The digital revolution is the autists taking revenge on the narcissists
Essay by Christoph Holz, a self-confessed nerd, a writer, and a keynote speaker
“Did you really think I was going to be normal?” said Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X and co-founder of several companies, when he made his appearance on Saturday Night Live. Why is it that IT nerds always seem a little peculiar? It’s because we are a little peculiar. The proximity to autism is not entirely coincidental. Say we didn’t have a slight communication disorder, there’s no way we could spend this much time in front of a computer. The laptop is our communication prosthesis.
Recent and not entirely uncontroversial research suggests that empathic and systematic thinking lie on opposite ends of a spectrum. People with autism tend to score poorly on tests of social intelligence but are very successful in recognising patterns and rules.
Overcoming the stigma of mental health challenges is one of the major steps forward in our time. We now know that a small dose of narcissism can be a key success factor. Without certain autistic traits, people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk would hardly have been as successful as they were, especially in fields that require a systematic approach. It used to take a little narcissism to be successful. Today, it takes a little bit of autism. Thank God I have both.
How times have changed: The nerds have been transformed from ridiculed outsiders into the shapers of the future. The future is not being shaped so much as programmed. We were not prepared to carry this responsibility. All we wanted to do was play.
We nerds have turned discrimination into world domination. Rather than styling us as the victims of an unjust society, we have created a better world in our own image. The pandemic has helped us do it. Other emancipation movements should take notes.
This can be tested at any supermarket checkout. The test question is: Which foodstuffs do you put in the front of the belt? Anyone who wonders about this question is certainly not a nerd. A nerd would immediately answer: “The heavy and bulky things. The light, sensitive and small things go at the end.” This is called a first-in-first-out queue in IT jargon. Nerds do not let chaos get in the way of packing their shopping. We arrange our items already on the belt so that they fit neatly into our shopping bag when the time comes. Like Tetris.
No one is more eloquent in criticising the leading schools of thought and business models of digital transformation than Shoshana Zuboff, an economist from the US. She describes what she has called surveillance capitalism as a siphoning of people’s personal data in order to generate a profit by predicting people’s behaviour. Zuboff deals with the question of how regular people will be able to find a home in a digital future. We nerds never wanted to compete with others for a home in the future. We just wanted to find a home for ourselves. But this is a community-based project. A good future is not the result of individual accomplishments. It must be negotiated. And so it is high time that we stop talking about each other but with each other.
The computer scientist Christoph Holz is a self-confessed nerd, a writer, and a keynote speaker. As a university lecturer and in his podcast DIGITAL SENSEMAKER, he deals with questions of digital ethics.