“Knowledge is power,” rings the old wise bell.
Indeed. Every school tells itself that old adage.
Schools teach subjects. Teachers, professors, Dr.s’, Mr.s’, Mrs.s’, and Ms.s’ lecture countless of topics. Hours and hours stack upon each other, and students listen—and not out of want, but a path (trap) they themselves built, or advisors bullshitted, or parents cranked.
Sitting in class, look around. To your right, a diligent student soaks his journal with paragraphs. His pen strings sentences and bubble maps, snapping and connecting every detail. He is your competitor. To your left, another exemplary student writes with a laptop. Faster and faster her fingers move, filling an empty page in seconds. She is also your competitor.
Thirty students sit in class, and all thirty seek the same career. All of them intelligent. Friends now, competitors later.
But that’s just the afternoon class. Morning class covered the same material. More competitors. Brilliant, more diligent than the students you know. The body of competitors increase. The fog of war widens and thickens.
Even then, that’s just two classes chronologically taught. Handful of teachers concurrently lecture the same topic. 100 multiplies the bodies of competitors.
However, where you sit now is just one campus. Thousands of campuses exist along the nation. And so the competitors you face skips the ten-thousand phase and jumps to hundreds of thousands—all of them your competitors.
But that’s not all—the internet distributes information: a single teacher could record a lecture and upload it into the internet. For free.
So now, careers no longer need institutions because somebody has made such careers available in free videos. And free videos allow information to not only reach those who are interested, but to those who happen to click on it. As such, your competition is world wide (web).
But even that’s not all.
If someone can teach someone else, then there’s someone smart enough to code it. If they upload the code onto the internet, anyone can CTRL + C and then CTRL + V the code, then create incremental variations, and then produce countless of improved code for companies and individuals.
Codes don’t complain as your competitors do. Codes don’t sleep. Don’t call-out. Don’t even need vacations. Codes work 24 hours every day. Better, codes are upgradeable—unlike people who degrade and decay.
And so now, your competitor is an infinitely replicable and upgradeable code. You competed all your educational life, only to be obsolete.
Knowledge is power. Indeed. But school was never about knowledge. It was about credentialing and then finding a career.
Knowledge is power. Yes. And the winner takes it all—the money, the cars, the yachts, the power, the women. They get peace. They get health.
Why compete against such a force?
Second place gets a letter of appreciation. Third place…nobody cares about third place.
So why school? For knowledge?
Even for the sake of knowledge, you wouldn’t need to. The internet exists, and what exists on the internet rests the knowledge of the best of the best of the best, not some second-rate professor who opens YouTube with back-to-back 30-second non-skippable advertisements and have some random fifth-rate, bandicam, notepad text, 240p, off-sync mic education.
The books are on the internet. The geniuses are on the internet, and you can find them by name or by media and contact them directly.
As people create, innovate, and automate code, one by one people lose their careers.
You haven’t experienced it. Perhaps you can’t see it happening to you. “I don’t see it, so it doesn’t exist” toots the idiotic.
You continue with school. You compete against n=∞ students. Four years later, you graduate. You find a last-rate company to take you in because you couldn’t outperform countless exemplary students. That’s fine—at least you got hired.
You enter the work zone with a smile, putting your education to good use. As it turns out, you studied for four years, to shit your education out the window—the company doesn’t operate the way you were taught. In fact, Sammy here didn’t need school, nor went to one. She learned everything online, on the web.
The company teaches you different things. You excel. Your boss lauds you as irreplaceable. But who do you think was in that position before they hired you?
The company CEO emails all the employees about an upcoming change. In it, the CEO explains a certain software automating several departments. Some people will lose their jobs. Fortunately, you are not in those affected departments. However, you wonder how long until your department is next.
What is teachable is replaceable.
Slow.
Then all at once.