I’ve been trying to do some genning up of late on the incidence of Aspergers, autism and other spectrum-extremes of human personality. Aspergers (ASD), for example, has long been known (and is now being more actively researched) as one of the key causes of computer software and other comms equipment being counter-intuitive, and manuals about it utterly impenetrable.

There is still some debate about whether ASD is just another sub-group of autism, or a separate condition. Either way, as the medical pages have it, the condition ‘is characterised by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests’. Such people lack antennae about when they’ve reacted or responded in an inappropriate way. They can, in numbers-driven fields where they often excel, be great achievers. But usually, the result of their disordered ‘aims’ is a degree of complication that isn’t apparent to the sufferer.

Selina Scott, who once spent some time with Gordon Brown, told me many years ago she thought Brown a classic Aspergers sufferer. This was confirmed by a now retired long-time source of mine in the Treasury, who averred that at least three senior pinstripes were employed purely to decipher what the then Chancellor was trying to say about his plans for this or that change in tax legislation.

For some time now, I’ve had the growing feeling that personality disorders have a disproportionate influence on things like Facebook, Twitter, single-issue blogs, and obsessive ‘infinistories’ like the JFK assassination, Maddy McCann and the paedomania that seems to have infected our society of late. I was talking about this to a blogger chum two weeks ago, and a Slogger who has taken an informed and intelligent interest in the same thing. They in turn pointed me at some fascinating work being done by a Midlands University. It’s clear that those over towards the autism end of the spectrum are finally being studied in relation to all the resultant confusion and complexity they may quite unwittingly produce.

However, what I find disturbing is the growing campaign to have Aspergers sufferers “rebranded” as nothing more than “alternative views of what is”. In some areas of life it is patently obvious that such people can bring profound insights to bear on hitherto intractable problems. But in others – most notably hitech – giving them control over software construction is obviously counter-productive.

Yesterday  afternoon I had a tragi-comic exchange with a self-confessed Aspergers sufferer, following my tweet questioning the wisdom of training children to get into software coding at the age of 5. I think that is far, far too young for any child; but for an Aspergers person (and the rest of us software users) it may well exacerbate the problem.

Within seconds, the Aspergers victim (and yes, I do see them as victims) was on my case. The ironic thing, however, was what happened when I answered her demand for my definition of an ‘Aspergers Nerd’ in the software context as ‘A person savant re number columns but suffering difficulty in explaining/relating to others’. She tweeted eight highly insulting, bizarrely ordered, and aggressive responses showing she hadn’t grasped any of my points, and then blocked me. It was a case of unintended ‘show’ winning hands-down over ‘tell’ when it came to the condition.

Some fifteen years ago, I switched away from Macs and back to pcs. The OS came with a user manual. It was not only insanely organised (‘quick setup’ was on P.87) the prose described things, but did not explain. Three years ago I purchased a Sony Xperia. The same deranged organisation applied (the very last chapter was ‘sending and receiving texts’) and the same obsession with description in favour of functional usage applied.

An Irish friend (and corporate software expert) advised me later, “ring an independent specialist up and buy some of his time – it’s sixty quid well spent”. Now the corporations producing this over-specced crap have simply given up on manuals: you are left to your own intuition.

The key elements I’m describing here are obsessive repetition, inability to explain in writing, tendency to complication and inappropriate social responses. The thing I can’t work out is why corporations and other institutions still allow people displaying these abnormalities to explain the eccentric result of their chosen coding structure. Because they don’t explain, they describe.

Last week I had a thermostatic wireless room control fitted to my new boiler…itself powering a ‘cutting edge’ central heating system. The boiler and ch installations, it dawned on me when it was too late, were needlessly complex. But nowhere in the boiler manual does it say you need a separate thermostatic control to make their ‘fully automatic’ system work. There is no doubt in my mind now (and the other six workers involved onsite agree with me) that the installer himself displayed several end-of-Aspergers spectrum symptoms: aggression when asked to explain – he couldn’t explain – and ignoring the order of works…simply continuing to do his own thing – were just two.

The thermostat is a Siemens. Its user leaflet begins by saying there are two settings, night and day. They are in fact ‘on’ and ‘off’ as well…a reality one discovers with trying tedium and infinite error over time. The usual descriptions of what it is (but not how it works) permeated every sentence and diagram. There are sixteen settings, twenty-nine variations, and five lights. The manufacturers say you can put the wireless programmer anywhere in the house. You can, but beyond a certain distance it cuts out. The manual omits to mention that once that’s happened, you need to reset the entire programme otherwise the boiler won’t come on at all. Discovering this at 7.15 am when the temperature outside in minus 2 is not a pleasurable experience.

Eventually I arrived at a reviews page of the unit on the internet. Almost everyone has had the same experience: complexity, unreliabilty, and general frustration.

Finally but most astonishingly, I arrive at the latest wave of pointlessness dreamed up by people who are clearly not the same as the rest of us….be that for good or bad. I refer, of course, to Apps….and will offer just one outstanding example of why I simply do not understand how these things got to market.

When one follows a Google link to a reference and some normal file text turns up, the user is able (a) to use it immediately and (b) copy extracts with ease. When the new app download applies, you have to wait…and you can’t copy from it – not even with page capture – because to do that, you need the toolbar, which isn’t visible in the app.

My Start Page now has 40 apps on it. I use one (1) of them because I’m forced to, and it’s useless. Apps, in a nutshell, seem to address a problem that doesn’t exist: not one single value has been added to user life by their arrival.

I despair. Aspergers/Autistic people are not mad in any way. But they are not fit for purpose if their wiring serves only to further frustrate those of us wrestling with hitech – which is, in and of itself, designed to create bafflement and thus force repurchase in the first place.

There are those who will see me as bullying sick people here. They’re probably the same people who want me to see them as not really sick. I am all for a spectrum of personality types in every civilisation. But I am also a great believer in horses for courses; and there is no way I would ever employ a skittish racing stallion as a pub beer dray.

Earlier at The Slog: Why the global economy has turned into a game of unthinking consequences