State Enforced Autism

If compliance is demanded from day one, what is one to do? The cameras are everywhere. Cameras waiting in pockets.

If a misstep in public social interaction or with bad actors means a reputation nuke, let alone a Gallows invitation, how should one proceed?

You can laugh all you want about those so fidgety when it comes to interacting and talking funny. But it seems the stakes are a little different nowadays. It seems those laughing haven’t felt the patch updates.

How absurd to think about XMPP and auto-deleting messages, and yet the tabloids whisper presciently, how this could be your personnel leaking, dug up later to cement your position on the chain. It is effectively illegal to be a man; you are already an outlaw waiting for an asinine conviction.

Perhaps it’s better off to never send a message then, knowing it can be stored and used for narrative twisting. Perhaps it’s best not to share much of anything, unless you like metadata analysis to pinpoint you, your location and, if too much of a threat, your eviction (sponsored by Palantir).

When every step and movement is recorded since your birth, what else but merge into the mask?

At a moment’s glance so we have an impromptu paparazzi clan etching into the web one’s mistakes; mobs of iPhones smearing your face across in its miscalculated drunken takes. You never know what’s the next McCarthyian scare waiting, however benign your current timeline is looking.

Of course you’d say you’re autistic. It’s the only out.

The other option is to walk about the minefields and pretend they don’t exist.