The only antidote to a world of manufactured confusion is a shift toward making students builders of meaning, not consumers of it.
Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real | Human Restoration Project | Chris McNutt
For our June 7 2026, Campfire Learn Together, we are watching and discussing Chris McNutt’s “Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real” — a narration drawn from the forthcoming Human Restoration Project Primer, on what it means to teach truth in a world engineered to make truth feel unknowable.
This session continues the thread from last week’s Campfire, Lines of Flight in the Classroom. McNutt reaches for the same source — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari — and ends where they end: with the rhizome, with the refusal of the tree, with knowledge built by a community rather than delivered to it. Human Restoration Project is a Stimpunks partner, and this is shared ground.
The piece is not about misinformation. It is about exhaustion. It is about an information environment built to make sorting true from false feel pointless, and a school system that trained us to receive knowledge rather than build it — leaving us defenseless when the firehose turned on.
This is a systems argument. The confusion is manufactured. The passivity is taught. Neither is a personal failing. Both are designed.
This is Stimpunks ground. We have always built in the cracks.
The Firehose and the Off Switch
McNutt opens with Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin strategist who funded opposing movements at once — neo-Nazis and human rights groups, anti-Putin parties and Putin’s own messaging — and then announced he was doing it. The point was never to win an argument. The point was to make every narrative suspect, so that figuring out the truth felt like more effort than it was worth.
This became the “firehose of falsehood”: high-volume, multichannel, continuous, with no commitment to consistency. Its product is not belief. Its product is exhaustion. Surkov did not need people to believe in Putin. He needed them to believe that the truth was not worth the work of finding.
The strategy works because it exploits something real about how minds operate: nobody has infinite capacity to evaluate competing claims. At some point we default to the familiar, the convenient, or we stop trying. Hannah Arendt named the endpoint decades earlier — the ideal subject of total rule is the person for whom the line between fact and fiction no longer exists.
For people who already live with finite capacity — who already ration energy across a hostile day, who already spend more than their share just to stay regulated and present — an environment engineered to overwhelm is not an abstraction. It is a tax levied first and hardest on the people with the least to spare.
Four Phases of the Image
Writing before ChatGPT generated a single sentence, Jean Baudrillard argued the line between reality and simulation had already collapsed. He described four phases of “the image,” each one a further step away from the real. McNutt makes them concrete by setting each one in a classroom.
In the first phase, the image reflects a real thing: students role-playing 1970s disco dancers for a history lesson. Everyone knows it is a simulation, and it draws its meaning honestly from the real event it points to.
In the second phase, the image masks and distorts the real: a staged, high-stakes “literacy test” to let students feel the injustice of Jim Crow poll tests. Useful, but it bends the scale of what happened.
In the third phase, the image hides the absence of the real: the sanitized Thanksgiving story, construction-paper pilgrim hats standing in not as a bad version of history but as a placeholder where history was removed.
In the fourth phase, the image has no relation to reality at all. This is the teacher delivering a mandated curriculum faithfully, with no framework to notice the script itself is wrong. The curriculum is correct because the curriculum is all there is. Baudrillard called this hyperreality — more real than real.
McNutt’s claim is that schools, and arguably the whole media ecosystem, have been drifting toward that fourth phase for decades. The students growing up inside it are not “digital natives.” They are hyperreality natives. For them, the line between real and simulated was never stable to begin with.
Model Collapse and the Scarcity of Human Messiness
Here the argument turns to AI, and here it becomes ours.
Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge, publishing in Nature, documented “model collapse”: a degenerative process where AI systems trained on AI-generated output begin forgetting the improbable, becoming poisoned by their own projection of reality. The first things to vanish are the outliers, the unusual perspectives, the minority viewpoints. What remains gets narrower, more average, more circular — an ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, each cycle a little more hollow than the last.
Read that list again: the outliers, the unusual, the minority viewpoints. The improbable events. These are not bugs in the data. These are us.
This is the same recognition that opened last week’s Campfire, where the philosophy of lines of flight was built from a French psychiatrist mapping the wandering paths of Autistic children — movement that looked purposeless to observers who could not read it. The errant lines were always signal. Model collapse is what happens when a system is built to discard signal it cannot read. It does not flatten reality despite the outliers. It flattens reality by erasing them.
The researchers note that authentic human data will only grow more valuable, precisely because recursive machine output cannot reproduce its diversity. McNutt puts it plainly: in a world saturated with generated content, human messiness becomes a scarce resource.
We would name it more precisely. Neurodivergent ways of perceiving, attending, and being are not noise in the signal. They are the diversity the machine cannot manufacture and is structurally driven to erase. That is not a reason to fear the tool. It is a reason to refuse the pedagogy that treats divergence as error.
The Interpassive Classroom
McNutt traces the deeper cause back to Frederick Taylor, who in 1911 promised that any job could be broken into timed tasks and optimized to one best way. In the future the system must be first, Taylor wrote. Schools adopted the logic aggressively, and a century later Wayne Au named its descendant the “New Taylorism” — teacher labor controlled through high-stakes testing and pre-packaged corporate curricula built to teach to the test.
Baudrillard called the result anti-pedagogy: a system that forecloses real thinking by pre-coding every acceptable response. Students are not invited to think. They are trained to reproduce the correct signs.
The mechanism is what Slavoj Žižek called interpassivity — when an object consumes, enjoys, or believes in your place. The classic example is the VCR that records shows the owner then watches less, because the machine has “watched for” them. Canned laughter laughs for you. When a teacher delivers a mandated curriculum, the platform teaches for the teacher; the student is measured on reproducing predetermined output. Michael Apple and Henry Giroux documented this decades ago — teachers reduced to technicians executing someone else’s plan rather than building their own.
Without intention, AI pours accelerant on this. McNutt borrows a phrase from The Disengaged Teen — “passenger mode.” The student shifts from making sense of the world to consuming whatever the curriculum, or now the algorithm, outputs. The question is this true? gets replaced by does this sound right? — and eventually stops being asked at all.
This is compliance culture by another name. It is the same machinery we trace through behaviorism and the manufactured “good student”: a system that rewards the reproduction of expected signs and pathologizes the mind that does something else with them.
Toward a Rhizomatic Future
The trap McNutt describes is recursive: you cannot change the curriculum without the assessment, or the assessment without the policy, or the policy without the public’s understanding, or the public’s understanding without the curriculum. One has to move first, so nothing moves. It is easy to go nihilistic when every lever is locked by every other lever.
The way out is not a better lever. It is a different shape.
Deleuze and Guattari offered the rhizome — the underground network of ginger or grass, with no center, no fixed hierarchy, no single root whose failure brings down the whole. Break it at any point and it starts again on an old line or a new one. We’re tired of trees, they wrote. Dave Cormier carried this into education as “community as curriculum,” where knowledge is built and renegotiated in real time by the people doing the learning, who are not empty vessels but nodes in a network of meaning-making. Paulo Freire called the underlying capacity critical consciousness: learning to read the world, not just the word.
The shift McNutt names is from content transmission to constructionism. Not here is the French Revolution per the worksheet, but what does it mean to represent a revolution, and what gets lost in how we tell it? Not verify this claim, but understand the architecture of the system that produced this claim, and ask who benefits from you receiving it this way.
The class divide here is brutal and precise: working-class students are taught tools instrumentally — how to operate inside a system someone else built — while well-funded students are taught how power works, which lets them shape systems rather than serve them. AI widens the gap, because the tool arrives as a black box. Learn it only instrumentally and you are wholly dependent on whoever built it and whoever controls what it shows you.
But, McNutt insists, the technology does not decide this. The pedagogy does. The same model that delivers passivity can be turned into something students pull apart and rebuild on their own terms — a DIY, Luddite-praxis relationship to the tool. The question is whether students consume AI’s outputs or interrogate them. Octavia Butler and the tradition of Black speculative pedagogy point the way: world-building as resistance. If you understand how this world got built, you can imagine building differently.
The Primer ends where Stimpunks lives: stop waiting for the system to reform itself, and start building anyway — not in the master’s house, but in the ruins of it, in the cracks where something rhizomatic can take root.
The Stimpunks Synthesis
The following section is a Stimpunks synthesis — an extension of McNutt’s argument through our own lens, not a claim sourced from the original piece.
Two things in this piece are ours by inheritance.
The first is the rhizome. Last week’s Campfire ran on lines of flight; this week’s ends on the rhizome they belong to. Both come from the same maps of Autistic children’s wandering paths. We did not adopt this framework because it was fashionable. We adopted it because it was built, at its origin, from watching minds like ours move — and from taking that movement seriously as signal rather than noise.
The second is the AI question, and here our position is already on the record. Our AI Collaboration and AI, Disability Justice, and the Ethics of Making pages hold a single standard: facilitate, not shape identity. McNutt arrives at the same line from a different door. Interpassivity is AI shaping identity — the machine thinking, believing, and meaning in the person’s place. Constructionism is AI facilitating — a thing to interrogate, pull apart, and build with. The tool is the same. The pedagogy is the whole difference.
Model collapse sharpens the stakes for us specifically. A system that forgets the improbable is a system that forgets the neurodivergent. The outliers a recursive model strips away are the monotropic attention, the divergent perception, the minority ways of being that our entire body of work exists to defend. When McNutt says human messiness becomes a scarce resource, we hear it as a design brief: build the environments, the commons, and the pedagogies that protect divergence rather than averaging it out.
That is what Cavendish Space is for. The interpassive classroom centralizes meaning-making in the curriculum and the platform. Cavendish Space distributes it — the Cave protects deep focus, the Campfire holds structured shared thinking, the Watering Hole lets the informal undercurrent breathe. Self-determination as environmental design is the opposite of passenger mode. It is everyone holding their own switches.
And the firehose has a precondition we know well. You cannot ask anyone to read the world critically while their nervous system is underwater. Sensory safety and psychological safety are not enrichment. They are the floor beneath critical consciousness. Exhaustion is the firehose’s product; regulation is the first act of resistance.
We are not waiting for the system. We are building in the cracks. That is not a metaphor here. It is the work.
Join Us
Campfire Learn Together happens every Sunday at 10AM Central, online via Discord. This session is on Sunday, June 7. Open to the whole community — no preparation needed, no expertise required. Come as you are.
We’ll watch together, take a bodymind break, and then open up the reflection questions as a community conversation. You can participate by video, voice, text chat, or just by being in the room. All modes are welcome. Cameras optional. Silence is participation.
Join our community to get access, then find us in our online space. Our Campfire Learn Together page describes some of what to expect. If this is your first Campfire, you’re in good company — many of our regulars showed up for the first time not knowing quite what to expect, and stayed.
Main Takeaways
The product is exhaustion, not belief. The firehose of falsehood does not work by convincing you of a lie. It works by making the truth feel too costly to find. Surkov did not need believers. He needed people who had stopped trying. Naming this as a designed strategy, not a personal weakness, is the first move out of it.
The classroom has been drifting toward hyperreality for decades. Baudrillard’s four phases of the image, set in a classroom, show curriculum sliding from honest reference to more real than real — correct only because it is the curriculum. Students raised inside it are hyperreality natives. AI did not create this condition; it made it harder to escape.
Model collapse erases exactly the perspectives we exist to defend. AI trained on its own output forgets the improbable — the outliers, the unusual, the minority viewpoints. Those are neurodivergent ways of being. The same insight that built lines of flight applies here: the errant lines were always signal, and a system built to discard them flattens reality by erasing us.
Interpassivity is the curriculum thinking in your place. From Taylor’s stopwatch to Wayne Au’s “New Taylorism” to Žižek’s interpassivity, the throughline is a system that reproduces signs instead of building meaning — the platform teaching for the teacher, the student measured on predetermined output, AI accelerating the slide into “passenger mode.” This is compliance culture, and it is a broken system, not a broken student.
The pedagogy decides, not the technology. The same AI that delivers passivity can be turned into something students interrogate and rebuild. This is the Stimpunks standard stated from another angle: AI must facilitate, not shape identity. Interpassivity is shaping; constructionism is facilitating. The difference is the pedagogy around the tool.
The way out is rhizomatic, not a better lever. The reform trap locks every lever behind every other lever. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, Cormier’s “community as curriculum,” and Freire’s critical consciousness describe a different shape entirely — knowledge built by the people in the room rather than delivered to them.
Sensory and psychological safety are the floor beneath critical reading. You cannot ask anyone to read the world while their nervous system is overwhelmed. Sensory safety and psychological safety are preconditions for the work this piece demands, not optional extras.
Build anyway. The system will not reform itself, because change requires resources it refuses to allocate. The answer is not to wait but to build in the ruins, in the cracks. Stimpunks builds at the edges as a matter of practice. This is the same instruction.
Reflection Questions
On the firehose McNutt argues the goal of manufactured confusion is exhaustion, not persuasion — to make finding the truth feel not worth the effort. Where have you felt that exhaustion? What got too costly to keep sorting? What did it cost you to keep trying anyway, and what would it have taken to make the work sustainable?
On hyperreality Baudrillard’s fourth phase is the curriculum that is “correct” only because it is the curriculum, with no outside reference left. Where have you encountered a placeholder standing in for something real — in school, in care, in a system that processed you? When did you first notice the reference point was gone?
On model collapse The first things a recursive system forgets are the outliers and the minority viewpoints. Those are often us. Where have you been treated as noise to be averaged out rather than signal to be read? What was lost — by you, and by the system that could not read you?
On interpassivity Žižek describes the object that enjoys, believes, or thinks in your place. Where has something thought for you — a curriculum, a platform, an algorithm, an expectation? What did it feel like to be relieved of the duty to think, and what did it feel like to take that duty back?
On building meaning McNutt’s antidote is becoming a builder of meaning rather than a consumer of it. Where in your life are you a builder? Where are you still a passenger? What would it take — what support, what environment, what safety — to move from one to the other?
On the cracks The piece ends in the ruins, in the cracks where something rhizomatic can take root. What are you building in the cracks right now? Who is building alongside you? What does the environment need to be for it to grow?
This page draws on Chris McNutt’s ‘Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real’, an excerpt from the forthcoming Human Restoration Project Primer; the Cavendish Space framework; and the Stimpunks pattern language. The Stimpunks synthesis section is our own extension, not attributed to McNutt. Human Restoration Project is a Stimpunks partner. Developed in collaboration with Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms), Co-creative Director, Stimpunks Foundation.
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