i s2g the biggest conflict in online spaces is autism being flattened such that many autistic people think other autistic people will have the same way of reading things they do
mixed with the unknowing-autodidact curse many of us have until we don't of thinking the whole world can learn as fast as you, for the thing it took ten years of building your own context to understand in the way that you do, and not all that many people in the grand scheme has exactly that context. but it reads as condescending for them not to if they aren't asking questions. because you've given them no indication about your pile of context
(this is at best a rough draft. it's also radioactive to my brain so I'm probably never touching it again.)
So for awhile now I've been thinking about:
recurring and cyclical patterns and failure modes of most communities I've been in, and struggling to put a lot of it into words until Boinking Dog People (P. Taxxon, 2023) gave some nucleation points. Followed by watching The Autistic Horror of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared (Taxon, 2023) which is explicitly about ABA trauma)
a lot of autistic people have been through what amounts to ABA, essentially dog training them how to act normal (where "normal" here means "the least nuisance for parents, care workers, and educators").
even if they havn't been officially subjected to ABA. because SPED teachers internalized it (or, rather, rotely memorized the formulas as if it was algebra).
In the book Me Talk Pretty One Day,
David Sedaris talks about his speech pathologist telling him his regionalisms were abberrant, because the speechie was taught in the midwest and not the south. She told him randomly talking about sports after games wasn't normal, even though that's what everyone around him had done.
ABA (and by extension, 90s and early 2000s sped training for teachers) is similar. A genericized, detached from where you were currently existing and a perspective two generations older than you, on how you should act. that's without going into the more conversion therapy aspects. With all the trappings of white people in kansas deciding they could dog train humans. (which evolved out of, among other things, making workers more efficient using behavior modification)
teachers and parents telling you what normal was, that didn't actually mesh with what your social group / school's students actually thought was normal. bullies are used to enforce the "edges of acceptable to teens", acting in a similar role to paramilitaries in this regard, while the teachers and school psych professionals tasked with your care tell you and your parents that the solution is just acting more normal (in the eyes of an adult). all while not listening when you say things are too much, doing a thing hurts, etc because normal people wouldnt do that. when what they're actually saying is "your pains are being overexaggerated. learn to ignore them or at least not tell us, because we will just make more work for you if you do".
which, of course, only makes it worse.
neither side of that equation is knowingly colluding. it's an organic system that makes the lives of those with the power easier. the schools don't even seem to know they're doing it, but change it and things fall apart.
so you have autistic people who know and don't know they have autism, going into a world where they have to learn social cues on the fly, can parse textual tone with varying ability (if they even know it's a thing, but this also varies by like, discord server)
some of us figure it out early, some later.
some get trapped there for longer. not for any fault of their own, but as you act a certain kind of way you think is normal, and passively present that as normal, you'll eventually filter your social groups to the ones okay with it.
some start enforcing those rules themselves, especially the nonautistics
and it's entirely preventable,
but in autistic heavy spaces it's pretty hard to break, because the same things that cause that sort of educated-guess-and-get-socially-punished phenomena is caused by another thing that that sort of framework teaches: passivity. Your yes doesn't matter to people with power over you, your no doesn't matter to people with power over you, so you just do nothing and hope it goes away. this is amplified by RSD (THOUGH THEY MAY BE THE SAME ROOT). so it's this cycle people have set up for autistic people on all parts of the spectrum, by refusing to tell us what they want us to do to make it stop, let alone anything else, for at least fifteen years of your life. Especially if you didn't know you had autism and slipped through the sped cracks.
So that's what we have now in a lot of online communities, and topical-high-investment physical communities, guessing at social cues until they're (in their mind) exploded on out of nowhere because they didn't realize they were making people uncomfortable.
because no one told them in a way they understood, until it got too much for the other party. and then off to guess again because no one could articulate the problem, until they come to the realization that they have to assume other people don't have their context when talking to them, and they need to sorta cursory-reverse-engineer where the other person is coming from. for me this took into my twenties only because of luck, for others it can last forever depending on how much their social group filters for just being ok with those things.
But the other party couldn't describe it to them, because they also had been made to do this, either by habit, or by these conversations never going well because of the mutual misunderstood, and that people very similar to you might have very different ways of reading you than you thought in text. or voice. or in person.
(i typed this in the shower. there's plenty of small mistakes probably. instead of telling me I'm applying generalizations broadly as if they're all true, please understand the term for the sake of discussion, colloquial use of language, and uhhhh. refer to the above. you don't need to enforce perfectionist/aspirational norms you've adopted as if they're physical laws)
