IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 8

the row of figures are all zeroes. In
other words, unchecked inequality is a major cause of the uprootedness that produces increased
social instability.
" For the second factor [in social
relations] making for uprooted-
ness is education as it is under-
stood nowadays. ... Moreover

How might technology be
contributing to uprootedness?
the desire to learn for the sake
of learning, the desire for truth,
has become very rare. ... The
youth of our schools are as
much obsessed by their exami-
nations ... " [1, p. 45-47].
Plus ça change, as Weil might
wryly observe, if she could see the
U.K.'s current education system,
in which: creativity is suppressed;
meaningful learning is subordinate
to meaningless performance metrics (cf., [19]); high-stakes testing
and selection exacerbate inequality
of both opportunity and outcome;
competitive testing combined with
peer and metric pressure exacerbate mental health and other wellbeing problems [20]; and the right
to self-organize to accommodate
local conditions is not recognized.
These problems persist even unto
tertiary education: rather than an
opportunity for self-determination
[21], a significant proportion of
university undergraduates seem
to think that the " learning game "
involves the professors being in possession of marks, and the student's
" role " in the game is to acquire their
share of those marks. Marks for
which they erroneously think that

sible behaviour: either to fall
into a spiritual lethargy resem-
bling death ... or to hurl them-
selves into some form of activi-
ty necessarily designed to
uproot, often by the most vio-
lent methods, those who are
not yet uprooted " [1, p. 47].

they have already paid in the form
of their fees,4 fueling first a sense
of entitlement; and subsequently a
sense of disillusion, when the scale
of their debt, and the future expectation of indentured servitude,
becomes manifest [15]: this sense
destroys roots.
In the U.K., the continual rightwing denigration of teachers, and
teaching as a respectful
and respectable profession,
does not help. Weil also
wrote " if a peasant tills
the soil with the feeling
that if he is a peasant, it
is because he wasn't intel-
ligent enough to become
a teacher " [1, p. 47]. Here,
Weil was criticizing a social system
in which cultural prestige, intellectual prowess, or examination success
for its own sake is as much overvalued as agricultural labor, say, is
undervalued. However, with the
rejection of knowledge for its own
sake as a value (indeed the inversion of knowledge as " elitist " rather
than admirable), and the perverse
desire to remain in wilful ignorance
[22], combined with the deprecation
of education and the educated, now
perhaps she might write " if someone works on a zero hours contract
for minimum wage, no statutory
sickness pay, no holiday pay, and no
union, he thinks to himself 'at least
he wasn't dumb enough to become
a teacher'. "

This disturbingly prescient passage quite distinctly characterizes
some of the less savory aspects of
on-line social media: in particular
activities of those already uprooted, often threatening violence, in
order to uproot those that are not;
hence the self-propagation. This process reached its nadir in the U.K. in
relation to the referendum on EU
membership (Brexit). There were
two defining characteristics of this
pitiful saga. The first characteristic
is that it was those who voted in
favor of " leave " were generally those
most adversely affected by the preceding years of cruel and needless
austerity that followed the financial
crash in 2008-2009; those most
backward-looking but who had benefitted most from EU membership;
and those most disadvantaged
regions that had benefitted most
from EU inward investment.5 While
the data is complex and still open
to interpretation, voting " leave "
appears to be systematically correlated with older age, lower educational attainment, unemployment or
under-employment, a lack of quality
of public service provision, white
ethnicity with intolerance of " foreigners, " infrequent use of smartphones and the Internet, receiving
benefits, adverse health, and lower
life satisfaction [23].

The Growing of Roots
" Uprootednesss is by far the
most dangerous malady to
which human societies are
exposed, for it is a self-propa-
gating one. For people who are
really uprooted there remain
only two possible sorts of pos-

5
The Germans have a word for this: schaden-
freudeschleppenscheisse.6
6
They don't, of course; I made it up. But there
should be such a word. Loosely translated it
would mean " misery likes company " ; literally it
would mean " one man's pleasure at the dis-
comfort of others caused by dragging them
into the same sh*t that he is in. "

4
It is possible to agitate for a market in higher
education and then whine about grade inflation,
if one does not mind people making inferences
about skipping logic class.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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DECEMBER 2020

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020

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