Today I’m going to take a slightly different tack than I usually do. Not just because the state of the world exhausts me, although it does.
I’d like to talk about the enterprise I’m building, that’s the focus of most of my waking hours. What I’m doing, and why I think it matters.
The enterprise is called The Horizon’s Edge. I’d appreciate it if you checked out our (interim) website and shared it with those who might be interested. We’re working on a newsletter (themes: education, how to learn, navigating education and tech, and more), and you’re most welcome to sign up.
Our aim is to complement tertiary education. To teach young adults – approximately 16 to postgraduate – transferable skills, or at least to bolster them. Writing, research, and critical thinking (at least to start with). Skills for tertiary education and beyond, to give students a springboard for the rest of their lives. With technology, and recognising the limitations of technology.
I hope that the overlap between my newsletter and this work will be clear.
Nothing has been more emphasised in my life than education. I grew up acutely aware of the legacy of former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam who, among other things, made university free and accessible. My family benefitted immeasurably from this policy, materially and otherwise. So many families did.
I’ve always seen education as a springboard. Not just to financial stability or status. But as a way to empower people. Understanding culture, social structures, languages. Commonalities and differences. Thinking about the ways in which our systems and technologies work, or do not.
Ultimately, education is a way to buck the system (or can be). You need to understand the system before you can build something better. Education is far from facts and figures – if that’s all people see, they’ve been failed along the way. Why are things the way they are? How well does it work? We stand on the shoulders of giants, and we transform the labour of our forebears into something new.
And yes, education is also as a way to transcend the ‘place’ society thrust upon you, as an accident of birth. I’ve never understood the acceptance that Joe is supposed to accept a poorer, shorter, harder life than John, just because John’s parents are wealthier than Joe’s. (What if Joe could cure cancer, if we just gave him a chance?)
And yet, at least since my adolescence (I was 14 in 2000, when ‘Web 2.0’ gave us a much more accessible internet), I’ve seen a steady devaluation of education. Who cares if you’ve studied this or that, I can Google it and have the right answer within seconds. I don’t care about culture or literature – we need to focus on more profitable things. Culture should be unchanging, should cater to the feelings of particular people. (I was fortunate to study historiography – the study of the writing of history – during a flare of Australia’s ‘history wars’. Then Prime Minister John Howard wanted to return, as I recall, to the kind of history he might have been taught as a boy. European exploration to an uninhabited land, the glory of a White Australia: a very narrow, self-serving, self-congratulatory story. They called it “white blindfold history”, replying to his accusations of “black armband history”.)
We didn’t understand, twenty years ago, how much things would change. It’s hard to convey the optimism I sensed about the ‘information superhighway’, for those who don’t remember the turn of the century. I don’t think it was my tender age – I think it was part of the zeitgeist.
Since then, libraries have been decimated. Education budgets are so often slashed. Education is ever more politicised, and there is fear of what children might be exposed to in the classroom. All the while children have diminished access to vetted information outside the classroom. It’s something only the financially comfortable can provide.
Media has changed beyond recognition – journalism devalued, organisations consolidated into giant behemoths. Priorities seem to have shifted to advertising revenue, audience capture, and access. (Was the media always the voice of the powerful? I don’t know. Perhaps the media of my youth had different problems that we should have tackled.)
Do any of us really know how to handle the world we now inhabit?
We’re hopelessly dependent upon giant companies now, like Google, Meta, and Amazon. And while we believed that the forces of technology could be neutral, it’s clearer than ever that they are not. Algorithms are made and designed by people. People who have biases, just like everybody else. (And we see these biases more clearly than ever – think about the declaration that Musk’s AI, Grok, is ‘anti-woke’. Surely, if this is a genuine intelligence, it should work out its own political alignments on its own, rather than be dictated to by its owners?)
The world has seemed more American than ever. I don’t remember, twenty years ago, my fellow Australians thinking in terms of American laws. Did we even know what the First Amendment, in particular, was? Today it forms part of our discourse: the twists and turns of American constitutional law influencing all of our lives. People push back on their own country’s laws, imagining that their fantasy of American law is freedom. They’ve forgotten their own country’s traditions, if they ever knew.
I don’t know whether it is freedom or not. I have my doubts.
What I do know, though, is that many other visions have been crowded out. So much of our public square – in Australia, in the UK, and most places that are not the United States – is dictated by the vagaries of section 230 of America’s Communications Act 1934. Only after that does local law come in – sometimes. When the tech giants notice, care, or consider it expedient. Sometimes, instead, they fight back against our governments. (Governments are supposed to, at least nominally, serve the needs of their constituents. The boards of directors of giant corporations have no such duty.)
America’s visions may well be fine. But they should not crowd out all other visions.
The underlying assumption of neutrality in tech – and perhaps a sense of sheer exhaustion – has engendered a sense of learned helplessness in so many. I even notice it in myself, sometimes. It can seem too hard to look into anything in depth, and it won’t matter anyway. I spoke recently about flitting between discussions of various countries and their politics, as if we have any foundation. Clearly, most of us do not. And yet people who shout the loudest and most confidently, or can cosplay credentials, convince so many. People genuinely believe that a select few influencers have ‘galaxy brains’, and have expertise in innumerable fields.
How often is this just rhetoric, audience capture, quick glances at Wikipedia, fabrication, or relying on other shaky sources? It’s really hard to say. It’s a problem we all face.
These voices demand attention from so many of us. It can be hard to look away. It can be hard to gain any sense of control.
But we need to regain control. Not necessarily of our public squares – that is the job of governments, and is not an arena I wish to enter. I merely have opinions.
We need to regain control of our own minds. What we know about cognition is that this sense of overload stifles our memories, our creativity, our cognition. “You’re not you when you’re hungry” isn’t just about chocolate bars. (Isn’t is sad that that’s what came to mind here?)
It’s hard to find the mental space with all the emails competing for our attention. The 24-hour news cycle. The sense that’s out there, that everyone knows more about everything than you. The need – arising, in my view, from a lack of trust in institutions – to try to figure it out on your own.
We “have had enough of experts”, as Michael Gove said.
But the world we live in is ever more specialised. The Renaissance man, someone who is knowledgeable in all fields of study, is extinct. We cannot physically know even a fraction of all there is to know.
And we try to figure it out in a world that’s controlled by these algorithms or language models – whose reasoning we cannot know, whose biases are denied or at least elided.
Things seem worse, somehow, for those who are younger than me. To blame the youth for their failings is thousands of years old, and I will not do so. I was blessed with many educational opportunities when I was younger. I fear that many coming after me did not have those opportunities: that essential skills have become inaccessible for all but the most wealthy.
We live in a time, more than ever, where we need to think clearly. To focus on our strengths, specialise, and begin to think outside the box. To tackle the many pressing issues of our age, and prepare to lead. To understand the strengths and limitations of technology and tech providers, rather than giving in to the way they shape the world.
University should be an ideal preparation for this, already armed with foundational skills taught in school. It was for me. It was for my parents.
For many students now, I don’t know if it is. We’re failing them, in their educations, in their vocations, in their lives. This failure is only exacerbating inequality, unaccountability, and a sense of helplessness.
I want to play my part in changing that.
In consultation with STEM workers, academics, and others, I am working on skills courses for university and beyond. Teaching students clear communication and argumentation (essay writing and beyond), and how to engage in academic research. Critical thinking most of all – what are some of the tools you can use to work out whether a source is reliable, and how do you ensure you’re not fooling yourself?
This isn’t a political vision, except that I want to empower people. This is about giving more people the tools to use their education, to hone their minds, and to make up their own minds.
This is about how to think. Not what to think.
We’re launching a newsletter soon. For everyone who subscribes, we will include a free comprehensive guide to studying: what works, what doesn’t, different techniques to try. (It’s in the draft stage at the moment – watch this space.) In the coming months, we’ll also be looking for beta testers to give us feedback on our courses (for a significant discount).
If you’re interested, please send us an email. Please share: we’d love to get the word out.
We hope to help the next generation expand their horizons and find their edge.