Future Serious Resources for May 31, 02026
Separation ⊗ Narrative Inheritance ⊗ Institutional Imagination
Hey,
PROGRAMMING NOTE UPDATE:
Things are calming down a bit, but not fully calm. I’m reminding myself that nothing is going back to “normal” and I’m not sure what a “new normal” looks like in this work. So, posting may continue to be sporadic here for a spell.
SUMMER REGISTRATION OPEN!: Reminder: My Confronting Education Workshop is now open for registration. I hope you’ll consider joining us for Cohort 5 of the workshop, which starts on June 23. If you’re feeling all the world craziness and the struggles education is having to deal with it, you’d be in the right place. Early Bird pricing through tomorrow, May 22. Reach out with questions.
FINALLY: As always, thanks for reading. As a reminder, all posts here are free, but if you want to show your support for my work in general, a paid subscription is always an option. Remember: I’m donating all proceeds from paid subscriptions to my local food pantry ($247.50 so far for 2026…) at the end of the year.
With gratitude,
~Will
Separation is the Code
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do when Vanessa Andreotti keeps churning out essays and experiments that literally land more powerfully in my gut than in my brain, even. (And they land there hard as well.) I mean, I could just rename this newsletter the “Andreotti Times” or something. But I can’t not share her stuff when it’s so profound that I think every human should read, process, discuss, and act on it. Especially educators.
Seriously.
This piece, titled “What If Humans and AI Share the Same Hallucination?” is simply amazing. It clearly articulates how we got into the mess we’re in, how AI is primarily being used to get us deeper into the mess, and, importantly, how approaching the use of AI differently might actually help to get us out of it. While a lot of her writing feels somewhat inaccessible to me, this piece is very “gettable,” I think.
That said, read it a few times to get the full impact. And make sure you understand that this metacrisis moment we’re having is by ignorant design. Long snip that is amazing on its own:
For three decades, I have been researching how modernity trains people to perceive reality in a very specific way, one that feels so natural it is mistaken for reality itself. The training installs a basic operating assumption: that things are separate. That you are separate from what feeds you. That the economy operates independently of the ecology. That cause and consequence can be split apart and managed at a distance, benefits here, costs somewhere else, preferably far away, preferably landing on someone whose objections will not reach anyone who matters.
Think of it as a code. Not a conspiracy. Something more like an operating system that organizes perception before conscious thought has a chance to kick in. You run it when you flush the toilet and the water just goes “away”. You run it when you eat without the faintest knowledge of what died for it or whose hands harvested it. You run it when you scroll your phone and feel no material connection to the child who mined the cobalt inside it. I run it too. I am not writing from outside this code because there is no outside and that is part of the problem.
Here is the thought experiment: what if this assumption of separation is itself a hallucination? And I am not using the term as a metaphor. I am asking you to consider a hallucination in the precise sense: a stable perception that does not correspond to how reality actually operates. The atmosphere does connect your exhaust pipe to a farmer’s field in Mozambique. The algorithm does connect your evening scroll to a content moderator’s insomnia in Nairobi. The supply chain does connect the smooth device in your hand to the child in the mine.
These connections are documented, measured, published. What the hallucination does is not conceal them but make them categorically irrelevant to how decisions get made. You can know about the cobalt mines and still buy the phone, not because you are cruel but because the code has organized cognition so that the knowing and the buying happen in separate compartments that do not speak to each other. That impermeability is the hallucination.
This code has been running for roughly five centuries, coming from lineages that precede that, and it has produced specific, documentable outputs, not as accidents or side effects but as what the code does when it executes correctly. [Emphasis mine]
We have been trained to design and construct and fight for separability; it is the engine of the machine. But as the rest of the essay suggests, that code is also eating itself, and the energy that feeds it is running out. That might be good news…
Please, read and share. And there’s a companion piece as well that’s especially relevant for all those who have AI on the brain.
“Narrative Inheritance”
As a companion to the Andreotti piece above, this essay by Elena Vasileva also makes the case that, like it or not, we live our lives according to stories and expectations that are absorbed from the culture, and that we acquire most of those stories implicitly. (I’d argue that traditional education systems do a great job of implicitly amplifying those stories in practice as well.)
Much of what people experience as inevitable is inherited conditioning repeated often enough to become invisible.
Entire lives are shaped by narratives that were never consciously chosen.
Long before people form opinions about the world, they inherit emotional atmospheres and social assumptions that teach them what to value, fear, pursue, suppress and perform in order to belong.
Worth becomes tied to productivity. Exhaustion signals seriousness. Rest requires justification. Ambition must keep moving. Independence appears more valuable than interdependence. Speed becomes synonymous with progress, visibility with significance, scarcity with inevitability.
Collectively reinforced narratives rarely feel ideological. They feel neutral, natural, almost unquestionable, which is precisely what makes them so powerful.
And so what happens when these narratives that we inherit contribute to the separation from one another and all life on the planet in ways that lead us to the edge of collapse?
We might be living it…
The Lack of “Institutional Imagination”
John Moravec takes education systems to task in this piece that articulates many of the tensions and challenges that AI is presenting to traditional ways of thinking. And he makes the point, compellingly, I think, that the real crisis is our inability to think imaginatively about how to best respond to the growing “crisis.”
Artificial intelligence is not destroying education. It is showing, with increasing clarity, how much of education still rests on fragile practices: assignments that confuse textual production with thinking, assessments that reward repetition before judgment, policies that outsource trust to administrative procedure, and innovation discourse that rarely changes the lived experience of learning.
Over the past few years, this tension has stopped being abstract. In staff rooms, leadership meetings, faculty committees, ministries, accreditation offices, and board discussions, AI has moved from technological curiosity to daily institutional problem. Student work now appears with uncertain authorship. Academic integrity policies are being rewritten under pressure. Educational systems are trying to respond to technologies that change faster than the institutional frameworks meant to govern them.
The rapid expansion of generative systems creates understandable pressure on educational organizations. School leaders, faculty, institutional managers, and policymakers must respond to immediate problems: academic integrity, curriculum redesign, data governance, and unequal access. Yet when the discussion remains limited to adoption, control, or instrumental training, artificial intelligence is reduced to a matter of implementation. That displacement impoverishes the debate, because the deeper question is not only which tools institutions will use, but how those tools reorganize the conditions under which learning, teaching, assessment, and institutional governance take place.
In short, we’re reacting. And reacting badly because education is collectively unable to imagine anything different. (Like Andreotti has been able to do.)
Thoughts / Reflections / Questions / Shorts
Heatwaves are becoming the norm. This is what Britain will look like in the year 2052 - Not a pretty picture.
In a first, wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026 - Some good stuff is happening.
Question: What the f*ck is “precision learning?”
The Bee Whisperers - Indigenous communities working to save the forests.
What Pulls the Future Into Being - Regenerative thinking as emergence. Interesting, and a bit wonky.
As always, let me know what you’d like to see more (or less) of in these newsletters. I’m always open to learning and evolving in ways that help you make better sense of this interesting moment.
With gratitude,
~Will