Technologically Skwair ▢ blog
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Print by Marian Hardey. We Are All Squares. March 2020.
Print, AILand, by Mariann Hardey 2025
Besides, if women are educated for dependence, that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop? Are they to be considered as viceregents, allowed to reign over a small domain, and answerable for their conduct to a higher tribunal, liable to error? Mary Wollstonecraft Chapter 3. The Same Subject Continued. Wollstonecraft, M. (2004). A vindication of the rights of woman. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1792). The tech internet is breathless with a fervour that borders on the religious. The headlines circulate with viral efficiency, proclaiming a new gospel of access: “I just learned that the $200,000 Stanford AI degree just became worth a lot less.” The narrative is seductive, familiar, and pernicious. And currently viral on LinkedIn. We are told the gatekeepers have unlocked the gates; the ivory tower has lowered the drawbridge. Stanford has uploaded its flagship AI and Machine Learning curriculum to YouTube, and now, we are assured, the only obstacle standing between the common person and a career in the bleeding edge of AI is their own lack of willpower.
A beautiful story of democratisation. It is also a lie that masks ongoing systemic inequalities in access and privilege. While the release of these materials--CS221, CS224N, the legendary CS229—is undoubtedly a boon for the curious autodidact, framing this as a levelling of the playing field is a dangerous oversimplification. It is a specious homage to equity paid by an institution that thrives on exclusivity. Take a moment. Pause. Question: When an elite institution gives away its content for free, what are they actually selling? And more importantly, what privileges are they securing for themselves? 1. The Commodification of Content vs. The Aristocracy of Context The prevailing argument is that “you don’t need a degree, you need the knowledge”. This relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of the university’s function in a capitalist society. It conflates information with instruction, and worse, it confuses learning with credentialing. Access to Andrew Ng’s lecture slides is not the same as access to Andrew Ng’s office hours. Watching a video on Backpropagation does not equate to the rigorous, graded feedback loop of a problem set, the pressure of a peer group, or the structured mentorship of a lab. By dumping raw content onto YouTube, Stanford has effectively commodified information that was already widely available in textbooks and papers, while retaining the context (the network, the mentorship, the credential) as a luxe good, thereby emphasising the disparity between content and meaningful learning. While a celebration of the dismantling of hierarchy is taking place, I want the audience to feel concerned about how this reinforces inequalities. It is concretised in a two-tier system of knowledge: the wealthy and the lucky receive the education (the dialogue, the critique, the social capital), while the rest of the world receives the PDF. It is the difference between being invited to the banquet and being allowed to read the menu from the street. 2. The Certification Industrial Complex: The Funnel of False Hope We must recognise this ‘gift’ for what it truly is: a loss leader in the grand supermarket of higher education. Stanford and platforms like Coursera have engineered a business model where the content, the lectures, the readings, the knowledge itself, is given away for free, not out of benevolence, but to devalue it. By flooding the market with open access, they have rendered the act of learning insufficient. In this new economy, knowledge is cheap, but proof (actual certification of your skills) is a luxe good. This is a trap that structurally disadvantages the autodidact (you teach yourself). You may watch every lecture and master every concept, but without the watermarked seal of the institution, your knowledge carries no currency in the labour market. They have created a system where you are strongly encouraged to purchase their $18,900+ “Graduate Certificate” to validate the very skills they claim to be giving away. Technically, you don't have to purchase it to learn; you have to purchase it to get the credential. So, not the democratisation of education; instead, the democratisation of the advertisement for their paid products. Such online courses have not opened the gates; they have simply moved the toll booth to the exit, ensuring that while anyone can enter the library, only those with the means can afford the receipt that proves they were there. 3. The Pedagogical Monoculture: Intellectual Imperialism in Code as The “Stanford Way” And, there is a sharper, more critical edge to this ‘gift’ that involves the exertion of soft power. By making their curriculum the global default for ‘free’ AI education, Stanford is effectively homogenising the discipline itself. It is time to confront the deeper, more insidious erasure at play here: intellectual colonialism. When thousands of self-taught engineers across the Global South, Europe, and Asia learn AI exclusively through the lens of CS224U or CS329H, Stanford’s approach limits the diversity of thought essential for inclusive development. Instead, we export Silicon Valley’s specific flavour of AI ideology, often accelerationist, often blind to social harm, as the neutral, objective standard for the world. We are exporting a specific, highly local ideology, one that prioritises hyper-scale, friction-free speed, and profit maximisation, selling it to the world under the guise of ‘neutral math.’ When the whole world learns to code from Silicon Valley, the entire world loses the vocabulary to critique Silicon Valley. A student in Mumbai or Lagos who learns AI exclusively through this syllabus is being trained to define “problems” and “solutions” through the narrow lens of a Palo Alto venture capitalist. They are taught to optimise for metrics that matter to the NASDAQ, not necessarily for the resilience of their local communities or the preservation of specific cultural contexts. In universalising this single mode of thought, we delegitimise any form of intelligence that does not fit the template. We are seeing the standardisation of the Stanford syllabus, ensuring that the next generation of builders, wherever they live, will build the world in Silicon Valley’s image. In doing so, we say ok to colonising markets and colonising the future’s imagination, ensuring that tomorrow’s builders can only dream in shapes approved by today’s monopolists. 4. The Externalisation of Training: A Subsidy for the Oligarchs So, who profits most from this sudden flood of ‘free’ expertise? It is not the student; it is the corporation. By establishing ‘Stanford-level knowledge’ as the prerequisite for entry, Silicon Valley has effectively externalised the cost of training its own workforce. In a previous era, corporations bore the burden of training junior employees, investing time and resources to bring them up to speed. Today, that cost is shifted entirely onto the individual. The aspiring engineer must now spend hundreds of unpaid hours consuming this “free” curriculum just to reach the starting line. Stanford has not liberated the learner; they have simply created a mechanism that allows Meta, Google, and Amazon to demand senior-level theoretical knowledge from entry-level applicants without paying for it. It is a massive, invisible subsidy for the most profitable companies on earth, paid for by the unpaid labour of the hopeful. 5. The Tyranny of Time and the ‘Bootstrap’ Myth The viral commentary surrounding this release asks a pointed, accusatory question: “What’s stopping you from diving into AI learning now that these barriers are gone?” Caution here. This is the classic neoliberal trap, a sentiment that Mary Wollstonecraft herself might have recognised as the tyranny of circumstance disguised as moral failing. It shifts the burden of structural inequality onto the individual. It implies that the only barrier to entry was the tuition fee, conveniently ignoring the massive, invisible infrastructure required to actually consume this content. To engage meaningfully with CS229M (Machine Learning Theory), one requires not just advanced calculus and linear algebra, but high-speed internet, a powerful GPU for training models, and, most crucially, time. Who has the leisure time to audit graduate-level Stanford courses for free? Not the working-class professional juggling two jobs to survive the cost-of-living crisis. Not the single parent negotiating the ‘double shift’ of care and labour. Not the caregiver juggling everything. This ‘free’ access may raise the audience’s awareness of systemic barriers, highlighting that resources, not just content, determine access. 6. The Hollow Liberty of Flexible Access Let’s look at the specious promise of flexibility with a cold, discerning eye, increasingly peddled to the marginalised. The architects of these modern educational programmes proclaim that they have opened the gates and that the digital classroom offers a flexibility of access that liberates the mother, the carer, and the weary. The outsiders are now on the inside??? Yet this is a hollow liberty. It is a flexibility of entry only and not a flexibility of learning. They grant the student the right to log in at midnight, but not the right to learn in a way that deviates from the rigid, linear norms of a curriculum built by and for the privileged and unencumbered male. We are told that the walls have been removed, but in truth, they have simply been rendered invisible. By shifting the site of learning from the collective and public space of the university or the office back into the private and domestic sphere, we are not liberating women. We are confining them. We are asking them to bear the double burden of domestic administration and professional acquisition without the sanctuary of a dedicated space. The flexibility to learn from home is too often the freedom to be interrupted, divided, and ultimately diminished. It is a trap that relies on the learner’s isolation to function. Similarly, we must consider the nature of the space we are asking these students to occupy. It is a space stripped of the protective friction of human mentorship. Increasingly, in the name of efficiency, we have replaced the wandering path of the apprentice with the streamlined perfection of the AI tutor. But authentic learning requires the right to be wrong and to know why you made those mistakes. It requires elbow room to make more mistakes without them becoming fatal to one’s professional identity. Removing the human interaction-infrastructure of learning, we create a system that demands perfection from those who can least afford the risk of failure. Rather than ‘an education’, such access mirrors a filtering mechanism that selects for those already indistinguishable from the machine. In doing so, students are reduced to zombie data. Elite universities and platforms like Coursera measure success by enrolment, not completion or competence. By flooding the web with free content, they boost their “impact” metrics (“We reached 10 million learners!”) without disclosing that 95% of those learners watched 2 videos and quit because they lacked the support to continue. Even the free users are generating data. Every pause, rewind, and quiz failure is data that can be used to refine its own educational AI models or sell to partners. The 'free' learner is not just a potential customer; they are a test subject for the next generation of ed-tech products. They are farming us for engagement metrics to justify their tax-exempt status, not measuring whether we actually learned anything. How about a new kind of space? Not merely the digital permission to access a server but the social permission to exist as a complex and fallible learner. One in which we can reject the efficiency that treats the student as a vessel to be filled with data and reclaim the inefficiency that allows the student to become a learner who unfolds with new knowledge. Until we do so, the open door of these programmes will remain nothing more than a gaping maw. It consumes the time and hope of the marginalised while offering nothing but the illusion of progress. 7. The Devaluation of Junior Labour and the Reserve Army Eventually, ‘Stanford-level knowledge’ is becoming the baseline expectation for entry-level roles simply because the material is free. The bar for entry does not lower; it rises. This move creates a ‘reserve army of labour’, a glut of semi-qualified individuals that drives down the value of junior roles. Employers can now demand that junior developers possess theoretical knowledge previously reserved for PhDs, without offering the pay or training to match. “Why should we train you?” they will ask. “The videos were on YouTube.” This is not a hypothetical danger. A dear friend who is senior engineer at a large tech firm recently told me she is already fighting this battle on the ground. She, and note that it is she, is performing the invisible, unpaid labour of protecting her junior staff from management’s abdication of duty. She is acting as a human shield against the logic of efficiency, filling the training gap with her own time because the institution has decided that 'free access' and vibe coding with a Chatbot absolves them of the responsibility to teach. It accelerates the credential arms race. If everyone has read the slides, the slides no longer distinguish you. The distinction moves back to the one thing you cannot download from YouTube: the pedigree. The degree, the brand, the handshake. 8. The Strategy of the Benevolent King: Reputation Washing The timing of this ostentatious largesse arrives at a precise historical moment when the elite university is increasingly, and correctly, characterised as a tax-exempt hedge fund with a tiny fraction of educational subsidiary (for the public good). In this light, the release of free curriculum is a strategic exercise in reputation washing. Not very revolutionary at all. It is a performance of noblesse oblige designed to purchase the moral high ground at a negligible cost. By scattering these digital crumbs, Stanford postures as a benevolent philanthropist, a gesture that conveniently distracts from the fortress of its $37.6 billion endowment, while the academy itself increasingly relies on an army of precarious, underpaid adjunct labour to function. This ‘gift’ (wearing out the quotation mark keys on my keyboard) allows the institution to cloak itself in the rhetoric of open access without engaging in the dangerous work of actual redistribution. Stanford and others are not SheRa. They have not shared their power; they have simply televised their prestige to ensure that, even in an open market, they remain the monarchs we must thank for the privilege of learning. Conclusion: The Library of Minds Far from dismantling the hierarchy, gestures like this serves only to fortify it. We must be careful not to confuse a repository with a school, nor a data dump with equity. Stanford has positioned itself as the benevolent monarch of the intellect, scattering the bread and circuses of 'open access' to the masses. At the same time, the actual keys to the kingdom, the networks, the laboratories, the whispered introductions to venture capital, remain safely vaulted behind the tuition paywall. Consume the content, by all means. Master the calculus. But do not be beguiled into calling this a revolution. The walls of the walled garden have not been breached; they have merely been fitted with glass, ensuring that while we may now clearly see the machinery of their privilege, we remain just as barred from touching it. Links & References
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