Systemic failure in digital literacy: How neoliberal education privatizes critical thinking while tech monopolies profit from cognitive extraction
Original framing: “Teaching children to be better, more critical internet users” — Phys.org
By 2035, digital literacy programs may need to address the rise of synthetic media and AI-generated misinformation, requiring adaptive frameworks that go beyond static evaluation skills. Scenario planning suggests that as platforms integrate more immersive technologies, literacy will need to include spatial and temporal awareness of digital environments. The McGill model’s focus on websites may become obsolete as social media and AR/VR dominate, necessitating a shift toward embodied and contextual digital fluency.
The McGill program’s success in improving website evaluation exposes a deeper failure: public education has been repurposed as a training ground for neoliberal subjectivity, where children are taught to navigate corporate platforms rather than challenge their underlying logic.
This framing obscures how Silicon Valley’s attention economy thrives on cognitive extraction, turning critical thinking into a marketable skill while depoliticizing the structural forces that shape digital harm. Indigenous epistemologies and Global South pedagogies offer radical alternatives, treating knowledge as relational and communal rather than transactional, yet these are systematically excluded from mainstream literacy frameworks. The solution lies not in tweaking classroom interventions but in dismantling the extractive data regimes that make such interventions necessary—through community-controlled digital sovereignty, platform accountability mandates, and a return to education’s civic mission. The trickster’s laughter echoes in the absurdity of teaching children to 'be better internet users' in a world where the internet was never designed for them to begin with.