—and that community feels threatened by the invasion of other-than-autistic folks into the first sanctuary they’ve been able to build in all of recorded history, then what that means is that they, we, are human.  It means we have normal fears and insecurities.  It means we are normal folk, Joel.

Just like you.

And maybe that’s only what you were trying to say.

So why do so in a way that delivers an actual kick in the teeth to autistics from inside the closing paragraphs of an otherwise sharp, hilarious, and much-needed piece?  Why say it in a way that scapegoats what you call “autistic” when autism may well be what makes tech the magical realm it is—in closed ecosystems like Apple’s and in open ones like linux—in the first place?  Why undercut the people you claim you’re trying to encourage by bringing up our neurology as a tag for our all-too-normal shortcomings?  Whose favor and good will are you courting, really, and what inspiration for “coming generations of tinkerers and engineers” do you leave behind with a mixed message like that?

What kills me is that the useful parts of the message you’re putting across—that it’s self-defeating to simply accept and bemoan what we are handed, and that the rules of the game aren’t going to be changed by anybody but us—are exactly what I’ve been trying to get across on this site.  I’ve been writing for just a few months but as I said it’s been over a decade since I started looking to tech as the context in which autism was going to first join the mainstream.  And simply by being a tech journalist, you’re reaching far more people whose cognitive style is identifiably autistic than I likely ever will from here.

But here we both are.  And to the extent that autism is what got us to this party, Joel, I say we dance with the one what brung us.

Item

Once in the cockpit of his F-11F though, Peewee Cobb’s whole character changes. The instant his hands and feet are on the controls, he’s as fast as his aircraft and as powerful as its armament.  He has superb reactions and eyesight.  Is rated superior in rocketry and gunnery.  Can outfly anyone in his squadron, including the Lieutenant Commander who leads it.

Item:  An acquaintance reports that a woman he has worked with is in person quiet, charming, and sweet, yet also confusing.  Her signature quirk is a shrug which comes frequently but seems neither to punctuate anything in particular, nor to be in response to anyone or anything that’s been said.

Some of the work they’re involved in gets hashed out and coordinated not in person however but online, via text, in listserves.  “In a listserve,” her observer notes, “this woman is a predator that takes no prisoners.  The same person in a different medium becomes a different person.”  He interprets the shrug as “some sort of tip-of-the iceberg evidence of the turmoil underneath,” and goes on to speculate that without the “analog signal,” the nonverbal back-and-forth of which the shrug is a part, “Instead of the tip, we get the Iceberg Whole.”

Item:  Another woman, a friend of ten years, becomes my partner in a long-distance courtship which is conducted at first largely by email.  As would be expected, new dimensions of her personality become available to me, and yet in person some of them remain largely unavailable.  We recognize these dimensions as being a “text-only persona,” and speak of her as such.  This persona becomes a third person in our courtship, and later, in our marriage.

A decade on, we become part of a far-flung online posse that’s in touch throughout the day and finds the experience so valuable that it migrates to a new social software platform when the first becomes unreliable.  Occasional discussions arise around the novelty and the pleasure of relating to each other in real time, via text-only personae.  Some find socializing this way to be more compelling and rewarding than relationships away from the keyboard have been for them, ever.

For some, even “text-only persona” doesn’t seem adequate to describe the experience.  In part as an exercise in geek humor but also to some extent in earnest, the phrase “text-based life form” is floated as an alternative and retains some currency.  Many in this group identify in fact as misfits, but these are not underachievers.  They’re professionals, climbers and rising stars in their field, coalesced out of a pool of attendees and presenters at annual conferences.

These text-only personae and text-based life forms then, the unlikely inhabitants of the Iceberg Whole—have they been here, quiet beneath the surface, all along?  There’s now a means for them to converse with one another, at any rate, a means for forming communities and coming to self-awareness—for only the first time, arguably, since the invention of text 5,000 years ago.  Or were the Icebergs Whole present prior to the creation of the written word?  Were they perhaps responsible for the creation of the written word?  How about for the creation of the internet, this other-than-analog means of communication that’s bringing the written word on a par with the spoken word—in terms of interactivity and real-time involvement—for the first time, ever?

Sure, the first use of writing was for keeping tax records and warehouse inventories—much as the first use of computers and the internet was to facilitate the interests of the powerful.  Yet culturally, along with the rise of computers, we’ve seen such a turnaround in the fortunes of the “geek” that most people under forty have no awareness that as recently as the 1970’s, being labeled one was about as empowering as being outed as a homosexual in Eisenhower’s America.

And now?  Yea, though the verbally gifted, the extroverted, outgoing tips-of-the-icebergs have overrun Twitter and Facebook and the rest of the internet with incessant inane chattering, surely it’s still the geeks, the Aspergian Tribe, the text-based life forms who built the joint and maintain it, those who are native to it, sometimes more familiar with its hacks than with those of analog reality, who are the ones who need the internet’s other-than-analog means of expression in order to recognize one another, experience themselves as a community, and maintain this tide of good fortune so recently come their way.

He’s a cliché now but even three decades ago a shy, geeky, pencil-necked kid who turns predator when faced with a cockpit full of gauges, buttons, and switches was still little more than a figure of fun in a book about real men—at best only a bitter-comic promise of possibility.  Now we see he was a proto-video gamer, and millions of shy, awkward kids have not only torn up the scenery in first-person shooters from beyond Ensign Cobb’s wildest dreams; they’ve done so as part of a community—which as they transition into their working years forms the basis for a social network potentially every bit as useful as the sports- or fraternity-based Good Old Boys’ versions to which they might formerly have had limited access.

In doing so they are making good on their lineage—as a group—for perhaps the first time in human history.  The same goes for those leveraging their text-only personae for professional networking.  How far back this lineage goes is anybody’s guess; it may reach back well beyond the paleolithic.  It’s a point I keep coming back to, that these people represent the oldest and most secret of all secret societies; at least throughout recorded history, its members seem not to have even known one another.

While it’s always an iffy proposition to imagine that we, yes, we in our lifetimes, are straddling a cusp that marks an epochal change, it does seem that after what may have been millennia in complete or relative silence and isolation, the arrival of the internet may mark the beginning of a re-membering, a calling-home of the children for the sort of minds who brought it into being.

Such a homecoming could well take centuries more to play out, but something Icebergian may be rising.  Those who set their store by the tip-of-the-iceberg and the analog signal will find it easy to see this rising as some Rough Beast whose hour has come round at last; wars are fought over just such matters of perspective, and for those who are paying attention this war is already being waged—and on more than one front at that.  What we are likely to see most of, however, is more and more adults whose text-only personae have grown up with far more opportunities than ours did.  Where that leads us, we’ll just have to wait and see.

I want you to know that my thoughts are very much with the family of your friend whose autistic child needs supervision literally twenty-four hours a day; your friend whose autistic brother has been institutionalized; your friend whose autistic sister lives with her aging parents and will find it all the more difficult to get by on her own when they are gone.  Your friend’s family—or perhaps you advocate for many families, as part of an organization—has been wrenched from the familiar.  Their time, money, and attention, scarce anyway, run all the shorter. Hopes, dreams, and expectations most take for granted are altered or denied to them.  They’ve been called on to love someone, a child of their own flesh, who seems so very unlike them, and so unable to return their love in any way they’re prepared to recognize.  Too few know, or want to know, what it’s like.  I get that.

Here’s what I think you don’t get—and what I’d like newcomers watching both sides of this discussion to entertain:  that the autistic spectrum is far, far larger and more widespread in 1) the number of people who occupy a place on it, 2) the breadth and variety of behavior, appearance, and experience by which it presents itself, and 3) the reach and scope of its influence on humankind’s cultural evolution, and perhaps even of its involvement in our biological evolution and in the evolution of our consciousness itself, than has yet been considered.

I ask that we all entertain the notion that the vast majority of those who occupy a place on the autistic spectrum—in its entirety, not just the most segment of it that the DSM finds reason to concern itself with, including many who are diagnosable, but many more who are sub-clinical—are functional, contributing members of society, whose contribution as a group is far out of proportion to their numbers.  True, as the world stands today, many of those included on this full spectrum might well feel frightened, ashamed, or offended to learn there’s anything about them which has to do with autism.  I lay much responsibility for such reactions at your feet for having promoted your own experience of others’ autism as the standard from which all of us should take our cues.

The big picture, in short, is not about you or your perspective.  The experiences you’re familiar with, however painful, are not thereby privileged to stand for the whole.  They do not privilege you to speak for the entire spectrum, or to define it as only pathological, or as smaller or less significant than it may be.  Above all, the people who should be defining autism are those who have it—and yet over and again, such people are told—by you—that they cannot be autistic because they have imagination and a “theory of mind,” are too articulate, too insightful, too empathetic; too rich in qualities that are reserved, in your mind, for others.

In this context, we both know, the elusive and long-sought cure for autism becomes a highly charged issue. While I am all for alleviating burdens on family members of the profoundly autistic, I would ask all involved to consider a possible contra-positive.  Remember that in the long sweep of Homo sapiens’ presence here on Gaia’s Green Earth, civilization not only hasn’t been around for more than a blink of Her eye—it also seems to be something of a fluke, besides.  We don’t really know how it got started, or why, or who was responsible, or why it happened when it did—or what keeps it moving forward into our own future.

So.  If autism had somehow been prevented at its genesis—and my assertions above are accurate—then the possibility exists that we would all still be living la vida paleolithic, sitting around campfires—assuming fire would be tamed—in front of caves that would feature blank, painting-free walls.  Some may find that last sentence confusing or lacking in sense; if so, I direct you to Michael Fitzgerald’s Autism and Creativity, or Norm Ledgin’s Diagnosing Jefferson, or any number of other sources which explore the lives of prominent contributors to civilization in the context of evidence indicating that these people do, in fact, belong on the autistic spectrum.

I ask you, moreover, to consider that these people’s accomplishments were achieved not in spite of the fact that they were to varying degrees autistic, but rather because they were to varying degrees autistic. Remember that the autistic are those who lack the common sense, who don’t pick up on “how things are done,” who don’t receive the received wisdom.  If they (or we—I’ll go ahead and out myself) are condemned to re-invent the wheel, for example to learn social interaction as a foreign language, to painstakingly back-engineer it by observing how nonautistic folks interact, then we have a skill set and a perennially fresh, outsider’s perspective which others—you—lack.

And with that skill set and perspective, we are not only re-inventing the wheel, we are also inventing new ones, new ways of doing things as well as new things to do—including, perhaps, back in the day, fashioning that first contraption involving an axle and … a wheel.  You look around today, anyway, and you’ll see an awful lot of talented auto mechanics and mechanical engineers on the spectrum.

All of which is cold comfort, I realize, to your friend whose child may never learn a trade or be able to support him or herself.  To suggest otherwise would be to do to her what’s done to others on her behalf, by those such as you—imposing your perspective on those who value the diversity autism presents and represents, insisting that we see the world from within the same limits as you do.  You are welcome to that perspective. The work at hand, however—as it has been from time immemorial—has to do with expanding limits and possibilities, not restricting them.  That work, that effort, of making the world bigger rather than smaller, you are welcome to join as well.