The President's speech is the educational industrial complex's standard paen to itself. It is uttered at appropriate "levelling-up" ceremonies by certified memb

The President's speech is the educational industrial complex's standard paen to itself. It is uttered at appropriate "levelling-up" ceremonies by certified members of the cabal to customers seeking justification of their expenditures and validation of the status they have obtained. It's the appropriate boilerplate to deliver to customers at this point in their buying experience, but it doesn't say too much about the President's views. If I read his speech on my iPad, does that make it a distraction, a diversion, or entertainment in the President's rubric? Am I being entertained or emancipated? It depends on who's doing the consumption and to what end. Am I being overwhelmed with an unmanageable deluge of information? That's the argument the church made against the Luther Bible and the printing press. Information wise, we've always been capable of overwhelming ourselves by scanning a landscape, listening at the shore, or staring into the night's sky. Is reading a novel educational or entertaining? Does it depend on the nature of the novel? Is there a quantitative basis for that classification, like the number of neurons rewired by ingesting the novel? or the improved efficacy or performance of the system after ingestion? Distractions, amusements and entertainments are the means by which our minds extend themselves to qualitative and quantitative changes in the information landscape: in information space, we evolve through play. Playing with information yields further information, knowledge, and maybe some wisdom. Sometimes play spills to the physical realm as artifacts or shared experience. Differentiating between "education" and "entertainment", "entertainment" and "art", or ranking things in terms of "usefulness" is post hoc analysis geared to reinforce the status quo, its information taxonomy, and its hierarchy of cultural value—an increasingly unmaintainable fiction, the acknowledgement of which would invalidate the blessing being conferred on this cohort of lemmings by the establishment through the President's words.