Let's Work in Cat Videos

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 24 October 2015.

Noam Chomsky

Bill Gates-era education theory is very Skinnerian.  It also is about turning the kids into unformatted operating systems—I suppose the Internet and their jobs are supposed to format them. Also, teachers are being trained to be interchangeable parts. I'm not sure why the digital age relies on business-age strategies for learning, digital-age strategies for formatting, and industrial-age strategies for teacher training. I suppose the industrial leanings for teachers are about planned obsolescence—a deliberate attempt to make us irrelevant.

Which is why Prinicipal Skinner is named Skinner, but we are in the era of Skinner 2 after a brief flirtation with the idea that young people have souls, that education isn't just about making students into functioning members of the economy, and that the liberal arts are good for people. Any lesson plans that work in that direction are now dismissed as being part of a Crayola classroom.

Chomsky would say that serving up Fox News or Harbaugh is the same thing: reinforcing corporate competition and loyalty.

And yes, I think this is what the lodestone does. Is the American Dream just inarticulate rage? Perhaps first against nature, and then against society, and then against the self. First, you dig through the earth and fist-fight some furry dinosaurs, then you live in the salt mines turning a nice city and some nice farm land into an industrial battlefield, and then you get so sick of it all you let Steffi Humboldt steal your power. Sounds about right.

It struck me the other day that our obsession with cat videos is a sign of our pain.  Cat videos are the real opium of the masses! So let's work in cat videos.