The Rise of the Aspie

People who reach the top of any high-stakes game are rarely well-rounded in the conventional sense. In the Gilded Age, ‘robber barons’ were described as shrewd, charismatic, conniving, Machiavellian, etc. Stereotypes about powerful men of their time implied (amongst other traits) a high level of social intelligence, one that is instinctively attuned to the intricacies of human nature and social organization. In contrast, the archetypal tech founder is caricatured as a genius who can solve six Rubik’s Cubes at once but can’t figure out why everyone at dinner suddenly got quiet.

Billionaires are salient examples of selection effects, but they are no more than the tip of the iceberg. In fact, people at the top of any organizational hierarchy are positively selected for social intelligence, since getting to the top still requires persuading investors, recruiting people etc. Zuckerberg and Musk don’t represent the median hyper-systemizer but those who also possessed enough social ability to rise to the top. If even the winners who make it through that filter look unusually socially awkward by historical standards, what sort of shift does that imply in the underlying economic paradigm?

That the Aspie specifically has risen in status seems obvious to me. But we should tease out the specific case of the Aspie from the general trend. Western societies have become much more accepting of neurodivergence and diversity more broadly, making it easier for people to self-identify as such. But this in itself does not predict any disproportionate rise in the status of one type.

The term ‘hyper-systemizer’ comes from Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge psychologist behind the empathizing–systemizing theory of autism. Systemizing is the drive to analyze or construct systems. When we systemize we are trying to identify the rules that govern the system, in order to predict how that system will behave. Empathizing, in his framework, involves recognizing what other people are thinking or feeling and responding emotionally to them.

According to the theory, autism combines below-average empathizing with average or above-average systemizing. Historically, Asperger’s referred to autism without major language delay or intellectual disability. That distinction certaintly shaped the connotations of the label. Still, the Aspie has recently been mainstreamed and even celebrated in a way he wasn’t in earlier periods. This is the late Steve Silberman, in his (very enjoyable) 2001 essay, the Geek syndrome.

In previous eras, even those who recognized early that autism might have a genetic underpinning considered it a disorder that only moved diagonally down branches of a family tree. Direct inheritance was almost out of the question, because autistic people rarely had children. The profoundly affected spent their lives in institutions, and those with Asperger’s syndrome tended to be loners. They were the strange uncle who droned on in a tuneless voice, tending his private logs of baseball statistics or military arcana; the cousin who never married, celibate by choice, fussy about the arrangement of her things, who spoke in a lexicon mined reading dictionaries cover to cover.

Systemizing as a trait is exceptionally useful in an industrialized society, well beyond software and code. The Industrial Revolution multiplied the number of physical/technical systems in the world and created whole professions whose entire job is to model and control rule-governed physical systems. All else equal, systemizing seems like an adaptive trait for electrical engineers and chemists too.

However, when commercial railroads ushered in a new era of wealth creation in the 19th century, it wasn’t the railroad engineers who cashed out the big bucks. It was those who could organize capital, court regulators, and command vast human organizations. So it’s not immediately obvious why software engineers, great as they might be at architecting a system, got to capture upside their technical forefathers couldn’t.

Software is unusual in that beyond having low marginal costs and thus being scalable, its fixed costs are dominated by human capital. The expensive input is not steel or land, but a small number of people capable of writing the codebase. In some early software markets, it was also fairly easy to get distribution right, because these were novel product lines and distribution channels with little competition. So a much larger share of the value created in a very profitable industry could accrue to those who could build digital rule-based systems, because technical talent was more of the bottleneck, giving the holders of such human capital bargaining power and thus higher compensation and ownership. In other words, software allowed hyper-systemizers to rise by minimizing the need for stupid shit like social norms and stupid people like normies.

At the highest level, software and the internet took parts of coordination itself—domains of trust, intuition and charisma—and routed them through formal, rule-bound systems. Some of us are young enough to have forgotten what the internet replaced. You had to call Delta or go to a ticket counter. You had to ask the guy at J Crew to find you what you wanted. The guy at J Crew had people managing him. Once you have the J Crew website and online checkout, you need fewer guys interacting with customers and fewer guys managing those guys.

Similarly, in earlier eras, social capital was largely local and embodied. The internet allowed for untangling it from these dependencies, enabling relationships and communities around shared abstractions. Niche interests were also now grounds for fostering new connections rather than simply a social liability. Moreover, the internet did not remain a refuge for the socially awkward . Ordinary social life came to be mediated through interfaces that the aspie considered home turf.

In other words, the Aspie rose in status not only because he made the world more aspie but because he got rich doing it, since for once, there were few normies waiting to eat his lunch.