NFT: Online-only Gig or "Ghost Work" advice needed

By "Ghost work" I don't mean work as a literal ghost, or where employee or employer blows each other off, or a job listing is not actually available. I mean someone who works "behind the scenes" where you, the user, the public, never encounter or even know about that person at all.


TL;DR -
Where would an extremely brilliant, capable and motivated young person, with no work history at all, who is super quirky and extremely socially anxious and can barely deal with people IRL, find gig work where there is zero face to face interaction and generally only text/chat/teams/slack with rare voice contact through teams or discord?

Someone who has no interest in technical skills like coding or web design, but is very capable at navigating an online world, existing as only an avatar. A dispassionate and rules oriented person with a strong ability to focus on process, rules, facts, correlate information and uncover data relationships?

If you are a Sherlock Holmes fan, he could almost be like Mycroft Holmes. Where would a real-life Mycroft go to get a job?


Unnecessary & oversharing backstory-

I have a 20 year old son who, the way he is built, doesn't line up in the least with how jobs work. Ok right now you are probably laughing and rolling your eyes. I would too. I know a lot of teens and young people.
But my kid honestly is a unique and edge case. He's not unmotivated or a dim-witted slacker. He's more unique than any other person I have ever known. Help me out here.

First, he is absolutely brilliant. I know legit geniuses and I think he's the smartest of all. A lot of people say that about him. His brain's horsepower is amazing, his logical and deductive abilities are awesome, his memory is incredible. He is an excellent problem solver in terms of data or logical puzzles.

Second thing to know is he has a hard-wired impairment in dealing with people directly. As a little kid he was fine at making instant friends on the playground, always had a great time being around other kids, but as he got older and as the people around him became older (maybe 'realer'), he started showing extreme fear, anxiety and mistrust regarding other people and most situations. He'd push people away. He'd run and hide. He'd meltdown. We have had multiple missing kid incidents where he just booked out of some situation and hid really well. Numerous times we'd be called to school because he locked himself in a closet or hid behind some desks and refuse to budge.

There were only two times when he was good in a group of people. one was pokemon club and the other was marching band in HS. Guess what, two groups of very quirky "special" people who generally speaking don't harass the hell out of you for not fitting their juvenile concept of what normal is.

Third thing is, he has a strong drive, if its something that he finds meaningful.

Next, he is absolutely a black / white all / nothing kind of person. The least little thing that puts him off, the whole scenario is now permanently ruined for him. He is absolutely inflexible in his opinions and attitudes.

Outside of school, on his own, he has developed a very frighteningly vast amount of specific and accurate knowledge about all kinds of things relevant to "now". Geography. Recent history. World cultures. Politics. Economics. You do not want to debate him on politics or current events whether in the US or abroad, his knowledge wins every time. So he has a thirst for knowledge and learning, on his terms.

He totally distains the real world and also sees social media as an ineptly superficial attempt to reflect and embellish the inherent dishonesty of real world. Social media is populated in his view by the most insecure and the most narcisistic of people, basically communities of liars, lying to other liars.

Outside of "social media", he has an online life with meaningful online friends from around the world through discord, slack, message boards. He has held volunteer positions as moderator and admin of various message boards and servers among name-recognized gaming communities.

While most people to him are shallow irrelevant NPC's who offer only "unpredictable inappropriateness and bad intentions", in real life, if he comes to trust you (and I can count those people using only my fingers) he values that relationship even as he has no clue and possibly no interest in your side of it.

To explain that last comment, we have had him evaluated several times during his life by psychologists, educational consultants, psychiatrists, medical professionals, social workers... they almost all report the same things. He has a few asperger's-like traits such as ocd, sensory issues, ridged thinking, but he come close to fitting the profile of any diagnosis. He has extremely high intelligence. but also an extremely high baseline level of anxiety and fear. He has very little ability to read people, to perceive or even acknowledge their emotions, drives and motivations.

All this makes life so frightening and uncertain, as one psychologist told us, "He goes through life living normally where you are, when someone has gotten on your very last nerve and you are barely holding back from having a meltdown. That's his starting point when he becomes stressed and anxious."

We have tried combinations of medications for anxiety. Nothing really helped. Currently he is not taking anything but aside from this work issue, he is actually in the best place he has been in his life. I honestly think that school, especially high school, gave him PTSD and he's needed more than a year of calm and no school to recover. His Mom and I gave him that, but now its time to discover the next thing.

We have talked numerous times over the last few years about what kind of job could he do, or more generally, what kind of goal based activity will take up his time? He has a lot of interest in this but has no idea what fits. No one else does either. He is reluctant to ask his online "friends" or anyone else for that matter, I suppose it is an embarrassing subject and he's not very big on self-reflection or explanations.

We talk about making your own opportunities, starting small and finding your way forward, and he's all good with that, but can't conceive of the right starting place.

So the person I just described, what does that person do for a job? I have no idea.

The most he would be able to handle, in terms of a "real job" in a "real place" is if he worked in some small company with very few other people where a clever person is needed to follow a few clearly defined processes to achieve clearly defined goals, with some occasional creative problem solving, toward outcomes that are interesting with obvious usefulness.

I am wondering if there are online-only versions of the same? Entirely through slack, discord, email, with no video and relatively little real time one-on-one discussion?

One last thing. He is not interested at all in the underpinnings of technology, so frustratingly that rules out a lot that might be in this kind of situation - web design, coding, information security, databases, general IT...

Data analytics, fact checker, researcher, those are some of the things I thought of. But I have no idea how to find limited interaction jobs in those areas.

If Roblox needed a full time online concierge to help newbies, that could be his dream job. Are there actual jobs within Second Life?

Does anyone have any thoughts or advice on jobs like I just described? Where would one go to find those opportunities, besides online gig sites?