As the prospect, more than the reality, of artificial intelligence looms over my livelihood and many others, and the rich and powerful continue to delegitimize and defund the liberal arts, I have been asking myself what the purpose of learning is, and searching for places to see it manifested in real life and online. That, in turn, led me to try to create such a space in my own life.<\/p>\n
The high number of personal curricula on my feeds could certainly be because my social media algorithms detected that I was searching for syllabi and trawling Project Gutenberg<\/a> for 300-year-old novels, or because it simply knows what kind of girl I am, which is: annoying about reading.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some of these people come dangerously close to the kind of \u201cdoing my own research\u201d rhetoric that inevitably leads a person down an RFK Jr.-style rabbit hole; others approach their syllabi with a neoliberal hustle mindset that sees every spare hour of the day as a potential resource to be monetized, and that is gross to me. I wish them all good luck in their studies, but I\u2019m not talking about those people. There\u2019s an even smaller group that seems to be sincerely interested in learning independently, and trying to do it in an organized and thoughtful way.<\/p>\n It feels bad to call \u201creading books\u201d or \u201cbeing curious\u201d a trend, and I realize that I\u2019m veering dangerously close to doing exactly that. But that\u2019s not what I mean. There\u2019s a certain kind of person who leaves school and wishes it had never ended\u2014the kind who gets off on buying fancy notebooks, got unreasonably into bullet journaling at some point in the last decade, and almost certainly identified as \u201ca Hermione\u201d before J.K. Rowling outed herself as a transphobe. And I\u2019m going to say right now, for better and for worse, that I am one of them.\u00a0<\/p>\n To be clear, I do not think this is a cute way to be; some of the most annoying people I\u2019ve met are the kind who seem to have a fetish for their books as physical objects and spend more time on the appearance of reading than actually reading. Generally, I think that the more a person makes a thing of their love of reading or learning, the less time you can expect that they actually spend doing that. This is the kind of person who will sheepishly admit they\u2019re considering grad school because they like the idea of reading books all day. Unfortunately for them, the experience of grad school is now more computer-oriented in almost every discipline<\/a> than it used to be.\u00a0<\/p>\n The instances of this autodidacticism that I find less cringey and more admirable are the ones that engage less with the aesthetics of learning and more with the actual work of it, complete with link-outs to readings and discussion sections. I’ve enjoyed following newsletter-based syllabi like Lit Girl’s<\/a> “terms” on fame<\/a> and games<\/a>, for example, or Bliss Foster’s video essays<\/a> about fashion and culture. There is so much pretending to read and performance of thought on social media that a prompt to actually do the reading and thinking felt refreshing. And the prospect of actually doing that work had its own appeal, and its own rewards.<\/p>\n As those in power continue to worship and leverage all things algorithmic and attempt to make \u201clearning\u201d the domain of machines rather than brains, a Luddite-adjacent aesthetic has taken hold among a subset of young people. It may not quite rise to the level of resistance\u2014and it is admittedly tough to square Luddite instincts with the reality of TikTok as it exists\u2014but it’s perhaps a way to cope with an increasing sense of futility surrounding intellectualism. If the machines are being put to use doing the thinking and reasoning and knowing for you, then simply smash (or just put down) the machines.<\/p>\n The term \u201cLuddite\u201d comes from the 19th-century protests of textile workers who raided English factories and destroyed the automatic sewing machines that would take their jobs. These protests were often violent clashes between workers and management, a labor conflict that feels increasingly relevant as the work that machines can do has grown from simple mechanical tasks to creative ideation and even what some of your less discerning Silicon Valley bros<\/a> deem passable \u201cart.\u201d To them, it might well be that, just as the text generated by a large language model would look like writing to someone who doesn\u2019t value writing as anything beyond a succession of words filling a page.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/image_8bc9bc.png\")
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