(I’ve been tossing this back and forth trying to rectify a few problematic details, so that the analogy is as clear and helpful as possible)

\begin{TheSecondPart}

Alternatively, imagine yourself as a Briton, sightseeing by car in Canada or the United States (I could’ve flipped this and made it an American in the UK or Australia, but never you mind that). In each country, and even within a country, you’d expect some difference in the kinds of roads and the kinds of traffic you encounter. And indeed, rush hour on the 95 in NYC, the 95 in Boston, the Northway in Saratoga and the Transcanadian in Quebec are radically different experiences (I’m pretty sure a Bostonian driving an Explorer and a Quebecois in a Renault are actually antiparticles of each other). An ordinary driver deals with this sort of adjustment by first getting as well-informed as possible about the rules, roadsigns and quirks of the locale, and then using caution and intuition until she gets the hang of things. But for someone with Asperger Syndrome, this is a potential nightmare–kind of like learning to drive from scratch.

(***DISCLAIMER: I have not actually done this, nor have I read the account of someone who has. I’m merely inferring based on what I know. More important than the literal hypothesis is the analogous implications for other situations.)

One of the fundamental problems of AS is limited ability to adapt and to tolerate change. A related problem is ability to predict the actions of other people, especially strangers. Driving on a crowded highway in an unfamiliar and unfriendly location, or wading through a crowded reception hall where people are pushing and shoving their way up to the food tables, is a bit like how someone with no social skills feels in a group conversation. You can’t seem to pull out into traffic without some asshole flying over the hill doing ninety almost clipping you in the process (and then giving you the finger). People will unexpectedly cut you off, slamming their brakes, or come riding up on your ass waiting for you to move aside for their sake. Or you forget that the guy opposite you will make his turn the instant that light turns green, expecting you to wait, whereas back home that kind of stunt would get someone killed (in Massachusetts it’s actually necessary in places to steal the right of way if you don’t want to wait forever).

Anyway, getting back to that British guy, who has been waiting for the last two paragraphs to make a left onto Washington ave. He’s an Aspy, and he’s starting to get anxious from the waiting, and when he gets anxious he’s even more of a klutz than usual. Finally, some kindly old daughter of the revolution stops to let him through. As quickly as he can, he pulls out into the street–just in time to get broadsided by a black Explorer coming the other way.

Now why did that happen? He couldn’t see the black Explorer because of the traffic jam on his side of the street, but shouldn’t he have anticipated it? Perhaps he figured everybody was stopping for him. The nice lady in the Camry was. Perhaps he forgot to take the usual precautions because he was so on edge. Or perhaps his mind–with its limited ability to multitask–was too busy between processing the rest of the situation and reminding itself every five seconds that it’s okay in America to drive on the right side of the road. For, to drive in America, he has had to forcibly ignore the rules of the road as they stand in the UK (where he was 100% accident-free, mind you).

Traffic, like socialization, is a delicate balance between order and chaos. Stoplights and signs impose some restrictions on the choices of drivers, but even assuming those rules were truly black-and-white (in practice, all traffic behavior is probabilistic), second- and third-order effects of the smallest disturbance reverberate on the highway, causing motorists to react in an unpredictable fashion. And some of the finer details are rarely followed correctly in practice (like who gets the right-of-way at a 4-way stop or an uncontrolled intersection if three cars arrive at once). So it becomes, again, discretionary. You gauge the speed of the other cars as they approach; you stereotype the drivers from their choice of automobile; and you proceed with the head-games. Frequently the order is determined just by who’s the biggest jerk and who is feeling magnanimous. Sometimes two drivers wind up in synchrony, both unable to determine what the other expects.

These are just the sort of games you wind up with when you throw strangers together. Suppose you came into the situation expecting (from long experience elsewhere) that it was all predetermined. Suppose you weren’t even perfectly clear on the meaning of the red octagons? What rule of operation could you possibly deduce from the resultant behavior, except perhaps pseudo-randomness? How does one adapt to this sort of thing? For some of us, it’s a mystery. For others, it’s less than a mystery, it’s a reflex.

(And for what it’s worth, I consider myself an excellent driver. I just don’t want to move to the UK.)

\end{TheSecondPart}

Last night I found myself in a frustrating position. My diagnosis came up in conversation with one of my closest friends, whom I have known for most of my life. I’m not at all shy about discussing it, but for some reason he and I never have before, and I was having a hard time explaining the situation appropriately to someone with little or no knowledge of medical disorders both psychological and otherwise. To make the situation even more delicate, he has never been diagnosed with anything, but as a kid he and I went through a lot of the same type of issues (we met because our parents were acquainted through the district’s special ed. program). In explaining the situation, I didn’t want to rock his world. But it’s in my nature (and one of the better parts thereof) to be blunt about such an important thing.

\begin{TechnicalDefinitions}

Asperger Syndrome (AS) has existed as a diagnosis only since 1994, when it was included in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM-IV. But its namesake, Hans Asperger, had identified the same population half a century earlier in his studies of so-called “little professors”, talented and highly verbal youths with symptoms quite distinct from what would come to be known as autism. In the years between, such children were diagnosed inconsistently or not at all. Only in this century has the disorder become familiar in medical practice.

As for what it is, Asperger Syndrome is a pervasive developmental disorder – a condition that begins in early childhood and causes multiple areas of the brain to develop in unusual ways, leading to a permenent abnormality of overall funcition. PDDs are often characterised in terms of their location on the “autistic spectrum”, a more or less continuous arrangement of the different PDDs according to the severity of their impairment of language and social skills – impairments for which autism is famous (it has been suggested here [dead link] that there is a bigger underlying correlation between the mind’s need for order and predicability and the likelihood of difficulty dealing with certain situations; but it is not yet clear how that explanation fits in with the peculiar developmental pattern of PDDs, particularly the sensory abnormalities).

In fact, classic autism lies in the middle of the spectrum – many autistics lead productive careers and lives, having learned how to compensate for their disabilties. At the far end of the spectrum is childhood disintegrative disorder, a heartbreaking condition in which seemingly normal children can regress to the point of being entirely nonverbal, cut off from the world. At the other end are PDD-not-otherwise-specified (NOS) – a catch-all diagnosis for cases that may not fully qualify as anything more specific – and Asperger Syndrome.

There are several definitions for AS, and they differ on some details, but all agree that the core features include social cluelessness, narrow but intense interests, and speech and language peculiarities. Other frequently associated traits include perseverant or repetitive behavior, problems with empathy, sensory hypersensitivities, motor tics and general uncoordination. These symptoms can add up in a number of different ways, but certainly not the least common is in the guise of a stereotypic “supernerd”. In fact, a significant fraction of self-described geeks and hackers probably have AS.

\end{TechnicalDefinitions}

\begin{Discussion}

From what I’ve read of the literature, my case was pretty typical. As a youngster I was both physically clumsy and socially inept. I was terrified of open flames, fireworks, lightning, tall rooms and buildings, and the buzzing of insects. I got into trouble frequently, my handwriting was too slow and too sloppy, and I couldn’t focus on schoolwork. I saw three different therapists–physical, occupational, speech–to fix, among other things, my coordination and my stutter. I was extremely forgetful and rarely at attention. And yet, they kept telling me, I was very, very smart. Maybe it was my incessant blabbing about [insert geeky subject]?

Whatever it was that’d caught their attention, their reaction was to give me lots and lots of tests. On these tests were new and interesting things – more difficult math, bigger words for me to spell – and I got to take them at my own pace. It was like a puzzle game, a game that I kept on winning, until at last I hit the grand prize: advanced placement and other concessions from the school district. About that time I also received my new, state-of-the-art diagnosis, and began taking ritalin for my attention problems. From then on, I knew I was winning big, at least with academics. Socially I continued to lose abominably for another eight years or so (then I discovered chaos theory, realized that what I was attempting was hopeless, and stopped trying. Things have gone fairly tolerably since then).

Asperger patients – “aspies” as my ex likes to put it – walk the line between the realm of autistics and that of everyone else. In some ways I think this makes our sense of empathy all the more powerful, once the basic social skills are learned, because we can relate to both populations. At the same time, we bear the emotional burden of knowing we’re just inches away from normal yet can’t quite seem to fit in. And whereas true autistics rarely overcome their dislike for being touched, we can and often do, only to realize how hard it is to find an outlet for our sexuality (because we suck at meeting people). Thus it is a frustrating and emotionally impactful condition. And I have struggled until now to put a face on it that is universally understandable. This morning, I hit on the perfect metaphor.

Suppose, for a moment, you live in one of those tiny border countries in Europe – let’s say Luxembourg – where absolutely everyone is bilingual, speaking both German and French (I’m going to assume they don’t have their own language, though I’m not 100% certain of it). And suppose the local highway departments are a little lazy, so they decide to write all the road signs in just one language, and they’re not consistent about which one they use. It’s all the same to them… kind of like Spanglish. Anyway, drivers from anywhere in Luxembourg don’t have a problem with this. Even most of the French and Germans aren’t bothered by it. The department heads figure, Europeans are such talented polyglots, they’ll figure it out.

Next, imagine a carload of visiting Italians and another carload of visiting Americans. The Italians have been studying French since grade school, but none of them knows any German. Unlike French, its roots aren’t latin, and as a result they have no intuition for it. They can barely even pronounce it. Meanwhile, a little ways down the road, the Americans are stuck at the border while unhelpful customs agents laugh at their attempts to make coherent statements in anything other than their native tongue. Unfortunately, they all chose to study Spanish in high school, and they all got bad grades.

See any connections? The Americans are like autistics – shut-in (or in this case out), utterly unwise to the ways of the world, with delayed verbal language and limited communicative faculties. Because of the language barrier, they lose all the benefits of the world, and the world loses all the benefits of their thoughts. But the Italians are like people with AS – they have made it into the foreign country, where their ignorance can do substantially more damage to themselves and to fellow motorists.

They can read half the signs – corresponding to the speech and reading/writing abilities of someone with AS – but they haven’t the slightest idea what is written on the other half of the signs. These are the unwritten rules and unspoken signals of society. You may not realize it, but you absorb phenomenal amounts of information from them. People who can’t decipher them are much more apt to get lost, ticketed, arrested or injured in a collision than the bilingual natives. Other people pick up on this naivete, and are able to identify them as outsiders. But they’re so tantalizingly close to being on track, they don’t want to have to stop for help with the directions. Real men don’t need that. “I could’ve sworn that highway entrance was right around here somewhere… maybe it was that thing marked all in German?”

More on that later.

\end{Discussion}

Is depressing. Idle discussion of bird flu, Al Gore’s new movie, and the new Muse album make for one bleak cocktail, but all of our technological and societal advancements only serve to make things worse. As someone pointed out, quarantine situations were less meaningful when the economy was smaller, with less vital systems, and most moms worked at home anyway. Comet impacts are unlikely, and EMP attacks on the US power grid aren’t feasible for even a well-funded terrorist group – but pandemics are clearly possible and, considering the Bush administration’s environmental policies, polar melting seems all but inevitable at times. Civilization is too busy with its IT addictions and large-scale political convulsions (like the new cold war of American hegemony against pan-Islamic extremism) to remember its duties to the planet. Not to mention the weighty inertia of democracy, with all its bureaucratic and partisan friction, apt to come back to bite us in the ass. Should we all just get it over with, declare the United States a failure and distribute ourselves among the growing economic powers of central Europe?

*sigh.*

And of course, when the fall comes, regardless of the severity of damage to infrastructure, those left (be it thousands, millions or billions) will have to endure the same old setbacks (more or less). The recession in the west might take a century to clear up. Because things don’t just need to be rebuilt. They need to be re-engineered. We’ve very nearly finished proving to ourselves why our present methods of metabolising the Earth are self-defeating. Of necessity it will (at last) be a sin to blight the land and sea and atmosphere and otherwise repeat the mistakes of industry as we have known it to date, but even now we barely know what we could put in place of that, and we can’t implement it until everyone (i.e., Big Oil) understands and willingly obeys the restrictions. That kind of social contract does not appear to be enforceable by a government that has previously enforced its opposite.

Worse, we’ve no reason to be sure that such an untested system is enforceable at all – communism wasn’t, and it seemed like a great idea on paper too. From what I know of it, I believe sustainable economics is too immature to tell us yet how, or if, humanity can survive such a sweeping change of mentality. It requires what one of Frank Herbert’s characters referred to as “true long-term planning” – in this case, an economic strategy that necessarily gives the proper weight and consideration to future losses associated with catastrophic system failure. If such a system existed, the President would know that the attentions of his “moral authority” are halfway across the globe from where they are needed most.

I don’t have a solution to this nightmare scenario myself, though I’m curious to see what Al Gore has to say on the matter. In any case, it isn’t just global warming, or acid rain, or resource exhaustion or the economic and social phenomena that fuel terrorism. It’s the sum of all of these. It’s hiding in the fact that the sun doesn’t supply as much power as we need in the forms in which we currently harvest it (even though we require only an insignificant fraction of the amount that regularly bombards the planet). It’s hiding in the fact that we’ll send our money halfway around the world to the regimes sitting on top of our fuel supply, unquestioning of their stability or ethics or the efficiency of what we’re doing, rather than invent new technologies that enable us to meet our own vital needs. It’s hiding in the fact that as our civilization gets smarter it shows no sign of getting any wiser, nor governments more equitable, nor culture less shallow. It’s hiding in our ability to ignore the anger roused against us among the people of nations we call friends.

Similarly I believe that any solution to the problems of the world – short of the unlikely event of our non-sustainable technologies getting us safely through space to new refuges, where we can continue our brazen metabolism – will be founded on more than just a set of green technologies. They must be woven together with new ways of thinking on a number of subjects. Words like politics and economics, themselves the irreducible source of so much that ails us, must become subserviant to words like design and information. Things of finite supply (such as energy and raw material and capital and the direct application of human intellect) must be weighed to reflect their finiteness regardless of current abundance or scarcity, while those of infinite supply (data, documents, mathematical truths and other fruits of the intellect) must be kept separate, and weighed to reflect that they are infinite.

For example: music and art are precious and invaluable gifts. We account for their preciousness, but ignore that they are invaluable. The record company that sells copies of a musician’s product is getting something for nothing. This becomes increasingly true as recording, mixing, distribution and advertising of the product become cheaper and easier. Piracy is one inevitable result of the new way of things – of metanomics, or neonomics, or whatever you’d like to call it – against which the old guard fights hopelessly. Shame on you, RIAA and MPAA, you can subsidize and patronize art, but in the long run you can’t commoditize it. What should we pay musicians for? Taking their asses on tour, of course. That, at least, won’t get old for a good long time.

Past science-fiction readings would seem to indicate that I’m not the first person to see things going this way either. The novel Turing, set early in this century, depicts a global culture and economic clime in which the internet has swept away regional politics and information, not physical product, is the overwhelming concern of business. While not yet possible, I do think the end of the world as we know it would at least offer its survivors the chance to think outside of the box we constructed for ourselves long ago. Small-scale communes, information economy and anarchistic-style government are just a piece of that.

Meanwhile, a tech job in Serbia is looking better every day.

DJ Recommends V for Vendetta. This is actually two separate recommendations. First, there’s the graphic novel by Alan Moore (award-winning author of Watchmen), a beautiful and witty dystopian epic. Then there’s the film adaptation by the Wachowski brothers (of Matrix fame), starring Hugo Weaving (of Matrix infamy) as the ultimate badass, complete with freaky mask. Political philosophy and the righteous kicking of fascist ass abound in both versions of this story.

DJ recommends Frank Miller’s Sin City. Also based on a series of graphic novels (which I have’t read), the movie tells the interwoven stories of a diverse cast of characters who frequent the underbelly of Basin City, where right and wrong have been turned upside-down by the interplay of Mob bosses, clergy, politicians, whores, mercenaries and the criminally insane. More than just a good action flick, Sin City is a groundbreaking aesthetic masterpiece that mixes computer graphics and realtime cinematography in new and interesting ways.

DJ recommends The Animatrix. A collection of short animated features based on a screenplay by the Wachowski brothers, The Animatrix fills in gaps in the canonical storyline of the Matrix films, primarily the human-machine war. Its visual depictions of both the real world and the virtual world are stunning.

DJ recommends The Animation Show. Produced by the celebrated cartoonists Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt, this series of animated shorts ranges from the beautiful and avant-garde to the merely hysterical. It features intro, outtro and intermission scenes with the white fluffy cloud-men from Hertzfeldt’s prize-winning “Rejected”. It also contains the Hertzfeldt short “Billy’s Balloon” and drafts by Mike Judge including the original “Office Space”.

DJ recommends the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Dune and Children of Dune. A whole lot better than that movie from the 70s, these two multi-DVD sets bring to life the human story of the Dune chronicles books 1-3. Granted, the low-budget special-effects seem dated even in the same decade in which they were made, and the set pieces are occasionally not so convincing. But the screenplay and actors are terrific. A great introduction to the series, especially for anyone who has struggled to get through those first 20 pages and on to the good stuff.

DJ recommends Casshern. Tired of movies that are bland, predictable, logical? Fear not. Watch Casshern and these problems will disappear in a flash of WTF?ness. Based on an anime from the 70s, Casshern tells the story of a dying world whose woes are further compounded when a medical experiment goes awry and gives birth to a mutant race. Features killer robots, supercharged heroes and villains, the Moonlight Sonata, and lots of strange philosophical moments in between the loud explosions.

DJ recommends Yellow Lights. Not only is this student-made film beautiful and funny, and thought provoking in that Breakfast Club sort of way; it also prominently features the various environs of my alma mater, where it was filmed by grads Kevin Tostado and Tom Kochem during their senior year. It represents one of the first efforts to document the character of Olin’s unique student culture in a work of fiction (here under the guise of imaginary “Isaac Newton College”), showcasing the differences but moreso the similarities between Olin and anywhere else.

This! This is what I want! All of it. This is exactly what I wanted for America’s youth. It’s fun, exciting (even for an adult), and it covers all (or most) of the important skillsets. God, what I wouldn’t give to be growing up now.

Also, this. Somebody showed it to me a while back. A bit narrower in focus than most of the above games, yes, but the people who developed Alice really did their homework. They did the user-oriented design thing and they made it very age- and gender-appropriate. See, Alice is targeted primarily to middle- and high-school girls. So all the would-be Mels of the world can be one step closer to their chance to stand up and be counted a geek.

Ah, the radiance of good design. *sigh*