The overdue reckoning with the slide deck-industrial complex. PowerPoint: that click-click prison of bullet points, clip art, and soulless transitions. Today, we launch the Initiative to Repatriate PowerPoint—to return it, with ceremony and remorse, to the ancestral oral storytelling traditions it bastardised in the name of “clarity.”
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The Council for Decolonised Cognition
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Students Against Digital Narrativicide
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The Department of Implied MeaningCorporate Sponsor: Microsoft, reluctantly
CAMPAIGN MOTTO:
“We do not ‘present.’ We gather. We honour. We tell.”
OPENING CEREMONY:
A single USB stick, containing the last PowerPoint ever made at the university, is placed in a hand-carved wooden bowl and passed around the circle. Students take turns whispering apologies to it.
SPEAKER: JORDAN (he/they)
M.A. candidate in Unwritten Histories
PowerPoint is not neutral. It is a colonial vessel—linearly sequenced, authority-driven, centre-justified.It demands a beginning, a middle, and—most violently—a conclusion.Oral storytelling, by contrast, loops. It dances. It forgets. It listens. It never says “next slide.”
SLIDE (IRONICALLY DISPLAYED ON LINEN VIA OVERHEAD PROJECTOR):
| PowerPoint Feature | Oral Tradition Equivalent |
|---|---|
| Bullet Points | Rhythmic Repetition |
| Slide Titles | Story Bones (provisional) |
| Clip Art | Face gestures / metaphorical vegetables |
| Transitions | Meaningful pauses |
| Presenter Notes | Ancestral murmurs beneath the breath |
INTERVENTIONS PROPOSED:
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Lecture slides banned except as archival artefacts in the Museum of Disembodied Speech.
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PowerPoint software repurposed as a tool for nonlinear dream journaling.
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Professors to be retrained in Vocal Texture Weaving and Collective Breath-Pacing.
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Group presentations to be delivered by rotating circle narrators, with the right to “pass the silence.”
MICRO-WORKSHOP: “DEBULLETING YOUR MOUTH”
Students are guided in unlearning the rhythms of list-speak:
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Practice saying “I don’t know yet” in three tones of reverence
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Replace every numbered argument with a remembered story from childhood
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Whenever tempted to say “in conclusion,” instead offer a sound or gesture that gestures toward continuance
TESTIMONIAL: ZORA (they/fae)
I used to make 10-slide decks on biodiversity. Now I just hum and show people a leaf. My HD average has never been higher.
FACULTY COMMITMENT: PROFESSOR NYLA THREAD (they/fae)
From now on, my lectures begin with a breath and a story. No handouts. No timelines. Just mutual willingness to wander.
Assessment is now based on your narrative honesty, eye contact with the unseen, and the texture of your closing sigh.
CLOSING RITUAL: THE CLICKER BURIAL
A university-issued PowerPoint remote is laid into the earth beneath a fig tree. A small plaque is placed nearby, reading:
Here lies Control.May our knowledge never again be so easily advanced.
