Hacking the MOOC: towards a postdigital pedagogy of critical hope

This article contributes to a praxis of critical hope by combining recent critical political economic (CPE) analyses of postdigital education with the inspiring experimental practices emerging from the new field of critical digital pedagogy (CDP). I argue that CDP offers hope to educators looking for practical ways beyond capitalist exploitation and alienation, but lacks the analytical foundations needed to contribute to the liberation of our ‘general intellect.’ I highlight the emergence of the Free/Libre Open-Source Software (FLOSS) movement and ‘hacker class’ as exemplars of a more dialectically conscious praxis. Conversely, I encourage CPE scholars of the postdigital to contribute to developing both intellectual tools for understanding our position within capitalism and practical tools for hacking for our liberation. Throughout the article, I use a historical materialist lens to emphasise that we can identify the conditions of and elaborate the strategies for achieving our emancipation in the dialectic of the historically specific contradictions generated by specific class antagonisms. It is in this dialectic that we find a critical hope.