The internet known within China is a very different internet to the one known by the world at large. It is censored, regulated and structured quite differently. It is controlled and managed, rather than organic and sprawling. From the outside looking in, it feels like an entirely different beast, and to begin to understand it, you must first understand the conditions that formed it.

History

Mao Zedong was the founder of the People’s Republic of China and led the country from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. He developed Maoism, a variation of Marxism–Leninism. Following the beginning of the Chinese Civil War, he aided in the establishment of the Chinese Red Army and then proceeded to head the Land Reform Movement (土tǔ改gǎi), industrialisation via five-year plans, and launch the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (镇zhèn压yā反fǎn革gé命mìng运yùn动dòng). He led intervention in the Korean War and oversaw the Great Leap Forward (大Dà跃yuè进jìn) campaign from 1958 to 1962.

In 1966 he launched the Cultural Revolution, aiming to purge capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society. During this period, there was mass destruction of artefacts, a violent class struggle, and, notably relevant within the context of this article, his cult of personality.

Mao Zedong’s cult of personality was a propaganda campaign designed to elevate Mao’s status as a beacon of communist China. His image was widely distributed in portraits and badges, and every Chinese citizen was given ‘Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung’ (毛Máo主Zhǔ席xí语yǔ录lù), otherwise known as the Little Red Book, which they were expected to carry at all times and read from frequently.

Following Mao’s death, the Boluan Fanzheng program was launched, which translates in English to ‘Eliminating chaos and returning to normal’. As part of this program and subsequent efforts by Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang, and others, China began to repeal some of the Cultural Revolution’s changes.

However, some felt that this occurred too abruptly and moved too swiftly, giving people too much freedom too suddenly and causing them to act in pursuit of further liberties. This caused disputes which directly led to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. China, which had before the protests seen greater (but far from full) press freedom, fell suddenly back under intense censorship. After a few years, restrictions were relaxed somewhat – particularly after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 southern tour. However, media remained very much restricted.

China’s first interactions with the internet were as early as 1987, but it wasn’t until 1989 that it started to properly gain a footing, starting with inter-university contact, as most countries’ internet communications did. In 1994, China began to embrace the internet, becoming properly linked to the internet in April. The next year, citing economic opportunity, the basis of infrastructure and a national network were established.

China, being an extremely large country, took a while to gain proper country-wide infrastructure, with it taking until the early 2010s for proper connections to reach rural areas. For a brief while in the 2000s, there was a surprisingly wild and free web, with minimal oversight. Unfortunately, as the internet became established, and the web began to form, censorship shaped it. China began to block many international sites, preventing penetration into the Chinese market. Under Xi Jinping, censorship has been far stricter.

Unlike much of the rest of the world, where the global interconnectivity of the internet is emphasised, China emphasises ‘Internet Sovereignty’ (网wǎng络luò主zhǔ权quán) – the idea that the government should have complete control of the internet as it operates and is available within the country.

The Great Firewall

This sovereignty is achieved via what is widely referred to as the Great Firewall (防Fáng火huǒ长cháng城chéng), a reference to the Great Wall of China. It is the combined product of the various legislation and unofficial degrees paired with technological enforcement.

It is a complex and oppressive measure. It does not merely block offending URLs but goes to great lengths by resetting connections, performing DNS poisoning to direct to incorrect IP addresses, scanning the actual data in transit via deep packet inspection, enacting full IP blocks, performing man-in-the-middle certificate takeover attacks, and more. It is one of the most complex filtering systems deployed at scale. Some sites are let through the filter but in extremely degraded states in an effort to avoid the backlash of full blocks while still functionally preventing access.

All of China’s major telecommunications companies – China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile – are state-owned, meaning that their services are inherently under government jurisdiction, making circumvention extremely difficult. They’re choke points of internet traffic.

Many of these restrictions can be bypassed by means of VPNs which are legal, albeit with restrictions. VPN providers must obtain state approval and face imprisonment if they fail to do so. As such, much information can be accessed, but it is made difficult and consuming of money and time. Unfortunately Tor functions in a degraded state, requiring workarounds, and many more standard proxies are thwarted by the firewall. The friction is only growing as time progresses.

The Great Firewall is a large part of this, and its prevention of access to international services has determined China’s development during the Fourth Industrial Revolution by giving preference to domestic organisations. Not only is this positive for China’s local economy, but it is also beneficial for the government as it has greater control over domestic companies than international ones. The Great Firewall acts as both a protective trade barrier and an instrument of ideological control.

Restricted Topics

There are many factors of China that are heavily suppressed. Information about the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre is one of the more famous examples of censorship, but there is far more. In their 2025 world press index, Reporters Without Borders placed the People’s Republic at 178 out of 180, higher only than North Korea and Eritrea. Some major topics subject to censorship include:

• Taiwan

  Specifically, discussion of the country Taiwan as the independent country which it is, rather than as a part of China.

• Human Rights Abuse

  There are ongoing mass human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities who are held in concentration camps. Starting in 2014 under the guise of the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism and escalating in 2017 with the mass unlawful incarceration of some one million Uyghurs, it is widely regarded as the largest mass internment of ethnic and religious minority groups since the Second World War.

  There are also great and horrific human rights abuses in Tibet which are censored so heavily that the availability of reliable information is even impacted globally. Discussions of the human rights abuses or Tibetan independence are very heavily censored.

• Government Dissent

  Much criticism of the government is silenced, particularly anything which is related to or could lead to activism. It is clearly outlined in Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere (关Guān于yú当dāng前qián意yì识shí形xíng态tài领lǐng域yù情qíng况kuàng的de通tōng报bào), a document leaked by journalist Gao Yu. The ‘Seven Noteworthy Problems’ outlined in the document are:

  1. Promoting Western Constitutional Democracy: An attempt to undermine the current leadership and the socialism with Chinese characteristics system of governance.
  2. Promoting ‘universal values’ in an attempt to weaken the theoretical foundations of the Party’s leadership.
  3. Promoting civil society in an attempt to dismantle the ruling party’s social foundation.
  4. Promoting Neoliberalism, attempting to change China’s Basic Economic System.
  5. Promoting the West’s idea of journalism, challenging China’s principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to Party discipline.
  6. Promoting historical nihilism, trying to undermine the history of the CCP and of New China.
  7. Questioning Reform and Opening and the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

• COVID-19

  Less so now given that the peak of the pandemic is past, but China heavily restricted discussion of the coronavirus. It also restricted discussion about other outbreaks, such as SARS during the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak, which was also first identified in China.

This censorship has gradually gained a tighter grip around Hong Kong, which previously enjoyed a largely unrestricted internet, with the passing of the 2020 Hong Kong National Security Law (香Xiāng港gǎng国guó家jiā安ān全quán法fǎ) presenting a significant alteration to the digital landscape.

Different Services

Given that the internet within China is aggressively moderated and filtered, internet services external to the country which cannot be controlled and don’t align with regulatory requirements are often disrupted or blocked wholesale. Some major services that are blocked include Google, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Signal, Discord, the Internet Archive, TikTok, and ChatGPT. This is by absolutely no means a comprehensive list, and there are so many more sites and services blocked. News sites especially are aggressively blocked due to China’s minimal press freedom.

With a population in excess of a billion people (roughly 20% of all web users), China has a size such that it can support a more or less self-contained web, with its own systems and alternatives to global platforms. The Great Firewall’s disruption of global competitors has created a massive domestic tech ecosystem within the vacuum.

Many services have received direct Chinese versions, such as LinkedIn, which had a Chinese version titled 领lǐng英yīng from 2014 until 2021 and then a stripped-down jobs-only version called InCareer until 2023. In other cases, there are equivalents or services with similar functionality that take their place. Commonly, the functions of many apps are combined into a singular.

Global Platform	Chinese Equivalent
WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook	Weixin (微Wēi信xìn)
Twitter, Bluesky, Tumblr	Sina Weibo (新Xīn浪làng微wēi博bó)
Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok	Xiaohongshu (小Xiǎo红hóng书shū), Douyin (抖Dǒu音yīn)
Reddit	Baidu Tieba (百Bǎi度dù贴tiē吧ba), Douban (豆Dòu瓣bàn)
Quora	Zhihu (知Zhī乎hū)
Tinder, Bumble	Tantan (探Tàn探tan), Momo (陌Mò陌mo)
YouTube	Bilibili (哔Bì哩lī哔bì哩lī / BB站zhàn)
Netflix, Disney+, Hulu	iQIYI (爱Ài奇qí艺yì), Tencent Video (腾Téng讯xùn视shì频pín)
Twitch	Huya (虎Hǔ牙yá), Douyu (斗Dòu鱼yú)
Spotify, Apple Music	QQ Yinyue (QQQQ音yīn乐yuè), NetEase Cloud Music (网Wǎng易yì云yún音yīn乐yuè)
Google Search	Baidu Search (百Bǎi度dù搜sōu索suǒ)
Amazon, eBay	Taobao (淘Táo宝bǎo), JD.com (京Jīng东dōng)
Temu, Shein	Pinduoduo (拼Pīn多duō多duō)
Uber, Lyft	DiDi (滴Dī滴dī)
Google Maps	Gaode Maps / Amap (高Gāo德dé地dì图tú), Baidu Maps (百Bǎi度dù地dì图tú)
Yelp, TripAdvisor	Dianping (点Diǎn评píng)
LinkedIn	Maimai (脉Mài脉mài), BOSS Zhipin (BOSS直zhí聘pìn)
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude	DeepSeek (深Shēn度dù求qiú索suǒ), ERNIE Bot (文Wén心xīn一yī言yán)

The ‘web’ as it exists elsewhere, with lots of interconnected separate sites, is not the same web that exists in China. Like a more aggressive version of the consolidation of the global web into a few social media sites that many have been critical of. There are many sites, but they’re all scrutinised.

Another defining feature of this domestic ecosystem is the absolute dominance of live commerce. Unlike the West, where e-commerce and social media are generally distinct, platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, and Taobao Live merge short-form entertainment with instant purchasing. This has birthed a substantial industry of livestream anchors and a highly accelerated consumer web experience.

One of the most famous Chinese apps is Weixin (微Wēi信xìn), which operates globally as WeChat. Developed by juggernaut Tencent, Weixin/WeChat is arguably an operating system in and of itself. It is used by almost everyone in China, as well as in other countries like Malaysia, to the point that it is difficult to get by without it. It encompasses messaging, voice/video calls, payments, location sharing, social media functionality, mini-programs, delivery, transport, games, appointments, and just about everything else one could think of. It is well and truly an ‘everything app’.

Weixin is integrated with China’s mass surveillance systems and has very restrictive terms of service which align with government policies. All data is kept within the country. However, outside China, WeChat data is largely stored elsewhere, and different platform policies apply (unless interacting with someone within China). The convenience and difficulty of avoiding Weixin and similar ‘everything apps’ creates a walled garden that keeps users deeply entrenched in platforms the state can easily monitor.

Systematic Oversight

This monitoring is not a side effect of the technology but a core feature of its design. There are a number of restrictions and influences from China’s uniquely structured internet.

In addition to mass censorship, there is also mass surveillance. In late 2012, the real name system came about, mandating online accounts be linked to people’s identities. This was furthered in 2025, when the National Online Identity Authentication (国Guó家jiā网wǎng络luò身shēn份fèn认rèn证zhèng) system launched.

Often in the West you’ll hear jokes about China’s social credit system based on mistranslated details presented in poorly researched, sensationalist articles. There is no single, national numeric ‘social credit’ score assigned to people like a financial credit rating. Companies and individuals who ensure compliance are treated more favourably, and those that fail to or frequently violate regulations may be restricted from certain benefits. On a smaller level, companies and local governments sometimes award perks to people who take positive action, but this has minimal impact on daily life. Credit systems do exist, but they’re fragmented and not a nationwide value.

However, it is worth noting that judicial blocklists do carry severe real-world consequences, such as bans on purchasing high-speed rail or airline tickets, which often fuels the Western confusion. It is a shame that China’s social credit system as a whole is so pervasive a myth, given how ubiquitous surveillance and censorship are within the country by other means.

In 2025 a new regulation was passed which has made it so that influencers without verified credentials are banned from speaking on certain topics, including finance, law, medicine, and education, in an effort to reduce misinformation. Further legislation, such as the Cybersecurity Law, mandates data localisation and network operator compliance, legally binding technology companies to state surveillance apparatuses.

Online Culture

Like much of the world, China’s online culture is a combination of both local and global trends and culture. However, the language barrier and isolation of China from the rest of the globe’s internet do lead to a more separate digital zeitgeist. Much that does make it into China is interpreted differently or associated with different meanings, much like information that is known globally about goings-on within China is distorted. This even leads to humour, seen in instances like the aforementioned Western misconceptions about the social credit system which have become the basis of many jokes and online discussions.

Within China, internet users are commonly referred to as netizens (网wǎng民mín). There are many global memes which have translated over to China, and there are also China-specific versions, interpretations, and equivalents of popular memes. Memes reflect culture and what people are thinking about. There are some interesting cases, though, such as the Doge meme maintaining relevance thanks to commonly being available as an emoji and used in messages to indicate sarcasm or irony.

For example, Baozou comics (暴bào走zǒu漫màn画huà) take the place of Western rage comics. Where in the West someone might reply they’re ‘eating popcorn’ when drama occurs, the Chinese equivalent is ‘eating melon’ (吃Chī瓜guā). There are many equivalents to many English terms. GOAT, meaning Greatest of All Time, is roughly equivalent to YYDS, which stands for Yǒngyuǎn de shén and means ‘Forever God’. You also have 润Rùn学xué. Rùn (润) means ‘moist’ or ‘profitable’ and is spelt in pinyin like the English word ‘run’. As such, it is used to refer to leaving China and is featured in discussions of how to get overseas visas.

As is typical for memes, they are not just empty humour but also reflect society at large and the general thoughts of the populace. In this vein, comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie-the-Pooh has become quite the meme, though one that is heavily censored against. Automated filter systems easily detect direct references to disallowed topics, so anything sensitive is referred to with evasive manoeuvres such as homophones, historical allegories, and deliberate typos.

Artificial Intelligence

Chinese large language models will refuse to discuss censored events or criticise the government, instead following Chinese Communist Party narratives. Trying to reference censored events such as Tiananmen Square is restricted, as is drawing comparisons between Winnie-the-Pooh and Xi Jinping, China’s leader:

It is worth noting that this exchange was conducted in English. The language used to converse with AI models can influence their responses and determine the contents of their messages. It isn’t just DeepSeek which is censored, for heavy restrictions are present in other major models. Alibaba’s Qwen, Moonshot’s Kimi, Zhipu AI’s GLM, Xiaomi’s MiMo, and many more are censored.

In the face of more and more people relying on AI for information, this is critical. More critical, however, is the use of language models for more advanced, nuanced censorship. Tricky turns of phrase, or vague allusions to a topic, are increasingly unviable. Moderation passes with language models can detect negative government sentiment or anything pertaining to a restricted topic to an almost unavoidable degree. This emphasises the importance of local AI models to reduce the ability of governments and companies to censor and control, keeping information and technology free and democratised.

Unfortunately, there is the further issue of Chinese-managed models being used to sway sentiment online, presenting as normal users and astroturfing discussions to influence people and sow discord.

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China’s digital landscape is a version of the web that is not World Wide but is instead fractured along the lines of ideology and nationalism. It has evolved not with the web as it is generally known globally, but alongside it, building its own identity, rules, and customs. It is restricted and only becoming more restricted in time, keeping information from entering and a population from exiting. It is a digital silo, where the tools designed to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and information have instead been repurposed to define the boundaries of a sovereign, state-sanctioned truth.

I have a piece in the spring issue of Jacobin, on the decline of literacy and what might happen to politics once our minds are no longer intimately structured by the written word. Like all these essays, it quotes Walter Ong. Apparently, some of you people are unware that you can just go and read Walter Ong for yourselves, because as soon as the essay was published I received several thousand emails all saying the same thing, which is that you really wanted to read the piece but you didn’t have a subscription to Jacobin, and could I help you out? And I am going to help you out, but while we’re here—why don’t you have a subscription to Jacobin? Why are you missing out on news, analysis, and perspectives from the leading voices on the global left? Isn’t it time you fixed that? If you need any more inducement Numb at the Lodge readers can get four print issues for $10 by clicking this link. Here’s the piece.

In 1931, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria traveled to the foothills of the Alai Mountains, in the barren borderlands between Uzbekistan and Kirghizia, to find out how the locals thought. He was trying to prove the theory that ‘mental processes are social and historical in origin’: that not just the content of our thoughts, but the way we think, is determined by the kind of society we live in. The society he found in the Alais was very different to his own. In the dry hills, illiterate pastoralists kept cattle; in the isolated green valleys jeweling the hillsides, illiterate peasants grew cotton. For centuries, essentially no one here had been able to read or write. But that was changing. When Luria arrived, the Soviet government was busy forcing herders and peasants into new, regimented collective farms, where large numbers of rural people were being taught, for the first time, to read. He spent the next year among these people, bothering them with a series of annoying tests.

What Luria found was that just a few years of basic literacy education in an agricultural school had massive cognitive effects. In one of his early experiments, he showed people a group of geometrical figures. Complete and incomplete circles and triangles, squares and rectangles drawn with straight or dotted lines. He asked them to group the shapes together. Even if they didn’t have any training in geometry, nearly half of the peasants who’d learned to read sorted the shapes geometrically: squares with other squares, circles with other circles. Meanwhile, none of the illiterate subjects considered the shapes geometrically at all; they related them to objects.

One subject, Khamid, a 24-year-old woman from an isolated village, insisted that nothing could be grouped with an incomplete circle. ‘That should go by itself. That’s the Moon.’ When Luria tried to suggest that she group a square and a rectangle, she refused. ‘That’s a glass and that’s a drinking-bowl, they can’t be put together.’ Other subjects described the shapes as tents, bracelets, mountains, irrigation ditches, and stars.

When sorting objects, collective farm workers put a saw with a hammer, because they’re both tools, while peasants put a saw with a log. ‘The log has to be here too! If we’ll be left without firewood, we won’t be able to do anything.’ Luria tried presenting them with syllogisms. ‘In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North. What color are bears there?’ Every single person who had received any literacy education at all, even the ones Luria described as ‘barely literate,’ could easily answer. But people who hadn’t been exposed to the written word simply refused.

They consistently explained that since they’d never been to Novaya Zemlya, they couldn’t say what kind of bears they had there. One middle-aged villager called Rustam said that ‘If there was someone who had a great deal of experience and had been everywhere, he would do well to answer the question.’ Eventually, after repeated prodding, he said that while he’d never personally been to Siberia, ‘Tadzhibai-aka who died last year was there. He said that there were bears there, but he didn’t say what kind.’ Others, like thirty-seven-year-old Abdulrakhim, grew angry. ‘I’ve never seen one and hence I can’t say. That’s my last word. Those who saw can tell, and those who didn’t see can’t say anything!’

The most upsetting of Luria’s puzzles was a mathematical problem. He told his subjects that it took three hours to walk from their village to Vuadil, and six along the same road to Fergana: how long would it take to walk to Fergana from Vuadil? Again, every single one of the collective farm workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very well that Fergana was actually closer than Vuadil, and refused to answer. Luria kept saying that it was just a scenario, but the villagers kept insisting that they couldn’t entertain a scenario that contradicted actual reality. ‘No!’ one exploded. ‘How can I solve a problem if it isn’t so?’

Luria took pains to point out that these people weren’t remotely stupid. They were perfectly capable of thinking rationally and deductively, and they could make ‘excellent judgments about facts of direct concern to them.’ But they lived in an incredibly conservative world, with its walls closed tight around direct sensory experience. Meanwhile, even a cursory exposure to writing produces an entirely different kind of thought. It lives in a spooky realm of ideal objects and useless categories, where you can talk confidently about invisible bears and measure distances even when they’re going the wrong way. But what we think of as politics seems to depend on this stuff, and revolutionary politics in particular. The lived experience of poverty or oppression isn’t enough; you need to be able to situate your own life in terms of something bigger, and imagine an entirely separate way of living that doesn’t currently exist. In 1919, launching the Soviet mass literacy program, Lenin had declared that ‘without literary, there can be no politics. There can only be rumours, gossip, and prejudice.’ Any transformative politics is, in some sense, the art of solving a problem even when it isn’t so.

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Luria had a basically progressive model of psychological development. Thinking based on abstractions is more advanced than thinking based on direct experience; as time moves on the advanced way of doing things will obviously overtake the more backwards. Which is why he had to go to the furthest barren fringes of the old Russian Empire to find people who had never been exposed to writing. But the villages he visited hadn’t always been a backwater. A thousand years ago, this land in the foothills of the Alai Mountains had been one of the great centers of world civilization. In his notes, he mentioned that he was walking in the homeland of scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, and poets like Ulugh Beg, al-Biruni, and ibn Sina. The illiterate herders and peasants were living in the ruins of a sophisticated literary culture that had, for the most part, vanished from the world.

Today, the same thing seems to be happening to us.

The kids can’t read. I don’t mean that they’re incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words, although an increasing proportion of them can’t do that either. In the US, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since. 40% of fourth-graders have ‘below basic’ reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any meaning from a written text; the number of illiterate students has been rising every year since 2014. But even when students can perform the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make their minds start working in textlike ways. It’s an entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes, and when they come to the written word they come to it from the outside.

This is not just happening to the impoverished or the disenfranchised; professors at elite universities increasingly report that their students are no longer capable of reading an entire novel, or even a thirty-page extract; some of them have difficulty making it through a single sentence. Instead of reading and understanding anything, they’re willing to pay $300,000 for the privilege of dumping an entire text into ChatGPT and submitting its response as an essay.

Probably the most alarming index of this was a study in which a group of English majors at two well-regarded public universities in Kansas were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening. Only 5% of the students could produce a ‘detailed, literal understanding’ of the text. The rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch of half-understood phrases, or could not comprehend anything at all.

One particular stumbling block was the novel’s third sentence, which describes London in December: ‘As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’ The students found this figurative language impossible; they could only read the sentence with the assumption that Dickens was describing the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile in Victorian London. One respondent glossed it like this: ‘It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another. So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these characters have met in the street.’ The study assessed this person as a ‘competent’ rather than a ‘problematic’ reader, because they’d at least managed to form an idea of what the text meant, even if it was wrong.

Bleak House is not an elitist text; not so long ago, it was mass entertainment. When Dickens visited America in 1867, over 100,000 people paid to see him speak. Delighted crowds mobbed him in the streets. Today, a person studying English literature at degree level responds to his work in essentially the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the 1930s, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality.

The situation is not likely to get better. Every advance in communications technology creates a new generation of people progressively more divorced from the abstractions of writing. In the late twentieth century, television was bad enough to inspire jeremiads like Neil Postman’s Entertaining Ourselves to Death. Now, it seems almost benign; our supposed cultural elites keep congratulating themselves on their ability to watch an entire episode of a prestige drama without distractedly poking at their phones, as if Mad Men were a kind of penitential mental gruel. I’m old enough to remember the first time I ever went online, and a lot of my contemporaries seem to have the same story. They loved to read as children, but mysteriously lost interest in books around the time that permanent broadband connections started appearing in every home.

Today’s undergraduates, meanwhile, were born around the same time as the iPhone was released, were about twelve years old for the beginning of the pandemic, and fifteen for the launch of ChatGPT. They can’t parse complex sentences, but at least they can identify words. What about the cohort who don’t have a gaping hole in their education at twelve, but at six? What happens when the babies currently being raised by AI-powered dolls grow up? When it’s their turn to govern the world?

This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks. This is what lies behind a lot of the growing liberal panic over the decline of literacy. For a growing chorus of people who write in the Atlantic, we’re recoiling into pre-Enlightenment conditions of absolute domination. A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets.

(Meanwhile, a lot of Silicon Valley ideologues agree, they just think this is a good thing. In their future, the vast majority of people will be wireheads, hooked up to an AI-powered pleasure machine that will keep them in a state of permanent hedonic bliss. At which point democracy becomes impossible, the masses are evicted from history, and a natural elite emerges to rule the world. The reactionary ideologues assume that they’ll be part of that literate elite, and not plugged in to the infinite porn machine. Given how many of their leading lights have already developed AI psychosis, I wouldn’t be so sure.)

I don’t think these people are wrong to fear an undemocratic post-literate future. You can already see it taking shape, and it isn’t pleasant. For a while, in an earlier phase of social media, it looked like everyone would be getting their worldview from frantic contextualized six-second soundbites. What’s actually happened is much worse. The most influential political figures among young people are now streamers: people like Nick Fuentes or Hasan Piker, who talk extemporaneously about politics into a webcam, sometimes for sixteen hours a day. It doesn’t matter if you notionally agree with one of these people; if you’re accustomed to written language, everything they say will sound aggressively stupid.

Streamers repeat themselves. They are incapable of saying anything once; they have to rhythmically fixate over the exact same phrase six or seven times before moving on. As Walter Ong points out in Orality and Literacy, this is normal in illiterate societies. Unlike writing, ‘the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered. Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer on track.’ (It doesn’t seem to matter that on a stream the utterance doesn’t actually vanish; you can go back and hear what was just said again. Clearly, no one does. Without text to structure it, we revert to mindless repetition, which is ‘in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity.’) Relatedly, oral discourse tends to be low-resolution. Like epic poets four thousand years ago, streamers rely on formulas. ‘Not the soldier, but the brave soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak.’ There’s nothing in the world that isn’t already known, that can’t be made instantly legible by assimilating it to some stereotype. Post-literate culture is deeply incurious.

Still, as miserable as this stuff might be, it’s strange that a lot of liberals tend to automatically associate literacy with careful, judicious, reasonable politics, and non-literacy with arbitrariness and unreason. In fact, the written word is a kind of madness. It tears you out of your actual context and deposits you in a world of bodiless abstractions. Lewis Mumford called it the ‘general starvation of the mind,’ in which actual sensuous knowledge of the world is replaced by ‘mere literacy, the ability to read signs.’ In late medieval Europe, the printing press and the beginnings of mass literacy didn’t produce an age of sober reason, but an enormous explosion in all forms of mysticism and esotericism, astrology, divination, witchcraft, Neoplatonist sects and charismatic religious cults, some of them peaceful, some of them murderous. It’s not hard to see why. These doctrines usually centered around the idea that material facts are just an echo of mental processes; they would have made a lot of sense to people who’d just been traumatically ripped out of physical reality by the strange magic of the written word. At the same time, as large numbers of people started to read the Bible for themselves for the first time, there was a wave of mass insurrections. These were revolutionary responses to the deeply unjust feudal and clerical system of the time, but they were also deranged. After radical Anbaptists seized Münster in 1534, they abolished money and socialized all private property. They also gave political power to whoever could most convincingly claim to have received a revelation from God. Eventually one of these was declared king, at which point he started renaming the days of the week and other people’s children, enforcing polygamy on pain of death, and trying to bring about the end of the world.

Even once the initial shock of expanded literacy faded, it could still produce bizarre and destructive ideologies. Modern nationalism would have been impossible without the dislocation of the written word. Your community is no longer made up of the people who actually surround you; it’s an entirely virtual construct, consisting of people you’ve never met in your life, but whose spoken language has been similarly homogenized by the mass-production of printed texts.

When Alexander Luria traveled to Uzbekistan, something terrible was happening just over the border in the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The Soviet authorities had decided to liberate the Kazakh people from feudalism by confiscating their cattle, and forcing herders to join new collective farms in lands entirely unsuitable for agriculture. As a result, in the three years from 1930 to 1933, maybe more than a third of the Kazakh population died. Some died of starvation, some died trying to flee across the desert, some were shot by border guards or the police. It was a disaster, but a disaster that could never have been produced by the backward peasants and herders Luria interviewed in the Alai Mountains. They didn’t have the necessary abstractions; they were too blinded by how things actually are. It could only have been the highly advanced and literate people who had sent him there.

One result of the Soviet Union’s mass literacy campaign is that today, Russians are essentially the only truly literate people left. The vast majority of Russians read regularly, more than anywhere else in the world. The rate is lower among young people, but not by much. Essentially everyone in the country is intimately familiar with the great works of Russian and world literature; they can all talk for hours, with sensitivity and insight, about the genius of Pushkin and Chekhov. But somehow, political culture in Russia is not saner or more democratic than in the mentally enfeebled West. If anything, the opposite. It’s possible that the great works of literature don’t actually do anything politically at all. They don’t make us better people or freer citizens. Their value exists in an entirely different world.

Post-literacy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type. Marshall McLuhan imagined a peaceable ‘global village,’ in which electronic technology gently snuffs out all the constant ideological warfare of the Gutenberg age, and integrates the entire world under ‘the spell and incantation of the tribe and the family.’ It hasn’t quite worked out like that. He thought electronic media would be primarily tactile, which is understandable; he was writing in an age when a computer was made of punch-cards and magnetic tape. He couldn’t have known how aggressively audiovisual computers would end up being.

Our illiterate future is unlikely to be peaceful. But political and ideological conflict is already waning, being replaced with something much more intimate. In every developed country, the last few decades have seen a massive political polarization among gender lines. Young women are swinging hard to the left; young men are swinging even harder to the right. A lot of people still seem to think that this is because we disagree more about politics than ever before, but actually it’s the opposite. Politics is losing its content; being on the left has come to mean being a girl, and being on the right is just another way of saying being a boy. Teenage boys watch esoteric Nazi edits for the same reason they used to pull girls’ hair; as a way of working through the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. Right-wing economic policy is now framed as a way of punishing women, reducing their social status until they’re willing to turn back the clock on liberation. In some parts of the left, anything can be justified as long as it seems to reduce the power of men. When we can no longer conceive of a political whole, this is what will be left: all struggles will be powered by outright sexual sadism.

Still, I think McLuhan was right that the post-literate age will have more in common with primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that produced it. After writing, we will once again live in a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But now, our direct sensory experience won’t be of the things that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones. It’s likely that before very long, absolutely all those images will be generated by AI. In the same way that a Tolstovian peasant has a deep, spiritual knowledge of the land, we will have a deep, spiritual knowledge of Tung Tung Tung Sahur. The politics of the future will be cautious, conservative, pragmatic, and unadventurous, grounded in empirical experience instead of fanatical ideologies. We will no longer try to think outside of the things we can see. It’s just that absolutely nothing we see will be real.

CT scans of four coffee beans, from unroasted green through French roast, reveal how density, porosity, and internal structure change at each stage of roasting.

There’s “The $725.32 Free Bread” at Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas, where, Caity Weaver observes, “my black napkin is of a material lovelier than my dress.” The “big and bulbous” dinner rolls at Lambert’s, in Foley, Alabama, which have the “tranquil hue of hot-dog buns” and are thrown at patrons by a staffer. The Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits. Weaver’s latest food odyssey reads like a maximalist version of her legendary TGI Fridays “Endless Appetizers” feast. May she live to eat for a thousand years.

Here is where the notion for the undertaking came from: Tucked within the viscera of the continental United States is a restaurant that gives away superb free bread. Every time I have eaten it (before this past year, three times total), I have said aloud (to my husband, who did not care), “This is the best free restaurant bread in America.” The thought made me feel the way you do when you realize you were just a half a moment away from being plowed by a car, and were spared only by a chance nanosecond of dawdling before stepping into the street: giddy and flabbergasted and grateful to be alive. It seemed incredible, but also possible, that this really could be the best free restaurant bread in America. What if it was? Even more dizzyingly, what if it wasn’t? What if—unfathomable—someone else was giving away an even better bread for free? The thought drove me crazy. I begged for the opportunity to investigate.

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This week’s question comes to us anonymously:

What would you say to someone who proclaims, “I want to be a donut maker,” but has never actually made a single donut in their life?

You say “That’s awesome. What can I do to help?”

Look, I’m going to be totally honest with you. Every week, I go through my bin of newsletter questions, looking for something I want to answer, and I get incredibly depressed. The vast majority of them are from people getting laid off, or being in their sixth month of looking for work, or justifiably freaking out because they heard layoffs are coming to their company. It’s a world of despair and a world of shit which, sadly, only appears to be picking up steam.

Meanwhile, half the people I know are wondering how they’re going to pay their rent and go to the doctor, and the other half are proclaiming this the “Era of Abundant Intelligence.” (For who?!?) All they need is half the world’s money (the half not going to bombing school children), half the world’s land, half the world’s water, all of the world’s microchips, and they will eventually deliver [checks notes] something in exchange for all this, just don’t ask them what because it’s really hard to say, but it’s right around the corner.

(I promise this newsletter will turn positive soon.)

Meanwhile, if I am stupid, sad, or desperate enough to go on LinkedIn for a minute, it’s a sea of people writing letters in praise of the leopard, proclaiming it has always been their dream to work for the leopard, asking the leopard not to eat their face, or hoping to get one of the few jobs at the face-eating factory where they feel like they’ll be safe from the face-eating leopard, which of course they’re not. So, yes, there are a fair amount of questions in my inbox from people upset that the leopard ate their face even though they were happy to help the leopard eat everyone else’s face.

(Or I may spiral out of control.)

Seriously though, era of abundant intelligence for who?!?

Let’s talk about your friend who wants to be a donut maker. Because they may be the smartest person here. First off, everyone loves a donut. Secondly, no one has ever reacted badly to the news that someone is making donuts. But most importantly for us today—not a single human being has ever been born with the ability to make donuts. Like all skills, you learn it, you do it badly for a while, then you do it better. Some people will get amazing at it, and most people will reach some level of competency. So while there’s an incredibly slim chance that your friend will become the world’s greatest donut maker, there’s an incredibly high possibility that your friend will learn how to make good, even great, donuts. Which you will benefit from. And which you should be incredibly grateful for.

For the last week, Erika and I have been glued to Artemis updates on the NASA site, because it’s become such a joy to watch people be good at something, and enjoy doing it, and all of this while being incredibly human about it. Seriously, these people sound positively giddy to be in space! And they’re rocking it. It feels like such a luxury to watch these people do their thing, and do it well, and with joy, at a time when we’re surrounded by a government who is very bad at what they do, and does it in the cruelest way possible, and an industry that’s trying to convince us that we are incapable of doing the things we love, and we’re doing them inefficiently anyway. (Because the problem was always that we weren’t breaking the world fast enough.)

Competence should not be a luxury.

Competence should not be something that we look at with nostalgia.

We’re lucky that we get to watch the Artemis crew do their thing, which they can do because they practiced doing it a thousand times. And you know that they made a lot of bad donuts, before they finally made a good donut. You know there was a Day One of learning to be an astronaut, just as there’s a Day One of learning to be a donut maker, or learning to be a designer, dentist, farmer, or teacher. And the only way to get to Day Thousand is to start at Day One, do it 999 more times, and get not just better, but confident enough that you decide you can do it in the confines of space. Confident enough that you can say to yourself and to everyone around you that you want to be a donut maker.

Meanwhile a friend who’s deep into a job interview is being asked to bring a passport to their next scheduled remote interview because their skillset shows a level of competence that has the potential employer worried they might be interviewing a deepfake. With one hand they force the slop down our throats. With the other hand they defend against us using the tools against them. Human competence has become a source of distrust. If you don’t trust the results of the tool, stop demanding we use it.

The era of abundant intelligence is actually the era of abundant theft. First they stole your work, then they stole the confidence you needed to do the work. This is violence.

Your friend is going to make some pretty crappy donuts to start. That’s to be expected. And then the day will come when they’ve gotten all the crappy donuts out of their system and they’ll hand you a good donut. I think you’ll be genuinely happy for your friend when this happens. And for yourself, which is fair.

But can’t you just get donuts at the corner bodega or at the donut shop? Yes, you can. And they are good. Donuts are good at every price point. From the waxy little chocolate ones at gas stations, to the funky ones you can buy from someone with a liberal arts degree and a polycule at Voodoo Donuts in Portland, to the boujie made-to-order (lord) donuts at Coffee Movement in SF, all donuts are good. (Bob’s Donuts are the best.) But your friend doesn’t want to buy donuts. Your friend wants to be a donut maker. And that is a very different thing.

Human beings crave making things. We make things out of wood. We make things out of wool. We make things out of steel. We make things out of folded paper. We make things out of flour, salt, and sugar. We make zines. We 3D-print whistles. We draw. We paint. We make instruments out of brass so we can make sounds. There is no more flexible word in the English language than “make.” We can make donuts, we can make plans, we can make someone dinner. We can make our cities more walkable. We can make bike lanes. We can make it around the moon. We can even make up our minds. Making is an act of sharing, it’s an act of using our joy, our labor, or expertise, in the service of adding to what’s here. Hopefully, in the service of improving what’s there. We make things so that we can bond with others.

And while the sloplords might reply to this by telling me that they enjoy making money, I’d happily reply that the making is actually done with our labor. It’s not the making that drives them, it’s the theft of labor. The theft of joy. And now the theft of competence. You can hear it in their language. They do not make. They disrupt. They extract. They colonize. Their joy is not in the giving, but in the taking. They are so broken, their only recourse is to attempt to break everything else around them. In their psychosis, they call this abundance.

I know very little about your friend, in fact all I know is that they want to be a donut maker and they’ve never made a single donut in their life. From this I can safely extrapolate that your friend isn’t currently a donut maker. I can also reasonably extrapolate that whatever your friend is currently doing isn’t what they want to be doing. And from there I can go out on a limb a little bit, from extrapolation to conjecture and guess that your friend isn’t happy doing what they’re currently doing. Happy people don’t generally dream about doing something else.

Turns out the Era of Abundant Intelligence isn’t coinciding with an Era of Abundant Happiness.

And here’s the thing about donuts: you want one. And the more I mention donuts the more you want one. Maybe you’re thinking of a custard donut, or maybe you’re thinking of a pink frosted donut with sprinkles, or maybe you’re thinking of an old-fashioned, or maybe you’re thinking of a gluten-free donut because everyone deserves donuts, but no one has ever had to be convinced to eat a donut. (The harder part is stopping, trust me.) Donuts are not inevitable, they are anticipated. When you make something you love, and other people also love, and it brings about as much joy as a donut does, there’s very little convincing that needs to happen. No one needs to declare that it’s the Era of Abundant Donuts because it’s apparent anytime you walk into a donut shop. The result of human competence, human labor, human joy, all laid out on baking sheet after baking sheet. Boston Cream. Glazed. Powdered. Chocolate Sprinkle. Jelly. Crullers. These are real. They exist. And they’re fucking delicious.

Trust that we are all closer to a good donut shop than we will ever be to AGI.

Trust that we are all closer to a good donut shop than we will ever be to AGI, and we should be taking full advantage of what is close to us, and what is possible, and what brings us joy. And that when the sloplords tell us that the thing we need might be right around the corner, maybe consider that they’re right after all. If there’s a donut shop around the corner.

We are in the Era of Abundant Donuts. If we want it. We should want it. Because a donut is amazing, and it’s right there for the taking.

I hope your friend succeeds in becoming a donut maker. I hope their donuts are amazing. I hope there are lines around the clock for their donuts. I hope you end up helping them at the donut shop and loving it so much that you decide you want to become a donut maker too. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s not the donuts that get your attention as much as it is your friend’s joy. Maybe you decide you want the joy, but your joy is found in something else. Maybe it’s making tacos, or opening a bookstore, or knitting, or opening a bar, or designing shoes.

I hope that when this happens someone says “That’s awesome. What can I do to help?”

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🙋 Got a question? Ask it. I will try to answer it.

📣 Trust me when I tell you that you are competent. But they may have stolen your confidence. I can help you get it back. I’ve got a few seats left for the upcoming Presenting w/Confidence workshop. You should grab one.

📕 My new book, How to Die (and other stories), is actually uplifting as fuck and you should get a copy. And if you’re in The Bay Area, come see me and Annalee Newitz talk about it at Booksmith on May 11!

🧺 Gilly & Billy enamel pins are back in stock.

🏳️‍⚧️ Fix Your Heart pins are here. 10 pins for $20, with $5 from each sale going to Trans Lifeline.

🍉 The ceasefire is a lie and Israel is insane. Please donate what you can to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

Here is a section of the Marzano Focused Teacher Evaluation Model, one of many popular frameworks for describing effective teaching.

Whether you use the Marzano model or something else, this is common advice in schools. Post the learning goal. Reference the learning goal throughout the lesson. Make sure students can explain the learning goal.

I think this is unhelpful advice.

Working Memory

Memory is the residue of thought.1 One of the core challenges of teaching is that the place where humans think, our working memory, has limited capacity. To maximize learning, teachers need to be deliberate with what students are thinking about. To use the language of cognitive load theory, extraneous load on working memory makes learning less likely.

My argument in this post is that all the hullaballoo about learning goals can end up being extraneous load on working memory. The idea that teachers should constantly reference learning goals and that students should, at any point in the lesson, be able to state the learning goal, is simply not reasonable given human cognitive architecture. Students cannot hold all of that information in their minds while also thinking hard about the stuff we want them to learn.

One qualifier here. I’m not saying that we should avoid telling students what we’re learning, or that we should march students into class and give them a series of tasks with no purpose or explanation. My argument is that the way we communicate those ideas with students should be conscious of the limits of working memory.

Circumference

Ok here’s example one. Let’s say I’m teaching students to find the circumference of a circle. I might start the lesson by saying, “Today we’re going to learn how to calculate something new as part of our work with circles.” I would avoid mentioning circumference. Students don’t know what that means yet. Then, the first thing I do in this lesson is to practice working with radius and diameter of circles. Draw a circle with a radius of 3 inches. If a circle has a radius of 10 inches, what is its diameter? Etc. I would tell students that we’re beginning with a review of radius and diameter because they’ll need to be able to convert between them later in the lesson. Here I am laser-focused on radius and diameter. I’m not introducing anything extra. I’m trying to make sure students are good to go with those ideas, checking for understanding and addressing any issues that come up.

Then I would introduce the idea of circumference with a bunch of examples and non-examples. Again, laser focus here: my goal is to help students understand what the word circumference means and why it can be useful. I’ll communicate that thinking about circumference is our main goal for the day, but I don’t want to get hung up on questions about how to find circumference yet. I’m not worried about whether a student can state the full learning objective for the lesson. I’m trying to make sure students understand the meaning of the word “circumference.”

Later in the lesson I’ll show students how to find circumference and we’ll practice a bit. This is hard! Students need to remember pi, they need to convert from radius to diameter if necessary, they’re using a calculator, they need to remember to write the units. Students are often focused on the calculation and lose track of the bigger picture. That’s totally normal. If you walk into my lesson and ask students what they’re learning, they might say they aren’t sure. That’s a reality of the human mind: students’ working memory is busy with the calculations, and they’ve lost the bigger picture.

To some teachers this is mindless calculation or memorization. I disagree. Part of learning circumference is a bit of practice to get the basic muscle memory for the calculation. We should expect that students will lose the forest for the trees, focusing on the calculation rather than what it represents. Once they gain a bit of confidence with the calculation, it’s my job to help everyone step back, think about what that calculation means, and connect it to everything we were doing earlier in the lesson. This is the part where I emphasize our learning goal and help students see the bigger picture.

I want to be clear: students should understand the learning goal by the end of the lesson, and I should also communicate to students the purpose of each part of the lesson along the way. Where I disagree with the conventional wisdom is that I don’t want to spend a bunch of time reading the learning goal at the start of the lesson, restating it multiple times, and making sure students can articulate the goal at any point during class. All of that feels like a distraction from the math I want students thinking about along the way.

Two-Step Equations

Here’s another example. Let’s say I want students to solve two-step equations, like 2x + 1 = 11. At the start of class I’ll tell students that we’re learning about a new type of equation today. I won’t stress about “two-step equations” — students might not know what those are yet. Often a goal for this lesson would be written something like “solve two-step equations of the form ax + b =c or ax - b = c where a, b, and c are whole numbers.” That’s a ton of extraneous information. Students don’t need to know the definition of whole numbers or parse what ax + b = c means before launching the lesson.

Again, I would start the lesson with some review and practice of prior knowledge. We would practice equations like 2x = 10 and x + 1 = 11 and lots of other similar equations. We would also practice evaluating expressions like 2x + 1 where x = 5. I would explain to students that we’re practicing these skills because we’ll need them to solve more complicated equations, but that’s it. I don’t want students worried about what those equations look like or what the larger objective is, I want to focus on one-step equations.

Then I introduce two-step equations. Again, I’m not worried about stating the learning goal here. What I want students thinking about is the connection between the one-step equations we were just solving and the new equation I’m showing them. How is 2x + 1 = 11 similar to x + 1 = 11? What happens after I subtract 1 from both sides of each equation? What’s left, and how do we solve that equation? Ok, what if the equation is 2x + 3 = 11? What’s different? I want student thinking laser-focused on my questions, and the connections between one problem and the next. I do not care if they can state the learning goal. That is extraneous load.

Later in the lesson we’ll look at equations with subtraction. Again, I don’t want to say, “hey students, our goal is to solve two-step equations of the form ax + b = c or ax - b = c. Look, we’re about to meet our objective!” This part of the lesson is tricky. Why do we sometimes add and sometimes subtract when solving equations? That’s a hard concept. I want students thinking about the meaning of those operations, not trying to parse the meaning of the learning goal.

As the lesson nears the end, I will step back and help students see what they’ve learned and name these equations as “two-step equations.” But I want to wait until students get some fluency with the math, so they have space in their working memory to see both the forest and the trees.

The Pitfalls of Learning Goals

In any class there will be some students who are more confident with the relevant prior knowledge than others. Some students will arrive to class already fluent with diameter and radius, or proficient with one-step equations. Others will be a bit shaky. Those more fluent students have extra space in their working memory. They can hear a learning goal at the start of class and repeat it back to you throughout the lesson. The students who don’t have that fluency simply do not have the cognitive capacity to do so. Their working memory is busy thinking about what we want them to learn, as it should be.

It’s easy to get this backwards. You might observe that stronger students can keep track of the learning goal, and think that you need to put more emphasis on the learning goal so that all students can keep track of it. That gets the causation backwards. Students aren’t learning because they can keep track of the learning goal. They can keep track of the learning goal because they already have a lot of the skills we want to teach.

I understand where all the emphasis on learning goals comes from. It’s easy as a teacher to lose track of the goal ourselves and end up planning a bunch of activities that don’t have a clear purpose. Every part of a lesson should contribute to student learning.

Also, we should absolutely tell students what they are going to learn. If nothing else, it’s a basic courtesy. My basic framework is to tell students what they’ll be learning at the beginning of the lesson, but use student-friendly language rather than stating a formal learning goal. During the lesson, I’m focused on managing working memory load, connecting new learning to prior knowledge, and making sure students understand what I want them to learn from each chunk of the lesson. By the end of the lesson, the learning goal should be clear to students.

There are all sorts of pitfalls of an emphasis on learning goals. Posting learning goals can become an exercise in compliance: the principal comes around and makes sure the learning goal is written on the board because that’s an easy thing to observe for, never mind whether or not students are learning. I’m not required to do that in my current job but I have been in the past. It always feels like a bit of theater where we go through the motions without any emphasis on whether students are learning. There’s opportunity cost here: all the energy a school spends chasing teachers around and telling them to write the learning goal on the board could be spent on something else.2

Another pitfall is that not every element of a lesson has to connect to a single learning goal. I start and end every class with a bit of mixed retrieval practice. Twice a week we practice fact fluency. Those aren’t tied to the day’s learning goal and that’s fine. I do have clear goals for what I want to accomplish during those times, and I communicate those goals to students. It just isn’t part of one big goal for the lesson.3

My real issue is that, in my experience, an emphasis on learning goals focuses on surface features rather than the substance of learning. Thinking drives learning. Everything I do in the classroom is meant to get students thinking. At best, all of this stuff about learning goals feels like a distraction from thinking. At worst, it can actively interfere with student thinking by overloading working memory at the wrong time.