Open Society

I am learning to be more embodied through somatic practice and connecting with other people exploring these ideas across various communities. The work of Kay & Dan Aldred (2023) about Embodied Education demonstrates how embodiment is essential for individuals to thrive, we need somatic practice embedded into the ways our education and healthcare systems operate and evolve, we need people to be deeply intune with others, embodied, so they can transform and work more meaningfully. We need to carve out time to embody ourselves in the world around us, reorient ourselves, realign ourselves, our past, connect with nature, embrace the rhythms and cycles in water, on earth and in the air and sky around us to fire and energize our bodyminds. We need to take moments to breathe so we can recharge and gather the force we need to move, to transform and to neuroqueer ourselves and our spaces.

I feel we are moving further away from embodied connections with each other; we are losing our primordial affinity with nature and drifting further from coherence, harmony, and the humanised ecology of care that we need (Bettin). The double empathy problem feels extreme, it feels deep; it is what I have been describing with my peers as DEEP (Double Empathy Extreme Problem).

The double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) creates a gap of disconnect experienced between people due to misunderstood shared lived experiences. It is “a breakdown in reciprocity and mutual understanding that can happen between people with very differing ways of experiencing the world.”

The DEEP (DOUBLE EMPATHY EXTREME PROBLEM) arises from feelings of disconnect; not only from cultural, sexual, political, religious, neurodivergent, or any other cross-section of differences but also through embodiment, or lack thereof. The double empathy gap is non-linear; it is deep, multidimensional, rhizomatic, and holographic (Mirra, 2023). DEEP could be a huge contributing factor that leads to burnout and ill health. The DEEP gap can break people at their core, leaving them fragmented, disconnected, disoriented and disembodied, feeling like they’re in a void space.

“Technological solutionism” is the related tendency to identify simple answers — in all domains, not just the tech sector — “before the questions have been fully asked” or the problems fully articulated. Take, for example: “the Internet has changed everything about how we teach and learn.” Thus, “education is broken.” And from there, “technology will fix it.”

So his book urges us to ask — of tech and, I’d add as well, of ed-tech: what exactly do we mean by optimization — optimized for what and for whom? Who builds and who audits the algorithms that purport to steer students forward through subject material? What subject material is important? Who says so, and why? Who wants to build more automated classroom software, more robot teachers, and why? Why is efficiency, particularly when it comes to learning, something we’d want to pursue? Why do we suppose that more data means better teaching, let alone means better learning? By what means? To what end?

Morozov claims to reject both cyber-utopianism and cyber-dystopian. Despite his savage critiques of Silicon Valley and his dour outlook on the future, Morozov insists that he’s neither anti-tech nor a “techno-pessimist.” Instead, he appeals throughout the book to what he calls “technostructuralism,” a framework for examining technologies not as “good” or “bad” or “neutral,” but as situated, constructed, social, and deeply deeply political. “Technostructuralists,” he argues, “view information technologies ‘neither as technologies of freedom nor of tyranny but primarily as technologies of power that lock into existing or emerging technostructures of power.’ Thus, any given technology is allowed to centralize and decentralize, homogenize and pluralize, empower and disempower simultaneously.” But it’s worth pushing Morozov on this point, I think: should the scenarios that he postulates for our future— and they are, no doubt, powerfully nightmarish scenarios — stop us from tinkering? Or in other words, should we tinker more with our political, social and education institutions, in the hopes perhaps of dismantling less? (Because let's not kid ourselves, there are plenty of folks, to misquote Grover Norquist, who want to shrink public education down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.)

How do we distinguish between ed-tech as solutionist marketing (what you hear in (ed-)tech blogs that gush uncritically about every new app and every new investment) and ed-tech as contingency-in-practice (the ways in which students and teachers have always MacGyver-ed together the tools that they need — hacks for inquiry and pleasure, despite a regime that might demand otherwise)? Because do so — distinguish, dismiss, agitate — we must.

Solutionism, no doubt, has far-reaching tentacles. Solutionism serves to foreclose critique.