The Neurodiversity Book

The Neurodiversity Book takes the epidemic of autism and ADHD diagnoses at its word (the numbers are real, after all) and then asks what is actually spreading. The answer is not a condition but a demand and a response to it: a world that runs on participation whether or not anything coheres, while it measures everyone against a standard nobody meets. This, and more, is why I am increasingly of the opinion that it is through the subject of neurodiversity that the spirit of the times can be seen seeing itself.

Inside, the discourse's prevailing vernacular is taken apart, word by word, because its words have already lost their meanings. "Neurotypical", first coined as satire, now employed in every HR deck, describing a person who has never existed (there are no neurotypicals; nor is that imaginary population the beneficiary of a world optimised for them). And "neurodivergent", a word that is quietly on its way to describing everyone, because it actually does.

Across three parts, The Neurodiversity Book shows how we got here, who we are when attention is understood as what it actually is - not a resource the world competes for or a description of capacity for compliance with external loops, but, simply, the substrate of the self - and where we are going; written not as prediction but from structural analysis of that which does not change.

Substantially rewritten and expanded for this second edition.