Shared-Air Space

SAS (Shared-Air Space): An alternative to “IRL” (in real life) that names physical, co-located presence without implying that other spaces — online, digital, networked — are somehow less real. “IRL” quietly encodes a hierarchy: physical presence as real, everything else as lesser.

For many Autistic, ADHD, and other neurodivergent people, this hierarchy doesn’t hold. Online spaces are often more regulated, more accessible, and more honest than face-to-face contexts shaped by masking demands, sensory overload, and the disjuncture in mutual understanding that can arise when differently-disposed social actors attempt to connect across different processing styles (Milton, 2012).

Networked space can ease some of that friction — timing pressure, eye contact expectations, unpredictable sensory input — making connection more direct, not less real. SAS names the specific texture of shared-air presence — breath, proximity, co-regulation between nervous systems occupying the same room — as one valid register of connection, alongside networked space, rather than the baseline others are measured against.

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Why solarpunk?

Air is not a neutral backdrop to connection; it’s shared.

Solarpunk thinking imagines futures grounded in interdependence and collective care rather than extraction and individualism (brown, 2017), and asks a habitat to be judged by a simple question: is this environment habitable, and for whom?

SAS asks the same question of the rooms we share. A room’s air can carry sensory weight — fluorescent hum, competing scents, unpredictable noise, the felt cost of masking — unevenly, depending on who is in it. That unevenness matters. Whose sensory needs get accommodated without question, and whose require justification or go unmet, is shaped by more than neurotype alone; race, disability type, gender, and class all affect who is permitted to visibly self-regulate in shared space without scrutiny or penalty (Milton, 2012).

Making shared air genuinely habitable is therefore a collective responsibility, not a private accommodation one person quietly manages — and naming it as solarpunk is a reminder that this labour, like tending soil or water, needs to be shared out fairly, not assumed away by good intentions. The shared air we’re all responsible for making habitable to our bodyminds. Connecting. Co-regulating. Cultivating the air we share, together.

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Related Terms

flesh space, corporeal space, networked space, meat space

Not a replacement for “IRL” — a refusal of the hierarchy it implies. Online life is real life too. SAS just names the specific texture of being breath-close with someone.

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References

brown, a. m. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press.

Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887

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Musical Closer

Breathe, breathe in the air
Don't be afraid to care 
Leave, but don't leave me 
Look around 
Choose your own ground