The Death of the Internet as a Haven for People with Autism
The Autistic Soul of the Internet Has Been at Death’s Door for Years. Its End May Finally Be Here.
cross-posted from: https://radiation.party/post/130898
My neurodivergent self is having a really hard time reading that article.
For us spectrum jockeys—avoidant, overwhelmed, and overstimulated as we are—community can be as slippery as the spectrum itself: something you surf along until you’ve slid straight through whatever you thought the end point was, before arriving back where you’ve always been, alone with your perpetually “other” self.
That’s the second sentence. And that’s all only one sentence. I’ve re-read it multiple times and I’m still scratching my head at most of it.
Anyway, I’m not sure I can relate to the sentiment that the internet was once more welcoming to neurodivergent people. I’ve never felt a sense of community online. It sure was a good tool for discovering new music, however.
I reject their entire premise. I've been on the internet since 1989, and the idea that the internet is for oddballs and outsiders might have been true once, but that ended in the late 1990s when AOL and Prodigy joined the internet.
Eternal September ruined everything.
I also agree that it hasn't really changed attitudes toward ND people. Heck, the first thing I thought about was how the Internet has always been fairly snarky and sarcastic; something a lot of other autistic people struggle with identifying which often leads to misunderstandings and arguments.
That’s the second sentence. And that’s all only one sentence. I’ve re-read it multiple times and I’m still scratching my head at most of it.
Yeah I don't think I have enough working memory to remember how the sentence started by the time my dyslexic neurodivergent ass has reached the end of the sentence.
It's unfortunately reading as word salad for me.
My experience with the internet as someone born almost the exact same time and place as the author was that once you found your space, it really was a great community. Finding that community was the difficult step, not as difficult as finding community offline, but certainly with more potential to stumble upon gore and grotesque imagery that I can still remember, 25 years later, thanks 4chan. Not much has changed in that regard, there's weird shit everywhere.
Given the authors relatively young age in the grand scheme of the internet, I wonder how much of the sentiment they're expressing is just pure nostalgia.
The internet did feel better back then. But so did life. Because I was a teenager with no real problems and no real sense of what was happening in the world.
The internet was novel and new, many of us felt like we were part of something, that we were building and creating something. Now the internet feels like it controls us, companies and corporations are building something that we must participate in whether we like it or not, lest we be left behind economically, socially, educationally, etc.
But it's all personal perception. Federation and decentralisation has changed my perception and I have a lot more hope for the future of the internet, it's feeling a little bit more like old times.
It really seems like the author is merely assuming everyone else’s experience was just like theirs…which is a huge pet peeve of mine!
I tried to make a TLDR
Thank you!
Yeah, I couldn't read past the first sentence/paragraph. I've got severe ADHD, though, so that's probably why the writing style was just too much for me.
Cool article actually. Even for non-autistic people, the internet was a better place before all the consolidation onto cancerous social media sites.
Man this resonated so hard. I think the author and I are approximately the same age so the narrative progression of their experience of the internet reflects mine so hard. I’d like to hope that the fediverse is in some way an attempt to reach back toward that, but the issue I see is that most of the applications that have been developed are aping the format of for-profit, ad driven, infiniscroll based engagement machines. The islands of self-contained niche interest are now few and far between and near impossible to discover because search is shit.
That said, I think some form of federated curated search is an interesting concept that may actually be scalable enough to be useful yet restricted enough to not be considered commercially viable and this attractive to SEO spam.
Anyway, this is my first comment on Lemmy, thanks for sharing this :)
I still remember every weekend during my youth when I would ask my dad to allow me to connect the LAN cable to my room's computer just to connect to the internet. I remember being stuck in the computer room at school when I had no friends in real life, even when there's no internet, in hopes to go online one day, just anything to keep me busy. But now the internet feels toxic, a hyperreality, a magnification of society's inherent traits, especially the non-autistics, and now even online feels about as bad as offline, even worse with its intense criticism of anything neurodivergent.
Get away from commercial social media. Chat services were always more helpful, and you don't have to deal with algorithms dragging you down. I'm on Matrix, IRC, and Discord, and in only communities that are relevant to my interests, academic, or autism centric. I browse Lemmy occasionally, but even it has the same pitfalls.
This is one of the reasons Lemmy exists.
I'm thankful for it. Reddit absolutely poisoned my brain for the longest time.