Morten's POV

This essay is experimental and was originally written for a different outlet. I am sharing it here with the caveat that I am not yet fully committed to the overall argument, so consider it more of a thinking-out-loud exercise than a definitive statement of my views. I welcome any thoughts as I continue to work through these ideas.

*

As they launch rockets into outer space, billionaires are talking of new societies among the stars. Meanwhile, technology boosters are raising billions to train neural networks that they claim will usher in a renaissance of plenty. New global powers are rising, and old alliances are eroding. Amidst all this, we could be forgiven for focusing too much on the rockets, and not enough on the groundwork they are laying.

In this speculative piece, I attempt to cut through the noise by identifying three interrelated dynamics that I see as foundational to the future of civic education: economies of scale and scope, portfolio logics, and the politically threatening undercurrents evident in, for example, techno-libertarian exit projects. Taken together, they provide the conditions for a dangerous alignment between AI-powered national and educational fragmentation, which could undermine education as a civic project.

*

From the perspective of the nation state, it matters not only if students learn; it matters what they learn, how they learn, and who they become. This is because reproducing the nation state requires socialising new generations into it through a shared imagination about the country they belong to and its place in the world and in history (Anderson, 2006). This is also called civic education.

For example, I am Danish, I feel Danish, and I feel a sense of loyalty to my country, although I have not lived in Denmark for more than a decade. In school I sang Danish songs every morning with my classmates, read fairytales written by Danish poet Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), and learned the legend of how the Danish flag fell from the sky during a battle in Tallinn, Estonia in 1219. While most of these stories are more fiction than fact, they are stories that most if not all Danes will know, and they give us a shared sense of belonging. In conjunction with other institutions and rituals, they shape our social experiences while instilling specific civic values across the nation. Devices like books and classrooms have been crucial to such civic projects because reading the same books and going to the same classes standardises national identification processes.

*

Traditional education devices such as classrooms and books are designed to leverage economies of scale and scope, thereby making the delivery of education more efficient. For example, the printing press provided a way of producing the same books very cheaply (economies of scale), as well as different kinds of books more cheaply (economies of scope). These books are then read in schools that can teach multiple students simultaneously (economies of scale) about different subjects (economies of scope).

As already hinted at, economies of scale align with a particular approach to civic education because students attending to duplicates of the same mass-produced device, like different copies of the same book, are presented the same ideas in the same way. This sameness in content and form can result in similar identification processes, just as when school children across Denmark used the same songbook for their morning songs. Educational standardisation therefore goes some way to explain the deep attachment some people feel toward their country.

National assimilation through educational standardisation is of course also problematic. Valuing unity over diversity, it can for example result in the suppression of regional identities or colonial histories. It is therefore important that students have the space and are encouraged to reach their own conclusions. But, despite these problems, some degree of assimilation through bumping into similar education devices remains crucial for reproducing nation states, because it ensures that students have had the chance to think through and deal with similar stories and concepts, in similar ways. This gives a people a shared frame of reference to—if nothing else—agree on what they disagree about and why.

Economies of scope, by contrast, invite more diversity in education devices and therefore, for more decentred processes of self-formation and national identification. Until now, economies of scope have always bumped up against material constraints in how education is provided. For example, a personal tutor can only attend to one individual at a time, and developing a curriculum unique to each student would be much more expensive than having students follow the same trajectories. Such limits to economies of scope in education have been an important force steering education systems towards standardisation and aligning it with the civic aim of producing similar national subjects.

AI-generated education, however, could cause hitherto unimagined fragmentation. The imagined future of AI-generated education is that the reconfiguration of learning materials becomes so cheap that, in theory, it could be created for every student on a continuous basis. The environmental consequences of this would be horrific, but this is not my concern here. The worry I want to examine is the following: what will happen if such economies of scope proliferate? In other words, economies of scope may not be limited to the small liminal spaces between students and the things that students must learn, i.e. those final stretches that will get them to that moment of learning through understanding via an additional one-on-one tutorial, for example.

Anything that can be expressed in computer code can be folded into new economies of scope: new curricula, new means of delivering teaching, new ways of organising it, and new ways of valuing it. This may look like traditional schooling—like when Elon Musk opened the Ad Astra school (Ecarma, 2025)—but it may also look very differently: what about online worlds where teachers and peers are AI-bots and the curriculum changes based on your engagement with them? We can thus think about education fragmentation through AI as the supply-driven proliferation (Geroski, 2003) of new education media, contents, and value systems, potentially undermining education’s traditional civic aims by binding and dividing groups of people in new ways.

*

Traditional education systems are vulnerable to AI-powered fragmentation because of the historical moment we are in. After all, such fragmentation would not spread into the unipolar world order that emerged from the ruins of World War II, but into an uncertain, multipolar and regulatorily-fragmented world plagued by accelerating polycrises (Tooze, 2024). The most extreme response to such uncertainty are political exit projects where (in particular) techno-libertarians like Peter Thiel have turned their backs to the nation state as we know it. With likeminded people, they claim to seek new frontiers and territory for starting new societies, from Greenland (Ward, 2025) to disused oilrigs (Slobodian, 2023) and outer space (Utrata, 2024).

Under such conditions, the meaning of civic education would shift because the purposes of political exit projects are orthogonal to that of nation states. For example, for the nation state, only one viable future exists: the future where the state survives. For techno-libertarians and their corporations, in contrast, many viable futures exist, and a political exit project is just one investment among many, in a portfolio hedging against different futures. In some futures, the order of nation states prevails, but in others it fails, or the picture is murky and complicated: the aim of the corporation is to succeed in any and all of these futures.

*

Looking at political exit projects through the logics of investment portfolios thus recasts how we can “see” them. Instead of seeing corporate secession from the state as a voyage in the distant future—say, the first astronaut flying out as an outpost to Mars before it is terraformed—we see begin seeing it as a financial play. This play gives investors and the public writ large alternative horizons to focus on. These horizons are useful to their creators regardless of whether they are likely, virtuous, or even possible. This is because the investments underpinning them are countercyclical and enact new anticipatory regimes.

Countercyclical investments are investments in assets that appreciate when most other assets depreciate. Gold is a traditional countercyclical asset because investors tend to buy it during financial crises. Anticipatory regimes imagine futures that redirect people’s attention, resources and sense of what is possible, like SpaceX’s imagined future where they save humanity from “terrestrial ruin” through the establishment of multiplanetary” life (Young and Docherty, 2024, p. 11). The anticipatory regimes of corporate exit projects are thus countercyclical due to their subversive bend: living in space becomes a much more attractive proposition if the world of nation states—and especially the relative peace we have enjoyed since the second World War—were to falter. Chaos and innovation, conflated in one act of hubris.

*

Corporations that hedge in this way do not need subjects that have unshakable loyalties to a specific place or a specific people. What they need are subjects who are sufficiently loyal and sufficiently ‘agile’ to go where the wind blows. This points to a new and potentially dangerous alignment between national and educational fragmentation: an emergent supply of cheap and diverse education offerings, ready to meet an emergent demand for learning systems unshackled from the nation states that political exit projects seek to escape.

While the fever-dream of techno-secession may never succeed, it is giving direction to a particular education production logic.

In this logic, AI-powered economies of scope can weaken existing national identities while harbouring the potential to create loyalties that may very well serve a new technocratic elite. It would be done by flooding education with experiences unique to each student, thereby disrupting the reproduction of shared national identities, and providing alternative routes of socialisation into these new societies.

After all, without schools to develop ingroup (and ultimately loyal) identities, true exit (and by extension true sovereignty) is hard to sustain.

References

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Revised edition). Verso.

Ecarma, C. (2025, February 11). The schools trying to teach America’s kids to think like Elon Musk. https://www.muskwatch.com/p/the-schools-trying-to-teach-americas

Geroski, P. (2003). The Evolution of New Markets. Oxford University Press.

Slobodian, Q. (2023). Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Random House.

Tooze, A. (2024, November 2). Polycrisis and the Fraying of U.S. Hegemony [Hans Maeder Lecture Series]. https://youtu.be/b57bVILz6FM?si=vR6plVj6Jd4nqzTH

Utrata, A. (2024). Engineering Territory: Space and Colonies in Silicon Valley. American Political Science Review, 118(3), 1097–1109.

Ward, I. (2025, January 16). The Spiritual Case for Greenland. POLITICO. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/16/spiritual-case-greenland-trump-00198848

Young, D., & Docherty, N. (2025). An anticipatory regime of multiplanetary life: on SpaceX, Martian colonisation and terrestrial ruin. Science as Culture, 34(2), 168–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2024.2393096