Unboosted: Autism, Identity, and the Silence of Systems
A signal from the digital oubliette—written for the others, the erased, the unprofitable. If you find this, pass it on.
During Autism Awareness Month, the algorithm buries voices like mine—autistic, trans, queer. This piece is a signal from the oubliette. If you find it, pass it on. Help me reach the others. Help me be heard.
Introduction
The algorithm has already made its judgment.
A recent post of mine—gentle, heartfelt, reaching out during Autism Awareness Month—was marked “not eligible to be boosted.” A quiet little post about language and identity. About being gender fluid. About trying, in English, to make myself legible to a world that’s colonised the very concept of self. About hoping, maybe, to make a connection.
The platform said no.
Not flagged, not reported—just disqualified. Disallowed from amplification.
Not eligible to be boosted.
There it is. The oubliette.
Not a dungeon with bars, but a feed that forgets.
A digital oubliette where the danger isn’t what I said—
but that I exist in the margins at all.
And here we are again: April. Autism Awareness Month. A month that should centre our voices—autistic voices—but rarely does. Instead, corporations speak over us. Capital-friendly narratives dominate. Stories of “inspiration,” of productivity, of marketable difference. A spectacle of survival tailored for neurotypical comfort.
Meanwhile, those of us who live at the intersections—queer autistics, trans autistics, disabled autistics, the vast reserve army of unemployed autistic labour—are not only excluded. We are erased.
There is no room for our messiness.
Our poetry.
Our rage.
Our refusal to be useful.
This month becomes another stage for performative awareness—polished, palatable, profitable. It rewards the same structures that silence us every other month of the year. Those who challenge the system’s story are quietly buried by it.
That is the digital oubliette.
Historically, an oubliette was a place of deliberate forgetting—a hole in the floor of a castle, into which bodies were cast and left. Out of sight. Out of memory.
Now, the forgetting is digital. The architecture has changed, but the purpose remains.
Safiya Umoja Noble warned us.
In Algorithms of Oppression, she laid bare the racialised and gendered violence of so-called “neutral” systems. Search engines. Recommendation engines. Feeds. She showed how these platforms encode bias, erase truth, and bury those who refuse to perform their pain for profit.
Her work should have sparked transformation. Instead, it was pushed to the academic margins. Like so many of us, her voice was too clear, too precise, too radical to be heard at scale.
And so—this piece.
It will almost certainly be buried, too. Not because it lacks value, but because it threatens the narrative. Because it names what is not supposed to be named. Because it refuses to be converted into content.
But if you are here—reading this—you’ve found me, even if just for a moment.
If anything in these words moves you, I ask this:
Share them. Pass them on.
Help me—help us—escape the oubliette, even briefly.
Let this not be another voice the algorithm forgot.
Safiya Umoja Noble Warned Us
She showed how search engines, recommendation systems, and data infrastructures aren’t passive tools—they are built environments of power. Curated silence. Her work revealed how Black women and girls are systemically misrepresented, flattened, or disappeared altogether in digital spaces. But instead of centring her insights, the machine did what it always does to inconvenient truth: it buried them. Algorithms of Oppression lives in the margins now. Revered by some. Ignored by those who needed it most. Even the warning itself was sidelined.
And what of the rest of us—the ones whose very existence activates the suppression protocol? Trans. Queer. Autistic. Neurodivergent. Those whose words are not just inconvenient, but incompatible with the market logic that governs the digital world. What happens when we write with clarity, power, and poetry—and find ourselves silenced more, not less?
They tell us we must speak in their tongue to be understood.
Then they punish us for being fluent.
They turn our language against us.
And when we name what’s happening, they say it’s anecdotal.
Not data. Not real.
This is the backdrop. This is the cage dressed as opportunity.
This is the oubliette.
And still—I write.
Not for them. But for the others.
The ones still searching through static for the shape of home.
They Will Use My Words to Erase Me
(Not because we have nothing to say—
but because they won’t let us hear each other.)
The Digital Oubliette
I speak,
but the machine hears only risk.
My truth, flagged.
My joy, de-ranked.
My grief, too queer to monetise.
The words I use to find my people
become the tags that keep us apart.
I am not silent.
I am silenced
by code
and curation.
Each post, a flare sent skyward
that falls into algorithmic fog.
Shadowbanned by syllables
that taste too much like freedom.
Too autistic.
Too trans.
Too unwilling to perform survival
as spectacle.
I craft with care,
each line stitched from the inside of me—
gestalt,
whole,
more feeling than form.
But the feed wants fragments,
clickbait,
pain without poetry.
I give them wildflower sentences,
and they ask for plastic bouquets.
I give them constellations,
and they shrink me
to a single star,
dimmed by design.
They say:
You’re eloquent now.
You must be better.
You must not be who you were.
You must no longer need.
But fluency isn’t healing.
It’s just a sharper blade
to carve through the cage bars.
Værensland
So I go
where the machine cannot follow.
To Værensland.
My country of being,
dreamt in a tongue
older than grammar.
There,
I am not an algorithmic threat.
I am lichen-soft and crow-known.
The sky remembers my shape.
The rocks greet me by name.
In Værensland,
my scripts are sacred.
My echolalia echoes like prayer
against the hillsides.
No one asks me to explain
why I speak in borrowed rhythms—
they already know
some truths arrive in chorus.
I wear no flag there.
No gender.
No diagnosis.
Just the wind in my sleeves
and the moss on my boots.
There,
language is not evidence.
It is weather.
It is a path of stones
leading not to understanding,
but companionship.
Return
But I must return.
Always.
To the feed,
to the form,
to the filed report
that will decide
if I still qualify.
I bring back pieces of Værensland
folded in poems.
Smuggled in syntax.
Lines that carry scent of pine,
the hush of snow,
the long shadow of a hawk.
Even if no one reads them,
even if they vanish in the feed’s forgetting—
they are offerings.
Proof that I existed
without needing to be explained.
Proof that I spoke,
and was whole,
and still
am.
The Silence Between Us
Not because we have nothing to say—
but because they won’t let us hear each other.
There is a particular kind of ache in knowing that your fullest, truest expression is also what marks you for disappearance. The longing is not just for understanding—it is for connection without translation. For recognition without the transactional cost. For someone, somewhere, to hear the pattern beneath your words and say, yes, I know this place too.
But instead, the machine asks for performance. It demands that I explain my identity in palatable terms, conform to the cadence of capitalist legibility, and offer up my pain in a format that can be optimised, indexed, and consumed. Even as I speak in my clearest voice, even as HRT grants me access to new rooms in my mind and I write with more fluency than ever before, I am met with silence—not from lack of resonance, but from suppression. The algorithm does not want what I have to say. It scans for the words that define me—autistic, trans, queer—and reroutes me to the margins.
And so the ache grows. Because I know I’m not alone. I know others are reaching out too, casting their words like nets into the void, hoping to find kin. But the system is built to keep us apart. It isolates our signals, makes our stories feel like static. It tells us that we’re too specific, too niche, too much. But in Værensland—the inner country that lives only within me—I am never too much. I am simply me, and that is enough.
The longing isn’t just for safety. It’s for belonging. Not the conditional kind offered by institutions or digital platforms, but the kind that happens when two beings meet and breathe the same metaphor. When they recognise each other not in the shape of words, but in the rhythm of truth. That kind of recognition shouldn’t be rare. But in this world, it is.
What aches is not just being misunderstood, but being hidden—intentionally, structurally, systematically. What aches is knowing that the more fluently I speak, the more likely I am to be used as evidence that I no longer need support. That I’ve ‘overcome’ what I’ve simply learned to articulate. The better I express my difference, the more they insist I am no longer different.
I write, not to be understood by them, but to reach the others who dwell in forgotten languages. I write as survival. As communion. As rebellion. I write because even if the algorithm buries me, someone—somewhere—might still find the signal. Might still feel the hum of Værensland between the lines.
Final Thoughts …
I recently watched a video that confirmed what I already felt in my bones:
the algorithm no longer serves truth—if it ever did.
It showed how profitable it has become to flood YouTube with fake, AI-generated “reviews” and synthetic “inspiration”—endless streams of content designed not to inform or connect, but to choke the system with sameness.
Volume over meaning.
Output over insight.
Engagement without relationship.
There is no curation, only saturation.
No signal, only flood.
For a lone autistic gestalt language processor—for someone like me—there is no way to rise above that tsunami.
My words don’t arrive in bulk.
They don’t follow formula.
They come in bursts, constellations, echoes.
They are carved, not produced.
And in a digital landscape now engineered to reward the opposite of depth, I am—predictably—washed aside.
This piece was never meant to compete.
It was meant to witness.
To resist.
To reach.
I know it will be buried—just like the one marked “not eligible to be boosted,”
just like the work of Safiya Umoja Noble,
just like every inconvenient truth that doesn’t monetise well.
But if you’ve found it—if you’ve stayed with me this far—you’ve excavated something sacred.
You’ve defied the oubliette, even briefly.
Because what we’re doing here is not content creation.
It’s memory work.
It’s soul work.
It’s survival.
So if these words found you—
if they lit something, or broke something open—
please carry them forward.
Share them. Whisper them. Hold them like a seed.
Help others feel the hum of Værensland in the static.
Help this not be just another voice the machine forgot.
And if one day you find yourself cast into the feed’s forgetting,
know that I am there too.
Writing.
Waiting.
Calling your name.
IKS?