The screen-exposure effect is real — but "virtual autism" continues to be the wrong name for it
Kadriye Ozyazici, writing in Acta Psychologica in June 2026, reviews the evidence on screen exposure and autism-like presentation in early childhood and reaches for the concept of “virtual autism” to describe what the literature keeps finding. The review leans on the most comprehensive synthesis available — Ophir and colleagues’ 2023 meta-analysis of 46 observational studies across 562,131 participants, which found a small but significant association between early screen exposure and autism-like symptoms, an association that attenuated after adjustment for publication bias. Ozyazici’s recommendation is the standard one: limit screen time, delay the age of first exposure, protect early development to reduce the “risk of virtual autism.”
The empirical work is sound. The framing is the latest instance of a pattern the Directory has tracked all week. Höfels and colleagues documented that childhood trauma carves the cognitive profile the apparatus catches as ADHD, then recommended trauma-informed management. Hargitai and colleagues showed anxiety and depression in neurodivergent adults are the cost of lifelong friction, then speculated about individual psychological mechanisms. The BMJ catalogued sixty pages of ADHD management and mentioned neurodiversity twice. In each case the field documents the phenomenon accurately and misframes what the phenomenon is (or, better said, keeps the phenomenon naturally within the bounds of that field’s own frames). Ozyazici, as it happens, does the same. The screen-exposure effect is real. But “virtual autism” is the wrong name for it.
The wrongness is specific, and the correction is the whole value of this piece. “Virtual autism” implies a counterfeit, something fraudulently not real — symptoms that imitate autism without being autism, a mimic of the real thing. That framing requires a “real autism” sitting elsewhere as the authentic article against which the screen-induced version is measured and found false. It is built on a distinction between genuine neurology and imitated neurology. And that distinction does not survive contact with what is actually happening in the developing nervous systems across our planet.
This piece is the latest update to the Directory’s tracking of virtual autism and the neurodiversity question underneath it. The earlier pieces in this thread — the February systematic-review piece and the March piece on the nursing review that formally proposed “virtual autism” as a diagnostic entity — drew a left circle and a right circle: neurology present from birth versus technology-formatted consciousness acquired during developmental windows. That distinction was right to draw. But it was under-specified in what it claimed each circle was. This piece grounds it.
The correction is not a retraction. It is what a developing corpus does — every piece inside it develops at the rate the corpus itself develops, and a frame that was directionally right in February gets its ontology sharpened in June. The screen pieces saw two circles. They had not yet named, with full accuracy, what the right circle is.
One substrate: two routes to the same configuration
Let’s start with what the substrate actually is. The Directory’s piece on ADHD and autism as archetypes catalogued the cognitive mechanisms the two diagnostic categories name, and found them to be a near-comprehensive list of universal human mechanisms — present in everyone, with the diagnostic labels (“autism”; “ADHD“) naming particular intensity-profiles of those mechanisms rather than naming alien conditions of deficit and disorder. The autistic substrate is real, coherent, and constitutional. It is an intense configuration of mechanisms every human runs. Leonardo da Vinci (et. al.) had the substrate. The substrate is not in question, has never been in question, and dissolving it would be both false and, for a corpus written by someone diagnosed with both autism and ADHD, hilariously incoherent.
So: the substrate exists. The question “virtual autism” mishandles is how a given nervous system arrives at that configuration. There are two routes. The first route is constitutional. The configuration arrives inherited or developmentally constituted, present from early life, intense from the start, expressing across every context because it is structural to that nervous system. This is the left circle — Da Vinci’s route, the route most autistic and ADHD people have travelled. The configuration was always there. The second route is induced. The cybernetic environment, delivered to a developing nervous system during the windows when neural architecture is most plastic, configures that substrate toward the same intensity-profile: this is the route more people than ever are travelling.
And it is worth being precise about which people. The neurodivergent severity framework I explored earlier this year distinguishes three operational levels by what each requires to reach functional baseline — recognition, medication, or support that exceeds both. The population at the third level, intrinsic and constitutional, has stayed small and stable. The growth — the “epidemic” talked of — is concentrated at the first two levels, the navigable ones. That is what the constitutional route, finally being recognised, would predict. It is, also, exactly where the induced route lands: cybernetic formatting shapes substrates toward the navigable configuration, not toward intrinsic impairment. Two routes, one destination — the levels where the configuration can still be carried.
Here is the correction the earlier pieces had not yet made: the induced configuration is not an imitation of the constitutional one. It is the same configuration, reached by a different road. The screen-formatted child’s nervous system is not pretending to be autistic. It has been configured toward the autistic profile by an environment that shaped it during the exact period when configuration happens. Norbert Wiener, founding cybernetics in the 1940s, named the mechanism. In Wiener’s seminal work and one of the founding texts of the Age of Cybernetics we find ourselves in, The Human Use of Human Beings, he observed that “the nervous system and the automatic machine are alike in being devices which decide on the basis of decisions they have made in the past.” Feed a developing nervous system rapid context-switching, intermittent reinforcement, attention fragmentation, and social experience routed through screens rather than faces, and the system configures itself on the basis of that experience — because configuring itself on the basis of past experience is what the system does. The induced configuration is the nervous system functioning exactly as designed, in an environment that formats it toward the profile.
So “real versus virtual” was the wrong axis. Both are real states of a real nervous system. The accurate axis is route of arrival — constitutional or induced — and one further variable the earlier pieces gestured at without grounding: reversibility. A constitutionally-arrived configuration does not reverse when the environment changes, because it was never environmentally held. An induced configuration may reverse while the plastic window remains open, and progressively cannot once that window closes. Reversibility is a fact about developmental timing and neuroplasticity. It is not a fact about authenticity. Nobody’s autism is fake.
The statistical average we are measured against was built, not found
The apparatus that catches both configurations measures them against a baseline it calls “neurotypical.” That baseline is presented and treated as a biological fact — a normal brain exists, against which divergence is deviation. This, though, is not a biological fact. It is a cybernetic concept, and Wiener’s own framework licenses the claim.
Cybernetics is the science of control and communication, and its primitive unit is the signal of compliance. Wiener wrote that “giving an order to a machine is not essentially different from giving an order to a person” — in both cases he is “aware of the order that has gone out and of the signal of compliance that has come back.” The compliance-signal is what the cybernetic frame is built to track. He held, too, that “society itself can only be understood through the study of the messages and the communication facilities belonging to it” — the human reconceived from the outset as a node in a communication system, legible by the signals it returns.
“Neurotypical” is one of the concepts that framework generates. Wiener described the purpose of cybernetics as developing techniques to classify the particular manifestations of control and communication under certain concepts. A substrate that returns the expected signal of compliance against the demand structure is “neurotypical.” A substrate that returns more friction, more chafe, a weaker compliance-signal, is “neurodivergent.” Neither term actually names a kind of brain, any biological fact, or actual reality. Both, though, are constructs that name a relationship between a substrate and a demand structure that is calibrated to a desired expectation of a statistical average — and that average is the average compliance-profile of the cybernetic settlement, again: not a fact of biology.
The cybernetic age we live in is the water that the fish can no longer see nor know is there: a settlement that dawned in the 1940s and 1950s, became quotidian, and now reads as simply how the world is.
This is why the demand structure does not create the autistic or ADHD substrate. It catches it. The round hole was not built to manufacture square pegs by definition — it was calibrated to an expected average, and it catches whoever fits that average less. The constitutional substrate gets caught because it always chafed against the average. This much the corpus has argued throughout. What the cybernetic frame adds is the second, sharper point, and it is the whole irony.
Cybernetics manufactures the peg, and medicalises it
Cybernetics built the round hole — the average-calibrated demand structure — and the same cybernetic environment is clinically demonstrated to induce the very configurations the round hole then catches. This is not metaphor and not speculation. It is what the screen-exposure literature, Ozyazici’s included, documents. Massive, population-wide, globally connected for the first time in human history, cybernetic conditions deliver to developing nervous systems the exact inputs that format them toward the deviance-profile. Wiener saw the mechanism at the origin and stated the consequence plainly: “we have so radically modified our environment that we must now modify ourselves to exist in it, and we can no longer live in the old one”. The self-modification he named is the induced configuration, and the underlying mechanistic signature of our age. Square pegs are produced at population scale, and met by an apparatus that pathologises them one at a time.
Then the second turn, where hope thins. The earlier pieces held out reversibility — remove the screens, restore human interaction, let neuroplasticity carry the configuration back. True in principle. In the Age-as-it-is, hope at best. Reversal requires detachment from the cybernetic environment for the length neuroplastic change demands, and that detachment is foreclosed for anyone who must keep contributing inside the same conditions that induced the configuration. You cannot step out of cybernetic life long enough to be reconfigured by its absence while that life remains the precondition of your participation in work, education, relationship, and economic survival.
The treatment route closes the loop. Take the stimulant pathway as the clearest case. Years of stimulant use raise baseline dopamine and norepinephrine to levels at which the substrate produces the engaged, compliant behaviour the demand structure rewards — and the pathway can be stopped only at the cost of sacrificing one’s continued progression inside the Age-as-it-is. The medication does not restore the substrate to some pre-cybernetic baseline. There is no pre-cybernetic baseline to return to. The medication maintains the peg’s grip on the round hole. i.e. if I was to stop taking the medication I am prescribed, I must be willing to sacrifice the rate of “progression” inside that which I contribute to: the ever-moving modern world.
This is the irony at full strength: cybernetics induces the configuration, and the primary clinical route medicalises the induced configuration so that the person can keep contributing inside the very conditions that induced it. Manufacture and medicalisation are not two systems. They are one system, and the apparatus cannot register this, because honest registration would indict the order the apparatus belongs to.
My previous screen-exposure pieces ended at a crossroads — the recognition that the train has left the station, that no voluntary contraction of the cybernetic order is coming, and that waiting for a conductor to regulate it (i.e. Governments; Big Tech) is still external regulation. This consolidation does not soften that. It sharpens it. “Virtual autism” is real autism, induced rather than inherited, and the cybernetic settlement that induces it is the same settlement that medicalises it. The field will keep documenting the effect and misnaming the cause, because the apparatus doing the documenting is a node in the order it would have to indict. Seeing it is the precondition for any choice that follows. The apparatus is structurally unable to see it. But we should not be.
Citations
Ozyazici, K. (2026) — Screen time and autism-like symptoms in early childhood: Examining the concept of virtual autism — Acta Psychologica 268:107285
Ophir, Y., Rosenberg, H., Tikochinski, R., Dalyot, S. & Lipshits-Braziler, Y. (2023) — Screen Time and Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis — JAMA Network Open 6(12):e2346775
Wiener, N. (1950) — The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society — Houghton Mifflin
