State education budgets are getting slashed and millions of children are starving. Meanwhile, they are pouring billions into "engagement pedometers" to track student excitement and make the "future of education."

This, of course, is just the beginning. A thread.

School in 2020 was already a maddening array of inequality, degradation, and alienation: now doing e-classes (higher than 1/10 in NYC don't have access to the tech at all), the deterritorializing force of social media, the ever-intensifying competition for status, etc.

Education is in a state of collapse at every level, a problem which they will solve by removing everything "extraneous" from it (art, music, performance, physical facilities, sports, etc.) and reducing it to its most essential disciplinary/hegemonic/selective processes.

Even when not online, it will always be "e"-school.

There will never be another snow day. The reach of academic authority now extends into every home.

Digital check-ins all summer. Apps that track how much you've retained and how much you study (are you meeting guidelines?)

"Mood-checking" apps that log your emotions during class, giving a ballooning cadre of administrators a view of psycho-hazards and "bad eggs" to be "corrected."

Teachers made just more efficient instruments of an immense system of measuring, reporting, and controlling:

Dozens of apps teachers must learn and use to fill out status updates, check-ins, biometric monitoring, eyeball tracking, classroom recording, and simulcasting.

"Engagement factors" and "wow quotients" will be used to determine salaries and who to hire as funding dries up.

The Party Line: "It's progressive and advanced, see? No longer do we only measure teachers based on standardized test scores. Now, we measure EVERYTHING, and the AI tells us who is worthy. We trim the fat and only the best teachers will remain."

Of course, just as with standardized tests, everything can be gamed and manipulated.

Teachers must adapt to a social media world where attention is at a premium. Bringing in cookies every day, wearing bright clothing, learning TikTok dances, and increasing their volume.

They need to keep their students stimulated to keep up those "engagement factors." They will agonize over "teacher guides" and show exciting films in class and desperately hide their fear and nausea in front of their students.

If they slip, or break down, or even just are a little boring it WILL be logged and tracked and reported and put in their file. They cannot let the mask slip.

Education will just be one of the society-wide transformations.

Amazon has already pioneered these precise systems of discipline and control - Service workers with posture and smile tracking - Customer engagement and serotonin levels - Movies and TV fine-tuned based on the biological responses of focus-grouped audiences

Pre-schoolers' math education, determined by whether their heart rate increased when they looked at a bar graph.

This is the future we are staring down. Reaping the collapse of our ability to build things, to imagine, to maintain or improve institutions that serve humanity.

Reject the pod, reject this Cuomo/Gates anti-human drivel, reject techno-babble and the decrepit aimless Silicon Valley "disruption" machine.

Embrace humanity, embrace solidarity and collective power, warn those around you of what is to come. Build a future worthy of the name.