# Local maximum: on popular technical pedagogy

## Preamble

We don’t believe in projects that stand as topical, self-contained interventions. We’d like instead to invite the reader into a speculative reflection that stems from our longer-term practice, which we see as an arch of activities that acquire meaning in context, in juxtaposition with one another and through time. Therefore, this small preamble might be a slightly unusual yet necessary way to start this conversation across distances. In 2019, the three of us initiated a collaboration on a research process called Pirate Care.[^1] Its content was inspired by the many initiatives of disobedient and insurgent social reproduction that we saw emerging around us as the latest, multi-layered "care crisis", engendered by a decade of neoliberal austerity politics and centuries of extractivism, was peaking across the globe. We wanted to learn from these care practices and to invite others to learn with us. Hence, the form that Pirate Care took on was inspired by the phenomenon of #syllabi used by a number of social movements as a tool of radical pedagogy in the mid- 2010s[^2], as well as by the shadow libraries that keep us close to the books we need to be reading. The resulting Pirate Care Syllabus[^3] was the fruit of the collective efforts of over twenty activists, artists and researchers, to whom we are profoundly indebted. For the creation of this Syllabus, the programmer amongst us (Marcell Mars) developed an experimental publishing platform, striving to embed in the digital technology we use the same political values we are committed to in our intellectual practice. Sandpoints,[^4] this is the name of the software, has since then continued to be developed and became a more complex tool for publishing initiatives that are non-aligned with canonical approaches. A number of groups and collectives have used it for their own needs and desires, while the non-programmers among us have been putting together an accompanying workflow to facilitate the sharing of skills and a production process that complicates some of the received notions and default roles deployed in the production of critical, political knowledge. In the text that follows we attempt to orient ourselves in the thickness of the now, writing as we set off to embark in a new adventure of trying to link political pedagogy with technological literacy. We therefore would like to borrow Isabel Stenger’s words in inviting the reader to "hesitate together" with us through these pages. To receive any advice, critique or proposal from you would make us, as the British would say, pleasantly surprised: [e-mail].

[^1]: https://pirate.care
[^2]: Graziano, Valeria, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak. “Learning from #Syllabus.” In *State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, and Art*, edited by Yiannis Colakides, Mark Garrett, and Inte Gloerich, 115–28. Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2019. http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/state-machines-reflections-and-actions-at-the-edge-of-digital-citizenship-finance-and-art/.
[^3]: https://syllabus.pirate.care
[^4]: https:// ????

## To Zoom or not to Zoom

We write here departing from our practice. Yet ours is not an attempt to place it into the centre, though the risk to appear doing so is always there. To the contrary. Ours is an effort to take a critical distance from what we do, to decentre our practice, to appreciate its minuscule scale and its partiality by acknowledging the many other practices, concerns and attachments that traverse it and give it consistency. This text is in a sense akin to an act of ritual or magic if you like, of convoking allies to stand beside us in perilous times.

`The fact is that most of the institutions hosting practices such as ours – cultural institutions, universities, fringe political organizations, independent art scenes, activist milieux and so on - are either being defunded with the pretext of the economic and social aftermath of the pandemic; under attack from neofascist and bigot movements; or transformed into farcical quasi-markets, obscene and beyond recognition (e.g. privatized academia). These transformations are easily detectable by common sensibility, yet this profound fragility is something our networks seem to still struggle to come to terms with in the open, possibly because it is dangerous to name the unknown when it might be just around the corner, much is at stake.`

The prominence of digital technologies in shaping the politics of everyday life has since the incept of the Covid-19 pandemic come in full relief. Yet three years ago, when we set our mind to coordinate the creation of an online collective syllabus, little did we know that after a short period of time thousands of courses would be forced to move online and the interactions between millions of students and teachers would be reduced to an interminable series of conference calls. The last years ushered in a widespread awareness of the materiality of our relation, which is "made visible and explicit under digital conditions,"[^5] an awareness that was previously shared mostly by those practitioners and scholars with a vested interest in computation. The shift of the digital tools from cutting-edge, optional gadgets to intrusive, unrefusable essentials is of course true within a plethora of realms, from home deliveries to access to care, yet there is something distinctive to the way the recent migration online has impacted the practices of knowledge production of critical circles and autonomous leftist scenes. An iconic example of this unease can be found in the conversation which we heard many times as conferences, performances, classes and workshops forcibly morphed into streamed video events: "We know Zoom is a problematic company, but we ended up using it anyway because there is no other provider that has a stable enough connection".

[^5]: Hui, Yuk. “Towards A Relational Materialism.” *Digital Culture & Society* 1, no. 1 (2015): 131–48.

In all their mundane banality, statements such as the one above cast a further shadow on the material conditions of critical knowledge production. And we couldn’t agree more. Once the need for such video conferences technologies surged beyond any expectation, Zoom was by far the most stable tool to use during the lockdowns. There was simply no project brewed within the free software movement that could meet the challenge, nor products from more transparent, or at least less intrusive, companies able to compete. The problem with the lack of viable alternatives to Zoom (a year or so ago) in our eyes was not a problem of ethical consumption. Our position vis-à-vis technologies was never one of purity to begin with. The problem we saw with the monopoly of Zoom was that it became the institution that mediated and profited from all our exchanges and efforts at a critical knowledge production. As we have written elsewhere,[^6] whomever owns the means of production within an institution de facto runs the said institution. The unavoidable reliance on Zoom makes us realize that not only critical thought is being pushed out from academia and cultural organizations, but that its mode of existence online is prey to a similar fragility of conditions.

[^6]: Mars, Marcell, and Tomislav Medak. “Against Innovation: Compromised Institutional Agency and Acts of Custodianship.” *Ephemera - Theory and Politics in Organisation* 19, no. 2 (May 2019): 345–68.

But while discourses of insititutional critique, inclusion and diversity, and more recently, decolonization and decarbonization are striving to impact cultural institutions, how are we vis-à-vis our digital tools, our lifelong nonhuman companions of production and reproduction? There the situation seems to be more troubling. The digital sphere enmeshes our relations in an infrastructure of seemingly immaterial yet very concrete conditions of toxicity, oppression and exploitation. But the route towards establishing practicing of emancipation that can provide convincing, sustainable and at scale modes of technopolitical resistance is blurred, its genealogies more intricate to excavate.

Critical interventions in the digital world order that were widespread among the “left” [not sure how to name this collective subjectivity – suggestions?] twenty years ago seem to have dwindled away, shrinking in size or/and relevance. We are thinking here of a bundle of diverse practices, to name but a few of the most characteristic of the period and culture we have in mind: using Creative Commons licences, Linux and Free Software tools; contributing to Wikis and Wikipedia; file sharing and torrenting of pirated movies, music, software and other materials; having one’s email or blog hosted by servers maintained by hacktivist collectives; using anonymizing browsers such as Tor; the production of independent news through the maintenance of networks such as Indymedia and other webrings; early efforts to construct alternative social media (such as n-1 in Spain for example).

This list is partial and it could definitely go on, but we feel it might suffice to sketch the perimeter of a stack of practices that demarcated a critical consciousness and a collective effort to articulate a critical culture of usership vis-à-vis the digital that would then be able to concretely support and make legible more specific (or technical) political struggles in this realm. All this appears to be rather missing today, evaporated for a number of interlocking reasons.
~~
[….this passage is to be written up – Maybe Tom or Marcell?]*….many of these technologies have been superseded by other services, rise of clouds, social media, etc…. what's a good analysis of how the technologies changed?*~~

The relations between what once was a politicised hacker movement and the countercultural scenes that used to intersect with it seem to have cooled down too. Among other factors, such as the technological changes described above, it seems reasonable to mention that the intersectional focus of many of the recent struggles has proven difficult to harmonize with the conducts and subjectivities that animate hacker’ circles, known to be rather homogeneous in their racial and gender composition. The more recent makers movement set up its own network of fablabs, but these tend to be a different kind of organization than the older generation of hackerspaces. Maker scenes cultivate a more entrepreneurial and reformist positioning, often geared to reconcile the advocacy for open technologies and licences with the necessity to appease funders or make a small profit in order to make ends meet. While more radical and critical initiatives within this milieu do exist, they remain uncharacteristic of its predominant orientation.

We should also mention that there is also – luckily! - a growing and effervescent movement of activists that is exposing the racist and sexist bias embedded in the commercial algorithms. This movement has been gaining traction at a moment when these algorithms are becoming ubiquitous in everyday life, from the allocations of credit scores to employee selection, all the way to determining the possibility of parole for convicted people and the unauthorized tracking of citizens’ movements. Public intellectuals such as Joy Buolamwini, Cathy O'Neil and Safiya Umoja Noble and activist organizations such as Data for Black Lives and Big Brother Watch are some of the actors of this nascent front of struggles. Yet these initiatives do not so much articulate a mass politics of usership, but rather fight at the level of connecting and radicalizing experts in the field, such as programmers, mathematicians, researchers or lawyers.

`These days, most efforts from the independent critical left culture to involve less specialized constituencies seem to be mainly focused around issues of privacy, for which regular workshops are organized in the independent scene, in a struggle to regain a sense of personal control over data extraction. `

-	Many people seem to have given up – free software, cc etc. all movements that are not in good shape etc…(exception: black data movements…)
-	Maybe the feeling is not to be able to make an impact – scale of fb mc etc. so big…similar to climate change…
-	We suspect there is a deeper reason: a lack of culture of technology / technique (decide on naming) within critical knowledge production

## Popular technical deskilling

-	Crisis of workers organizations that used to host critical courses – unions etc.
-	Privatization reversed the process of mass education – new barriers – stem as gatekeeper
-	The limits of art and cultural pedagogies – quick formats, workshops etc. 
-	Online hack cultures – how to name the problems there? Who does a good job?
-	The pedagogy of technology: the case of photoshop vs insta filters = the deskilled user
-	Illiteracy as a technical problem – aliteracy etc.

[BRIDGE:]

To decentre the perspective on the politics of usership, as a form of skilful application of tools others make, and to understand the crisis of technical pedagogy in political organising, it is useful to look at the relations between users and technologies, which can be roughly divided for our purposes into three main contexts of encounter: first, the relation between workers and their tools of production; second, the relation between participants in a public sphere and the technological apparatus that allows them to communicate information; and third, the relation between people and the everyday objects that make up their domestic or leisurely worlds.

1) TOOLS OF PRODUCTION

The strategic power of the working-class emerged on the terrain where the political and the economic interact most tightly — rules that define the relations of production: private property, the limitations on intervention into capitalist enterprise, and the labour market.

The ascendancy of industrial capitalism, employing an army of labour manning increasingly complex machinery, created a mass basis of workers who, by dint of their numbers and their skills, could pool together their collective knowledge, material resources and indispensability to the production process to organise, set demands and, as an ultimate demonstration of power, withdraw their labour. The growing concentration and working knowledge of industrial workers thus created the prerequisites for the exercise of *power from below* that Francis Fox Piven had called interdependent or disruptive power.[^7] The interdependence of labour processes on the shopfloor created pre-conditions for collective intellegibility of the factory that allowed workers to ameliorate the hardship of work, game the production quota and withdraw their labour to the greatest effect.

[^7]: Piven, Frances Fox. “Can Power from below Change the World?” *American Sociological Review* 73, no. 1 (2008): 1–14.

Rooted in a combination of technological and organisational konwledge, in a general intellect acquired by the workers collectively and furthered through union-led education programmes, this disruptive power has been a determining factor in achieving labour rights, welfare and popular democratic processes throughout the twentieth century.

Collective knowledge of the means of production helped workers to politicise the relations of production. However, in the latter part of the 20th century the technical division of labour, with its rationalisation, downskilling and automation of production, and the global division of labour, with its creation of lean supply chains, have led to a fragmentation and disaggregation of the working class and the collective intelligibility of the factory, which is now a fluid entity, diffused and social.[^8]

[^8]: Tronti, Mario. “Factory and Society.” In *Workers and Capital*. London: Verso Books, 2019.

Todays' workers are logged onto networked systems that allocate, coordinate and dictate their labour across a translocal geography in ways that are neither easily legible nor contestable. Not only have the workplaces become smaller in numbers, and the workers organisations have been decimated, but the complex technological systems organising contemporary production and distribution force workers to interact through interfaces that leave little room for autonomous coordination with other workers and provide little insight in how the processes are organised behind those interfaces.

In the pandemic we could bear witness to the decimated disruptive power of on-demand workers in fulfillment centres and delivery services. Platform workers could not shelter in place and work online from home, but had to work at an increased pace dictated by their apps to meet the expanding demand.[^9]

The non-unionised and diffused workers in the digital economy face highly complex technological systems, and there are very few organizations to facilitate their legibility and contestability. One notable exception has been the case of SMart, a Belgian freelance workers cooperative that begun by assisting creative and cultural workers. In 2016, SMart started a campaign on behalf of Deliveroo couriers in its ranks that challenged its algorithmic rule. SMart members would pay in 6.5% of their income to receive its services and benefits, which included insurance for accident, liability and biking gear, coverage of their data plans and, importantly, a counter-algorithm for the aggregation [I'VE DOUBLE-CHECKED -- IT SEEMS THERE WAS NO COUNTER-APP INVOLVED -- SMart formed an agreement that Deliveroo delivers its data automatically onto SMart's system: "Deliveroo linked the app which its couriers used to record deliveries to SMart’s information systems, allowing data to be transferred between them automatically"] of deliveries to guarantee a minimum shift duration. By early 2017, 90% of Deliveroo couriers in Belgium shifted to working through SMart, however, by the end of the same year Deliveroo decided to change its deliveries allocation algorithm, terminated the contract with SMart as a go-between agency, and shift to working only with the self-employed couriers.[^10] Such actions of platform capitalists suppressing worker organising abound - from Amazon.com to Uber - and are resulting in what has been described as a regime of "digital neofeudalism",[^11] thriving on workers being "free as a bird" from all protections and regularities of the workplace.

[^9]: Paul, Ian Alan. “The Corona Reboot,” March 15, 2020. https://www.ianalanpaul.com/the-corona-reboot/.
[^10]: Charles, Julien, Isabelle Ferreras, and Auriane Lamine. “A Freelancers’ Cooperative as a Case of Democratic Institutional Experimentation for Better Work: A Case Study of SMart-Belgium.” *Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research* 26, no. 2 (May 1, 2020): 157–74.
[^11]: Dean, Jodi. “Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?” *Los Angeles Review of Books*, 2019. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/.

Other attempts from the part of workers to regain some margins on control over the digital tools of production which they must use took on the shape of experiments in organising autonomous worker-led and worker-owned platforms. Such efforts have been proliferating, unified under the motto of "platform cooperativism": notable examples include Fairbnb.com for short-term apartment letting, Fairmondo for ethical goods and services, Resonate for ethical music streaming, and a number of local ridesharing projects. However, the capacity of these cooperatives to scale up and become economically viable has been limited. And it couldn't be otherwise, given that they are facing the competition of over-capitalised digital monopolies who can slash and burn money from their excessive valuations to cover the cost of expansion and enormous operating losses (for instance, Uber has incurred US$25.5bn loss over the last five years). Though experimental and small in their capacity, platform cooperatives have practically demonstrated the important principle that the technological systems developed and deployed by Big Tech can be functionally replicated and re-adapted to increase autonomy, working knowledge and welfare of the workers and society.

2) DIGITAL MEDIA

If we now shift our view back to the second context of usership outlined above, the opacity of technological systems governing the social production has been mirrored in the opacity of digital information and communication environments, that is, those environments that extract capital value not only from people in formal contractual arrangements, but from societal relationships at large. Digital media strive to make interfaces as simple as possible for their users. A case in point would be the parable of photo editing software, to take just one example. Up until 2010 and the ascendancy of Instagram, Photoshop stood as the standard for best practice in this field. This was a tool already designed with different levels of expertise in mind. Yet, when compared to today's usability standards offered by apps that rely on pre-arranged filters and effects to be instantly applied to one's photographs, Photoshop appears not at all intuitive. This simplified interaction patterns of the new generation apps occlude the complexity of computing infrastructures and the intricacy of social behaviours they generate. Data-driven engagement algorithms have pushed social networks and online media to fragment the information into clickbait-able snippets to keep readers scrolling and to attract as much of their eyeball-time as possible. Time of engagement is after all long been recognized as the most valuable asset in contemporary attention economy, one that is resulting in a number of new mental health issues and addictions. [^12] At the same time, the parallel fragmentation and overload are increasingly contributing to the disinterest for attentive reading and understanding of context, a condition of aliteracy, which grows diametrically proportionate to the degree of attention the increasingly complex reality calls for.

[^12]: [if you can add references here]

This has contributed to the creation of "disinformation machine" with its viral proliferation of content created more for its affective load than informational content. The affect is not a negative thing, however clickbait aimed at stirring negative affects such as outrage and doubt is, at the same time, disabling intelligibility and pedagogy that could open avenues for such sad passions to transform into effective forms of collective action. The growing regulatory scrutiny over the effect of fake news on political processes and in the pandemic has forced Facebook, Twitter and Youtube to introduce fact-checking and counter misinformation with contextual information, however the references to additional context offered by these platforms primarily function as a nuisance deterring engagement and make the misinformation less effective, however do not facilitate the actual engagement with the larger context of information. To make transparent how user data is captured, how algorithms operate and how they are combined to drive surveillance and viral content, it has necessitated the actions of whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden, Timnit Gebru or Frances Haugen. Much research has also been done on algorithmic transparency, including on racial profiling that we mentioned earlier. While this has had a sobering effect and has called for scrutiny, it hasn't contributed much to the intelligibility and accountability of the interfaces toward their users.

3) SMART OBJECTS

Finally, as digitisation permeates objects and tools of everyday use, which are increasingly incorporating bits of software in order to become "smart" and achieve various degrees of automation, the experience of users with the very "stuff" that surrounds quotidian activities is also changing. Behind a rhetoric of increased consumer empowerment, the so-called "internet of things" is impacting material cultures by further reducing autonomy of use. Companies stand to dictate much more than in the past the "correct" uses of a given object, by reducing scope of inventiveness, misuse or re-purposing; by limiting their property rights, especially to discourage practices of sharing, collective usage, landing and borrowing; as well as the products' life cycle, through the combined reliance on planned obsolescence and proprietary software that make independent repair impossible.[^13]

[^13]: [add some ref. here]

## What vocation? Technical training between pacification and revolution

[ - History of vocational training for the working classes
- Problem of executioner and thinker/planner split - management schools
- Two Cultures debates: humanities and arts separated from science and engineering
- Autonomous Working Class Education – tended to replicate same tensions – workers want to learn skills to improve their earnings (this is also a fight against deskillig); organizers want them to think critically – some examples here
- The problem of technical pedagogy: steep at the beginning – one needs to rely on the context more for motivation and support etc. Also, technology is political in a different way… ]

The three macro-tendencies that we analysed above are by no means intended to present an exhaustive picture of the issues with the present technological infrastructure. Rather, they are our attempt to draw out from an extremely intricate scenario what we identified as the three principal zones of contact between technologies and diffused usership in contemporary societies, three zones that we can therefore cast as being fronts of political struggles and direct action. By focusing on the relation between workers and tools of production; internet users and technologies of communication; and consumers and everyday objects, we wanted to bring into relief the ways in which, in each of these three cases, the ubiquitous introduction of digital technology coincided with a loss of autonomy that takes on the contours of an experience of deskilling.

The advent of what media scholars have been calling the "post-digital condition" - that is, a condition in which the digital stratum underpins to a degree all of the principal exchanges in a given society [^14] - has coincided with a recoiling of the social places and contexts in which one person's technical knowledge would be able to make a significant and political impact over their own wellbeing, their chosen forms of life or the life of their communities.

[^14]: Cramer, Florian. “What Is ‘Post-Digital’?” In *Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design*, edited by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, 12–26. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015.

But how was such vast bundle of insights and know-hows that we called technical knowledges exercised and passed on historically amongst the plebs, the working (and unworking) poor? Is there a difference from the then and now, and if so, is it intrinsic to the digital, having substituted the analogical machine? At this point of our reflection, we felt it useful to spend some time with the archive in order to give some historical perspective to our quest for a meaningful form of intervention in the present. This detour has proved important for us also to ground our practice in a genealogy that, albeit fragmented and half-forgotten, is still with us and carries consequences for the present.

In a strict sense, technical training is of course too vast a subjected to be treated in a single essay. Regimes of apprenticeship have been present in many cultures across time and space, ("the thirty-five apprenticeship contracts written in the Neo- and Late-Babylonian periods that have come to our hands" provide a stark example of this [^15]). However, if one focuses on recent history, some patterns concerning the political contexts in which technical training is first conceived and administered on a mass scale begin to emerge clearly. The ambivalent status of technical training as conceptualised in colonial Western Europe accompanies this branch of education since its "foundations...were laid most of all in the 19th century"[^16] (soon to be followed by the the US, where the first bill formalizing vocational training was the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917) and it is traversed by a number of contradictions symptomatic of the power struggles at the heart of capitalist industrialization.

Across the board, the idea of creating official vocational training paths was to alleviate the problem of youth unemployment and the overcrowding of public schools. Yet, this type of courses quickly became the only realistic options for the poorest children and youth. Education that put technological know-how at its centre was, in other words, conceived and connoted as of yielding less value in terms of an overall cultivation of the mind.

[^15]: Kedar, Sivan. “Apprenticeship in the Neo-Babylonian Period: A Study of Bargaining Power.” In *La Famille Dans Le Proche-Orient Ancien: Réalités, Symbolismes et Images*, 537–46. Penn State University Press, 2021.

[^16]: Berner, Esther, and Philipp Gonon, eds. *History of Vocational Education and Training in Europe*, 2017. [WHAT PAGE, WHAT ARTICLE?]

While, as Åsa Broberg has put it "at the beginning of the 20th century work was still believed to harbour pedagogical qualities"[^17] , yet these qualities were mostly identified with embracing hard work as a form of spiritual testing ground, obedience and knowing one’s place in the social order largely underpinned by religious views of state and family. Workers were encouraged to embrace a vision of social mobility based on the acquisition of more or more up-to-date skills that could make them more valuable for the rapidly changing systems of industrial production of the era.

[^17]: Broberg, Åsa. “Negotiating the Pedagogical Value of School and Work: A Historical Perspective on Pedagogical Development in Swedish VET.” In *History of Vocational Education and Training in Europe: Cases, Concepts and Challenges*, edited by Esther Berner and Philipp Gonon, 165–84. Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2016.

Three characteristics mark the development of vocational training programmes in the 19th century. First, they "developed most of all in national state contexts and are publicly or state-regulated"[^18]. This means that the relationship between education and work, or more precisely, the political tensions between the emancipatory promise of education and the subjugation of waged labour, were keenly managed and modelled as part of nationalist and colonial development projects. Secondly, as Manfred Wahle pointed out, "the early public debate on vocational education happens precisely at the time of the appearance of photography and mass communication by way of posters, leaflets etc. Often the ideological components of historical discourses find clear expression by them."[^19] As such, vocational training also parallels new identities and subjectivities within the working classes as well. One of the most significant ones from a political perspective was the growing gap in self-perception between skilled and unskilled workers, which was a major obstacle for union organizers and party members. And finally, a third characteristic of the origin of vocational training is that these programmes developed mostly in social-democratic and Christian contexts, building up an offer that often paralleled and stood in ideological opposition with the independent efforts of working class organizations to provide a worthy and partisan education to its members. [^20].

[^18]: Berner, Esther, and Philipp Gonon, eds. *History of Vocational Education and Training in Europe*, 2017. [WHAT PAGE, WHAT ARTICLE?]
[^19]: Ibid. [WHAT PAGE, WHAT ARTICLE?]
[^20]: Sharp, Rachel, Mervyn Hartwig, and Jan O’Leary. “Independent Working Class Education: A Repressed Historical Alternative.” *Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education* 10, no. 1 (October 1, 1989): 1–26.

For instance, in the United Kingdom the Chartists, reeling from their political defeat in amending the Reform Act of 1832 to gain universal suffrage (for men), started to open reading rooms and cooperative lending libraries, which would quickly become a popular hotbed of social exchanges between the lower classes. The education provided to the proletariat and the poor by the ruling classes of that time consisted either of a pious moral edification serving political pacification or of an inculcation of the skills and knowledge useful to the factory owner. Even the seemingly noble efforts of Society for the Diffusion of the Useful Knowledge, a Whig organization aimed at bringing high-brow learning to the middle and working classes in the form of simplified and inexpensive publications, were aimed at dulling the edge of radicalism of popular movements.4

These efforts to pacify the downtrodden masses pushed them to seek ways of self-organized education that would provide them with literacy and really useful knowledge – not only applied, but also critical knowledge that would allow them to see through their own political and economic subjection, develop radical politics and innovate shadow social institutions of their own. This radical education, reliant on the meager resources and time of the working classes, developed in the informal setting of household, neighborhood and workplace, but also through radical press and communal reading and discussion groups.5

The demand for a really useful knowledge encompassed a critique of ‘all forms of “provided” education’ and of the liberal conception ‘that “national education” was a necessary condition for the granting of universal suffrage.’ Development of radical ‘curricula and pedagogies’ formed a part of the arsenal of ‘political strategy as a means of changing the world.’6 In the aftermath of the revolutionary upheavals of 1848, the fearful ruling classes heeded the demand for tax-financed public libraries, hoping that the access to literature and edification would ultimately hegemonize the working class for the benefits of capitalism’s culture of self-interest and competition.2 This is the context of the emergence of public library. A historic compromise between a push for radical pedagogy and a response to dull its edge.

## TECHNICAL COUNTERPEDAGOGIES

Leaving specific regional differences aside, an overview of the status of technical education within the broader tradition of "independent working-class education"[^21] reveals that while proletarian culture was seen as a mean not of social mobility, but of political emancipation, the status of technical training within its pedagogy was in an unresolved status of tension. Many radical teachers were keen to politicise workers, and while pure theory was recognized as insufficient and generally there was consensus around the need for political learning to be rooted in the practices and everyday struggles of the workers, in practice this commitment struggled to result in a concrete pedagogical approach. The chronicles suggest that there was a recurrent tension between the educational offer coming from the organizers and the desires of the pupils, whom would often be more interested in acquiring practical skills that could improve their job prospects than in socialist analysis.

[^21]: Ibid.

Moreover, even though counter-institutions such as Peoples’ Houses, Labour Colleges or Popular Universities were striving to develop a distinctive pedagogy that would oppose the hierarchical models and supposed neutrality predominant in the bourgeois educational establishment,[^22] it was hard for teachers committed to an anti-capitalist stance to develop different methods, especially when technical knowledges are concerned. For instance Gustave Bardin, in a memoire about his experience as a teacher in a French drawing school for workers, lamented that “in only one or two hours a week it is impossible to learn how to draw and workers know this perfectly well.”[^23]

[^22]: Ibid., p. 22.
[^23]: (Educacion popular, 137). [WHERE IS THIS REFERENCE FROM]

Limitations to the independent tradition of working-class education in 19th and early 20th centuries Europe are underpinned by the conditions of hardship and deprivation in which their subjects lived. This meant for instance that full-time courses were a luxury a few could afford, a time poverty that impacts especially technical training where the familiarity with tools and processes requires students to go through a prolonged period of unrewarding attempts. Another material problem confronted by these radical pedagogical movements was the difficulty is securing spaces where to meet (many Peoples’ Houses were in fact self-built by volunteers on weekends, with money donated by other comrades) together with “the perennial lack of appropriate reading matter which could foster an anti-capitalist stance. Members of the independent tradition were thus frequently forced to be active producers of an alternative literature and teaching resources”.[^24]

[^24]: Sharp, Rachel, Mervyn Hartwig, and Jan O’Leary. “Independent Working Class Education: A Repressed Historical Alternative.” *Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education* 10, no. 1 (October 1, 1989): 1–26. p. 20.

Tracing this genealogy of technical training within the working-class education in Europe after WWII is an intricate task, as the world's political and economic systems were reconfigured in a new order. In the parts of the world where socialist governments were in power, the status of the technical training of the worker had obviously gained a positive symbolic and ideological status and was largely promoted via official institutions, rather than through self-organized efforts as it had been the case under capitalism.

In the regions of the world engaged in decolonial struggles, militant intellectuals committed themselves to a complex process of analysis and sieving through notions and techniques received through the colonial apparatus, in order to disentangle knowledges that could be reappropriated for achieving liberation and independence from those who were technoscientific manifestation of the colonial rule. Perhaps the most influential figure in this process was Amílcar Cabral, the leader of the anti-colonial movements in Guinea-Bissau and Capo Verde Islands. Trained as agricultural engineer in Lisbon, Portugal, before returning to Guinea-Bissau in the 1950s, he placed pedagogical activities at the centre of liberation struggles, founding many schools for both adults and children, and insisting on the importance of "providing agricultural training for the farmers and militants, both before and during the liberation struggle"[^25] as a mean of developing a new agricultural model against the unsustainable practices – both for people and for the environment - imposed by Portugese imperialism. To say it with Filipa Cesar, “Cabral’s understanding of soil and erosion are not dissociable from his project of liberation struggle. […] Cabral understood agronomy not merely as a discipline combining geology, soil science, agriculture, biology and economics but as a means to gain materialist knowledge about peoples’ lived conditions under colonialism.”[^26]

[^25]: “Conversation with Amilcar Cabral: From Agronomist to Liberator.” *Health of Mother Earth Foundation* (blog), August 18, 2020. https://homef.org/2020/08/18/conversation-with-amilcar-cabral-from-agronomist-to-liberator/.
[^26]: César, Filipa. “Meteorisations: Reading Amílcar Cabral’s Agronomy of Liberation.” *Third Text* 32, no. 2–3 (May 4, 2018): 254–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2018.1492073.

Echos of these two [CABRAL AND ...?] radically different pedagogical efforts in other parts of the world shaped the way in which social movements and workers organizations articulated their needs and desires in Europe too, as the revolutionary impetus that characterised the decades 1960s and 1970s found in highschools and universities powerful incubators. As students demanded (and partially managed to obtain) reforms in the public education sector, workers’ organizations (including feminist organizations responsible for expanding the very category of those who count as "workers" at the time) also asserted the need for a direct control over the forms and contents of the educational opportunities available to them. To cite one example paradigmatic of the struggles of this historic phase, in 1973 the Italian trade union of metalworkers managed to secure an unprecedented mechanism for the right to study as part of their renewed national contract. Named "the 150 hours", this new contractual institution guaranteed employees a maximum number of hours of paid leave (that had to be matched by an equal amount of hours freely commited by the worker, resulting in courses that had a minimal duration of 300 hours in total) to be used for learning projects. The management and planning of such training activities was under the control of the trade unions, public and local authorities, ministries, schools and universities. In the years immediately following, the "150 hours for the right to study" were extended to a large number of other professional categories and it exploded into a transversal social phenomenon. Alongside the majority of courses that helped workers to complete their primary education, many experimental initiatives developed novel pedagogical approaches and subject areas, including pioneering courses in workers' heath and safety conditions. Here, technical or scientific know-how would be intertwined with biographical and creative methods, since the intention was to learn useful skills for everyday life: for example, the teaching of arithmetic and accounting would start with learning how to correctly read one's pay slips, graphs and percentages, piecework and taxation mechanisms. The feminist movement also strategically developed their own 150 hours courses, which created the first basis in the country for the creation of feminist cultural institutions such as the Virginia Wolf in Rome or the Free Women University of Milan. On the webpage of the latter, the 150 hours are described as follows:

> This was not the Anglo-Saxon model of adult education. It was a cultural experiment run by the vanguards of the trade unions themselves. They took over the choice of objectives and methods of study, negotiated formal recognition of the curriculum with the state, and trained the teachers. The pupils were the avant-garde workers who had led the struggles of 1968 with the students, and the teachers were those same students who flocked to these schools en masse. It was a serious attempt to re-appropriate and change culture, its destination, its use, its meaning, on the part of the subordinate classes, in the spirit of the best Gramscian tradition, in the debate opened by the arrival in Italy of Paulo Freire, in the encounter between the "classic" philosophical tradition of the working classes and the post-Marxist one, from Fanon to Lukacs, to the Frankfurt School.

...

leftover refs:

Berner, Esther, and Philipp Gonon. *History of Vocational Education and Training in Europe*, 2017.

Sharp, Rachel, Mervyn Hartwig, and Jan O’Leary. “Independent Working Class Education: A Repressed Historical Alternative.” *Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education* 10, no. 1 (October 1, 1989): 1–26.

----

The capitalist development, however, led to a complex division of labour with increasingly intricate tools and machines that required specialised knowledge of the production process. The interdependence of labour processes on the shopfloor created pre-conditions for collective intellegibility of factory work that allowed workers to ameliorate the hardship of work, game the production quota and withdraw their labour to the greatest effect. The growing technical expertise combined with the growing organisational capacity to oppose capital and win signification wage and welfare concessions. The emergent worker movement grew with the collective acquisition of the technical and organisational skills. The import of technical knowledge was frequently underestimated by labour organisers and agitators, insisting on the primacy of ideological and organisational aspects. However, workers needed also technical know-how to effectively instigate strikes and sustain themselves and their communities throughout the strike. Within the trade-union movement this consolidated into upskilling further education programmes.

These developments have also sedimented in the educational system as it massified in the latter part of the 20th century.

On the one hand, education in our society is valued a desirable good and a mark of personal distinction, and as such, today, under neoliberalism it is increasingly packaged as a commodity to be purchased and consumed, often through contracting a debt. But even leaving aside this most recent finacialization of studying, also public education systems, and especially higher education pathways that open the way to liberal professions (that represent a potential mean for social mobility for few deserving poor), have predominantly been modelled as pyramidal institutions based on processes of exclusion and regulated by all kinds of barriers to access that performed in their pedagogies a sharp distinction between mind and hand, planner and executioner, innovator and reproducer. 

Within such thorny genealogy of officially sanctioned education, the acquisition of technical skills has often been qualified as a lesser kind of learning. So called "vocational" schools typically attracted and were designed for catering to lower social classes, in need of acquiring competences that could lead to an occupation in industry as soon as possible. And because of this financial urgency, other kinds of learning - of philosophy, history, arts or pure sciences and mathematics -  would be typically cut from the official curriculum without much regret. A layman impression thus sedimented over time, acquiring the status of common knowledge: that technical education effectively results in a atrophization of the capacity for critical thinking. It is for those less smart, so to speak, because those who will be called to interact with tools and machines will also be the ones who will be managed and told what to do. A poisonous myth that reinforces class disparities and condolescence under the cloack of meritocracy. This credo is still at the basis of the dominant way managers receive training in business schools today, where the dominant approach is that a managenr ought to know about running a lean and profitable business and not concern himself with the specifics of this or that production process. ***[ find refs ]***

To bring things back closer to our own positionings, it might be useful to remark how, within this scenario, artistic training was argubly for a long stretch of time one of the few paths to knowledge production that simultaneously valorised the exercise of critical thinking, abstract reasoning, a knowledge of history and cultural variations on the one hand, while also promoting the acquisition of proficiency and dexterity in the practical use of some tools and techniques on the other. 

However, even within art education such tension was never fully resolved, with different programmes embracing one or the other sides as most valuable in the training of future artists. Today, in the aftermath of recent development in contemporary culture, it can be said that the much techical training has lost its meaning in the field, perhpas a testament among many to the post-media condition of art production, coupled with the de-materialization of work processes. Contemporary arts fully embrace a conceptualist idea of practice, with many famous professionals effectively functioning as creative directors for productions carried out by contracted artisans or technologists. 

# Local maximum: Fragments for a political technical pedagogy

-	Ours is an intervention in the awareness around the division of labour that entangles us with our machines and our peers (editing, maintaining content online, etc..) 
-	Reflexivity around the means of knowledge production paramount to navigate this uncertain time 
-	Explanation of local maximum…
-	we didn't intervene into the collaborative editing text-area (gdocs, etherpad...) but rather allowed for the outcomes not to alienate from the creators but to stay political (via its aspects (offline, pdf, piracy library..) and with no promise of making it more popular).

What renders technologies opaque — and the corporate power undergirded by technologies uncontestable — is not simply the complexity of technical systems, but the fact that the technical is embedded in illegible corporate structures that are adapting to operate across regulatory arrangements and territories so as to avoid limitations of regulatory overshight, concentrated organised labour and public accountability. The technical systems are designed to integrate and optimise such functioning at a scale and to make it opaque. A notable evidence of that is Amazon.com. Unlike Google and other internet Silicon Valley giants that prided themselves on the hacker genius of their coders, Amazon.com has built the market-dominant cloud-computing infastructure by following the most bureaucratic approach to building infrastructure — one that leaves least freedom to coders and forces them to work according to the Taylorist rulebook of service-oriented architecture, where each component is designed strictly to be interoperable with other components. The most bureaucratic approach proved to be the best fit to integrate and optimise operations of heterogenous corporate structures — as it always did. The virtual marketplace, radically non-virtual fulfilment centres and logistical operations, algorithimically coordinted labour of over a million of workers, data centers across the world, constitute heterogenous realities that are smoothed out for the end-user into a single interface. These realities preclude popular technical pedagogies. In them we as users, workers and subjects to their action move in radically heteronomous spaces.

Yet, technological environments can be organised to be legibile and to enable warying degrees of engagement to those who work on them. Arguably, the most successful of such attempts is Wikipedia, where a simple syntax and evolving community rules, built on MediaWiki platform and under Wikimedia Foundation's stewardship have enabled massive participation and relatively inclusive process. Nonetheless, hostile deletionism, male-dominated culture and Western-centrism tends to alienate many users. The rules of neutrality and notability frequently fail against the capture by the nationalist groups. These phenomena call for active stewardship and constant adaptation of rules, and the fact that Wikipedia is a well-funded, non-commercial project allows for such a process of re-regulation. Still, the technological environment places a low barrier on acquisition of ever-more-specialised skills of Wiki synatax and structure of Wikipedia that then allows users to get involved with editorial work, administrative work or even bureaucrats to achieve a relative maximum of autonomy within that system. This is not an absolute autonomy, but one within the conditions created by the developers of MediaWiki, which are coded with the idea of empowering users to organise an increasingly complex entanglements of technology and community structures. Encounters between technologists and constituencies, between more masterable convivial tools and popular organising pedagogies, can create technological environments with increasing degrees of relative maxima of autonomy.

This has been proven time and again by the projects developed by Constant vzw. Working from the tenets of feminism, inclusivity and free culture, Constant vzw been queering the existing technical tools such as wikis, open publishing software and other free software to create experimental collective situations, while contesting power and privilege inscribed in code, hardware and copyright. The constituencies involved in Constant vzw's work are minoritarian, and frequently embedded in art education, however the focus of Contstant vzw is on how to create technological environments that allow for different constituent processes. To give an example, their most recent intervention is a creation of a free culture license that starts with the following preamble: "The authored work released under the CC4r was never yours to begin with. The CC4r considers authorship to be part of a collective cultural effort and rejects authorship as ownership derived from individual genius. This means to recognize that it is situated in social and historical conditions and that there may be reasons to refrain from release and re-use." and goes on to specify: "The invitation to (re-)use the work licenced under CC4r applies as long as the FUTURE AUTHOR is convinced that this does not contribute to oppressive arrangements of power, privilege and difference."[^21]

[^27]: https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html

Similar such effort at creating a relative maximum has been the DeCode project[^22] that has brought together a number of organisations with hacking culture credentials and municipalities of Barcelona and Amsterdam in an attempt to create tools that allow "individuals in control of whether they keep their personal data private or share it for the public good". In Barcelona it has lead to the development of Decidim, a free software platform for citizen participation, as well as a variety of tools deploying IoT and blockchain technologies to enhance citizen participation in municipal governance.

[^28]: https://decodeproject.eu/

In our work on Sandpoints, we have been focusing on developing an environment for collective writing, learning and experimental publishing that allows users to decide how far will they engage with the technological environment. Sandpoints allows for the development of collective pedagogy process in the conditions of modest or no access (e.g. Rojava) or in the work of vulnerable groups who require that their content never be accessible online. The full editing in the offline environment, with the ability to syncronize later in a P2P network or with a central server, is an essential aspect for such a scenario. But, also, Sandpoints allows readers to easily copy onto a USB drive a single folder containing the entire publication with the PDF collection of all references, all of which can then be accessed through an Internet browser, without the need to install any additional software. Both writing and reading can happen offline. Users can simply contribute and let more technical-savvy collaborators do administration on the system. Or, they can level up and become editors themselves, responsible for the collective process of writing, or even administrators entering texts in markdown syntax onto the system and structuring the publication. Barriers to entry to all these tasks are low and acquiring basic technical skills in markdown, git and our custom tools go a long way in facilitating collective processes of writing, learning, publishing and archiving.

Activists in the last 20 years made a demand on the free software community to follow all new trends - they only pick up tools if they do exactly what the corporate tools already do, everying else is dismissed as too complicated to be learned. There has been little to no resistance by the users - they have been learning new skills, but have stuck with the tools produced by corporations.

So, pedagogy could be a way to address this connivence - we need to understand and know better the tools we use. And this is what we are trying to do in the micro-environment of Sandpoints. With Sandpoints we have tried to provide an environment similar enough to Wordpress, but at the same time we have tried to teach through the reflexive use of the technology and a collective practice. Many aspects of Sandpoints are coming from things we know from the past, they are actually quite conservative, reminding us of "old technologies" - but include also a couple of features that are cutting-edge new, for instance the possibility of printing into a well-paginated PDF.

This is what we need to address: if organizing is the priority, then we do not have to care about how we do it. We just need to orgnaize - and can use Facebook or whatever is most conducive to the cause. But there is also the question, and this is something we'd like to invite people to think about, what does organizing require in terms of technology - what are the tools, what is the degree of autonomy a given technology allows. This is ultimately not about the consumer, anti-corporate sentiments - aka, we want to avoid the Big Tech. Ours is a contribution to the politcs of usership, not to the politics of consumption.

Our tools developing are not aimed at creating autarchic processes or disrupting large technosocial systems, but rather they are an effort at the construction of collective learning processes and an intervtion in the division of labour that entangles us with our machines and our peers. We see it as our responsibility to maximise entanglements of technical pedagogies and constituent processes.

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8 - 10 pages

Local maximum: on popular technical pedagogy

Wolfram Alpha: "A local maximum, also called a relative maximum, is a maximum within some neighborhood that need not be (but may be) a global maximum."

Local maximum can be defined, within complex systems, as the maximum autonomy that an agent can achieve within such a system. Our piece wants to articulate a reflection on the current horizon open to the possibility of an emancipatory pedagogy around technical knowledge (centred on digital technologies) that would allow a critical mass of users (who are not aiming to become engineers) to create a more autonomous and empowered praxis around the digital tools that underpin their everyday life.

Our starting point is the consideration that the present age is defined by the expansion of coordination via digital networks that has allowed communication and coordination among dispersed groups of people and have made it easier to organize remotely (e.g. Arab Springs, M15, Occupy, Gezi Park and beyond). On the other hand, mass organizations, such as trade unions, professional organisations and parties, have lost their centrality in organizing the popular masses which they had earlier, and as their membership has been decimated away, so have many places disappeared that constituted the backbone infrastructure of politicized technical training for the working classes. This evolution was largely due to technological changes that have transformed the sphere of work and the sphere of public interaction, or what Marx would call the technical composition of capital. Now, in the aftermath and the new era marked by the advent of Covid, a novel economic and political crisis is menacing to dismantle many more cultural institutions that sustain popular sociality and education.

Thus, amidst the technological changes that keep reshaping the lives of millions, there are very few organizations that are able to facilitate sustained, critical and transversal learning and education about the very tools that transform the everyday.[^1] [^2] [^3]
And predictably, in the midst of these disruptions, a popular and reasonable sentiment of resentment towards experts and technicians is taking sway, in an interlocking process with the ongoing deskilling of populations who, deprived of the necessarey social and institutional environments to foster a diversity of technical practices and conducts, risk rejecting technical knowledges together with the power configurations that underpin them as tools of inequality.

While the non-unionised and diffused workers in the digital economy face highly complex technological systems, there are very few organizations to facilitate their legibility. This has resulted in digital neofeudalism, which thrives on workers being "free as a bird" from all protections and regularities of the workplace.
[Ex. SMart Belgium as exception?]

[i think this is a separate point form the one above about workers, we should develop it in its own right]
While digital information and communication environments try to make interfaces as simple as possible, this occludes the complexity of how computing infrastructures behind the interfaces interact and the intricacy of social communications they generate. [examples?] This has resulted in what has been called a 'disinformation machine', which thrives on the manufacturing of dissent.

Even the hackers movements that had initially tried to make these systems and their implications upon society legible, is not in good health vis-a-vis popular educational efforts, as attempts in this direction have often been impaired by the limitations and biases that pertain to that specific, male-dominated, geek subculture.
[examples?]

Yet, there are attempts to build technical systems and make them legible "otherwise", holding their ground in the present conjuncture, even if in a minoritarian key, keeping the doors open to usher in a different technopolitical horizon. Their "otherwise" is premised upon experimentation: encounters between technologists and constituencies, between more masterable convivial tools and popular institutent pedagogies, always to be reworked and renewed.

In our essay we intend to excavate the role that technical learning had played in historical popular education initiatives linked with the international worker movements (e.g. People's universities, Freedom Schools, trade unions education efforts, etc. really useful knowledge) and to place these genealogies in dialogue with contemporary efforts to invent suitable pedagogies of the present, even in the absence of institutional embeddedness (e.g. the work of Constant; Platform Cooperativism; our own approach developed out from Pirate Care into the experimental publishing platform Sandpoints; and more). [Also Dyne. Org and D-Cent for Barcelona?]

[^1]: The strategic power of the working-class emerges on the terrain where the political and the economic interact most tightly — rules that define the relations of production: private property, the limitations on intervention into capitalist enterprise, and the labour market. The ascendancy of industrial capitalism, employing an army of labour manning increasingly complex machinery, creates a mass basis of workers who, by dint of their numbers and their skills, can pool together their skills, their material resources and their indispensability to the production process to organise, set demands and, as an ultimate demonstration of power, withdraw their labour. The concentration and specialisation of industrial workers thus created the prerequisites for the exercise of *power from below* that Francis Fox Piven [-@piven_can_2008] has also called interdependent or disruptive power. The introduction of coal as a primary energy source for motive power created chokepoints along the extraction and transport lines that miners and railway workers could use to disrupt key nodes in the expanding system of industrial production and thus set demands that fundamentally contributed to early gains in labour, social and democratic rights in the 19th century Britain [@mitchell_carbon_2011]. That disruptive power of industrial labour had structural effects on the development of capitalist societies at large.

The disruptive capacity is strongly correlated with both the levels of unionisation [-@usmani_fortunes_2020] and the level of democratisation and equality in societies [-@usmani_democracy_2018]. In fact, social and democratic gaps in late-developing economies turn out to be strongly correlated with the low levels of unionisation, while the low levels of unionisation turn out to be strongly correlated with the late start and early peaking of industrial development. Finally, the fall in unionisation turns out to be strongly correlated with the de-industrialisation in the high-income economies over the last fifty years. These insights dovetail with the view that capitalist development, with its large-scale and skill-enhancing industries, has gestated a growing disruptive power of the working class, enabling it to achieve democratic and social gains in the countries that have industrialised early.

Unlike the elite theories of power that see the strategic terrain of institutions dominated by the political and economic elites, theories of non-elite power or power from below highlight the capacity of disruption — the collective breaking of rules and the withdrawal from interdependent relations in complex institutional setups. [who are you referring to here? maybe some citations are needed - Francis Fox Piven & McAlevey] The central, material aspect in a social conflict is the capacity to threaten cost on the opposing side. To be able to level a significant "disruption cost" [@mcalevey_no_2016] on a more powerful corporate or political actor — that is, to be able to withdraw labour, persevere in an industrial action and risk wagelessness and unemployment — requires mass organising that can pool together collective resources and communal solidarity to buffer those risks. That disruption and that solidarity need prior organisational and technical knowledge, consciousness-building and community work. And that was the principal historical achievement of working class organising.

---

--------------------------------------------------------------

### LEFTOVERS

The technical division of labour, driven by the imperatives of competition and labour cheapening, led to a differentiation between manual labour and engineering labour that was, amongst others, focused at rationalising, downskilling and automating the production process. In the industrial capitalist countries, with the process of de-industrialisation and tertiarisation in the 1970s and 1990s, the large-scale industrial armies have been reduced in size and de-skilled [@troy_us_1990]. The restructuring was driven by the changing market forces and relations of production [@silver_forces_2003]. The rising costs of wages, social protections and environmental protection achieved by labour militancy, accompanied by a profit squeeze resulting from a growing international competition, resulted in a backlash of anti-labour actions and policies promulgated by the governments of that period.

problems:

functional analphabetism?? illich etc.

most mass tools are made by very few boys (ex.from docu)

The issue of technical education in popular education
Ex. Amilcar Cabral; Institutional Pedagogy; Celestin Franet; technical library of workers...

150 ore

technical compo

Sandpoints...

framed by other contemporary projects

Indian Example of interventions
Femke
Columbia
Minimal computing

domain maximum

marcell list of all the simple mechanisms at the basis of ubu, etc...

far right being pushed - our last chance to do it out of desire and not out of repression...disappointment with the left, illegal disobedient play was done by private - spotify, youtube etc. starting as piracy

Valeria some notes:

### Contextualizing our intervention:

I think the no vax movement but also the eruption of conspiracy theories such as QAnon in the last years have brought to the fore with some urgency a latent contraddiction in contemporary capitalist logics of education. These people can be judged as ignorant, misguided, incapable of rational thought, prey of susperstitions and group psychosis. The fact remain that the relationship with science, understood first and foremost as a set of methods for producing knowledge that do not rely on faith and a priori trust onto authorities in order to offer accurate predictions of reality, well, this relation is broken. Although ironically this brokenness is often lamented as a loss of "faith" or "trust" in science", our hypothesis is that this has to do more broadly with the aftermath of about a hundred years of failed reforms of the educational institutions that characterised the social project of modernity.

Therefore, without going down this rabbit hole of the polemics surroudning no vax and other reactionary credo, we wish nonetheless to start from the disquieting scenarios that this current movements are cracking open in front of us to situate our reflection around the politics of technical pedagogies in the present time. Our thinking is articulated in writing here but also in practice, via an ongoing process of collective experimental writing, archiving and publishing using a digital tool call Sandpoints. But more on this later.

On the one hand, education in our society is valued a desirable good and a mark of personal distinction, and as such, under neoliberalism it is increasingly packaged as a commodity to be purchased and consumed, often through contracting a debt. But even leaving aside this most recent finacialization of studying, also public education systems, and especially higher education pathways that open the way to liberal professions (that represent a potential mean for social mobility for few deserving poor), have predominantly been modelled as pyramidal institutions based on processes of exclusion and regulated by all kinds of barriers to access.

Within such thorny genealogy of officially sanctioned education, technical training has often been qualified as a lesser kind of learning. So called "vocational" schools typically attracted and were designed for catering to lower social classes, in need of acquiring skill that could lead to an occupation in industry as soon as possible. And because of this financial urgency, other kinds of learning - of philosophy, history, arts or abstract mathematics, for instance - would be typically cut from the official curriculum without much regret. A layman impression thus could sediment over time to acquire the status of common knowledge: that technical education effectively results in a atrophization of the capacity for critical thinking. It is for the less smart, so to speak, poisonous myth that reinforces class disparities under the cloack of meritocracy.

Artistic training (in the visual arts, that is) was argubly for a long stretch of time one of the few paths to knowledge production that simultaneously valorised the exercise of critical thinking, abstract reasoning, a knowledge of history and cultural variations on the one hand, while also promoting the acquisition of proficiency and dexterity in the practical use of tools and techniques on the other.

However, even within arts education such tension was never fully resolved, with different programmes embracing one or the other sides as most valuable and crucial in the education of future artists. Finally, in the aftermath of recent development in contemporary culture, it can be said that the much techical training has lost its meaningful in the field, perhpas a testament among many to the post-media condition of art production, coupled with the de-materialization of work processes. The contemporary art field fully embraced a conceptualist idea of practice, with many famous professionals effectively functioning as creative directors for studios where the work are produced by hired hands or directly commissioned off to specific artisans.

> marcell's notes: to introduce the tension/challenge coming from writing. it is simplicity vs complexity. simplicity is desired by the ones in need (non-educated) but also by the neoliberal politics which asks for practical which is only the one with the (monetary) value. at the same time writing always lives in some vernacular grammars and formalizations and by its natural progression the production of knowledge becomes also production of knowledge about its own (writing) environment. and that's where we can not avoid complexity (although we can make it more comprehensible and inclusive (via pedagogy)). that meta level is text capturing its own context. in particular it is the text's own (most natural) history, its own social-economic-class based context, solidified means of expression (metaphors....) but (especially with the introduction of the digital (networks)) also its own context of the (textual) tools of writing. some of the symptoms of that problem is the category of autonomy through the battle of "doing it for its own sake"....

management studies...