#social structures

[ladyfingerpress]

#82 The Autistic Mistake (Communication with Neurotypicals)

Morgan Stern introduces a simplifying idea with the Larson-Munroe Hypothesis of allistic communication

The Autistic Mistake in Communication: What Language Really Is To Neurotypicals : Morgan Stern : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Inte

The Why Do Neurotypicals? series gets more ambitious with a simplifying theory on the fundamental actions of neurotypical communication. Ano

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Echoes of Stone: Moai and Karajía

The Moai of Easter Island and the Sarcophagi of Karajía in Peru are remarkable cultural landmarks that offer deep insights into the civilizations that created them.

These statues, each displaying distinctive artistic styles, stand as lasting symbols of the spiritual beliefs, social structures, and customs of their respective peoples.

Studying these mysterious figures prompts important questions about the societies behind them — why they were built, what roles they played, and how they were crafted with the tools and knowledge available at the time.

Ongoing research into these monuments continues to reveal new layers of meaning, shedding light on the complexities of ancient cultures and the enduring mysteries that surround their heritage.

—

The Sarcophagi of Carajía are unusually large pre-Inca Chachapoyas culture sarcophagi at the archaeological site of Carajía in the Utcubamba Valley, located 18 km northwest of the city of Chachapoyas, Peru (Luya Province, Amazonas Region).

The site contains eight Chachapoyan mummies located on a cliffside, referred to by local residents as the “ancient wise men."

—

Moai or moʻai are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500.

[krisrisk]

omg, i just realized smth personally

you know how social acceptance is the thing that actually makes people be happy? It's a bit more complicated, but I get to that in a moment.

This youtuber I just watched, said something along the lines of "without you people watching and liking my videos, I wouldn't be where I am today, able to do what i love and make an income of it", and it just. hurt. Because only a minute earlier I was admiring his house, his workshop, tools, etc. All these things he got to buy was because people like what he does. And the reason people buy his stuff is because they know about it. And the reason they know about it is because other people watched him first and liked him.

He gets to spend his days using his talents to earn money.

Which is basically what I always hear is the goal. And for me, who's (very obviously if you know what to look for) autistic and adhd, it's even more important to do things I like, because my brain will literally go "nope" and turn off the happy mode otherwise.

But I don't get to do what I love for work. I did, once, which broke my heart even more, when that work experience got invalidated completely by the company I'm (supposed to) work at now.

And what I love also doesn't give me an audience (user support in ict). I started modding on some games and got a few likes, but generally, that also doesn't give me an audience. The people who get an audience are not the ones doing technically usable stuff. The programmers who make software sometimes do (ConcernedApe certainly has his fans, as does Gronkh). Artists sometimes do (DestinyBlue as well as Bob Ross).

But is there even one person you know who became famous for helping others use stuff? Manual writers (my condolences to you guys, I did appreciate your work), translators, ict supporters, medical carers - the list of people who cannot get even slightly famous for their work is endless. So endless, that it is the universal experience to Never Be Known. And that is not a bad thing per se.

But in this age, where visibility and likeability is the only way to ever get a shot in the first place it is absolutely destroying lives. I don't get a job because people don't like me. I have been told that I was not hired because I had been unemployed for too long. So not getting a job actually made stay unemployed.

And I can never hope to build a youtube channel to start earning money. Because I do not have anything to "sell". Sure I could try and make some tutorials on how to make using your computer more easy and comfortable. But there's already thousands of videos like that. As well as millions of blogs.

And I have adhd, meaning I have less impulse control than the average person, meaning I do have the occasional "oh ffs why don't you all fuck off with your stupid invisible rules" moments. And boy do people not like those.

I also have no clue why every person I ever met ghosts me. They always seem to enjoy my company, talking with me easily and never complaining or showing discomfort (I sadly know how to spot that). Always saying "we HAVE to meet again" and then simply not contacting me. Or even responding.

Even my so called "best friend" never gets in touch, always saying she'd rather meet irl and talk face to face, but then never proposing such a meetup.

I don't even know where to go with this rant.

Just. Be kind to people. Give them a chance.

[philosophicoats]

interactions are so complicated and nuanced I just don’t want to think about them anymore . I feel like I fuck everything up more whenever I say anything but if I don’t say anything I feel awful about being in the situation at all and there is no way to predetermine the right thing to say because everyone is different and each person will have a different reaction than the other . Not to mention the layers of interpersonal pasts??? Like there is a certain nuance when talking to someone you’ve known for years vs someone you met today vs someone you’ve known for maybe a few months . Vulnerability is endearing but too much looks selfish or filterless and too little looks closed off or bland or even stuck up . How the fuck are all of these things supposed to even be known, let alone put into practice every single day with many different people who are constantly turning into new versions of themselves as they’re influenced by other dynamics (and all the while, you’re doing the same thing too)?! Don’t get me wrong . I love the human experience and I love interpersonal dynamics and connection with every single fibre of my being and I wouldn’t trade it for the world . I just really think there should be some sort of manual to this ?? Like maybe if we all just read the manual no one would ever have to cut anyone off and we could gauge how well we gel with other people from the get-go based on quantitative measures . It would remove a lot of unnecessary pretense, which could also still be kept for artistic purposes but then it would at least be acknowledged that it was pretense and all of the people’s intentions would be elucidated sooner . I want to hold the infinite in my hands .

[awolfinmycity]

"They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had." -Naomi Novak, A Deadly Education

[shamandrummer]

“The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a landmark new book by British archaeologist David Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber, who was a London-based author, anarchist activist and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. Graeber was the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan, "We are the 99 percent."

The Dawn of Everything offers a dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution -- from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality -- and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. In its early chapters, the book proposes that the European Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries was actually, in great measure, a response to the Indigenous philosophies that Colonists and Imperialists had come into contact with in the New World of North America. Ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy did not exist in Medieval Europe. Ever since then, the Western mind has been moving closer, in these areas, to Native American views. As the authors point out, our ideas about human freedom, democracy, and sexual equality are much closer to that of an Indigenous person of the 16th Century than they are to the European Catholic view.

One of the main propositions that Graeber and Wengrow put forth in The Dawn of Everything is that the ancestors of our prehistory were not simple, ignorant savages, but rather self-conscious, idiosyncratic social organizers, evolving through a "carnival parade of political forms." Today we might use words like anarchist, communist, authoritarian, or egalitarian to describe their activity, but that language fails to represent the sheer quirkiness of the actual case studies: large cities without central authorities or farming (Göbekli Tepe), tribal nations spanning entire continents (Cahokia), and social housing projects (Teotihuacan).

Some populations would even alternate their social systems on a seasonal basis. For example, the Plains tribes of North America formed into an organized political community under one government during the seasonal bison hunt. There was a police force and squads of warriors with full coercive powers. If anyone endangered the success of the hunt, they could be punished, imprisoned, or even killed. The people who occupied those enforcement roles rotated from year to year. These coercive institutions did not last beyond the period of the hunting and ritual Sundance season. During the rest of the year, these Plains societies would split off into smaller groups which had entirely different social systems where people would have to resolve disputes through processes of deliberation and debate.

For 40,000 years, people have been moving between various forms of equal and unequal social structures, building up hierarchies and then dismantling them. The authors make the case that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies were considerably more so. How did we get stuck?

One of the key arguments of the book is its stance against a reductionist view of our current circumstances: its insistence that the first 300,000 years of human history offer a past that is more varied, hopeful and altogether more interesting than what we have interpreted it to be, and that the same might be true of our future. Our species has been creating new ways of living in all the diverse ecosystems on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. We have the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality, so why not exercise it. We have done all this before. We can do it again. The book's optimism, in the face of impending climate doom, political polarization, and social upheaval, is itself a provocation to act.

[tabby-shieldmaiden]

Honestly there is something to be said about power imbalances in systems which come about because people who often run the systems tend to come from what they feel is a place of authority. But since they do, that leads to a number of problems. Mostly to do with this idea that comes about when one sees themselves as an authority figure. That is the assumption that the people you serve become beneath you because they don’t have the power you have. And surely you had to be so special in order to acquire this position of power to begin with. Surely when people raise objections, they are merely doing it because they’re a part of the ignorant masses. Surely you can call the shots on their life better than they can.

And with this mindset, you no longer see yourself as a part of “the people”, but rather the keepers and protectors of “the people”. When you no longer see yourself as a part of the people you serve, that is intensely dangerous territory.

And honestly, I don’t have any solution that can be implemented as a first step to solving this problem. Maybe beyond distributing the power more evenly. Which requires education. Because to be informed gives the people power. But education as a system also runs on this type of power system, such that those in power (educators, the makers of textbooks, education ministers) may also be susceptible to this mindset of “serving those beneath them”.

This just in: making social change is very hard because society’s a mess!