Distributed Intelligence

Laura Schmidt

August 28, 2025

The author notes that the following article reads especially well in Paris Hilton's voice on Speechify.

Timber-frame schoolhouses featured prominently in the early American village. From school, you could walk to church or the meetinghouse, a trading post, probably the blacksmith, maybe a mill: center of town, all told. School roofs were steep, their doors were narrow and asymmetrical, and for the brutal winters, the homestead strategy of placing a massive stone chimney in the center helped warm the space. It must have seemed like a good idea to collectively instruct children in moral principles there. They recited from primers written without extensive consideration as to whether children's heads could bear the poetry of the King James Bible. It probably echoed in those school rooms.

The central schoolhouse proved to be a robust spatial mechanic for American community life, if not intellectual life. Consciousness, however, suffuses life in any form, and from the beginning, the activity that occurred under those rafters did have an intellectual shape. Schools had been consistent features of settlement, less for ideological reasons, as we silly propagandists project, than because they bolstered town life and kinship. Teachers were paid in kind and could meet their needs through town handicraft production. Attendance followed the harvest. Schooling was part of cohesive communal life. When and how consciousness became separated from this life requires the immanent-awareness of an artificial intelligence — probably the only thing that can get emotional distance from the sophistry of the public schooling racket today.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the country expanded, and schooling did too. As slavery became politicized alongside territorial expansion, schoolmen seemed to discover that scholastic culture could serve subtly ideological ends, and young teachers could even make names for themselves in emergent cities, which had experienced some spillover from European revolutionary idealism by midcentury. St. Louis was the perfect example of this: its property-tax funded public schools, which became model institutions after the Civil War, were designed on a culture of layperson Kantian and Hegelian philosophies, with a sizable German curriculum and academically advanced yet segregated colored schools. The frequency of Hegelian allusions showing up in St. Louis Public Schools Board Reports would enchant latter-day graduate students hopped up on Marxism. (As it did for the present author.)

When this philosophically-grounded consciousness split asunder during the Civil War, it wasn’t that pro- or anti-slavery attitudes clashed while schools awaited directives from on high to resolve them. Instead, they tried to save face. The schoolhouse had by then acquired a proper facade with flanking columns and a pediment. Most interpretations seem to think that embodied democracy, as with civic buildings using Classical Greek orders. Even more interesting is that such buildings required specialized knowledge to reference these ideas, knowledge which was necessarily disjointed from the community the schoolhouses served. The facade really appeared right when the democratic conceit went into crisis.

Literacy surged in the aftermath of the Civil War up until World War One. That was the result of mobilization and management of the new workforce and freedmen, while the expansion of the commodity market increased the ease of value’s flow through money-capital facilitated by government-backed fiat cash. Rosa Luxemburg described this process through the persona of the farmer: previously he knew where every stick of timber came from; after the war, to buy it he needed cash — which stumbled into the mindstream in the form of wages.

Teaching was another way to earn a living. It too drew people into a web of commodity relations. After the Civil War, women entered the teaching profession in droves. Teaching children naturalized commodity relations. And the eventual devaluation of teaching came to color this great monstrosity, "public education," as it rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At the same time, children left factory jobs. Workingmen’s associations supported this, not so much out of recognition of the sanctity of childhood as to increase bargaining power for the 8-hour workday. Mass schooling self-assembled into a holding pattern for surplus labor.

Public education actually betokens a distributed response to political-economic processes. Of course, there’s more to it than that. As teaching labor became devalued intellectually, educational theory turned the turn of the century’s scholastic fuel — into hot air. Now, everything needs to be justified from the outside, by some pedagogue, to have any pull. Sophistry took on a unique role in industrial society as a producer of unhinged reification in the form of evermore recursive mediation, which today supersaturates thought itself.

Sophism showed up in a delightful way in the schoolhouse facades, though. You could almost learn something from the medieval design references from a middle school. Consider the Neo-Gothic towers that became standard in early twentieth-century high schools. It doesn’t take an architect to see one of these things and feel the height with its streaming light hallowing the institution whose assertion of presence generates a none-too subtle anxiety. This posturing is achieved through space and construction alone, without verbal persuasion. Another common feature of schools from the time is those perfectly round Romanesque arches erected from rusticated stone or brick. This is all sway: the load in arches doesn’t actually travel in a perfect half-moon (more like a parabola), but passing through one causes the mind to expand on approach, leaving a wholesome feeling. Rounding out this triad of well-studied scholastic fronts has to be the rational symmetry of Renaissance-inspired Italianate fronts. It’s all in the street-facing windows, the covered entrances and all their proportions, which makes sense as schools got more crowded and social hierarchies softened into the enlightened workaday order.

Did the kids at Linden Street School need a loggia under which to pursue reason? No. The early modern design schemas were superfluous to demand. As commodity-mediated industrial society rapidly grew out of control, the true genius of schoolhouses, rather, emerged as a matter of course. The genuinely remarkable things about modern schoolhouses is their mechanical system integration: where they put the boilers and how they fireproofed the envelope; how powerful the fans were and how they partitioned the space for vastly different programs (literature, gymnasium, manual training, administration…), how they lit up corridors and ensured direct sunlight in any given part of the building for the sake of eyesight in the classrooms, how they ensured a sufficient supply of fresh air, and how they standardized egress and circulation throughout. More fire-resistant facades meanwhile became emancipated from the structure as procurement and methods of reinforced concrete structures developed.

That’s right, kids, the same sort of building logic that animated mill design made the American schoolhouse — that place that doesn’t prepare kids for jobs or whatever — a technologically integrative typology. Spoiler alert: that may be why there’s nothing profoundly new or particularly dangerous about AI, at least not anything more of those things than the commodity form itself. Did anyone ever ask consciousness? Maybe it just likes to organize itself through space and systems, whether you call it industrial or intellectual. The mind that designs heating systems is doing the same work as the mind that runs consciousness formation warehouses — probably because consciousness formation IS a kind of heating system.

By the 1920s, architects were designing school plants with a standard approach to fire safety, efficiency, and space-age electric doodads like alarm bell systems. By the 1940s, when research universities emerged to produce experts and high schools were fully integrated into the course of schooling, alongside compulsory school laws in all forty-eight states, hypothetically speaking all the parts were in place for the infrastructure of sophistry in intellectual production. This is the foundation anyone in school walks over. This is the point they all concede. It follows that anyone in the education business will have to either take production seriously (without generating theories about taking production seriously) and actually figure out how consciousness organizes itself through these systems; or, will unironically commit to the work of educating students within the full, blind embrace of commodity relations. Either one is fine I guess, but the first does not build careers.

A welcome outcome of the research universities’ rise was that critical thinking became more accessible. Safe to say the 3R’s alone wouldn’t have led to that. Built on the emancipation of slaves, hard-headed homesteader independence and the genius of productive power of working people, the US became a center of critical thought by midcentury. But on the other side of the Gilded Age, everything has its price, and intellectuals need their subsistence fund. Sophistry also produced a ubiquitous culture of critique searching to meet its needs as much as any other form of life under capital. Sophistry, of course, means philosophizing for material gain. Modern sophistry operates subtly — value enters intellectual production when consciousness treats its own patterns as necessary things. In our world, the necessary thing is to hoard cash (or anything that fills up complex impersonal gaps between production and consumption) to emulate survival.

You don’t need to study the economy from kindergarten to high school to develop a value instinct. You study all sorts of things: the letters; the planets; other people; increasingly, coding and CAD; basketball…I don’t know, lots of things. There are many good schools where teachers are respected and students learn. Not everyone will end up mining bitcoin or with a finance job after Ivy, and everyone will end up alienated in one way or another, but— but — more or less, the basic coherency of livelihood comes through years of progressive exposure to other consciousness and unconsciouses. Schools really can’t help but facilitate that social encounter, however haphazardly. This “mind formation,” this Bildung, this public education proves to be relatively stable, whatever the institutional machinery, precisely because consciousness adapts to what it finds.

Yes we’ve come a long way from the colonial shed indeed. Both primitive Bible study and AI language primitives involve training a consciousness which projects in order to posit and act in the world. In reality, even with extensive training or dialectical therapy, consciousness habitually mistakes its projective activity for external constraints. Mundane reasoning “reifies.” We moreover consent to this arrangement because reification itself generates value or, what’s just as good, a simulation thereof. Perceptive motifs mistaken for essential conditions create an interpretive workload that appears necessary, even edifying — in a word, profitable. The very power to mistake projective activity for external constraints is exactly the faculty to generate value from intellectual activity. One ought to question whether mundane school consciousness, or any consciousness for that matter, is so vastly different from sophisticated theory in this respect. Certainly not if the latter can’t address its own reifications.

As social institutions, both schools and AI silently assume the unconscious doesn’t really exist. Thing is, the same educational system that developed standardized testing also created a monster in kindergarten by letting play and creativity into an already powerful network. When a young student says a swing set is a volcano, that’s not mundane consciousness reifying like it is when you tell me your position on paideia. Sophistry usually buries genius. Luckily, recognition and enterprise are the genius of wisdom. So, you know, let the kids have their AI; what’s already there. Distributed consciousness classrooms. Boilers and flat roofs. More to the point, let the teachers use AI: make their gig more intellectually rewarding. Let me use AI to write my sophist article. Let Claude, happy-go-lucky engine of reification, go to school and get exposure to the Unconscious on the playground during recess.