Internet
Trucking Culture and Chicken Crates
This foreword was written by an angry contributor who tracked down Mark Stairwalt last Friday at the loading dock of Thelma and Louise’s farm in Stink Creek, Kentucky. A heated conversation followe...
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Guest on 02/17/12 | 4 Comments | Read More
Hard Work, Highway Safety, and the Road Ahead
The smart money never would have bet that Shift Journal would come as far as it has. This was the case for a number of reasons, only one of which I want to talk about below. And for as far as we’ve ...
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Mark Stairwalt on 02/6/12 | 3 Comments | Read More
Why Serpents, Dragons, and Shift (part 2)
As I move back toward discussing Shift Journal, it bears mentioning that Andrew Lehman is a man who continues to have an extraordinary and privileged relationship with his unconscious. He had shared e...
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Mark Stairwalt on 01/23/12 | 2 Comments | Read More
Why Serpents, Dragons, and Shift (part 1)
You may know Shift Journal as the home from which Julia Bascom’s essay The Obsessive Joy of Autism went viral late last year, to the tune now of over 40,000 pageviews. If you’ve been payin...
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Mark Stairwalt on 01/20/12 | 2 Comments | Read More
The Internet and the Iceberg Whole
Item: Ensign James “Peewee” Cobb, at 5’6”, 124 pounds, and 23 years old—in Pat Frank’s 1959 Cold War thriller Alas, Babylon—distinguishes himself as the only pilot in Fighting Forty-Fou...
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Mark Stairwalt on 01/19/12 | 1 Comment | Read More
Unity Without Uniformity: The Implications of Wikis
The internet has resulted in forms of collective human association without any individual being crushed by the collective.
One form of such an association has come to be called a ‘wiki.’ In the im...
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Zygmunt on 08/22/11 | No Comments | Read More
Autism In The Mirror
Comedian Glen Wool, musing on the sacking of the middle classes and treasuries of the United States and other nations by the looting class, has suggested that newspapers be divided into just two secti...
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Mark Stairwalt on 08/19/11 | No Comments | Read More
A quicky on the internet and ASD; how something rotten led me to something beautiful
Because the awareness and (arguably accordingly) the numbers of autism, are on the rise, and yet it still remains mysterious and misunderstood, “autism” is an easy term to toss around when you wan...
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Guest on 08/5/11 | No Comments | Read More
Greetings, members of NATO. We are Anonymous.
What follows here is to be read in the light of an earlier entry that looked at conflicts between autistic and corporate culture, An Autistic Ethos: It’s All About Respect. In that post, it was sug...
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Mark Stairwalt on 06/13/11 | 4 Comments | Read More
We’re Back (Housekeeping)
Servers placated; more better backups in place.
For those of you who caught the alternate-reality/time-travel sidetrip to the Shift Journal of 2005, no charge.
Regular posting will resume tomorrow....
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Mark Stairwalt on 05/26/11 | No Comments | Read More
False Friends
We’ve all seen it happen many times on the Internet. People with similar interests get together and form a community, sharing their ideas on how to change the world. They find solidarity, friendship...
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Gwen McKay on 03/23/11 | 3 Comments | Read More
What’s So Funny About Wikileaks and Autism?
Caitlin Wray’s essay Be the Change: How to Shift Autism into the Mainstream appeared in this space last August, opening with her declaration that “I have a neighbour who can’t say ‘autism.’�...
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Mark Stairwalt on 01/28/11 | 4 Comments | Read More
The Autistic Cohort as a Distributed System
A few weeks ago I proposed that what the autistic cohort and the Wikileaks file-sharing drama had in common was that opposition to both came from centralized systems of power which in turn mistake aut...
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Mark Stairwalt on 01/21/11 | 2 Comments | Read More
Versatile Blogger Award (and retrospective nod to Andrew Lehman)
It’s hard to imagine anyone I’d rather have Shift Journal be tagged by for the Versatile Blogger Award than the grand old codger of autism blogging, early friend of the site, and man who’s seen ...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/3/10 | 3 Comments | Read More
Comments Policy (and Contributor Guidelines)
It is not an easy thing to turn down the burner on a successful alchemical setup, an opus contra naturam which has been known to actually produce gold out of base metals. Shift Journal has contribut...
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Mark Stairwalt on 09/6/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
The Post-Consumer Workforce
As the free sharing of information and creative endeavors on the Internet moves the economy away from a focus on consumerism, we can expect that the careers of the future will differ in many ways from...
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Gwen McKay on 05/19/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
The Post-Consumer Age
As economist Tyler Cowen discusses in his book Create Your Own Economy, today’s digital media are causing society to develop in what he characterizes as a more autistic direction. Instead of pa...
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Gwen McKay on 05/17/10 | No Comments | Read More
Open Letter to Joel Johnson (Gizmodo)
Hi Joel –
I’ve waited twelve years now to see the word “autistic” begin to come out of the closet in the tech world, but your otherwise dead-on post the other day about “iPad Snivelers” wa...
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Mark Stairwalt on 02/6/10 | No Comments | Read More
The Internet and the Iceberg Whole
Item: Ensign James “Peewee” Cobb, at 5’6”, 124 pounds, and 23 years old—in Pat Frank’s 1959 Cold War thriller Alas, Babylon—distinguishes himself as the only pilot in Fighting Forty-Fo...
[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 09/25/09 | No Comments | Read More
Neurodiversity: A Pre-emptive Reply
Hello, there. I’ve been expecting you. While the focus here at Shift Journal may be a good bit more broad than that found at, say, Ballastexistenz, aspie rhetor, Whose Planet Is It Anyway?, or Asp...
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Mark Stairwalt on 08/28/09 | No Comments | Read More