Teaching Against the Machine
Critical Pedagogy in an Era of Artificial Intelligence
Teaching Against the Machine
Critical Pedagogy in an Era of Artificial Intelligence
Description
This book examines the entanglement of capitalism, technological acceleration and AI, and warns that they are eroding education as a means of collective intelligence.
Alexander J. Means shows how our desires, dreams, emotions, and psychic life have become the target of optimizing drives and algorithmic manipulation aimed at extracting value from thought and time. He argues that this is leading to a disintegration of meaning, knowledge, and culture, allowing Fascism, fraud, racism, ecocide, and war to thrive in an environment of systemic nihilism and the collapse of memory into computation. He examines how education has become a brand word and how education is being reduced to training in compliance and suggests ways to stop this trend. Means draws on a range of theorists book including Franco Berardi, Alain Badiou, Byung-Hul Chan, Fredric Jameson and Achille Mbembe. The book represents a warning against a life of fundamentalism, money, consumption, and power and argues that education should, in contradiction to the current trends, be equipping young people and adults with the tools to live a life filled with meaning and purpose.
Table of Contents
Introduction: End of Education
1. Optimized Nihilism and the Disfiguration of Thought
2. Capitalist Catastrophism and the Politics of Knowledge
3. Mind Factory in Ruins: From Cognitive to AI Capital
4. Platform Learning, Cities, and Silicon Illusions
5. Digital Squalor: Scams, War, and Mindlessness
6. Corrupting the Xanax Generation
7. Futurability: Seizing the Means of Cognition for Postcapitalism
Conclusion
References
Index
Product details
| Published | 22 Aug 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 224 |
| ISBN | 9781350506824 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Series | Critical Directions in Education, Technology, and Politics |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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