More Money Than Brains Read Online Free
Author: Laura Penny
like we are performing more functions for ourselves – pay bills in your jammies with the click of a mouse! – but comprehension fails many of us when the site or modem crashes. All those easy-to-navigate web pages are floating on an unseen sea of technical expertise.
Lack of computer savvy is just the tip of the not-knowing, of the systems we depend on that stretch beyond our individual ken. The more complex shit gets, the more we are engulfed by structures we do not and cannot comprehend, the more anxious we get about our understanding of the world and suck on our soggy, well-gnawed ideological binkies.
This is why explanations such as “intellectual elites ruined everything” are so appealing. They order apparently chaotic events and turn them into familiar stories of good versus evil. The big problem with this particular tale is that it credits nerds with positively super-villainous powers and plans.
After we destroy traditional values, we shall repair to our mountain hideaway and turn on the Weather Machine!
The mad scientist and the loony prof are hardy pop-culture stereotypes. But they are also alive and well in political life and public discourse, where brains get the blame for socialchanges that come from a confluence of political and economic causes.
4. Nerds have never run anything real and they live in a candy-coloured dream world .
It seems silly to dispute the existence of schools. We’ve all seen them, and the vast majority of us have attended one or more. Nevertheless, the academic realm is not just excluded from the real world but pitted against it, described as its opposite, as if it does not properly exist. This opposition between school and the real, between learning and doing, does students a great disservice by sending them the mixed message that school is very important, but most of the stuff you learn there is not!
So cram, cheat, pass, and forget. Binge and purge info when required, then advance to the next level and the next until you reach the end screen of graduation and enter regularly scheduled reality, already in progress. It’s okay to game the system when the system is a game. You jump through hoops so employers know you can jump through hoops; nobody gives a shit whether you majored in regular hoops, flaming hoops, or jumping and juggling at the same time.
A number of post-secondary institutions, ranging from accredited universities to substandard diploma mills, try to pitch themselves as education for the “real world,” which perpetuates the notion that campuses are spun of fairy dust and wishes. This split between academia and reality is based on the popular conception of thought and action as polar opposites. Thinking is not the necessary precursor to action, orsimply another kind of activity. Instead, thought is the enemy of efficacy and resolve, a perilously querulous anti-productive drag. Doubt is the mark of the quisling. Deliberation is flip-flopping or waffling, failure or unwillingness to heed the call of the heart and the gut. Consideration equals procrastination. Perspiration trumps contemplation.
This sense that activity is real and thinking is artificial is not confined to either side of the political aisle. The right wing’s dismissal of academia as unreal may be more straightforward and full-throated, but the activist left is equally hostile towards tenured stooges who sit in cushy offices writing about poor people’s problems in elite, specialized jargon poor people cannot read.
Others who appoint themselves arbiters of the real do so from a perspective that pleads political neutrality, that speaks for the common sense that politicians and professors of all stripes have abjured. These denizens of the real world, such as business owners, managers, lobbyists, and pundits, are qualified to call for the demise of fields they know nothing about precisely because they know nothing about them. Here ignorance functions as proof of their savvy, a sign that Mr. or
Lack of computer savvy is just the tip of the not-knowing, of the systems we depend on that stretch beyond our individual ken. The more complex shit gets, the more we are engulfed by structures we do not and cannot comprehend, the more anxious we get about our understanding of the world and suck on our soggy, well-gnawed ideological binkies.
This is why explanations such as “intellectual elites ruined everything” are so appealing. They order apparently chaotic events and turn them into familiar stories of good versus evil. The big problem with this particular tale is that it credits nerds with positively super-villainous powers and plans.
After we destroy traditional values, we shall repair to our mountain hideaway and turn on the Weather Machine!
The mad scientist and the loony prof are hardy pop-culture stereotypes. But they are also alive and well in political life and public discourse, where brains get the blame for socialchanges that come from a confluence of political and economic causes.
4. Nerds have never run anything real and they live in a candy-coloured dream world .
It seems silly to dispute the existence of schools. We’ve all seen them, and the vast majority of us have attended one or more. Nevertheless, the academic realm is not just excluded from the real world but pitted against it, described as its opposite, as if it does not properly exist. This opposition between school and the real, between learning and doing, does students a great disservice by sending them the mixed message that school is very important, but most of the stuff you learn there is not!
So cram, cheat, pass, and forget. Binge and purge info when required, then advance to the next level and the next until you reach the end screen of graduation and enter regularly scheduled reality, already in progress. It’s okay to game the system when the system is a game. You jump through hoops so employers know you can jump through hoops; nobody gives a shit whether you majored in regular hoops, flaming hoops, or jumping and juggling at the same time.
A number of post-secondary institutions, ranging from accredited universities to substandard diploma mills, try to pitch themselves as education for the “real world,” which perpetuates the notion that campuses are spun of fairy dust and wishes. This split between academia and reality is based on the popular conception of thought and action as polar opposites. Thinking is not the necessary precursor to action, orsimply another kind of activity. Instead, thought is the enemy of efficacy and resolve, a perilously querulous anti-productive drag. Doubt is the mark of the quisling. Deliberation is flip-flopping or waffling, failure or unwillingness to heed the call of the heart and the gut. Consideration equals procrastination. Perspiration trumps contemplation.
This sense that activity is real and thinking is artificial is not confined to either side of the political aisle. The right wing’s dismissal of academia as unreal may be more straightforward and full-throated, but the activist left is equally hostile towards tenured stooges who sit in cushy offices writing about poor people’s problems in elite, specialized jargon poor people cannot read.
Others who appoint themselves arbiters of the real do so from a perspective that pleads political neutrality, that speaks for the common sense that politicians and professors of all stripes have abjured. These denizens of the real world, such as business owners, managers, lobbyists, and pundits, are qualified to call for the demise of fields they know nothing about precisely because they know nothing about them. Here ignorance functions as proof of their savvy, a sign that Mr. or
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