I and Thou and Life in Aspergerstan
10 Oct 2026 - 10 Oct 2026
- One of my guest posts on Ribbonfarm: I and Thou and Life in Aspergerstan. Was well-received and part of the Ribbonfarm highlights tour (I am honored).
- The essay had a bunch of different goals:
- to present Buber to a crowd that had probably never heard of him,
- to develop my own thinking about parts and wholes, the nature of the self, fictionalism, all that good stuff.
- To suggest that Aspies have a z
xtougher time than normal with I/Thou, - That Buber might have been a bit of an Aspie himself and that's why he noticed things like I/Thou as a thing, whereas to most people it's just what you do, who you are.
Fictional does not mean unreal or trivial or dismissable.
- That's a good line, expanded on in fictionalism
- Here's what vgr_zirp had to say, speaking of a problematic Thou.
- This was a guest post by Mike Travers 5(https://ribbonfarm.com/2013/08/20/i-and-thou-and-life-in-aspergerstan/) — one of the MIT-trained AI researchers who contributed to Ribbonfarm. The core move is applying Martin Buber's I-Thou/I-It distinction to the internet age, particularly to what Travers calls the "aspie" experience of social cognition.
- The central anxiety: the internet accelerates I-It encroachment — treating everything as object, information, distraction — to a degree Buber couldn't have imagined. But Travers lands somewhere surprisingly optimistic. His bet is that "human presence is strong enough to survive and find new ways to relate," and he deploys a striking inversion: maybe people who struggle more than average to achieve I-Thou relations (the quasi-aspies) are better positioned to theorize and fight for them — like Buber himself, who Travers suspects "could develop his theory of the I-You because it was not that natural to him." Moses leading people to a promised land he couldn't enter 5(https://ribbonfarm.com/2013/08/20/i-and-thou-and-life-in-aspergerstan/).
- The comments thread is where it gets messy in productive ways — a reader named Robin 6(https://ribbonfarm.com/2013/08/20/i-and-thou-and-life-in-aspergerstan/#comment-37190) pushes back on the whole frame, noting that the I-Thou/I-It binary, rationality vs. emotion, STEM vs. liberal arts all feel "baggy and ill-fitting" as abstractions. That's a fair hit. The post lives in a zone where Buber's mystical vocabulary is being applied to a secular-technical problem, and the seams show.