The Shala Daily

Media theorist Neil Postman warned that a “technopoly” arises when societies surrender judgment to technological imperatives—when efficiency and innovation become moral goods in themselves. Once metrics like speed and optimization replace reflection and dialogue, education mutates into logistics: grading automated, essays generated in seconds. Knowledge becomes data; teaching becomes delivery.

What disappears are precious human capacities—curiosity, discernment, presence. The result isn’t augmented intelligence but simulated learning: a paint-by-numbers approach to thought.

🤖 Do Artifacts Have Politics?

Political theorist Langdon Winner once asked whether artifacts can have politics. They can—and AI systems are no exception. They encode assumptions about what counts as intelligence and whose labor counts as valuable. The more we rely on algorithms, the more we normalize their values: automation, prediction, standardization, and corporate dependency. Eventually these priorities fade from view and come to seem natural—”just the way things are.”

In classrooms today, the technopoly is thriving. Universities are being retrofitted as fulfillment centers of cognitive convenience. Students aren’t being taught to think more deeply but to prompt more effectively. We are exporting the very labor of teaching and learning—the struggle that produces understanding—to systems optimized for output, not insight.

🔥 The Cave We’re Building

The yogis had a name for mistaking shadows for reality: avidya—spiritual ignorance. Plato had a metaphor: the allegory of the cave, where prisoners mistake flickering shadows on a wall for the whole of existence.

We’re building a new cave. Not with chains and firelight, but with interfaces and algorithms. The shadows move faster now. They’re personalized, optimized, frictionless. But they’re still shadows.

What gets lost isn’t information—we have more of that than ever. What gets lost is the capacity to engage with information. The patience to sit with difficulty. The willingness to not-know while understanding develops. The tolerance for ambiguity that actual learning requires.

📚 Svadhyaya Can’t Be Outsourced

Svadhyaya—self-study through sacred texts and inner inquiry—is one of the niyamas, the personal observances. It points to something that can’t be delegated: the irreplaceable work of coming to know yourself through sustained engagement with teachings.

You can’t outsource this to an algorithm. You can’t prompt your way to self-knowledge. The struggle is the point. The friction produces the insight.

When we export cognitive labor to systems designed for efficiency, we optimize away the very processes that develop human capacity. We get answers without understanding. Outputs without insight. Credentials without competence.

🧘 The Practice of Attention

This is why present moment awareness matters more than ever. Not as escape from technology, but as resistance to its capture of attention.

Every time we sit with discomfort instead of reaching for distraction, we’re exercising a capacity the technopoly would rather let atrophy. Every time we stay with a difficult text instead of asking for a summary, we’re building the neural pathways that distinguish thinking from processing.

The practice doesn’t reject tools. It asks: What capacities am I developing? What capacities am I letting decay? Am I using this tool, or is it using me?

The shadows on the wall are beautiful now. They move in response to our desires. They tell us what we want to hear.

But they’re still shadows.

— MJH