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  • Theo problem that I'm trying to address is that human beings think of ourselves in terms of our utility value, and that's going to be the mean the end of us.

  • Partly because machines have more utility value than people, we can always develop a machine that will have more utility value than then a human beings.

  • That's kind of what Norbert Wiener was arguing back in the and the guy who came up with cybernetics when he was thinking about feedback mechanisms in the first Robots that we're gonna have to think about what's the human use of human beings?

  • But to me it it be speaks of a reversal of figure and ground reversal of subject and object we're thinking about.

  • How does technology treat humans rather than how to human beings?

  • Use technology, right?

  • So we're no longer the figures were no longer the actors.

  • The intelligent agents have agency.

  • So we've ended up living in a world where even those who want to make technology in theory that that's nicer to people, are still thinking about.

  • Technology is something that plays us, and that's the experience I have and and that, I believe, is Israel right now is that I'm not using my technology.

  • My technology uses me.

  • Every time I swipe my smartphone.

  • It gets smarter about me, and I get dumber about it.

  • But the response that I'm trying to provoke is not another techno solution.

  • Ist response.

  • I don't think it's about Let's write algorithms to beat the algorithms that are hurting us.

  • No new army of that.

  • Or let's develop a better social media network that does this or a better smartphone algorithm.

  • No, I think what I'm trying to do is a little bit more homeopathic in spirit or natural path.

  • It rather than fighting the disease and even giving more weight and authority to that digital, the digital monster.

  • Let's get off line.

  • No, that's enhance our human resilience.

  • Let's it enhance our own, our own vitality, our cultural immune response.

  • You know, if there's weaponized teams out there that I don't want my kid using a weaponized, mean filter, I want my kid being strong enough to not respond to the weaponized mean.

  • When I went in the States, we had this Twitter phenomenon where there was this video of some Mogg, a kid kid with a Maga hat facing off with a Native American, and it was like 20 seconds.

  • It started like this 22nd video, and I saw all my friends, smart friends, professors of media friends and tweeting that Retweeting my God, look at this horrible fascist child.

  • And and I was I was kind of amazed.

  • It's like Wait a minute.

  • Can't you be a human being for a minute?

  • Can't you be smart enough to realize you're not there?

  • You don't know what happened?

  • You're you're reacting to a picture on social media and using it to vent whatever the rage you have against the Trump presidency or against Mogg.

  • A people are against racism.

  • And, of course, you know as they pull back, it became another story and they pull back a little bit more, and it became yet another story.

  • So the object of the game is not to teach Twitter how to make sure that these bad messages don't come through.

  • That's like saying, Well, let's just rid the world of viruses.

  • Know that the object of the game is to increase our own immune response as people are collective cultural immune response on the way to do that is to have enough solidarity between people who can sit in rooms together, make eye contact, have conversations and not feel so threatened.

  • They can't tolerate one another every semester that I teach.

  • I've only talked for five years now.

  • Every semester I get more notes from students on the first day of class, notes signed by their psychiatrists saying, Please excuse Johnnie from class participation and presentations.

  • But because Johnny's got, you know, it's anxiety, social anxiety, and I'm sure that's really But why is there so much?

  • Why hasn't Johnny been trained in kindergarten 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade?

  • How to be in a room with other people?

  • You know, it's because Johnny is education has been surrendered to Johnny's utility value.

  • Let's make him a good worker.

  • You know anyone in the UK who knows the history of public education here?

  • You know, public education was not to make better workers.

  • Public education was started to give dignity to the coal worker so that they'd be working in the mines all day.

  • But at least they could come home and have the dignity of being able to read a novel or participate intelligently in representative democracy.

  • When we turn education into extensions into an extension of work or we've really done has taken a corporate costs and externalized it to the public sector.

  • And we've devalued education, so it's no longer teaching people that they have essential dignity when they come in that room.

  • But they're gonna have to learn something in order to be useful.

  • Valuable members of society and the principles of the schools meet with the CEOs of the companies to find out.

  • Oh, what do you want them to know?

  • Do you want them to know Excel?

  • I want them to know Java.

  • You want them to know Python will deliver you the employees of the future, you know, and give employees.

  • There are no jobs in the future.

  • But that's another story, right?

  • Employed.

  • But it's fine.

  • Employments, temporary.

  • We can talk about that.

  • Employment was invented in the in the Renaissance.

  • It's not.

  • It's not essential toe work.

  • It's just it's really employment was a way to prevent people from owning their own businesses.

  • They had to go work for chartered monopolies.

  • That's when employment was born.

  • But that's that's a whole other story.

  • So yeah, so I'm arguing that once we can learn to establish and maintain basic rapport with one another.

  • That's when the great human conspiracy can begin and I mean it.

  • The word conspiracy literally comes.

  • Spire means what to breathe together, but people breathing together right now that constitutes a conspiracy.

  • If you can breathe together with other people in a room, because then the whole thing, the whole artifice, begins to unravel, you know, and you start to experience your power and you start to experience the dignity of yourself and the dignity of the other people that you're with.

  • And once you touch that core of dignity and yourself and others, then it's much, much harder to be controlled.

  • Bye bye, anyone or anything?

Theo problem that I'm trying to address is that human beings think of ourselves in terms of our utility value, and that's going to be the mean the end of us.

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