In November 2018, a developer in Stockholm released an app called Samantics. It tracked conversational turn-taking in real time. A small light on your phone screen shifted from green to amber to red as you spoke, measuring duration, interruption frequency, pause length. It was designed for autistic users. The marketing copy said it would help us “navigate social flow more naturally.”
In March 2023, a school district in Melbourne rolled out a similar tool. Classroom software that flagged students who spoke too long, who interrupted at atypical intervals, who failed to match the prosodic rhythm—the patterns of speech rhythm and intonation—of their peers. Teachers received weekly reports. The software was called Harmony.
Same pattern recognition engine. Same underlying algorithm. One marketed as liberation. One deployed as surveillance.
I first encountered Samantics at a meetup in Rotterdam, January 2019. Someone had it running on their phone, propped against a coffee cup. The light was red. He was talking about signal processing. He looked at the light, stopped mid-sentence, and said “apparently I should shut up now.” He laughed. Everyone laughed. Then he stopped talking. The green light came back. The conversation moved on without him.
I watched his face. I know that face. I have been that face.
The tool did exactly what it promised. It detected a pattern. It flagged the deviation. It nudged toward compliance. The tool worked. The question nobody asked was: compliance with what?
Here’s what I find genuinely beautiful about the engineering. The turn-taking algorithm is elegant. It maps conversational dynamics as a network graph, weights each node by duration and frequency, identifies asymmetries. I spent two hours reading the technical documentation. The math is clean. The pattern recognition is precise. Someone built this because the categories needed to exist, because the structure of conversation is real and measurable and nobody had mapped it quite this way. I respect the taxonomy.
The taxonomy is also a normative claim—it presents itself as a neutral measurement, but it’s actually making a value judgment about what counts as good communication.
Nick Walker, a neurodiversity researcher and theorist, wrote in 2021 about neuroqueer practice: the idea of refusing to perform neurotypicality—to act like someone without autism or similar neurodevelopmental differences—as the price of social inclusion. The Samantics app does the opposite. It encodes the conversational rhythm of neurotypical speakers as the target state and frames deviation as the problem to be solved. The tool doesn’t bridge a gap. It builds the gap, then offers to help you cross it.
Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the most influential researchers in autism studies, has spent decades investigating how autistic people process social information. His turn-taking research—which underpins tools like this—treats reciprocal conversation as a fixed cognitive benchmark. I have read every major paper in this lineage. The methodology is consistent and consistently circular. You define what counts as “normal” turn-taking by studying neurotypical speakers. You measure autistic speakers against that norm. You find a deficit. You build a tool to correct it. The tool solves for the pattern the research created.
Sure, some autistic people genuinely want help reading conversational cues. I am not dismissing that. The desire is real. But the tool doesn’t teach you to read the room. It teaches you to match a rhythm that was never yours. The difference matters.
Gregory Bateson, a twentieth-century systems theorist, argued that mind exists in the pattern of relationships between organisms, not inside any single skull. A conversation is a system. When you add a compliance device to one participant, you haven’t fixed the system. You’ve frozen it. You’ve told one node to reshape itself while every other node stays exactly where it is. The system doesn’t become more flexible. It becomes more rigid, with the rigidity hidden inside the person holding the phone.
The Melbourne deployment made this visible. Rosie Arndt, an autistic educator in Victoria, told Disability News Australia in April 2023 that Harmony “turns every classroom into a diagnostic environment where the deviation is the child.” The tool didn’t enter the classroom as a neutral aid. It entered as a definition.
Turn the Samantics app around. Point it at the neurotypical speakers. Flag every time someone uses social laughter to avoid a direct answer. Flag the false question that isn’t a question. Flag the silence that means disapproval but will never be stated. Run the report. See what the pattern looks like from the other direction.
That man in Rotterdam, January 2019, his phone still propped against the coffee cup, the light cycling green in a room where he had stopped talking.