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I only just got the book today, but I was curious to see just what Zerzan did say on the topic of autism. His main interest in the short essay, "Not So Close Encounters: Distanced In the Age of Autism" is in using autism as a metaphor for what he sees as the alienating conditions of life in a modern technological society. What he says about autism as such is largely drawn from the works of several authors whom he quotes - Leo Kanner, Stuart Murray, Clara Clairborne Park, and Alexander Durig, as well as a study called "Researching the Autism Perspective".

To quote Zerzan:

The social world is fragmented, and there is indeed a worrying trend toward greater fragility and emotional instability. The most severe example is likely autism, for which the prevalence estimates have risen almost exponentially. If the capacity for empathy is a defining feature of human relationships, autistic individuals are more or less cut off from the human experience. Characteristically, they don't like to be touched. Autism literally means "self"-ism and is an inability to form affective, emotional contat with others, living in "a world in which they have been total strangers from the beginning." ...

There are just three more paragraphs of the piece that address autism directly, and I don't see any of them as particularly objectionable. My main criticism is that Zerzan seems to uncritically accept scientific labels for various manifestations of human behavior.