EP 486: How Knowledge Really Does Become Power

What does my new website, the TikTok "ban," and the ongoing purge of "woke" from government websites have in common?

The power to decide what content counts and what doesn't—and use that power to shape the knowledge and experiences of others.

In this episode, I continue to examine the state of The Website today. Amidst a backdrop of diffuse epistemic violence, the website is both an archive and a communication tool we can use to preserve the knowledge and ways of knowing we care about. In the second half of the episode, I share a piece I wrote last year on how artificial intelligence disrupts and deskills our critical thinking.

Footnotes:

• "Broken Links" by Tara McMullin on What Works
• "Knowledge Is Power: A Brief History" on Mental Floss
• Full text of the House bill "banning" TikTok
• "Multiple Ways of Knowing: Expanding How We Know" by Elissa Sloane Perry and Aja Couchois Duncan on Nonprofit Quarterly
• "Black Box Thinking" by Tara McMullin on What Works
• "Scientists Increasingly Cannot Explain How AI Works" by Chloe Xiang on Vice
• "Google is redesigning its search engine: it's AI all the way down" on The Verge
• "Hostile Epistemology" by C. Thi Nguyen
• "Microsoft Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills" by AJ Dellinger on Gizmodo

Find a written version of this audio essay, subscribe free to the What Works newsletter, and learn more about working with me to turn your meaningful ideas into remarkable content at whatworks.fyi.

• (00:00) - EP 486: How Knowledge Really Does Become Power


• (03:21) - 1. Knowledge is Power


• (06:41) - The Purge


• (14:05) - 2. Black Box Thinking


• (18:07) - Technological Conditioning


• (26:12) - Credits