Take the initiative the formulate a paper survey, being that you’re perfectly grounded in reality, to distribute to a number of schools. After studying trends of thought in Pedagogy, having a relevant experience with the private sector and knowing how certain businesses aim to derive money from the product of knowledge (we can discuss where it went wrong in some American university, for the lack of a coherent space), you’re interested in topics that are both noble and populist. You’re not a politician, but you could surely be working for the government. Let’s narrow it down: you’re an academic (that word they make you memorize to give your education a very serious and important status, regardless of your grades, your attendance, your basic adherence to norms and your social skills, much less the stuff you’ve published). In today’s world, these items constitute a significant data pool to be analyzed by experts, but social media companies have convinced us, somehow, that they can do the job for us, and we don’t even have to worry.

What could possibly go wrong? Let’s think it through: if you go with paper, you won’t have a fast flow of information registering, let alone automation processes. Please, do not ask why doctors still use pens and stamps — let’s not go there. I mean, we could, but that’s not the point. If you’re a Public Health professional, good luck, because I’ve never seen a field so imbibed with an array of special interests, speaking as a Brazilian and someone whose best friend is a historian of coffee consumption, and who spent seven happy years being a vegetarian, while the country saw news of corruption in the meat giant JBS. But who says people care about the human memory? It’s all about Nvidia, baby!

French philosopher Jacques Derrida has an interesting book (and if you think it’s a shame I haven’t read it in full, here’s a fun song for you) called “Paper Machine”, where you can tell that Semiotics would play a bigger role in communication; but coming back to common sense (the world where people have no fucking idea of what the word “Semiotics” means, much less will argue or correct you because you used the wrong conjugation, which curiously doesn’t apply to the common phrase in English “the US”), the old man wasn’t talking about motherfucking AI, much less illiterate people “having fun” with it (which seems to be what Google wants, and so many others).

But in the question of Education, the survey matters. Because (spoiler alert: the media will love this) in Education, you’re supposed to listen to your master. And dare I say, countries like Japan have this very clear in their culture. So just in case you’re some kind of macho man, remember that when you want to learn how to fight, there’s going to be an instructor (which, I have to point out, is not going to give you a driving lesson, unless you’re a schizophrenic fuck who wants to learn jiu jitsu by reading a PDF saved on One Drive — going hard on Microsoft, pal?) so you’ll surely understand.

Each response to questions such as “how many people are in your trusted group of friends?” — which have been put in print by yours truly in the year of 2018, one year after Participatory Fluency was founded, with later consultation to the coordinator of the National Teacher Development and Literacy Program, who thought questionnaires on paper were not the way to go — would have been collected, and then, analyzed carefully. Manually? Partly, because they would have to be transcribed, and maybe then, put into a visualizer (I must correct myself on a certain equivocal statement: Canva is a design platform; I don’t know what the fuck Canvas is) which would allow for those annoying people who probably love playing the dinossaur game on Google Chrome because they know how it was built, to navigate through your data as if it were some kind of really satisfying activity.

But the problem, which, I think, the reader might already have concluded, is that Instagram asked this first. Or did it?

So, basically, to wrap up: no matter what your intentions are; no matter how much you’ve read; no matter who you are; no matter what you’ve been through; no matter who likes you or who you fuck; no matter where you’ve studied; no matter where you’re from: Big Tech, regardless of whether or not you wanna pull this thread and list the problems that come with this premise, was faster, so it got to decide.

Now, I get it that Sabrina Carpenter would be bothered by this text. “What is he trying to say?” — she would exclaim. Because maybe a few people are “just slow”. I’m not gonna mention Deepseek, fuck off. You decide what this is about. You didn’t see the questionnaire. I’m showing it to you at the end. But the people who take my course have access to a robust set of guiding questions for debate, which nobody talks about — because technically, the files are stored on a Windows device, and Microsoft has access.

Privacy? Grow up, bitch (see annex).