An Argument for Forgiving Student Debt

 Generally higher tax rates after WWII made public goods like affordable education and necessary public works a possibility. The post-war GI Bill sent many to college who would never have been able to afford it without public support. These public goods benefited everyone, including the wealthy 1% and corporations. 

Our current tax structure favors the wealthy and makes these former public goods unavailable or punishing to achieve. 

One result of the wealth/taxing imbalance in our country is the decision to make individual debt a means of paying the common good of having an educated populace. This was always a bad idea, made worse by predatory lenders, inflexible interest rates and crippling repayment plans. As others have noted, the ones benefiting from this outrage are not our students.

Substituting private debt for public financing was a huge mistake and was a conscious change in policy to cripple universities and create an entire generation preoccupied with their debt status. The unanticipated outcome was universities jacked up tuition past the annual cost of living to compensate.

Saying people caught up in this national debt scam should “man up” and pay back their debt is nonsense. It’s an Alice in Wonderland craziness. The nonsense is that our children are put in life-long debt peonage while billionaires launch themselves in their penis rockets into outer space. Student debtors need to “man up” to pay back loans to attend college they never should have needed. The super-wealthy “man up” by going up to the Kármán line with the tax dollars they avoid paying.

Previous generations who now dismiss student debt forbearance benefitted from larger public funding to get their own degrees. The question going forward is should we continue to punish this debtor generation for that mistaken policy change?

Debt forgiveness is the best option, though a national debt strike is also a good idea. Then raise tax rates on wealthy individuals and corporations, return to former methods of PUBLIC financing of higher education and we’re out of this viscous cycle.

Media Literacy And the Quantisation of Media Ecology

Media Literacy is a misleading term.

First of all media “literacy” is a partial oxymoron. While you can become “literate” in chirographic (alphabetic) or print media, by definition you cannot become “literate” in electronic media and if you are only “literate” in digital media, you are only partly “literate” in digital media.

Second, Media Ecology is actually a call to inaction. I mean that in the best possible way. Media Ecology asks us not to be unreflectively responsive to the influence or bias of any given medium, but rather to understand the implications of those influences and biases in order to decide whether they should be embraced or resisted.

Personally, I prefer Media Quantisation. Neil Postman used to tell the story of the three baseball umpires. 

The first umpire says “I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em.”

The second umpire says “I calls ‘em as they are.”

The third umpire says “They ain’t nothin’ until I calls ‘em!”

We can’t address the impact of a medium until we can see it AS a medium. The act of seeing it changes it into something else. Until then, we are all just Neo stuck in the Matrix.

Today’s Media Ecology Lesson

All cultures manufacture consent, ie. a shared mythology, employing the medium of communication available to them. 

Time binding cultures set their rules and beliefs in a durable medium like stone. 

Think Egyptian. 

Space binding cultures use portable media like papyrus or paper to transmit their message of manufactured consent across the space they control. Think Roman. 

Our electronic and digital media are perhaps the first technologies that enable the binding of time AND space, though the bias of the electronic broadcast media was centralized messaging while the bias of digital network media is decentralized messaging.

New media technologies threaten the hegemony of the existing manufactured consent, leading to the type of disruptions that we experience today in our public sphere.  Marshall McLuhan suggested that a paradigm shift such as we are currently experiencing almost always leads to violence as men and women struggle to create a new identity within the affordances of the rising medium and hence a new public shared consent mythos.

That loss of the previous shared mythos is what creates the fear and despair of both the oppressors AND the oppressed. It is NOT caused by economic or social inequality, political oppression or religious differences, though it may be expressed through them. My understanding is that revolutions are often led by members of the ruling or favored class who use the despair of the populace to affect political change. The techniques they use to manufacture the new consent are determined by the affordances and the biases of the media they employ.

Shared consent is created by the stories people tell each other explicitly and implicitly through their media of communication. Control the stories people tell and the means by which they tell them and you control the culture.