![]() Lost in this ongoing heat death are the autistics, who suddenly find themselves like Bigfoot without a forest. ![]() The algorithmic convergence brought about by Google, Facebook, and the past decade’s consolidation of the internet careened us into a continental shift, with generic SEO fodder and tired clickbait replacing the web’s belt-unbuckling barbecue buffet with the equivalent of a gruel-and-trucker-speed glove-box brunch.įor a time, Twitter achieved what I think “peak internet” can achieve when it’s at its best: the ability to make autistics of us all. The megacorp takeover of every independent outlet, blog, platform, site, forum, and heck, form of the Webosphere has led to a stultifying sameness, as unappealing and bland as it is desperate for our attention and money. There is a sense, among those of us who have been online long enough to receive permanent and irreparable psychic scarring from Goatse and the like, that whatever it was that made the internet that brought us Goatse and the like is now dying, and that that, perversely, is sad. Today’s internet, to borrow from the late, great David Berman, feels like a room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling. It was, as I’m sure you now know, doomed. Here we were, speaking in the shared language of Brass Eye sketches and Achewood comic strips, peeling back the cheap plaster society slaps onto our autistic armature, and being our authentic selves in ways we rarely could offline in the “real” world.įor a young autist with a voracious appetite for the new and the obscure, it was an education, it was a bar brawl, it was a party. There, in DMs and threads, with people I knew to be off-kilter capital-S strangers and pet-topic enthusiasts of all stripes, I began to whittle away at the great gnarled stick of diagnosis and otherness, until I found the hint of the shape of what I’ll call my “autistic self”-one shaped largely by a surrender turned acceptance, and a certain freeing of the habits and hubris that non-autistic society had conditioned me to repress and reject. Skewing slightly older than me, my new friends were truly shaped by the early net. This community was made up of people I’d found by way of the comedy, art, music, humor, and modes of thinking that I’d been introduced to in my online adolescence. I did not really begin to come to terms with my autism diagnosis until my mid-to-late 20s, and it wasn’t until I was shin-deep in Twitter that I found what I’ve come to consider my autistic community (hello, Chloe!). ![]() It was an education, it was a bar brawl, it was a party.
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