This is where the thinking behind Corporate Capture lives in full. The book in progress. The essays. The ideas that don't fit in a keynote or a workshop — but that underpin everything that does.
by Mike Mueller
Work in progress — excerpts belowWe live in a world that's nigh-on impossible to understand. For a species that seems to desire certainty as much as sustenance, this is a problem.
This book began as a promise to students — several thousand of them, across 27 years — who kept asking the same thing: why don't you write down the stuff you teach us? Not the syllabus. The other stuff. The questions that arrive sideways in the middle of a lesson about something else and turn out to be the most important questions anyone asks all year.
It is not an academic book. It is what one person — a reader, a teacher, a thinker — has managed to do with what he's learned. An attempt to explain how to make sense of a world that wasn't designed to be comprehended. The questions it addresses can never be fully answered. That, precisely, is the point.
The sum of human knowledge can be viewed like a pie chart, and we, each of us, stand in the middle of it. In theory, all of it is accessible to us via the internet or formal study; we just need to choose where to walk and what to investigate. But from where we stand, we cannot see just how large the circle is, and how finely each 'slice' of subject-specific knowledge is required to be in order to 'fit them' into the pie. The slices used to be larger; astronomy, for example, might once have been measurable in degrees, whereas now, there's at least twenty strands with specific areas of focus which continue to multiply. Simultaneously, the circle grows ever larger, to allow room for more and more specified knowledge.
The knowledge is accessible, but it is unattainable. If the average memory were quantified in computational data, we roughly possess about 2.5 petabytes of information. That's no small figure — it's two and a half million gigabytes. However, the total amount of information that exists needs to be measured in exabytes. There are one thousand petabytes in an exabyte. So, even if a person had twice the average memory capacity, they'd still only be in possession of 0.05% of what's out there. Another way to think about it is to visualise a library. A library of almost infinite size. On average, people read around a thousand books in their lifetime. The British Library in London has approximately 25 million books in its collection. It would take the average person two and a half million lifetimes to read them all. The pot of gold exists, but the rainbow is too long.
And accessing the knowledge is only the half of it. I can download the complete works of Einstein in a matter of minutes, but I'd likely never be able to grasp a tenth of it, even if you gave me two lifetimes. Such are the complexities that lay out there in the collective disconnect known as the sum of human learning. Or at the very least, that which has been retained rather than lost, and shared, assuming it is shareable at all. And a great deal of knowledge isn't shareable because there are many kinds of knowledge that can only be attained experientially. They can be broadly represented in linguistic or numeric form, but the substance exists in a form that isn't transmissible.
If the substance of experientially gleaned and internalised knowledge could be shared from person to person, we'd enter a profoundly new phase of human evolution. Empathy, as we understand it, would dissolve. Language would substantively become a form of meaning rather than a conduit for it — assuming it continued to exist at all.
How on earth are we supposed to navigate this world of dizzying complexity? Increasingly, the answer seems to be 'with great difficulty.' In effect, we live in a kind of bubble; a little pocket of understanding of the wider world that we carry with us like a backpack full of essentials on a long, unmapped journey. We don't know if what we have with us is going to be useful, or if we've brought the wrong stuff, but in the main, we've done our best to select the best option available.
We do not live in a world designed to be comprehended by human beings. Whether we speak of the likely infinite combinations of knowledge and understanding that can be gleaned from the natural world, or 'merely' the human footprint upon it, the scope of what exists is beyond us. And yet, we must find a way to live meaningfully within it.
You'd think this would be an easy question to answer, wouldn't you? Isn't history just a record of the stuff that's happened?
No. History is an extremely complex organism, and I call it an organism because it's alive. It's not carved in stone. Well, some of it is, but those carvings are only ever part of the fabric and never the whole tapestry. History produces objects and events that can be tracked and tamed by dates, art and architecture, but there is a human dimension that exists beyond and ultimately before these things that needs to be inferred by the presence of the seemingly endless details that the people of the past have left behind. History isn't just a record of what happened, but who happened. And importantly, the histories that emerge reveal as much about those who compose the histories as those who lived them, if not more.
The events of the distant past can often appear more clearly to us than the events of the present because they have been slowly refined and polished into narrative, into a catalogue of dates, places, names, and events. Shorn of inhabitable nuance, they breathe again — and we breathe them in — in the form of written history.
We do not look to history for facts, at least, not exclusively so. We look to history for knowledge, understanding and insight, which really means we are looking for an aspect of the past to be translated for us and evocatively examined by someone who knows more about it than we do.
And yet this is inevitable. If our world could be considered as a machine — and it is, in a way — it could be said to run on information, knowledge, understanding, beliefs, attitudes and values. It is the interaction of these elements — within any individual, any group, any society, any culture, or any nation — that defines it. Change is inevitable because these elements are co-dependent; a change in any one of them fundamentally affects the others, even if imperceptibly at first. This is how the world has operated for millennia, and I cannot see how it is ever going to follow any other developmental path.
It is difficult to live in so uncertain a world. The more one ages, the more one learns this from the inside out. Nothing ages you more than realising that the world in which you live isn't the same one as the students you teach. I first accessed the internet in 1997, the year I turned 21. It was for a university assignment. I bought my first mobile phone in 2001. The students I teach today cannot conceive of a world without smartphone technology. Trying to explain to them what life was like before such technological and cultural revolutions is both amusing and difficult. Their brains work differently.
That's a question that needs asking and answering. There's nothing worse than trying to engage students with either of them without first providing them with an understanding of the need to do so.
The study of fiction is vital because we perceive the world — and engage with it — in two ways. The first is sensorially, and the second is temporally. Without our five senses, we couldn't experience the world at all, and without our ability to construct a sense of narrative from the passing of time, we couldn't comprehend it. Our narratives are singular and collective in equal measure. Put simply, we experience the world through stories.
Even language itself is embedded with stories, many of which are unknown to most, save for the fragments left embedded in cliché and idiom. A Trojan Horse has its origins in Homer. A specific weakness in something otherwise robust is often described as an Achilles Heel. Whether their origins be religious, mythical, historical, apocryphal or largely verifiable, our experience of the world once lived and yet retained is carried predominantly in the form of narrative, embellished with — rather than defined by — facts and numbers.
Numbers need the context of narrative to have any inherent worth to us. I can recall, having learnt it, many facts of the Holocaust, and the fact that approximately six million Jewish men, women and children were murdered is the one that most stays with me. But this is a fact I need to summon. For narrative, I need only Spielberg's Schindler's List. I have seen that film just the once. Many of its scenes are burned into my mind. I will never forget them. They attack the sinews of me more than any statistic ever possibly could, because they possess a human quality that numbers cannot.
We are creatures dependent on connection and empathy for our very survival — partly on a base personal level, but particularly if we are to endure together. The novel is not a luxury or an academic exercise. It is the technology through which human experience becomes transmissible. And that is why, after 27 years, I have never tired of teaching one.
These essays began as thinking-out-loud — responses to conversations, to readings, to things that didn't sit right. They are published here in full, without abbreviation, because the thinking requires the space. If you want the short version, you'll have to make it yourself.
I read quite a lot about Artificial Intelligence, and as an admirer of Nick Cave, have followed his evolving comments about it for some time. Over that time, broadly speaking, Cave's moved from contempt to fascination to most recently, a sense of despair. In his Red Hand File #359, he sadly notes that AI song generators grieve him not because they aren't good — they are, or soon will be too good — but because they will be identical in presentation, perhaps even superior, yet entirely devoid of soul. He speaks of notions of artistic struggle, of striving, of triumph over adversity, personal pride, desire, delight, inspiration, and resilience being dismissed as mere obstacles on the way to the AI-generated song: perfect in its cynicism, magnificent in its emptiness.
In a sense, he is right, but there is much more to it than this. The visual or aural similarity between that which can be considered authentic art and that which is manufactured to resemble it has never been clear-cut. Artists themselves have sought to blur those boundaries for generations. When John Cage released 4′33″ in 1952, he mutated the distinction between art and reality into something profoundly challenging. It both invited cynicism — demanded it, even — but also defied it.
The uniqueness of art has long existed alongside the pressuring counterpoints of imitation and mass production. Anyone who's spent any time with ceramics or porcelain will tell you that these are some of the most revered forms of artistic expression; the very best examples of the medium take extraordinary skill to produce, by artisans who hone their abilities over decades. It's easy enough to find an imitation Ming vase that will pass for the real thing to all but the most trained of eyes. Whilst you can put a price on rarity, it's much harder to put a price on authenticity. The person who seeks the authentic item sees a value in the fact that something made by human hands possesses something more inherently human than something that does not.
And it is this desire for human connection that will save art from the inevitable coming of AI art. It's ok to call what AI can produce 'art'; it's just not human art. It's derived art, just like the copy of a Ming vase is derived from a Ming vase. For some, the derivation is as close as they're ever going to get, and as much as they're ever going to need. For others, nothing will replace the humanity imbued in art that only human hands or the human voice can create.
When I listen to music created by human beings, I know I am hearing that which is human. Now, I might not always be able to spot that something is created by AI or by a human being, but knowing the provenance is a key element of how I engage with it. I will never stand in front of a copy of Van Gogh's Sunflowers with anything remotely resembling the awe I felt when I once had the privilege of standing in front of the real thing.
For a while now, it's been posited that AI slop will end the internet as a knowledge source due to the increasingly indistinguishable nature of the real and the fake. As a result, the book will return to its role as the authoritative medium for authentic human knowledge and experience. AI may well do the same for music. The cheap fakes will draw us more and more to the real, because the sense of hollowness that fakery produces is unviable, unsustainable. If it were not, the $50 'Rolex' would suffice. We all know that for many it never will.
The artisan will never sell on the same scale as the AI approximation, but it will sell. A lot of artists know and accept this. The age of the rock multimillionaire may well be coming to a close, but the artist who can make a living from producing their art is far from over. For every thousand pieces of self-assembled IKEA furniture, there is the carpenter's table. For every thousand pairs of sweatshop loafers, there is a cobbled boot. And for all the AI-churned greeting card platitudes, there are love poems torn from the heart. We will always crave these things. The rise of the mp3 has corresponded with the resurrection of the vinyl record. Sales of analogue cameras are surging. What we are seeing — despite all appearances — isn't the death of human art, but the rise of the artisan.
I had a very interesting conversation with a student the other day. One of the many pleasures of my job is that the questions I get asked become valuable teaching moments. And often, it's those questions that at best might be considered syllabus adjacent that become the most rewarding. On this occasion, I was asked about my opinion of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
I thought this a very interesting question. Far more interesting than the answer it invited. As such, my reply set aside a response that addressed the question in favour of one that interrogated it. I wanted to get the student to reflect on what the asking of that specific question revealed.
Questions are not neutral; they engage with the world from the context of their authors, and those same people possess varying degrees of insight in their own perspectives and the prevailing values, attitudes and experiences that have shaped them.
In this case, I asked the student why they were interested in my opinion on this particular person. The assertion that she is a controversial figure only provided more opportunity to dig a bit deeper. Why was she controversial? Quickly, it became apparent that the core of her controversial identity was her indigeneity.
Many of Nampijinpa Price's views are in binary opposition to those held by a majority of Indigenous Australians. As I pointed out to the student, many people hold views that are contrary to the majority, either within their political party, a given societal group or the Australian population as a whole. It's not by chance that I am less likely to be asked about my opinion of a white male whose views differ from the norm, unless their views are so far outside the boundaries of what is considered reasonable that they are difficult to avoid.
The issue is one of representation and the conferring of authority. Nampijinpa Price's views are considered controversial because she is adjudged by some to be a kind of racial anomaly — and significantly, she confers a legitimacy to perspectives that seek to de-emphasise the significance of Indigeneity and the need for any kind of representative voice to Parliament. No such weight is usually given to other dissenting voices across the political spectrum.
Challenging this student's question provided a fine opportunity to consider what questions in themselves can reveal. In this case, it was a normalised and conflated sense of significance being ascribed to a dissenting opinion. In other cases, the question might embed the desire to entrap someone or compel them to offer an over-simplified response. When a politician or media pundit asks someone to 'define a woman' or say how many genders there are, this is the likely purpose. These questions are statements in disguise; attempted 'gotcha' moments that do nothing whatsoever to advance dialogue or understanding.
It's important to challenge questions. They are not the rulebooks of discourse. Teaching students to 'question the question' is one of the most valuable things a teacher can do. It's our ability to shape the conversations in which we participate that will play a key role in determining the rewards of holding them. In an increasingly polarised world in which perceived differences allow people to congeal into ideological tribes, the richness of questions is central to shifting us to more fertile conversational ground.
I should preface these musings with the belief that because any discussion of technology and literacy sits broadly within an education paradigm, no such discussion should exclude the ways in which these issues apply to teachers. The progress of students — however one chooses to quantify it — is a product of a student-teacher dynamic that borders on symbiotic. You can't have one without the existence of the other.
I've been a teacher for twenty-six years and counting. I've not lost my passion for teaching, nor have I come close to losing the passion for learning. Personally, I think teachers that aren't keen on learning should find something else to do.
Kids today are — and aren't — like the kids of yesterdays. Minds grow, hormones surge, feelings hurt. I don't think young people are any more or less secure in themselves than they were a generation ago. They're not any more or less intelligent. They're as dependent on love and role models as ever.
Their literacies are changing, however. I'm always irked when I hear people — teachers included — bemoaning what they perceive to be a drop in literacy standards. This is rubbish, because it is an extremely selective reading of the text. If one travels back half a century, students lived in a world that required one type of literacy: the printed word. Today, students roam an infinite library that lacks a catalogue, a librarian, and any form of quality control. Suddenly, kids in primary school need to be taught to be critically aware on a level that was unthinkable thirty years ago. Something had to give, and that 'something' has been the thoroughness that could previously be devoted to functional literacy.
ICT is a brain extension of sorts. Knowledge at one's fingertips. A go-everywhere library. These are wonderful things. But they are externalities; we are dependent on them being there when we need them. The person who learns and retains understanding will always have an advantage over those who can access it but haven't internalised it.
And one of the secrets of getting students to retain knowledge is to deliver it in a way that engages and inspires. No student has ever been inspired by a OneNote. The best lessons are ones that by 2025 standards go completely off piste, where students and teachers are jointly on a discovery path.
My 14-year-old said something to me the other day that I thought remarkably insightful. He said that he hated AI with a passion because it was so easy to use. He found in Year 5 and 6 that if something needed to be written, he could just ask ChatGPT and out something would come. This, he told me, was having more than just a corrosive effect on his literacy or his work ethic, or even his cognitive development. He believed that it was compromising his emotional development, because it was removing the need for him to find his own words to express himself. I thought this an incredibly astute, chilling observation. Right now, adults are evaluating the impact of AI from a perspective that is deeply removed from the young people who are experiencing it developmentally. It is not re-wiring their brains; it is wiring them.
If we want to really increase standards of literacy — be it reading based, critical or written — time needs to be given over to it. A lot more time. And for a good deal of it, technology in those middle years needs to be given the flick. Brain capacity needs to be extended. Students need to be taught memory strategies and given compelling reasons to adopt them.
There is a great deal to think about. There is still plenty to enlighten and inspire, but there is arguably more to worry about and even to fear than there has been for some time.
If you agree with this, you, like me, are susceptible to plausible generalisations.
People these days have lost faith in the idea of accepted truths. Seen from the perspective of those increasingly bewildered by the 'alts' out in the distance — regardless of which 'alt' that might be — this view seems valid. And it is, in a sense; what is a fundamental truth for person or group A is a dangerous lie in the eyes of person or group B.
The problem with this assumption, however, is that things have never really been any different. Our world has never been unified in any conceptual sense. And when it has managed to unify, it was always along lines of conflict; an 'us' and a 'them.'
It's not unreasonable to assert that people alive today have greater access to knowledge than any other generation in human history. But 'greater access' might imply 'easier' access, and it is wrong to assume so. It might be easier to type a request into Google than it is to catch a bus to a library, but the texts found in a library are far more likely to possess a quasi-verifiable quality that many internet texts do not. The internet doesn't have a catalogue in the same way a library does. And in reality, the internet was never designed to be unbiased; it was designed to be thoughtless. That's very different, and very dangerous.
The internet is increasingly designed to act as an ideological echo chamber, putting users in closer and closer contact with like-minded individuals and reality-reinforcing concepts. This can be lovely, but it is very, very dangerous. It doesn't take long at all for someone with frustrations about their lack of a love life to be deep in the web of INCEL hatred, without ever coming into meaningful contact with a countering viewpoint.
And the unavoidable truth is that no matter how much I know, or learn, or read, I will never know enough about everything to be truly certain of anything. It was Bertrand Russell who famously said, 'I don't want knowledge; I want certainty', and when a man who has as much knowledge as Russell can express such a thought, you know that knowledge, of itself, has no endpoint of fulfilment or completion.
More than ever, our values matter. Values are complex and multidimensional; they transcend fact and truth, because they manifest in word, act, thought and deed. They cannot be hidden, nor are they ever not present. We just need to embrace the idea of living in accordance with them, sharing them, living in common accord, challenging each other in good faith, and resisting attitudes and actions that challenge the place of an agreed higher value.
This will be incredibly difficult, and a long and drawn-out process. But it's already underway. Invariably, we move towards unity, if not simplicity. This is the fracturing phase of long-held assumptions and long-valued institutions. We're on our own. It's pretty confronting. Some will make terrible decisions and do terrible things. But this has always happened. No system can account for all human frailty.
When it comes to education and the teaching profession, a good deal of what gets written about focuses on wages, teacher burnout, the influence of AI technologies, student conduct, and of course, NAPLAN results. It's not that these aren't important issues (NAPLAN results notwithstanding), but aside from the influence of AI, they aren't what I spend the most time thinking about.
I write this as an English teacher who is about to start his 26th year of teaching in 2025. Though I've taken on managerial roles in that time, it's always been the classroom that I've loved and where I most feel I belong.
The key reason I'm making these observations is that in an age when meeting the needs of students on an individualised basis is seen as a priority, the question needs to be asked: what unifies and drives education in Australia in 2025?
The drive for higher literacy and numeracy standards is a cheap answer to an expensive question. Literacy and numeracy standards need to be fit for purpose, and anyone who knows anything about the content of NAPLAN tests knows that it is only partially relevant at best. There is, for example, no need whatsoever to teach algebra to all students. None. It is a precursor to calculus which is relevant only to a highly select number of professions. And whilst students are taught their quadratics, they are not being taught the ins and outs of simple and complex interest until the upper years of high school. It does not make sense to teach niche knowledge to all, and necessary knowledge to a few.
I've lost count of the number of questions I get asked by students that — when it comes to staying 'on task' — I ought not answer. And yet, they are the most pertinent and most important of questions. What is masculinity? What exactly is wrong with Andrew Tate? What does 'woke' actually mean? What is intergenerational trauma? How many genders are there? The fact that students are asking these questions is wonderful. The fact that our educational system isn't designed to answer them is tragic.
Think about this: as things stand, AI is not a component of any syllabus anywhere in the country, as schools do not have the power to incorporate the teaching of it. Instead, they are meant to continue teaching the same old content in the context of AI. Just think about how ludicrous this is.
Societies do not need to want to change for change to be inevitable and unstoppable. The world in which we live barely resembles the world that produced our current model. The best we can hope for is to be aligned with the forces of change; to understand them, and at best, to exert some kind of influence over them that is driven by knowledge and a collective understanding of what we'd like our society to value. Unless we can find a way to equip our teachers with the ability and opportunity to answer the most vital of student inquiries, we will only become further and further polarised as they seek answers from increasingly unreliable and extreme sources. Put another way, to stop so many of our young men from being radicalised into extremists of every conceivable kind, we may need to teach them less algebra.
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