#newfuture

Ausschnitte lassen tief blicken | Cut-outs can be deep

Feeling a little tired this morning, I considered turning to Google Bard (Google’s AI system) to ask it to produce this week’s blog. I didn’t, although you may wish that I had! 

While AI will continue to improve, it is already producing some impressive results. As with many advances of new technology, there are advantages but also some pitfalls and how we interact with systems needs to be carefully developed. 

The speed and ease with which the systems can produce work is a challenge for schools and could be seen as shortcut, avoiding pupils having to think too hard. Yet, we know that thought is a key part in the learning process; what we think about, we usually remember. Used correctly, however, these systems have the potential to make us much more efficient, which could allow us to spend more time on the activities that really make a difference.

In addition, the assessment process - including external examinations - needs to adapt quickly, especially when in many situations we cannot be certain whether something has been developed by a human or a computer (the Turing Test).

Pupils at Bablake are successful because they acquire both knowledge AND skills as they progress through the School. You have to know things and you also have to be able to communicate and work with others. Our recent inspection report commented that, “Pupils achieve excellent levels of knowledge, skills and understanding”, “Pupils are extremely self-confident and self-disciplined; they are reflective and understand how to improve their learning”, and “Pupils display a mature social awareness working together with an excellent sense of purpose and enjoyment.” This is genuine intelligence and these skills are key reasons why our pupils are successful – it is not just about examination results, but also how our young people collaborate, lead and communicate. While AI brings both opportunities and challenges, the purpose of education hasn’t really changed since the classical world. We need to develop knowledge, we need to have the skills to analyse what we learn and we need to be able to communicate our thoughts to others. 

We are all still learning how we might interact with these systems; however, as you would expect, we are not ignoring the changes. For example, in the last few weeks, Sixth Formers have heard from current parents and former pupils who are at the forefront of developing AI, we spent time with our middle leaders looking at some of the benefits and downsides, and we have met with senior leaders in other schools to consider some of the structures we might put in place to make sure we get the most from new advances. 

We will provide more guidance in the new academic year; there are issues to consider on both the academic and pastoral aspects of our work. Over the summer, I encourage you to spend time looking at how AI has developed so far. It will continue to improve and is already a part of our everyday life; its influence will only increase. The more we understand about the systems, the better we are able to interact with them to our benefit and avoid some of the downsides. 

Andrew Wright   Headmaster

A break-up is never a fun thing. Your future is suddenly changed. In the course of a day or two your whole future looks different, and maybe not better. Maybe you thought your future would be with this person. You thought you would be with this person for the rest of your life. And suddenly that’s not the case anymore. One of you decided that this wasn’t going to happen. And the second person usually can’t do much about it. A relationship is usually over if one person decides it is. And that sucks. It sucks to be abandoned like that. To be told that you aren’t wanted like that anymore. Maybe you aren’t wanted at all.

People need to be wanted. We want to be wanted. We want someone to like us and belong. I did, at least. I belonged somewhere. My future was set, and I was home. Then something changed. I’m still not sure what that was. Even after all this time, I still don’t know why. But I have to accept it. And I have to make a new future. Without him. Without the life I lived for almost 10 years.

I miss the sound of him coming home. The sound of his jacket being hanged in the hallway and the joy in his voice when he called out to see if I was home. I miss his arms around me and his nose in my neck. I miss the way he sniffed me and smiled at me. Home. I miss the way his mouth felt against mine and how close he held me. I could easily tell if he had thought about me that day or not.

I miss the feeling of his freshly shaven head and the smell of the lotion he used. I miss sitting in the passenger seat of our car and the way he grabbed my hand sometimes. I used to love that feeling. Especially if he kissed it. I miss the smell of our tv-room where we used to watch movies. The way the darkness surrounded us, and I got to curl up close to him. How his arm felt around me, and his fingers intertwined with mine. His kisses on my head. His laughter. His soft voice and lips when he woke me up in the morning before he went to work.

First Draft Of the Capitalist Surrealist Writing Project. Steal and appropriate, critique and interrogate, with the author's full endorsement and permission. Looking (back)(for)wyrds After the Bush interregneum and the long, terrible, progress destroying Reagan years, the American empire had something like a moment of hope. Riding high on the peace dividend and a delusion of idealism among the donating classes, the economic aristocracy which in effect was the senior partner in “American Democracy” (and so duly represented in both parties) and the voter was a paternalized junior to be both petted and protected had selected the Clinton dynasty. The grand bargain between labour and capital against the state resulted in the bitter fruit of the Bush years, as Conservatives paternalists rightly mocked the Clintonian urge to middling action on domestic issues while gladly partnering with him to rob labour at large. While a wealth transfer had already been going on as part of a trend for the better part of a century, this phase in which a semi-coherent ruling class dynamic of the donating classes and the government service classes became visible. It is beyond satire now, but this was not always so visible, as racism, white supremacy, American exceptionalism, various fundementalist and conservative (as well as equally harmful, supposedly liberal versions of the same) religious beliefs; Turtle Island was rife with reasons for temporary cross class solidarity in order to oppose an other or to advance an idealistic goal.

And yet moments of class consciousness and solidarity have perenially emerged, from the “grassroots” as the insiders like to say. They frame the people as “the base” or “the grassroots” and narrowly target their interests to make people find conflict with each other. It is irrelevent (for this missive) whether this is a conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious process; it is enough to notice it happening. Despite this, moments in the pre new-modern (to be defined later, promise~) politics that predate terms like Black Lives Matter or Trans Rights are Human Rights show that these movements represent an unbroken chain of revolutionary attempts at self-consciousness and conscience transformation that coincide and are just as important as any history of violence. The Ides of March, and the campaign of anonymous internet citizens against Scientology, represents such a moment. Occupy Wall Street was such a movement. “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used To It!” was such a phrase. The many quotes attributed to names like Mandela and James Baldwin; the Black Panthers, the revolutionary feminists, the Hippie movement, down back to the (In the American mind) hoary days of yore when the Wide Awakes would march a brass band around the houses of pro slave Senators.

It is a poor yet accurate summation to say that the ‘present’ (a dubious notion) political reality is the sum of all of these and more; a reader can orient themselves to the history of late stage capitalism by the growth of the donating classes influence and the acceleration of their detachment from society at large. Moments which also impact this reality are the donating classes sense of pessimism about the future; the devaluing of nearly all forms of labour, the increasing visibility of law enforcement brutality; the list can be referenced in the moment to moment, wide eyed and angry reporting of self-matyring, news-junkie amateur journalists found anywhere online, the shocked and angry expressions of young activists at protests and the weary, numbed faces of the old. Up and down the class system, there has been a wide spread death of hope.

Enter the climate crisis.

Before climate consciousness achieved real steam, our escatological fears were (mostly) confined to the realm of human action or cosmic events unimaginable (and unrelatable) to the modern person’s experience of life. For decades, the effects of climate change were reported to a world told not to care. As Terrance Mkenna said, ““The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”

The impact of this can and will be expanded upon, but it is safe to say that the bubble has been popped. Whatever finds popular currency within the dialogue around it, that the climate is changing rapidly in ways inemical to human society at large/at present is true by material impact; people everywhere have experienced some negative result of the changing conditions, and there is a rising anxiety in the classes who cannot afford an escape pod or fortress bunker that the people they’ve entrusted themselves to intend to withdraw to safety and abandon them, or even expose them to more harm in order to “make more of the earth’s carrying weight available in the reclamation” (this kind of talk is not alien to them, though this specific quotation is my own invention.

It is important to acknowledge that the bubble has popped. It is the exclamation on Capitalist Realism; it is the moment of awareness, that encounter with a death of hope, in which Capitalist Surrealism, our phenomenological experience of the Capitalist Real, is born. While this Surrealist stage is both uncomfortable and has deleterious effects on the human condition, it represents the chink in the armour of banality and inertia, and the diminishing politics of the powerful. The sense that anything, absolutely *anything,* can happen to you, is both incredibly terrifying, and when looked at squarely, an opportunity for radical freedom.

It is this radical freedom that we see ourselves invited to in the many facets of human expression and convention which have experienced an awakening of new consciousness (or the restoration of old ones. Beliefs, ways of interacting with the world, and surviving are no longer benefited by or even neutrally treated by their operating environment anymore; if the complete weight of propaganda in circulation at the moment could be translated into sound, it would present an impenetrable and unlistenable wall.

It is that environment that individual ideologies not sanctioned by the operating environment have struggled against; all of them now have new life and vigor because despite that wall, and the spectacle societies which generate them, the literal truth of material impacts trump all prior arguments. With awareness of most likely outcomes of the climate crisis on a sliding scale, we see radicalization and existential depression of all varieties spike; the answers they attempt to generate to these apparent conditions lack hope in broad but uneven spikes along that scale of awareness, with the suicidally depressed expert climatologist and the radical anarcho-primitivist sharing the same ontological space in orientation to that crisis.

This project, among other things, is an attempt to generate an alternative answer (what that project consists of is entirely based in literature and mutual aid, the oldest Christian platforms for emancipatory action.) Terms like Solarpunk and Cloud City Futures approach but fail to capture the spirit of an alternative answer, mostly with an appeal to the world of aesthetics, a dubious method for summoning change at best. Terminology alone, or even in tandem with education, is also not sufficient; the noise environment they enter into immediately drowns out the creators meaning, especially if these terms are successful and gain currency with the wealthy.

Rather, we must articulate the positive from all our apparent negatives: The apocalyptic futures we anticipate cannot begin actually describe the terrain of the future, and the apparancy of our material conditions impact on our lives is now drowning out the sound of the standing ideologies. This is a brave time, where people blaze trails for others to follow out of the collapsing structures of the past and into the dwelling places of the new future. Our experience of reality, though surreal, has now unlocked an awareness of an apparent power: making meaning.

It is with the tools of meaning-making that these, who are the heirs of their elders, queer and colour revolutionary and indigenous land defender and abolitionist, pioneer the hopeful vistas of the future. It is necessary that they *be* hopeful; it was the Buddha who taught that people deceived by Samsara may be “deceived” by the apparent gifts of pursuing enlightenment, the majority of which are ancillary incidentals not to be meditated on. The king calls his indolent heirs out of the burning palace with a promise of gifts; when they arrive, they protest the lack of gifts, but it is in his embrace of them we realize they are the gift, and their survival was worth the promise of chariots and ponies.

But there must also be chariots, and ponies; luxuries, and finery; the grim tools of “defense” and all the things the human animal finds comforting in their resting environment to assure them of its stability. In the Dao De Jing, (Though Mueller butchers the poetry,) the Sage articulates this and describes how to create it: “Let there be a small country with few people,

Who, even having much machinery, don't use it.

Who take death seriously and don't wander far away.

Even though they have boats and carriages, they never ride in them.

Having armor and weapons, they never go to war.

Let them return to measurement by tying knots in rope.

Sweeten their food, give them nice clothes, a peaceful abode and a relaxed life.

Even though the next country can be seen and its doges and chickens can be heard,

The people will grow old and die without visiting each other's land.” A.C. Mueller Translation, The Dao De Jing, Attributed to Lao Tzu

It is as naked an appeal to a return to the life of the community and the village as can be found. A return to idigenous ways of being, which speaks to the preservation of folk ways, while the reality that the sage is administering them (even if only by moral teaching) shows a potential for new ideas to be instanced; innovation is not a property innate to the colonizing and walled world, and memetic culture and the society of truth-telling through representation around it reflect callbacks to this desire. The political movement around Land Back, while perennial to the causes of indigenous people, crystalizes an actionable answer for individuals and collectives to support. Its cousins in other colour movements, many of them representing indigenous people displaced by imperialism in the first place, are also generative of positive futures; it is a fact of history that as the rights of people classified as “minorities” are raised, the general quality of life for all in society rises, with the exception of those who could never be touched but by the highest tides.

These movements and moments of consciousness are their own inestimable goods, not mere ends for the would be conscious person to hijack for their goals. This is in fact a position inimical to the success of any of these movements; grifting starts at home, and it is the white leftist who is more easily conquered by the white liberal, since neither of them have conquered their own whiteness in the first place. But that supporting them generates positive benefits for all can only be argued against if you value the lives and comforts of some over others; those who value the general benefit first can see a clear path.

2020, the year that will be remembered for generations to come. It started with an incredible twist and turn and created such a high level of uncertainty. What we had thought was the way the world should be turned out to be not so true as one virus put the whole world to a stop. 

It gave everyone an opportunity to recollect and create a new direction and a new future. 

What is yours?  How has this affected you? Did it make you think of that dream that was buried in the pile of all the running around and making ends meet for you and your family? Did it make you realize that you are important?