ORIGINAL ARTICLES

Hacking the MOOC: Towards a Postdigital Pedagogyof Critical Hope

Joel Lazarus1

Published online: 3 August 2019# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

AbstractThis article contributes to a praxis of critical hope by combining recent critical politicaleconomic (CPE) analyses of postdigital education with the inspiring experimentalpractices emerging from the new field of critical digital pedagogy (CDP). I argue thatCDP offers hope to educators looking for practical ways beyond capitalist exploitationand alienation, but lacks the analytical foundations needed to contribute to the libera-tion of our ‘general intellect.’ I highlight the emergence of the Free/Libre Open-SourceSoftware (FLOSS) movement and ‘hacker class’ as exemplars of a more dialecticallyconscious praxis. Conversely, I encourage CPE scholars of the postdigital to contributeto developing both intellectual tools for understanding our position within capitalismand practical tools for hacking for our liberation. Throughout the article, I use ahistorical materialist lens to emphasise that we can identify the conditions of andelaborate the strategies for achieving our emancipation in the dialectic of the histori-cally specific contradictions generated by specific class antagonisms. It is in thisdialectic that we find a critical hope.

Keywords Historical materialism . Dialectic . Postdigital . Critical political economy.

Critical digital pedagogy.MOOC . Critical hope

Introduction

Is it possible to use the implementation of TEL [technologically enhancedlearning] in the University to reveal the mechanics of expropriation and alienationand to develop alternatives? (...) It is possible to use pedagogic innovation toliberate time and sociability from Capital? If so, can this be enacted co-

Postdigital Science and Education (2019) 1:391–412https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-019-00063-w

* Joel Lazarus

1 Bristol, UK

operatively? Moreover, what is the role of techniques and technologies inrehabilitating academic labour’s collective, social power? (Hall 2016: 1006)

Recent years have seen a flourishing of historical materialist scholarship in the broadfield of the critical political economy (CPE) of knowledge production. I refer here inparticular to work on the CPE of ‘academic labour’ and of ‘digital labour’ and theircombination by scholars analysing capital’s recent expansion into the realm of educa-tional technologies (cf. Winn 2015a, 2015b; Fuchs and Sevignani 2013; Fuchs andSandoval 2014; Hall 2014, 2015). What underpins this scholarship is a fundamentalontology of capital itself as a historical agent pursuing a process of monomaniacal,ever-expanding, and interminable self-valorisation through the subsumption of evermore realms of social and natural life within the logic and circuits of its accumulation(Marx 1990). At the same time, by emphasising its historicity, historical materialismrecognises capitalism’s contingency—there was a past before it and there will be afuture beyond it. It does this through a dialectical ontology (and subsequent method-ology) that, beyond crude cause and effect, identifies not just a mode of production, buta social system, in perpetual motion and transformation, a system of dynamic interac-tions driven by structural antagonisms. These antagonisms generate contradictions thatinevitably instantiate crises. Historical materialist scholarship, then, also illuminates thepolitical economic mechanisms and the nature of those crises, and the correspondingopportunities for emancipation they present. Above all, in this regard, rather thanpositing any vulgar determinism, historical materialism shows that it is we, the humanbeings enslaved within capital’s logic and circuits, who ourselves already possess thecollective power to transcend our enslavement by channelling the growing power of co-operation that capital drives towards social rather than private ends (Postone 1993).Within a historical materialist ontology, then, be it the axe, abacus, accounting book, oralgorithm, technology is understood as a tool for both oppression and freedom and acentral site of social struggle within this capital-labour antagonism (Marx 1990: Ch15;Feenberg 1999).

Capital is ‘value in motion’,1 causing ‘all that is solid’ to ‘melt into air’ (Marx1992a: 255; Marx and Engels 2002: 4). And yet, while capital itself is in constantmetamorphosis, its essential nature, and the essential nature of capitalist society,remains unchanged. The social product, and thus society and our very ‘species being’itself, is wrought asunder by its separation into use value and exchange value and theconsequent establishment and expansion of the law of exchange value over use value asthe motive for production (Marx 1992b: 391). Thus, it remains that the historical formof the commodity constitutes a slow but accelerating, and inexpressibly violent, atomicfission generative of alienation, suffering, desecration, and death on a planetary scale. Itis from these robust ontological and methodological foundations that historical mate-rialist scholars continue to contribute the richest analyses of new relations of knowledgeproduction within the rapidly transforming context of what is referred to within thisjournal as the ‘postdigital’—the subsumption of life itself within digital technology anda ‘digitalist’ rationality, and the naturalisation of this process (Jandrić et al. 2018; Knox2019: 3; Fuller and Jandrić 2019: 215).

1 Ben Fowkes’ translation in the Penguin edition reads ‘value in process’ (Marx 1992a). Here, to express thedynamism I seek to emphasise, I select the translation ‘value in motion’ offered on www.marxists.org.

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The generation of such invaluable critical scholarship is praiseworthy enough.Yet, as Karl Marx infamously noted, to be a truly critical scholar is not merely to‘interpret the world’; it is ‘to change it’ (Marx 1969: Thesis no. 11). Who am I tojudge the extent to which individual scholars fulfil this element of ‘critical’?Working within universities in which workloads exceed capacities, pressures topublish are incessant, and dualist separations of thought and action areinstitutionalised makes this fulfilment all the more arduous. Indeed, evoking thespirit (spectre!) of Marx’s final thesis on Feuerbach, Mackenzie Wark goes so faras to describe all critical theory as ‘hypocritical’ to the extent that it ‘questionsunequal modes of knowledge production and yet participates in them’ (Wark inJandrić 2017: 108). Nonetheless, being practically involved in constructing thealternatives that such scholarship points to remains our urgent historical task. It iswith excitement, then, that we should greet the emerging field of ‘critical digitalpedagogy’—growing community and wider network of scholar-practitioners re-flexively experimenting to develop emancipatory forms, contents, and, above all,relations of knowledge production.2 This is a most hopeful emergence. And yet,through this article, I seek to contribute what I identify as indispensable historicalmaterialist foundations to CDP thought in order for CDP to fulfil its historicalemancipatory potential. This involves, above all, a more conscious and explicitdialectical understanding of capital on which to found experimental pedagogicalinnovations in order for all participants to develop a clearer sense of the natures ofthe alienation we are struggling against and the freedom we are working towards.

This article begins with an overview of (Marx 1993: 782) concept of the ‘generalintellect’ that overarches a critical political economy of academic labour, digital labour,and educational technology. In the second section, I explore the field of knowledgeproduction as the most conscious emergence of emancipatory post-capitalist commons-based, co-operative relations of knowledge production—the Free/Libre Open-SourceSoftware (FLOSS)3 movement. By conscious emergence, I refer not just to theemergent mode of production, but to emergent new subjectivities creating and createdby this movement. In short, what is emerging from the FLOSS movement (and alsoarguably the platform co-operative movement) (see Winn 2015a) is not just the hack,but the ‘hacker class’ (Wark 2004). In the third section, I contrast the class conscious-ness of the FLOSS movement with the CDP movement. I reflect on the ‘bill of rightsand principles for learning in the digital age’ co-produced by the pioneers of the CDPcommunity (Morris and Stommel 2013). In the fourth section, I critically review twoexamples of a new digital pedagogical innovation, namely the ‘connectivist’ massiveopen online course (cMOOC). Here, I look at #Rhizo14—a cMOOC created by amember of the CDP community, Dave Cormier—as well as U.Lab, a cMOOC thatdoes not consciously describe itself as such, but is now a worldwide, large-scalepedagogical intervention aimed at engendering planetary transformation. Though boththese examples are praised, I also reveal an insufficient materialism and historicity thatprecludes the emergence of a class consciousness capable of fully grasping andresponding to the historical task of liberating our general intellect.

2 See http://hybridpedagogy.org/ for the online home of the Critical Digital Pedagogy community.3 Also known as Free Software Movement (FSM) or Free and Open-Source Software Movement (FOSSM).

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I conclude by arguing that the liberation of our general intellect lies in a praxis of‘critical hope’—a concept developed by Paolo Freire (1992: 2), but intimately tied toErnst Bloch’s (1995) concept of ‘educated hope’ (docta spes) (Amsler 2015). A praxisof critical hope founds utopian visions and plans on a solid historical sociology ofmaterial conditions. Thus, in the field of critical pedagogy, it is essential that we thinkand act dialectically, designing educational technologies not just according to an ethicalbill of rights and principles, but according to the commons-based forms of ownershipand co-operative relations of production that our historical conditions demand in orderto produce the knowledge, the relations, and the subjectivities we need for ouremancipation from capital. CDP offers us tentative answers to the questions thatRichard Hall poses at the beginning of this article, but only through a more consciouslydialectical approach can it play a significant role in a process of historical transforma-tion already underway. I encourage scholars of CPE and the postdigital to contributenot just to intellectual tools for understanding our enslavement, but to practical tools forhacking for our liberation. By combining the dialectical insights of critical politicaleconomy with the practical experimentation of critical digital pedagogues, we candesign and develop the hybrid technologies we need—such as cMOOCs—in thestruggle to liberate our general intellect and ourselves from our current dystopianpostdigital reality.

Situating CDP within a Critical Political Economy of PostdigitalKnowledge Production

Critical political economy illuminates the alienated ways in which, through digitaltechnology, we all co-produce knowledge, culture, and our very selves. I begin,therefore, with the ways in which technology is used by capital in the subsumption,exploitation, discipline and control of all labour or, in short, in our continued andintensified alienation. Next, I consider the contemporary alienated forms and conditionsof what Fuchs and Sandoval (2014) term ‘informational digital labour’. This revealshow online unpaid labour, learning, and leisure have now become so subsumed withincircuits of capitalist production, exchange, and consumption that we can now recogniseour contemporary system truly as a ‘social’ or even ‘planetary’ factory (Tronti inCleaver 1992; Dyer-Witheford 2010). Then, I explore capital’s incursion into highereducation (HE) and its subsumption of academic labour and educational technologicalinnovation. Finally, I introduce the concept of the ‘general intellect’, arguing thatwithout it, we cannot develop a dialectical understanding that shines a light on a pathtowards emancipation from within.

Technology in Capitalism: Alienation, Biopower, and Psychopower

Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of theproduction of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the productionof the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow fromthose relations. (Marx 1990: 1284–5)

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Beyond the techno-fetishism that ascribes to technology agentic historical power, ahistorical materialist perspective sees technology as shaping and shaped by the physicaland semiotic character and trajectory of all social struggles (Feenberg 1999). Hence,technology ‘can function both as a tool for and an obstacle to liberation’ (Stommel2014). Capitalism is a system whose historical novelty lies in the indirect and mediatedform that its natural and social relations of exploitation and control take. Such relationsare mediated through the category of labour, both abstract and concrete. Abstractlabour, the foundation of social wealth or ‘value’, is measured in average amounts of‘socially necessary labour time’, congealing itself in concrete forms as commoditiesand money. Through its relentless expansion, capital is a ‘self-valorising’ subject,converting labour power into surplus value via endless metamorphic circuits of pro-duction and exchange (‘money-commodities-money’) (Marx 1990: 259). In theseproduction and exchange processes, capital unifies us in separation, that is, in social,co-operative, but alienated forms of production. Alienation is, therefore, a structuralsocial relation mediated and enforced by technology. Consequently, technology func-tions as a ‘biopower’ and a ‘psychopower’ of capital in order to construct the wage-labourer and as a tool of control in the continuous reproduction of productive bodiesand subjectivities ( Foucault 2008; Stiegler 2010). Though discipline remains funda-mental, we can identify a long-run emergence of societies of dispersed control in whichwe are constantly, mostly unwittingly, reproducing ourselves as ‘willing slaves ofcapital’ (Lordon 2014). Be it social media or ‘wearable and other self-tracking devices’(Moore and Robinson 2016), technological innovation remains the engine of capitalistalienation, discipline, and control.

‘Informational digital labour’ Within the Global Social Factory

Mauricio Lazzarato (1996) defines ‘immaterial labour’ as ‘the labour that produces theinformational and cultural content of the commodity’. He identifies a whole ‘newnature of productive activity’, one in which old dichotomies between ‘mental andmanual labour’,

‘between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between authorand audience’ are ‘simultaneously transcended’ (Lazzarato 1996). Online pro-cesses of economic, cultural, and social (re)production make it ‘increasinglydifficult to distinguish leisure time from work time. In a sense, life becomesinseparable from work’ (Lazzarato 1996).

Contra Lazzarato, other scholars have rightly re-emphasised the (painfully harsh)material basis—the wage and slave labour—of the production of the technologicalhardware maintaining our immaterial, virtual reality (Fuchs and Sandoval 2014; Knox2019). Fuchs and Sandoval (2014) use the term ‘digital labour’ and construct an‘international division of digital labour’ incorporating both physical (agricultural andindustrial) and informational (ideas, information, and attitudes) forms (see also Wil-liams 1976: 9). Following these authors, I employ the term ‘informational digitallabour’ to describe the current ways we labour specifically online, wittingly or unwit-tingly, to (re)produce both surplus value and our own alienated social relations andsubjectivities.

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Fuchs (2016: 236) details the ways in which capital is ‘institut[ing] new formsof labour-time, value creation and exploitation in the information economy’. Thesecentre on the entirely unpaid ‘consumption work’ that, through incessant surveil-lance and monitoring of our online behaviour and data collection of our generatedcontent, is commodified by Google, Facebook, and other social media firms(Fuchs 2014, 2016; Smythe 2006). Fuchs (2016: 236) additionally details the‘various forms of irregular, unpaid, precarious, outsourced, crowdsourced, andclick-worked digital labour’. His conclusion is that, though it may depend on thecontinued hyper-exploitation of our labour, ‘[d]igital and informationalcapitalism...is a reality, in which we have to live today' (Fuchs 2016: 237). CPEanalyses like Fuchs reveal how, in this ‘reality’ of digital capitalism, we co-produce not just knowledge and culture, but our alienated selves. Indeed, withour informational digital labour functioning within global interdependent supplychains, it is appropriate to speak of a global ‘social factory’ or ‘factory planet’which, as Mario Tronti presaged, constitutes the ‘highest level of capitalistdevelopment’ (Dyer-Witheford 2010: 485; Tronti in Cleaver 1992: 137). In ourglobal social factory, ‘social relations become moments of the relations of pro-duction, and the whole society becomes an articulation of production. In short, allof society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusivedomination over all of society’ (Tronti in Cleaver 1992: 137 137).

Behind the construction of our global factory, as postdigital scholars havehighlighted, is the science and technology of cybernetics—the intermeshing ofhumans and machines within expanding and intensifying mechanisms of controlfuelled by the generation of data, themselves, generated through the constantsurveillance and monitoring of our behaviour (cf. Jandrić et al. 2018; Peters andBesley 2019; Knox 2019; Cormier et al. 2019). Interpretations of data andsubsequent operational, strategic, policy, or political decisions can be increasinglytaken by computers with no human intervention. What we are speaking of, then, isthe gradual realisation of long held fears over the totalitarian potential of ratio-nality (cf. Adorno and Horkheimer 1997) or, as Bernard Stiegler (2016) has put it,the triumph over reason by ‘rationalisation’. This ‘gigantic abstract machine’constitutes a ‘new form of political sovereignty’ requiring new forms of politicalsubjectivity and these are made by us, the subject-objects of cybernetics, momentto moment as we live and labour within (Tiqqun 2001). Politics itself or, synon-ymously put, human freedom is threatened by cybernetic rationalisation in which‘the digital becomes the master narrative of the world’ (Fuller and Jandrić 2019:215).

Academic Labour and Technological Innovation in Higher Education

Recent CPE analyses of higher education are grounded in a concept of knowledgeas collectively produced by ‘academic labour’—academics and students workingtogether in processes of ‘social combination’ (Marx 1993: 782; Neary 2016; Winn2015a, b; Hall 2014). Capital’s recently accelerated and expanded incursions intohigher education are not just political, but driven by an urgent need to reviveprofitability and expand accumulation. The expertise of academic labour and the

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passionate dedication of academic labourers are rich sources of energy to convertinto surplus value.

Academics, themselves, at the sharp end of this process, have shown how thesubsumption of academic labour within capitalist circuits of accumulation hasdemanded the deployment of cybernetic technologies of rationalisation, discipline,and control that have combined macro-level regulatory and institutional restructuringswith micro-level practices of ‘undermining’ communal and solidaristic cultures andpractices (Amsler 2011: 67). This decades-long process has now generated a model,overwhelmingly reliant on unpaid and underpaid precarious labour, demanding relent-less productivity gains experienced as an incessant ‘speed-up’, burgeoning workloads,and consequent stress and burnout (Harney and Moten 1999; UCU 2016; AnalogueUniversity 2017). Since ‘cybernetic rationality demands and reinforces certain digitaland material behaviours, literacies, practices, attributes, and competencies’, we are alsospeaking of transformations in academic subjectivities—‘entrepreneurial behavioursand a new governance mentality in academia’ (Hall 2016: 1007). Politically, we arealso speaking of a rise in ‘the power of technocrats, administrators or educationcorporations for risk management’ and a concomitant fall in the economic and politicalpower of academics and students (Hall 2016: 1007).

Capitalist accumulation within higher education is simultaneously driving digitalinnovation in the commodification of online teaching, learning, and research within andfar beyond the university, most evidently in the development of a global industry in‘MOOCs’ within which the knowledge produced by academic labour is packaged,distributed, and consumed. Recent historical materialist analyses conceptualiseMOOCs as labour models ‘revolutionising...the means of production and the disciplin-ing of academic labour’ (Hall 2015: 281). Crucially, the vast majority of MOOCsrequire virtually no professional academic time for supporting individual learners(Haggard in Hall 2015: 274). Within the dominant MOOC model, academics are mereproducers and students mere consumers of knowledge. Even most of those ‘adaptive’MOOCs that ‘claim to personalize an experience and adapt to students’ generally do soby using algorithms recommending limited options based on historical data of formerstudents’ choices (Derk 2014).

Academic producers of MOOCs alienate their intellectual products for universitiesto convert into brand and exchange for accreditation. Student consumers of MOOCeducation are self-entrepreneurs taking private, personal responsibility for their learningand employability. MOOCs also offer universities alternative revenue sources, oppor-tunities for corporate collaboration, and diminished dependence on public financing,thereby increasing the privatisation and corporatisation of the institution. Hence,MOOCs are integral to the development of ‘associations of capital’ that link states,international organisations, venture capital, publishers, non-profit firms, and universi-ties in the development of technologies pioneering course delivery and certification aswell as data-mining for surveillance and commodification (Hall 2014: 825; Watters2013; Regalado and Leber 2013; Hall 2015). In these ways, the MOOC can ultimatelybe understood as a ‘negation of the University’ and

an attempt to critique the participatory traditions and positions of academics asorganic intellectuals, and to analyse how they actively contribute to the dissolu-tion of their expertise as a commodity. Underpinning this is an analysis of the

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academic labour of students and staff as it responds to the disciplinary logic ofcompetition and profitability (Hall 2015: 278).

Academic/digital informational labour in capitalist higher education is highly alienatedand often hyper-exploitative. MOOCs are, then, indeed truly revolutionary, ‘but onlyon capital’s terms’—a passive revolution (Hall 2015: 275).

The General Intellect and the Dialectics of Capitalist Knowledge Production

In order to develop genuinely emancipatory pedagogical technologies, we need tobegin with a critical political economy of knowledge production because suchanalyses reveal not just the nature of our alienation and oppressions, but thedialectical foundations of our emancipation. This is why I offer an overview ofthe CPE of alienated knowledge production and a political economy capturedwithin Marx’s overarching concept of the ‘general intellect’ (1993a: 782) InGrundrisse, Marx (1993: 771) reflects on the extent to which the world weexperience is the materialisation of our collective minds, our ‘social brain’, our‘general intellect’. Because all commodities, including knowledge, are producedthrough co-operative processes, Marx recognises how, in each successivelyexpanding and intensifying cycle of accumulation, capital inadvertently also ex-pands and intensifies our powers of ‘social combination’ (Marx 1993: 782). Marx(1993: 861) envisages, therefore, a moment at which all the sciences have beenpressed into the service of capital and ‘invention...becomes a business’—a prescientprophecy of the contemporary corporate university. At the same time, however, hisdialectical understanding leads him to realise that such a condition would equally beunderpinned by a general intellect potentially powerful enough to constitute ‘thematerial conditions to blow this foundation sky-high’ (Marx 1993: 782). We aretalking about a revolutionary situation in which, rather than abstract labour, ‘nec-essary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual’ and,consequently, social wealth will no longer be measured as exchange value, but aswealth for all (Marx 1993: 784). The outcome is that ‘disposable time will grow forall’ (Marx 1993: 784). Finally, Keynes’ (2009) faux vision of capitalism is realisedin its only possibly authentic way—as communism. Marx identifies the liberation ofour general intellect—co-produced knowledge for social use—as the dialecticaldetonator of capital.

The struggle for the liberation of our general intellect provides the overarchingtheoretical framework for and historical significance of our praxis as radical educators.Within this framework, being conscious of the structural contradictions at play is essential.For instance, a dialectical CPE reveals that the violence of recent financialisation andcommodification policies express not a power and strength of neo-liberal capitalism, but,conversely, increasingly desperate efforts to colonise previously uncommodified spheresof social relations in attempts to revive accumulation and profitability. Such policies also,therefore, reveal that this global system of domination is contingent, impermanent, and, insome ways, fragile. Similarly, a dialectical understanding of social relations of digitalinformational labour reveal how contemporary capitalism is underpinned by and mag-nifies an ‘extreme socialisation’ that unequivocally reveals the general intellect as‘society’s main productive force’ (Hall and Stahl 2013: 73).

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An alternative, emancipatory future can and will only emerge out from the currentconditions of alienated knowledge labour today. Consequently, it becomes ‘possible tosketch and support a flowering of dissent based on the autonomous utilisation of thosesame emergent hardware, software and networks that are used to immiserate’ (Hall andStahl 2013: 86). What Hall and Stahl express poetically here can be expressed far moreprosaically as ‘the hack’—the disassembling of a biopolitical/psychopolitical technol-ogy in order to reconfigure it for emancipatory uses, a dialectical process itself. Let usexamine, then, an example that appears to constitute precisely a conscious ‘flowering ofdissent’ or ‘hack’ of this very nature.

The FLOSS Movement and the ‘Hacker Class’: Co-ProducingPost-Capitalist Knowledge, Relations, and Subjectivities

I locate such promise within the FLOSS movement, identifying the emergence of theproductive forces of an emergent ‘hacker class’, grounded in co-operative practices,hacking back against the cybernetic ‘empire’ to create new common modes of knowl-edge production and new revolutionary post-capitalist subjectivities into existence(Tiqqun 2001; Wark 2004; Moore 2011).

An Emergent ‘Hacker Class’

Mackenzie Wark (2004) identifies an epic dialectical struggle playing out over theliberation of information itself—the ‘potential of potential’, the ‘medium in which objectsand subjects actually come into existence’, and themost recent form of privatised property.ForWark, today ‘[i]nformation wants to be free but is everywhere in chains’. He identifiesthe Internet as an overarching ‘vector’ through which the ‘free flow’ of information is‘arrested’. Its stocks, flows, and vectors themselves are owned and commodified by ‘thevectoral class’. This imposition of scarcity of information to maintain economic powermeans ‘the enslavement of its producers [all of us] to the interests of its owners’, thevectoral class. For Wark (2004), ‘the vector itself usurps the subjective role, becoming thesole repository of will toward a world that can be apprehended only in its commodifiedform’. And yet, though information is in chains, enslaved by the law of value, Warkemphasises what he sees as the unique emancipatory quality of information: ‘informationas property may be shared without diminishing anything but its scarcity. Information isthat which can escape the commodity form’.

Wark identifies how ‘as the abstraction of private property was extended to infor-mation it produced the hacker class’. Hackers are the objects of ‘an intensive struggle’waged by the vectoralist class ‘to dispossess hackers of their intellectual property’, their‘capacity for abstraction’ (Wark 2004). Through being attacked, hackers realise thattheir struggle is not just for their own private intellectual property, but are coming ‘as aclass to recognise their class interest is best expressed through the struggle to...abstractthe form of property itself’. Since processes of production also re-form producers’subjectivities, the hacker class has an emergent potential to evolve from a class in itselfthrough a collective consciousness as a class for itself. This is taking place preciselywhen ‘freedom from necessity and from class domination appears on the horizon as apossibility’ (Wark 2004).

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The FLOSS Movement: an Emergent Revolutionary Class and Subject?

The legal, proprietorial, and cultural commoning of information pursued by anemergent hacker class that Wark (2004) speaks of seems to be evolving andgrowing at breath-taking speed. This article is being written on LibreOffice, anexample of the burgeoning FLOSS movement, an ‘open, evolutionary arena’ inwhich ‘hundreds and sometimes thousands of users voluntarily explore and designcode, spot bugs in code, make contributions to the code, release software, createartwork, and develop licenses in a fashion that is becoming increasingly prevalentin the otherwise hugely monopolised software market’ (Moore 2011: 82). TheFLOSS movement has as its ultimate revolutionary goal the provision of ‘freesoftware to do all of the jobs computer users want to do and thus make proprietarysoftware obsolete’ (Free Software Foundation 2005). At work (and play), here aregroups of ‘geeks, artists, hackers, designers, carpenters and programmers, all ofwhom are committed to the flourishing of a radical ecology based on tenets thatdefy the proprietary and competitive relations that dominate the majority ofproductive relationships in the current, seemingly post-industrial, digital age’(Moore 2011: 84). Their ‘cooperative and collaborative production have becomea threat to globalised information capitalism, as much through contributors’ valuesystems as through material outputs’ (Moore 2011: 84). Open-source and freesoftware movements pioneer new common forms of ownership and accesssustained by innovative licencing forms such as the ‘general public license’,‘creative commons’, and ‘peer production license’ (Kostakis and Bauwens 2014;Kleiner 2010).

Again, the dialectic is at play. The rebel pioneers of these movements—Wark’s‘hacker class’—draw from the ‘cognitariat’ who endure low pay and precarious labourconditions within the privatised ecologies of oligopolistic IT firms (Newfield 2010).The emergence of a new generation of ‘platform co-operatives’ that are decentralisedand collective in their design, ownership, and usage reveal that FLOSS workers are‘becoming increasingly empowered, a group who increasingly own or control theirown means of production: i.e. their brains, computers, and access to the socialisednetwork that is the internet’ (Bauwens 2009). The radical dynamism of their non-market organising principle threatens the hegemony of the rigid market-bound firm(Benkler 2006). This seems to constitute a ‘genuinely new form of production’ drivenby ‘productive forces’ of gift and co-operation with the potentia to usurp and supersedethe productive forces of capital (Bauwens 2009; Marx 1992b: 501). It is founded on the‘creation of common value’ (Bauwens 2009).

For Moore, the FLOSS movement’s post-capitalist, common social relations ofinformation (knowledge) production and property are evolving a democratic and farmore adaptive and effective mode of production:

The cultures that have emerged from this process have been discussed as beingmore truly democratic for nearly a decade. Both consensus and democratic meansare used to lead towards becoming more fully individual or self-governing. Thismeans using consensus or democratic means for vital infrastructure; the best andmost widely adopted outcomes are from the adaptive systems created that enable

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an individual freedom of adaptation, without the knowledge of or permission bycore developers, as these adaptations do not endanger, but merely enrich, the coredesign. (Moore 2011: 88)

Furthermore, through iterative processes of collaborative peer-to-peer production,Moore (2011: 84) also identifies ‘radical’ peer-to-peer ‘ecologies of production’ withinwhich potentially revolutionary ‘subjectivities-in-common’ are being forged. Similarly,Kelty (2006) identifies ‘recursive communities’ emerging from collaborative practiceswith shared practices, principles, and objectives.

It is in the realm, or ‘ecology’, of peer-to-peer production, then, that we canidentify not just the production of free and open-source software based on aradical, alternative social value, but the production of radical democratic culturesand revolutionary post-capitalist subjectivities. We can identify what Wark (2004)calls the emergent hacker class and an emergent hacker class consciousness. Thus,we can identify the mode (informational digital labour), the means (digital infor-mational technologies), and the subjects (the hacker class) of productive forcesdeveloping the potentia to liberate our general intellect and detonate abstractlabour and the commodity form.

Yet, Wark (2004) insists that the hacker class can ‘release the virtuality of the vectoronly in principle’—a recognition that, ultimately, ‘[i]t is up to an alliance of all theproductive classes to turn that potential to actuality, to organise themselves subjectively,and use the available vectors for a collective and subjective becoming’. I understandWark here to be asserting that the liberation of our general intellect necessitates asociety-wide engagement and empowerment beyond hacker communities—the culti-vation of our mass intellectuality (Virno 2001; Hall and Winn 2017). This is where atruly and fully critical digital pedagogy has a vital role to play. I turn next, therefore, toa critical assessment of CDP’s philosophy expressed through a co-produced ‘bill ofrights and principles in the digital age’ and of the cMOOC as a leading CDPtechnology.

Assessing CDP’s ‘Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the DigitalAge’

CDP’s Bill of Rights and Principles

We may define ‘critical digital pedagogy’ broadly as the application of theprinciples of critical pedagogy to the digital terrain, but, as critical digital peda-gogy pioneer Jesse Stommel has argued, and as theorists of the postdigital (i.e.Jandrić et al. 2018) would also assert, digital pedagogy is becoming increasingly‘coterminous’ with critical pedagogy itself since the digital has already become anintegral medium for teaching and learning (Stommel 2013, 2014). What, then, arethe core rights and principles promoted by and embodied in critical digitalpedagogical innovations? In 2013, CDP pioneers gathered together to co-produce a ‘bill of rights and principles for learning in the digital age’ (Morrisand Stommel 2013). Within this bill, they identified the following as the universalrights of every student:

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& The right to online access& The right to privacy& The right to create public knowledge& The right to own one’s personal data and intellectual property& The right to financial transparency& The right to pedagogical transparency& The right to quality and care& The right to have great teachers& The right to be teachers (Morris and Stommel 2013)

Most of the rights here present a fundamental challenge to current capitalist alienatedand privatised relations of learning and knowledge production. The insistence on therights to create public knowledge and to be teachers demonstrates CDP pioneers’unequivocal belief in and promotion of knowledge co-production and co-ownership.On the right to create public knowledge, for example, Morris and Stommel insist that:

Learners within a global, digital commons have the right to work, network, andcontribute to knowledge in public; to share their ideas and their learning in visibleand connected ways if they so choose. Courses should encourage open partici-pation and meaningful engagement with real audiences where possible, includingpeers and the broader public. (Morris and Stommel 2013)

On the right to be teachers, they insist that:

In an online environment, teachers no longer need to be sole authority figures butinstead should share responsibility with learners at almost every turn. Students canparticipate and shape one another’s learning through peer interaction, new content,enhancement of learning materials and by forming virtual and real-world networks.Students have the right to engaged participation in the construction of their ownlearning. Students are makers, doers, thinkers, contributors, not just passive recipientsof someone else’s lecture notes or methods. They are critical contributors to theirdisciplines, fields, and to the larger enterprise of education. (Morris and Stommel 2013)

Here, CDP scholars insist that the foundation of CDP is not just enhanced participatoryteaching and learning, but the production of knowledge by and for all.

As for the principles of CDP, some of those identified by Morris, Stommel include:

& Global contribution—technologies and processes that ‘maximize opportunities forstudents from different countries to collaborate with one another, to contribute localknowledge and histories and to learn one another’s methods, assumptions, values,knowledge and points of view’.

& Flexibility—technologies and processes that ‘suggest and support new forms ofinterdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary inquiry that are independent of old gate-keepers such as academic institutions or disciplines, certification agencies, time-to-degree measurements, etc’.

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& Hybrid learning—technologies and processes that ‘[f]reed from time andplace,...should nonetheless be connected back to multiple locations around theworld and not tethered exclusively to the digital realm’. Stommel envisage onlineinnovations ‘rooted in real-world dilemmas’.

& Innovation—technologies and processes that innovate ‘a wide variety of pedagog-ical approaches, learning tools, methods and practices’ to ‘support students’ diverselearning modes’.

& Experimentation—which must be ‘an acknowledged affordance and benefit ofonline learning’.

& Civility—technologies and processes should ‘encourage interaction and collabora-tion’ and ‘generous, kind, constructive communication’ in ‘an atmosphere ofintegrity and respect’.

& Play—technologies and processes that ‘inspire the unexpected, experimentation,and questioning’—in other words, encourage play. (Morris and Stommel 2013)

Such principles, and the emerging literature around them, express robust ethicalfoundations for generating hybrid innovations for co-producing the knowledge, knowl-edge relations, and subjectivities we urgently need. They also do indeed also articulatea democratic politics of knowledge production. However, in the absence of a robusttheoretical, dialectical understanding of the political economy of our postdigital expe-rience, the CDP principles reveal the traditional humanistic roots of the ‘general projectof education’ that does not account fully for the novelty of the postdigital condition(Knox 2019). In order to fulfil its historical emancipatory promise, CDP’s politicalontological foundations need to go deeper and wider by adding an historical materialistunderstanding of the nature of capitalist and, therefore, emerging and potential post-capitalist relations of knowledge production—in short, the context from which CDPhas emerged and seeks to escape.

Critically Assessing the cMOOC

Many experiments in CDP are emerging from within universities, often in a form ofcMOOCs. Connectivist MOOCs ‘encourage learner autonomy, diversity, openness andinteraction’ (Mackness and Bell 2015: 25; Haggard 2013). cMOOCs also make use ofmultiple, distributed platforms, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and participant blogs.Experimental cMOOCs such as CCK08 and CCK09,4 eduMOOC underground,5 andDS106 (Digital Storytelling),6 all running at American universities, espouse experi-mental, decentralised approaches that put responsibility, not just for learning, but forproducing knowledge, in the hands of course participants. CMOOC innovators reject‘tracing’ practices that simply require students to trace their own limited trajectoryacross a predetermined map for practices that allow for radical de- and re-

4 Connectivism and Connective Knowledge run by Stephen Downes and George Siemens at University ofManitoba. See https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/3-cck08%2D%2D-the-distributed-course.5 Run by Ray Shraeder and then Jeff Lebow of Busan University. See https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/12-edumooc%2D%2D-extending-a-mooc.6 Digital Storytelling run by no one, but convened by Jim Groom and Martha Burtis at University of MaryWashington. See http://ds106.us/about/.

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territorialisation, creating spaces for users to redraw maps time and again (cf. Deleuzeand Guattari 1987). In short, such cMOOCs are not teaching spaces, nor learningspaces; they are knowledge spaces. Here, I will briefly overview two cMOOCs—Rhizo14 and U.Lab.

Rhizo14

One inspiring and pioneering example of a cMOOC is Rhizo14, an experiment in‘online community style learning’ designed and launched by Dave Cormier, an ‘edu-cational activist’ based at the University of Prince Edward Island.7 Rhizo14 embodiedCormier’s philosophy and practice of ‘rhizomatic learning’, inspired by Deleuze andGuattari’s (1987) central concept of the ‘rhizome’. Cormier defines rhizomatic learningthus:

The idea is to think of a classroom/community/network as an ecosystem in whicheach person is spreading their own understanding with the pieces … available inthat ecosystem. The public negotiation of that ‘acquisition’ (through contentcreation, sharing) provides a contextual curriculum to remix back into the existingresearch/thoughts/ideas in a given field. Their own rhizomatic learning experi-ence becomes more curriculum for others.8

Rhizo14 was hosted by Peer to Peer University (P2PU) and, though specific numbersare unattainable since no formal registration was required, over five hundred peopleparticipated in the course (Bali et al. 2016; Mackness and Bell 2015). Rhizo14 had noprescribed readings, materials, nor learning outcomes. Cormier merely offered twomain things: a digital ‘scaffold’ (an online architecture to host and support communitylearning) and a weekly provocation (a pedagogical question and accompanying videoand blog expressing thoughts on that question). Cormier sought merely to assist the‘community’ to become ‘the curriculum’, to help participants explore ‘how we canlearn in a world of abundance—abundance of perspective, of information and ofconnection.’9 While the course formally lasted for just 6 weeks, it was continued bythe Rhizo14 community for a further 7 weeks and, according to one team of partici-pants, continues through various and fluid configurations (Bali et al. 2016: 47).

Bali et al. (2016: 51–53), a team of authors who participated in Rhizo14, credit thecMOOC with a ‘genius force’ able to ‘expand your view of reality’ and generate‘transformative learning experiences’ through the emergence of ‘polyphonic truth’.Mackness and Bell (2015: 26) temper their positive ‘light’ analysis with some ‘dark’findings. Some of the Rhizo14 participants they interviewed found the course ‘isolat-ing’ and lacking ‘appropriate facilitation’ and insufficient content and theoreticalfoundations (Mackness and Bell 2015: 32). Situating their critique within a wider,

7 See 'Your Unguided tour of Rhizo14' by Dave Cormier at http://davecormier.com/edblog/2014/01/12/your-unguided-tour-of-rhizo14/.8 See 'Trying to write Rhizomatic Learning in 300 words' by Dave Cormierat http://davecormier.com/edblog/2012/12/13/trying-to-write-rhizomatic-learning-in-300-words/.9 See 'Rhizomatic Learning – The community is the curriculum' at https://courses.p2pu.org/en/courses/882/rhizomatic-learning-the-community-is-the-curriculum/.

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emerging literature on cMOOCs, Mackness and Bell (2015: 32) emphasise also theethical problems raised by Rhizo14, particularly with respect to the role of theconvener/teacher and ‘social interaction and community building’.

Cormier offers a rhizomatic technology for a potentially rhizomatic medium.Rhizo14 as project and rhizomatic learning as broader model demonstrate howcMOOCs can embody the rights and principles of CDP in ways that can potentiallylead to transformative outcomes. I am not prescribing a one-size-fits-all approach inwhich every cMOOC is unswervingly focused on the political economy of knowledgeproduction, nor am I arguing that, in the absence of a dialectical class consciousness,transformation is impossible. Instead, I am arguing that radical cMOOCs should bedesigned with and express a consciousness of class relations of knowledge productionand that the relations and knowledge we cultivate through our cMOOC experience andendeavours can express our personal and collective power to overturn and transformthese relations.

U.Lab

U.Lab is the creation of a team based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) led by Otto Scharmer and inspired and informed by Scharmer’s practicalphilosophy known as ‘Theory U’, so named because it leads participants through aU-shaped journey of transformation. It is a hybrid cMOOC or, as its creators phrase it,an ‘o2o (online-to-offline) blended learning environment’ that ‘provides participantswith quality spaces for reflection, dialogue, and collaborative action’ and that ‘co-evolves with a movement in the making’ (Scharmer 2016a, b: xxxvii). Hundreds ofthousands have completed the MOOC either as individuals or, very often, as membersof hubs based in governmental, corporate, non-governmental or other organisations. Icompleted the U.Lab cMOOC in 2016. In Theory U and through U.Lab, incrediblyprofound, rich, and living knowledges are articulated and generated, knowledges thatexpress and embody radical ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies of knowl-edge and its production that align with and, indeed, fruitfully expand the bill of rightsand principles developed by the CDP community.

U.Lab is focused on addressing humanity’s material problems and transformingsociety by helping participants to ‘invert’ their awareness internally towards theirrelations with self and between self and other until the individual and the collectivecome to recognise the living existence of a greater third living entity constituted by theirco-existence and co-operation (Scharmer 2016a). This is achieved by taking a personaland collective journey of ‘co-sensing’ down the left-hand side of the ‘U’ (Scharmer2016b: 26). Fundamental to the journey upwards into transformation are holistic (head-hand-heart) practices that facilitate the ‘co-presencing’ of an ‘emergent future’(Scharmer 2016b: 26). The goal is then to incorporate these emergent futures intoprototypes that inform subsequent institutionalisation of the new within ‘eco-systems’that work for the interests of the system itself rather than individuals or groups withinthe system (Scharmer 2016b: 33).

As a pedagogical innovation, U.Lab constitutes a comprehensive and coherent leapforward in the MOOC’s rapid evolution. Scharmer (2016a) sees U.Lab as the embodi-ment of ‘MOOC 4.0’ within the following schema:

& MOOC 1.0—One-to-Many: Professor lecturing to a global audience

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& MOOC 2.0—One-to-One: Lecture plus individual or small-group exercises& MOOC 3.0—Many-to-Many: Massive decentralised peer-to-peer learning.& MOOC 4.0—Many-to-One: Seeing your future potential through the eyes of

others—and seeing yourself in the mirror of the whole. (Scharmer 2016a)

In turn, a MOOC 4.0 constitutes primarily of five main components:

& distributed organising: opening up the classroom to many self-organised hubsaround the world;

& generative dialogue: opening up the conversation from teacher-centric downloadingto student-centric generative dialogue;

& collective governance: opening up the institution to a global innovation contextwhile cultivating spaces that help the system sense and see itself;

& prototyping practices: opening up the learning modes through hands-on actionlearning methodologies;

& self-transformation: opening up the deeper sources of human intelligence by acti-vating the open mind, open heart, and open will. (Scharmer 2016a)

Because of the scale it has achieved, U.Lab is a seminal pedagogical innovation. Itcombines a ‘massive democratization of access to free education, methods, and tools’with ‘the activation of a deep learning cycle that combines a shift of awareness throughconcrete projects and local work’ (Scharmer 2016b: 39). Thus, it constitutes a genuinepraxis. However, it is a praxis founded on painfully weak and incoherent historical andsociological foundations, weaknesses that subsequently shape its practice and limits itspotential.

Scharmer understandably seeks to offer a convincing theory of history on whichto found his vision. What he presents (alongside Katrin Kaufer), however, is anincredibly simplistic asocial and Euro-centric periodisation of history. Historybegins for Scharmer and Kaufer (2013: 52–3) with ‘Society 1.0’—a ‘stage ofsocietal development’ in which ‘a strong central actor...holds the decision-makingpower of the whole’. They contrast the ‘stability’ of Society 1.0 with the ‘randomviolence’ that preceded it, but critiques Society 1.0’s ‘lack of dynamism’ (Scharmerand Kaufer 2013: 53). Scharmer and Kaufer offer the Soviet Union as one exampleof this ‘pre-capitalist stage’ of history. What, then, of the facts that centuries ofczarist imperialist autocracy preceded and provoked socialist revolution, that theviolence prior to 1917 was not ‘random’, but systemic expressions of national andEuropean capitalist imperialism, and that, though genocidal, what characterised theearly Soviet era was a breath-taking developmental dynamism?

The trend continues. Rather than emerging dialectically through social struggle,Society 2.0: ‘Organising around competition’ (effectively, capitalism) emerges througha ‘shift of focus from stability to growth and greater individual initiative and freedom’(Scharmer and Kaufer 2013: 53). Similarly, Society 3.0—‘Organising around interestgroups’—is presented as the rational technocratic response to market excesses by thecreation of the welfare state (Scharmer and Kaufer 2013: 54). Such periodisations aremerely history as the naturalisation of desocialised institutional ‘innovations’ ratherthan any remotely credible, genuine social history (Scharmer and Kaufer 2013: 54).

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There is no social in Scharmer and Kaufer’s historical model of ‘Society’, merelyoccasional evolutionary upgrades.

When we do not recognise history as dialectical, that is, as driven by structurallyantagonistic social forces, we have no credible theory of history and thus no clearontological basis for understanding and envisioning our potential freedom. This isrevealed in the ahistoricity of Theory U’s practical expression, U.Lab. By ahistoricity, Irefer to the near total lack of the historical dimension in U.Lab’s purely present- andfuture-oriented practice. To the extent it is recognised, history is presented in almostpurely negative terms, enacted when we ‘download’ the unthinking, entrenched pa-thologies of our past (Scharmer 2016b: 30). Due to this ahistoricity, U.Lab offersnegligible space for addressing the injustices of the past and present. For a praxisgrounded in the relational, it makes little or no mention to exploitation, oppression, oreven violence. Structural conflict is absent from Scharmer’s analysis and U.Lab’spractice: class, racism, and patriarchy are invisible. Instead, ‘[t]he primary battlefieldof this century is with our Selves. It is a battle between the self and the Self: betweenour existing, habituated self and our emerging future Self, both individually andcollectively’ (Scharmer and Kaufer 2013: 30). One gets the sense that, by seeking toappeal to all (i.e. corporate) sections of society, Scharmer is playing the liberal game ofrendering power relations invisible. Yet, there is no such thing as neutrality and, to theextent that they render structural relations of violence invisible, Theory U and U.Lab doharm to the cause of human justice and freedom. Humanity needs healing and healingrequires confronting the historical and ongoing realities of colonialist, racist, patriar-chal, capitalist, and other forms of structural violence.

Scharmer (2016b: 41) claims that, ultimately, Theory U expresses humanity’sultimate task - ‘the reintegration of matter and mind’. Yet, I encounter Theory U as afundamentally idealist philosophy, privileging mind over matter and, consequently,sustaining liberalism’s hegemony. Scharmer recognises that within an era of ‘disrup-tion’ grow the seeds of a great evolutionary awakening (Scharmer and Kaufer 2013: 3).Yet, by not identifying this era of disruption as the fallout of the seemingly terminalcrisis of capital, Theory U and U.Lab fall short of a praxis capable of facilitatingdialectical consciousness. We are capital (and patriarchy, and colonialism, and racism).If we do not know what we are, we cannot know what we must become and how. If wecannot confront our history, we cannot found a new society on truth, peace, and justice.All that said, U.Lab constitutes an immense contribution to the advance of educationaltechnologies for emancipation and transformation of self, communities, and society.Scharmer (2016a) defines education as ‘activing global social fields’ and U.Lab isdoing this. Nonetheless, to activate global social fields for emancipation from capital,racism, and patriarchy requires coherent social theory. This is absent in Theory U andthis is very much our challenge.

Rhizo14 and U.Lab

cMOOCs constitute the kind of revolutionary technologies we need to further theliberation of not just our general intellect, but, as U.Lab shows, of our hearts also,transforming the modes and democratising the means of knowledge production,empowering and transforming the subjectivities of participant co-producers in theprocess. Rhizo14’s emphasis on ‘community as curriculum’, for example, echoes Mike

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Neary’s (2012: 150–151) call to ‘re-appropriate knowledge and science so that thepopulation which has produced this knowledge becomes the project and not theresource for a new progressive political programme’. What is absent from Rhizo14,however, is a dialectical understanding of capital that would inform and shape a morefocused, yet in no way prescribed, framework for knowledge co-production.

The other example covered here, U.Lab, offers a digital platform that is truly andradically open, that allows for profound personal and social communication, action, andtransformation. Nonetheless, its omission of the past in the quest for the future is acentral and serious flaw. This prompts the question: can a process of confronting thedeeply painful trauma of our shared past actually be enacted online at all? My heart andhead tell me it must; my personal experience tells me it can.10 In short, as bothcMOOCs Rhizo14 and U.Lab show and as my personal experiences of U.Lab attest,the conditions for real human connection can be created online. The barriers to ourtransformation are not technological; they are political.

Conclusions

Marx famously noted that:

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it issufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production neverreplace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have maturedwithin the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself onlysuch tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show thatthe problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution arealready present or at least in the course of formation. (Marx 1992b: 501)

A critical political economy of knowledge production reveals a historical situation inwhich capital’s crisis of accumulation is increasingly dependent on free labour and isbeing steadily undermined by emergent superior commons-based forces and co-operative relations of production struggling to be born from within. The emergenceof the FLOSS movement demonstrates this, but, as Wark rightly emphasises, therevolutionary emancipatory power of its productive forces requires vanguard hackerclass to help to cultivate the mass intellectuality of wider society. This is a pedagogicaltask. This struggle requires the conscious design of technologies that create hybridpedagogical spaces for this endeavour and have highlighted CDP as an excitingemergent community doing just this. I have highlighted the rights and principles ofCDP that express the ethics and, to some degree, the politics on which to found andimbue such technologies and I have critically reviewed two examples of such atechnology, the cMOOC.

While the first half of Marx’s quote compels a dialectical critique of our historicalsituation, the second half offers us great hope. It posits that the historical challenge we

10 I am part of a UK-based group which meets both online and face-to-face and works to explore the natureand heal the wounds of intergenerational violence and trauma. Over the past two years, we have worked atendlessly surprising depths even online. See https://pocketproject.org/.

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set ourselves must be surmountable because if it was not, it would mean that thematerial conditions for the question to even be posed would not have yet arisen. Thus,when Hall asks us...

Is it possible that a critical political economy of MOOCs might offer a way ofdeveloping an emancipatory critical pedagogy on a global scale? Might such apolitical economy enable the knowledge, practices, and skills produced sociallyand cooperatively to underpin new social relations of production as a pedagogicproject beyond the market? (Hall 2015: 283)

...we are obliged, dialectically at least, to answer ‘yes!’ I believe that, through acombination of a critical political economy of postdigital educational technologiesand the principles and practices of critical digital pedagogy, we can indeed envision,design, and construct cMOOCs that contribute to the flourishing of mass intellectualityand the liberation of our general intellect. Elsewhere, I have written about my ownlimited practical attempts to do just this (Lazarus 2018).

I would describe my experience of reading scholarship on the postdigital so far asintellectually rewarding, but emotionally draining. The fact that articles in PostdigitalScience and Education often read as terrifying lists of mechanisms for ever-intensifyingand expanding surveillance, manipulation, exploitation, and control is not a criticism,but I find it hard to locate hope within (albeit essential and ground-breaking) descrip-tions of the emergent regime of ‘bio-informational capitalism’ (Peters and Besley2019). Recognising both the difficulties of transcending hypocritical theory withinthe very institutions of cognitive capitalism that academics work and the fact thatintellectual work is a form of political activism, I still insist that postdigital scholarsneed to contribute not just to the development of intellectual tools for understanding ourenslavement, but also the practical tools for hacking our liberation.

In the praxis of CDP, I find great hope. However, we need to ground our techno-logical innovations on a firmer historical materialist dialectical understanding of ourhistorical situation. In this way, combining a critical political economy of the postdigitalwith critical digital pedagogy brings a genuine critical foundation on which CDP’shopeful praxis might flourish. Ultimately, the dialectic is source of authentic criticalhope, for in an accurate analysis of the (historically particular) forces of enslavementlies the discovery of the (historically particular) potential conditions and agents ofemancipation. From a historical, materialist, dialectical analysis, scholars of thepostdigital and CDP practitioners might develop a critical hope that could then makea major historical contribution towards our collective hacking for humanity’s freedom(Freire 1992; Bloch 1995; Cormier et al. 2019).

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