Platforms are, in a sense, capitalism distilled to its essence. They are proudly experimental and maximally consequential, prone to creating externalities and especially disinclined to address or even acknowledge what happens beyond their rising walls. And accordingly, platforms are the underlying trend that ties together popular narratives about technology and the economy in general. Platforms provide the substructure for the “gig economy” and the “sharing economy”; they’re the economic engine of social media; they’re the architecture of the “attention economy” and the inspiration for claims about the “end of ownership.”

Source: Platform Companies Are Becoming More Powerful — but What Exactly Do They Want? – The New York Times

Via: The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

Sensory Flooding and the Roundabout Hypothesis

“New research finds that #autism isn’t just about the brain. If you dampen the overexcitement of tactile sensors outside the brain, suddenly the brain doesn’t have to deal with that flood of incoming signals. It helps anxiety & social too.

Source: AspergersAutismNews on Twitter

What’s even more interesting is that once this over-ramping of incoming signals happened, it directly led to an increase in anxiety. That makes sense. If your brain is dealing with lots of additional input, it’s being stressed. Second, that over-ramping of incoming signals also lead to social issues. Again, it makes sense if the brain is already swamped with sensory signals that it doesn’t have extra time to deal with facial expressions and relationships. So everything here is related.

Source: Tactile Sensitivity Autism and Neurons – Aspergers Autism News

But, what about if your brain takes in too much information at once?  The second photo shows a roundabout where there’s too much traffic happening from all directions.  Gridlock.  Now, nothing can get through.  (Well, maybe cyclists.  They can always get through somehow.)  But the rest of us, stuck, overheating, beeping horns or collapsed in a heap of despair, going nowhere.  Some autistic brains take in so much information that they can’t get any of it processed and sent on its way.

When it happens, our brains simply have to wait for the ‘traffic’ to clear.  Just adding more traffic to it won’t work.  More ‘traffic’ might be chatting with us, or trying to put a hand on a shoulder without our consent.  Or shouting at us.  Or making us stay in a busy, noisy place where the queue of ‘traffic’ waiting for our brains to process it just gets longer, and longer.  It might be more ‘traffic’ from our brain trying to work out how to speak, or how to understand non-literal language.

We need the traffic to stop arriving. Noise cancelling headphones help me. Sunglasses help, too. A quiet room without bright artificial lighting also helps. Wearing comfortable clothes so that there’s isn’t a constant traffic jam from the, for example, ‘Your socks are hurting you’ lane.

Find out what helps us reduce the ‘traffic’.

Source: Ann’s Autism Blog: Roundabout Hypothesis – a Guest Blog by Chris Memmott

People with ASD commonly experience aberrant tactile sensitivity: a seemingly innocuous touch, such as a gentle breeze or a hug, can be unpleasant or even painful (1, 2). In fact, sensory overreactivity is so common that it is now a diagnostic factor for ASD (2).

We therefore sought to determine whether somatosensory circuits were affected in ASD, and whether altered tactile sensitivity might contribute to other ASD traits. Our goal was to focus on tractable symptoms-somatosensory abnormalities-as an entry into these complex, heterogeneous disorders.

Together with a growing body of other research (_3_, _4_, _16_-_18_), our work highlights that peripheral sensory neurons have a major role in ASD and that selective treatment of these neurons has the potential to improve some developmental and behavioral abnormalities associated with ASD. We are moving toward measuring touch overreactivity in humans with ASD and pursuing modulation of peripheral neuron excitability as a potential clinical therapy.

Via:

One thing that short vote to impeach the president makes visible: the degree to which impeachment pits a diverse America of women, people of color, and immigrants trying to uphold democracy against a white, largely male past trying to use corrupt means to cling to power.

Source: emptywheel on Twitter

The Republicans who voted against were all white. Just two were women.  These Republicans voted to permit a racist white male President to cheat to get reelected in violation of the rule of law.

This is about a clash between the rising America and the past.

Source: A Diverse America Votes to Uphold the Constitution; A Largely Male White America Votes to Abrogate It | emptywheel

For that white male past to retain power, this impeachment makes clear, they need to abrogate the Constitution and join Trump in his fondness for authoritarianism.

Source: emptywheel on Twitter

Trump’s political movement is pro-authoritarian and pro-oligarch. It has no interest in preserving pluralism, free and fair elections or any version of the rule of law that applies to the powerful as well as the powerless. It’s contemptuous of the notion of America as a lofty idea rather than a blood-and-soil nation.

Source: Opinion | Democracy Grief Is Real – The New York Times

For this reason, I would suggest a renewed focus on MESH education, which stands for Media Literacy, Ethics, Sociology, and History. Because if these are not given equal attention, we could end up with incredibly bright and technically proficient people who lack all capacity for democratic citizenship.

The future of the nation and the world depends on an engaged, informed, and critically-thinking population. That means we need more than just STEM, more than technological advances, and more than high standardized test scores. We need MESH and civic competence as well.

Source: Forget STEM, We Need MESH – Our Human Family – Medium

“Move fast and break things” is an abomination if your goal is to create a healthy society. Taking shortcuts may be financially profitable in the short-term, but the cost to society is too great to be justified. In a healthy society, we accommodate differently abled people through accessibility standards, not because it’s financially prudent but because it’s the right thing to do. In a healthy society, we make certain that the vulnerable amongst us are not harassed into silence because that is not the value behind free speech. In a healthy society, we strategically design to increase social cohesion because binaries are machine logic not human logic.

Source: Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On – OneZero

We must work not only toward providing better security around student data but also toward _educating _students about the need to critically evaluate how their data is used and how to participate in shaping data privacy practices and policies. These policies and practices will affect them for the rest of their lives, as individuals with personal data and also as leaders with power over the personal data of others. Regulation is necessary, but education is the foundation that enables society to recognize when its members’ changing needs require a corresponding evolution in its regulations. And for those of us in academia, unlike those in industry, education is our work.

Source: Education before Regulation: Empowering Students to Question Their Data Privacy | EDUCAUSE

Via: 📑 Education before Regulation: Empowering Students to Question Their Data Privacy | Read Write Collect

To be a certified instructor in “Therapeutic Options,” one needs four days of training. That’s it. Four days to learn how to teach people maneuvers that kill and traumatize autistic kids.

Not once did anyone mention that maybe children shouldn’t be subjected to compliance training. It was a joke, and people like me were the punchline.

Source: Becoming an ABA Registered Behavior Technician Before Knowing I Was Autistic: Part 1 – Restraint Training | The Aspergian | A Collective of Autistic Voices

…flawed terminology, measurement and theory have all contributed to the mischaracterisation of autistic people as lacking empathy, to severely negative effect.

The myth of an empathy deficit in autism is now so well ingrained, that for an autistic volunteer to report they do not lack empathy is either to question the views of the large majority of medical and scientific professionals, or even to deny their diagnosis. As such, they may report empathy deficits even when they frequently experience empathic feelings.

Autistic people have described that they experience ‘…hyperarousal of the empathic system…’ (Elcheson et al., 2018, p. 189) or an ‘…intense, uncontrollable empathy…’ (Williams, 1998, p. 59).

Recent research has further indicated that autistic people may be more prone to object personification (White & Remington, 2019), suggesting that the autistic manifestation of empathy could not only be more intense but also more all-encompassing that the neurotypical model.

Source: Autism and empathy: What are the real links? – Sue Fletcher-Watson, Geoffrey Bird,

Via:

Related:

I updated “Bring the backchannel forward. Written communication is the great social equalizer.” with selections from “NeuroDiversity: The Birth of an Idea by Judy Singer”.

Computers as the essential prosthetic device for autistics?

Despite a common history of what can, with the wisdom of hindsight, be termed “oppression”, the limited social, networking, and organisational skills of people with AS together with their aversion to direct human contact, had prevented them joining together to form an effective movement to address their specific issues. All this changed however with the advent of the Internet. Computers are the communications medium par excellence for autistics. A significant number of autistics claim that computers mirror the way their minds work (Grandin, with Blume, 1997). By filtering out all the sensory overwhelm caused by actual physical presence, computers free up autistics’ communicative abilities.

InLv members regularly sing the praises of the new medium that allows them to have the form of communication they desire, while protecting them from the overwhelming sensory overload and rapid processing demands of human presence. For many, email lists are their first experience of community. Jane Meyerding, a member of InLv makes clear just how much autistics owe to computer technology:

Like a lot of ACs (autistics and cousins), I find myself able to enjoy “community” for the first time through the internet. The style of communication suits me just fine because it is one-on-one, entirely under my control in terms of when and how long I engage in it, and, unlike real-life encounters, allows me enough time to figure out and formulate my responses. In real-world encounters with groups—even very small groups—of people, I am freighted with disadvantages. I am distracted by my struggle to identify who is who (not being able to recognise faces), worn out by the effort to understand what is being said (because if there is more than one conversation going on in the room, or more than one voice speaking at a time, all the words become meaningless noise to me), and stressed by a great desire to escape from a confusing flood of sensation coming at me much too fast. (Jane Meyerding – Thoughts on Finding Myself Differently Brained, 1998)

As this statement shows, for autistics, computers are the essential prosthetic device, one which turns them from withdrawn, isolated individuals, to networked social beings, the prerequisite to effective social action, and a voice in the public arena.

Autistics compare the importance to them of computers with the importance of seeing-eye dogs to the blind. Martijn Dekker, who is the ‘owner’ of the InLv email forum, and a prominent autistic activist foreshadows puts it plainly:

For reasons obvious to our HFA/AS community, I consider a computer to be an essential disability provision for a person with Asperger’s. (8 Nov 1998)

Source: NeuroDiversity: The Birth of an Idea by Judy Singer