The Wiki Man

5 December 2009

I read Dennis Sewell’s article on the damaging influence of eugenics on the welfare state with interest and mostly agree with his views.

Is this automatically a bad thing? While the genetic purist may think so, a new book intriguingly suggests the opposite. In Create Your Own Economy, Tyler Cowen, himself a self-diagnosed ‘Aspie’ as well as a respected academic and blogger, proposes that mild Asperger’s Syndrome can be an advantage to those born in the information age. Because it creates infovores, and allows its ‘sufferers’ to derive immense pleasure from processing and ordering information, Cowen believes the condition can be as much an endowment as a curse. The deep yet narrow fields of obsession common in Aspies may make for a bad conversationalist in a provincial pub but a valuable guru when that knowledge can be tapped from all over the world. (There are certainly train-spotting websites — ‘Note the revised headlamp farings, characteristic of the later 56b Diesel, seen here after a repaint plying the freight loop south of Runcorn’ — where I would rather read the content than meet the author.)

But before you assume that people with mild autism are beneficiaries of the internet age, spare a thought for one who isn’t. The low-level hacker Gary McKinnon, himself diagnosed as autistic, is about to be deported to the US by our government for breaches of US military networks while seeking evidence of UFO cover-ups. The fact that, rather than holding a trial here, our government chooses to hand to the American penal system a British subject who has never visited the United States seems shameful. When Sting, Stephen Fry and the Daily Mail are agreed on this, we should probably all take note.