Somewhere in Austin there is a fifteen-year-old refreshing a follower count on X, as part of their homework assignment.

The requirement comes from Alpha School, which charges forty thousand dollars a year, has grown to fifty campuses, and sells itself on the claim that artificial intelligence can compress a full academic day into two hours. In a report that is by turns shocking and hilarious, Benjamin Riley, at Cognitive Resonance, describes the various educational activities that students in Alpha School were asked to do as part of an eight-week boot camp. For instance, one of the activities was to complete one AP course unit in five days with a score of 5 on the end-of-unit exam. Interesting. Another was to create an account on X (formerly Twitter) and get at least a hundred “authentic” followers by early October. As someone at Alpha School explained, building an audience was what they had been working on for the past seven days at Alpha high.

Why complete an AP unit in five days? Why a hundred followers?

Turns out, as they write on their microsite, these are “life skills” with the ultimate goal of audience-building to serve as a feedback loop and a means for distribution. A hundred, because that is an objective early benchmark. What they would be writing about to their followers was apparently not discussed. Having a social media following is the quest; what you learn in the process of getting the followers is the pedagogical goal.

Two things came to mind, neither of them about school: a report on young people in India, and a movie from 1995.

The report is from Quest Alliance, called The Complex Digital Lives of Young People, built from conversations with more than two hundred people between thirteen and twenty-five in government schools and industrial training institutes across Gujarat, Odisha, Delhi, Kerala and Haryana, in India. This report (that I had written about earlier) explores the “Digital Maidan,” the vast, emotionally charged digital public square where India’s youth now gather. The young people in it see “digital visibility” as a more viable ladder to economic mobility than academic excellence. When graduate unemployment is high and the physical world feels closed off by barriers of caste, class, or gender, the “screen” becomes the only space where you can claim a self, because the actual self has no market value in a stagnant economy.

The movie is To Die For, which I first saw as a graduate student back in Illinois in 1995 or 96. It is a black comedy directed by Gus Van Sant, with Nicole Kidman as Suzanne Stone, a small-town weather girl with dreams of making it big on TV. Loosely based on a true story, Kidman plays Suzanne as a sociopath and the movie was a cautionary tale about the seduction of fame and celebrity-hood. As Daniel Boorstin once said, “a celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.” That is what Suzanne is looking for.

Her credo, delivered to camera, is this: “You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV. On TV is where we learn about who we really are. Because what’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody’s watching? And if people are watching, it makes you a better person.” In the movie, Suzanne was someone outside the circle of celebrity-hood and was willing to manipulate, seduce, and eventually orchestrate a murder just to get a few minutes of primetime visibility.

It has one of Kidman’s greatest performances and a remarkable supporting cast. Van Sant plays throughout with the tropes of reality television, separating the people who understand the rules of the medium from the people caught in a media frenzy they never asked for. I remember being blown away by it.

Van Sant was prescient about the world we live in today. And suddenly, Suzanne ceases being a villain. In some ways, she is an early adopter, a proto-influencer born thirty years before the social-media infrastructure was built. In the movie, she curates her wardrobe, her speech and every action, to fit what she believed to be an authentic, broadcast-ready aesthetic. In other words, she was engaged in branding before we had the word for it. The barriers she faced were different—a camcorder and access to a local cable station. Those barriers have all but vanished today, with phones and easy access to the internet.

Van Sant shoots the whole thing as a mock documentary, with everyone who knew Suzanne talking to camera about her, so that the structure of the movie is an audience convened to decide what she was. The viewer becomes part of the jury judging Suzanne, a woman who wanted to be watched and whom the film makes ridiculous for wanting it. And yet, here we were complicit in that process of judging, even as we laughed at the small-town characters and their foibles.

Today the fear that drove Suzanne is the same one it was in 1995, the fear of being invisible, but back then it looked like a private pathology, something wrong with one woman in one small town. That pathology is no longer private. There are now a billion Suzanne Stones competing for the same sliver of attention, and we have collectively decided that witnessed lives are the only ones that count. The structure of the film has caught up with us too. Van Sant cut between Suzanne performing for the camera and the townspeople talking to the camera about her. Some of us are Suzanne now, posting to be seen, but nearly all of us are the townspeople, scrolling past other people’s performances and passing judgment on them for wanting to be watched.

In the film, Suzanne’s desperation for the screen was seen as a character flaw. In the “Digital Maidan,” that same desperation is a survival strategy, and at Alpha it has been converted into a curriculum with rubrics and measures attached to it. So there are two sets of teenagers learning the same skill. The young woman in Odisha is trying to build an audience because there are no other pathways to a viable future, while the boy in Austin builds one because his parents are paying forty thousand dollars a year to have him taught it as an advantage, on a deadline, against a benchmark, with an adult checking the number. Essentially, Alpha has taken a survival tactic worked out by young people who had no other options and sold it to families who have every option. The irony of it all is enough to bend your mind.

Marx said that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. Suzanne’s story was the tragedy. She killed a man because she believed that being watched was how a person becomes real, and however deranged that is, it is a belief about what makes a life count. The kids in India are trying to make the best of a situation they did not choose, but they at least know what the audience is for. Alpha School has kept the metric and dropped the belief, which is why nobody there needed an answer to what the students would actually say and to whom.

School, at its best, works in the other order. It is where you slowly work out what you think and what you have to say, and if that turns out to be worth hearing, people start to listen, so that influence follows from having something to say. Alpha School has it backwards. It gives fifteen-year-olds the goal of finding an audience and abdicates its own responsibility, which is to help them develop a voice and something worthwhile to say with it.