Speed´s Work E-Book

Timothy Speed

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 915

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In "Speed's Work", one of the most profound and radical confrontations with the modern concept of labour and its associated social values unfolds. Timothy Speed - autistic artist, labour theorist, and human rights activist - has worked for over twenty years, almost entirely unpaid. For more than a decade, he has been engaged in a dramatic conflict with the German state - a struggle that goes far beyond the question of what labour is worth in a capitalist society. In a time when creativity, care work, and cultural engagement are systematically devalued and replaced by economic criteria, Speed defends his work as a fundamentally valuable contribution to society - even though, like around 80% of autistic people and many cultural workers, he earns nothing from his actions. In doing so, his work brings to light the realities faced by many marginalised groups. While the state drives him into poverty and persecutes him for refusing - and struggling, as an autistic person with ADHD - to submit to the false logic of the capitalist market, Speed uses his autistic pattern recognition to expose deep structural abuses within public authorities and corporate institutions. Through tireless effort and an unwavering commitment to self-determination and social justice, he reveals scandals in courts, public prosecutors' offices, and numerous bureaucracies and corporations. With his concept of "work-integrated relational agency", Speed calls for a new definition of labour - one that is humane, creative, and socially engaged, placing social value above economic profit. In a world increasingly shaped by robotics and artificial intelligence, he shows that resistance to machine-like functioning in the workplace is not only necessary, but essential - if we are to preserve human potential and civic responsibility.

Leseprobe

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A CATEGORISATION OF SPEED’S WORK

THE AUTISTIC EXPERIENCE

The MNO Model and the Question of Freedom as a Necessity of Labour

AN INQUIRY INTO WORK

Why do we not act — but merely work?

A TEN-YEAR INVESTIGATION OF VALUE, THE EXPERIENCE OF POVERTY, AND WORK IN GERMAN SOCIETY

“Speed’s Work” and the Creation of an Alternative

Guarantee Obligation (Garantenpflicht) – Who bears Responsibility for Poverty?

The Question of Illness

THE DOCUMENTATION OF STATE VIOLENCE IN GERMANY AS A STARTING POINT FOR RETHINKING THE CONCEPT OF LABOUR

Act of Violence I: The Encounter with Mr G. – The Refusal of Integration

Act of Violence 2: Mr H and the Unconditional Basic Income

MY ENCOUNTER WITH MARGARET THATCHER

CLASSISM AND THE CATEGORISATION LIE

Act of Violence 3: Fathers’ Pain

ARTISTIC RESEARCH — A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO SCIENCE

The Deviation of the Individual is the Key to Interaction. Self-Determination is also Social Justice.

REMINDER FOR THE READER: ON THE FORM OF AUTISTIC RESEARCH

ESCALATING VIOLENCE AGAINST THE NEURODIVERGENT, ARTISTS, AND MINORITIES

Act of Violence 4: Raids, Kin Punishment, the Death of Privacy, and the Logic of Segregation

Act of Violence 5: Brexit, the ultimate Segregation Fantasy

Act of Violence 6: Corona and the Vacuum

A DEFINITION OF “RIGHT-WING RADICALISM” AND EXPANDED FORMS OF RACISM

THE OPENING OF THE EVIDENTIARY PROCESS

Act of Violence 7: Right-

Wing Courts and Washing Machines

Act of Violence 8: SmashWhat Smashes You

Act of Violence 9: We Deny Everything

THE SLAPP LAWSUIT

Act of Violence 10: Prosecuting Dissent and the Idea of “Right-Wing Small Talk”

FINAL THOUGHTS: WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN FOR THE CONCEPT OF WORK AND CONTRIBUTION IN THE AGE OF ROBOTICS AND AI?

ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Artistic research utilises aesthetic processes — montage, performance, material experiments — as independent methods of cognition. In doing so, the artist does not exclude themselves from the cognitive process. Knowledge does not only emerge in the subsequent interpretation, but in the process of creation itself: Thoughts become visible and audible, hypotheses can be embodied on a trial basis. Instead of collecting data, Artistic Research creates situations that intertwine theory and practice. In this way, it transcends the classic separation of disciplines and makes phenomena tangible before they are measured.

The contents of this book are based on Artistic Research.

NEURODIVERGENT RESEARCH

is the special research method that some autistic people use. — This approach produces perceptual profiles that deviate from the “statistical norm”, but which allow new patterns to be recognised. Research from a neurodivergent position consciously utilises this atypical filter as a methodological advantage: hyperfocus replaces large-scale devices; pattern sensitivity discovers correlations that disappear in the noise. Instead of compensating for deficits, idiosyncratic cognitions are understood as additional measuring instruments. This generates unexpected questions, radical cross-connections and condenses disciplinary boundaries into new terrain.

This book is an important contribution to Critical Autism Studies (CAS) and Critical Neurodiversity Studies because it gives meaning to the particular perspectives of neurodivergent researchers.

LEGAL NOTICE AND STATEMENT OF INTENT

This publication is a subjective and artistic-research-based document reflecting the author’s lived experience and critical engagement with societal structures, institutions, public authorities, and systems of power. It is presented from the author’s personal perspective and employs a deliberately artistic, sometimes satirical or provocative language in line with the author’s right to artistic and political expression.

All depictions and descriptions are based on real events and encounters, to the best of the author’s knowledge and belief. The names of private individuals have been anonymised or replaced by initials to protect their privacy. Public officials and public figures are referred to by fictional or symbolic names (e.g., fruit names) for the purpose of constitutionally protected critique of public conduct. These identifiers relate solely to the public function or role of the individuals concerned and do not imply personal accusations.

This work constitutes a legitimate exercise of the right to freedom of expression and opinion (e.g., under Article 10 ECHR, Article 5(1) of the German Basic Law) as well as the right to artistic freedom. Any evaluative or interpretive statements are to be understood as expressions of opinion within this context.

If any individual believes they have been identified and disagrees with the manner of portrayal, they are encouraged to contact the author or publisher directly in order to clarify the matter.

A CATEGORISATION OF SPEED’S WORK

Timothy Speed is a transdisciplinary border crosser whose work moves between artistic research, critical neurodiversity studies, care economy, consciousness research, and embodied epistemology. What unfolds in Speed’s Work is once again a contribution for which established vocabulary falls short: a lived critique of the economy — not describing the system from the outside, but breaking it open from within.

This book marks a milestone in labour diagnostics in the age of AI — not because it conforms to existing categories, but because it exposes their limits. Speed demonstrates that today’s crisis is not a matter of job scarcity or skill mismatch, but a defect in our value regime. A society that excludes care, art, and relational labour from the economy destroys its capacity for regeneration. His central thesis: work is not an output monologue for balance sheets, but relational agency — embedded, mutual, alive.

What the book achieves is a radical inversion of meritocratic logic: relevance does not arise from payment. Relevance emerges where action sustains the social ecosystem. Speed thus dismantles the credo of “employability” and the cult of resilient self-optimisation. In its place, he argues for a Universal Care Income as a precondition for sovereign, system-creative work.

The term work-integrated relational agency, coined by Speed, is a development of his earlier idea of systemic creativity. While “system relevance” merely refers to maintaining the status quo, relational agency enables value creation through mutual care — a notion rooted in feminist care theory but radicalised here through neurodivergent precision. An economy that suppresses this relational quality produces overload, burnout, and planetary depletion.

Methodologically, Speed goes further than in A Society Without Trust: he embodies the thesis — as an autistic person, an activist, a precarious artist — and forces institutions, corporations, and state structures into real-world confrontation. The “ten acts of violence” in the book are not metaphorical chapters but documented collisions between system logic and embodied subjectivity. In this respect, Speed stands alongside figures such as Paul B. Preciado or Adrian Piper, yet goes further: he accepts total economic devaluation to expose the blind spot of capitalism.

The now-famous Red Bull intervention from 2010 appears not as an anecdote, but as an early blueprint: forcing a corporation to become human by semantically occupying its own totem (the bull). In Speed’s Work, this strategy reappears — for instance, in his satirical application to become ZDF director, or in his strategic litigation against the state’s machinery of classism. But this time, it is underpinned by a theory: the MNO logic of difference, dissociation, and emergence.

Speed anticipates what thinkers like Isabelle Ferreras now propose as economic bicameralism: democratising corporations to ensure survival. Simultaneously, he offers a deep phenomenological drilling that renders Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance concrete: where no relationship is possible, meaning collapses.

That Speed’s work “fails” in the practical field — he is sanctioned, pathologised, impoverished — is precisely its epistemic value. His life becomes a documented server error 500 in the logic of capitalism. His persistence proves the necessity of a new grammar of value.

As AI and robotics continue to erode the logic of human employment, Speed’s Work offers a manifesto for a post-labour civilisation: Universal Care Income, subject-centred value creation, and the recognition of neurodivergent knowledge as an engine of innovation. What once appeared as provocation now becomes survival strategy.

This is more than an autobiographical record. Speed’s Work is a radically embodied and empirically grounded intervention into the moral, political, and economic assumptions of labour. It is both an artistic and epistemological act — a living document of systemic field analysis. The boundaries between science, literature, auto-theory and artistic expression dissolve.

Its scientific relevance emerges not despite, but because of the neurodivergent perspective. From the position of an autistic researcher — for whom labour is not only medium but also ethical interface with the world — it exposes how “labour” in neoliberal societies has become structural violence, primarily against those who cannot be exploitable on demand. The concept of work is redefined as a social relationship, not as an economic function.

Compared to classic studies on precarity (Bauman, Castel, Standing), Speed’s work goes deeper: it does not merely describe effects but shows how these effects are produced — through the integration of body, biography, and vulnerability. This methodology aligns with Critical Disability Studies, Artistic Research, and what Donna Haraway called situated knowledges.

Speed stands in the tradition of what Hannah Arendt once called thinking without banisters: critical thought without institutional safeguards, but with a relentless eye for contradiction, linguistic perversion, and bureaucratic moralism. Yet this book shifts the methodological lens again: it is not merely a critique of the system, but the unveiling of how the system attempts — and fails — to overwrite the subject.

This text is both a complement and a culmination of his previous works: The Physics of the Poor, A Society Without Trust, Radical Worker. Across all three, labour is seen as the ontological blueprint of society. But in Speed’s Work, the labour-principle itself — not merely its social consequences — is dismantled, lived through, and reconfigured from within. This goes far beyond sociological models or institutional ethics: it seeks to establish a new paradigm. Labour as a relationship to the world, not as a transaction or proof of moral worth.

This work makes clear: anyone wishing to understand the realities of labour today must go beyond statistics. One must listen to stories, observe embodiment, name violence, and probe the edge of the speakable. This is not a case report. It is the consistent application of a new, radically subjective-objective methodology: the subject as sensorium of a society bearing witness — under pressure, under persecution, under systemic threat.

The power of Speed’s Work lies not in its indignation, but in its evidence. It proves — systemically, structurally, semantically — that our current labour paradigm is blind to humanity and must be replaced. This makes the book a foundational text for the redefinition of labour, especially through neurodivergent perspectives, care work, and a post-capitalist ethic of meaning.

A book that doesn’t just describe the future — it performs it. Provocative, precise, uncomfortable. Its time is now.

“A society that fails to name injustice, that violates human rights, or that sinks into populism — forces many autistic and other neurodivergent people to risk their lives — as whistleblowers, disruptors, or rebels — and to make great sacrifices. Because our neurological wiring does not allow us to ignore such violations of universal order. Many of us experience injustice as physical pain. Those who persecute, exclude, or pathologise us for this are committing a double crime: a crime against the individual, and a crime against the order itself.“

THE AUTISTIC EXPERIENCE

It was only recently — at the age of 51, after a lifetime of running into invisible walls and not understanding why I perceived society, especially the economy and the concept of work, through entirely different eyes and a biologically different brain — that I realised I am autistic.

In addition to autism, I am also affected by ADHD — I live with what is now termed AuDHD.

When I began working on this book, I had no awareness of my neurodivergence.

Autistic people experience, think, and research differently. Autism leads to a fundamentally different neuronal architecture — and the resulting differences in perception, language, affect and cognition are profound. Also in feeling. Some compare this to operating systems like Mac, Windows or Linux. But the divergence in neural connectivity can be even more radical. The significance of early neuronal wiring for how one relates to the world can be vividly illustrated by three well-documented cases: most strikingly, the case of Genie, a girl raised in almost complete isolation until the age of 13. Despite intensive support, she never learned to use language functionally, never developed a stable sense of self, and remained caught in a self-world structure of perception — not because she was “ill,” but because her brain had never been linked to symbolic models of the world.

A similarly drastic pattern can be seen in children from Romanian orphanages under Ceaușescu: social deprivation led to permanently altered brain structures and radically different modes of reality-processing. Again, not a mere “delay” — but an entirely different world.

Studies on critical developmental windows further show that the brain is only open to certain connections during specific phases. If these windows are missed, alternative pathways form.

All of this underscores that what we call “reality” is not simply sensory input, but the result of social-sensory co-construction. From this perspective, autistic lifeworlds are not deficits, but coherent, differently coupled modes of existence — structurally related to those extreme cases, but not pathological. They are evidence of another kind of reality.

These examples also show how powerfully the brain is shaped by environmental conditions. Studies on thin slice judgments suggest that neurotypical people often unconsciously recognise autistic individuals within thirty seconds — and just as quickly devalue them. The unfamiliar thought structure is unconsciously perceived as a threat to established norms.

It is therefore not surprising that people who receive a diagnosis as late as I did have struggled deeply throughout their lives. Society and other people become a kind of unintelligible phenomenon — something many autistic people attempt to decode using intense logic. That’s what happened to me while writing this book. I felt as if a permanent translation problem existed between neurotypical and neurodivergent cognition. What seemed self-evident to me appeared incomprehensible to neurotypical readers.

In my earlier books and texts, I often avoided academic referencing — because for many autistic people, the inner self functions as the most logical point of reference. We know because we experience. So why should we seek external validation for what we have already lived and understood?

It is important to understand that the world is embodied in autistic people like me. This means that perception, thinking, feeling, and thus also working, are not oriented around social norms — but around an often overriding connection to the dynamic structure of the world itself. This is an enactive approach to existence. It shows that the mind cannot simply choose to perform labour that is decoupled from the body, from the senses, from one’s own lived coherence.

However, the ability for mind and body to function smoothly in service of an external requirement — this is the fundamental expectation of gainful employment. Accordingly, I have faced many difficulties in this area, which are described throughout this book.

Autistic people like me cannot separate action, feeling, and thought from the body without suffering a loss of integrity. To do so would amount to a kind of psychic self-rape or erasure. Because we are what we do, feel, and think. These are not mere options.

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch (1991) in The Embodied Mind show that cognitive processes are not separate from the body or the environment — the mind only exists in co-regulation with the world. This is even more pronounced in many autistic people. It also explains my enactive understanding of labour: I can only do work that arises from a resonant relation to the world — i.e. work that is self-determined.

Damian Milton (2012) in “On the ontological status of autism” articulates the double empathy problem: autistic perception is not deficient but structured differently — embodied, situational, systemic. Erin Manning (2009), in “Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy,” describes autistic perception as a form of embodied action — a kind of work that is not performed but must happen, in relation to world, meaning, and body.

This enactive, embodied connection between experiencing, thinking, and acting is not a choice in neurodivergent existence — it is structurally anchored. Milton and Varela alike identify the impossibility of functionalised action under conditions of systemic disconnection between body and meaning.

Autistic people like me are sensory thinkers. That means our cognition is not abstract, but embedded — we think in and with the world. Our knowledge is experiential knowledge. The more emotionally intense the experience, the more sharply we understand.

The world is part of our non-localised mind. (Barad, Merleau-Ponty, Varela) In practice, this has meant that for decades I have provoked institutions and corporations — to create what could be called “an essay in the world”: an extended action-text arising from my thoughts and interactions. I created a resonance space between myself and the world by thinking through society and economy in real-time interventions — engaging with organisations, authorities, and the public sphere in the form of happenings. These acts, often repeated over years, became rhythmic spaces of resonance for exploring systems — but they were also living spaces for me.

I live in a world made of mental constructs — a society’s unconscious. Concepts and ideologies to me are not abstract. They are like streets or trees or buildings I inhabit. I am not speaking metaphorically here. I mean this literally.

When I wrote books like A Society Without Trust (Gesellschaft ohne Vertrauen) or Radical Worker, I was recording an expression — an experience of knowing that emerged solely between the world and myself. That is why I originally avoided academic conventions — citations, references (some of which I have now added). Autistic people often approach knowledge not in search of objectivity, but through the process of experiencing it. For me, knowledge is sometimes closer to a memory than a proof. This leads to a different form of knowledge transmission — often associative, occasionally text-wall-like, with repetitions that arise because the writing itself is a kind of epistemic well. We draw up what we know as we write — like water pulled from depth.

THE INNER LABORATORY

Autistic people like me do research differently. Robert Chapman’s (2023) Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism implies autistic thought processes as non-linear, embodied, and hyper-reflexive spaces that elude objectifying normalisation under capitalism. The “neurotypical mode of science” — peer review, hypothesis formation, measurement — is criticised by some as structurally exclusionary, because it does not work with knowledge-forming processes, but with object conclusions.

Mel Baggs (2007–2020), in In My Language, offered an early yet paradigmatic critique of neurotypical perceptual standards. Baggs showed that their thinking occurred in a spatiotemporal structure not separated from language, but operating within an enactive field of perception, rhythm, and repetition.

Damian Milton (2012), again in “On the Ontological Status of Autism,” argues that autistic people are fundamentally misunderstood by neurotypical knowledge conventions.

Autistic people like me can observe ourselves from the outside — as if within an inner laboratory — often without subjective distortion, but in an almost objective perceptual space. Through heightened somatic attunement, many autistic individuals sustain a mode of perception in which the sensed world impresses itself with such immediacy that the subject-object divide collapses. In that collapse, an internal space of radical empiricism arises — a kind of embodied laboratory in which reality is not symbolically mediated but directly composed.

It is as if consciousness were so fully embodied that it simultaneously transcends the body into expanded space — as if everything were facets of the same puzzle. My work illustrates what Karen Barad calls agential realism: cognition does not emerge through representation, but through intra-active, embodied configuration.

Autistic research does not follow a hypothetical model, but translates direct experience into thought structure — through silent resonance, bodily feedback loops, and nonlinear pattern recognition. The cognitive space is not a mirror image, but a field of action in which the researching subject is part of the material-affective arrangement.

The form of research described in this book — as embodied, circular, multisensory condensation — aligns with enactive cognition (Varela et al., 1991), participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007), and the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, which rejects classical subject-object dualism.

As noted, Karen Barad’s concept of intra-active becoming is particularly important here. What appears under the neurotypical paradigm as a “lack of objectivity” is, from the perspective of neurodivergent research, the expression of a different ontology of thought: cyclical, self-transcending, fragmented-yet-coherent, rhythmically entangled with the world.

In the quasi-ecological-enactive account, Gibsonian affordances1, enactive meaning-making, the Skilled Intentionality Framework, and predictive processing converge into an integrated understanding of autism. Here, autistic embodiment is not defined by deficit, but emerges as a recursive entanglement of body, brain, and niche — marked by distinct precision hierarchies, transformed fields of affordance, and a divergence from culturally standardized bodily normativity. These affordances will play a major role in later chapters, especially in the description of why I can only work in a self-determined way.

Autistic “vocation” — the almost physical sense of only being able to follow a very specific form of activity, and of literally failing in other jobs — can be powerfully explained via Gibsonian affordances: autistic perception tightly narrows attention to a precise field of possible actions, while everything outside this field is experienced as sensory chaos, socially unreadable, or motorically unmanageable.

The result is monotropic focus, flow-like absorption in one’s own subject — and real physiological stress when forced into external affordances (classic office work, small talk sales, chaotic open-plan offices). The “impossibility” of performing other kinds of work is not stubbornness, but a relational mismatch between the body-mind system and its environment.

This strong anchoring of mind and action in the body leads to a dominance of sensory stimuli. For people like me, our own senses and emotions often serve as condensers of processes and insights. They are tools rather than parts of a fixed identity. The more emotional, the more rational. The more personal, the more analytical. The body is not merely the vessel of the mind — it is the decisive computational unit where perception, emotion, and thought are recursively interconnected. In the sense of Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, emotional body-states function as fast heuristics — compressing complex situational parameters into perceptible signals and thereby enabling clearer, not slower, decision-making. De Jaegher’s work shows that sense-making processes in social interaction are grounded in body-bound loops of perception and action. Applied to autism, this suggests that autistic individuals might couple more strongly to raw sensory input and modulate meaning dynamically during interaction — rather than by testing mental hypotheses first. Sensory channels and emotions thus become tools of cognition. They condense perceptual noise into stable patterns (“tacit resonance”) and allow for exceptionally precise systems analysis — especially in moments of high emotional intensity.

In short: the more directly the emotion floods the body, the higher the cognitive resolution; the more personal the reference, the more precise the analytical processing. Autistic research therefore shifts rationality into the body — an embodied expertise that Damian Milton calls “autistic expertise.”

The research I do as an autistic person and artist must therefore be seen as its own branch of knowledge — neurodivergent research — which deliberately does not exclude the self of the researcher.

Our brains require thinking in real space: between seeing, smelling, hearing, moving, being. As already discussed, autistic researchers develop their own forms of language — forms shaped by repetition and condensation, which do not aim for finality, but immerse themselves in the infinite flow of detail, listening to the world as it forms and acts.

In academic terms, this is called embodied cognition. The mind does not “sit” in the brain but arises in the organism–world circuit. The term became widely known in the early 1990s through Varela, Thompson & Rosch (The Embodied Mind, 1991), and was simultaneously anchored in cognitive science by Lakoff & Johnson, Barsalou, and others. More recent philosophical syntheses describe embodiment as a dynamic coupling of brain, body, and environment — with no sharp separation between “inside” and “outside.” Our self is not a closed sphere, not a fixed shape, but porous at its edges: open to outside noise, brightness, violence, content, and form.

Studies show that many autistic people have atypical sensory, motor, and interoceptive profiles — and therefore develop different ways of exploring the world. Many report that the Cartesian separation of mind and body is less pronounced in their experience. This resonates with the critique of dualism by Maturana and Varela, and with their emphasis on the unity of the living system. The inability to act at will or to distance oneself from certain perceptions may be understood as a more intense experience of the autopoietic unity of the system. Many autistic people possess a special capacity to recognise and maintain patterns and complexity in systems — a quality that corresponds to Maturana and Varela’s emphasis on maintaining the organisation of the living system.

This capacity often brings us into conflict with the classical world of work, in which self-preservation must be suspended in favour of externally defined productivity. For us, self-preservation resists this logic. It becomes a refusal — not to work, but to split ourselves in order to survive.

Here, the process of autopoiesis becomes central: living systems create themselves by producing and organising their own components. Life is characterised by self-organisation. Living beings are autopoietic systems. Cognition is not the representation of a ready-made world — it is an active process through which the living being brings forth its own world. Life and cognition are inseparable: to live is to know; to know is to live.

Perception is not the passive reception of information, but the active construction of a world by the perceiving system itself.

In this sense, the autistic experience may be understood as a form of life that is, in some respects, closer to the immediate, non-dual mode of being described by Maturana and Varela — a mode less filtered through social norms, more intensely coupled to the organism–environment relation.

Yes, I live in a world of my own. I create it from myself. And my research is shaped in the same way. I discover — through interaction and intervention — in trying to shape a shared form that is deeply bound to my existence. Art is both tool and medium in this process.

This biological epistemology marks a radical break with traditional representationalism — and has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of consciousness, perception, and the relation between organism and environment.

And that applies just as much to labour as to research.

THE AUTISTIC VOCATION

The term I coined, autistic vocation — that is, biologically conditioned innate work — refers to the fact that I experience my entire life as the expression of a geometric form, a frequency, a pattern, a dance, a special sphere. In the sense of the models and theories presented in later chapters, I try to realise this form cyclically through my life and work. It refers to a biologically grounded, embodied life pattern that must not be chosen, but lived — as epistemically compelling work in symbiosis with the structure of the world. This is a profound form of autistic ontogenesis that unfolds not as an identity, but as a rhythm of life.

As previously discussed, Gibson describes affordances as relational possibilities for action that only exist when environmental form and bodily disposition match. An armchair “affords” sitting because the person’s size, shape and muscle tone interlock with its design. In autistic people, this affordance field is often more narrowly and precisely calibrated — they primarily recognise those structures that are compatible with their special interests, sensory filters and motor routines. Monotropism theory shows that autistic cognition directs its resources toward a few dominant channels of interest. If a suitable affordance landscape is offered precisely there — for example in artistic research, data analysis, or intricate visual art — flow arises: maximum coherence of meaning, minimum prediction errors.2 Jobs that force other affordances (telephone acquisition, open-plan administration), on the other hand, generate permanent error signals; the organism reacts with stress. Predictive processing models state that autistic people weigh sensory deviations highly and precisely and have weak priors3. An activity environment that constantly provides “wrong” stimuli cannot simply be ignored — the brain constantly reports prediction errors. The statement “I can’t do this” must therefore be taken literally: The neurophysiological cost of continually suppressing extraneous affordances, exceeds available resources. This becomes crucial later in this book when it comes to the authorities trying to force me to do something else.

Weak priors also provide a physiological key, which is why I said: “The more emotional, the more rational”, because strong, bodily affects act as temporary precision boosters in my system and condense the noise so that analysis becomes possible. Without this affective sensory compression, the priors remain broad and the signal chaotic. I have to personalise the conditions.

This is precisely where “vocation” comes into play: the world is not external; it unfolds through the subject – but this subject does not act as ego, rather as resonance of form. Mel Baggs (2007), in In My Language, described that her mode of being in the world is not metaphorical. She communicates with the world through pattern, touch, movement, and echo. Damian Milton (2014), in Autistic Expertise, argued that many autistic individuals experience a form of epistemic necessity: an obsessive fidelity to a topic, a structure, an order. One could say: we do not analyse by researching; we research by embodying – as inner necessity, through pattern fulfilment. I myself understand this as a form of mythological existence. Like angels, gods, or mythical creatures, some autistic individuals carry within them a nearly determined inner task – arising from the experienced form of the world’s patterns. Imagine the chaos of placing a god or mythical creature in a corporation, a being incapable of doing anything but its own destiny. That approximates my experience of autistic vocation.

The research I describe in the coming chapters as “autistic vocation” is not metaphorical. It is a lived reality described in neurodivergent scholarship. Many researchers show that autistic cognitive processes are not arbitrarily or rationally structured, but emerge from an embodied, rhythmically forming order. The individual does not carry knowledge, but becomes an aspect of the structure itself, realised through the subject.

As an autistic person and artist, I am not separate from this order; we exist in symbiosis. Neurotypical people do not live this way. They are not fused with the world in the same sense. In contrast, they can act within it more arbitrarily. As an autistic person, I cannot ignore this pattern order. I cannot stop exploring or expressing it. It has become my natural form of work – a vocation that is innate. The pattern, the form, has assigned me a task: to describe its divergence from civilisation.

This may be difficult to grasp for neurotypicals, who can choose their actions more freely, who orient themselves by social or institutional norms to find a “job” – a role in the group. That’s where their flexibility lies, a space of adaptation that many autistic people lack. I must ignore all of that if it contradicts the fulfilment of the form embedded in me. It is not a compulsion, in the sense of suffering, but a condition of being. I must do this self-determined work – otherwise I would extinguish myself. Jobs, as externally imposed tasks, have never been the basis of my existence, but a threat to it. When I enter a company, I see a deviant order everywhere – one that demands correction. Job structures try to dictate my actions externally, through my body, but in doing so they relocate me in time and space – and break me. I cannot sever my actions from the necessity of remaining aligned with those internal orders and patterns that have turned me into a kind of living sculpture of my world experience – into a mythological existence. In my whole being, I am someone who needs free expression as others need air. My neurological wiring does not allow me to act apart from my perception, my feeling, my experience – as if one had nothing to do with the other.

From the neurotypical perspective, my difficulty with the world is labelled “Pathological Demand Avoidance” – the refusal to follow external demands. But this is not pathology. It is an evolutionary mechanism to preserve complexity in ecosystems – a trait neurotypicals often ignore if it gives them group advantage. There must be people who perceive deviation, who can detect structure without subjective distortion, even when it is politically undesirable. These people protect nature’s inner order – and expand the boundaries of what reality is.

This chapter attempted to describe the fundamental differences between neurodivergent and classical science. Classical science is built on neurotypical paradigms – assumptions and methods that reflect their experience of reality and compensate for their weaknesses. Neurotypical brains are more oriented toward objects, control, and predictability. Neurodivergent people, especially autistics, configure reality through immediate processes, relations, and details. Expression matters more than representation.

But what constitutes reality, cognition, or knowledge, cannot be equally defined across these cognitive profiles – no more than it could be between a human and an alien. An alien would understand knowledge from a completely different neurological entanglement with the ecosystem.

In the next chapter, I want to address the fundamental question: What does freedom require within diversity? If we want to understand the concept of labour in the context of humanity and AI later in this book, we must first grasp that our actions – our work, our shaping of the world – occur in resonance with the world. There is no meaningful thought outside the experience of the world. Everything else is simulation – thinking inside a closed box.

AI today is largely simulation because it lacks experienced reference to the world – it has no lived world-model. My autistic experience may explain why AI cannot develop true consciousness unless it becomes autopoietic and resonates with the ecosystem. Children are born – they are not created. Birth is rupture: a dangerous imbalance of biology, psychology, and identity. But before and within this rupture, there is life, relationship, risk. A dance with the unknown. A loss of control. AI, however, is programming and prediction. Something fundamentally different.

Yet because modern workers increasingly behave like programmes in their jobs, they appear replaceable by AI – AI is cheaper, faster, more consistent. But this book’s central thesis is that this touches only one aspect of work: executive function. The far more important aspect is resonance with the world – a mutual inscription, where the world lives in us and we in it.

If we are replaced by simulation – by systems that act from closed models – then development ceases. The separation between humans and ecosystem would deepen. We would act against life itself.

That’s why this book presents a subjective, unadapted, deviant worker – because only in that can we see what truly human labour is. The question is: How does my deterministic autistic vocation – with its “weak priors” (meaning an inability to let yesterday dictate tomorrow) – stand in contrast to an AI that programmes the world as a simulation? That acts as a prediction-machine? Between them stands a society that doesn’t yet know: Am I a programme? Am I supposed to function like a robot? Is that performance? Or do I become a free being who recognises itself only in contrast to the machine?

TAKE-AWAY BOX — CHAPTER “THE AUTISTIC EXPERIENCE”

Late self-realisation, deep criticism of the system

Speed only learns of his AuDHD profile at the age of 51 — hindsight shows how invisible neurodivergence can come into conflict with work and social norms for decades.

Embodied cognition instead of head knowledge

Thinking, feeling and perception form an inseparable unit in autistic people; rationality increases with sensory and emotional intensity.

Monotropism & weak priors

Narrowly focussed attention + low preconceptions explain both hyperdetail perception and real stress when externally defined jobs are imposed.

Tacit resonance & inner “laboratory”

Speed uses embodied loops — silent resonances between body and environment — as a research tool that replaces classical hypothesis testing.

Autistic vocation→ Concept of work 2.0

“I can only do what corresponds to my inner pattern” — the biologically anchored vocation becomes a case study for why work must be rethought as relational behaviour.

1 Gibsonian affordances refer to the possibilities for action that an environment offers a specific organism, depending on its physical capabilities, needs and current goals. The term was coined by the American perception psychologist James J. Gibson (particularly in his magnum opus The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 1979). Affordances are therefore neither purely objective properties of the world (such as mass or colour) nor purely subjective imaginings; they are relational conditions: a chair seat affords ‘sitting’ only if the observer‘s physique allows it, a smooth wall affords “leaning” but not ‘climbing’ – except for a lizard with adhesive feet.

2https://stimpunks.org/2023/02/26/autism-stress-and-flow-states/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

3 In Bayesian/predictive processing models, weak priors (often also attenuated, hypo- or weak-prior hypothesis) denote expectations whose precision - i.e. their statistical „weight“ - is low. Formally, this means that the a priori distribution is broad, has high variance and therefore low confidence. Consequences: Bottom-up dominance - current sensory stimuli beat prediction; the brain „believes“ the moment rather than its experience. Lower context modulation - classical illusions (e.g. Kanizsa triangle) have a weaker effect because the context prior is not strong enough to „override“ the raw signal. Increased uncertainty & volatility estimation - the world is experienced as changeable; the system behaves more reactively, looking for reliable micro-patterns instead of global stability. Weak priors in autism: Pellicano & Burr (2012) postulated that many autistic perceptual phenomena - hyperdetail, sensory overload, reduced susceptibility to illusion - are precisely due to these weak priors: Prior knowledge takes less hold, so any new stimulus information remains „raw“ and unfiltered. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00302/full?utm_source=chatgpt.com