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Teaching Against the Machine

Critical Pedagogy in an Era of Artificial Intelligence

Teaching Against the Machine cover

Teaching Against the Machine

Critical Pedagogy in an Era of Artificial Intelligence

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Pre-order. Available Aug 20 2026
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Description

This book is an experimental critical pedagogy of artificial intelligence in relation to futures of capitalism, thought, education, politics, and radical imagination.

Teaching Against the Machine offers a searing account of artificial intelligence as a cultural and pedagogical force in an era of systemic nihilism. Alexander J. Means shows how AI extracts from the living archive of human creativity and knowledge only to degrade it through the financial, algorithmic, and military circuitry of late capitalism and its destructive geopolitics. Algorithmic systems disfigure collective memory, fragment thought, and attempt to foreclose a shared humanity and future. Refusing both transhumanist fantasy and apocalyptic fatalism, Means argues for an experimental critical pedagogy that can teach against the dead machines of the present. This is a book about reclaiming thought, time, imagination, and political agency. It investigates what education must become if it is to foster lives of meaning rather than surrender them to barbarism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Beyond Techno-Brutalism
1. AI Thresholds: Dreamwork of the Machine
2. AI's Academic War Regime
3. True Life for the AI Generation
4. Fascist Futurism, AI, and Apocalyptic Time
5. Utopian AI: Laboratories of Futurity
Conclusion: Teaching Against the Machine

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published Aug 20 2026
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Pages 224
ISBN 9781350506794
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions 9 x 5 inches
Series Critical Directions in Education, Technology, and Politics
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

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