Love is the Last Technology
Emotion, Leadership, and the Posthuman Classroom
This is my tribe. These are the people I love - unreservedly. I know this because I feel it, so that is why I know it, but…..
We are entering an age in which intelligence is automated, decisions are accelerated, and leadership is increasingly framed by dashboards and predictive systems. In this new regime, the human is being redrawn (slowly, subtly), by logics not of care or judgement, but of optimisation.
What, then, becomes of love?
This is not a sentimental question. It is a political one. And it strikes at the heart of what it means to lead, teach, and dwell meaningfully in a world increasingly governed by algorithms.
In their powerful study, Amanda McKay and Martin Mills (2023) offer a portrait of educational leadership rooted not in control, but in care. Drawing on Kathleen Lynch’s concept of affective justice, they explore the emotional and relational labour of school leaders working in marginalised communities in England and Australia. These leaders do not simply manage institutions: they sustain fragile ecologies of love, solidarity, and care, often at great personal cost.
Their findings are deeply moving. Principals speak of exhaustion, grief, joy, shame, and hope. They talk about broken marriages, sleepless nights, and the feeling of carrying entire communities on their backs. They also speak of an unshakeable sense of purpose: a commitment to making a difference where it is needed most.
But what makes this research essential today is not just its attention to affective labour. It is its timing.
Because right now, in education, another kind of labour is rising: the labour of the machine.
AI is not arriving - it has already arrived. Recommendation engines shape curricula. Surveillance systems track attendance and behaviour. Learning analytics promise ‘personalisation’ while reproducing existing inequalities. And soon, if not already, artificial intelligence will become a decision-making partner in the lives of teachers and leaders.
These systems do not simply assist us. They frame us. Much like Heidegger’s concept of Gestell (the ‘enframing’) ,AI renders the world as a standing-reserve of data to be ordered, parsed, and acted upon. It sees not the lived emotion of relationships but patterns, not context but input. It feeds us back to ourselves with uncanny precision: and we, seduced by its efficiency, are likely to begin to act in accordance with its logic - in fact, it appears this is already happening.
This recursive loop - between what the machine anticipates and what we reproduce -is not neutral. It disciplines our perceptions of time, authority, success, and care. As Günther Anders warned decades ago, the machine does not just outpace us, it shames us. It makes us feel obsolete. It teaches us to measure our humanity against its own logic, and inevitably, to find ourselves lacking.
This is already visible in education. The child, once understood as a becoming subject is a mind in formation, a heart in relation and is now increasingly a datapoint. A dashboard entity. A behaviour to be monitored, nudged, corrected. In this system, the ideal learner is the one most like the machine: efficient, responsive, always available.
But what happens to love in this world?
McKay and Mills do not pose this question explicitly. But their work provides an answer. In their interviews, we encounter principals who refuse to treat care as an afterthought. They understand, instinctively, that to lead well is to dwell in complexity. To stay present amid pain. To hold space for the unquantifiable.
They embody what Lynch calls affective solidarity: the decision to align one’s labour with those most vulnerable, even when it comes at a cost. They choose to serve in schools others avoid. They absorb the emotional turbulence of students, staff, and families. They do this not for accolades, but because they believe in education as a relational, ethical, and embodied practice.
This is not naïve. It is radical.
Because to care deeply in an age of automation is a form of resistance.
To love when love is inefficient, to dwell when time is compressed, to feel when feeling is inconvenient: these are not soft acts. They are ontological refusals. They reject the framing of humans as systems to be optimised and instead insist on something far older and harder to replicate: the messiness of relation.
In my current work, I argue that we are living through a crisis not just of education, but of becoming. Under the governance of algorithms, the space for human emergence is shrinking. Time is no longer experienced but predicted. Futures are not imagined but calculated. And presence (real, embodied, affective presence), is displaced by immediacy.
What McKay and Mills remind us is that presence is leadership. Not in the managerial sense, but in the ontological one. To be present is to remain in relation, even when metrics fail. To lead is to create time: not just manage it. And to love, in this context, is to insist that education remains a human endeavour, irreducible to code.
Love is not a pedagogy. It is not a behaviour. It is a metaphysical claim.
It says: this child matters. This teacher matters. This moment matters, even if it cannot be measured, predicted, or reproduced.
And in an era where everything that was directly lived threatens to recede into representation (as Gui Debord warned), love is the last technology we must not surrender. It cannot be uploaded. It cannot be outsourced. It must be held, embodied, and passed on.
McKay and Mills show us that this holding is already happening, quietly, in the corners of classrooms, in the corridors of care, in the tired yet luminous eyes of principals who choose solidarity over self-preservation.
Our task now is to name this work. To honour it. To protect it.
Because in the shadow of the machine, it is love and not data, that might still save us.
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If you like this thinking, then listen to the podcast, and look out for my upcoming articles on Love and the Robot. I am writing a book AI and Educational Leadership: Ontology, Ethics, and the Future of Human Systems, so am very curious to gather thoughts for it through this substack.
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Read MacKay and Mills here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0305764X.2022.2103099
McKay, A., & Mills, M. (2022). Love, care, and solidarity: understanding the emotional and affective labour of school leadership. Cambridge Journal of Education, 53(3), 311–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2022.2103099