Blink and you'll miss it

Since I was younger than I should’ve been, I’ve had a thing about blinking. Someone once did the “you are now manually breathing” thing on me in school, and for a hot minute in the 2000s this trend extended through body awareness. Unfortunately, my body is rarely a particularly comfortable place to be¹, which means noticing can be hit and miss, rather than new-age awakening, and kids can really cotton on to shit that upsets you.

It took me a good 5-6 years to work out how to ‘forget’ to blink again. And to date, it’ll stay on my mind for too damn long, sitting in the forefront of my head: “and close, and open, ugh stop!” But we’re all on our journey. Anyway, I was driving on Nawu Country today and a caravan flicked a rather large rock at the windscreen. Blink. Life. Blink.

This marks the second time I’ve lost a windscreen in 12 months. Last time was a severely mentally ill man who threw a literal cinder block through the car window at our heads². This was much less dramatic, but less than 1cm of glass separated the exact centre of my forehead from a ~110kph rock flying through my brain. A bit like the quintessential life-flashed-before-my-eyes trope, my heart raced, I held my breath, and I thought about how far I’d come.

I don’t think about my breathing, my blinking, my slightly odd mannerisms so much. I’ve navigated through some extremely tough shit these past 33 years. Like a perpetual onslaught. And only after talking to my therapist recently have I realised that I’m quite proud of developing my skills to learn, to change, and over time to thrive, in spite³ of. Something here has tickled my brain recently, after having cause to spend a bit of time on Youtube avoiding a gnawing pit of depression in my soul: the notion that we are being dualistically deskilled.

Mode one

Education, as an institution, has been on a nosedive for the last 30 years. It has never been perfect, and that has everything to do with being a capitalist hegemon. Education’s purpose is to produce workers with just enough knowledge to drive “the economy™” going “up”. There have been some ideologies along the way which notionally acknowledged the existence of human agency and choice. But the west has pretty well just got this shit wrong over and over in different ways which are not worth rehashing.

If you are curious and for some reason I’m the first person you’re reading saying this, Henry Giroux has some very good books and papers on this. It’s americanised, so I should mention Freire, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Whaea Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and particularly Sandy Grande (Red Pedagogy⁴). Anyhow, we’re in good company here for mode one. There are countless educators who, through practice, research or passion, have collectively thrown the towels (or perhaps cinder blocks) in, dismayed at what happens to humanity in the name of “teaching”.

From Jessie J: Forget about the price tag⁵.

We’re marching towards profit, forgetting the human toll. The human toll is millions of young people who lack skills of self-expression, understanding, curiosity, empathy, passion, drive, collectivism, relaxation, spiritualisms and creativity. These are antithetical to the inhuman cancer that is our economy. Checkbox curriculums demand just a few things:

• basic maths (maybe)
• basic literacy
• some ability to follow instructions
• some physical fitness
• no drive for inquiry or critical thinking

This process induced in me severe paranoia about my breathing, my blinking, my slightly odd mannerisms and my capability to be “useful”. Being on the receiving end of merciless bullying. Oh, and a PhD. Who’s a sucker for punishment?

Mode two

This one has been shooting around in my head like a game of pong. For my fellow witches, it’s one part eye of newt, two parts frog leg, and about $1tn in speculative fabricated market cap on the NASDAQ. Artificial Intelligence⁶, and LLMs in particular, are made to be ‘men in the middle’. Before you get all Judith Butler on me, I mean this in the pejorative sense. The LLM functions as an inhibitor to skills which are practically essential for ‘productive’ engagement in the modern economy - i.e., they steal wages from the working class through ever enhanced machines.

Taken alone, an LLM which makes interfacing between computers and humans easier is morally neutral. Perhaps even verging on positive. But as with all good things under the capitalist virus, it too must be corrupted.

When I used to be paid to blast out “academic freedom”, I wrote a paper on how corporations were deliberately undermining fruitful efforts for ecologically sound, genuinely progressive, and life-changing AI/LLM solutions for profit⁷. This has escalated far beyond what I thought. Not only has AI become increasingly corporatised, laden with ‘guard rails’ (read “make machine say subliminally pro-capitalist things”), and continued to subsume human labour without any viable alternative, now education is being run on it.

If you asked me today what the greatest threat to continued human existence on this planet is over the next 20 years, “artificial intelligence” would still be the answer. Not only ecologically speaking, but now morally and in a deeply human sense.

See, when you ask an AI to complete a task for you – if you’re anything like me with raging ADHD at least – you feel a little spark of dopamine. Wow. I made the machine do that! That would’ve taken me an hour. When you accumulate “complete a task for me” in aggregate over a month, particularly when you get good at writing prompts, breaking up work into chunks, refining outputs, modelling; you can, in fact, teach a generalist AI (in particular Claude) to do a fairly reasonable job of computer-related things. It, and ChatGPT, still can’t write for shit. At least my brainfarts are safe for another day.

The major problem 🧊 I see on the port-side bow is we now have coupled: utterly uninteresting, nihilistic and menial curriculum; problematic, raced, gendered and classed pedagogy; and an educational institution run by ceo-wannabes who are as excited about AI as a 15-year-old boy discovering a box of magazines under his dad’s bed⁸. Oh, and to no one’s surprise, none of those ceo-wannabes have any skills whatsoever.

This means schooling is at EXTREMELY real risk of becoming a “learn how to write AI prompts” academy. And longer term, actually more likely the worst case, it becomes an academy for performing the labour assigned to you by the corporate closed-source pay-to-play AI that apportions your life in marketing-sized chunks. And this is the exact future we’re driving towards in the corporate-o-sphere already – full bore. Those of us who have amassed an irritatingly broad range of skills⁹ for capitalism’s grist mill are equally if not more susceptible to this, and here’s the TL;DR, right at the bottom of the essay. HA.

When we allow AI to step in and do the “work” for us, be that creative, emotional, “professional”, you name it, we begin to unlearn the skill. It doesn’t happen straight away, but give it six months and we start to forget “how do I write that callback in C”, “what’s the command to rebase in git”, “how do I communicate without feeling to a human-robot”, or “where do I start with this art project”.

This mode is hugely damaging to those of us who could become masters of a trade. But when shared with mode one, it poses a risk to creative and “professional” human capacity. Not because “the kids are fried out on AI” but because the kids reject the concept of work that the boomers have left us, and the future the elder millennials are stepping into is a “hype bro ceo” 0.01% AI reseller with an empathy radar that’s been hammered into the ground deeper than BP’s biggest wells.

So going back to humble play, breaking out of broken systems, almost dying on a highway, and surviving years of trauma and abuse can all coalesce into an under-thinked piece on hoping that the kids do, in fact, stand a chance – they just have to keep rejecting the bullshit that is capitalism. You get it, kids.

“In conclusion,”¹⁰ on our drive Ikara showed me that distractedly taking the long way home will instil a sense of mortal dread (rocks) and make you take the time to think back over your life (flashing before your eyes), while having a little fun along the way (being licked on the face). The future isn’t hopeless, because creatures great and small remind us of life. Trees grow, wind blows, and Country gives rise to life anew. Just take your Clauding in bite-sized doses, and home-school your kids.

“Finally,” I’ve been through a lot lately, and yet I’ve had some wonderful humans by my side. While things seem bleak in moments, there is truly hope for some kind of future. Growing in a garden, sitting by a fire, talking out the trauma, shaking out the limbs, sharing a dream, little acts that help us connect make us human. No amount of technology (denial), or grieving of systems gives us back what those systems may take from us. Only we can do that. And the best bit of that is that we truly are intelligent and can learn - not just approximate Elon’s robo trad-wife’s brain.

Oh and I bet you forgot all about blinking¹¹.

Footnotes

1. see also PTSD and fibromyalgia. ↩

2. like actually one of these https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?ia=images&q=cinder+block&iax=images ↩

3. yes, I hope to stop living quite so spitefully from here onward ↩

4. https://annas-archive.gl/md5/4e0762ec84f1894fa53d8512f0d6dea0 if you have means, buy it, but for god’s sake not from bloomsbury. ↩

5. https://genius.com/Jessie-j-price-tag-lyrics ↩

6. At this point I’m really just using this phrasing to mock the people who think it will change the world for the better. ↩

7. https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/fastcapitalism/vol21/iss1/8/ if only I could see me now ↩

8. I have to take this on notice from TV. My dad’s bed is a futon. ↩

9. Jill has nine trades and is master of none. ↩

10. Just venting marking some 3,000 essays worth of AI use. ↩

11. The actual trick is your body knows how, find a good tree to yarn with, you’ll notice how wonderful it is to feel the breeze. ↩