Ass Burger Island

Benkler is the stuff. Written in Asperger, my father tongue.

Novel: little kid, asberger boy, somewhere in the hypervolume that is autism, fights his way out of the conventional tar pit in which he was crudely placed by conventional society.

He may even be "diagnosed" with this "syndrome" early on, labeled as what sounds to him like "ass burger," It makes no sense to him that this label should be relevant to anybody let alone to him, which vastly complicates the problem, serving as a moat between the isolated ass burger tar pit and the conventional world. A baseline understanding scrambler that does in most of the people on ass burger island.

By the turn of the century, with the growth of the network information economy, individuals are increasingly free "to do more for and by themselves," ... "do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationships through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization," and "to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere." [Benkler, WN @ 8].

So, asberger people -- a great many of whom are the ones that really have something going on, of course, Einstein for example -- finally link up and turn convention inside out. "Asberger Syndrome," this purported subset of "Autism" is an n-dimensional blob, not a neat clinical distinction. In other words, it is no tar pit leper colony on an isolated island.

No, no.

Now who has the order, and who the disorder?

Rather than focus on what Asberger's syndrome is, or what to call the disease suffered by conventional individuals whose worldview permits such clumsy distinctions, it would be better to ask this question [paraphrasing Benkler, WN @ 8]:

How long can conventional limits imposed by the economics of industrial production persist with the rise of the networked information economy? -- limits that constrain our ability to pursue new and better mixes of economic tradeoffs, to make new and more productive arrangements that enable the conception and implementation of commitments to freedom and justice.

To be sure there are also sociopaths of various stripes on the conventional Ass Burger Island, but how surprising is it that many asperger people throughout the ages couldn't ultimately cope with tar-pit life on an isolated island?

Now the boggle trays have turned. Enhanced individual autonomy requires "a fairly substantive and rich conception of autonomy as a practical lived experience, rather than the formal conception preferred by many who think of autonomy as a philosophical concept." [Benkler, WN @ 9].

Individuals now have "a significantly greater role in authoring their own lives, by enabling them to perceive a broader range of possibilities, and by providing them a richer baseline against which to measure the choices they in fact make." [Benkler, WN @ 9]

So asberger people can more and more easily find their way off of Ass Burger Island, and the delusion of the island is simply transcended. Just as a three-dimensional safe will not exclude a four-dimensional thief, doofus-dimensional moats cannot long circumscribe their mythical islands, not any more.