I hadn’t actually read Tyler Cowen’s book when I first took to calling myself an infovore. May not have even known it existed. But I always liked the word.
The idea of living not on bread alone, but on information seemed to fit with my obsessive attitude toward knowing things, and the term itself felt vaguely flattering in a way that “bookworm” or “junkie” never did.
Now taking note of some cool new fact and tucking it away for later felt like a kind of superpower, and whenever I got carried away sharing articles with friends as if they had inadvertently subscribed to some kind of inescapable RSS feed, I could invoke its subtly positive framing to soften my impulsivity.
Sorry, you don’t need to read all of this. I’m just a bit of an infovore.
By the time I opened The Age of the Infovore, the term as I understood it had come to form a portion of my identity. So imagine my surprise when on page two I read,
One strong feature of autism is the tendency of autistics to impose additional structure on information by the acts of arranging, organizing, classifying, collecting, memorizing, categorizing, and listing. Autistics are information lovers to an extreme degree and they are the people who engage with information most passionately. When it comes to their areas of interest, autistics are the true infovores, as I call them.
II.
Inadvertently, I had been identifying myself by a term that now appeared to be interchangeable with autistic. I felt I had made a mistake. But as I kept reading, I started to wonder.
A key claim in AOTI is that autism, broadly defined, is much more common than is generally believed. Our perception of who qualifies as autistic is heavily shaped by selection bias—medical professionals zero in on pronounced functional problems when determining their diagnoses and informal forums for discussing autism largely attract participants seeking to satisfy emotional needs. In this way, the category of autism comes to be defined by intractable life problems, while thriving individuals who share many of the same essential cognitive features pass under the radar.
Though many of these individuals experience initial challenges, they successfully learn to adapt and overcome them. Counter to prevailing stereotype, autistics can learn to develop greater flexibility, dynamism, and social aptitude while leveraging the unique strengths of their cognitive profile to great effect.
This perspective prompted me to reevaluate life experiences in light of common markers of autism. As a child, I struggled learning to write and would sometimes become mute in stressful situations. I learned social skills very gradually by consciously mirroring the things friends did that received positive results, and avoided physical touch until I was almost twenty.
I wasn’t sure I wanted the label, but aspects of the psychology seemed to fit.
III.
Many great stories feature a seemingly ordinary person discovering they are actually very special. Think Luke Skywalker meeting Obi Wan, Clark Kent discovering his alien origins, or Harry Potter receiving admission to Hogwarts. Once the protagonist learns the secret of who they really are, they can never be the same.
It’s important to note that in each of these stories, the moment of transformation precedes any tangible change in their heroic abilities. All that changes is their self-conception.
Though honing and developing unique talents forms an important part of their later stories, none of these heroes are able to even aspire to their full potential without a positive identity to structure and direct their abilities toward a meaningful goal.
Before becoming a. . .
Wizard, Harry is just an awkward, insecure kid living in a cupboard under the stairs.
Jedi Knight, Luke feels trapped and unimportant, as common as sand on the planet of Tatooine.
Superhero, Clark is an obscure farm boy living in small town, oblivious to the impact his talents can have.
And while Clark Kent is technically a weird alien from the planet Krypton, that’s not the personal brand he settles on. Superman sounds so much better.