One who argues for the production of human knowledge must accept two premises. The first premise is that a human being actually exists, else there would be no one to create knowledge. To exist, a human being must produce the means of her own subsistence. "By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life." Karl Marx, The German Ideology Ch. 1. A human being that does not produce food, water, etc. will not exist for long and will therefore not produce knowledge. Unfortunately, too often the global economic system organizes itself around the production of useless luxuries and frivolous intermediaries for the conversion of capital into itself. This reality impedes the pace by which human beings produce their material subsistence, which in turn impedes the existence of human beings, which in turn impedes the production of human knowledge. Thus, a central priority for the advocate of human knowledge production should be the redistribution of resources, labor, and capital toward more efficient production, most likely through state intervention.

The second premise is that human beings possess the time necessary to produce creative work. Unfortunately, to survive in capitalist society, proletarians are forced into a system of labor relations which alienate them from the the product of their work and inhibits their freedom to participate in creative production on their own accord. A central priority of the human knowledge advocate should then be to liberate individuals from the labor relations that stand in the way of their freedom.

Ask yourself: what is biggest impediment to creative expression for the worker that spends 80 hours a week at her desk to feed her family? For the young child in Mumbai who goes to bed hungry? For the wife of a cancer patient, who spends her life fearing she will wake up a widow? Patent law and time spent searching through the Facebook news feed? Really?

Ask any of these people, and I guarantee they will not need a free software educational system to explain the source of their oppression.

I will of course keep an open mind over the remainder of this class, but this is the current state of my thought development. I fear that our working theory requires us to spend too much time attempting to build a box in which to accumulate human knowledge and not enough time filling in that box ourselves. We already have the means to condemn the hypocrisy of those in power, even if the software, learning systems, and tools at our disposal are less than perfect . What prevents us from simply using what we have?

-- ShayBanerjee - 23 Sep 2015