The AI pages got a map this week — a front door, a split, and three new crosswalks. Underneath them, a root: Dinah Murray, whose monotropism-and-computing work is the bloodline of everything we say about machines. And a crosswalk handed us a name we’d been missing — relational opacity, the right not to be fully decoded.
Throughline
- The AI cluster got a map. The AI pages had grown into a tangle, so we built a front door. Rebuilt /ai/ as an overview of every AI page we have, split the alignments cluster off AI and Disability Justice into its own page — AI Ethics — Alignments and External Frameworks — and published a general-audience evaluation page, Evaluating Relational AI Tools. Three new crosswalks landed on the hub. The pile is a structure now.
- The machine has a root, and its name is Dinah Murray. Published Autism and Computing: The Root of Our Online Space, added a 1999 Murray & Lesser lineage coda to Monotropic AI, and published Inside the Tunnel, a crosswalk of Murray’s 2011 “therapy with computers.” Everything we say about machines descends from a monotropism researcher who saw the computer as a place Autistic people could be. Bloodline, not resemblance.
- A crosswalk handed us a name we lacked. Spaces of Relational Opacity and Our Learning Space reads Ahmetovic, De Jaegher, Williams, and Grace’s 2026 paper against our learning space and lands where Cavendish Space already stood — communicative breakdown between Autistic and non-Autistic people is an ecological misalignment in the room, not a deficit in the Autistic person. And it names the thing we’d been circling: relational opacity, the right not to be fully decoded as the price of recognition.
The Work
A Map for the Machines
The AI pages had accumulated faster than their architecture could hold. This week we gave the cluster a shape.
We rebuilt /ai/ as an overview — a front door that names and links every AI page we have, so a reader lands on the map before the pages. We split the alignments cluster off the AI and Disability Justice page into its own home, AI Ethics — Alignments and External Frameworks, then wired the two together: callouts from AI Collaboration and AI and Disability Justice now point into the hub, and the alignments anchor on the latter is restored so old links still land.
Then the hub grew. Three new crosswalks:
- The Cognitive Uploading crosswalk (Johnson & Wagner).
- An alignment with Campbell Walker’s documentary “The AI Question No One Wants to Ask” (Struthless, 2026, made with Petr / @SciencePetr). It opens on the same scene as Audrey Watters’ “Of Course They Booed” — a graduating class booing Eric Schmidt off the stage — and runs the popular-register version of the political-economy critique: it refuses “AI” as a single thing, names the conflicts of interest the vague word hides, and turns Tony Benn’s five questions of power into a teaching tool. We map six convergences against our AI Collaboration and AI and Disability Justice pages, then name where we go further: the essay never reaches disability, and its own map has no cell for the Disabled person using a tool to survive an inaccessible system. Converges toward, stops short of.
- The Critical AI Handbook (Human Restoration Project), added as the lead entry. Same Freirean root, same enemies — the pedagogy half of a project whose disability-justice half is this site. Names where HRP converges (tools not systems, broken systems not broken people, environmental cost held as tension) and where we go further (disability as the frame, not an example; the neurodiversity paradigm; masking and identity-shaping harms; the AAC carve-out).
And we published Evaluating Relational AI Tools, a general-audience page on the questions to ask before trusting a relational AI tool — the kind that has you rehearse intimacy, conflict, and vulnerability with a simulated partner. Five questions: does it reinforce neuronormativity, encourage masking, affirm neurodivergence, invite anthropomorphization, or swap sycophancy for a correction mechanism calibrated to non-Autistic norms? The throughline is a hard one: a tool that trains an Autistic person to practice until they pass is reinforcing masking, and masking carries documented links to burnout and suicidality.
The Machine Has a Root
The AI work isn’t new. It descends.
We published Autism and Computing: The Root of Our Online Space — Dinah Murray’s edited collection read as the origin of our online space — with a /space/ directory entry and references threaded in from Online and Written Communication. We added a 1999 Murray & Lesser lineage coda to Monotropic AI, dating the bloodline. And we published Inside the Tunnel: How to Sit Beside a Monotropic Learner, a /space/ crosswalk of Murray’s 2011 “Autism and information technology: therapy with computers” — the method companion to Autism and Computing.
The seam runs clean. Monotropism, the online space, and the machine all trace back to the same researcher, who understood the computer as a place an Autistic person could be. When we say the screen is infrastructure and the tunnel is a place to sit beside, we are saying what Murray said. Memory is the practice.
The Right Not to Be Decoded
The new crosswalk gave us a word.
Spaces of Relational Opacity and Our Learning Space reads Ahmetovic, De Jaegher, Williams, and Grace’s 2026 paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research against our learning space. They rebuild classroom interaction from enactive cognitive science and phenomenology and land where Cavendish Space already stood: communicative breakdown between Autistic and non-Autistic people is an ecological misalignment in the room, not a deficit in the Autistic person. The paper cites McGoldrick and colleagues’ Autistic SPACE — a framework already in our garden — so the convergence read less like a discovery than a reunion.
And it hands us a name we lacked: relational opacity, the right not to be fully decoded as the price of recognition. It joins the converges crosswalks in the /space/ directory. The crosswalk maps the alignment.
Week 27 Changelog
- Published “Stimpunks.org Changelog for Week 26 2026: From Convergence to Lineage, From the Bloodline to Brighter Days.”
- Rebuilt /ai/ as an overview of all our AI pages.
- Split the alignments cluster off the AI and Disability Justice page into its own page, AI Ethics — Alignments and External Frameworks.
- Added callouts from AI Collaboration and AI and Disability Justice into the hub; restored the alignments anchor on the latter.
- Added the Cognitive Uploading crosswalk (Johnson & Wagner) to the hub.
- Added an alignment to AI Ethics — Alignments and External Frameworks: our AI and Disability Justice guidelines and Campbell Walker’s documentary “The AI Question No One Wants to Ask” (Struthless, 2026, made with Petr / @SciencePetr). The essay opens on the same scene as Audrey Watters’ “Of Course They Booed” — a graduating class booing Eric Schmidt off the stage — and runs the popular-register version of the political-economy critique: it refuses “AI” as a single thing, names the conflicts of interest the vague word hides, and turns Tony Benn’s five questions of power into a teaching tool. The section maps six convergences — naming the systems of power, the doom decoy, evaluate by effects, sycophancy (“grown, not built”), the training data as a cathedral humans built first, and critical consciousness as the lever — against our AI Collaboration and AI and Disability Justice pages, then names where we go further: the essay never reaches disability, and its own map has no cell for the Disabled person using a tool to survive an inaccessible system. Walker’s own reading list makes the lineage explicit — Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the Tony Benn documentary Whose Progress? Converges toward, stops short of. The disability-justice correction is the part only we are positioned to add.
- Crosswalked the Critical AI Handbook (Human Restoration Project) — added as the lead entry on the AI Ethics Alignments page. Same Freirean root, same enemies; the pedagogy half of a project whose disability-justice half is this site. Names where HRP converges (tools not systems, broken systems not broken people, environmental cost held as tension) and where we go further (disability as the frame not an example, the neurodiversity paradigm, masking and identity-shaping harms, the AAC carve-out).
- Published Evaluating Relational AI Tools, a general-audience page on the questions to ask before trusting a relational AI tool — the kind that has you rehearse intimacy, conflict, and vulnerability with a simulated partner. Five questions: does it reinforce neuronormativity, encourage masking, affirm neurodivergence, invite anthropomorphization, or swap sycophancy for a correction mechanism calibrated to non-Autistic norms? The throughline: a tool that trains an Autistic person to practice until they pass is reinforcing masking, and masking carries documented links to burnout and suicidality. Added the page to the AI at Stimpunks hub, next to the Alignments and external-frameworks work.
- Published Autism and Computing: The Root of Our Online Space, with a /space/ directory entry and references from Online and Written Communication.
- Added a 1999 Murray & Lesser lineage coda to Monotropic AI.
- Published Inside the Tunnel: How to Sit Beside a Monotropic Learner — a
/space/crosswalk of Dinah Murray’s 2011 “Autism and information technology: therapy with computers,” the method companion to Autism and Computing. - Published a new crosswalk — Spaces of Relational Opacity and Our Learning Space — reading Ahmetovic, De Jaegher, Williams, and Grace’s 2026 paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research against our learning space. They rebuild classroom interaction from enactive cognitive science and phenomenology and land where Cavendish Space already stood: communicative breakdown between Autistic and non-Autistic people is an ecological misalignment in the room, not a deficit in the Autistic person. The paper cites McGoldrick and colleagues’ Autistic SPACE — a framework already in our garden — so the convergence read less like a discovery than a reunion. And it hands us a name we lacked: relational opacity, the right not to be fully decoded as the price of recognition. It joins the converges crosswalks in the /space/ directory. This crosswalk maps the alignment.
- The gaming page grew up. It was always making a claim bigger than games — that for neurodivergent and Disabled people, the screen is infrastructure, not indulgence — so we made the page say it. Retitled from Gaming Is Infrastructure to Screens Are Infrastructure: Gaming, Screen Use, Neurodiversity, and Disability. The slug stays
/gaming/; every existing link still lands. - Published Monitor Power, Not People, a July 4th reflection for the 250th. The Declaration of Independence is a bill of particulars against a king — the founding gesture was to name the systems of power and aim the grievance upward, at the crown, not the governed. Today the surveillance is inverted: the state monitors people, not power, while care systems are dismantled. Broken systems, not broken people. Monitor Power, Not People.
- Published “Stimpunks Monthly Newsletter — June 2026” — synthesized the month from convergence to lineage, pulling the four June changelogs (Week 23, Week 24, Week 25, Week 26) into one arc: the month the method got its name, ARLES; the six crosswalks that measured the world against it and each converged toward, then stopped short of, the systemic layer; the editorial that crossed that line and named the coordinated dismantling of Disabled people’s right to live in community; and the turn from convergence to lineage, naming who we descend from in the Highlander and Freedom Schools crosswalks. Broken systems, not broken people.
- Published a new Infodumplings page built around the Farming While Beige reels of Chris Newman (Sylvanaqua Farms / Blackbird Collective), whose short-form videos land race, class, mutual aid, decolonization, and structural economic analysis — while being funny as hell. The page pebbles six reels and threads them through our frameworks: mutual aid as a verb, artificial scarcity and food shame as a social-model problem, market consolidation as the market’s endpoint, and the “tomb or town” Solarpunk fork.
- Published “Campfire Learn Together: Two Masters at Two Pianos.”
- Added selections from “Presuming Competence: A Neuro-Affirming Reframe To Support Autistic People” (Autistic Realms) to “Presume competence. Never assume that the ability to speak equals intelligence.” Also added section headings.
- Added a new section, “How These Spaces Work,” to the Events page.
- Published “Shared-Air Space.”
Week 27. The AI pages stopped being a pile and became a map — a front door, a split, a set of crosswalks. And, a root: Dinah Murray, who saw the machine as a place we could be. We named the right not to be decoded. Broken systems, not broken people. The work continues.