I’ve begun a project over the past year conducting research into worldbuilding. As readers will have noticed I’m really interested in the diversity of worlds we inhabit, both physical and digital, and the ways that these worlds can serve as sites for presence, connection, collaboration, and communication. There’s a shadow side to these capabilities as the worlds we inhabit can also be sites for opppression and control. It is important to acknowledge that the worlds we inhabit are indeed plural worlds and not just a single homogenous world. I’ve often observed the ways that we shuttle back and forth between worlds (and identities which are facets of ourselves that we can perform or inhabit) can be an act of resistance to avoid or resist forms of coercive control and oppression. This is especially true for neurominorities, whose embodied difference is most cogently expressed as a difference in communication and cognitive style, both elements which are either facilitated or closed down by the parameters of a communicative lifeworld. Perhaps the worst form of oppression you can subject another human person to is to close down their world-choices to a single homogenous space with parameters that they cannot readily inhabit. Take, for example, the insistence that Deaf people inhabit a hearing world, or that our Blind friends inhabit a sighted world. This conviction about world pluralism lies at the heart of the social model of disability, and in conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues about disability, it seems like the core problem that prevents them from inhabiting empathetic understanding is a lack of understanding about the multiplicity of worlds we can inhabit. I’ve often found forms of philosophical realism, at least by some definitions based on the insistence that we inhabit a singlar common world, to be a worrisome tool for the unselfconscious-privileged to try to exert control over others. And this insistence that we ignore differences and multiplicity, dangerous and cruel.

To dig a bit more into the meaning of this insight for neurominorities, let me highlight a few examples. For someone with sensory hypersensitivity like me, the lack of dampening and the loud/brightness of environments can be a recipe for disaster. Our build enviroment is often designed around a single sensory experience, cost cutting around noise dampening can seem reasonable if you haven’t inahbited the sensory world of another person. Patterned decorations on walls and floors can be oppressively overstimulating, even nauseating, or inducing vertigo for some people.

A key part of worldbuilding relates to the forms of communication we enable and disable, and this is particularly acute with digital platforms. I was getting re-aquainted with the OG chat platform IRC a few weeks ago and some of the design features really stuck out having been away for several years. IRC doesn’t have a chat history, so you can’t jump into a room and catch-up. It’s purely synchronous, with messages appearing in real time, and if you’re not logged in, once you join back on you only have access to the lines which arise from that point forward. You can always put up a message or send a direct message to someone asking them to update you on the conversation that has ensued, but these are the demands of a stateless communication environment. A bit like real life.

This isn’t a problem for some people who don’t engage with long-term memory in an intensive way, and I know some who enjoy the ephemeral nature of IRC (and similar environments like raves and parties) who can just “drop in” and catch up to the extent they want to, but perhaps also simmer a bit in a sublime statelessness. Contrast this with some kinds of autistic cognitive experience which are oriented around a more saturated perception of the world, taking in more sensory and other perceptual data without filtering as much out, in some cases (at least it feels this way!) without filtering anything at all. When I’m in a room for a meeting, I’m processing all the body language, poses, microexpressions of all the people around me, unable really to filter it, short of wearing a blindfold, and even then I’ll pick up a lot from tone and speech patterns, which again are forms of noise I can’t really filter much. So we take a lot more in, unavoidably, and as a result we need longer to process it all, more time to recover from that kind of full saturation, and also tend to have more accurate recollections. You can read a bit more about this in Precise minds in uncertain worlds: Predictive coding in autism. But we also have diverse ways of getting to back to a comfortable baseline in light of this saturation. A person might narrow their experiences and environments until they’re receiving a level that isn’t overwhelming. Or you might find (sometimes pharmaceautical) ways to dull your senses through adrenaline or dopamine dumping. In other cases, you might simply work through it all and synthesise everything that is coming at you.

Personally, I find that when the atmosphere or my experience of it has some jagged edges, where I’m missing some information, those jagged edges really scream at me until I can resolve them. This might arise when I join at the second half of a conversation missing the previous context, someone has a mood or reaction that can’t be explained by the current conversation, or we’re being introduced to a new policy which really can’t be explained by the justification that’s being provided. Sometimes places and not just people have these jagged screaming edges for me. And the only real way to quiet that noise is to sort things out and get my head around what’s going on. I’d hypothesise that many people that we encounter who are unusually pastoral or compassionate might be driven by a similar kind of alterity, it’s not just that you care (though of course this is the foundation), but that you need to understand what’s going on with a person. Following this kind of natural drive leads to a lifetime of practice which produces people who are fluent in cross-cultural communication, at stretching beyond the horizon of their own lifeworld into that of someone else. Many autistic bodyminds are also highly systematic, constantly searching for the patterns which lend coherence to that information you’re taking in. This can be a kind of hyper-relationality, the person you go to when you need to catch up on the happenings in your community.

For all these reasons, stateless communication contexts are really uncomfortable for me. When I log into a slack room, discord, or MS teams page, I’ll read the entire history up to where I left off previously. I can’t help it, each message hits me with a demand that I understand it’s meaning. To avoid such a thing feels like an abrogation of community, relationship, and even just basic perception of the world around me. I’m not sure I’m wrong about this, either.

It occurred to me, on reflection, that I’ve always gravitated towards stateful or synchronous communication styles, probably for this reason. Contrast IRC with email, which is straight-forwardly stateful and transactional – you send an email, you get a response. And when you read that response, you have all the information without any gaps in the middle, or invisible histories. But there is also a contrast here with other contemporary platforms, and the ways we use email inasmuch as we make use of and have access to forms of message threading. Think of it this way, if you’re in a room with 15 people all talking, all having different discussions with each other, meaning at least half the people are talking, those conversations aren’t necessarily linked to one another in any meaningful way outside of the influences produced by the atmosphere of the room and the exigencies of the moment. Each of those conversations has it’s own coherence which may not be linked to any of the others. Why don’t we find this overwhelming? Well in many cases, people use eye-contact, bodily closeness and other cues to hone in on the specific conversation that is intended for them. In this way threading is about visibility and proximity. Well designed social media works this way too, if you’re in a room with many conversations happening, messages might be threaded into each other based on a visual reminder of what the poster is replying to, or the use of thematic hastags. Now imagine there are 100 people all in a room chatting at the same time but you’re all blindfolded, and everyone is speaking into a microphone which is then aggregated and fed into headphones so you don’t have the usual cues to separate out the different threads of conversation. That’s pretty much my experience of every room – even when I have the visual cues, I can’t shut out the other conversations (or at least I can but only by using quite a lot of physical and mental energy which will definitely run out quickly). Scott Christian Salva has a really nice video he’s produced to share what this is like:

Some digital environments, or at least the ways we use them, can produce conversations with the same kind of messiness for some people. On discord or slack you can quickly make a break-out room, a sub-conversation within a channel. MS Teams, not so much. Some platforms all you to visually mute mesages in a stream which don’t have a specific tag. This is also the case for omnibus email newsletters with huge chains of information which isn’t necessarily tied to a moment. Some people feel comfortable skipping sections and scanning quickly. I read all the text.

Just like in architecture and the crafting of a building or some other built environment as an act of worldbuilding, each of these platforms is designed to project an extension or amplification of our personal world’s structures, the kinds of presence and availability we find comfortable, the pace, rhythm and texture of communication. While some forms of worldbuilding like writing fiction, have craft cultures which are oriented around horizon-crossing, crafting a world which opens up into a mode of being which isn’t your own through trans-cultural, trans-racial, or trans-species writing. But some of our worldbuilding discourses and craft don’t really seem to be oriented by this kind of horizon-crossing as an exercise. It strikes me that, at least at presence, the people who build worlds we inhabit as common spaces, don’t really do this kind of work, except for some noteworthy exceptions. To do this we’d need to have modes of participatory and collaborative design which opens up these experiments in horizon-crossing in deliberate ways, and provides participants who have been subjected to silencing and oppression time and space to discover their own suppressed or masked modes of inhabitation. There’s an increasing conversation about digital accessibility, but it strikes me that most of this conversation is about legal liability, law compliance, and even corporate branding. It be amazing if we could find ways, in our communities and organisations, to open up forms of participatory design which were inclusive, open ended, and prepared for the emotional and financial costliness of this kind of experiment.