Our Autistic World

ASD people run the show. Where are they taking us?

Martin Starr as Gilfoyle in Mike Judge’s ‘Silicon Valley,’ HB0, 2014-2019. One of my favorite characters in one of my favorite shows. Tangent: Judge, through comedy, is one of our true prophets and sages. His only equal in this regard (who tends to lean more into pathos) is Mike White.

(Note: if you’re in email and click on the headline of this page—Our Autistic World—it will link you to a better-looking format.)

Earlier this year in Houston, around the time people in the central part of the city were starting to go to places like grocery stores without wearing masks, I went to the H-E-B in Montrose. I walked in at the same time as a father-son duo, and as we shopped we moved through the store in a similar pattern and speed, so I was often in close range of them. The dad was a Gen-Xer about my age. The kid was a teenager, I’m guessing around 16.

The kid was a lot bigger than his dad. He seemed excited and sort of stunned to be out in the world. As they walked up the aisles, the teen relentlessly held forth, loudly and with a real sense of intellectual confidence, on topics related to what they were seeing on the shelves: he threw out granular facts about cheese production in India, the properties of low-calorie sweeteners, the immorality of disposable diapers. He also, in an extended non-sequitur, kept circling back to something about fuel systems. His dad went along with it, quietly and methodically affirming his kid. He looked kind of exhausted.

I am making assumptions here. I’d bet my left leg that the teenager was on the autism spectrum. He may have until pretty recently been considered Asperger’s, or, high-functioning autistic (“Aspies” was the one-time affectionate term), but now everyone with any level of this neurodivergent condition is considered by the clinical world to have ASD: autism spectrum disorder.

Let me slip into a kind of semantic cliché that also happens to be true: some of my closest friends are on the spectrum; some of my extended family members are on the spectrum, and some of the most brilliant and creative people in history were (and are) on the spectrum. As a longtime culture critic, I’ll contend that some of the best art, music, filmmaking, and more has been created by ASD people, and god knows that many of our most accomplished inventors and tech people have been and are ASD minds. Given what I understand about my brain, my husband’s brain, and our family histories, I think if we’d had a kid, that kid would likely have been on the spectrum.

How does ASD impact our world now, our discourse, and our government and medical policy-making? Because we all live in an increasingly tech-dominated paradigm that is swallowing us whole. Especially our younger generations—digital natives who have never not been dominated by screen time, gaming, and social media.

The nuts-and-bolts, inventive part of the tech world beckons ASD types. (Not the venture capitalist dude-bros. I mean the actual architects.) While the vast majority of diagnosable ASD people are notably handicapped by this condition in a world that up to this point has been shaped by neurotypical people, functional Aspies thrive in the tech industry, and have shaped that culture, which is shaping our whole culture. You don’t have to be an avid watcher of Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley to know what I’m talking about. (My favorite-ever performance of an Aspie is by the late actor Christopher Evan Welch, as Peter Gregory— a sort of Steve Jobs/Bill Gates/Peter Thiel composite who had savant pattern-recognition power.) These days, what happens via tech demands constant upgrades in almost every sphere of life—whether you personally spend much time online or not. Try getting a flu shot without a smartphone.

Here’s the thing about ASD people, even high-functioning ones. They can be rigid, obsessive, often dogmatic, in need of structure, and they are extremely literal. Here’s what’s most consequential to the resonance of the culture they have created through the dominance of tech and social media: they have terrible difficulty recognizing and understanding social cues, i.e.: they can’t read the room, and they can’t access a kind of mirroring empathy that allows fluid and meaningful emotional connection in real-world settings. (This has nothing to do with their emotional capacity. It just means that theirs does not find a rhythm with others’.)

Just watch a Mark Zuckerberg interview. The guy comes off like a robot who, when on the spot, is carefully recalibrating every second of his speech in order to not short circuit. That’s something you find with ASD.

If an ASD person is intelligent and knows it, this real-world setback isn’t a setback at all online, or in tech. There is a common, and I think cultivated if not encouraged arrogance in tech culture (and also, by the way, in IDW and atheist-rationalist circles; these all overlap); they have been telling themselves that their brains (if not characters) are superior to the brains and wisdom of all the people who throughout history have better understood and illuminated what makes humans and communities hold together, care about each other, and function. ASD people can seem impatient with the kind of emotional warmth and scope that gives life meaning for so many, that acts as a North Star for most of humanity even when we keep screwing things up.

There’s a reason Mark Zuckerberg seems to not understand why Meta and what it promises is so terrifying to (awake) neurotypical people, who can see how this vision of a totalizing transhuman existence spells the end of empathy and human connection. He cannot see how damaging his social media companies have been to the mental health and compassion of not only kids, but to entire communities, if not the entire Western world. He does not get it. He does not seem to want to get it. The arrogance of high-functioning Aspies, at this point, is a feature, not a bug. (Look up Curtis Yarvin.) Forgive me for going here, but it seems like Elon Musk, as a self-described Asperger’s person, seems to be the only massively successful and famous one who keeps trying to figure out how this kind of brain function is affecting humanity in the long term. It’s like his purported desire to buy Twitter is meant to act as a corrective to Zuckerberg (and Dorsey) and the rest of them, and the tremendous damage they have caused and will continue to cause. I know a lot of you will think this is an absurd amount of credit to give to Musk, but I sense his concern is real.

Social media and most of our most beloved and popular platforms, games, and apps are built by people on the spectrum. Obsessive message boards and online life are heavily populated by spectrum types: they prefer living online, for obvious reasons. Social media and its algorithms map closely onto the brain functions and preferences of spectrum dispositions. Facebook, IG, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, dating apps, etc., etc.—most all of them invented by, coded by, shaped by, administered and often even moderated by people on the spectrum. Spectrum people have strong opinions, they have political stances, they have their own brand of “moral clarity,” which can often manifest as a (morally disinterested) moral relativism.

From the National Institute of Mental Health:

“Across the CDC surveillance sites, an average of 1 in every 44 (2.3%) 8-year-old children were estimated to have ASD in 2018. ASD is 4.2 times as prevalent among boys (3.7%) as among girls (0.9%). ASD is reported to occur in all racial and ethnic groups.”

Here’s the thing about our very online lives, and the thing about how so many of us increased our online living throughout the pandemic. We stepped even further into an autistic world, that by default rewards behaviors and thought patterns and traits that are ASD. The more time we spend online, the more we grow dogmatic, rigid, literal. Arrogant. Obsessive. We are losing empathy. We are shorting out. We are Zuckerberging ourselves, without the practice and IQ he has, and it is making us miserable; it is making our young people anxious and mentally ill. Move fast and break things, indeed. ASD brains are 2.3% of society, yet their brains are calling the shots for the other 97.7% of us who are desperate to change course, to avoid catastrophe, to head off a civil war.

We have to deal with this. Or not. We can just not deal with this, and give up on humanity as we have ever known it, and let all our shit continue to deteriorate into I don’t know what. Into one giant heaving disembodied avatar, subsisting on numbing medication, violent games, and porn, with incurable depression and a massive anxiety disorder—the ultimate collective disease that a metaverse both creates and “cures.”

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