Technology, Time and Class

 https://weresolvingsociety.medium.com/technology-time-and-class-e601b7f9c478

Imagine you have a book that you want to read. You’ve opened it up and read some of it, but understood that in order to do it due diligence you will need a period of reading, thoughtful reflection, application, and review. You know the whole piece should be read in a seamless fashion, to really understand the transitions, answers, and buildups. But the problem is you simply don’t have the time for that. You are busy with several different catastrophes, cacophonies, and sometimes just simple errands. On top of it, you are dealing with contention tax, while still receiving demands to persist despite such harassments. On one hand is an individual insisting that you read this book, and on the other hand is an individual saying that you’re not reading it right. And, should you finally set aside the material and time, the final individual says “you’re not doing enough for others.”

It is in ordeals like this that we see that technology, time and class are all interrelated.

Let’s talk about technology. Technology is seen as an engineering design using the scientific process. We start with a hypothesis, approximate what will get us there, attempt it, reflect, and adapt. Ultimately when we talk about such industrial sciences, we are talking about efficiency and saving time. But, in order to save time we need time. And that there is the catch.

Let’s see a basic application of this. Say I wanted to go to school. In order to do well, I need time to ingest the material without too much distraction and with enough material sustenance that I’m not worried about lower rung concerns like food, shelter, or social ties. However, this is not the reality for many students. Though they may have the proper student loan, they still have to work during school to make ends meet even with the stresses of debt to “look forward to” in the future. They cannot properly focus on their schoolwork, and in the end their understanding is not what it could be given the time limitations. Thus, they miss out on all the time-savingness inherent in the material. They grabbed what they could, but ultimately it will likely not be enough given the uphill battle against student loans — which would require A level mastery to outwit. It would take someone with sincere and nearly bizarre mastery to both work and receive A’s, and yet we reward these people with the same merit as those who have sufficient material backing and do well. In fact, we are more likely to honor these previously backed A students as though it were on their merit, and fail to see that they in themselves may have a failure to see this success-to-time-saved ratio. Thus, without such insights into technological privilege, no meritocracy can truly exist.

There are many ways that technology privilege can be privileged or taken

• Easier access to the best material on the matter; aka, search engine input and results are generally quite relevant depending on the person and their incoming data (which, in itself, is a function of their income or access to those with income)
• Given a tool that saves time
• Giving information on how to best use that tool to save time
• Access to the design on the tool, in which one sees how maximal time was supposed to be saved
• Poor or excellent teaching; teaching is or isn’t clear, written into substeps, etc
• Access to nervous-system informed supports, such as positive and trauma sensitive therapeutic backing for the abused, depressed, or anxious.
• Access to differentiated instruction that can detect such discrepancies such as ADHD, depression, etc.

It is also on all students to be able to detect when pathological disenfranchisement is occuring. If the withdrawal of technology greatly outnumbers the instances of its providence, we can say that we live in a society keen on pathological disenfranchisement and that such a society is collapsing and heaving from the inside out in a win-lose manner. Should such behaviors continue to receive funding? Should we merge ourselves with material on “how to deal with narcissistic bosses” as Covid-19 surges continue to decimate the country, and we just figure we should wait it out? Or is that, in many ways, an external blindness — a lack of sensitivity to the absolute pain occurring outside, in an attempt to avoid it or an actual inability to engage with it? If it could be proven with just a little less self-absorption and bit more sensitivity half the casualties would have occurred, wouldn’t it be right to say we were not even under a boss at all? And then, how ironic would it be for such a person to make judgments on what was right or wrong to do, when they didn’t have the sufficiently sensitive cognitive apparatus to correctly grab even the bare minimum of necessary data to stop the catastrophe?

When such accumulations of time and their mechanisms of management and savings are mistaken for merit, what is seen as justice — receiving what is one’s own — could actually be a bandit’s alibi. Is it your own when the student in your class with excessive debt sent in a few brilliant papers, but then was forced to drop out due to their mental illness or familial issues stemming again from residual class traumas (overworked due to race, low access to food and funds due to socioeconomic status, etc). And then, if someone were to say this person “is just part of that class”, what would we say about such a person being in education? If the person is in education simply to ensure that the proper mechanisms of self-defeat are installed, the final product will be a cacophony of self-hating mass. And ultimately, such a severely inflamed alumni will not support the structure of education that would be required. And soon the entirety would collapse.

The truth is, the educational institute has survived on the generosity of those inherent in it, not the classist brandishing that might occur. This includes recommendations, extra time taken to explain, to grow, to encourage. I remember when I was relatively young a teacher who was extremely encouraging, only placing himself in the conversation when there was a necessary correction he felt might cost us too much later. It seems, today, that these presences dwindle more and more.

Today, we may grieve not only our lost education and the understandings we might have had, but the educational institutions that increasingly seem less and less on our side. May we see a return then, away from the self-eating educational institution and back to the universe of mutual aid. And may we all get better at that craft ourselves instead of throwing in towels, not having generosity for our failing brilliance, and not taking the time to analyze and remediate the infrastructure.