We live, largely, in a utilitarian world. This is not a state of affairs I welcome but it’s one, having survived the American educational system, I understand. Much of learning is framed in a fundamentally transactional way. What will this do for me? What kind of job can I get? How much money will I make? My youth was spent at what was probably the apex of the degradation of the humanities. The bloody cry of the striving class was Learn to Code! Get kids tablets, get kids smartboards, get kids ready for the twenty-first century about to smash them in the face. Silicon Valley and its offshoots promised easy money and only a sucker wouldn’t try to land a six-figure gig out of college at a startup pumping out an app that Google or Amazon or Facebook would happily buy up. “I would never read a book,” declared boy wonder billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, speaking for many in his cohort. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that … I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
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