School ™: Resist the Feed, Feed the Resistance

“School ™ is not so bad now, like back when my grandparents were kids, when the schools were run by the government, which sounds completely like, Nazi, to have the government running the schools?”

So proclaims what sounds like a Twitter tirade by angry, futuristic teenage reincarnation of Milton Friedman. Rather, it is Titus, the wired teen protagonist M.T. Anderson’s prophetic 2002 Young Adult (YA) novel Feed, who lives in a world in which Friedman’s neo-liberal economic philosophies have been taken to their dystopian extreme: America’s environment is so spoiled by consumption that everyone must live in hermetically-sealed bubbles, in which the public commons have been so privatized, that even the clouds are trademarked. Titus – and most Americans – also live in a hermetically-sealed bubble of their mind, each plugged into the “feed” – a chip which connects his brain to a corporate controlled internet, which is constantly bombarding him with marketing, even in dreams.

Sound familiar?

While many have commented on how accurate the 11-year old Feed is in its predictions of social networking and mobile technology, its dire predictions on the corporatization of education are no less accurate – and certainly, no less frightening. Published in the same year as the No Child Left Behind was implemented, Feed takes Friedman’s anti-government belief on education to its logical conclusion: that of a corporate monopoly on our children’s minds.

In Titus’ description of his “feed” – which is no utterly normal to him, beyond the point of question – we hear echoes of corporate reformers and technological utopians, who say our public, government run-school system is outdated, in need of “disruptive innovation” – or, to put it more plainly, corporate management and products. In Titus’ future America, the “feed” is the ultimate disruptive invention for education, putting online education, MOOCs, and teaching machines to shame:

People were really excited when they first came out with feeds. It was all da da da, this big educational thing, da da da, your child will have the advantage, encyclopedias at their fingertips, closer than their fingertips, etc. That’s one of the great things about the feed – that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit.

While Titus may say that the feed makes everyone “supersmart,” he can’t read, he isn’t informed on any world events, and uses the feed primarily to m-chat (mind chat), watch TV programs, and most of all, to buy the latest things – things that, somehow, the corporate-run feed knows before he does – a marketing strategy we now call “predictive analytics”:

But the braggest thing about the feed, the thing that made it really big, is that it knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are. Everything we think and feel is taken in by the corporations, mainly by data ones like Feedlink and On Feed and American Feedware, and they make a special profile, one that’s keyed just to you…so all you have to do is want something and there’s a chance it will be yours.

Again, sound familiar?

School ™ is perfectly designed for the “feed” – for the constant consumerism required of the hermetically-sealed corporate state he lives in. Indeed, School ™ is essential in training children for how to use to feed, to make sure its hardwired not just in their minds, but their spirits:

Now that School ™ is run by the corporations, it’s pretty brag because it teaches us how the world can be used, like mainly how to use our feeds… now we do stuff in classes about how to work technology and how to find bargains and what’s the best way to get a job and how to decorate our bedroom.

Ultimately, just as schools in a fascist nation are indoctrination sites, critical investments by the ruling class to ensure its continued rule, School ™ cultivates loyalty to corporate bubble in which Titus lives:

Also, it’s good because that way we know that the big corps are made up of real human beings, and not just jerks out for money, because taking care of children, they care about America’s future. It’s an investment in tomorrow (Emphasis added).

In shockingly accurate parallels to post-NCLB corporate media narratives, Titus sees the public school system as a “failure,” its bad teachersdestroying the moral fiber of the youth, and his corporate masters as philanthropists, providing his salvation:

When no one was going to pay for the public schools anymore and they were all like filled with guns and drugs and English teachers who were really pimps and stuff, some of the big media congloms got together and gave all this money and bought the schools so all of them could have computers and pizza for lunch and stuff.

And while Titus might be swayed by free pizza, faux-philanthropy, and discounts for the Watts Riot inspired pants from Weatherbee and Crotch, he still knows something is wrong, something worse than pimp English teachers:

Of course, everyone is like, da da da, evil corporations, oh they’re so bad, we all say that, and we all know they control everything. I mean, it’s not great, because who knows what evil shit they’re up to. Everyone feels bad about that.

But for Titus, the corporate takeover has happened – generations ago. His life is “normal,” and beyond normal, it’s pleasant. Most of all, it’s the only way Titus knows how to live, as School ™, his parents, his friends – everyone, really – tell him the feed is all there is and should be:

But [corporations] are the only way to get all this stuff, and it’s no good getting pissy about it, because they’re still going to control everything whether you like it or not. Plus, they keep like everyone in the world employed, so it’s not like we could do without them. And it’s really great to know everything about everything whenever we want, to have it just like, in our brain, just sitting there.

Titus’ tale, his resignation to the blind pleasures of consumerism on which he was raised and schooled, could be many of my students – heck, Titus probably was me at some point in time, or any of us who grew up in the hermetically-sealed suburbs of post-modern America Feed so poignantly reflects. Our public school system – while increasingly consumed by corporate America – still presents education as an economic service, part of the “cradle-to-career pipeline,” or worse yet, a consumable product, like a pair of Kent State inspired jackets from Weatherbee and Crotch.

Thankfully, though, Titus has hope, in the form of an unlikely flower growing in their dead world: Violet. And hopefully, she teaches Titus – and all of us, working and learning at School ™ – to “Resist the Feed. Buy an Oxcart.”