This chapter explores postdigital approaches to critically rethinking and dismantling grind culture—a relentless cycle of productivity and overwork. We explore pathways to resistance against grind culture by mapping out different forms of opposition and reform, relying mainly on theoretical explorations, but also illustrating these with both historical and contemporary examples. Central to our discussion is the role of digital systems in exacerbating grind culture, where the relentless pursuit of efficiency and optimization paradoxically often leads to increased work and more bureaucracy. To disrupt this harmful cycle, it is crucial to imagine and implement postdigital frameworks that challenge the constant strive for more productivity. Our speculative approach involves deconstructing existing technologies and imagining new paradigms that promote, for example, rest, meaningfulness, and individual and collective agency. The chapter draws on Foucauldian concepts such as ‘docile bodies’ and ‘technologies of the self’ to examine how power operates through the regulation of the body and both external and internalized disciplinary frameworks. It provides a tentative roadmap for reimagining ‘the machine’, advocating for futures where technologies take unexpected turns or breaks in directions that could make current productivity paradigms impossible.

Employing a mixed postqualitative methods approach, this article examines the concept of reading imaginaries in public library events in three cases where children read with robots, dogs, and drag performers. Using the critical analytical tools of sociotechnical imaginaries and matters of care, we regard our cases as containers for resolving societal problems, and we explore how they contain societal expectations and imaginaries about reading and literacy in postdigital ecologies. The care practices observed in our case studies transcend digital technologies, encompassing broader and politically charged issues and the importance of situating the hype and fear surrounding emerging technologies, such as AI, within a more comprehensive and far-reaching framework. As concerns over privacy, data flows, and security increasingly extend to analog technologies such as books, curriculum content, and the embodiment of educators, mediated public discourse continues to play a significant role in shaping these dynamics. An example of this is how drag reading events become hot-button issues in a politicised and polarised school debate, while dogs and robots do not.

In the current study, we explore the endeavours to encourage and develop children’s reading in a case where a robot becomes a node within the traditional welfare system where public libraries, tech corporations, children, and books meet. Although the robot is designed as a care robot that can help children who struggle with reading, this is the task that the robot might be least equipped to do. However, when the robot fails, the unintended consequences result in fortunate strokes of serendipity. We study how failure, here as an effect of care, sociotechnical imaginaries, and power relations, can be a productive way of examining the ideals and imaginaries surrounding reading and robots and the possibility of finding unexpected forms of resistance

Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a new era of enlightenment and Bildung, yet we find ourselves left in the dark regarding its fundamental impact. Currently, there is a public request for citizens to educate themselves about the societal effects that AI and other autonomous systems produce. International education policies assert that individuals need to acquire a breadth of new skills to adapt successfully to the changes that AI will bring to society. The skills and abilities that are required under the umbrella term AI literacy alone have expanded to such an extent that they must now be understood as a form of holistic civic knowledge comparable to a general Bildung. The public uptake of this is phrased as a universal solution to a vast variety of problems in postdigital societies. This chapter explores one genealogy of Bildung and lifelong learning in relation to digital developments and finally imagines postdigital Bildung in the Anthropocene.

This article contributes to moving forward current discourses about speculative methods by explaining how they can become critical in practice. It explores how the collaborative construction of speculative technological solutions (in this case relating to AI in education) can reveal an implicit acceptance of restricting imaginaries. In three design fiction workshops, a total of 36 teacher students were given the task to create an AI-powered technical solution to a self-identified and urgent problem in education. These design workshops revealed several interesting ‘ironies’ relevant to both actual technical development as well as speculative methods about technological futures. The ironies include an ‘ironic imitation’ of the discourses and norms that are perceived as surrounding contemporary technology. These workshops further reveal and question discourses about desirable learning, and as such these ironies are productive in illuminating power asymmetries, thereby creating space for important failures, resistances, and disruptions.