On 15 October 2026, I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the Computers and Learning Research Group (CALRG) of the Open University. Many thanks to Beck for hosting the session and to everyone who joined online and stayed for the discussion. The talk was originally planned for the CALRG conference in June, and quite a bit has happened since then. So what I presented was an updated version: the core argument of the abstract remained, but instead of the Multi-Level Perspective, I used a little case study, which I call „an evening in Berlin“.

What was it about?

The challenge we are currently facing in society and in education is not primarily technological. It is imaginative. We have very powerful tools to turn the promises of Open Education into concrete projects. What we are missing is the utopian surplus: the confidence that our ideas about education come first, and that we do not leave it all to technology.

From a lost future to a stolen future

I started with a cartoon from Jan Zielonka’s book The Lost Future. A man walks up to an information desk and asks: „Could you tell me where the world is heading to?“ The woman behind the desk has obviously no answer. Zielonka’s argument is that the future has not simply become uncertain. It has become unimaginable. Our societies and institutions are tied to the present, to current crises and to short electoral cycles. They no longer govern toward a future. They only react to an accelerating present.

What does that mean for education? In 2009, the late German educator Rolf Schulmeister published an essay with a telling title: „The computer holds the promise of the future.“ Schulmeister calls the computer of his day a crutch. It is slow and heavy, it is not intelligent and it cannot understand us. But it is a crutch that drives us forward, because it makes a promise of the future. Yet Schulmeister gives a warning: one of the greatest traps would be to adapt our teaching to the current state of technology. Our vision of education should come first. The technology should follow.

This promise of the future is what I call the utopian surplus. My point is: this promise has not simply faded away. It has been hijacked by Big Tech. The journalist Gil Durán puts it bluntly in his new book The Nerd Reich: „We live in a world that has enabled a tiny number of billionaires to monopolize the visions of our future, and they would rather fund the end of the world – literal apocalypse – than risk a world of equality, fairness, and justice.“ So the future is not just lost. It has been taken. We have moved from a lost future to a stolen future.

Which future are we being sold?

The German cultural critic Adrian Daub, who teaches at Stanford, writes in his new book (my translation): „One of the most damaging misconceptions that Silicon Valley has introduced into public discourse is the fact that it has become almost impossible to distinguish between descriptions of a possible future and mere hype.“ Daub distinguishes three levels of the AI boom: the technology itself, the imagination, and the hype, which has long since turned into an investment bubble. So far, the imagination has been by far the more relevant level. If imagination is the decisive level, then the future is not a technical question. So we need to ask: which future are we being sold?

To answer that, I went back to a book from 1984. The historian Jeffrey Herf studied a paradox of German modernity: „the embrace of modern technology by German thinkers who rejected Enlightenment reason.“ He called it reactionary modernism. Forty years later, the communication scholar Rebecca Lewis found a similar figure in Silicon Valley. Drawing explicitly on Herf, she calls it reactionary futurism: information technology becomes a vehicle to restore an idealised and unequal social order, the entrepreneur is the hero, and the new networks are used to bypass the mass media and the schools. Peter Thiel stands at the centre of this network.

Taken Herf and Lewis together, we can conclude a lens with four features:

1. Technology yes, Enlightenment no
2. Inwardness and the soul of the nation
3. Closing the future
4. Bypassing knowledge institutions, such as universities and the press

An evening in Berlin

On 24 September 2026, the media company Axel Springer awarded its annual prize to Peter Thiel. Mathias Döpfner introduced him as „the most impactful German of our times“. On stage were Döpfner, the journalist Bari Weiss, Thiel himself and his PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. Garry Kasparov, Sam Altman and Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, sent their congratulations by video. Outside, several hundred people protested under the motto „Thiel shall not pass“.

Why should we, as educational researchers, care about an award ceremony? Because a ceremony is not a position paper. It is a public performance, and on that evening one vision of the future was publicly performed and certified by an institution.

The first feature of the lens, technology yes, Enlightenment no, leads back to Thiel’s essay „The Education of a Libertarian“ (2009): „I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.“ His answer was technology: „We are in a deadly race between politics and technology“, and the great task is „to find an escape from politics in all its forms“. In Berlin, Döpfner’s rhetorical question was: „Did we award an anti-democrat?“ Thiel said: „No.“ The essay was „this hastily typed out thing“, and he doesn’t think he said „anything that controversial“. Then he explained that he worries about „a bull market in politics“. Nothing is taken back. The same diagnosis returns, only in a softer tone. Democracy now appears as too much politics.

The second feature, inwardness, marked one of the climaxes of the evening. Thiel was born in Frankfurt in 1967, and his family left Germany when he was one year old. And yet, in his video message, Alex Karp called him „the last standing German“, a man whose heart still beats German. Karp knows the German intellectual tradition well: he wrote his doctorate in Frankfurt, attended Habermas’s seminars and built his thesis on Habermas’s concept of the lifeworld. But in Berlin he did not mention Habermas once. Instead, he quoted Heinrich Heine and spoke of „Deutsche Innerlichkeit“. German intellectual history is captured, and the part about democracy is left out. Herf described reactionary modernism as „the interpenetration of German Innerlichkeit and modern technology“. Thirty years ago, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron called the Californian Ideology a „bizarre fusion“. Here we see a new bizarre fusion: German inwardness and Silicon Valley capitalism. Not technology for democracy, but technology as an escape from it. Habermas stands for the opposite: modernity as an „unfinished project“, to be completed through public reasoning and more democracy, not less.

The evening worked through a double move. The laudators elevated Thiel, and Thiel trivialised himself. The German far right has its own word for this pattern: self-trivialisation. The elevation supplies the imaginary, the self-trivialisation makes it respectable. What we saw in Berlin is an imaginary at work. And against an imaginary, no fact-check will help. Only another imaginary can.

Educational imaginaries

Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim define sociotechnical imaginaries as „collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures“. Imaginaries work best when nobody questions them, when a vision of education feels natural and inevitable. Norm Friesen shows this with what he calls the primal scene of education: Comenius‘ master and boy in dialogue. This scene gets reinvented with every new technology, from the printed book to the teaching machines of the 1960s to today’s AI tutors, and each reinvention presents itself as the fulfilment of an old promise.

But imaginaries can also become institutions, and there is no better example than the Open University: open to people, places, methods and ideas. Both the OU and the evening in Berlin are public performances of a vision of the future. But only one opens the future to many. The other consolidates a future for a few. And yet, the Open University became a special kind of institution. Most of higher education kept its closed defaults. So why is the democratic imaginary so hard to institutionalise?

Bildung: Humboldt vs. Thiel

Here, the German concept of Bildung helps. In 1810, Wilhelm von Humboldt imagined the University of Berlin as a place of Bildung through science, in freedom and in common. Humboldt is partly a myth, but it is a powerful imaginary. The Thiel Fellowship stands for the opposite: it pays young people 250,000 dollars over two years if they are 22 or younger, without a degree, and drop out of university, for those „who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom“. On the one side, Bildung through the university. On the other side, Bildung against the university.

There is a second axis: the future. Drawing on Lyotard, Hans-Christoph Koller argues that Bildung means doing justice to conflict, keeping conflicts open and defending „the plurality of discourses“. Silicon Valley offers the opposite: a future that is already decided. As Durán puts it: „The ending of worlds has become the business model.“ Thiel adds a theology to it: „Perhaps we should fear the Antichrist, perhaps we should fear the one-world totalitarian state more than Armageddon“ (Oxford, 2023). Whoever wants to keep the future open becomes a servant of the Antichrist. The conflict is not kept open. It is decided.

And an imaginary with money and power can become policy. Curtis Yarvin, promoted by Thiel for years, calls universities and the press „the Cathedral“ and proposed „RAGE: Retire All Government Employees“. In Durán’s words: „These ideas, once dismissed as silly internet trolling, became government policy.“ The democratic imaginary of Open Education has something else: practices, communities and convictions. So the question is: how do you institutionalise an imaginary without money and power?

The AI challenge

Those who have money and power do not wait, and a major vehicle is AI. If AI can generate learning materials on demand and personalise teaching at scale, what is the point of OER? This is not a stupid argument, but it is wrong. AI comes with its own imaginary. As Neil Selwyn put it, „the underlying presumption is that ‚There Is No Alternative‘.“ This imaginary rests on techno-solutionism and on what David Golumbia called cyberlibertarianism: digital technology beyond democratic oversight.

The question „Can AI do what OER does?“ only makes sense if we accept the AI imaginary, in which education is the delivery of content: one-to-one, personalised, scalable and owned by a few. Open Education rests on a different imaginary. At its core is Bildung as a process that is never finished. Koller suggests we call Bildung „only those changes that open us to further growth or experiences, that is, that enable further processes of Bildung.“ Knowledge belongs to everyone, and learning is a democratic practice: collective, uncertain and open. Rob Farrow and I have described this as a situation of contested imaginaries. AI can replace content. It cannot replace an imaginary.

Reclaiming the utopian surplus, piece by piece

So Schulmeister was right: the computer still holds the promise of the future. But today, this future belongs to a different imaginary. And today’s computer is no longer a single device on a desk. It is an assemblage of content, software and infrastructure. This means that we cannot reclaim the stolen future all at once. We can only reclaim it piece by piece.

The way to do this has a name: prefiguration. With Arno Wilhelm-Weidner, Michael Schubert and Bastian Granas, I have described prefigurative politics as „practices in which the goals and values of a future social order are already embodied in present forms of action“. For Open Education, this means that open, participatory and solidarity-based learning is not a distant goal. It is already lived today, even if only in small contexts. My answer to the question of how to institutionalise an imaginary without money and power is: practise, connect, organise.

In the talk, I made this concrete on two levels:

• Content: Instead of AI-generated content, we build open content that anyone can modify. It is created and shared, and in this process teachers and learners shape something together. That is Bildung in practice. One example is OpenRewi, an openly licensed textbook series for legal education in Germany.
• Infrastructure: Instead of „sovereignty as a service“, in which universities rent their autonomy, we build infrastructure that is open in code and governance and public in funding. In Germany, the Sovereign Tech Agency already pays for the maintenance of open-source software. What we need is an Educational Sovereign Tech Fund, with the state as a public-interest customer that pays for the care of open educational infrastructure instead of ever new short-term projects.

More than fifty years ago, a group of people did not wait for the future of education to be invented. They built it, and they called it the Open University: open to people, places, methods and ideas. Perhaps today we need to add one more: open to the future. Because Bildung is never finished, and neither is Open Education. The future of Open Education is not waiting to be invented. It is being reclaimed, piece by piece.

Slides

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References

• Axel Springer. (2026, 24 September). Peter Thiel mit dem Axel Springer Award 2026 ausgezeichnet [Press release]. https://www.axelspringer.com/de/ax-press-release/peter-thiel-mit-dem-axel-springer-award-2026-ausgezeichnet
• Barbrook, R., & Cameron, A. (1996). The Californian Ideology. Science as Culture, 6(1), 44–72.
• Daub, A. (2026). Was das Valley herrschen nennt. Suhrkamp.
• Deimann, M., & Farrow, R. (2025). Contested imaginaries: Reclaiming higher education in the age of AI. In S. Isaacs, G. Hertelendy & F. Apilado (Eds.), AI and the Future of Education: Disruptions, Dilemmas and Directions (pp. 46–52). UNESCO. https://doi.org/10.54675/KECK1261
• Durán, G. (2026). The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Nerd-Reich/Gil-Duran/9781668221402
• Friesen, N. (2020). The technological imaginary in education: Myth and enlightenment in „personalized learning“. In M. Stocchetti (Ed.), The Digital Age and Its Discontents: Critical Reflections in Education (pp. 141–160). Helsinki University Press. https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-4-8
• Golumbia, D. (2024). Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. University of Minnesota Press.
• Herf, J. (1984). Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge University Press.
• Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (Eds.). (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press.
• Koller, H.-C. (2020). Problems and perspectives of a theory of transformational processes of Bildung. Educational Theory, 70(5), 633–651. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12448
• Lewis, R. (2024). Tech’s Right Turn: The Rise of Reactionary Politics in Silicon Valley and Online [Doctoral dissertation]. Stanford University.
• Schulmeister, R. (2009). Der Computer enthält in sich ein Versprechen auf die Zukunft. In U. Dittler, J. Krameritsch, N. Nistor, C. Schwarz & A. Thillosen (Eds.), E-Learning: Eine Zwischenbilanz. Kritischer Rückblick als Basis eines Aufbruchs (pp. 317–323). Waxmann.
• Selwyn, N. (2023, 25 August). Resisting and reimagining artificial intelligence. Worlds of Education.
• Thiel, P. (2009, 13 April). The education of a libertarian. Cato Unbound. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
• Wilhelm-Weidner, A., Deimann, M., Schubert, M., & Granas, B. (2026). Shaping the future: Prefigurative politics and the political dimension of Open Education in the age of artificial intelligence. In K. Tödt, B. Granas & C. Büching (Eds.), Digital Education and Innovation (pp. 443–468). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-26816-7_18
• Zielonka, J. (2023). The Lost Future: And How to Reclaim It. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300271638

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