Icons, symbols, metaphors, analogies, …

September 20, 2026 @ 6:40 am · Filed by under Metaphors

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As counterpoint to Scott Alexander's impressive "King Ludd" exploration, consider this thematic image from The Spectator magazine ("The autistocracy: the men on the spectrum who rule our world"), featuring caricatures of Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman engaged in modeling a cubical world:

This should immediately remind us of William Blake's image of Urizen from Europe a Prophesy (1794):

Or perhaps his 1795 image of Newton:

Blake was no doubt inspired by earlier interpretations of God as geometer, as in this 13th century illustration (also used in Benoit Mandelbrot's 1982 The Fractal Geometry of Nature):

And probably also by the Square and Compasses symbol of Freemasonry:

As the Wikipedia article explains, Urizen was not Blake's favorite:

In the mythology of William Blake, Urizen is the embodiment of conventional reason and law. He is usually depicted as a bearded old man; he sometimes bears architect's tools, to create and constrain the universe; or nets, with which he ensnares people in webs of law and conventional society.

Blake also saw Newton's view of the universe as superficial and misleading, in Urizen-ish ways. See also "William Blake, Swedenborgianism, and Freemasonry: A Study of Mystical and Radical Networks in 18th-Century London".

The author of the Spectator article, unsurprisingly, has a rather different attitude toward Musk et al. than whoever commissioned the cube-world illustration, or Harvey Rothman, who crafted it. But webs of metaphorical transport can be like that, as King Ludd's history illustrates.

September 20, 2026 @ 6:40 am · Filed by under Metaphors


20 Comments »

  1. bks said,

    September 20, 2026 @ 8:00 am

    The image immediately reminds me of Htrae, the Bizarro World:
    https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/e/e9/Bizarro_World_002.jpg

  2. Mark Liberman said,

    September 20, 2026 @ 8:26 am

    @bks:

    I should also have been reminded of Bizarro World!

    In the Bizarro World of "Htrae", society is ruled by the Bizarro Code which states "Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!" In one episode, for example, a salesman is doing a brisk trade selling Bizarro bonds: "Guaranteed to lose money for you". Later, the mayor appoints Bizarro #1 to investigate a crime, "Because you are stupider than the entire Bizarro police force put together". This is intended and taken as a great compliment.

    William Blake meets DC Comics, for another hint that the cartoonist is not a Musk/Amodei/Altman fan.

  3. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 20, 2026 @ 2:10 pm

    Back when I was 15, I was quite enamored (in my defense, I was 15) of Blake's famous assertion that: "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.” But something similar seems true of Blake as visual artist. His images of Urizen and Newton make them look so heroic and cool that no one who doesn't read the fine print will suspect that Blake actually had negative evaluations of them.

  4. Jerry Packard said,

    September 20, 2026 @ 2:27 pm

    The caricatures of Musk, Amodei and Altman anally machinating the cube would be a better fit to me if they were thought of as modeling a qubital world – the ambiguous perspective of, eg, a Necker Cube used to represent the abstract mechanics of quantum superposition and entanglement to human minds, like in Prime TV’s use of the ‘quantum cube’ visual in their tv series ‘Dark Matter.’

  5. Viseguy said,

    September 20, 2026 @ 3:48 pm

    I'm reminded of Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, in which the human figure is the compass measuring (and being measured by) the cube and the sphere.

  6. Viseguy said,

    September 20, 2026 @ 3:53 pm

    (Projecting the square and the circle into a third dimension — the human figure, after all, being nothing if not three-dimensional.)

  7. HS said,

    September 20, 2026 @ 7:11 pm

    The cartoon immediately reminded me of the old joke in physics to "consider a spherical cow".

  8. Mark Liberman said,

    September 21, 2026 @ 5:54 am

    @HS:

    See also "A perfectly spherical politician", 3/6/2016.

  9. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    September 21, 2026 @ 5:17 pm

    Prof. Liberman,

    For those of us unable to scale the paywall, what was the gist of:https://spectator.com/article/the-autistocracy-the-men-on-the-spectrum-who-rule-our-world/ ?

  10. Philip Taylor said,

    September 22, 2026 @ 5:35 am

    For Benjamin, and any others unable to access the article —

    The autistocracy: the men on the spectrum who rule our world
    Charles Steel
    Harvey Rothman
    19 Sep 2026

    Ben Delo, the source of one half of Reform’s £72 million mega-donation, wrote in The Spectator last year about being diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as a child. The self-confessed geek, now 42, was socially awkward. He did not fit in and he did not care to. His condition would shape the course of his life, making him very good at maths, very rich and hell-bent on getting involved in politics.

    Christopher Harborne, the crypto millionaire who has matched Delo’s donation, we know much less about. Despite being a billionaire many times over, the 63-year-old has the air of a chemistry teacher and an aversion to interviews. Like Delo, who until recently lived in Hong Kong, he also forged his way in the Far East, living in Thailand. It’s invidious to make conjectures about anyone’s neurodiversity – and I won’t – but Harborne is clearly extremely smart and highly unconventional.

    We are on safer ground, however, when it comes to Elon Musk, who considered donating to Reform before ditching Nigel Farage, calling him ‘weak sauce’. Musk had more time to get used to the media and in 2021, at the age of 49, he used the stage of the US TV show Saturday Night Live to tell the world he had Asperger’s. It played no less a role in shaping his life than it did for Delo, even if it does not define him.

    On the same weekend that the £72 million earthquake was changing the financial landscape of Britain’s political parties, another seismic event was happening over in the United States in the world of AI. Musk – who runs SpaceXAI – joined OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis in supporting a call by Anthropic founder Dario Amodei for a coordinated slowdown in the pace of frontier model development. These four men have a huge role in stewarding the biggest technological revolution in history. Despite their huge power, however, we still know relatively little about them.

    I spent four years researching Musk for a book and am convinced that he thinks in a way that is far more different than most of us can imagine. Altman and Amodei have their own particularities but they meet the same description. One of Altman’s mentors, Peter Thiel, for example, told the New Yorker: ‘Sam’s programme for the world is anchored by ideas, not people. And that’s what makes it powerful – because it doesn’t immediately get derailed by questions of popularity.’ Amodei, meanwhile, has earned a reputation for being more vocal on moral questions; he is no friend of Donald Trump and his worldview has been linked to the Effective Altruism movement, which is highly rationalist in nature.

    Whether it’s Delo or Musk, should we be worried when men who think so differently from the rest of us wield such financial and political power? Their raw cognitive ability enables them to accrue wealth on a quasi-sovereign level by understanding complex systems rather than people. But communication is not their forte and, with some exceptions (Doge, for example), they avoid public office and, as a consequence, evade the scrutiny that elected politicians are subjected to.

    The phrase ‘autistocracy’, once used by Rory Sutherland, comes to mind but not in the sense that he meant it. The Spectator’s Wiki Man was describing ineffective bureaucrats, trained in law and economics, who are detached from reality and take the biggest risk of not taking any risks. They are the reason that Dominic Cummings wanted truly neurodivergent people – ‘weirdos and misfits’ – to join the ranks of government. But might Sutherland’s phrase be better applied to the cadre of deep-pocketed, risk-taking geniuses who operate outside the realms of government, pulling the strings from behind the scenes?

    We need to look separately at the crypto donors and the AI titans, but let’s first examine what Delo and Musk mean when they talk about their Asperger’s. This is not simply a term for people who happen to be both very smart and socially awkward. It is a neurological condition, now described more commonly as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In fact, it used to go undiagnosed, which is probably why we feel more aware of it nowadays (the legendary bond manager Bill Gross, who founded Pimco, only realised he had it in his seventies – his ex-wife quickly agreed).

    On the one hand, the brain of someone with ASD is very good at systemising, trying to establish order in a conscientious way. Cambridge professor Simon Baron-Cohen has even challenged the way that we think about creativity, arguing that people with ASD are ‘pattern-seekers’ who are excellent at solving problems and are likely responsible for a great many of humanity’s inventions.

    It is called a disorder for a reason, though, because social interaction for people with ASD is very difficult. The brain can be overloaded with sensory stimuli and so is unable to interpret and adjust to what other people are thinking and feeling. Characters like Delo and Musk, therefore, spent a lot of their childhoods in relative solitude, obsessively trying to master different intellectual domains. In the case of Musk, it contributed to appalling bullying as well. They learned to live with ASD, to use social cues (Musk by watching films), but this is not something you would wish on anyone.

    This is crucial to understanding how the likes of Delo and Musk function as adults. They have what feels like a very literal view of the world and an obsession with the truth. More than that, they are used to being in a minority and are very resistant to being told what to think.

    The systemising brain often jumps, too, from the level of individual humans to society or humanity as a whole. This is where their so-called lack of empathy is often misunderstood. They are less able to understand what others are feeling (cognitive empathy) but they feel for others (affective empathy) in a similar way.

    As it turns out, not fussing over what other people think can sometimes be a valuable attribute if you want to succeed in business. That’s the view of Thiel, co-founder of PayPal with Musk. He has made a very successful career investing in people who are ‘Asperger’s-like’, finding them less likely to follow other people and more single-minded in pursuing their goals. They just have to find a way to work with other people.

    This is the link between someone with ASD, excelling in a field like mathematics, physics and computing, and becoming very rich. In years past, that profile of person might have whiled away their time doing research at Bell Labs, Xerox PARC or the Ministry of Defence. Since the late 1970s, though, there has been a path to monetise their abilities by starting a company or, more recently, to work at a hedge fund, trading in crypto or building AI.

    It is wrong, however, to think that people like Delo and Musk get involved in right-of-centre politics simply because they are neurodivergent or rich. It is much more complicated than that. Bill Gates, for example, wrote in his memoir, Source Code, that he believes he likely would have been diagnosed with ASD if he were a child growing up today. Greta Thunberg is another example. Her family discuss her ASD diagnosis in their book Our House Is on Fire.

    The link between Delo, Gates and Thunberg is that they cannot understand why the world does not see what they see and act on it with the same conviction, be it the decline of the UK, the urgency of improving global health or combating climate change. There is an overlap here, too, with the Effective Altruism movement, which prioritises achieving impact by focusing time and money on areas which are neglected by others, including more recently the potential catastrophic impact of AI.

    What Musk and Delo have in common is a visceral dislike of wokeness, which they believe is an affront to the truth. They believe it operates by stifling criticism as most people go along with it for an easier life. Their own willingness not to fit in and care what others think, therefore, becomes a strength. They may be billionaires looking at the UK from afar but they’re convinced the public has more common sense than the Whitehall elites.

    So you end up with a strange situation where two individuals with ASD team up with two politicians – Trump and Farage – who are renowned for having the common touch, being plain speaking and wanting to be liked. All four, however, share a temperamental dislike of the Establishment. They are willing to take big risks and bulldoze accepted norms. They talk of moving the Overton Window to the right because they think the centre lacks the ability to reform itself, be it protecting our borders, social media free speech, rape gangs or self-identification of gender. They put it down to political correctness, which they consider themselves immune from.

    This has not been the way that Westminster functions. But these men are outsiders and they are not trying to play by gentlemanly rules. Delo sees his neurodivergence as bringing true diversity of thinking to the debates in question. ‘Transformational change,’ he told the Telegraph, ‘starts with heretics and misfits taking on institutions and orthodoxies.’

    He and Harborne, therefore, make strange bedfellows with the instinctive, emotional Farage but the alliance is well founded. And £36 million is chump change for them both.

    In a way, all of this is reassuring: £72 million buys a lot of advertising and logistics for Reform but the donors are not standing for election themselves. Journalists will play a vital role, providing scrutiny of party finances and the potential links to cryptocurrency regulation. And, in the end, the public will subject Farage to a sniff test and make up their own mind on the merits of the candidates.

    Here the view of Tony Blair is instructive. If ever there was a silky communicator who could read the mood of the nation, it was him. In his epistle to Sir Keir Starmer, he identified what Delo and Harborne like about Farage: he is an ‘unconventional leader’ who does not blow with the wind or care about upsetting the media. He represents the ‘radical right’, and other parties who want to remain relevant should respond by being similarly radical, just nearer the centre. They should do ‘whatever it takes’ on illegal immigration and, more broadly, they must help the government to find its new place in a world of technological change.

    This brings us back to AI. Political donors still have to operate through a democratic framework. They may target ‘the Establishment’ but we have a parliamentary system and necessarily there will be trade-offs and compromises. As of yet, though, the frontier of AI development is arguably operating outside the democratic framework because the vast majority of politicians have little understanding of what’s going on.

    Amodei, Altman, Hassabis and Musk might be the smartest guys in the room but they only wield the power – and create the wealth – that they have because governments let them. President Trump has, thus far, given the AI companies a green light because he loves to let the animal spirits loose, and he’s watching over his shoulder for China. But as George Akerlof and Robert Shiller wrote, the role of the government is to set the stage, give full rein to the creativity of capitalism and also to countervail its excesses.

    Amodei et al are now in a game of chicken with the Trump administration. Critics say that they are calling for regulation to cement their position and reduce the competitive threat of open-source models. But it’s not a game the government should play.

    The worst scenario if you believe in an ‘autistocracy’ would be that ultra-competitive, neurodivergent AI bosses are taking reckless risks without regard for society, a view held by both Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon. But if the people with the most insight are actually saying that there is a non-negligible chance of catastrophic destruction which can only be mitigated if everyone accepts oversight, then is it not hard not to give them the benefit of the doubt?

    The UK, unfortunately, is largely downstream of the US when it comes to AI. And no matter what happens in terms of US regulation, the prosperity of our country will continue to depend on how we respond to this challenge. Sadly, none of the party leaders has yet shown that they take this as seriously as Blair. While it is good that we have some senior people inside companies like OpenAI (George Osborne) and Anthropic (Jack Clark, Rishi Sunak, Liam Booth-Smith and now Matt Clifford), we need our biggest brains working on this inside both government and the private sector. Above all, we need to unleash the next generation of pattern-seekers to build useful things here on our shores.

    Charles Steel’s book The Curious Mind of Elon Musk is out now.

    Written by
    Charles Steel

  11. Rodger C said,

    September 22, 2026 @ 9:47 am

    What's the current feeling about the use of the word "Asperger's"? A few years ago there was a move to abandon it for two reasons:

    (1) There are no precise diagnostic criteria distinguishing it from other forms of autism.

    (2) Hans Asperger was a Nazi who was trying to distinguish autists who could do valuable work for the Reich from the others who got sent off to an "institute" that they didn't come out of.

    Numbered lists are a sign of Asperger's, right?

  12. KeithB said,

    September 22, 2026 @ 2:29 pm

    "Numbered lists are a sign of Asperger's, right?"

    Only when you have one entry, so you are safe.

  13. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    September 23, 2026 @ 8:53 am

    Thanks, Philip!

    From an HR perspective, I'm a little concerned about potential backlash against our friends on the autism spectrum. The article reads to me like a call to arms to contain and control these spectrummy-types because they're dangerous and unpredictable. Kind of has a whiff of the "immigrant scares" of the early 20th century. Can we not have any more lynchings?

  14. Philip Taylor said,

    September 23, 2026 @ 2:39 pm

    I am genuinely sorry to have to report that, in the United Kingdom at least (and certainly in England) "immigrant scares" are as much a part of the early 21st century as they were (presumably in the United States) a part of the early 20th.

  15. Trogluddite said,

    September 23, 2026 @ 2:41 pm

    @Rodger C said: "What's the current feeling about the use of the word "Asperger's"?"

    To take your two points first:

    (1) 'Asperger's Syndrome' was only ever included in the diagnostic manuals as a way to win over folks who objected to expanding the autism diagnosis into a wider 'spectrum' form back in the 1980s. It was dropped clinically well over a decade ago in favour of ASD 'support levels' (themselves also controversial). The desire for neat boxes to place individuals into is primarily driven by the needs of the health insurance industry, and makes little sense to most clinicians or autistic people who's opinions I've ever encountered. Some autistic people do still prefer the 'Asperger' diagnosis, either out of attachment to their original diagnosis, because they wish to distinguish themselves from autistic people with more severe deficits, or in an effort to avoid the stigma of being labelled 'autistic'.

    (2) An alternative framing is that Asperger was caught in a diabolical trolley problem, and chose to save his own life, and by extension those of at least some of his patients, by participating in the 'death panels', rather than *everybody* concerned being murdered (sadly, an Allied bombing raid killed most of his remaining patients). However, the subject is extremely controversial among both historians and autistic people, and this is a common reason cited for deprecating the informal use of the 'Asperger' label.

    I would also add (3): No playground bully is going to pass up the opportunity to transform 'Asperger' into 'ass burger' (even without the encouragement of the South Park cartoon series!)

    Overall, I encounter a range of sentiments, but my impression is that 'Asperger's syndrome' is slowly fading from use, and is extremely rare in a clinical setting these days.

    @Benjamin E. Orsatti: Seconded!

    It should be remembered that the majority of autistic people often face poor prospects in terms of employment, interpersonal relationships, and healthcare. Even for 'Aspergian' (or 'level 1') autists in wealthy nations, life expectancies can be decades shorter than population averages. Musk et al. are extreme outliers, as much a consequence of socio-economic factors as any particular set of autistic traits. I, for one, do not want tarring with the same brush simply because I share a fraction of my neurology with any of them!

    It's also worth saying that AFAIK autistic people are no more nor any less likely to be stubborn, selfish, avaricious, power hungry, anti-social, etc.; we span the full range of human qualities and foibles. My own (likely very biased!) opinion is that autism is something of a red herring where Musk et al. are concerned; their particular visions for humanity are nothing that dozens of sci-fi authors haven't imagined before, and their wealth and power would be enough to corrupt even the most saintly of souls, autistic or not.

  16. Andrew Usher said,

    September 24, 2026 @ 7:37 am

    Look who showed up – I remember you, Trogluddite, and I'm not going to try to have an argument with you. But you did say many of the things I was going to, so I'll have to frame my post as a reply.

    The last paragraph is what I was already thinking – there's no reason to believe these people having autism/Asperger's is relevant to the public, no matter how much it may be to them. The author of the article (whose full text Philip Taylor kindly provided) fails to show that, if he was trying to. I don't notice anything unusual in how they run their businesses or develope their technologies or whatever that can be attributed to that, and I wouldn't expect to – they're still human and still live in the same world as everyone else. I don't expect autistic people to have exactly the same distribution of other failings, but do agree that they are not immune. It's not just money and power that corrupts one's mind, but also the nature of one's work. Someone working in AI is likely to have a higher opinion of it than the average person, to take the relevant example.

    Take the most important point he mentions – that that several of these people have agreed to the dangers to society from uncontrolled AI and suggested that government might need to control it. These are some of the people that should be the biggest experts on that question (at least among those that can talk publicly), and seem to be making a statement against their or their companies' interests, or at least one on which they have no reason to lie. There is no reason to need to know anything further about them, nothing about their psychology or character, to take that as evidence the idea (of controlling AI use) should be taken seriously.

    'Autistocracy' is certainly an ugly word to me, and I wouldn't come up with it (who did here?). The article doesn't seem to conclude anything about it, and nor do I at such a general level. Benjamin Orsatti, if he was serious (and it seems he never is completely serious when posting here), I think misunderstood the article as being more negative about autistic people than the author intended, and that word and some other poor choices of phrasing would, I agree, contribute to that perception. No one in particular is to blame for what autistic people suffer from, and I don't think this article or its author can be blamed, either.

    Finally I never understood the 'ass burger' thing, though of course I'd never watch South Park. But Asperger and ass burger are already perfect homophones (at least in standard American) and the only was to distinguish the latter in speech would be putting an unnatural pause between the words. Admittedly, perfect homophony doesn't stop Uranus jokes, but your anus is a much more sensible and frequent collocation than *ass burger.

    (The reason my post was delayed is that I wanted to research on Asperger and the term Asperger's first, but in view of Trogluddite I no longer want to mention it.)

  17. HS said,

    September 25, 2026 @ 5:38 pm

    See also "A perfectly spherical politician", 3/6/2016.

    I like the SMBC cartoon from 2016. But the evidence of the last ten years clearly shows that the Stupid Speech Defence System was never built. Or if it was built it was never deployed in the United States. Or if it was deployed in the United States it was never turned on. Or if it was turned on it was accidentally set to "reinforce" mode rather than "cancellation" mode.

    By the way, regarding the Spectator cartoon, I vaguely remember a lecturer in a university geophysics course actually using a cubical model of the earth for some calculation. I can't remember what the calculation was about now (it's a long time ago) but he only wanted a quick and dirty estimate of some quantity.

  18. Trogluddite said,

    September 26, 2026 @ 11:59 am

    @Andrew Usher said: "Look who showed up…"
    I've never stopped lurking (and learning, I hope); I've just become less eager to open my mouth and prove what a fool I am. Thankfully, the humble pie is usually served up very politely around here!

    Regarding "autistocracy"; though the coinage is new to me, the idea of a future society presided over by (certain kinds of) autistic people has precedent…

    Whether to appease Nazi eugenicists or not, Hans Asperger focussed much of his attention on his most exceptional patients – the origin of the "little professors" stereotype which still persists. Over the years, this has been extrapolated to all manner of speculation about allegedly autism-related evolutionary advantages and technological advances. Naturally, this kind of exceptionalism can feel comforting to autistic people who are struggling to find a place or purpose in society despite good academic performance.

    At the extreme fringe, a small cohort posit that their particular kinds of autism represent the emergence of a superior form of humanity which will create utopia. Around the time I was diagnosed, Steve Jobs was often their poster boy, I assume now succeeded by e.g. the subjects of this discussion. Quite how the allegedly advantageous genetics are meant to become so prevalent is never made clear (hopefully not an ironic twist involving eugenics).

    I don't recall there ever being a consensus on a name for this ideology; I always thought of it as simply supremacism, so not requiring a new word (let alone such an ugly one).

  19. Andrew Usher said,

    September 27, 2026 @ 1:04 pm

    This is why. However, I can see the main part of your post isn't an actual argument with an actual point that can be reasonably argued against.

    Presumably the extreme ideology you allude to and attribute to unnamed people is rare enough no one thinks to give it a name – 'supremacism' is a loaded term even if accurate, and doesn't capture the utopian part of it.

    As for the term 'autistocracy', I am not sure it was intended to name an ideology at all. Words in '-ocracy' when used alone normally name a factual state of affairs, not the ideology behind it – and the definite article ("the autistocracy") makes that reading even more the plausible one. Of course, all such words can be used to describe the ideology also, but I didn't see that here.

  20. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    September 29, 2026 @ 6:51 am

    "Benjamin Orsatti, if he was serious (and it seems he never is completely serious when posting here), I think misunderstood the article as being more negative about autistic people than the author intended, and that word and some other poor choices of phrasing would, I agree, contribute to that perception."

    True, but also never completely un-serious…

    …and also true that the article itself is not a call to arms — in fact, it's very nuanced, but people inclined to pick up torches and pitchforks don't always go in for "nuance". Sometimes all it takes is the just the slightest hint that, well, the Jews, you see, do control _all_ the money, and they occupy seats of government and I heard somewhere that they may be working in secret with the Communists, and don't we, the "normals", need a little "Livingspace" away from them?

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