The Terrain of Our Relationships

An Anti-Digitalist argument

“Raised to Obey”

(Raised to Obey is the title of a 2025 book by Agustina Paglayan where she makes the argument that compulsory education, where ever it has been implemented around the globe has been heavily influenced by a goal of social control.)

Humans aspire to shape the world to fit our aspirations. When I talk to students about what they want, they say they want to be rich. We dig into what that means and, yes, in the first iteration it means a Dodge Hellcat or Ford F-150 but eventually we get down to a mundane desire to earn enough money to have a family, own a nice car, live in a nice place, go on vacations and pay for their kids’ education. This is normal. This aspiration is how we should shape the world.

America does not think this is reasonable. America has never thought this was reasonable. All of our mythologies are built around requiring these children to want these things while making it nearly impossible for them to have them.

• "All [white, property owning] men are created equal".

• "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is a requirement to do something that is impossible.

• Manifest Destiny was propaganda designed to justify taking Texas, California and Oregon from Mexico.

• Horatio Alger was a pedophile priest

• The “American Dream” was never a dream of equality but of conquest.

• Rugged Individualism was never a description of American behavior but Herbert Hoover’s disingenuous justification to end government programs started in WWI.

In her book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, Keri Leigh Merritt writes about how aristocrats set poor whites against blacks in the 1840’s and 1850’s ensuring neither group ever gained power or influence in America.

“Complete with large percentages of slaves and a sizable, disaffected poor white underclass, a constant state of anxiety engulfed much of the Deep South in the years preceding secession,” Merritt writes. An alliance between slaves and poor whites would have threatened “the fortunes, the power, and even the lives of the region’s masters.” Slaveholders would take nearly any step to prevent this interracial alliance from forming, and Merritt argues that the treatment of poor southern whites stemmed in part from the white elite’s efforts to preserve the institution of slavery.

- Steven White, In his review of Masterless Men in the Los Angeles Review of Books

As Agustina Paglayan documents in her paper, Education or Indoctrination, education has always been a tool used to indoctrinate these mythologies.

“...during the Early Republic, when a majority of white men could vote, the Founding Fathers’ concern about promoting social order intensified following Shays’ Rebellion (1786–87) and the Whiskey Rebellion (1791–94). To prevent future rebellions, Early Republic leaders proposed educating white people to teach them to express discontent through elections instead of anarchy. These ideas … shaped the first state laws encouraging elementary education in the 1780s–90s. More recently, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 triggered many efforts to introduce state legislation promoting “patriotic education” and prohibiting public schools from teaching “divisive concepts” such as institutional racism.”

School reform has consistently failed because education policy has always been written to benefit those who are powerful enough to impose their will, those with the hubris to believe they own the future.

In their book Tinkering Toward Utopia, David Tyack and Larry Cuban refer to the structural inertia that fights reform as the “grammar of education”.

Most Americans have been to school and know what a “real school” is like. Congruence with that cultural template has helped maintain the legitimacy of the institution in the minds of the public. But when schooling departed too much from the consensual model of a “real school,” failed to match the grammar of schooling, trouble often ensued. If teachers did not maintain strict discipline and consistently supervise students in class, if traditional subjects were neglected, if pupils did not bring report cards home, reforms might be suspect.

Commenting on Tyack and Cuban’s work and reflecting on his own reform efforts, Seymour Papert evolves his stance from reformer to something more like evolver.

With the evolution-reform distinction in mind, I found myself reading Tinkering Towards Utopia more sympathetically. I could now appreciate the elucidation of mechanisms by which the system systematically frustrates reform without feeling obliged to defend my own intellectual commitments. In fact, I could learn from it -- the shift from a stance of reform to a stance of evolution does not exclude active intervention, but the role of the change agent becomes less like the architect or builder and more like the plant or animal breeder whose interventions take the form of influencing processes that have their own dynamic.

-Seymour Papert, Why School Reform Is Impossible

Many years later, in her book Hospicing Modernity, Venessa Machado de Oliviera tackles this (de)evolution more broadly and provides a visceral description of modernity as the ideology that holds our inequitable, unsustainable and decaying cultural aspirations.

We talk in the book about how to compost our shit—both literally and metaphorically. How to stay with what’s difficult and painful without relationships falling apart, without feeling overwhelmed and immobilized, and without demanding a quick fix, or to be rescued from the discomfort. Hospicing is about developing our capacity to stomach what’s difficult and nauseating without throwing up, throwing a tantrum, or throwing in the towel. It’s about staying with this death, approaching death, and relating to death very differently—the death of the system, and our own death—in order to be able to live well. What we learned from the Indigenous communities in the South is that living well—buen vivir as a philosophy that challenges the Western philosophy of “the good life”—is inseparable from dying well. And if we don’t know how to die well, that’s when we take up arms to defend the wealth we have accumulated, even though this wealth is not giving us anything, not even the security we thought it was going to give us. Hospicing is about generatively approaching endings with much more maturity and wisdom. It’s about listening to the stories of failure and success that will help us support that which the earth is birthing, which is a new system, whatever that may be.

I can no longer allow myself the conceit of believing that I am a reformer; that I’m on the just and righteous side of history. It is clear that this distinction, the idea that there is a righteous side, his irrelevant even if true. There is only living and the quality of our lives and the quality of my life is inextricably linked to humanity and the quality of everyone’s life and the quality of everyone’s death. We are each one of many. Being right is not valuable if I am right and alone. We, all of us, each of us, need to find purchase in living.

However, when humanity seems to gain a foothold, aristocracy always pushes back. When the industry of slavery was made illegal, we created Reconstruction. In response to the Reconstruction, the Aristocracy built the Gilded Age and morphed slavery into Segregation. After Segregation came the Civil Rights era. In response to Civil Rights, the aristocracy created the Digital Age and now uses machines to enforce invidious discrimination across race and class.

The American Experiment is not an experiment in democracy. This is not an experiment “of the people, by the people, for the people”. The Great American Experiment is better described as an aristocratic effort to titrate just enough freedom, allow just enough comfort, that fear of losing that comfort motivates us to participate in an inequitable system that permits the survival of the many to serve the pride and gluttony of the few.

Gilded Age Robber Barons and their modern counterparts from Silicon Valley from the Economist: Robber Barons and Silicon Sultans

I like to think of myself as something like a neo-hippie but more Gil Scott Heron than Timothy Leary. In 1967, in the middle of the Vietnam War and the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Timothy Leary asked 30,000 hippies gathered in San Francisco to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

The American aristocrats depend on Americans to support their aristocracy. They depend on Americans to choose to keep our allowed freedoms, our constrained comforts, as opposed to risking them in a movement towards something better. Leary’s rebellion was personal, each of us rejecting and consciously abandoning the American aristocracy, each of us, individually, finding enlightenment and liberation.

“Turn on” meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. “Tune in” meant interact harmoniously with the world around you — externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. “Drop out” suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. “Drop Out” meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change.” -Timothy Leary in his 1983 autobiography Flashbacks

But this is something the aristocrats do. This is what Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey do. Personal enlightenment can easily be performed as an act of privilege; a sort of metaphysical masturbation. In contrast to the personal enlightenment that Leary described, in 1970, three years after the Summer of Love, Gil Scott Heron released “The Revolution Will not Be Televised” and confronted the privilege inherent in Leary’s aspiration of personal enlightenment.

You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag
And skip out for beer during commercials, because
The revolution will not be televised

Gil Scott Heron saw a collective movement where individuals compared their own lives to those around them in an effort to build a collective enlightenment, a revolution. The revolution will not be televised because it doesn’t happen where it can be seen from your couch or from your screen.

The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. The thing that’s going to change people is something that nobody will ever be able to capture on film. It’s just something that you see and you’ll think, “Oh I’m on the wrong page,” or “I’m on the right page but the wrong note. And I’ve got to get in sync with everyone else to find out what’s happening in this country.”

- Gil Scott Heron, 6:25 in this Interview

I don’t think Heron is negating Leary. Heron is agreeing that we must each become awake to the trajectory of the country but Heron is also declaring that personal enlightenment is insufficient. After becoming aware, we must each get in sync with everyone else and only then can we move. Each of us moving alone is not good enough. Heron seems to declare a truth; as individuals we are still pawns in someone else’s game but through solidarity it may be possible to rewrite American mythology, to write ourselves into a different story.

Liberatory Education responds to this incessant demand for obedience by suggesting that if each student has the capability they need to make decisions that will positively impact their lives then an equitable society is possible. But that is not what America has ever wanted.

Purity v. Neighborliness

A weirdly ignored fact is that students are part of humanity. Students are novice humans. When I lose my way as a teacher it is usually because I believe that I have some specific truth for students to install, a righteousness that I ask them to subscribe to, and that I should assess their adoption of. When I lose my way as a teacher, I believe in a sort of purity of thought. When I am at my best, I practice neighborliness and leverage my experience to help my students build their own understandings through their own experiences. This is the only possible foundation for their personal agency. Only through their independence can students choose to be interdependent. Only through their agency can students choose to join with others to move us forward in the future.

I have always loved the creation story of the first, placenta encrusted, life climbing out of a primordial soup; first life as a series of mutations made manifest by the fertility of a chaotic sea of pre-biological goo. And I see so much of what we are doing as humans as an effort to sanitize the story of our origins and our evolution and our humanity, as an effort to make ourselves into something shiny and new, something destined, something pure. This echoes the dichotomy of Freire’s messy, collaborative problem posing education vs the distinct purity of right answers in banking education.

In 2015 at Xavier university in Ohio, I heard Old Testament Theologian Walter Brueggman talk about the ancient, biblical contestation between purity and neighborliness.

On one hand there are protocols of purity about how to sort out who the really pure people are according to right gender and right food and right clothes and right worship and right agriculture. What the rules of purity do is stratify the community according to purity.

He went on to describe purity as a mechanism to enforce obedience and justify socio-economic oppression. Purity dictates that those who are impure deserve lower wages, poor housing, insufficient healthcare, and oppressive education. Purity is defined as the set of rules that benefit those with the power to create the rules and to whom, of course, the rules do not apply.

Brueggmann then asked the audience, “do the protocols of neighborliness have any chance to be effective in a society that is governed by the protocols of purity?” The protocols of neighborliness begin, he said, with the recognition “that human persons merit dignity and the most important question is, ‘who is my neighbor?’” This draws a line in a natural place. It takes the radical position that we begin with the right to exist; that our differences are real and so are we neighbors.

Neighborliness declares that our differences are not what separates and stratifies us. Instead, our differences are what makes life fertile, what makes life living. I’m not talking about the idiosyncrasies of our cognition. I’m not talking about our perception of our differences or the interpretation or definition or description of our differences. It is not our opinions or our ideas that merit dignity, it is our existence, our beginning, our becoming, and our ending. We are neighbors because we exist. How we choose to exist and the ideas we give countenance attenuate our value but even the most vile of us exists and is therefore my neighbor.

Obedience education is designed to fight against this specific reality, the reality that we are different and that our difference is both unavoidable and essential. Obedience education declares that the answers that are chosen as right are right and these chosen right answers oppose and negate all adjacent possibilities. Please don’t understand this as an argument for relativism, an argument that 2+2 does not equal 4. This is an argument for students as novice humans who are earnestly becoming. Wherever a student is at any moment, is temporal, is changing, a movie not a photograph, a river not a reservoir, and we can help them in their becoming because we are neighbors.

Efficiency

We have broken education by asserting right answers mostly because we, the adults, overvalue answers and undervalue the cycles of mindful intention, informed action and thoughtful reflection that are necessary for Constructivist learning. Problem solving is inefficient if you think the purpose of education is to regurgitate right answers.

If the goal is knowing the answer, if the goal is to calculate the result, then we don’t need a process of exploration, a process for discovering how answers are found and what those answers tell us about the world and how those answers can be used to create better questions. If the goal is knowing the answer, we don’t need a process of mindful intention, informed action and thoughtful reflection and so we compress education into the process of regurgitating approved answers, answers which we used to have to memorize, answers that can now be delivered to us digitally before we even think to ask, before we even bother to think. If the goal is only to know the answer, then thinking no longer needs to be biological. We can be the androids that they said would serve us.

Robert E. Ulanowicz is a self-described rogue scientist who studies Process Ecology. He is unique because he wades into the immeasurable, tangled mess of the practice of living and in describing what he sees, he challenges the hubris of scientific fiat. I am drawn to his work on “sustainability”, a term that after years of abuse has come to mean almost nothing. Ulanowicz resuscitates sustainability by respecting time; time as the engine of misfortune and serendipity.

“There appears to be some balance between constraint and freedom that characterizes naturally persistent, sustainable ecosystems. In fact, one may take as a definition of sustainable systems those that achieve a stable balance between efficiency and flexibility.”

- Quantifying sustainable balance in ecosystem configurations, Ulanowicz

This definition of sustainability is counterintuitive because it asserts the anti-capitalist idea that a system can be too efficient, but this is exactly what we saw in the recession of 2008. The aristocrats constructed a spectacularly efficient process for extracting money out of the housing market and a large percentage of total investment dollars went chasing those huge financial returns. And then their process broke. Just like the Irish potato famine of 1845, the system broke. Because the potato was the crop that could grow in abundance at that moment in that ecosystem it was the crop everyone grew, the crop they chose to rely on to eat and to sell. All investment went into that potato. When it failed, there was nothing to replace it.

Efficiency in this context is a profit maximizing effort to separate signal from noise, to separate chaos from order, to sanitize ourselves of the primordial goo that we crawled out of and where we will return. The quest for efficiency has made our world more brittle and less able to exploit the fertility of chaos and the serendipity in noise.

When education is too efficient there is no learning, only regurgitating answers.

“I play really old guitars. Plastic guitars. If you want it to be easy, buy a brand new Les Paul or a brand new Stratacaster.” -Jack White, It Might Get Loud

Education should not be an effort to teach children right answers; to teach children to imitate still-life, to reduce life to a hula dance, at a tourist luau, at Disneyland. Education is an IRL event between humans struggling to make the world. Learning is hard. Learning is conflict and negotiation and dialog. Learning is the effort to make the world, not just to live within it.

Fertility

We have been hurtling into the digital for about 50 years now. In the 1970’s Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, working in the US Dept. of Defense, started to build what became the Internet and Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert started the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and began developing their Society of Mind theory in an attempt to understand human intelligence.

What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle. (Minsky)

In 2002 Seymour Papert lamented how his research in Artificial Intelligence had changed from a discipline focused on studying human intelligence to a product focused on maximizing profit.

“We started with a big ‘cosmic question’: Can we make a machine to rival human intelligence? Can we make a machine so we can understand intelligence in general? But AI was a victim of its own worldly success. People discovered you could make computer programs so robots could assemble cars. Robots could do accounting!”

This idea was reflected more recently in the paper entitled “Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science.”

The contemporary field of AI, however, has taken the theoretical possibility of explaining human cognition as a form of computation to imply the practical feasibility of realising human(-like or -level) cognition in factual computational systems; and, the field frames this realisation as a short-term inevitability. Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable.This means that any factual AI systems created in the short-run are at best decoys. When we think these systems capture something deep about ourselves and our thinking, we induce distorted and impoverished images of ourselves and our cognition. In other words, AI in current practice is deteriorating our theoretical understanding of cognition rather than advancing and enhancing it. The situation could be remediated by releasing the grip of the currently dominant view on AI and by returning to the idea of AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science.

Our pursuit of efficiency, our efforts to generate the greatest possible output today with malingering consideration for the future, has convinced us that it is preferable to be digital. Not that computers can be tools used by humans, but that humans can be more like computers. We have become convinced that we can excise the chaos and the noise that is indigenous to life and we can approach pure order and pure signal. We can each be essential, distinct, discrete, predictable, replicable, non-perishable, efficient. But this is, of course, another mythology. The digital is just an easier and more efficient way for to get us to obey.

“If behavior was controlled (and controllable) by the environment, then what better way to make adjustments to individuals – and as [B. F.] Skinner imagined, to all of society – than by machine.”

Audrey Watters, Teaching Machines, The History of Personalized Learning

This idea is not new. This era of modernity is defined by our efforts and our aspirations to control everything including each other. I don’t think that Large Language Model Generative Artificial Intelligence is the most influential invention of the last several years. I think the most influential discovery is Behavioral Economics; first defined by Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman and extended by Nobel Prize winners Esther Duflo and Abjit Banerjee. Behavioral economics dethroned the idea of the rational economic actor that classical economics was based on and recognized that many human decisions are irrational. What will we do with this discovery? Well, as Duflo and Banerjee demonstrated in their book Poor Economics, we could use it to give people a framework for economic decision making to make it more likely for us to be positive agents in our own lives. We didn’t do that. Instead, we did what Stuart Russell describes in the quote below, we used Behavioral Economics to manipulate consumers to do irrational things.

“To get just an inkling of the fire we are playing with, consider how content-selection algorithms function on social media. They aren’t particularly intelligent, but they are in a position to affect the entire world because they directly influence billions of people. Typically, such algorithms are designed to maximize click-through, that is, the probability that the user clicks on presented items. The solution is simply to present items that the user likes to click on, right? Wrong. The solution is to change the user’s preferences so that they become more predictable. [Emphasis mine] A more predictable user can be fed items they are more likely to click on, thereby generating more revenue. People with more extreme political views tend to be more predictable in which items they will click on. ... Like any rational entity, the algorithm learns how to modify the state of its environment -- in this case, the user’s mind -- in order to maximize its own reward. The consequences include the resurgence of fascism, the dissolution of the social contract that underpins democracies around the world, and potentially the end of the European Union and NATO.”

- Stuart Russell, Human Compatible

Science has given us new perspectives into the world we live in, given us information that we can choose to use to manipulate and extract or to nurture and sustain. We have clearly over-invested in the former while neglecting the latter but the reality is that both are legitimate as long as both exist as choices. How these choices play out defines much of the tension we feel in modern life; how we respond to manipulation and how we exercise our agency. At the same moment when there are forces attacking science for predicting inconvenient likelihoods like less water, severe weather, more war, there are others using science as a weapon against biological life; a weapon intended to sanitize life of its unknowables and lie to us about what life is.

Miguel Benasayag, an Argentinian Guevarist resistance fighter and epistemologist, (best biography line ever!) writes about how the language and tools we use to describe and examine the world also impact how we exercise our agency in the world. He uses the analogy of a map. Describing the map is an abstraction of the actual terrain, the actual place. The map is analogous to the mathematical language of science which seeks to abstract the world in order to describe it. This process of abstraction is useful. This process of abstraction makes it possible for science to be a catalyst of dialogue about our world and this conversation is enabled by the reductionist abstraction of mathematical language.

Mathematical language, like the world of language in general and that of writing, actually seeks to make the territory resemble the map. However, it does not deny the otherness of the territory, which continues to exist in a conflictual relationship with the map. And this dynamic determines the lines of non-compossibility that limit and modify the map in return. - Miguel Benasayag

There is, of course, a difference between the unknown and the unknowable. There is a difference, except in that very brief moment when we first say to ourselves, “I don’t know.” The moment before knowing takes over. The moment before we convince ourselves that knowing is always and only “I know” and “I don’t know” or “I can know” and “I can’t know”.

In the digital world, the principle ‘everything is information’ considers territories as a simple mode of the map’s existence. The violence of digitalization thus resides not in some project of domination [science over nature], but rather in the negation of all forms of alterity and singular identity to make room for a dimension of pure abstraction. Anything in the territory (the reality of bodies, of ecosystems . . . ) that resists attempts at modeling thus becomes, in the world of digital models, ‘noise in the system.’

When students didn’t exhibit right behavior I was told I could put their name on the board and when it happened again, I was told I could add check marks. This is called “behavior management” and it is something a teacher is supposed to do; as if students reacting to their environment in difficult ways, unproductive but inevitable ways, was somehow wrong and was something that I, the teacher, needed to manage so that it won’t happen again, as if it didn’t happen, as if it couldn’t happen, as if it was noise that inhibited the signal, chaos that obscured the order. It is not my job to manage a student’s behavior. It is my job to nurture an environment and design experiences where a whole student can exist, where they can reflect themselves, ricochet themselves, against the world they are required to inhabit and choose how to act based on their understandings built from their experiences.

To this day, many many years after I was taught to put students' names on the board, I still do it. It’s hysterical. They are shocked at first but quickly realize just how absurd it is. Eventually, they get their own white board markers and add my name and the many many check marks I deserve.

Artificial Intelligence, specifically Large Model Generative Artificial Intelligence, is the latest in a long line of technologies designed by and for the American Aristocracy so that they can increase their control over the future. AI isn’t an effort to understand human intelligence but to redefine, capture and control it. This is not an argument that the machines are going to take over. This is an argument that we are becoming machines; we aspire to be digital. We are attempting to leave the noisy, chaotic, painful complexity of the terrain to live in the simplistic, efficient, pure abstraction of the map. AI is an attempt to sanitize life; to remove chaos, to remove noise, to remove biology, which, of course, will kill the actual, biological, us. Large Language Model Generative Artificial Intelligence is an assault on living. The way to counter this is not to fight reason(ably), but to be human. Not to set human reason against computation. That's fighting in the map. We have to fight on the terrain of our relationships.

I think we are drawn to this technology because we want so badly to believe that there is a way past the mortal coil. We want so badly to believe that life could be efficient, that we can cast ourselves into the machine where things are easier, where answers exist; into the machine where there are always only two choices. Right. Wrong. And when it comes to how we prepare our children for an unknowable world we prefer to reject both noise and chaos in favor of the craven declaration of pure signal and pure order. The opportunity cost of this calculation is our humanity.

The danger of Artificial General Intelligence is NOT a machine overlord. It is a shifting of our identities from human to machine and all that entails. It's a de-evolution.

The drive to purify ourselves of life, to become artificial, to become digital, is a logical end to our relentless pursuit of efficiency. However, neighborliness is the context of sustainability, the context of existence over time. Neighborliness is the fertile compost that hosts our living, our dying and our return.

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

― Carl Sagan

Unknowing

Cherokee Creation Myth

When all was water, the animals were above in Gälûñ’lätï, beyond the arch; but it was very much crowded, and they were wanting more room. They wondered what was below the water, and at last Dâyuni’sï, “Beaver’s Grandchild,” the little Water-beetle, offered to go and see if it could learn. It darted in every direction over the surface of the water, but could find no firm place to rest. Then it dived to the bottom and came up with some soft mud, which began to grow and spread on every side until it became the island which we call the earth. It was afterward fastened to the sky with four cords, but no one remembers who did this.

What does it mean to remember that no one remembers? What does it mean to understand existence as not knowing? As a kid I tried to read the Mayan creation story, Popol Vuh. It made absolutely no sense to me. Not in an it’s-too-complicated sort of way but in a my-understandings-are-not-structured-like-that sort of way. It was exciting to think that minds could be so different. It was exciting to think about existence and experience and understandings and how culture is the unreplicable and invaluable output of living.

There is, of course, a difference between the unknown and the unknowable. There is a difference, except in that very brief moment when we first say to ourselves, “I don’t know.” The moment before knowing takes over. The moment before we convince ourselves that knowing is always and only “I know” and “I don’t know” or “I can know” and “I can’t know”.

“I’ve taken Computer Science for 4 years now and I’ve got an ‘F’ every year. Why do they keep making me do this? I can’t do Computer Science”. - Santana, 11th grade

Students say “I can't do computer science.” because they have been asked to know Computer Science. They have been asked to get an A on a test to demonstrate their knowledge, to demonstrate their mastery. Paolo Freire advocated for a problem posing pedagogy because he described problem solving and dialog as necessary to making and remaking the world. Existence is a problem, a very complex problem that has no solution; a problem for which a solution is irrelevant. Schools, and modernity in general, are centered around knowing but I am increasingly attracted to unknowing as a place more grounded in being human.

Unknowing is a place different from the binary of knowing vs. not knowing. Unknowing Isn’t an expansion of the binary true false into a spectrum that includes nuance and grey. Unknowing isn’t maybe. Unknowing isn’t a space in between. In unknowing, knowing is unmoored, knowing has no purchase, no special relevance, no suffocating primacy. Unknowing is a place where complexity can be experienced; a place that does not assume anything, that does not ask for anything, that does not anticipate anything. It’s a place I have only ever been able to visit for very short periods of time. I think it’s where people try to go when they meditate?

I think unknowing is the only place from which we can feel complexity. Math has never been easy for me but I want to experience it because I think math is a language that will help me ask better questions. I have never been good at computer programming but I write computer programs because it helps me to deconstruct and investigate the whole of a problem by examining and manipulating dis-embodied pieces and how those pieces relate to their whole and how they influence my understandings and how they resonate with old patterns I have experienced. I think unknowing is the source, the primordial ooze, of my understandings.

We, humans, created digital spaces so that we can reduce and deconstruct, so that we can examine the pieces and their relation to the whole. Digital spaces help us to investigate existence but they can’t solve existence. Digital spaces can never be existence. Digital spaces can only be right now, the moment of the calculation. They are disconnected; points, never a line, never a plane, never space. They can only suggest connection.

I don’t think unknowing is resonant with knowing or even with thinking. Unknowing feels like acceptance but whenever I investigate exactly what it is I am accepting, things get really squishy and unknowing disappears. So I just accept that.

The perception of complexity requires the possibility of living in a situational time that’s not trapped in the immediate. - Miguel Benasayag

Our digital world is situated in immediacy. The gravity of efficiency and its digital tools have pulled us into a gravity well of existential insignificance, a place where our questions of being and knowing are turned into questions about information; storage, categorization and retrieval. I mean this quite literally. The discipline of Ontology, once an inquiry into what it means to exist, is now defined as a process of categorizing and mapping information. This is not a new use of an old word nor is this apple now means orange. This is the evolution of language that reflects an intentional devolution of humanity; the reduction of humanity to something that can exist in a digital world.

I came back to education after about 10 years away because education was the only way I could see myself as a net positive in the world. There are a lot of bugs squashed on the windshield of my metaphorical life car and my efforts to see the world clearly are horribly distorted by e(n)tymological viscera making it impossible to understand the efficacy of driving the next mile, the next day, the next month, the next year.

I am trying to not live in next. Several years ago I came to the conclusion that while I might be right there is very little actual benefit to being right. Being right provides me a blanket, keeps me a bit warmer, but it’s my blanket. Declaring that I am right can’t warm anyone else. However, recently I have come to a more uncomfortable conclusion. I am not right. At least not from the perspective of complexity, I can’t know if I am right because complexity can only be experienced from unknowing where being right has no resonance because no one can know complexity. Complexity is impossible to see through.

So here is what I have decided. Complexity exists and I exist and because I exist, I intend, I act and I reflect. I build understandings through an accretion of experiences and with my mind as open as I can make it, I engage with the world. I continue to actively experience the world. I exercise my agency in accordance with my evolving understandings. However, action within a complex and unknowable world can’t have a known outcome. Complexity is impossible to see through. So what guides my action, and more relevant to this screed, what guides my praxis; what guides my pedagogy? I think the answer to that question is reflexive. Existence guides me.

Because the humanity of the digital world is also the humanity of the ultra-feedback and permanent immediacy, we can understand a primary reason for our contemporaries lack of reaction when confronted by dangers that are not only outside the realm of immediacy and feedback, but also require a complex perception of mediated phenomena. Most of our contemporaries are incited to live elsewhere, but in an elsewhere that is, in reality, nowhere. And as one can easily imagine, it is very hard to act from nowhere.

• Miguel Benasayag, Tyranny of Algorithms