Multifarious Threads

Sociological Hyperawareness

The Socioeconomic Dimensions of Software Privacy on Android and Windows

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Big Tech’s indiscriminate data-harvesting practices are an ethical outrage in and of themselves, but systemic social inequality determines who is most affected by these practices. Microsoft’s and Google’s operating systems are installed on low-priced devices, but users pay with their data instead. (I focus on Microsoft and Google, rather than other companies like Facebook or Amazon, because you can avoid using Facebook or Amazon, but you can’t use a phone, tablet or computer without an operating system.)

Apple has made commitments to protecting users’ privacy, but Apple products have a relatively high entry cost. The cheapest MacBooks cost around $1000 new, and that’s just in the United States. New iPhones are similarly expensive, even with costs being distributed with a payment plan. Apple’s prices are even more prohibitive in other markets. MacOS, iOS and iPadOS can’t be run on non-Apple devices unless you go the Hackintosh route. In contrast, you can get a Windows PC or Chromebook for a few hundred dollars. Windows itself isn’t cheap, but the cost of the licence is built into the cheap PCs it’s installed on. That’s how Microsoft gained its market dominance in the first place: it licensed MS-DOS, and later Windows, to multiple computer manufacturers. Android phones are similarly affordable. Unfortunately, Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft, have used their desktop and mobile operating systems to gather large amounts of data on their users. In the Global South, Android – and its rapacious data-collecting practices – rules. People who use Android devices as their sole means of accessing the internet are a captive audience for Google and device manufacturers that also install data-harvesting apps. Android Go, a lightweight version of Google’s flagship operating system, is explicitly geared towards people in lower-income countries.

To be fair, technically inclined users can install Linux on just about everything, but that requires the knowledge, experience and interest to install an alternative operating system. If you just want a computer to browse the internet, write documents, send email and use social media, the jump to Linux may be an insurmountable barrier. People can also buy used iPads, Macs and iPhones, but buying used devices is riskier than buying new ones, especially if they’re out of warranty. If you don’t have a lot of money, the consequences are higher if you make a risky financial decision. In most cases, the only clear choices are Windows or Android…and their concomitant privacy violations.

I’ve avoided Windows as a primary operating system for nine years. I flatly refuse to use Android. I exclusively use Apple devices, but if I couldn’t afford to do so, I’d install Linux on my computers and an alternative operating system on my phones. My avoidance of Android and Windows is a product of financial privilege and technical knowledge. Many other people typically have no other choice but to use Windows or Android if they can afford to own their own devices at all.

Coverage about the privacy violations that Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon have focused on the ethical problems of unaccountable data-harvesting on its own, but haven’t examined this problem using a socioeconomic lens. This obscures one of the most significant problems with these companies’ use of customers’ data: people unable to opt out are going to be their primary sources of information. This is a form of technological class exploitation. Billion-dollar companies make obscene amounts of money by selling the data of people who can’t afford to opt out, or don’t know how. It’s a classic feature of unregulated capitalism, where profits always come before people. Low-income users may not buy first-party applications, high-end Windows versions or top-of-the-line phones, but they have plenty of data. Most of these captive customers will also put up with advertising if that means they can keep in touch with the people who matter most to them.

Technology should be affordable, accessible and inclusive, but users should have a reasonable expectation of privacy, too. Unaccountable exploitation by rich and powerful tech interests has caused poor and working-class people to pay for this accessibility with their data. Tech writers portray the shift from Android to iPhones, or Windows to Linux or Mac, as a painless transition without financial consequences, but that’s far from true. Jumping ship may be extremely risky or downright impossible. More coverage of unethical data-gathering practices must take into account the individual, regional and global socioeconomic factors that force people to use Android and Windows.

The slipperiness of “I”: emergent properties, personal mythos, and co-creative development

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I’ve talked before about having psychiatric disabilities and being an abuse survivor. Today, I’m going to go into a bit more detail. This hasn’t been easy to write, but I think it’s a story that needs to be told.

It’s honestly a misnomer to say “I” in the first place; it’s more for your convenience than it is an inner truth. There are a lot of ghosts in this machine. I have a complex, intricate personal mythos; though I am very private about what that entails, it’s still a central component of my experience. I don’t feel comfortable with any of the “official” diagnostic labels that come close to what I experience, but there’s some similarity to Internal Family Systems. I’d say that the experience is more complex than that therapeutic model encourages, but it’s vastly better than anything that immediately evokes thoughts of Sybil and Three Faces of Eve.

I said this when I was 19:

It is difficult to define me in a few words; I see myself as a fissiparous, separate collection of ideas consolidated into one whole, forced to work together because of physical unity. In my mind exist multitudes of plots, characters, turns of phrase, denouements, orchestras with rousing crescendos and subtle diminuendos, the decisions and revisions of daily life, and the constant analysis of information. I’ve likened my brain to a large music-box or production factory; the ideas and influences of this world enter me, and I take them and combine them through my perception and interpretation, and take the universe and make it into [my own].

So many “psychiatric disorders” are extreme responses to a disordered, chaotic, and often mean world. To imply that the person experiencing psychiatric disability is the one who is “disordered” lets abusers, dictators, and warmongers off the hook. Our lives are intricately linked with others’. It’s important to understand individual factors, but it’s also vital to remember that we exist within systems: families, towns and cities, friend groups, countries, Earth at large. My lack of a contiguous “I”-narrator is in part a response to the circumstances in which I was brought up. I don’t—can’t—believe anything with absolute certitude, because I know my entire universe can be ruptured at any moment. It gets even more intense when you add in generational trauma: slavery, the Middle Passage, Jim Crow, and centuries of tilling the land without being able to reap the results of one’s own handiwork. This is not a stable foundation on which to build a singular sense of self, but my brain mitigated this problem by allowing for varied and co-creative senses of self to exist instead. I’m not anti-psychiatry, but I am vehemently against seeing people’s mental health as something extricable from the contexts in which people grow, live, work, and play.

A contiguous sense of self is an epiphenomenal emergent property anyway, not a concrete reality that can be used as an absolute benchmark of sanity or insanity. Because it’s all people know, they act as though it can be used to delineate what is beneficial and what is harmful. That’s not to say that there aren’t consistent tendencies, traits, and behaviours I can label as mine, but they’re the traits of a microcosm. There are plenty of other creative people who “contain multitudes,” pace Walt Whitman.

On a meta-level, it’s already pretty fucking weird that a collection of atoms can perceive itself at all. Thought itself is an intangible process generated by electrical impulses and chemical baths washing over our brains. I could continue the reduction to the sub-atomic levels: quarks, photons, and the like.

If it weren’t for the way my cognition is arranged, I don’t think I’d be alive to be telling you about this today, or if I were still alive, I think my quality of life would be greatly diminished. Having an internal support team has allowed me to pull through difficult traumas and create a better life for myself. This is deeply important to me and I am horrified by narratives that pathologise, flatten, and diminish my interiority or its positive effects on my external presentation. It’s especially galling when those judgements come from other neurodivergent people who seem to think that only some forms of cognitive difference are acceptable. Anxiety, autism, and depression are OK to talk about, but nothing else is. This is not OK. There is no point in trying to win the Oppression Olympics. Some animals are not more equal than others.

I don’t typically talk about it publicly because I have no interest in ontological debates, especially when people drag in the medical model. I’m also profoundly uncomfortable with having people apply inaccurate, minimising, and hurtful narratives to my experiences, turning a complex, multi-dimensional topological space into a two-dimensional figure or stripping it into non-contiguous pieces separate from the context in which they originally existed. It’s particularly painful to see people who know me well do it. I don’t want people to delve into extensive analyses of my personal mereology. I just want them to listen and not try to create their own—ultimately inaccurate—stories that they think supersede my own.

I refuse to allow people to denigrate me for having internal mechanisms that allow me to survive and even thrive after years of abuse, discrimination, marginalisation, and oppression. It’s time to take my power back by telling my story. Our story.

Existential aggression: the connective tissue of bigotry

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Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism and xenophobia are forms of existential aggression. Existential aggression is behaviour that indicates that people don’t deserve to live or must be second-class citizens by virtue of what they are. Note that I said what they are, rather than who they are; this kind of aggression is based entirely on categorical groupings and not on individual traits.

Existential aggression is a term I’ve coined to refer to patterns I’ve seen repeated over and over again, but with no clear, agreed-upon name to describe the interrelationships between these forms of ostracism. Bigotry and prejudice don’t seem to capture the suffocating, annihilating force that is existential aggression. Eliminationism comes close, but not all existential aggressors necessarily want their victims to die. (One could argue, though, that they want their victims’ self-concept to be altered to fit their criteria for being a Real Person, which is possibly a form of death.)

Existential aggression is rooted in essentialist thinking. Essentialism, at least within a social context, is the idea that everyone exhibits transcendent, immutable traits that define their personhood, value and position within society. Authoritarians tend towards essentialist thought to define who should rule and who should serve…or be eliminated, for that matter. These attitudes result in a Manichaean worldview in which the forces of good must defeat the forces of evil, and goodness and evil are defined by people’s existence, rather than by their behaviour. I’ve discussed the relationships between Platonism, essentialism and authoritarianism in “The Problems with Closed Systems.”

Examples of existential aggression on an interpersonal scale include

  • Deliberately refusing to use names, pronouns and forms of address that a trans person has asked others to use
  • Referring to immigrants, especially undocumented ones, as ‘aliens’ or ‘illegal aliens’, in casual speech

Larger-scale versions of this phenomenon include

  • Refusing to grant legal recognition to LGBTQ people’s identities or relationships with other consenting adults
  • Directly allowing employers to fire people because of their race, gender, sexual orientation or disability
  • Xenophobic or disablist immigration laws
  • Eugenics, especially negative eugenics
  • Genocide

Far-rightists and their radical centrist enablers have their particular hobby horses of hate: religious fanatics’ fulmination about gay marriage and trans people using public bathrooms; so-called men’s rights activists’ rants about their inability to assault women with impunity; and white nationalists’ ardent desire to cleanse western countries of non-white people. That said, however, I suspect that the correlation coefficients between one form of existential aggression and another are not zero. Time and time again I see white nationalists expressing misogynistic, disablist, homophobic and transphobic views. Right-wing Christian fundamentalists may focus their ire on anyone who falls outside their idealised gender roles, but it’s not uncommon to see them haranguing about Muslims and undocumented immigrants. When you believe that there are some people who are less human than others, it’s likely that you may extend this reasoning to other groups, too. Websites where alt-righters and other hatemongers congregate are brimming with vitriolic attacks on all manner of people, from feminists to trans people to members of ‘weird’ subcultures.

These tendencies are not limited to the right, though I do think existential aggression is primarily the province of the right. I’ve noticed people on the left acting as though members of traditionally privileged groups are essentially bigoted, regardless of their own personal beliefs. A random white person may or may not be an ideological racist. European ancestry doesn’t make people automatically hateful. Having ancestors from continents other than Europe doesn’t make you automatically more credible or ‘woke’, either. Yes, white people benefit from systemic racism in the west, but it’s important to distinguish between social pressure and individual people’s behaviour and feelings. I’ve seen countless articles, tweets and Facebook statuses that imply that having a marginalised status makes you more enlightened. It doesn’t take much countervailing evidence to show this isn’t true. Ben Carson and Herman Cain wouldn’t be Republicans, anti-feminist women would be complete non-entities, and Milo Yiannopoulos wouldn’t have made a brief career out of terrorising other marginalised people. I’ll even make this personal and say that this applies to my own mother. My mother is a black Trinidadian immigrant who moved to the US in the late 1960s and spent the remainder of her childhood and adolescence in Queens. You would think that these demographic markers would make her an enthusiastic Democrat, right? Wrong: she hasn’t supported the Democrats in twenty years and is a Trump supporter. She likes Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly just as much as any other hardcore conservative Republican does. When my parents became evangelical Christians, they also became Republicans. I don’t think the assumptions made by people on the left about race and ideology are nearly as dangerous as those espoused on the right, but they’re still traps worth avoiding. People’s awareness of systemic oppression is dependent on their self-awareness, curiosity and attention to current affairs. Some people may sense that they’re being treated unfairly, but may not be able to articulate exactly why. Because they don’t have an explicit framework, either self-created, acquired or both, to explain their mistreatment, they may not use the correct ‘woke’ language du jour.

Existential aggression is dangerous because it focusses on people’s presence rather than their treatment of others. Simply existing is not a threat; mistreating others is. Be wary of any belief system that promotes existential aggression over good works.

Worst Practices: The Discrediting of Autistic Narratives through Pathologising Constructs

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The one positive of my neuropsychology horror story was the series of existential, epistemic and personal revelations that proceeded from it. I knew that after that experience, I had to move forward in rejecting the politics of shame and pathologisation and move towards a more holistic framework to understand myself and the way I gather and express knowledge. Since that incident, I’ve been thinking about how professionals’ ideas of autistic epistemology (people’s relationship with knowledge, how it is gathered, and the validity of that knowledge) and ontology (ideas about existence and what it represents) are rooted in the idea that marginalised people’s self-perceptions and -knowledge are intrinsically invalid because of who we are.

A few days after I received the letter from Beth Israel’s patient relations department standing by the neuropsychology department’s poor methodology, I came across some writing by the disability scholar and activist Alex Haagaard about how the voices of people with chronic illnesses are routinely discredited by doctors because these doctors have either consciously or unconsciously adopted an attitude towards marginalised people that renders their words unreliable. Their writing reminded me of some of my own ideas on how medical professionals discredit the self-perceptions of autistic people and treat us as though our self-knowledge is either non-existent or reliable; we are Hans Asperger’s ‘intelligent automata’, even if they may not directly refer to us as robots rendered in flesh in their reports. People who do not feel a fundamental tension between their self-knowledge and the ways others view them—the fraught relationship between the subjective ‘I’ and the objective ‘me’ that George Herbert Mead refers to in his work—will not appreciate the level to which this subjective/objective tension affects people’s lives. For people whose life is blissfully absent of this tension, there is a clear distinction between Normal and Abnormal, between truly human and monstrous. Furthermore, the tension that we feel is inherent to us, a flaw that must be corrected, rather than a reflection of the complex interplay between individual traits and social structures. It is a form of victim-blaming applied to people who find themselves on the wrong end of a power differential; if you’re not powerful enough to matter, your problems are your fault. You are the problem. (Incidentally, this is why I am generally indisposed to refer to neurodivergent experiences as being disorders instead of disabilities except in specific circumstances; being disordered implies that the problem inheres within the individual and exists separate from a broader context, whereas disability implies a more complex state of affairs in which people experience both internal disabling experiences and social disablement. It’s even worse in languages like German, in which disorder is translated as Störung, or disturbance.)

When your clinical standpoint requires that ‘disordered’ people must be discredited, then it is far too easy to reject or distort patients’ experiences. After all, our existence is a flaw in the human design. Anything we produce must be flawed by extension. This is magnified if autistic people also experience intersecting forms of marginalisation, like misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia or classism. The discrediting experiences that women, people of colour, low- and moderate-income people, and LGBTQ people encounter reinforce and magnify the disablism we face. People like me cannot be reliable narrators under this framework. The idea, for example, of a black, queer, disabled person being intelligent enough to question the underestimation of their intelligence and to question the idea that the methodology used to evaluate me would accurately describe my cognition, is unfathomable. Recognising that a black, autistic man was capable of being empathic would destroy the very foundations upon which his faulty framework of autism was based. After all, aren’t black men all brutes and autistic people unfeeling robots? Had I come into that office with the same level of education – at the time I was a semester away from finishing my master’s degree and had mentioned being interested in doing a doctoral dissertation – and work experience as a white, non-disabled man with unconditional male privilege, I doubt I would have received the same treatment.

This neuropsychologist had a clear ontological framework of Being Autistic: restricted interests, poor social skills, unable to have legitimate insights into one’s own intellect, knowledge-gathering processes, or background. This pattern of traits was his foundational definition of being autistic within the world. I suspect that he had an absolute, reified version of autism in which it exists as a solid entity with clear boundaries, rather than a socially constructed phenomenon or set of phenomena that is defined primarily for its utility, not its concrete existence.

While I refer specifically to a professional who was immured in a particular kind of thinking and applied it to me, this is certainly not limited to him. It’s the entire foundation of how autism is viewed within traditional medicalised practice. Please note that I’m not a strict adherent of either the social or medical model; rather, I view disability as a combination of social and medical factors. I admit that I am more hostile towards the strictly medical model than I am the strictly social model; I find the former profoundly dehumanising and Othering in ways I do not see the latter. I am generally opposed to models that view people as entities entirely deracinated from the social and cultural contexts in which they live, work and learn.

This systemic devaluation of autistic self-knowledge and existence has real, palpable effects: self-hatred, depression, anxiety, free-floating existential angst. They lead to a construction of an oppositional self-concept that internalises those messages. Whenever I think about my experience with this doctor and and other ‘experts’ like him, I fall into spirals of self-doubt, wondering if my perceptions can be trusted or if my memories are real. I start tearing myself apart, constantly trying to psychoanalyse myself in an effort to find out why I view myself the way I do. I feel a nasty chill running up my spine and a metallic tang in my mouth. I can feel my thoughts starting to scramble and introjected voices taunting me and trying to discourage me from scholarship and intellectual inquiry. I’ve had lifelong mental health struggles because of this kind of devaluation. I know I’m mostly talking about it from a theoretical standpoint here, but it goes beyond that. Remember that even the most abstruse academic theories about identity and selfhood attempt to address internal experiences and social structures that can and do affect real people.

If this happened to me, somebody who does have educational privilege and can engage critically with academic literature, imagine what might happen to someone else who doesn’t have those external markers of credibility.

On autism, early diagnosis and identity

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I suppose this is an unorthodox Autism Acceptance Month post, but so was my previous one. This is an expansion of a Facebook status I wrote about two weeks ago.

I have a difficult time relating to the accounts of late-diagnosed autistic adults who did not grow up with this label being used to marginalise, segregate and discredit them. I see so many accounts of unalloyed joy at being diagnosed with autism and having the diagnosis explain most or all of the difficulties they’d encountered throughout their lives. That’s not to say that late- and self-diagnosed adults don’t encounter oppression or stereotyping, especially after they receive a formal diagnosis and encounter stereotyping from misinformed practitioners, but that it’s of a different nature from what early-diagnosed people can experience. For me, though, it was a mark of Cain until I discovered the neurodiversity movement back in 2005 or so.

I was diagnosed before I started school and had my differences placed squarely within a pathologising framework. Deficits in social interactions. Lack of eye contact. Restricted interests. Deficits in personal organisation. I was wrongly thought to be intellectually disabled – to the point that a doctor declared that I would ‘never learn’ – because I was late to start talking, though this impression of me was mercifully very short. People like my parents and teachers would emphasise my weaknesses, either real or perceived, over my strengths. While I had two concurrent labels when I was at school – autistic (officially PDD-NOS and Asperger Syndrome) and gifted (I am not a fan of the word ‘giftedness’, by the way. I use it reluctantly to refer to an educational label and a neurotype, or a set of neurotypes, but the current language around it is not that great)- much of what I dealt with was pigeonholing, pathologisation and exclusion from opportunities that would have benefited me socially and intellectually. I felt like a ‘fake intelligent person’ because of my diagnosis. In fact, my methods of internalising and interpreting information were frequently treated as autism symptoms. I was forced to sit through boring classes that didn’t challenge me intellectually because ‘quiet hands’ and extinguishing ‘behaviours’ came first. While I did skip a grade and participate in gifted programming for the majority of my elementary- and middle-school years, I was still under-stimulated intellectually and often found myself disengaged from the general-education curriculum. There were also a lot of neurodivergent traits I had that couldn’t be explained by my being autistic, but made sense given my learning style, but people tended to subsume all of these traits under the label of ‘autism’ just because they weren’t neurotypical. My parents and teachers would often treat me as though I were a list of diagnostic traits instead of a person, and would ascribe stereotypes based on those diagnostic traits that didn’t actually match my own experiences or my internal self-perceptions. Most gallingly, my parents actually told me they understood me more than I did! I was wary of that statement then and I think it was utter nonsense now. If they’d truly understood me, I wouldn’t have severed contact with them nearly twelve years ago. 

I realised that I couldn’t attribute everything different about me to autism after going through something of a quarter-life crisis at the age of seventeen. I started rebuilding my self-concept to incorporate a more holistic interpretation of my cognition, though admittedly I was still struggling with internalised disablism and wondered over the course of two years whether I was Properly Autistic because I didn’t match the Asperger Syndrome stereotype. Some of this was because most of the literature I’d encountered on autism characterised it as a disability that primarily affected social interactions, even though social interactions were and are not what I find the most disabling, especially after the age of 14 or so. My social skills difficulties were contextual, not global. Compared to many of the accounts I read in books and on blogs online, I got off pretty easily socially. I’m not saying that social interaction was necessarily easy for me – it wasn’t – but it was easier if I was talking to people who understood what I was trying to tell them, which my parents frequently didn’t. They’d shut down if I tried to explain my reasoning for my behaviour and preferred superficial explanations that didn’t address the root problem. Somehow *I* was the one who was impaired for having complex interpretations of my behaviour, though, since they liked to pin anything they didn’t understand about me on the autism diagnosis. I remember arguing with my mother when I was 18 and trying to explain myself and having her tell me ‘You have Asperger Syndrome!’ as though it invalidated the content of my argument. My executive functioning issues are vastly more disabling; in fact, I find them the most disabling (and expensive) part of being autistic. I have a reasonably active social life and have an easier time making friends.

For a period in my mid- to late twenties after I became more involved in public disability advocacy, I moved back towards attributing all my atypical perceptions to my being autistic, even if I knew multiple autistic people who saw the world very differently from me. Much of this was from indirect peer pressure from late-diagnosed and self-diagnosed autistic people. I was using it as a crude, brute-force method to identify and categorise anything that seemed to separate me from the general public, even if *there was no direct evidence* that the experiences in question could actually be explained using an autism-centric framework. I also felt that I had to do this to be the Right Kind of disability advocate, even though I knew plenty of other autistic people who didn’t have the same Weird Brain Things as me; it didn’t help that I had internalised the idea that using other interpretations for it might suggest that I was somehow expressing some form of disablism for not using a framework that centred on disability. I just felt crazy and isolated during that period. It is painful to read back from blog posts and private journal entries from between 2011 and 2016 in which I explain aspects of my thinking as being part of being autistic when they’re not necessarily autistic traits in and of themselves.

I still think I’m autistic, of course, but I no longer feel comfortable treating it as though it is the sole explanation for my divergent thinking. More specifically, I think the diagnostic label is useful for me to identify specific supports for the issues that I find disabling, and it is politically useful as a framework to advocate for the rights of a group of people with somewhat related experiences who experience systemic marginalisation for their disability. This is different from internalised disablism or claiming that I don’t have a disability at all; it’s just that when I was growing up, I had a disability-centric narrative and identity imposed on me against my will. People who were diagnosed as teenagers and adults and encountered less pathologising narratives about autism when they found out about it are more likely to see a politicised disabled identity as something of a revelation. I won’t deny being disabled. I’m not a Shiny Aspie. There’s a difference, though, between denial and recognition of the complexity of one’s experiences.

Moving towards a more holistic way of interpreting my neurodivergence seems to be healthier for me. I can’t do to myself what people did to me when I was growing up.