Essay

Or: I Bought a VPN, Stopped the Government from GPS Tracking my Phone, and Still Cut $8/Month off my Phone Bill

This article was originally drafted and shared on October 4, 2020. It has been uploaded here due to the inaccessibility of its original publication. This article is an incomplete first draft, and may be updated and reposted at a later date. Death of the Author is a concept and term originally coined in the eponymous essay by Roland Barthes. In his essay’s conclusion, Barthes writes the following: In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, […] but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, […] and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader:

They drag my body towards the pit. I don’t want to go. I knew, when I made the decision, what they would do to me if I failed, and it was the strongest reason to turn back: the pain, the terror, my body forming into something bestial and wrong - despite my convictions, if I knew it would come to this, I would have fled. I’m standing over the pit now, if it can truly be called “standing” when my body is so held by others, as it is now.

I think I can do better than “nasin nanpa kijetesantakalu”.

To be autistic is, in many ways, much like it is to be an immigrant from a foreign land. I do not mean this in the sense of metaphor, but more so that in some ways, it is the same experience. I do not know, directly, what exactly it is like to have come from another culture into one which I do not understand, but I do know for myself what it is like to be in a culture which is not mine and which I do not understand.