So @williamshatner is still shitting publicly on autistic people. In this case he’s getting confused about different forms of electric shock therapy (ECT vs GED) and putting autistic people on blast who try to help him correct his mistake.
This gets the autistic people brigaded.
Autistic People: “help us we are being shock tortured in ways that violate UN torture rules”
William Shatner: “Carrie Fisher used shock therapy and this is basically the same thing.”
Autistic People: “no, please, that’s false and harmful.”
William Shatner: “how dare you?”
“Brigading” means he retweets the autistic person offering him updated information to his hoard of followers with a caption like “this idiot thinks I made a mistake” and that poor person gets hundreds of messages and threats and has to go private.
This would be bad enough if he didn’t parade himself around like some kind of ally to the autistic struggle.
But he doesn’t just take up space he helps Autism Speaks take up all the autism money, all while confidently pontificating about shit he doesn’t understand.
Accidentally did two threads about this, here are the receipts for the claims I make in this one.
Anyone sometimes just sit quietly for a moment and remember that episode of South Park where they talk about ADHD diagnosis and basically make fun of anyone who acts like ADHD is real?
How much harm you figure that did to us, overall? One TV episode, how far back did it set us?
(God, I remember when I used to think South Park was smart and funny. Sigh.)
South Park is "I'm a White Man with a White Man's Opinion" presented as some sort of animated punk rock.
Like every edge lord ever, they're not nearly as clever or interesting as they think they are. Pointing out imperfections is easy, supporting The Work is hard.
*sings* If you have ADHD you might be autistic too and not know it, and a lot of big ADHD accounts are often including Autistic symptoms in their list of what it's like to be ADHD.
Autism isn't a bad word or scary or anything, it's a valid way of being just like ADHD.
You: "All these ADHD instagram accounts really resonate, especially the ones talking about sensory overload and social challenges."
Me: "ADHD and Autism are frequently comorbid, and you may be surprised by what you learn if you read about today's Autistic culture."
You: "My ADHD meds have really helped me manage a lot of things in my life, but I still get really confused by a lot of communication with people even when medicated."
Me: "Communication challenges are often not merely the result of unmedicated ADHD, and it's worth learning why"
I've been in tech long enough to see this play out more than once:
1. Autistic person has an idea 2. Autistic person creates a startup 3. Autistic person succeeds, creates some profit 4. Autistic person retreats to advisory capacity as investors install a slick professional CEO.
Why do they do that? Because the profit in 3 proves that the business CAN make money, and now step 4 is about extracting every possible dollar it can possibly extract.
But like, what if we stopped at 3? Why isn't that enough?
y'all get that Skynet was capitalism all along, right?
That the invisible algorithms that shape our entire society were already running at full strength before silicon became a thing?
That we're living in a vast computational graph that treats us as resources?
"Skynet is an AI, you can't have AI without computers"
You can, "AI" just means that decisions are made by an inhuman system when you get down to it.
"Sorry, I don't want to foreclose on your house but the numbers require it" etc is algorithmic whitewashing a century ago.
Sure, computers reified the extant power structures and probably consolidated a ruling class for the rest of humanity's short future, but they aren't the AI. They're just the hardware that parts of it moved to.
Here's a Facebook post I just made, reflecting on some time in high school. I can't post alt-text for the whole thing, but it's an image of me today holding my HS senior photo. I write about how I didn't understand how appreciated I was.
Got some nice comments on Facebook. I've always been loved, and I never understood or believed it.
A lot of the people that loved me, though, also spent years standing by as I got mercilessly bullied by the worst people around.
So love and acceptance got complicated, for me.
I spent a long time feeling like if I wasn't being treated badly in some way then the person must not really care about me.
How toxic is that? How many other people internalize that their value is in enduring, not in existing?