1. Notes on autism: Medical terms can bleed into popular usage. About a decade ago, it was “OCD”. Merely tidying a bedroom would lead to a person to say, “I’m totally OCD.” This a joke, but one that conceals genuine anxiety.
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2. Similarly, we now speak about being “austisitc”. I’ve met women who speak, half jokingly, about “being autistic” as they once spoke of “having OCD”. This is because they picked it up in the media. Women are very unlikely to have autism.
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3. On the flipside, “autism” or “autistic” is used as an Internet insult for anyone who is too obsessive or pedantic about a particular subject—or who breaks established social or Internet etiquette.
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4. The term is an excellent insult/joke because it accurately captures a certain type of overly literal and pedantic style of argument and engagement on the Internet. But it also contains a deeper truth, which is that our technological would makes us “autistic”.
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5. I mean this in the sense that the person who obsessively plays Candy Crush Saga, plays on their phone on the train, plays a video game, goes on Tinder etc atrophies their social skills and becomes a monomaniac. In this sense, technology turns everyone “autistic”.
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6. The constant jokes conceal a universal fear that we have all turned “autistic”. It is also connected to the nature of a democratic society where “sociability” is seen as a sign of health. The more democratic a society, as in the US, the more conformist that society is.
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7. There’s a great fear of not fitting in, and the “autist” is the figure who does not fit at all. Hence the democratic society medicalises the idiosyncratic. A person who is out of whack must be “autistic”. The non-pathological term, the eccentric, is not used.
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8. Equally, there is little room for the lonely genius—such as Nietzsche or Schopenhauer—who must be retrospectively diagnosed as “autists”. But having your own view or your own perspective is not the same as being overly literally or having little theory of mind.
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9. The cry “autist” is the cry of a democratic society where people hide anonymously online to be an individual and say what they cannot say among the mob. As their machines make them increasingly “autistic”, they still demand uniformity.
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10. Hence we look to the medical model. People “have issues”, “need to work on coping mechanisms (see: ‘cope’)”, are “autistic”, or are “mentally ill”. Character, individuality, spirit, and soul are eliminated in the dmeocratic society, which is only interested in efficiency.
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