This is absolutely correct (curb-cut effect) but it’s also why employers will fight it.
The reason neurodiversity is such an issue for employers is that there’s no good way to measure people for talent (everyone needs to believe they are atypically talented in order to invent in the corporate “meritocracy,” even though it’s not a real one.) So instead they run on a system of blame and shared suffering, an attrition tournament that serves no purpose but is the best a company can come up with. Autistic people need exemption to thrive, but this is something everyone else wants—to be evaluated on merit rather than suffering—but that the firm, politically, will never be able to achieve.
Autism is an exaggerated version of the human experience. In many ways we are less robotic and more intensely human, with our hyper focus and extreme sensory experiences. Although we’re only about 5 percent of the population, there is a universality about us that makes us impossible for private sector firms to accommodate. If they treat us well, they have to treat everyone well, which is something executives will never stand for.
It was always hard, but it used to be possible. These days, though, you have to compete for visibility against people who are as good at manipulation as you are at actually doing stuff.
Platform capitalism has made the “idiot box” age of TV downright civilized in comparison—at least they didn’t eat Tide pods in the trash cable era.
Ypu can throw generative AI/LLM summarization into that heap as well. Previously, juicing one's numbers for platform visibility meant churning out content in a labour-intensive manner. Now, there's no limit to how much marketing garbage they can spew out to try to catch every stray eyeball.
There’s a bit of sour truth in this. I don’t think it’s Substack’s fault, but the era in which quality content could grow an audience through organic means is over. TikTok is more of a symptom than a driver, but the Internet in this Big Platform, enshittifed era is just as much a wasteland as TV was in the “idiot box” age.
Ten years ago, if the powers that be wanted to put you to the big sleep, they had to MOC you. Now, they don’t have to do anything because unless you have the funds and time to build a platform in today’s low-effort, low-attention world, they know you will be ignored.
This is just an attempt to pit workers against other workers, both to make lower-proles hate WFH upper-proles (“middle class”) and to pit the upper-proles on notice that RTO will come for them if they don’t shape up. Do not fall for it. The real enemy is up top and always has been.
Anyway, RTO is more about fucking over people with disabilities—for unclear reason, because accommodated disabled people are, in my experience, the best people to work with, because they’ve seen real shit—and this attempt to create intra-proletarian dissension is just a distraction, at the end of the day.
I read this the same way. Any divide will be exploited to keep us from getting mad over all time high corporate profits unaccompanied by any benefit to the workers, the actual value creators.
"Ahh, cool, you want me to help blue collar workers unionize to get more leverage and agency against low empathy high status demanding usually elderly (55+) management. You got it boss."
We’re screwed then. The 99% can’t afford to go one to two years without an income, and the 1% simply never will because they don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.
The reason neurodiversity is such an issue for employers is that there’s no good way to measure people for talent (everyone needs to believe they are atypically talented in order to invent in the corporate “meritocracy,” even though it’s not a real one.) So instead they run on a system of blame and shared suffering, an attrition tournament that serves no purpose but is the best a company can come up with. Autistic people need exemption to thrive, but this is something everyone else wants—to be evaluated on merit rather than suffering—but that the firm, politically, will never be able to achieve.
Autism is an exaggerated version of the human experience. In many ways we are less robotic and more intensely human, with our hyper focus and extreme sensory experiences. Although we’re only about 5 percent of the population, there is a universality about us that makes us impossible for private sector firms to accommodate. If they treat us well, they have to treat everyone well, which is something executives will never stand for.