Open Society

For decades, we were told that nearly all autistic people mostly have a low level of intelligence  - a low IQ.  This is a big part of being diagnosed with a 'learning disability' or 'intellectual disability' (shortened to LD or ID) This was based on a misunderstanding of autism, and a misunderstanding of which IQ tests work for us.

Then, there's how we measure IQ for autistic people.  We'd often been using the wrong tests, it seems.  Using a Raven's test, the IQ results for autistic people are way higher than we'd realised, for many.   Here's a chart where people realised the error.  Bit technical, so feel free to skip this explanation:  Four sets of bars.  Each shows a different IQ test.  First two bars in each group of four is the results of female and male autistic people.  Second two bars in each group of four is the results of female and male non-autistic people ('controls').The first three IQ tests showed a whacking great difference between autistic people and the non-autistic ones.  But look at that Raven's test.  Hardly any difference at all.  Have we been accidentally putting a lot of autistic people into the 'intellectual disability' group when in fact their IQ is pretty normal?

Neurodiversity and Disability Justice, taken together, are indeed celebrations of who we are and how we exist in the world. They are also movements rooted in lived experience, which ask us to understand and engage with the many ways we relate to our bodies and brains, inside our own minds, and in social context.

We have protests to stage, driven by the fuel of our righteous anger. We have speeches to make, written from the soaring pleas of our individual and collective trauma, and our wildest dreams of joy and freedom and love. We have cultural narratives to rewrite because they really do hate us and they really will kill us, and if we’re going to rewrite the narratives, then there’s no reason to hold ourselves back from our most radical and defiant rewritings. We have autistic children who need us to support them as architects of their own liberation against the schools and clinicians and institutions and police and prosecutors who would crush and destroy them. We’re going to need our anger and our public celebrations of stimming and our complicated, imperfect, messy selves for this long and hard road, because we need all of us, and all of our tactics and strategies, to keep a movement going and ultimately, to win.

But we can’t possibly be committed to the long-haul work of liberation and justice — the freedom work, the community-building work, the creating-alternatives work — without completely rejecting the false promises and mythologies of respectability politics and its cousin, “civil discourse.”

Respectability politics didn’t save me then, and they won’t save our community or movement now or in the future either. Believe me, I understand the need for day to day survival. If wearing a suit versus a t-shirt and jeans will make a difference in whether my advocacy for/with a friend or client works, of course I’ll wear the suit. If using certain academic/professional field-specific terminology will help an audience understand an argument I’m making, of course I’ll use that terminology (so long as it’s not something I find inherently dehumanizing). If I need to be careful about not dropping the word “fuck” during a job interview (which we all should strive to not do), of course I’ll be mindful of it.

Our movement, however, needs nothing of respectability politics. Accepting — conceding, surrendering, submitting to — that will only erode our movement until it crumbles entirely. Respectability politics is what’s gotten us into reliance on foundations and nonprofits, and elected officials and bureaucrats, and policies and programs that only benefit the most privileged and resourced members of our communities at the direct expense of the most marginalized. Radical, militant anger — and radical, militant hope, and radical, wild dreams, and radical, active love — that’s what’ll get us past the death machines of ableism and capitalism and white supremacy and laws and institutions working overtime to kill us.

Anger is a necessary rhetorical and strategic tool.

“stop telling people not to be angry. anger can absolutely be transformative. none of our movements would happen without it. anger can help reveal what is most important to us and give us a kind of clarity that few other emotions can. anger is fire and fire is powerful. we can channel anger in useful & accountable ways.” — Mia Mingus

I do not believe in even attempting to appease the impossible, asymptoptic standards of respectability politics and (white, abled, cis, masculine-centric) professionalism simply because such attempts will always and inevitably be doomed to fail.

Lilian Aluri, #RevUp Voting Campaign Coordinator at the American Association of People with Disabilities cites two related ideological beliefs that discourage and prevent disabled people from voting. One is the notion that disabled people shouldn’t be allowed to vote. The other is the idea that voting processes should be at least somewhat difficult and exacting, as a way of ensuring that only the most informed and committed citizens vote. “This belief hides a very pernicious idea of who deserves to vote,” says Aluri, “and is rooted in barely masked racism and ableism.”

“Data voids are a security vulnerability that must be systematically, intentionally, and thoughtfully managed.” Michael Golebiewski of Microsoft coined the term “data void” in May 2018 to describe search engine queries that turn up little to no results, especially when the query is rather obscure, or not searched often. In Data Voids: Where Missing Data Can Easily Be Exploited, Golebiewski teams up with danah boyd (Microsoft Research; Data & Society) to demonstrate how data voids are exploited by manipulators eager to expose people to problematic content including falsehoods, misinformation, and disinformation. Data voids are often difficult to detect. Most can be harmless until something happens that causes lots of people to search for the same term, such as a breaking news event, or a reporter using an unfamiliar phrase. In some cases, manipulators work quickly to produce conspiratorial content to fill a void, whereas other data voids, such as those from outdated terms, are filled slowly over time. Data voids are compounded by the fraught pathways of search-adjacent recommendation systems such as auto-play, auto-fill, and trending topics; each of which are vulnerable to manipulation.

Data voids are not unique to search engines; they occur on social media platforms, too, where search is typically limited to information hosted on that particular platform. Golebiewski and boyd emphasize that there is no “quick fix” for data voids. Instead, they urge search engines and content creators to work together to anticipate and identify risky data voids, and to fill them with quality content. “Data voids are a security vulnerability that must be systematically, intentionally, and thoughtfully managed.” Golebiewski and boyd first introduced data voids in the May 2018 version of this report. Read it here.

So what you get is what researchers call a “data void“: people who know anything about the history of Europe, immigration, etc. don’t talk about Kalergi, because he is insignificant, a figure most notable for the conspiracy theories built around him. But people using the conspiracy theory talk about Kalergi quite a lot. So when you search Kalergi Plan, almost all the information you get will be by white supremacist conspiracy theorists. These bad actors then use the language of critical thinking to tell you to look at the evidence and “make up your own mind.”

Things used to be much worse up until a few months ago, because if you watched one of these videos, YouTube would keep playing you conspiracy videos on the “Kalergi Plan” via a combination of autoplay, recommended videos, and personalization. It would start connecting you to other videos on other neo-Nazi theories, “race science”, and the like. People would Google a term once and suddenly find themselves permanently occupying a racist, conspiracy driven corner of the internet. Fun stuff. Due to some recent actions by YouTube this follow-on effect has been substantially mitigated (though their delay in taking action has led to the development of a racist-conspiracist bro culture on YouTube that continues to radicalize youth). The tamping down of the recommended video conspiracy vector isn’t perfect, but it is already having good effects. However, it’s worth noting that reducing the influence of this vector has probably increased the importance of Google This ploys on the net, since people are less likely to hit these videos without direct encouragement.