Myk's Digital Garden

Personal Summary
Personal Summary

This site may seem a bit confusing — am I a software engineer? An Autism coach? A philosopher? A maniac?

What I’m Doing

I’ve spent my whole

Autistic⁠

life trying to understand why my reality seemed so different from the realities of others. 40 years spent applying my considerable cognitive faculties to the problem of “reality seems to be constructed, what does that imply?” and simply tugging that string has led me down some fascinating paths. For instance, this leads directly to the next step in the dialectic between modernism and post-modernism — it’s called

metamodernism⁠

, and it’s just taking some things to their obvious conclusions.

All I’m doing is tugging on that string.

In Technology

I’ve spent my adult life as a software engineer, engineering manager, consultant, architect etc. I understand how digital systems work, because digital systems are just interconnected “realities” that have to communicate. Easy. Programming was never hard for me.

As a result I’ve got a long resume with projects ranging from cool apps to entirely new kinds of database. I’m not so much interested in what the thing is as I am in how it works, what relations it exposes.

Most of my best work has been for clients that owned it, and I don’t have code to show. But take a look at my

Ethical Technologist⁠

profile to understand where I’m at.

In Philosophy

The rise of LLM’s and this generation of artificial intelligence raises a number of fascinating questions, but more interesting to me right now is the set of questions they seem to speak to. By comparing my subjective experience of reality to that of an AI that I’m interacting with I can begin to model the ways in which we’re the same and the ways in which we’re different.

At first I thought I had discovered a way to do

meta-structuralist narrative analysis⁠

by using LLM’s to perform

advanced mathematical operations on narrative structures⁠

. But it was more than that.

I am currently trying to articulate the minimal viable surface area of a new metaphysics I’m calling the

Turtle Beam⁠

model.

In Society

The idea that reality is constructed means that any part of our society that is built on the assumption that reality is objective is causing violence.

That takes many forms, and we generally understand that we can refer to the idea that “there is one right way to be” as kyriarchy. We resist kyriarchy by demanding to be accepted on our own terms, and that work looks different depending on the ways in which we’re not accepted by the kyriarchy. The one thing we all agree on is that respectability politics is the enemy. Respect needs to go

both ways⁠

I’m a white Autistic dude. To me, the work looks like building community and identity with other Autistic people — but first, it looks like finally defining Autism,

understanding what Autism is not in the language of the neurotypicals trying to understand it⁠

. This isn’t a new project.

This is what James Joyces was talking about when Stephen Dedalus sets off to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race” — he didn’t have our language for it, but the ‘race’ he was referring to was ‘Neurodivergent People’. This is what Dostoevsky wrote about, almost exclusively. This is where Virginia Woolf and Octavia Butler and David Byrne live. Whole domains of our culture were formed by centuries of people yearning to name the thing that they are.

I devote as much time per week as I can to

offering free coaching⁠

to other Autistic people, predicated on the idea that many of us suffer from something I’m referring to as

Autistic Identity Trauma⁠

. I use the film

“The Matrix” as a map⁠

to illustrate the way that liberation cannot come from trying harder, or building yet another version of our mental model of reality. It comes from getting in touch with our bodies, and from being in community with other Autistic people.

Yeah but capitalism tho?

Right?

My real mid-term goal is the creation of an alternative economic structure called Skew North. This is a Social Purpose Corporation with the mandate to fill and grow a monetary fund that can be used to pay Autistic professionals for providing their professional services to other Autistic people. My coaching work, for instance, would become a subsidized project. Me and any other coaches get paid by people who can afford it and from the subsidy fund for people who can’t, etc.

The short-term goals are a lot less clear. I am in some serious financial jeopardy right now and trying to figure out how to keep this ship afloat. Please

hire me⁠

if you have any problems that you think AI could be used to solve, I’ll either be able to help you or connect you with someone who can.

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