not clutching pearls exactly because i think people im listening to are mostly doing a good job but re silicon valley freaks and autism this distinction has been helpful to me
certain modes of awkwardness, anxieties, non-normative desires w/r/t the social, an incompatibility between individuals’ social norms and intuitions — these are asocial tendencies, or can be, especially considered in light of dominant extant sociality
neoliberalism, on the other hand, is antisocial. mass shooters are antisocial. hostile architecture designed to keep homeless people from sleeping in public places are antisocial. the nuclear family is antisocial. there’s a hostility there. the antisocial is the opposite of the prosocial; the asocial is the opposite of the social.
the asocial and the antisocial are often conflated, and from outside, at least, there can be some overlap. but in reality one is a basic, if differently distributed, tendency of human psychological life, whereas the other one is a modality of hatred. like, i am angry at the social world for devaluing my own capacities, which are often disruptively asocial (in the sense e.g. that my cognitive apparatus has failed to grant me an understanding of when i’m being flirted with, or how to get a fucking job). but that anger is a result of misunderstanding, which only hurts when you want to be understood, which is, ultimately, a prosocial desire.
the problem isn’t, or isn’t just, that tech lunatics have never interacted successfully with another person, or whatever podcastery thinkpiecey thing you want to say. it’s that they are invested in making the world more actively hostile to social life in the broadest sense of the term. the culture already privileges many of these forms of antisociality; the most significant political movement of the last half-century is constructed to obliterate the conceivability of the social, of the public, etc
this is the ludicrous irony of a certain strain of right-winger positing that the “modern left” (whatever the fuck that is) rejects the communal in lieu of individuation (blue hair, inscrutable genders, etc.). every trans person ive ever known transitions at least partially in order to make social existence tolerable. it is in order to facilitate the possibility of intelligibly partaking of collective experience
most people’s counterarguments to the enthusiastic proliferation of chatbot friends or therapists or whatever privilege the “messy reality” of real human beings or the primacy of physical interaction; i don’t think this line of reasoning is false, but i do think we can make an argument from even more fundamental principles: every thought and action a human being takes is performed in an elaborate and embodied dialogue with the world of things and animals, including people; AI purports to encapsulate and express this world when from an ontological perspective it is a tool like a screwdriver or dictionary — a minimal participant in the world whose intelligibility and interest is entirely a result of human beings one step back in the causal chain. hanging out with an AI is like trying to live inside of a documentary movie
in any case, the brutal poverty of even the most intellectually rigorous modern right-wing social thought is genuinely breathtaking