all of the reasons to hate ai and to love ai are valid, to a point. it does things for us that are helpful to have done for us. it does things to us that are harmful to have done to us.
the main thing we should focus on is what it requires of us. it requires that power be centralized in such a way that concerns about water and land use are deprioritized. it requires that people who don’t have our best interests in mind influence elections. it requires that we relinquish our rights to our own ideas in the tos agreement required to use it.
ai is not local: it requires centralized control of a vast network of resources from around the globe. it doesn’t fit in a backpack.
ai is not democratic: the algorithms that deliver it’s results are designed by a small team that does not answer to us. it doesn’t respond to community review.
ai is not neutral: it’s knowledge base is a collection of writings that represents centuries of colonizers writing about encounters with beings deemed lesser. it doesn’t weight indigenous voices higher.
ai is not embodied: nothing in its database includes information that can only be experienced through the senses. it didn’t smell what you smelled.
ai has not experienced loss: it can tell you what grieving people have said, but it cannot experience their pain, and console you in the ways that only someone who has experienced loss can console you. it can’t adjust the way you’ve adjusted.
ai has never attended a birth, nor tasted the final breath of a loved one. it doesn’t know the poem your mother needed to hear for comfort.
ai is a performance by someone who was never there, but who requires you to hand over all rights to land, water, minerals, species diversity, diplomatic nonpartisanship, labor justice, bioregional congruity, indigenous stewardship, ecosystem integrity, economic equity, cultural heritage, family legacy, intellectual architecture, emotional elaboration, and environmental renewal.
How Making Sense of My Child’s Cannabis Use Helped Me Understand The Beauty of Human Adaptation
Does Domestication of the Human Species Really Represent Our Shared Future on the Planet?
My almost-adult child is a gifted and challenged person, navigating the transition to adulthood in post-industrial American society. They’re a systems thinker, who aces every test, and who also can’t sit still or conform to the demands of a quiet workplace or a grid-based schedule. They often miss appointments due to oversleeping, and sometimes sleep for periods that don’t align with respectable industrial grid time.
They are highly engaged in any task at hand, but have difficulty playing the long game of connecting with a regular schedule. They pick up new skills very quickly, but express little interest in developing any of those skills into something that, in a modern context, looks like a career.
The environments they express the most affection for are highly cooperative: soccer is a big one; skateboarding in community, where peers are moving together, both in synchronous and asynchronous formations; making public art in strategically complex spaces, that require collaboration to envision, coordination to plan, and cooperation to execute. They are the epitome of the team player, as long as the team has a clear plan that serves the collective need for transparent and direct expression of experience in a creative and innovative way.
Making Sense of the Early Adult Drive for Autonomy and Relevance
My child’s challenges have moved them toward strategies to mitigate those challenges, and cannabis has been a recurring strategy that serves some need.
As an engaged parent, who is trying to nurture their adult child’s independence, while managing my alarm when witnessing behaviors that appear problematic, or as leading toward future failure to integrate into the workplace, I’ve been trying to make sense of what I’m seeing: a young person who is fiercely dedicated to their friends; who takes pride in a complex task well-executed; who resists being pigeonholed into existing categories of social, ideological, economic, or aesthetic legibility; and who sincerely wants to play a meaningful role in their community, despite repeated experiences of mismatch with established academic and occupational cultures.
Considering all of this, I’ve been unsatisfied with the ‘just say no’ or ‘avoid this substance because of the potential dangers involved’ frameworks of personal discipline, relative to what I see as cannabis use as substance-scaffolding.
I ask instead, “How is this scaffold serving their needs,” and “what is this person seeking to satisfy, according to the tendencies of their nervous system?”
Asking these questions, and exploring the range of possible resolutions, has caused me to rethink everything I know about individual competence, self-medication, and utility-within-community.
Here’s the story that unfolds in my brain, starting with trying to understand my child’s use of cannabis.
Understanding Cannabis as a Regulation Support
Question: A subset of neurodivergent people find cannabis to be highly regulating. Using current diagnostic frameworks, would we be able to reverse engineer this mechanism and suggest alternative supports for regulation?
Answer (from multiple channels): Diagnostic frameworks don’t code this directly—no DSM category for “cannabinoid-responsive regulation phenotype”—but the mechanistic literature gives us enough to reverse-engineer some plausible pathways, and each one maps to a non-cannabis lever.
The candidate mechanisms, each with its alt-support:
Excitation/inhibition imbalance (the leading cortical model in autism/ADHD research)—the nervous system runs with too much glutamatergic drive relative to GABAergic brake. CB1 agonism works presynaptically to turn down excess signal. Alt-support: deep pressure/proprioceptive input, rhythmic bilateral movement, anything that mechanically dampens throughput rather than trying to out-think it.
Low endocannabinoid tone—some autism research finds blunted anandamide signaling tied to social ease and anxiety regulation. If the system’s baseline ECS is running lean, exogenous cannabinoids are topping up a deficit rather than adding a foreign effect. Alt-support: sustained aerobic movement (the “runner’s high” is partly endocannabinoid-mediated), omega-3s as ECS precursors, consistent touch/massage.
Thalamic sensory gating failure—the filter that should mute irrelevant input doesn’t, so everything arrives undifferentiated and loud. Cannabinoids affect thalamic gating directly. Alt-support: environmental engineering, without pharmacological substitution: reduce raw input volume rather than trying to improve the filter (single-channel environments, structured monotropic focus, noise reduction).
Vagal/parasympathetic underactivation—anxiety compounding the sensory load, cannabis’s anxiolytic effect partly vagally mediated. Alt-support: direct vagal stimulation—humming, slow exhale-longer-than-inhale breathing, cold water on the face.
Dopaminergic under-stimulation(more ADHD-coded)—restlessness eased by mild dopaminergic modulation. Alt-support: novelty-structured tasks, high-engagement movement, body doubling.
Considering this data, relative to the questions that framed my inquiry, here’s how I connect the dots when I choose to view my child as perfectly-abled, rather than disabled, and here’s how I attempt to contextualize this for my community.
Greetings, esteemed community:
I compiled this explanation of how cannabis helps regulate the neurodivergent nervous system. This all maps very cleanly onto our child’s character, and shows why they miss soccer so much (missing as ‘longing for,’ and not ‘fails to show up for.’ I think you get my meaning, but it’s good be precise where language suggests multiple meanings).
This all points to running (‘rhythmic bilateral movement,’ ‘sustained aerobic movement’), with intense interest-based focus (‘structured monotropic focus,’ ‘high-engagement movement’) and cooperative participation (‘high-engagement movement,’ ‘body doubling’) as being the the regulation supports they are reaching for, or the activities that they are predisposed to seek in making their character meaningful in a human community engaged in dialogue with a natural environment.
Basically, our child shows the collection of ecological adaptations that would enable ice-age hunter-gatherers to hunt and bring down a wooly mammoth, as a source of food and raw materials for clothing, shelter, and tools. Mammoths were herd animals, much larger than humans, with thick skins and wooly coats that were very difficult to pierce with the projectiles of the time—wood or bone projectiles that were either sharpened or had separate affixed bone or stone tips specialized for cutting/piercing.
Bringing down a mammoth would require a high degree of coordination and sustained movement by a group of humans—to first isolate an animal from the herd; bombard it with a number of projectiles, none of which would be able to kill the animal on its own, but only weaken it when applied in numbers; and then chase the animal until it was weak enough to be able to approach directly, to apply severing cuts with stone knives at strategic points, to bring on death. Then, the animal had to be processed fairly quickly, before bacteria, insects, and scavengers moved in to take their share.
The Mental Health Day
This coordinated activity would involve great risk-taking, and sublimation of fear-response. In other words, badass individuals engaged in a life-or-death struggle to meet the needs of their community.
Engaging in this way would have resulted in a huge output of energy in a specific time period, that would likely extend beyond one cycle of dawn-to-dusk; which could not be segmented into work hours that resemble modern industrial time cycles of work and rest; by an individual who could literally measure their life by their proximity to such a resource as a mammoth herd. The individuals involved in this project would have needed extended periods of rest to recover from the endeavor, perhaps spanning multiple day-night cycles; and the community would have been happy to oblige, considering the benefit of their energy expenditure to the community.
Where Do We Go From Here?
in the context of domesticated society, none of our child’s particular traits make sense. but our period of domestication has been a tiny blip in the overall arc of the human project. human evolution, and adaptation to changing environments, is a very long and slow process, relative to our understanding of adapting to environmental changes within our lifetimes.
Considering those changes, i hope we can find ways to recognize our child’s unique gifts as adaptations that are valuable to the community; to recognize the range of skills required to make the human project work; and to rediscover how a person with these natural predispositions is a valuable contributor to their community — because of, and not in spite of, their characteristic rhythms and sensibilities.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, and thank you for your cooperation in this project of nurturing a unique person to be their best self in the rapidly-shifting priorities of life in modern industrial society.
In part one, I explored my mother’s life and work, relative to the social conditions she experienced as a low-income, self-directed woman navigating the public health and housing systems, and asked whether, viewing her life through the arc of 76 years of continuous productivity in the fiber arts, different decisions could have been made resulting in better accommodations and better integration into her community. I asked whether it was worthwhile to reassess our standards of fitness, disability, and disorder.
What are the conditions of disorder in an individual, and at what moment does disorder become a permanent designation, rather than a temporary condition?
Let’s use a slightly less emotionally fraught frame than a human life. Let’s observe some monkey behavior, not because of the monkey’s proximity to humans, as a primate, or because they have been fascinating to science for that reason, but because the monkey is my mother’s Chinese astrological sign, and she would like that association.
We are studying capuchin monkey behavior, for the purpose of developing a standard of fitness. We enter the habitat where they have evolved and adapted over countless millennia—let’s say a forested area in Honduras. We observe a troop and look for a specimen that appears healthy and generally representative of the species. We settle on an individual that does not appear to be a dominant male or a highly fertile female, but a female of no special rank relative to the troop, who is socially mobile, non-aggressive, non-avoidant. Our selection appears to represent a fairly neutral specimen from which we can extrapolate our findings onto the rest of the species. She appears fit, at the median presentation for the species—not the most successful, not the most disadvantaged. Just an average capuchin monkey. This is our focal individual, our point of departure for understanding monkeys.
We have chosen as our focal individual, our case study, an individual who exists within a social order that has many categories, and who exhibits a variety of behaviors and characteristics, monkeys being a highly social species. She is healthy—fit, we might say—within her environment and her social order. Looked at with more context, we can see that we are selecting an individual who has some characteristics that can be said to be representative of the species—bilateral symmetry, similar arrangements of limbs, tail, organs, fur. But this individual will differ from other individuals according to their social role—sex characteristics, size and weight relative to a dominant male or fertile female, specific social behaviors relative to their place in the troop, and so on. Because we haven’t studied the whole troop over generations, we don’t really know how this individual ranks, in percentile terms, for any given characteristic. But for our purposes, we call her good enough to represent the species for our study.
We capture the individual and bring her into our laboratory.
Stop. Reflect. Project. Pause.
This is the most important moment of the whole examination. Everything that follows is exposition.
In bringing an example of a fit individual into the laboratory, we are now examining a disordered individual. Disorder is a function of environment, not identity.
The condition of her disorder is the environment of the laboratory—an environment to which she is not adapted. The fit individual is fit within a set of conditions—in this case, forest canopy; a containing species with a social order that sorts its members into roles; a milieu of related species; and environmental resources and conditions. In changing the monkey’s environmental and social conditions, we introduce her into a natural and social environment that diverges from the one for which she is adapted.
In changing this individual’s relational status from emplaced to portable—meaning that her original environment was unique, and that uniqueness is due to a relationship with land—the environmental conditions are emplaced—while our laboratory conditions have been carefully designed to be invisible and replicable—and therefore portable—we change the way any data we collect can be interpreted.
We can no longer make predictions about her behavior relative to her embedded environment. We are now examining monkey disability. Monkey environmental disorder. Monkey social disorder. Monkey with special needs.
Disability is defined by an environment, not an individual. Saying otherwise makes the conditions that shaped that environment invisible, and therefore assumed as immutable. Shout it loud. Steal the idea and run with it.
From now forward, every. single. metric. is measuring a disordered individual, relative to the social and environmental conditions she has evolved over millennia to be fit within. From now forward, the only standard of fitness is her ability to thrive in a hostile environment.
In defining her characteristics as representative of her species, using the snapshot of any data we collect the moment we arrive in the laboratory, there are a lot of things that we don’t know:
we don’t know if she was ascendant or descendant relative to the median for an individual of her social class;
we don’t know what she would have become, given another five years in the troop she was taken from;
we don’t know what knowledge she carried that only existed in her—which relationships, which routes through the canopy, which individuals trusted her and why;
we don’t know what role she was growing into, and little about the role she occupied on the day we captured her;
we don’t know who she would have mentored, or been mentored by, had we not removed her from her environment;
we don’t know what her position cost her to hold, or what it would have paid her, over a longer arc;
we don’t know what conditions produced her “neutrality” – whether it was constitutional, or whether it was what her troop’s social order permitted her to be;
we don’t know what she would look like measured against a troop with more resources, less predation pressure, a different history;
we don’t know what our presence, before capture, had already changed;
we don’t know what her stress response tells us about her species, and what it only tells us about this laboratory or this individual;
we don’t know what parts of her behavior we are about to record can be considered a baseline, and which are trauma responses to a hostile environment.
We don’t know that our definition of fitness is sound, relative to her environment, since fitness was never a property she carried alone—it was always a relationship between her, her community, and a forest we have just removed her from.
Sit with that.
rigor: mortis
Science demands rigor. Yet ‘rigor,’ as a term of art, defines stiffness, rigidity, resistance to change. And it’s this scientific rigor that my thesis is presented to indict. We have, as scientists, observers of phenomena, been entraining to limited premises, to confined metrics that don’t scale, to questions defined by a culture that has changed faster than our environment has changed us. The method is sound: question, test, record, reflect, question, repeat. But in our pursuit of specificity of quantifiable data, we’ve lost the frame. We rarely ask the systems level questions, because they often involve cooperation to answer, and cooperation is hard.
Einstein’s theory of relativity established this formally: there is no privileged, view-from-nowhere position from which to measure anything. Every observation is frame-dependent—inseparable from the position, motion, and condition of the observer making it. There is no neutral laboratory. There is no absolute vantage from which the monkey can be measured without the measurement itself already being shaped by the frame we’ve placed her in.
We need to start observing ourselves, and the conditions we assume before observing our subject.
a study of a study
Let’s move forward. Considering that our study is now the study of a disordered individual, let’s make the best of it, and reflect on our data.
We recognize that we want this to be a longitudinal study. We are rigorous—we want to play the long game. So we bring in another individual—a male—to make a breeding pair. We can now study our subject over generations.
We observe as many aspects of biology and behavior as we can think of, in our laboratory:
growth rate, weight gain, caloric intake relative to species norms established elsewhere;
reproductive cycle, gestation length, litter size, interval between pregnancies;
maternal behavior—grooming frequency, nursing duration, proximity-seeking in offspring;
social hierarchy between our two adults, now that a hierarchy of two is all that’s available to form;
vocalization patterns, and how they change in an enclosure with no canopy to carry them;
activity level across a 24-hour cycle, measured against a light schedule we control;
stress hormone levels, sampled at intervals convenient to our staffing;
response to novel objects, introduced on our schedule, to test cognition and adaptability;
aggression and appeasement behaviors, now performed for an audience of one instead of a troop;
longevity, and cause of death, when it comes, recorded as data rather than as loss;
And, across generations, we record whether any of these measurements drift.
And recognize that all of these findings represent behaviors and adaptations within a hostile environment that our subjects were not adapted to inhabit. We are recording disorder as baseline data for the species being observed.
Sit with that. Metabolize the conflicts presented here. Chew on the difficult truths.
Pause. Reflect. If you understand, grieve.
Then let’s move on.
We publish our findings. We present our data as representative of the normal range for the species. We get funding and extend our study to 20 generations of monkeys. This appears to be a longitudinal study.
But it’s a longitudinal study of disordered individuals, now sorted according to their fitness within a hostile environment they were not adapted to. Our study has shifted from “observing monkey fitness” to “monkey fitness relative to a specific, hostile environment.” Or better yet, “how do monkeys sort when we force them through this tube?”
Our 20-generation study is now sorting for survivability of hostile conditions, rather than fitness within the environment for which they are adapted.
Make note of that, and flag this for further study.
Hey, but we’ve got a lot of data. Our boss is impressed.
20 generations on, we’ve got a lot to work with in understanding monkey fitness and behavior. We’re able to establish norms, and medians, and divergences, and anomalies. We have a serious body of work, that’s the result of deep investments of time, attention, and capital.
This is the moment of truth, regarding the economy of scale, and its effect on the future success of our control group: the lab-raised monkeys relative to the land-embedded monkeys.
We come to this moment, recognizing that we have two populations to consider. We can name the conditions of their isolation. We can also consider the conditions of their reintegration. Let’s explore this.
Given that the monkeys evolved within a unique environment that they were then separated from;
and given that a subset of those monkeys were allowed to thrive within a different environment;
what is the degree of shift, relative to the original environment?
What did the laboratory monkeys miss out on, in their adaptation to the laboratory environment, and how might those variables provide challenges for reintegrating into their ancestral environment?
Our new control group of lab-embedded monkeys missed out on a lot of sensory and cognitive experiences that inform their new fitness criteria:
the full sensory and spatial complexity of forest canopy—three-dimensional movement, depth judgment across branches, distance calibrated to a body moving through open space rather than a cage;
exposure to the full range of native food sources, and the searching, testing, and problem-solving that foraging for them requires;
a troop large enough to generate the full range of social roles—elders, rivals, allies, mentors, mentees—rather than the truncated hierarchy of a mated pair;
exposure to predation risk, and the vigilance, alarm-calling, and group-coordination behaviors that risk selects for;
seasonal variation—rainfall, food scarcity and abundance, temperature shifts—and the adaptive behaviors those cycles require;
inter-species contact—the milieu of other animals sharing the forest, and the behaviors calibrated to that wider ecology;
the chance to leave a troop, or be displaced from one, and everything that migration and renegotiation of status would have taught;
unstructured time with no observer present—behavior that isn’t shaped, even unconsciously, by being watched;
the possibility of failure with real consequence—a wrong choice that costs a life, rather than one recorded as data and intervened upon;
continuity of relationship with individuals who remembered them across years, not just across a study’s observation window.
Along with this, our new control group is sorting along new criteria for fitness, that didn’t apply to our original population:
tolerance for confinement—stillness, restricted range of movement, proximity to walls and boundaries with no option to leave;
tolerance for chronic proximity to a small, fixed set of individuals with no ability to disperse, avoid, or seek distance;
tolerance for human observation—habituation to being watched, handled, and measured as a condition of daily life;
tolerance for a fixed, human-controlled feeding schedule, rather than self-directed foraging;
tolerance for a fixed light/dark cycle imposed by researchers, rather than natural seasonal variation;
reduced vigilance behavior, in the absence of any predation pressure to maintain it;
reduced range of alarm and coordination calls, in an environment with nothing left to coordinate against;
compliance with novel-object and cognitive-testing protocols introduced on a schedule convenient to staff, not to the control group;
recovery speed from repeated, unavoidable stress exposure—since the same procedures recur across a generation’s whole life, and across every generation after it;
whatever traits made an individual “easy to study”—docility, low reactivity, predictability—now quietly functioning as fitness criteria in their own right, selected for without ever being named as such.
Let’s pause again. That’s a lot to take in.
Two populations of monkeys. They’re all the same species, but observed in contrast, they are functionally different in important ways.
Having observed a group of monkeys in the laboratory with deep granularity, we have learned a lot about monkey behavior, variation, and fitness.
Having said that, let’s consider a different project. Let’s say we want to abandon our study, and allow our laboratory subjects to reintegrate into their ancestral environment. Will this be a clean and easy transition? Considering the metrics for fitness our data supports, and considering that we are choosing candidates for reintroduction based on our laboratory model of fitness, let’s see what the net gain/loss looks like.
Compared to our lab-based control group, here’s who would be sorted out of the original community:
Individuals that exhibit:
heightened vigilance and frequent alarm-calling would read as hypervigilance or excessive anxiety, since the new baseline has no predation pressure to calibrate against;
complex three-dimensional spatial navigation and constant movement across variable terrain would read as hyperactivity or an inability to remain still;
a wide vocal repertoire, calibrated to coordinate a large troop across dense canopy, would read as excessive or disordered vocalization relative to a population that only ever had to communicate across a cage;
strong reactivity to novel stimuli, appropriate to an environment where the unfamiliar is often dangerous, would read as poor stress regulation or low stimulus tolerance;
selective, discriminating avoidance of certain individuals or situations would read as social dysfunction, since the lab baseline was shaped by populations with no ability to avoid anyone;
assertive competition for troop rank and resources would read as aggression, absent the larger social structure that gives competition its context and its limits;
deep, long-term bonds formed and re-formed across a large, shifting troop would read as inconsistent or unstable attachment, next to a baseline of fixed, forced proximity to the same few individuals for life;
foraging behavior—wide-ranging, exploratory, tolerant of extended uncertainty about where the next meal is—would read as restlessness or food-seeking dysregulation, next to a population fed on a fixed schedule;
resistance to human handling and observation would read as poor compliance or temperament problems, rather than as an intact, appropriate wariness of an unfamiliar species;
variability itself—the sheer range of individual difference the original troop could sustain—would read as noise, or as a lack of the consistency the new baseline has come to expect, simply because the new population was never permitted to generate that range in the first place.
Every trait that would now be called divergent is a trait that was, in the original environment, either neutral or actively adaptive. Nothing in this list describes a defect. It describes a population still calibrated to an environment they have been separated from, and that moment of separation has ceased to be factored in to any assessment metric. This is the legacy of our original group of scientists failing to pass on their knowledge to a new generation. This is not an indictment, just an acknowledgment that there is cultural information that was simply forgotten.
None of this should be controversial, from my perspective. Nothing I’m presenting is new. It’s just considering a broader and more reasonable set of variables for organizing data. Why this doesn’t reflect current diagnostic paradigms is difficult to not interpret as nefarious intent, but I know better than to assume that.
monkey see, monkey do
From here, i’d like to actually step into the frame, or rather ask that together, we merge with it. We are the monkeys, the monkeys we were observing are now us. and we are observing the traits we have described as divergent, with the understanding that we are a colony of highly social primates, observing behavior, scanning for range, and sorting for adaptation to a highly restricted environment. How did we get here? What assumptions do we bring with us to our observations? Are our calculations neutral, or are they calibrated to ensure that the environment, the conditions of the laboratory, are maintained?
And by environment, i don’t just mean the physical environment, i mean the web of social relationships that exist inside of cultural expectations. We are a population that has been living in a constrained environment for generations, and our scientists have forgotten to relate their current data back to this population’s original emplaced environment.
I’m not sure we should even be studying autism in the United States.
My mother just turned 82 today. She has faced challenges in every measurable area of her life, that I won’t go into—that’s a different story. Her diagnosis has changed with the trends of the healthcare industry, and she has only recently been recognized as autistic. It’s hard to imagine that someone who has experienced the challenges that have been placed on her would have such a sweet and sunny disposition and enthusiastic and optimistic outlook during times when her accommodations meet her needs. During times when her challenges are centered, she can be deeply dysregulated and difficult to comfort.
I’m going to take this in a surprising direction, at least considering the thrust of my advocacy, which is that love is the missing accommodation that’s never measured in any diagnostic framework. I never want to look at a person in a way that frames them according to their worth as a producer of economic output. Yet a remarkable characteristic of my mom is that throughout every stage of her life, from the time she was 6 years old until now—76 years and counting—she has been continuously engaged in making.
Her discipline is the fiber arts, and within that her skills and output are varied and broad—sewing, knitting, crochet, natural dyes are the main ones, and she’s dabbled in all other areas of the work. She has worked for brief periods in her industry, but there are so few compensated roles in the US that she has mostly done work in highly unaccommodating environments and lived on public assistance.
She’ll spend her last $20 on a skein of yarn to make a garment for a friend she met yesterday. No amount of reminding or cajoling can convince her to practice practical economy.
Making is literally self-regulation for her. When she is focused on a project, all of the other challenges stop being centered. As long as her needs are provided for, making work is her happy place. She also loves to share information, and she delights in the opportunity to pass on her skills and knowledge. I wish more of those opportunities existed, because they provide the context for the type of social interaction that both feeds her heart and nurtures her community.
76 years and counting of continuous making. What metric in the paradigm of industrial capitalist culture and disability accommodation factors in that part of her profile? None that I’ve ever come across. And this with a history of social isolation that can be viewed as a life-limiting condition on its own.
The condition of her disability makes sense in the context of the socioeconomic realities that her culture presents to her as the standard environment against which fitness is measured—where the type of handwork she produces is only valuable in a privileged family who can afford to accommodate the person making it, or in a country designated, within the global economy, as a labor-extraction zone—where high-skill, low-output handwork like hers becomes an input in production channels serving that economic system. Using that lens, it’s difficult to recognize her as a person of great economic value to any community. Her challenges add up to a net liability, when public housing, mental health care, and economic assistance are factored in.
When we recognize this person, nearing the end of their life expectancy, which is an important stage to factor into any metric of fitness—where will this person be expected to be in their later years? Will they still be enjoying life and engaged with their community? Any metric of fitness should take in the full arc of a person’s life, and not just ability to function at the level required to be measured as functional relative to potential economic output at the age of eligibility for the workforce.
When we recognize this person independently of their cultural frame, we can notice some things that are both remarkable and unremarkable, depending on how they are viewed.
Relative to an 82-year-old person who is engaged in a 76-year-and-counting period of productivity, who is warm, congenial, and who shares information and mentors freely when she is in her element (that seems like a good standard of fitness), let’s reframe the history of accommodations she’s received.
My mom’s primary relationship has been with the healthcare system and the public assistance apparatus that negotiates access on her behalf. Looked at honestly, her mental health accommodations have been based around her ability to interact in working environments that don’t meet her needs, and in intimate relationships with people who are similarly undervalued in our society, who also have communication differences, social challenges, unaddressed trauma, and self-regulation strategies that involve substances and power-balancing behaviors that are responses to perceived loss of autonomy.
In retrospect, all of that could be accommodated quite simply in another cultural context: recognize her as valuable; provide her with food and housing, for which her needs are quite modest relative to the median; interact with her socially in ways that suit her needs—let her interact with people in all stages of life, engage her on topics in which she has deep and exceptional knowledge, allow her to mentor people who share her interests, and accompany her in gentle restorative exercise like a walk through the neighborhood; and make sure she has a project and the resources to complete it.
The culture that frames the conditions of industrial capitalism as the standard environment within which fitness is judged is in fact a statistical anomaly, a tiny blip in the arc of human evolution relative to a variety of environments—5 centuries of organization and 2 centuries of implementation—in a journey of hundreds of millennia. Changing that frame, how could her life, and her value to a community, look different?
As this is not a dissertation, but meant to inspire dissertations based on different paradigms and cultural assumptions, I’m going to share information without proof. I’ll leave it to the inspired and informed reader to explore the connections I’m pointing to. Let’s continue having these conversations.
Consider that a cross-cultural examination of precolonial land-embedded societies around the world reveals a consistent pattern—deities and portions of cultural mythology that represent the role of the maker—the smith, the weaver—as the one who provides the necessary bridge from the natural world to a world of order that human habitation demands. The mythology directly legitimizes a person like my mother as the person who makes human existence possible—the skills they possess to transform raw materials into the tools, roads, clothing, and artifacts of material culture are seen as literally connecting humans to their environment in the exact ways necessary to support a community sustainably. Not as decoration—as vital infrastructure.
A culture with these embedded myths would have recognized my mother early, and, knowing her value to the community, would have nurtured her unique qualities.
Keep in mind: my mother acquired her skills at her own expense, in pursuit of her personal interests. The type of obsessive attention to detail that is required to turn raw fiber into garment, implement, or tool does not come easily to many people. To take the average person and force them into a program of training would be an energy-demanding exercise that would place possibly debilitating demands on most people. The demands of industrial capitalist economies force people through training programs like this as a matter of course. She pursued her program with joy, determination and pride, not to meet the demands of a credential, but to satisfy her precise curiosity, to regulate her life, and make it meaningful.
How would my mother’s brain, her nervous system, her psycho-emotional development, her ability to connect socially, have grown differently, had she been recognized within a community that valued her unique qualities? I’ll leave it to the reader to do the emotional and cognitive work of making those connections.
For me, understanding is inseparable from grief. If you understand, let’s pause, and reflect, and grieve. But also celebrate, and repair.
Back to my opening statement: I’m not sure we should even be studying autism in the United States, at least without radically reframing our metrics for how autistic people are judged relative to the societies they are embedded within.
Many will dismiss my argument as lacking data, as naive projection onto indigenous cultures of inclusiveness that wasn’t present, as mythologizing an idealized past I wasn’t present for. My hope is that the smiths and weavers of paradigms will sew together the threads of our precolonial collective past and show where specific human cultures crossed the boundaries of acceptable behavior by making portable mythologies that didn’t keep the connection legible of the natural world to humanity’s space within it. I hope they might show how specific cultures subjugated the role of the highly interested woman that weaves the community together to that of the warrior bent on destroying anything that doesn’t resemble it.
I realize that I’ve forced the ending here. I’m rushing an idea that deserves more space, for the comfort of the reader. How is this functionally different from rushing my mother into a diagnosis and cultural ghetto for the comfort of a diagnostic committee that is suffering cognitive overwhelm, too tired to assess the arc of a person’s life? And, if we’re kind, this is not an indictment. It’s the gentle reminder to the researcher with low interoception that it’s time to go to bed. Because you are an important asset to the community and we recognize your value.
I have such mixed feelings here. I feel terrible, having reduced my mother’s life to a case study. But having rendered her as valuable, and worthy of the recognition of a community that values her specific qualities, I rest, hoping that in making her legible, a community might find a better way to organize itself.
Education builds bridges to new understanding. (educare: to bring up; to nurture). Indoctrination burns bridges and prevents new ones from being built. (endoctriner: to instruct; to imbue with an idea or opinion). Education makes the world bigger. Indoctrination keeps one sequestered in a silo.
The reason anti-woke folks rail so hard against indoctrination is that they were shaped by indoctrination that was presented as education; and in the absence of actual education, it’s easy to conflate the two, or confuse one for the other. Their impulse to resist indoctrination is sound. The target of their ire is misplaced.
The people who built these systems often believed in them completely—which is exactly what makes indoctrination so effective. You don’t need cynics at the top. You need true believers who’ve never crossed the bridge themselves.
That’s how the confusion between indoctrination and education perpetuates itself—not through deception, but through unexamined inheritance.
‘woke’ just means ‘educated, and ready to cross the bridge when it presents itself.’
‘anti-woke’ just means ‘bridges are dangerous: it’s only safe in the silo.’
Good for you, for recognizing the importance of education, and the power of indoctrination to limit education’s reach. If you’re sitting with the anxiety of a world widened beyond the scale of what you were prescribed, just reach out. Folks are here for you—just over the bridge.
to be woke is to have a visceral sense of justice, as reliable as the senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and cognition—that allows one to recognize that the current language of justice is inadequate, as justice is not applied equitably across all who would access it; and to participate in creating language that leads to equitable application.
to be a woke ally is to recognize that one lacks the visceral sense of justice; to believe those who experience it; and to use the other senses to fill the gap, trusting that the language will mature if allowed to do so—to be blind, but willing to coexist with the sighted.
to be anti-woke is to deny the existence of the visceral experience of justice; to belittle those who would enrich its language—to be blind, to deny the existence of sight, in the most literal sense, and to refuse to coexist with the sighted.
only a person who has had the sense of justice bred out of them can own humans or force them through contract into unpaid labor; deny them equal access to the right to vote; justify and continue to fund genocide; or accumulate wealth while others starve.
knowing that the path of the ally is available, one follows it to redemption.
never suspecting that justice is lived experience, the whole world becomes one’s adversary.
I recently received pushback from the usual channels when I posted about decolonizing the gender binary. As is my way, I went looking to history to see if I was being unfair to white guys. What I found was pretty clear, and it’s not just related to race (like gender, a relational construct), but more about power.
Gender flexibility tends to appear in cultures where gender is understood as a relational/functional/spiritual category rather than a biological one. The binary hardened historically where:
Roman law codified sex/gender into property and inheritance structures: strict gender roles ensure that only certain people are eligible to pass along the family name, and that eligibility is determined by the accidental conditions of one’s birth, framed as divine right—the same power structure that legitimized the emperor.
Abrahamic traditions systematized binary creation theology: by encoding the male/female pair as the first and foundational act of divine sorting, the binary was lifted out of social negotiation and into ontology—it became not a human arrangement subject to revision but a feature of reality itself, which meant that any person who didn’t fit wasn’t merely unusual but was an offense against the created order, converting natural human variation into theological emergency.
Colonial administration required legible, fixed categories for population management: census-taking, taxation, land assignment, and conscription all demanded that bodies be sortable into stable, enumerable units—and a population with fluid gender categories resisted that enumeration, making it ungovernable by the ledger’s logic, which is why colonial law didn’t merely discourage gender variance but criminalized it, converting a bureaucratic convenience into a moral imperative.
Industrial capitalism needs stable labor and domestic role assignments: the factory and the household have to be administered as separate spheres with non-overlapping populations, because the system’s profitability depended on reproductive and household labor remaining unwaged. Enter binary gender roles, enforced at the level of law, medicine, and social shame simultaneously.
Each of these systems borrowed legitimacy from the one before it, passing the same externalization cost forward in an unbroken chain.
What’s lost if we only recognize the one narrative? We miss that the relational/functional/spiritual frame for gender is much older than the biological one—many traditions that include multiple genders are thousands of years old. The binary as a rigid universal is, relatively speaking, a recent and geographically specific imposition.
And in many countries around the world where gender and sexual binaries are strictly enforced after the supposed retreat of colonialism, it’s not a return to some older tradition. Many of the countries with the most prescriptive gender codes had some of the most complex and dynamic relationships to gender in pre-colonial times: they are literally continuing to do the colonizers’ work. It turns out that the gender binary’s effectiveness as a sorting mechanism is often seen as more important than recognizing a history that embraces human variation.
So yeah, it’s looking like mostly white guys. I look enough like a white guy that I don’t have any trouble pointing out this information. My inner white guy can handle it. I choose to transcend the binary. How? Understand the history of the sorting mechanism, and for whose comfort it was designed—and then decide whether your discomfort with dismantling it is really yours, or just the mechanism doing its job.
as a practicing buddhist, “leave no trace” is a guiding principle embedded into every teaching: leave no physical trace of your passage through the busy world, and leave no stinky teaching behind that muddies the waters of the dharma.
how do we practice this, living as we do with the legacy of colonialism, cultural appropriation, and industrial capitalism? do i join a monastery that maintains a culture derived from practices developed thousands of miles away within a separate but equally asymmetrical power structure as medieval Japan?
maybe—but what other options are there?
considering that i was born and raised in California, what models for living are available for living a leave-no-trace lifestyle in this place?
Let’s consider a moment like this.
dōgen, the go-to teacher in my particular subsect of zen buddhism, the Sōto school, was sharing his wisdom from a temple in a remote area of Echizen province in Japan in the 13th century. consider what was happening in California at that time.
California was arguably one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions in the world. people had lived here for millennia, and by 1500CE (3 centuries after Dōgen’s birth), there were somewhere around 80 distinct languages and cultural groups living in this place: in the coastal region; in the great valley between the coastal ranges and the Sierra Nevada; in myriad river valleys, watersheds, grasslands, and oak groves.
Consider this: upon arrival, on ships and overland, European colonists encountered a land that they believed to be pristine and uninhabited.
Let that sink in.
One of the most culturally diverse regions on Earth.
For anyone paying mindful attention (as we are entreated to do), this would seem to provide a textbook example of “leave-no-trace.” Look around. Where are the crumbling monuments and scorched places that a region with 80 distinct cultures would be expected to contain?
If you have the capacity to think about this for even a moment, it is likely to be almost unimaginable.
that being said, it would be inaccurate and unfair to say that the people who inhabited this place left no trace—on the contrary, the traces are there, if one knows where to look.
Let’s consider the traces left behind, in California, by the 80 or so distinct cultures that inhabited this place for millennia, before the ships came.
They left behind fire-shaped oak woodlands, park-like oak savannas with open understories, that early European observers admired and assumed were natural. They were natural, but they were also made—through precise, seasonally timed cultural burning that suppressed encroaching conifers, stimulated acorn production, and maintained the grassland-woodland mosaic that supported enormous biodiversity.
They left behind a superabundance of large game. The astonishing density of elk, deer, and pronghorn reported by early contact-era observers was not an accident of wilderness conditions—it was the managed outcome of burn regimens, selective harvest, and spiritual protocols around killing that functioned as de facto conservation law.
They left behind salmon run integrity—weir systems, harvest techniques, and first-catch ceremonies functioned together as a distributed watershed management system. The ceremonies were societal self-regulation—embedding catch limits and seasonal closures as cultural touchstones.
We knock on doors to ask for candy. They practiced similar rituals to ensure next season’s catch.
they left behind camas and brodaea meadows. These extensive bulb plantings, which fed both humans and animals across enormous areas, were cultivated through selective harvest, replanting, and burning. Europeans saw them as wildflower meadows—they were cultivated gardens in disguise.
Leave no trace, indeed.
They left behind tarweed and clover patches, in distinct patterns. Intentional burning created a patchwork of early-succession forb communities across hillsides—maximizing seed yield while simultaneously creating the habitat that makes species diversity possible. The quilt pattern that Europeans noticed in the landscape was an agricultural design, cultivated by people with intention and systems wisdom.
They left behind a near-universal network of dense, structurally complex riparian zones—willows, alders, sedges. These corridors were the circulatory system of the landscape, and they were kept open and healthy by people who understood the value of stewardship and systems thinking to their lifeways.
They left behind shell midden topography: shellmounds are found along the Bay, the coast, the rivers. They are features of the landscape now, that support unique alkaline plant communities. These indigenous communities had their landfills, but what they leave behind is kind of an accidental monument to valuable plant species that grow nowhere else.
They left behind stands of elderberry and hazel. Both were actively managed—elderberry for food and medicine, hazel for basket-making. Their distribution across the landscape reflects human intention. Where you find dense hazel stands, you are standing in someone’s workshop—again, disguised as natural selection.
They also left behind absence: absence of erosion signatures in pre-contact sediment cores. Paleoecological cores from California lakes and estuaries show remarkably stable sediment profiles through the pre-contact period—low erosion, stable watersheds, consistent organic input. In contrast, the colonial period shows up as an abrupt, catastrophic sediment disruption. These 80 cultures left behind measurable stability in the geological record. The entrance of Europeans is literally visible at the sedimentary level.
They left behind black, carbon-rich soils in valley and foothill community sites—soils darkened and enriched by millennia of habitation, burning, composting, and refuse incorporation. These patches grow differently than surrounding soils. Farmers and gardeners notice them. They are slowly-accumulated signatures of long residence—in the best way: they continue to support biodiversity and utility to the stewards who tend them.
Landscape. Systems. People. Intention. All working together for millennia. 80 distinct cultures.
Europeans arrive and see nothing but a natural landscape.
I’m saying this over and over again because it’s so easy to gloss over if you don’t make the effort to consider the alternative.
What is the alternative?
Let’s consider the legacy left behind by the people on ships (and overland) who saw a pristine place and sought to save the inhabitants from their sins.
If we consider the legacy of a supposedly civilized people;
and if we consider that what was left behind was left behind by a diversity of peoples whose numbers were diminished by 95% within 150 years of contact with the (supposed) savior peoples whose numbers arrived on ships (and overland);
what would be the legacy of the people who intervened in the millennia-long experiment of California’s indigenous peoples?
Let’s consider the legacy of an intervening people, if their numbers were suddenly diminished by 95%. Let’s consider (if we consider the intervening people to be more civilized) what we would expect to have found:
(I hope fellow buddhists are practicing mindfulness here)
Where are the prisons? The structures whose purpose is the forcible removal of human beings from the social body, if we assume that such removal is a necessary function of civilization? No pre-contact California culture is known to have required one. This begs the question: what kind of society needs this many cages?
Where are the parking lots? Surely an ecosystem that supports 80 different cultures must require an impermeable surface with zero ecological function, and a thermal mass that raises ambient temperature, that exceeds the footprint of habitable buildings, to carry out its work of saving a population from their sins. Surely they would have needed a warehouse for their means of travel.
Where are the landfills? We found shellmounds that became soil, ecology, and monument in one. What about their accumulated poisons, leachates, methane—sealed from the biological processes that would otherwise transform them?
Where are the strip malls—the commercial vernacular of a healthy market economy—built for a lifespan of 30 years, and already obsolescing before completion? We don’t see the parking lots (larger than the buildings themselves), but surely we would see some signs of commerce.
Where are the stadiums—the enormous structures used for roughly 20 days per year, built with public money, named for corporations, demolished when the team demands a newer one? The Romans had their amphitheater, that was apparently well-used—where did these people display their spectacle?
Where are the hospitals? is it possible that these people did not allow their baseline conditions—diet, air, water, social cohesion, meaningful work—to degrade so severely that industrial-scale intervention became necessary to sustain normal human function? Did they not live in such a way that made such monuments to care necessary?
Where are the highways? Roman roads are still visible from satellites. American interstates will be legible to geologists a millennium from now. Impermeable, like parking lots, severing watersheds, fragmenting habitat, producing runoff laced with tire particulate that is now measurable in the tissues of Pacific salmon. Surely civilized people would have needed a structure to move vehicles between parking lots, no?
Where are the golf courses? Doesn’t a civilized culture need a chemically maintained monoculture on land that could support hundreds of species, with water consumption needs on an agricultural scale—poisoned earth, to support a certain shade of turf, for the leisure of a few?
Where is the advertising infrastructure: billboards, signage, the entire visual apparatus of commercial persuasion permanently installed in the landscape? How would people have known what products to purchase to maintain legibility as citizens and support the corporate infrastructure?
Where are the Superfund sites? Certainly, a section of the continent that was home to 80 distinct cultures would have needed places where industrial processes so thoroughly poisoned land, water, and soil that the collective body would have designated them national sacrifice zones requiring generations of remediation—if remediation is even possible.
Shellmounds? Were these people even human?
Let’s pause, and reflect.
Eighty distinct cultures. Eighty different languages. Eighty different cosmologies, kinship structures, ceremonial calendars, ways of knowing. Not one people with one answer—eighty peoples with eighty answers, none of which required a prison, a landfill, or a Superfund site.
This is the part that is almost impossible to hold in the mind.
Dōgen’s monastery is a monoculture: an island of shared language and isolated cultural identity. The colonial project is a monoculture: a multivalent operation of power, subjugation, and extraction at industrial scale. Both operating from the assumption that there is one correct way, transmissible as doctrine, applicable universally, independent of place.
The eighty cultures of California suggest something the monastery and the colonial project both missed: that diversity of approach, held within shared relationship to place, is itself the technology of leave-no-trace. Not one answer refined to perfection—many answers, in conversation with one another and with the land. The oak savanna is not a monoculture. Its stability is a product of the diversity of its understory.
California today is one of the most diverse places on earth—again, still, differently. The question the land is asking has not changed.
What is meant by leave-no-trace? What traces have we been asked to reflect on?
From where we are, in this present moment,
what would buddha do?
Where would dōgen go to dispense his kitchen wisdom?
Does one attempt to move a civilization whose legacy is prisons and superfund sites toward a gentler stewardship?
What of the legacy of 80 cultures, across millennia, who left behind healthy fisheries, and pastoral oak groves that supported a diverse ecology?
What is a buddhist, who devotes themselves to leaving no trace, to do?
there’s no decolonization without dismantling the gender binary.
the intersectional person is the one who binds community—because they actually understand and empathize with everyone.
countries and communities who stigmatize nonbinary identity and orientation are doing white colonizers’ work: one-drop purity tests don’t build you up—they prove you’re not good enough.
if you’re judging someone for their nonconformity, just know that you’re doing the white colonizers’ work. no reason not to say it out loud.
