Days Gone By

What a terrible year. Good riddance to today being the very last of it.

Way back when I used to publish things on Hack Education, I was always proud of my end-of-year stories -- the series of articles I posted annually that tried to chronicle all the incredibly awfulness that ed-tech had wrought in the prior months. It was important, I believed, to remember and reflect; capitalism and technology work hand-in-hand to encourage us to forget, to move on. I toyed with the idea of doing the same thing here, on Second Breakfast; but new site, new name, new distribution mechanism... it seems best to leave some things behind.

Or more accurately, I’m not sure I have the stamina right now to revisit the horrors of 2025 in detail, the kind of detail that I’d carefully track in those Hack Education essays. It has, since the very first days of January -- Trump’s inauguration, surrounded and applauded by Silicon Valley’s leaders -- been dangerous, disastrous, deadly, inside and outside of schools.

And I’ve received one too many email newsletters in the past week or so in which someone boasted that they’d had ChatGPT identify the important themes and trends for the year for them -- a good reminder that these sorts of seasonal prompts for content production (lists after lists after lists after lists) have never really been about inquiry or criticism, but more about the churning out of data for someone else’s algorithmic machinery. It’s insulting. It’s undignified. But it’s the future that some men sure seem to yearn for.

That said, I do think I'd be remiss to not make a few observations here on December 31, particularly before the usual suspects launch into the new year peddling the very same bullshit they've tried to have us choke down with a smile for decades now. (Indeed, 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of Sidney Pressey's landmark article that launched the whole teaching machine industry: "A simple apparatus which gives tests and scores-- and teaches." I'll have more to say about that anniversary in the coming weeks.)

Artificial intelligence has, no doubt, sucked all the proverbial oxygen out of the proverbial room in education and education technology. It is not just the top of the year-end list; it is the list. (And as I noted above, too many people let the technology “generate” the list for them.) “AI” seemed to be almost all that anyone could talk about, certainly all that many hope to sell. Of course, this is why the ed-tech amnesia does matter: the myriad of ed-tech products with some sort of algorithmic teaching and testing and bureaucratic classroom-management procedures -- built and sold that way for decades now -- have all rebranded as "AI," and "AI" has been inserted into almost every single piece of software, whether you like it or not.

And you shouldn't. It's bad fucking news. It's bad for thinking. It's bad for learning. It's bad for teaching. It's bad for research. It's bad for knowledge. It's bad for justice. It’s bad for democracy. It's bad for humanity. It's bad for the planet. Everyone knows it, as Alan Jacobs recently wrote. But plenty of folks are out there hustling hustling hustling. They’re willing to ignore the bad, in no small part because that's what their privilege affords them.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it – Upton Sinclair

As the Department of Justice slowly releases more documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein, perhaps it's worth reminding people of this convicted sex offender's connection not just to artificial intelligence, but to those working in AI and ed-tech specifically. Bill Gates. Marvin Minsky. Roger Schank. Joi Ito. Whether or not these men -- or any of the men listed in Epstein's "little black book" -- were engaged in child sex trafficking is beside the point: they were willing to ignore its occurrence, willing to continue their own access to money and power and influence at the expense of the health and safety of girls.

And so it continues: the willingness of those supporting some "AI" future to overlook the real harms, the substantive exploitation, the actual violence in order to maintain their own access to money and power and influence.

It's par for the course, I suppose. Because "the big story" in "AI" doesn't necessarily involve this new generative "AI" hoopla, but rather an older, even more dangerous version of / vision for the technology: prediction, facial recognition, geolocation, surveillance, policing. "The big story" in education and "AI" isn't necessarily students using the technology to cheat themselves of learning or teachers using the technology to automate their profession away; but rather the usage of "AI" by ICE -- with the assistance of every major technology company, not just Palantir -- to identify, mis-identify, harass, arrest, imprison, and deport people. Hundreds of thousands of people. People in our communities. People in and around our schools. Our neighbors. Our co-workers. Our students. Our teachers. Families. Parents. Children.

This is the story of what "AI" means in education – or part of it, at least. “AI” is central to the move towards techno-authoritarianism, a move that of course will target democratic institutions – institutions tasks with building knowledge and building human capacity – first.

"AI" is, after all, an endeavor undeniably intertwined with eugenics. It is fundamentally a reactionary effort – despite all the rhetoric about it being future-facing – an effort inseparable from the anti-diversity initiatives undertaken throughout governments and corporations this year. "AI" is a backlash to civil rights movements, a backlash to the advancements of the past few decades that shifted (ever so slightly) the power away from white men.

You can see this in the onslaught of "AI" hype, almost entirely vocalized by men – the Sams and the Marks and the Peters and the Jasons so deeply aggrieved at having to share the stage, the mic, the platform, the workplace, the classroom, the world with women, with Black people, with queer folk, with people with disabilities, with indigenous people, with refugees, with non-English speakers, with Muslims, with anyone from the majority world. And this isn't simply a matter of representation in their datafied corpus – although that still matters. "AI" means erasure, epistemic erasure – all writing, all images, all sounds, all expression squeezed towards the middle, the mundane, the Man. AI is a silencing; "AI" is genocidal. Its acceptance, begrudging or willful, means the normalization of this violence – of its harms to ourselves and to one another and to the environment; of its demands for efficiency and optimization; of its sing-song allure of sycophantic mediocrity at the expense of creativity, spontaneity, diversity, life.

But “let’s be clear: AI" is not the only technology being wielded right now to control bodies, to control minds, to control labor, to control knowledge. And here's where the incessant focus on "AI" -- whether it be promotion or critique -- easily serves to further impoverish our understanding of what's happening in education. Among the other important stories of 2025: the banning of books; the banning of cellphones in the classroom; age-restrictions on social media; the re-emergence of the “standards” (and standardized testing) cadre; the digital surveillance and silencing (and firing) of professors for what’s on the syllabus, what’s discussed in class -- all efforts, to one degree or another, to limit access to information. To certain kinds of information, of course. To acquiesce to “AI” is to surrender to what Neil Postman so presciently called Technopoly – the monopolistic control of knowledge and information and media, the control of our very understanding of ourselves and the world around us, in the hands of a small handful of fascistic tech billionaires.

And look, I’ll be the first to suggest that we’d all be well-served to step away from our digital devices, to spend much much much less time on the Internet. Put your phone away while you eat and while you walk down the street, for crying out loud. “Touch grass.” Read a book. Read a book to your children. Please.

But I’m wary of many of the efforts to curb children’s access to technology because these initiatives are, at their heart, often not about the tech (and certainly not about structural redress) but about curbing children’s access to knowledge. These are efforts at stifling children’s self-discovery – particularly around questions of gender identity – and their discovery of like-minded community.

"Narrative power, maybe all power, was never about flaunting the rules, yelling at a cop, making trouble – it was about knowing that, for a privileged class, there existed a hard ceiling on the consequences.

And on the heels of that realization, a converse one: I began to suspect that the principles holding up this place might not withstand as much as I first thought. That the entire edifice of equality under law and process, of fair treatment, could just as easily be set aside to reward those who belong as to punish those who don't. A hard ceiling for some, no floor for others."

– Omar El Akkad, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

There’s a refrain you’ll often hear, that “the kids are alright.” I get it. It’s comforting to think that, despite all the horrors that surround them – environmental destruction, genocide, school shootings, immigration raids, anti-trans policies, economic inequality, homelessness, mental health crises, job insecurity (hell, job non-existence, some say) – that younger folks are good and strong and resilient. And maybe some are. Maybe some can put on a good face. They can still go through the motions. They over-schedule; they over-achieve. What choice is there, really? Right?

But what if they aren’t okay? (I mean, crikey, what if none of us grownups really are either? And I’m looking right at those of you lulled by the siren call of “AI," driving this ship straight into the rocks. But I'm looking at, I'm looking to all of us.)

A day doesn’t go by where I don’t think about my son – about my own losses, my own grief in the face of this abysmal world we have built for our children. And since this summer, barely a day has gone by when I haven’t thought about Adam Raine, the 16-year-old who died by suicide after lengthy discussions -- encouragement, even -- from ChatGPT. And for the past few weeks now I think about the Reiner family too, a very famous stand-in, I suppose, for all the families who have chronically mentally ill children – violent or not, adult or not, in or not in active addiction. I’d say “you have no idea what it’s like” but so many of us do. More than we care to admit, more than we care to talk about, and obviously – fucking hell – more than we care to address.

“The purpose of a system is what it does,” the cybernetician Stafford Beer famously said. It is clear to me what the purpose of “AI,” what the purpose of ed-tech is. 2025 made it oh so clear. Sure, people still like to talk about innovation and enhancement. They wave their hands around excitedly – some "think bigger!" gesture, extolling some imaginary shiny future of cognitive speed and efficiency. But the purpose of these systems is what they do. And look what they have done.

Everyone knows. Everyone sees it. Some of us try to convince ourselves otherwise. But it's right there. The purpose of the system is extraction. The purpose is obedience. The purpose is compliance. The purpose is death – death of agency and death of dignity and death of joy.

We have much work to do to make our institutions – educational and otherwise – into something else. We cannot do it chained to the technologies that are designed to stop us from ever even thinking about becoming free.

But we can do it.

Today’s bird is the starling, which has been called one of the worst invasive species in the world, brought to the US from Europe in the late nineteenth century, according to one story at least, by Eugene Schieffelin, an ornithologist who thought it'd be neat to introduce into the US – via a release in Central Park in the case of the starling – every bird mentioned in Shakespeare's works. (Good grief, the hell men will unleash just to get you to pay attention to western literature.)

I see starlings almost every day in the park – during warmer months at least. Close up, their plumage is striking: an iridescent purple and green. Their beak is yellow. Their calls are comprised of squeaks and clicks, but they're known to mimic other birds. (Hotspur tries to teach a starling to say "Mortimer" in Henry IV, Part 1.)

Starlings are aggressive birds, attacking and displacing other species and, according to the USDA at least, causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to agricultural crops every year. But what happens when we mark up the world – who belongs, who belongs where – into "native" and "invader" and "alien"?

Starlings are "gregarious," meaning their flocks are often very large. Very very large – roosts can be comprised of over one million birds. Their swarm-like flights are called murmurations; and these are beautiful, almost musical, magical feats of coordination.

We don't know why the birds move this way; there's so much we do not know about the beings with whom we inhabit this world (although I'm sure ChatGPT, that other shiny invasive species specious, would surely tell you that it knows.)