ABSTRACT
When Facebook and other social media platforms care about our psychological well-being, how worried should we be? Their business model demands our presence and seeks to control our absence. By again examining the digitalisation of education, this chapter explores the vicissitudes of (inter)subjectivity when we are continually nudged not to leave the digital premises and be ever present on the screen. What happens when the traditional blackboard is replaced by the digital whiteboard? What happens if education becomes screenless and we directly download knowledge into our brains? This is what led Slavoj Žižek to proclaim that AI signalled the ‘end of humanity as we know it’. By discussing the digital educational platform ClassDojo and the parenting app BabyBrains, I argue that parents are turned into bots that execute specific tasks set by hidden algorithms (informed primarily by mainstream neuropsychology). Regarding the question of where this leaves children, I conclude that children’s little absences are brought under totalitarian digital control. After arguing that this is where the school as a separate institution disappears, the chapter concludes by exploring whether virtuality represents a regression to the medieval spectacle, and asks if we should oppose the elimination of screens in the digital era.
