My neighbour almost got scammed last week. A message landed on her phone telling her she had a court case pending, and that an agent would call to “handle it.” The agent called. Her son called me next — voice tight, trying not to alarm his mother, asking what to do.
I told him: play along, challenge the man, ask to meet face to face. Keep a couple of real ordinances ready to quote if he pushed back — enough real law in your pocket to make a bluff collapse under its own weight.
It worked. The call fell apart the moment it met someone who wasn’t guessing. A few days later, I got a cake — a secret family recipe, still warm, dropped off out of pure gratitude. I was thankful for the cake. But what stayed with me was the son.
To me, reading that scam took ten seconds. Court case, urgent agent, pressure to act now — a pattern I’ve seen a hundred times. But to her son, carrying a gut feeling he couldn’t yet prove — that wasn’t easy. He was right before I said a word. He just didn’t have the scaffolding to trust that instinct on his own. What got them through wasn’t luck. It was one person who’d been given the tools to see the shape of the monster before it finished forming — and a son brave enough to make the call.
That’s the whole column, before I’ve even reached outer space.
Somewhere this week, that same son — like most of us — has also watched a movie or scrolled past a video where someone said “dark matter” like it was obvious. A power source. A villain’s origin story. Nobody paused to explain it. The story moved on, and so did he, nodding along at a phrase he’s heard a hundred times and understood zero times.
That’s not a knock on him. That’s most of us.
What It Actually Is
Here’s the simple version, the one I promised last column. Scientists watched stars at the edge of galaxies spinning fast — so fast that, by the rules we know, they should fly off into space, the way you’d fly off a merry-go-round spun too hard. They don’t. Something invisible is holding them on. Nobody’s ever seen it, touched it, or photographed it. We just know, from how tightly it’s holding on, that it must be there.
That’s dark matter. Not a power source. Not a villain. Just a name scientists gave to a gap — the space between what we can see holding the universe together, and what’s actually holding it together.
Where You Actually Meet It
Now here’s the part that should bother you a little. You didn’t learn that in school. You learned it — if at all — from a Marvel movie, a game loading screen, a YouTube thumbnail your algorithm decided you’d click.
That’s not an accident. Science arrives pre-packaged inside entertainment, dressed up as a plot device, and we absorb the vocabulary without ever being handed the meaning. We know “dark matter” the way we know a brand name — instantly recognizable, completely hollow.
And it’s not just dark matter. People know their phone has “5G” without knowing what a signal is. People know their bank uses “encryption” without knowing what’s being locked. People know AI “learns,” without anyone explaining what that word is doing in the sentence.
Think back to my neighbour’s phone call. It almost worked for the same reason all scams do: it borrowed the vocabulary of something real. Court case. Agent. Legal action. The scammer was counting on the fact that most people only know those words as sounds that mean “be afraid,” not as things they could actually question. Same with a deepfake voice — it’s not magic, just pattern-matching, the same idea behind autocomplete, scaled up until it’s good enough to fool an ear. Understand that much, and the fear shrinks to something manageable. Don’t, and every fake voice note becomes a small, unanswerable panic — the same panic that son was sitting with, before he had someone to call.
We’re soaked in tech vocabulary and starved of tech literacy, and nobody built us a bridge between the two. We call kids “digital natives” because they can swipe through five apps before breakfast, and mistake that fluency for understanding. It isn’t. A kid who navigates TikTok blindfolded may have no idea what an algorithm actually is, or that it’s making thousands of small decisions about their attention every day. Using something and understanding it are different skills — and right now, schools teach neither on purpose.
The Case for the Classroom
Here’s my actual argument: this should be taught in schools. Not as astrophysics — nobody’s asking a Form Two student to solve Einstein’s field equations. As literacy. The same basic muscle we already ask kids to build when we teach them to read a contract, or check a source.
Because when a generation grows up fluent in tech vocabulary but illiterate in tech meaning, they become easy to sell to, easy to scare, easy to fool. The uncle who shares fake news because it “sounds scientific.” The teenager who believes a conspiracy theory because it borrows real words — quantum, frequency, dark energy — and wears them like a costume. None of that works on someone who actually understands the words. It only works on someone who’s only ever met them as decoration.
Dark matter, taught properly — four sentences, not four chapters — isn’t really a physics lesson. It’s the most useful skill there is: knowing the difference between hearing a word and understanding an idea.
Picture it in a Sarawak classroom. A teacher telling a story like my neighbour’s — court case, urgent agent, pressure to act now — and asking the room: why does this work? What word is doing the tricking? Ten minutes, once a week, built around whatever tech vocabulary showed up on TikTok that week — dark matter one week, deepfakes the next. Cheap to run. No new syllabus needed.
The Bigger Conversation
I like looking at matters through the lens of the ancients, and Socrates remains relevant for one enduring lesson: true wisdom lies in knowing what you do not know.
He understood the gap between sounding informed and actually being informed. Dark matter is merely today’s example. Exposure is not education; hearing a word repeatedly does not mean understanding it. That false familiarity can be exploited by scammers and marketers.
So, teach children what dark matter is—not simply for the physics, but to develop the habit of asking, “What does that actually mean?”
That reflex matters more than the fact itself: it separates technology consumers from people who truly understand it.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
