u/dylan10472

Adorno & Horkheimer’s The Culture Industry-

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm

This framework highlights the standardization of thought under technological systems, and its implications for creativity, education, and discourse. AI continues this by getting ahold of the means of production and circulation of knowledge and can diminish the potential for genuine creative thought.

What are specific ways that AI’s integration into society is an extension of the cognitive flattening that can happen when important mental processes are outsourced to technology?

One way I’d say is that AI can lessen the value of consideration of perspectives different from one’s own, since it’s really good at reinforcing what you already say and believe, making you think you’re right, and reducing the need to improve, broaden, or clarify knowledge and beliefs. This is dangerous and has already homogenized significant amounts of thought across societies today, just as Adorno said the culture industry and its technologies did in the 20th century.

I think AI is a natural outgrowth of the processes that Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Habermas analyzed and traced back to the emergence of instrumental enlightenment rationality, which sees its most modern form in the monopoly of disinformation and manipulation of thought by the technocapitalist billionaire oligarchs who are in charge of the direction of AI, human thought, and largely too the viability of our societies.

Open to thoughts you might have!

Modern education often feels structured according to an industrial-administrative logic: systems optimized for mass coordination sacrifice cognitive individuality in exchange for predictability, administrability, obedience, measurable performance, and scalable order. Schooling becomes centered around surveillance, metrics, ranking, recall, punctuality, standardization, and behavioral normalization. While these systems are not without value and have undoubtedly expanded literacy and access to knowledge, they are not neutral. They shape the kinds of minds, behaviors, and selves that can comfortably exist within them.

For many students, school does not feel like illumination. It feels like vaccination: the instrumental insertion of information into a subject rather than the awakening of understanding within a person. The issue is not learning itself. The issue is that the delivery architecture of education often conflicts with how certain minds naturally organize attention, curiosity, reflection, energy, perception, and motivation.

Students do not think identically. Some learn socially, others privately. Some verbally, others spatially. Some rapidly but unevenly, others slowly but steadily. Some flourish amid discussion and movement, while others think most clearly in silence and solitude. Some need abstraction first, others need concreteness first. Yet modern education frequently treats variation as deviation from a norm rather than as reality itself.

This creates forms of flattening. The same systems that educate also classify, and classification can become reduction. “Good student,” “bad student,” GPA, ACT score, attendance records, behavioral card systems — these often become substitutes for a deeper understanding of how a particular mind actually functions. A student may appear disengaged when the environment itself is cognitively incompatible with them. Another may perform well while internally dissociating from learning entirely.

I am not arguing for the abolition of education, structure, or even assessment. Nor am I naïvely imagining a world outside of power or subjectification. Any educational system will shape people. The question is whether systems can be designed that produce less harmful forms of subjectification and more humane, intellectually alive ones.

What would happen if schools prioritized understanding cognition rather than merely measuring performance?

Imagine an educational system where assessments are designed not primarily to test recall, but to illuminate how a student thinks. Schools would maintain nuanced profiles of students’ interests, cognitive tendencies, intellectual strengths, limitations, environmental sensitivities, social needs, motivational structures, and learning styles. These records would matter more than simplistic abstractions like a letter grade.

This would not mean creating hierarchies of “better” or “worse” students. It would mean creating environments that fit different cognitive architectures.

Some students should learn in small groups. Some should work independently for portions of the day. Some teacher-student pairings simply do not work because they think in incompatible ways, and should be changed without stigma. The order of subjects throughout the day should reflect cognitive rhythms rather than administrative convenience. Teachers should continually demonstrate the ability to teach different kinds of minds rather than merely receiving one theoretical training years earlier. Socialization should exist in both organized and spontaneous forms. Educational environments should be adaptive rather than rigidly uniform.

This would require rethinking grading, ranking, testing, pacing, and even what counts as educational success. It would also require philosophical literacy within education itself. Students should learn about power, normalization, discourse, institutional structure, and the ways systems shape human beings. Thinkers like Michel Foucault and critiques such as Dana Ștefana Belu’s analysis of the technoscientific educational paradigm should not remain isolated within academia. Students should be offered conceptual tools to understand the systems structuring their lives.

None of this is anti-science, anti-order, or anti-school. The issue is not that modern educational systems are malicious. The issue is that systems designed primarily for administrability, efficiency, and scalability often flatten subjective value and cognitive individuality. Human minds are too varied to be treated as interchangeable units moving through identical pipelines.

The persistence of rigid educational standardization is not merely a pedagogical issue but also an economic and political one. Modern societies routinely allocate enormous resources toward military expansion, surveillance technologies, corporate subsidies, and systems designed to preserve existing power structures, while education remains underfunded, overcrowded, psychologically flattening, and administratively exhausted. This reflects a deeper societal contradiction: we claim to value human potential while investing comparatively little in understanding how human beings actually learn, think, create, and flourish.

From a broader social and economic perspective, a more adaptive educational model would not weaken society — it would strengthen it. A system that identifies and cultivates different cognitive architectures early in life would produce individuals more capable of meaningful contribution, innovation, psychological stability, and sustained engagement with their work and communities. People are far more productive when their labor aligns with their genuine interests, capacities, and modes of thought.

Instead, many people currently pass through a largely uniform and often depressingly dull educational apparatus that treats students as administratively manageable groups rather than cognitively distinct individuals. Information is often delivered mechanically, detached from lived meaning, curiosity, or existential orientation. Students then emerge into adulthood disoriented, alienated from their own capacities, and economically pressured to accept forms of labor with little relationship to the first eighteen years of their intellectual and emotional development. Many spend most of their lives performing work they feel no deep connection to, only to eventually die having never fully understood what kinds of contribution or existence might actually have fulfilled them.

A society genuinely concerned with human flourishing would recognize education not as a factory pipeline into labor markets, but as the developmental cultivation of varied forms of human possibility. Funding educational environments that respect cognitive individuality is not utopian excess; it is long-term social, economic, psychological, and cultural investment. The cost of failing to do so is visible everywhere in burnout, alienation, disengagement, wasted potential, and lives lived in quiet resignation rather than active self-realization, let alone the crime pervasive across societies that don’t take care of their citizens (though this extends to issues not covered here).

A healthy society should care not only about whether students perform, but about how school feels phenomenologically to the students themselves. Does learning awaken them or suppress them? Does the first thought in the morning of going to school feel like a burden or like an opportunity to cultivate one’s own strengths? Does school cultivate agency, curiosity, and self-knowledge, or merely compliance and exhaustion?

The deepest purpose of education should not simply be the production of obedient workers or statistically legible citizens. It should be the cultivation of fully developed human beings capable of thinking, perceiving, creating, questioning, relating, and living meaningfully in ways appropriate to their own cognitive and existential structure.

The words above are a work in progress, and I’m open to any feedback from anyone. I love Foucault and have been thinking about his biopower/biopolitics, Dana Belu’s critique of the technoscientific model of education, Marxist critiques of capitalism, Bratton’s stacks, and various other areas of intersections of society, culture, education, technology, ecology, etc, and have plans for how to continue to improve the argumentative strength of methodology for sharing words that I think. Also, the words above do not nearly touch all the centers of gravity which I list as interests above- this was inspired by my decision tonight to send an article about Foucaldian biopower to a friend who I think may be interested, which led me to think for a while in this area and try to synthesize it with some other scattered thoughts I have. I do not have a philosophy degree (I teach jazz music at a state university) so I am trying to think about things in a way that may be opposed or maybe less developed to certain formally academically trained philosophers, who I imagine are in this group and have greater argumentative prowess than I. I am aware of this deficiency and have several pieces like this that I am working on when I have time, about topics both related to and entirely in different worlds from this, in order to strengthen my communicative ability, and to express my deepest concerns for various things.

Thanks for your time reading this, and for your time thinking about Foucault’s work. For reasons I would love to talk about with someone, I believe that his words are meant to reverberate for eons.