Gerald Roche

Anyway, there's lots more I could say but I might stop there for now. It's a great thing, this feeling, and I'm glad I have it in my life.

I just listened to it now, before I wrote this thread. It's amazing.

And it is such a wonderful and precious feeling that I almost never listen to that recording.

The sense of stillness, fascination, and deep connection is intensely physical and physiological. I can feel my breathing slow, muscles relax, pupils dilate, and hairs stand on end. My whole posture shifts, feeling like it somehow falls into alignment like the mechanisms of a combination lock.

I could listen to it forever. Whenever I put it on, I feel like I'm suspended in the middle of endless space and nothing exists except me and this song. I could send my ears rummaging around in the details of the audio for an eternity.

But it's so captivating.

As the recorder walks around, the interplay between the overlapping voices and stamping rhythms shifts in and out.

It's not a great recording. There's a lot of wind buffeting the microphone.

It was this recording, playing through a speaker attached to a laptop. Someone had left it playing and gone out.

It's a song sung together by dozens of men, while they stamp their feet and ram the ground beneath them with a sort of mallet.

sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1109538/

It was very quiet at first, barely audible. But as I walked into the next room, I heard a jumble of interlocking, overlapping voices, singing with a strong, steady beat behind them.

It became very, very quiet, like everything else in the whole world had disappeared, and I was all alone in the universe with *something.*

I didn't even hear what it was until I rose up out of my chair and started walking away from my desk.

My attention was gradually pulled away from what I was working on. I slowly sat up straight in my chair, starting to turn around to figure out what was going on. The hair on my arms stood up.

Most of those graduates were working on projects to document local music and oral traditions, and part of my job was to support that work.

So anyway, one day I was working in my office, and nobody else was there.

Somewhere, in the distance I could hear something. Or sense it.

I was living in China, in the city of Xining on the northeast Tibetan plateau, teaching at a university there.

I had an office near the university where I went to work most days, and some graduates from the program where I taught would come and work there too.

So I would just like to give one example of what it feels like for me.

Now I know that non-autistic people also had this experience, but there's something specifically, wonderfully, and relatably autistic about the way that Blindboy describes the sudden sense of wonder and amazement that blossoms into obsession.

So the episode starts out by talking about the pre-internet days of cultural scarcity, and how you might stumble across something amazing on TV or the radio but then never be able to find it again, and just have to live with a version of it in your head.

I'm going to try and do a bit of a thread about the autistic experience of wonder, inspired by a recent episode from @blindboyboatclub.bsky.social (called "I can't describe what this one is about, you'll just have to trust my process and listen to it please")

I heard there was a secret chat
That David knew, and it pleased his cat
But you don't really PSPSPSPSP do you?

A meme consisting of a five panel comic. 1: man in blue and white track suit bows his head while a woman in a pink dress places a medal round his neck. 2: man bights on medal 3: man sprays champagne from a bottle. 4. man raises two hands, giving the finger to the crowd, and shouts at them 5. wide angle shot of man standing on the lowest place on a podium next to eight other people; he is spraying champagne in his face

pictured: me when I come home from a public event and celebrate how well I masked

😩

yep

Endangered languages AI tools developed by UH researchers | University of Hawaiʻi System News UH researchers created the first AI benchmark for endangered Austronesian languages, paving the way for more inclusive language technology.

“These results show that current AI systems are not yet capable of supporting low-resource languages.”
www.hawaii.edu/news/2025/09...

And for everybody currently writing and thinking about deglobalization but overlooking its linguistic dimensions - I think you should go talk to a linguist 🙂

Anyway, my advice to linguists (inc sociolinguists, applied linguists & ling anths)is: read up on deglobalization. Even if you don't think globalization is a really happening thing (I do), there is good critical literature on the topic you can engage with:
online.ucpress.edu/currenthisto...

Globalization by Manfred Steger, Roland Benedikter, Harald Pechlaner, Ingrid Kofler - Paper Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.

And this fantastic open access book has a great chapter discussing deglobalization:
www.ucpress.edu/books/global...

There are also good open access books that explore deglobalization, for example, this book published by the World Society Foundation — “After Globalization: The Future of World Society”...
www.worldsociety.ch/publications...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

"Theory, Culture, and Society" had a special section on "Global Culture Revisited" in 2020 (looks like I am accidentally going in reverse chronological order).
journals.sagepub.com/toc/tcsa/37/...

There was a 2021 special issue “International Affairs” —on “Deglobalization? The future of the liberal international order” (sorry for not posting these in chronological order)...
academic.oup.com/ia/issue/97/5

Dialogues in Sociology - Volume 1, Number 1 Table of contents for Dialogues in Sociology, 1, 1

There have also been a few deglobalization special issues and forums in various journals in the last few years, where you can find a range of perspectives on the topic.

There's this 2024 forum in “Dialogues in Society”...
journals.sagepub.com/toc/dssa/1/1

Immigration and Globalization (and Deglobalization) Immigration policy is often portrayed as a zero-sum trade-off between labor and capital or between high- and low-skilled labor. Many have attributed the rise of populist politicians and populist movem...

And there's a more recent contribution (2022) on migration and deglobalization in the Annual Review of Political Science:
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...