CONCEPT
Feigned Ignorance
The strategic performance of incomprehension — the weapon that exploits the dominant group's assumptions about the subordinate group's capacity, turning condescension into shield.
Scott found feigned ignorance everywhere he looked. Malaysian peasants who had been farming for decades claimed they could not understand the new planting schedules. They understood them perfectly. What they understood even more clearly was that compliance would benefit the landlords and the state at their own expense. The claim of incomprehension created space for continued non-compliance without the risk of open refusal. The tactic works because it turns the powerful's condescension into the weak's shield: the more the dominant group believes in the subordinate group's inability, the more space the subordinate group has to operate without scrutiny. In the AI workplace, the senior engineer who asks elementary questions about prompt formatting is conducting the identical operation — establishing a record of difficulty that justifies continued non-adoption while remaining within the proponent discourse's own vocabulary of 'upskilling' and 'learning curve.'
In The You On AI Field Guide
The tactic's effectiveness depends on a specific asymmetry: the proponent class assumes that resistance to AI is a symptom of technical insufficiency rather than strategic