melmagazine | We know that people on the spectrum can exhibit remarkable mental gifts in addition to their difficulties; Asperger syndrome has been associated with superior IQs
that reach up to the “genius” threshold (4chan trolls use “aspie” and
“autist” interchangeably). In practice, weaponized autism is best
understood as a perversion of these hidden advantages. Think, for
example, of the keen pattern recognition that underlies musical talent
repurposed for doxxing efforts: Among the more “successful” deployments
of weaponized autism, in the alt-right’s view, was a collective attempt
to identify an antifa demonstrator who assaulted several of their own
with a bike lock at a Berkeley rally this past April.
As Berkeleyside reported,
“the amateur detectives” of 4chan’s /pol/ board went about “matching up
his perceived height and hairline with photos of people at a previous
rally and on social media,” ultimately claiming that Eric Clanton, a
former professor at Diablo Valley College, was the assailant in question. Arrested and charged in May,
Clanton faces a preliminary hearing this week, and has condemned the
Berkeley PD for relying on the conjecture of random assholes. “My case
threatens to set a new standard in which rightwing extremists can select
targets for repression and have police enthusiastically and forcefully
pursue them,” he wrote in a statement.
The denizens of /pol/, meanwhile, are terribly proud of their work, and
fellow Trump boosters have used their platforms to applaud it.
Conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec
called it a new form of “facial recognition,” as if it were in any way
forensic, and lent credence to another dubious victory for the forces of
weaponized autism: supposed coordination with the Russian government to
take out ISIS camps in Syria. 4chan users are now routinely
deconstructing raw videos of terrorist training sites and the like to
make estimations about where they are, then sending those findings to
the Russian Ministry of Defense’s Twitter account. There is zero reason
to believe, as Posobiec and others contend, that 4chan has ever “called in an airstrike,” nor that Russia even bothered to look at the meager “intel” offered, yet the aggrandizing myth persists.
Since “autistic” has become a catchall idiom on 4chan, the self-defined
mentality of anyone willing to spend time reading and contributing to
the site, it’s impossible to know how many users are diagnosed with the
condition, or could be, or earnestly believe that it correlates to their
own experience, regardless of professional medical opinion. They tend
to assume, at any rate, that autistic personalities are readily drawn to
the board as introverted, societal misfits in search of connection. The
badge of “autist” conveys the dueling attitudes of pride and loathing
at work in troll communities: They may be considered and sometimes feel
like failures offline — stereotyped as sexless, jobless and
immature — but this is because they are different, transgressive, in a
sense better, elevated from the realm of polite, neurotypical normies. Their handicap is a virtue.
0 comments:
Post a Comment