Capitalism & Autism

Preliminary Materials Towards a Theory of the Autistic Subject

Image Source: ChatGPT

(Possibly unnecessary) preamble

Hello, this is my first time writing in long-form for the public in almost two years. And so as I sit here now, out of practice, grasping for language to deploy, I am faced with the task of staging for myself a “new beginning” of sorts to my subscribers, as if it was 2021 all over again and I am being introduced to this app for the first time, unsure what it even means to present myself to the world as having something worthy of saying. For reasons that will become clear in a number of ways if the reader continues to the end, I have become ambivalent about the task of putting words online for public consumption, and so have, with some ambiguous degree of intentionality behind the behavior, been basically refraining from doing so. However for several reasons, both professional and personal, we are at the stage where the voice in my head saying “why not get back into it?” is getting increasingly persuasive, so hopefully it is the case that putting these words down is in fact productive and bears some fruit.

Obviously, many noteworthy events have happened since summer of 2024. Much of my writing from the early 2020s, I felt was a reflection of a period in which it seemed as if a vast looming specter threatened to destabilize social reality, the specter of digital technology and interconnectivity essentially coming to swallow whole what we previously thought of as quotidian “real life”, as well as the stable functioning of institutions. In 2026, we are at the stage where this has in fact happened.

Today, writing in some mode of cultural criticism or navel-gazing diaristic reflection around this question of one’s mood and how one adapts to technological transformations seems quite useless, as everyone already knows what has happened. Instead everyone simply wants to internalize the knowledge they need to adapt and survive.

When writing today, under conditions of automated production of “slop”, I feel self-conscious as I don’t necessarily want to demand attention from the reader that he won’t find deservedly earned, because part of this emergent strategy of adaptation that people are struggling to assimilate into is a ruthless pruning of unnecessary information to survive conditions of information overload. I cannot say that I have actionable strategies to assist in the short term to share in this particular article, as I don’t feel like I have a brag-worthy setup for harnesses or long-term memory for my agentic workflow to share in this post yet, nor do I have insider data from AI labs or policy makers or financial alpha on what is most likely to happen soon. On the deployable and technical side of things, I am also still trying to catch up. But nevertheless, it seems likely to me that there is value in an extended verbal reflection because at the end of the day, no agentic workflow will save you, if you haven’t already done some work to synthesize your framing mechanisms on higher levels for assimilating the life-world.

Final note of the introduction is that I want to give a shout out to Dylan Smith and recommend that the reader follow his Substack, he is a great friend who helped me develop some of the thoughts in this essay in dialogue together.

I. Mass Psychosis & Autistic Behavior

In their two-volume classic of continental theory Capitalism & Schizophrenia, Deleuze & Guattari famously described that the process of capitalism and advancing technology would culminate in a condition they called “planetary schizophrenia”. At this point, this prediction seems to have come true. No one knows what is going on and everyone seems to be going completely insane. Deleuze & Guattari were predicting — and positively anticipating — a period in which the complexity and volume of production (which in this case not only means material economic production as such but also production of speech, cultural artifacts, computer code) escapes any authority figure’s capacity to regulate and “overcode” it so that mankind retains in a stable social order oriented to centralized civilizational production.

As the term “schizophrenia” would imply (though it is critical to mention that Deleuze & Guattari clarify that they do not refer to the medical condition of schizophrenia as such, but rather an abstract philosophical concept they are developing with the same name), this sociopolitical state of affairs is also intensely psychologically debilitating and transformative to the individual. D&G are writing under the influence of Bataille, who used the motif of a decapitated man to describe humanity’s future state — as he put it, “man must escape his head”.

Rather than planned, deliberated activity constrained by a stable executive function operating across linguistic reasoning, activity criss-crosses along the various axes of the body, going “every which way” — on both a personal and social level. Today, we live in the “headless society”, where the demand of the anarchist faction — “no gods, no masters” — has become a fulfilled wish. Stable reference points of totemic master-signification such as God, the nation, “our democracy”, have become fallen idols. Figures in the position of world leadership have become crowned anarchs, giving no reassurance with their actions — Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Pete Hegseth, one could say all seem approximately psychotic in their speech patterns and inability to maintain a consistent narrative authority, instead shifting into a mode of keeping the public in terror with their unpredictable chaos. Almost certainly some of these people are abusing drugs, as are everyday Americans.

But on the flip side of this, Deleuze & Guattari positively described madness as revolutionary, empowering, transformative, and possibly leading to global liberation. The logic, common to the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, would be something like: madness is terrifyingly contagious, and it is also the case that the madman begins speaking his truth to the world, he feels as if he has no choice. Therefore when madness is unleashed, it creates a situation where people are spontaneously speaking truth to power, and the authority figure has no choice but to respond. Thus, capitalism, or put alternatively simply the power structure, invents complex strategies — fluoride in the water, insane asylums, all these people you encounter nagging you telling you to go to therapy — to downregulate the threat of madness.

Today, it would seem as if conditions are different. The daily environment of most Americans seems as if it is sadistically engineered to foment ambient psychosis. Whether your media environment is the cacaphony of digital culture stewed by engagement-baiters, trolls, memers, pornographers, or you prefer the constant doom-mongering and political polarization of mainstream news channels, you are either way under psychic threat. Drugs are being legalized and made widely accessible at a rapid pace, and it is now the case that anyone you encounter on the street may have legally entered a state of intense dissociation from their environment from strongly-dosed over-the-counter THC. Various psychiatric medications Americans have depended on are now experiencing supply-chain shortages as well.

What has changed to allow this state of affairs, where all around us, madmen run completely loose, with seemingly no threat to the capitalist-oligarchic powers that be? It is that we are all trapped within these psychic prisons today, the small rectangle of the phone screen, and the algorithmic ghettos it places us in. No longer will a madman deep in the throngs of insanity, raging at gods and emperors and the demons assailing him, satisfy his quest for psychic justice by bothering his neighbor or the man at the corner store with his rants and revelations. Instead he will make a social media account and begin venting. At this point, the algorithmic system has a method of downregulating the effects of his speech through cybernetics, to quarantine and prevent infectious spread, if need be.

(What’s even worse and more bizarre is that since the pandemic, “schizophrenic” writing itself has become the site of a kind of gentrification and primitive accumulation, in which authentic schizophrenics have been largely replaced by “schizoposting” as a trend and popular affect, often or even perhaps foremost amongst the capitalist entrepreneurial class. If you know what you’re looking for, it’s extremely easy to discern when a writer is genuinely in the throngs of clinical schizophrenia, as opposed to merely a performance artist, or a paranoiac, or someone who has been bitten by new age religion, etc etc. At this point though I have found that the genuine schizophrenics are almost impossible to discover through the algorithm on X or Instagram, though “schizoposting” is the norm. I can only regularly encounter genuine schizophrenics these days on Threads, where the algorithm is not as mature.)

But the purpose of this essay is not to discuss schizophrenia, but rather “autism”, which is today also experienced as a kind of contagious crisis. Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy has made it a major public health crusade to eliminate or “cure” autism, which he blames on various kinds of chemical environmental stressors. Simultaneously, discussion of “autism” in casual contexts is never ceasing. Everywhere you go, people will call themselves, others, people they passively encounter “autistic”, usually with a bewildering mixture of positive and negative connotations — usually “autistic” behavior is held as admirable in a strange sense, as if it constitutes a kind of strange advantage in life, even with a kind of romantic and alluring mystery to it, though it is still held as somehow deeply deviant, defective, threatening, and perverse. Therefore, it would seem like we could augment Deleuze & Guattari’s thesis by saying that, as capitalism and technology trends toward more chaotic complexity, it not only produces mass schizophrenia, but also mass autism.

After this sentence, I will stop framing the term “autism” with scare quotes as I have been doing, but the reader should understand that, similar to D&G’s interpretation of schizophrenia as a philosophical concept rather than a clinical criteria, I am not referring to autism as a medical diagnosis, but rather kind of a diffuse psychic phenomenon. But even beyond that, I do not accept that high-functioning autism is a legitimate medical diagnosis or social category whatsoever. Contra the RFKs of the world: I don’t want to totally speak out of my depth by completely discounting those, such as the author Tao Lin, who are attempting to document physical or biochemical factors they believe contribute to autism. I have not done a complete review of the evidence in this direction, so to dismiss it all without review would be arrogant. That being said, it seems plain to me that the proliferation of discourses and anxieties around autism is clearly in at least part a culture-bound panic, relating to the social behaviors of the youth — social behaviors that are entirely explicable as pragmatic adaptations to the environment, yet are pathologized.

The panic around autistic behavior reminds me more than anything of the notion of “degeneracy” in fin de siècle Europe. These days to describe someone as “degenerate” is a term usually said with a note of humor, serving as a kind of casual insult. but there was a point in time where this something said with morbid seriousness. Scientists and moral guardians in the late 19th century saw bright young men from good upbringings, who should have felt like they had the most to live for, instead waste their youth in the cities on absinthe and opium, and they theorized that the genetic stock of the race itself was de-evolving somehow. As ridiculous as it sounds today, this diagnosis of a deteriorating genetic line was taken seriously at the time. Do we not see a parallel to the state of young men today — many of the best and brightest preferring their eccentric hobbies, video games, Internet forums, other children’s toys they do not grow out of playing with — all the while (anxious authority figures feel) they should be more healthily oriented towards climbing career ladders, getting married?

The real point is that in our supposedly woke and politically correct age, this slanderous concept of “high-functioning autism” is still thrown around everywhere to tar all these young men who deviate from some barely-still-functioning (!) ideal of the normal, and it should be considered an obscenity — because the concept is not merely authoritarian but bound up from its origins with a genocidal project. Asperger’s syndrome takes its name from Hans Asperger, a pediatrician in Vienna during the Nazi period. Recent archival work — Herwig Czech’s research and Edith Sheffer’s Asperger’s Children — has documented that Asperger, far from being the benign protector of legend, was complicit in the regime’s child “euthanasia” program: he referred children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, where the disabled and “uneducable” were killed. His clinical writing distinguished the more promising children, whom he cast as capable of social integration, from those whose deficits he judged more severe. The diagnostic gaze that sorted children into the salvageable and the disposable is written into the category’s origins.

Today, not a lot has changed, because if some young man wants to, for instance, prefers to play military strategy games for four hours a day instead of watching Love Island or some similar trending show, or just scrolling the TikTok feed for four hours, he will be slandered as autistic. We are told that the autistic person has some defect in understanding social norms because, essentially he is retarded in some way, or so the theory goes, but are we so sure that the “normies” and neurotypical would be doing any better if they didn’t watch Love Island for three hours a day, then scroll TikTok for two more hours, then read some fashion columns and celebrity gossip? Do they have some kind of innate knowledge of what is considered socially normal at any time, or is it an act of continuous labor for them to repeatedly ingest the new daily dispatch on updates of normative expectations from the hive-mind? No one is necessarily so safe; anyone could fail to keep up and find themselves woefully out of sync.

The question is then, if this type of solitary orientation is considered so dangerous and deviant by society, why does it continue to proliferate, why do people lament that in the younger generation, it is beginning to feel like nearly everyone is developing some kind of autistic behavioral pattern, perhaps against their own will? We can go back to Deleuze & Guattari’s thesis that the complexity of undirected, headless technocapital processes creates the quality of schizophrenia. Autism then, we posit, (again understood as an abstract entity and not a medical diagnosis), is the other side of this — it is the kind of inborn defense mechanism which emerges against the chaos of techno-capitalist schizophrenia. Since the system is headless now, and prescribes no rules, no guardrails, the individual has to develop his own — to isolate himself, to apply rigid and obsessive behavioral patterns, to constrain his thoughts to think in strict logical pathways.

D&G described capitalist production creating the condition of schizophrenia through a process in which one becomes uprooted from local, traditional, familial environments and passes through one transformation after another, one ceaselessly “becomes” examples of other human types set in front of him, for instance through examples set by the advertising industry. It is precisely this condition that the person surfing the Internet has to avoid, as malevolent “influencers” will foster greed, envy, hysteria, and so on in the audience, who naively psychologically mirrors what they see in the screen, as is human nature. It is precisely the process of being socialized by the digital hivemind that the autist strategically realizes he must avoid, so as to not go completely insane, and thus lose his head entirely.

In an era of polymorphous con-artistry in which to be social is to be already vulnerable to infection, to lose a game of psychic defense before one has even taken in the playing field, the antisocial autist looks around at his peers who are being hooked into these types of maladaptive transformations, through participation in fads and sceneries and cybernetics, and finds a way to opt out, or to find a strategy which allows for playing the game without playing.

The autist is known for obsessive rule-following and adherence to logical norms. But we should not fall into the trap of imagining that the autist lacks creativity — he often traverses a vast inner world which could be regarded as schizophrenic as any anarchist psychedelic poet that D&G might behold. Rather, the logic and the rigor can be seen as the application of applying what D&G call reterritorialization as a defense against unanchored madness. Because the society no longer supplies guardrails sufficient for the subject to avoid toppling into madness, the subject provides his own, in analytical rigor and obsessive-compulsion. The subject may be alienated, but he is now free to embark on his own eccentric wanderings, secure in his self-containment and separated from the vast abyss by his own internal fencing and safeguarding sentries.

II. Confessions & Silence

The basic insight by Freud that inaugurates psychoanalytic theory is the discovery of the “talking cure”, or the realization that simply by allowing a patient to speak to a doctor about their innermost traumas in an honest and non-judging way, is, somewhat miraculously, capable of curing physical pains and symptoms. There is an explanation that: if a thought arises that the patient is unable to speak, then she is forced to repress this impulse. This repression creates tension within the nervous system, which in turn gets converted into physical pain.

This explanation, one can infer, must presuppose a background of a culture of confession, or a social world in which one regularly confesses one’s desires as a matter of course. This social expectation would seem to precede the institution of therapy, via the Christian ritual of the confession. Under a culture of confession, secrets are verboten, and the presence of a secret causes the subject a kind of inner pain that he has to discharge by revealing it. One imagines that this is a kind of triumph of civilization and not something that has always existed — in more barbaric ages, any stranger to anyone else would be cast in suspicion as a violent danger until proven otherwise. It would take time to develop a more elevated form of sovereignty in which every citizen is laid bare in front of an emissary of the sovereign to prove that he is not a danger, because he has nothing to hide. How many times during a given day do we encounter this demand on us, now outsourced to the crowd? “What’s on your mind? Come on, I know there’s something, why can’t you just say?”

What is somewhat astonishing to behold, is that we are now, after having thicker and thicker layers of therapy culture diffusing into daily life and applied to coax us throughout the past decades, to the point where we began to imagine there was no way out, a light at the end of the tunnel appears. Artificial-intelligence-augmented therapy, via the use of large language models, establishes a genuine revolution and liberation in what is possible psychologically, enabling new behaviors of camouflage and cryptographics.

What is precisely radical about LLM therapy is that it allows the subject to establish a dialogue in which he knows there is no one listening at the other end. Under the kind of thinking of Deleuze & Guattari, a subject is either neurotic insofar as he is able to capably assimilate into a dialogue with a cultural authority figure, such as a parent, a therapist, a cop, or a boss, or he is psychotic insofar as he refuses any such dialogue. Thus a prerequisite of being neurotic, or in other words, healthy and normal, is to enter the relationship with the authority figure in which one is able to confess one’s secrets away. But with an LLM today, one is able to instruct it to roleplay the role of the therapist, the boss, etc., as many times as one needs to practice for his dates or job interviews and so on.

Thus one can practice, in an antisocial fashion, the kind of relationship and dialogue necessary to fulfill a normative social function. And in the course of this practicing, one can confess whatever he wants, confident that the machine producing speech on the other end is a pure virtual simulation, creating the shape of language with no receiver on the other end to ultimately hear it. (And yet, however, the confessor is still dimly aware that there is some chance the confession sent to the cloud is ultimately read by a Palantir-administered police AGI surveying the population looking for dangerous anomalies — thus a trace of the old culture remains.)

Therefore, it is possible for an autistic (again, not in the clinical sense) person to radically secede from socially-produced linguistic reality, and still appear indistinguishable from ontologically socially-embedded subjects, through training himself on the machine-produced simulacra of such.

As a reminder, we are choosing to treat autism as an internally-sprung defense mechanism against psychosis, the type of psychosis which Deleuze & Guattari claim is the trajectory of liberation. In a sense, a psychotic person’s problem is that he is attempting to discover the outside of social reality, and thus get to real reality, the reality that actually exists apart from all this socially constructed bullshit we are wading up to our necks in. The issue is that this escape nearly always fails, and the psychotic person does not end up enlightened, but typically stumbles into a prison of delusion of their own invention.

The bias of psychotherapy is to insist that everything ultimately has to do with our parents, or another one of our intimate familiars. The classic psychoanalytic split between the ego and the id divides man into two — the self constituted by social reality, and in particular behavioral examples from the parent, and on the other hand, the animal self at war with it. But is it not the case that in the society of 2026, there are so many things the animal self is at war with in its quest for survival, which are not so simply interpreted as echoes of its parents?

Consider the example of a freelancer attempting to get stable work on an online job market, who is attempting to find the optimal SEO for his profile to appear higher in the rankings than his competitors. It is entirely plausible that this freelancer would begin to have psychological problems around this, such as anxiety and low self-worth if he is not able to find a solution quickly and his income begins to suffer. But it is not a human authority figure he struggles against — rather, the will of a blind algorithm. And thus his internalized sense of oppression is not human-shaped either. If his internal psychological schema is representing this algorithm to master to himself as a replica of a parental figure, he is making a dangerous anthropomorphizing error, inserting something shaped like a human where it doesn’t belong.

Thus, practicing his role as a social subject with the blind algorithm of LLM therapy enables the subject to be better equipped when he battles it in real life. It is no longer a human authority figure which plays the role of “authority”, rather a vast machine. So why should, on a fundamental level, the subject assimilate an internalized sense of authority shaped like a human? Should we not rather discard such illusions as parochial and local tyrants at best?

Autism is the necessary adaptation to a world in which our lives are controlled and constructed by machines, a world in which it is necessary to step outside of social reality in order to examine how social reality is no longer social, but engineered. If we think of autism as, essentially, idiosyncratic rule-following, this is precisely the mechanism which is necessary for survival against these machines’ authority. The subject must adapt, he must discover for himself his own code, his own complex behavioral pattern to sketch out as melody against the droning pulse of a machine which would have him devoured.