The New York Times recently published an essay about overzealous use of the Asperger’s diagnosis, and the detrimental effects getting the wrong label stuck on you can have.
I was professionally diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as a child. I do not believe I am anywhere on the autistic spectrum. Many people profess their relief at being given a diagnosis. For me, receiving a diagnosis felt like being punched in the fucking face. Repeatedly.
This is one of the longer posts I’ve written on this blog, and possibly the most personal. Take from it what you will, or ignore it if you so choose.
The Setup
The background for my diagnosis was bullying. In a perfect world, the bullies would be the ones referred for psychiatric evaluation. But I was the victim. It infuriates me to hear people talk about bullying as if it were some sort of childhood rite of passage that everyone experiences. Everyone gets teased, but teasing isn’t bullying. In my experience, every school has one or two kids who get singled out, maybe more if it’s a large school. These kids are the ones the resident bullies pick out, for whatever reason, and they are the ones who are subjected to almost continual physical and emotional torment. For years. I was the chosen one in my elementary and middle school.
I don’t know why I was chosen. I was quiet, introverted, and not naturally one to draw any attention to myself. I wasn’t obviously dysfunctional, and I had no physical defects that obviously presented themselves as targets for peer ridicule. Of course, once you do get chosen to play the role of victim, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. You get bullied because you’re the victim, you’re the victim because you get bullied. It didn’t help that I would get incredibly angry. I don’t believe I really have any anger issues. In adulthood, years after leaving an environment of emotional and physical abuse, of being made to feel like your only value is as a toy that can be tormented for the sadistic pleasure of others, I don’t anger easily, and would classify myself as a rather calm person. But faced with daily taunts, threats, getting beat up, spit on, ignored, excluded, having all sorts of slurs thrown after you—and through clever manipulation on the part of my tormentors usually getting in trouble for any altercations that resulted—I was violent, I was loud, and I was destructive.
I don’t think my response to bullying was in any way evidence of my abnormal psychology. Fight or flight is a basic human instinct. Cuss or cry. Explode or implode. When faced with a situation that inflicts extreme emotional pain, I could either curl into the fetal position and be sad, or I could get angry. I have cried a lot, but I have also fought a lot. I never backed out of a fight, which is idiotic, since I was a skinny kid and everyone was bigger than me. I usually got beat up, if I didn’t get off the first punch; many bullies are also cowards who can’t take the pain they like to dish out. The supposedly mature response to a bullying situation would be to let the adults sort it out, but when all the adults in your life prove to be completely unable to solve the problem, and frequently put the blame on you, what is a child to do? Vigilante justice can happen because someone’s an ass, or it can happen because the official channels for administering justice fail completely both at rectifying the situation and at dealing out appropriate punishment to the perpetrators.
I’m not advocating vigilantism. I’m not saying violence is the answer to anything. But I believe my response was well within the range of normal human psychology when faced with a dysfunctional and abusive environment. Extreme situations breed extreme action. Of course, my actions were only extreme for a middle schooler. All I ever did was get in a few fights with my peers, yell and scream and insult and possibly do minor damage to school property. I didn’t become a school shooter, I didn’t start bombing hospitals or office buildings, and obviously I don’t condone such actions. But I think I can understand the impulse, if I’m right in the assumption that they’re fueled by the same kind of righteous anger I experienced—and I suspect people never placed in such a situation can never fully understand it.
Emotional logic doesn’t operate on rational principles. I don’t pretend that being the victim of severe and prolonged bullying is anything like living in poverty under a repressive regime, or being raped, or persecuted for your skin color. But suffering is a subjective phenomenon, and I truly believe bullying can be as traumatizing to a child as more generally recognized forms of abuse, and scientists are starting to see evidence of that in bullied brains. And if it’s true that it can be as traumatizing, then surely it makes sense that bullied children would react as extremely—within the parameters of their existence—as some victims of other kinds of abuse do, according to the parameters of theirs. Which is to say that I refuse to see what would in analogous situations be seen as dysfunctional, but normal mechanisms for coping with extreme stress as evidence of cognitive abnormality.
The Diagnosis
Getting a professional diagnosis is a drawn-out, complicated affair. At least it was for me. I sat down with so many experts, I had so many interviews and tests with weird strangers. I might have been nine or ten when it started. My parents told me that all this was so that I would get help with my bullying problem, that is, the problem of other people bullying me. No one ever let on that I was being given a psychological evaluation. Finally, at the end of it, I was sat down with my mother, my father, and one of the experts I had talked to, and told that I “had something called Asperger’s syndrome”, a condition which led to social difficulties. What I heard was: there’s something wrong with you. They tried to assure me that there was nothing wrong with me, but they couldn’t mask the fact that that’s generally what a psychological diagnosis means.
It’s hard to articulate how crushing this verdict was. I’m struggling to find an appropriate metaphor. Maybe it’s like going to a support center for rape victims and getting told you shouldn’t have worn such sexy clothes. Maybe it’s like getting jumped by a gang and robbed, and while you’re lying there beaten and bloody, someone walks by and offers a hand—but as soon as you take it, they punch you in the face. I don’t know. Neither scenario has ever happened to me. Empathy is a useful fiction, but a fiction nonetheless: we can never know what it’s really like to be in another’s shoes. Unless we have experienced a similar situation, we can never understand what someone else is feeling, and even then our imaginary picture of their suffering or their joy is a poor simulacrum at best. I don’t know how to properly convey the emotion I felt then, and the anger I feel now recalling it, but suffice it to say I felt betrayed by the people I loved the most, and I was both incredibly sad and incredibly disappointed.
I’ve tried to forgive my parents. I come from a loving home, two great parents, and I know they had the best of intentions. They wanted to help me. I know this rationally. But the way this situation was handled, the way I was told I’d get help because people were mean to me, and then I ended up getting what felt like the blame—emotionally, it’s hard to accept. I bear no grudges, at least rationally, and I don’t think much about it, but every time I recall that moment, I get angry.
In truth, my parents wanted to help me, but couldn’t. My mom’s advice for dealing with bullying was to ignore it, and it would go away. I suppose the thought is that bullies get off on emotional reaction and by providing none, you take away the incentive. But, apart from the fact that it is both impossible to sustain a poker face when you’re a child and hurting, and the fact that this strategy never worked for me, this is incredibly condescending advice. Not deliberately, but condescending nonetheless. No adult would ever give this advice to a fellow adult. Stuck in an abusive relationship? Suck it up, and it will go away. Got robbed at knifepoint? Ignore it, move on, and it’ll be all right. Your boss at work beat you up because he didn’t like your tie? Maybe a laissez-faire approach will solve that for ya. No fucking way. When put like that, it sounds preposterous, which makes it even more incredible that it seems like common advice given to children, who are vulnerable in ways that adults are not.
The Disconnect
Apart from the problematic situation that resulted in my diagnosis, I never felt at home with it in the way that many who are diagnosed do. “Aspie culture” is not, and never felt like home to me. At first, I refused to hear or read anything about Asperger’s. Since then, I’ve more than made up for it, spending countless hours reading the scientific literature, the diagnostic criteria, fictional representations of the disorder, and online aspie forums. I’ve only become more convinced that it doesn’t fit. I tried unsuccessfully to get some clarification from the people who diagnosed me, the experts. Finally, I was told that the man responsible for my diagnosis had died. I guess I will never get anyone to explain the reasoning for the original diagnosis. The diagnosis was set by professionals after many interviews and tests, so I don’t think it was done hastily or sloppily, but there is still a margin of error.
I was introverted and awkward, but not debilitatingly so. I had unusual interests, but I’m not fucking Rain Man, and I always knew my interests could be seen as odd, and so never let them dominate my conversations. I do not exhibit the motor clumsiness often associated with Asperger’s, nor the inability to understand abstract language, nor the lack of theory of mind. Nor can I be seen doing the repetitive, self-stimulating behaviors or “stims”—rocking back and forth, say—often seen in autists. I did not fail to develop age-appropriate relationships with peers, since I did have real friends (friends who couldn’t or wouldn’t protect me from bullies, sadly). Ironically, my loner years of few friends and time spent mostly staring at computer screens rather than human faces happened in my teens, years after I was diagnosed.
The possibility that the child psychologists overlooked was that the dysfunction lay not with me, but with my environment. Perhaps I was justifiably angry because I was constantly tormented, and perhaps I was having trouble getting accepted by some of my peers because those peers had decided not to accept me. When I was a teenage loner—a fact that the psychologists couldn’t have known, since they diagnosed me when I was ten or eleven—it might not just be because I was odd, but also because I lived in a small town of five thousand people. In such a small community, there is no such thing as an alternative scene or a subculture. If you don’t fit in with the majority, you don’t fit in, period. And you won’t fit in with the majority if you don’t share their narrow band of preoccupations and interests. If I’d lived in a proper city, maybe I’d have fallen in with some subculture or other, and experienced some acceptance there. That acceptance, in turn, would allow me to gain the same social experience my peers who shared the majority interests got—which in turn make them more well-adjusted to this day.
Since I didn’t fit in with the majority, and there was no minority group to speak of, I turned to the internet. I had no trouble fitting in with on the internet, joining various sites centered around things that interested me. (The only places I didn’t fit in online were the aspie forums.) But the internet is a poor substitute for face-to-face, real human connections. I’ve made plenty of online buddies over the years, but I never had the means or opportunity to meet them in real life and form real-life friendships with them. (When I was fourteen, my greatest regret was not being able to go to a convention for Lord of the Rings fans, organized and attended by people I’d made good online friends with. My parents were justifiably concerned about sending a fourteen-year-old across the country alone to meet strangers, but on the other hand, if I’d gained some real friends there maybe many of my teenage sorrows would have been avoided.)
Maybe I succeeded online where I failed offline because I’m an aspie, and aspies do well in environments where they don’t need to read facial expressions and nonverbal cues. Or maybe I did well there not because I have abnormal neurology, but because I could bond with people over shared interests, and the reason I failed offline was there was no one anywhere near me who did share my interests.
The Salvation?
In the working draft of the DSM-V, the coming update to the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, Asperger’s has been rolled into the autism diagnosis, and many who are currently diagnosed with Asperger’s will not meet the new definition of autism spectrum disorder. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. Many diagnosees are concerned about losing legal rights to the help they need, and their concern is justified. But there needs to be a balance between false positives and false negatives. Both will always occur, but currently, the definition is biased to prevent false negatives. It has no provisions for preventing false positives, that is, diagnosing people who aren’t really autistic with autistic spectrum disorders. Perhaps people who are legitimately diagnosed have trouble seeing that, while false negatives are harmful, so are false positives.
Since I live in Europe, I wasn’t diagnosed using the DSM criteria. I was diagnosed with the World Health Organization’s manual, the current version of which is the ICD-10. I expect the next revision of the ICD to follow if the DSM rolls Asperger’s into autism. And personally, if my diagnosis ceases to exist, if the very condition I supposedly have will lose all official recognition, I will be relieved. Tremendously so.
The New York Times essay touches on this: when a professional diagnoses you with a pervasive, life-long and incurable condition that puts a ceiling on your expected success in the social arena, it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. Even if you consciously reject the diagnosis, it’s really hard to get rid of that little voice in the back of your head saying: You will never have the social life you desire. You will never achieve in life the things you want to achieve, and as a result, you will never be truly happy. Is it any wonder I was at times depressed and thought about suicide?
Between the bullying and the professional labeling, I have a set of bad neurotic habits—a constant second-guessing of own actions, a fear that any time I pick up a nonverbal cue I must surely be mistaken, a hesitance to ever take charge in a social situation for fear of the potential fallout—that I still struggle with. It would be immature and unfair to blame any and all problems in my adult life on a problematic childhood caused by the bad actions of other people. I don’t. But neither can I ignore the impact those formative years had on my developing brain. I often think about where I’d be today if I’d never been bullied, but had an accepting peer group all childhood and all adolescence. I probably would have never been diagnosed, and I probably would be in a better place than I am now.
For purely selfish reasons, I’d like for Asperger’s to go away. So that I can go the places I want to go, unburdened by a troubled past.
Feb 5, 2012
From a technical standpoint, the success of the lowly GIF is a mystery. Both as an image format and as a video/animation format, it’s vastly inferior to the alternatives. It only supports 256 colors; its compression is inefficient; it doesn’t support sound; the last specification was published more than twenty years ago. Yet it’s still thriving. The reason, of course, is convenience: on the web, the GIF, and especially the animated GIF, is the only video format that runs everywhere, runs automatically, and loops. These characteristics serve to make the GIF a potent vector for memes. But the story of how we got here is really the story of the internet growing up, and for that reason, it’s worth spending a few words on. Maybe even a lot of words, more words than most file formats deserve.
I’m going to attempt the impossible: to tell an engaging story accessible to relative laymen using a hex editor (a program for manually editing binary files). The above is the binary content of a very simple test GIF I made in order to better understand the GIF specification. Here it is, if you want to play along at home: 
. I’ll walk you through each part of the file, and explain each part as it pertains to the history of the GIF.
GIF89a
The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) was invented by CompuServe in 1987. The eighties were really the wild west days of the internet. The web had yet to be invented, and the internet had yet to go mainstream. At the start of the decade, there was no such thing as a single internet. Instead, there were a bunch of different computer networks that gradually grew together to form one. CompuServe ran one of these networks.
CompuServe was founded in 1969. These were the days when computers were so large and expensive that regular companies couldn’t afford one, so they rented computing time from a timesharing company. Compuserve was one such company, and they built a dial-up network to support their business. In 1979, they became the first to provide an online service to regular consumers. This was not the internet: it was a self-contained network, unconnected to the various other computer networks at the time. Downloading files from this network—which would be connected to the general internet in the late 80s—was the purpose GIF was designed for. The first GIF standard was released in 1987, and the second in July, 1989. The GIF file format has remained unchanged since then. The web hadn’t been invented yet.
GIF files weren’t intended to store animations. Unlike other image formats, however, GIF files were designed to hold more than one image. This had more to do with eliminating redundant information that was shared across files than with sequences of moving images. Online connections weren’t fast in 1987. Here’s what the 1989 standard has to say:
A GIF Data Stream is a sequence of protocol blocks and sub-blocks representing a collection of graphics. In general, the graphics in a Data Stream are assumed to be related to some degree, and to share some control information; it is recommended that encoders attempt to group together related graphics in order to minimize hardware changes during processing and to minimize control information overhead.
The updated standard published in 1989 introduced two crucial features on the way to the animated GIF we all know and love. One was delays between one image and the next. There was no explicit mention of animation in the standard:
Delay Time - If not 0, this field specifies the number of hundredths (1/100) of a second to wait before continuing with the processing of the Data Stream.
The other new feature was Application Extension Blocks, which allow for information to be encoded into GIF files that tells a specific application to process the file in a specific way. (Other applications will ignore this info.) Note that the standard actually discourages developers from using Application Extension Blocks, and instead recommends that they embed the GIF format in their own file formats:
As an embedded protocol, GIF may be part of larger application protocols,
within which GIF is used to render graphics. (…) This approach is recommended in favor of using Application Extensions, which become overhead for all other applications
that do not process them.
04 00 04 00
This part defines the size of what the GIF standard calls the “Logical Screen”. This is the overall size of the image (here 4x4 pixels, each dimension stored as a 16-bit integer). Note, however, that each image in the file need not have the same dimensions as the “logical screen”. As long as the image fits within the logical screen, it can be smaller, and indeed, each image within a GIF file must specify an offset of the logical screen. (If you have a GIF where the content is surrounded on all sides by one solid color, you can use this feature to optimize the file.)
FF FF FF 00 00 00
After some flags, we come to another well-known feature of GIFs: the color table. As you probably know, GIFs can only store 256 different colors. This makes it ill-suited for true-color photographs. These 256 colors, however, can be chosen from a palette of millions. It’s just that out of those millions of colors, each image in the GIF can only use 256. The color table stores the color values for each of these 256 colors, and then the rest of the file simply specifies where in the table each pixel’s color is located. This GIF file has the simplest possible palette: only two colors, pure white (FF FF FF) and pure black (00 00 00). GIF was an improvement over CompuServe’s older file format, which only supported black and white.
!NETSCAPE2.0
This is where things start to get interesting. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee opened the web to the public. Although there were others, the first great web browser was called Mosaic. Mosaic evolved into the second great browser, and the one that went head-to-head with Internet Explorer during the Browser Wars of the nineties: Netscape Navigator. (The Netscape codebase later evolved into Mozilla Firefox. Netscape lost the war with Internet Explorer, but IE lost the war to Firefox. The Mosaic line won in the end. But I digress.)
In the early days, there was no way to embed an image into an HTML page. While working on Mosaic, Marc Andreessen came up with the <img> tag. You can read more about this here. When Andreessen announced the <img> tag in February, 1993, his was far from the only proposed way to embed images into web pages. Many people disagreed with his proposal. Some proposed alternative tags. Others wanted a general solution to embedding other media into web pages. Why create a dedicated image tag, when this would surely lead to dedicated video tags, audio tags, and so on? Why not create a general solution that could embed all sorts of media, including images, video, audio, and novel future media?
This was another important moment that led to the ubiquity of animated GIFs. Andreessen and the other pioneers could have devised a way to embed general media into web pages in 1993. If they had, then we wouldn’t have had to wait so long for non-GIF video formats to work everywhere. But Andreessen’s proposal won out, and so the GIF, the video file format that masquerades as still image, became the only way to display moving images on the web everywhere you can display stills. Why did Andreessen win? Because he happened to be the developer of a popular web browser, and he shipped code that worked. Once <img> worked in Mosaic, it soon spread and became ubiquitous. The img tag started showing up in HTML standards after the web browsers had standardized on it.
Then, finally, we get to Netscape 2.0. Peek inside a GIF file sometime: every animated GIF contains a reference to Netscape Navigator 2.0, a browser that has been obsolete for fifteen years. Netscape 2 introduced a slew of new features: embedded Java, JavaScript, frames. And animated GIFs. Netscape 2.0, you see, defined one of those Application Extension Blocks. What the Extension Block does is basically say that the browser should loop through each image within the GIF file. Although other people had come up with the idea of using the multi-image feature of GIF to make animations, interest in animated GIFs didn’t explode until Netscape made the feature available to website owners everywhere.
Remember this little fellow, one of the first animated GIFs to truly go viral?
21 F9 04 04 64 00 00 00 2C
Finally, we’re closing in on the actual image in my sample GIF. The sequence that starts with an exclamation point (0x21 in hex) is a control block that has metadata for the image data to come.
The highlighted section in the screenshot says that the browser should wait one-hundred 1/00ths of a second (i.e., one whole second) after rendering the first frame before rendering the next. After the comma comes the first image frame.
02 04 8C 8F 19 05 00
The tiny bits here are the actual pixel data. Everything else is metadata. Of course, I deliberately made this file very small in order for it to be instructive. In a real file, which would be much larger than 4x4 pixels, data will outweigh metadata. The pixel data, as mentioned, consists of a series of bytes, each of which represents one pixel by telling a decoder where in the color table to look for the right color value. Only, it’s not so simple. As you can see, there are only seven bytes to describe sixteen pixels, and each pixel is supposed to be described by one byte. This is because the lossless Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression algorithm is used to reduce file sizes.
When CompuServe developed GIF in 1987, LZW compression was a commonly used technique, and CompuServe found it natural to use it for GIF. Unbeknownst to CompuServe, however, a patent on the LZW technique had been already been granted to Unisys. For years, Unisys chose to ignore people using it in software, rather staking their claim against manufacturers implementing the algorithm in hardware. In late 1994, Unisys suddenly decided to start pursuing software implementations, and CompuServe in particular. Predictably, there was outrage. The whole debacle ended with a deal where people who wrote software that processed GIF files would have to pay royalties to UniSys, while end users were free to use GIF as they pleased. In order to develop a completely free and open alternative to GIF, a working group sat down and eventually came up with PNG.
The LZW patents expired in 2004, and since then, GIF has been completely free.
3B, or ;
The semicolon indicates the end of a GIF file, and the end of this discussion. I said that I find this story interesting and instructive, and I stand by that. I fully understand that some may consider this too long and too technical, but the technical aspects tie in to many of the most important events and trends in internet history.
Here’s an interesting graph. I don’t know of any way to reliably quantify the public interest in GIFs, but we can make an estimate using Google trend data. Although it feels like GIFs (especially the animated variety) are everywhere, people certainly are googling less for them than they were before. I suspect that while meme gifs are common on blogs and forums, the many other uses for the file format are slowly being phased out. The GIF is really only suitable for small pictures with a very limited color palette. Due to historical accident, it has seen more widely use than its technical qualities would indicate. Now, finally, twenty-plus years after the GIF was invented, we’re seeing widespread support and adoption of alternatives. PNGs, JPEGs and HTML5’s <video> are making the old uses for the GIF obsolete. What we are left with is the GIF as a lowest common denominator. Not unlike the memes it’s being paired with.
If you’re technically inclined, and if the above mass of words wasn’t enough for you, you might want to read the GIF specification. Be prepared to muck around alt-tabbing between binary files and your browser window for a while before it starts making sense. The specification also details other, little-used (and little-supported) features of the file format, such as waiting for user input before proceeding with an animation, and rendering plain text stored in the file (not in the rasterized image data).
Feb 3, 2012
