Hyperlinked is a collaborative book that Raaghav Pandya and I are writing at hyperlinked.us. Each chapter starts with something from the culture, usually a film or a book, and follows it to see what it can tell us about learning, teaching, and technology.
This chapter took me longer to write than most. For some time I had been carrying around two things I was sure belonged together. The first was a report from Quest Alliance, The Complex Digital Lives of Young People, which I wrote about here. It describes how young people in India’s government schools and industrial training institutes have come to see visibility online as a more promising route to a livelihood than doing well in school. The second was Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, the 1995 film in which Nicole Kidman plays a small-town weather girl who will do anything to get on television. I first saw it as a graduate student in Illinois. I could see the connection between the report and the film, but every draft I attempted read like two separate essays placed side by side, and I could not find a way in.
Then Benjamin Riley at Cognitive Resonance published his account of an eight-week boot camp at Alpha School, the private school in Austin that charges forty thousand dollars a year and claims AI can compress the academic day into two hours. One of the assignments asked students to gain one hundred “authentic” followers on X by early October. That frankly grotesque assignment gave me the opening I had been missing. The young people in the Quest Alliance report chase an audience because they have few other options, and the film treats that same chase as a pathology, yet here was a school selling it to parents as a line item in the curriculum.
The piece linked below follows those three threads to an argument about what school is for, and about the order in which a voice and an audience ought to arrive. You can read it on Hyperlinked: One Hundred Authentic Followers To Die For.