Listening to Sonic Youth this morning and thinking of Thurston Moore’s assertion in The Year Punk Broke that “People see rock and roll as youth culture, and when youth culture becomes monopolized by big business, what are the youth to do? I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture …”

I’ve also been thinking a lot about Stiegler lately and his version of proletarianization, which is how he’d describe Moore’s monopolization. In works like Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2008/2010 trans), Stiegler investigates the pharmacological negotiations over attention and intelligence. For those in rhetoric, the book is contemporaneous with Lanham’s Economics of Attention (2007). This was also the time of Nick Carr’s “Google is Making Us Stupid” (2009) and the extended dance mix version, The Shallows. With the kind of irony that only Alanis Morissette, Carr’s superficial treatment of the pharmacological challenges we were facing was not especially helpful.

At the core of Stiegler’s argument is the claim that generations are re-produced through mnemotechnics. Mnemotechnics hold our stored memories, right? They give access to our enfolded processes, like knowing how to drive a nail with a hammer. That’s savoir-faire, know-how. But Stiegler also insists on savoir-vivre, on which he layers a philosophical dimension atop the conventional notion of social savviness. And there’s savoir-theoriser, which intensifies declarative knowledge in the way that his savoir-faire intensifies standard concepts of practical knowledge. Savoir-theoriser makes propositions but it is focused on critical encounters.

All of this must be considered in the context of Stiegler’s commitment to individuation and negentropy. But not today, or at least not here and now. So I’ll just skip to the end.

The Year Punk Broke is a 1991 documentary. Moore is referencing corporate rock, Tipper Gore and all that crap. Stiegler wrote about such things in the nineties as well (though the English translations didn’t arrive for a decade). What we are looking at since 2010 and Taking Care is a massive capture and enshitification not only of youth culture but also of the agency, the cognitive capacities, of attention and analysis that are integral to our individuation, to our capacity to remain something other than allopoietic servants of control societies. We have poisoned ourselves with our mnemotechnic pharmakons and we must discover a way to turn them to nurturing individuation.

As we look to take care of new cohorts of students (young in their formal educations if not otherwise), these issues are presented to us. We understand the cultural drive to seek a desirable allopoietic state, to plug oneself into culture in a manner that maximizes predictability, starting with a good job on graduation. It is not an “incorrect” drive, as if drives could be correct, but we certainly do attempt to correct them. As I’ve been writing about, the AI looper is the latest version of this security: educating students to serve as “the human in the loop” of otherwise AI processes.

The cultural pressure to transform education into a series of AI loops is real, palpable, and powerful. That we do not really. know what artificial intelligence is or might be, that we have little idea what this would look like in a classroom, let alone in a workplace, does little to mitigate this pressure. The whole business is clearly riddled with contradictions.

I stepped down as department chair on Friday (yay!), and I’m not teaching this semester. So this is all easy for me to say right now. But for me, like Stiegler I suppose, the aim of teaching is not to transform humans into a collection of predictable operations that reliably produce political-cultural-economic value.

It is weird that that sounds like an increasingly controversial thing to say. I mean what would Sonic Youth say? “Are you gonna liberate us girls from male, white corporate oppression?”