Make Shift

In his soon-to-be-released book Vaporware, Inc, political scientist David Karpf argues that Silicon Valley is no longer in the business of inventing new technologies, building new products, or engineering new “solutions.” “All tech companies,” he correctly observes, “have become, to various extents, speculative finance companies” – that’s what the over-reliance on venture capital has wrought; that’s what happens when what matters is no longer profitability (or sustainability of any sort) as much as scale and growth and a gesturing towards the “someday” when the big money will come.

Wait, what? you might ask. The business of the tech industry isn’t tech? After all, CEOs still climb up on stage and show off their latest gadgetry (or, increasingly, they just vomit up some autogenerated text into a blog post or post something similar to their adoring fans on Twitter: "new!" "great!" "revolutionary!"). It sure looks like they’re trying to sell us something, always hustling to convince us (or our bosses) that we simply won’t be able to live another day without the latest upgrade/update/refresh.

But look more closely, Karpf urges. “The tech billionaire class is in the storytelling business,” he writes. What they’re selling is not so much technology (and, my god, it’s certainly not science) as much as it is story -- a story about the future that, as the subtitle of his book puts it, is their attempt to control the present.

This is “futurity,” according to Karpf, “the ambient collective sense of what comes next.” It’s an aura. It’s a vibe. But it’s not merely a rhetorical gesture. It’s an insistence that is well-funded; it has become the powerful politics of the world’s richest men (many of whom have openly embraced techno-authoritarianism): the particular future that they desire – a future full of their products, natch – is inescapable, inevitable.

That’s bullshit, of course. We do have agency, as citizens and as consumers; and for the last decade or so -- particularly since the tech industry has stopped making things that work let alone that make people happy, since its best-known figures now openly gloat about growing economic and social inequalities – more and more of us now recognize that a better future demands (at the very least) more regulation of tech companies and more taxation of tech billionaires.

Maybe once-upon-a-time the story that the tech industry told about the future seemed appealing. Maybe. But I’m not sure they’re even trying any more to appeal to most of us. (Not with stories about the end of jobs. With an embrace of climate collapse. With their insistence we pave over paradise to build a world full of data center, and then while we're at it, pave over other planets as well.) The stories they tell now – particularly stories about “AI” – are utterly, utterly dystopian.

Karpf’s book traces a history of how this “futurity” came to dominate Silicon Valley’s storytelling: from the mythology of Moore’s Law and an insistence that everything was accelerating faster and faster and faster (untrue) and getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper (also untrue); to stories about some promised New Economy and that libertarian rejection of governmental funding and oversight as the path for scientific and technological progress; to "techno-optimist" manifestos and these oligarchs' fascistic turn.

As I read Karpf's book, I couldn’t help but think of how frequently “futurity” has been wielded in education technology circles too – the ways in which schools have been chastised as out-moded and out-of-step with the future that Silicon Valley executives and investors have hoped to manifest; how schools have been encouraged (surprise surprise) to buy tech gadgets (and undermine teachers' unions) in order to align themselves with that vision.

(“Tech futurists always predict the imminent disruption of medicine, law, and higher education for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks,” Karpf quips. “Because that’s where the money is.” And he quips a lot in the book, which makes it a joy to read, despite the depressing nature of “techno-optimism.” )

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of “Shift Happens,” a PowerPoint presentation first delivered by math teacher Karl Fisch to a handful of educators and administrators in his school district – a presentation that was then turned into a YouTube video by education professor Scott McLeod. The earliest versions of this still exist online, many of these already touting the number of viewers – embracing and reinforcing the tech industry’s message about the importance of scale and growth.

Indeed, much of that "Shift Happens" slideshow can be summarized, to borrow from cryptocurrency parlance, as “number go up.” The presentation contains a strange collection of statistics, mostly without any citation, that all purportedly indicate “shift happens.” "Shift happens," graphically at least, upwards and to the right. That shift could be seen in "more" – more data, more devices, more TV viewing, more text messages, more eBay revenue, more MySpace users. More and faster. “We are living in exponential times,” the presentation claims.

Despite being a pitch to convince teachers, principals, and school boards to “do something” in response to this "shift" – to buy and use more technology in the classroom, no doubt – there is little of substance about how this will affect teaching or learning. The message is focused on the economy – that “New Economy” that Silicon Valley has long championed, which as Karpf notes “was less about revolutionary technological abundance and more about the rebalancing of economic power”: a decline in union membership, a push for deregulation, the expansion of the service economy, the financialization of everything.

That the rationale for ed-tech adoption is framed, in this storytelling and elsewhere, almost singularly about “job readiness” marks an abdication of any other, civic or democratic mission for schools. “We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist,” the text reads – a made-up claim that Benjamin Doxtdator countered in a marvelous essay about several years ago.

What ed-tech has forgotten to prepare students for: their present lives. Their humanity.

This is the "futurity" that Karpf writes of. And where have the last two decades of ed-tech gotten us as a result of schools' embrace of this particular vision for the future?

The decades-old “Shift Happens” video can certainly be read as an artifact from a different era. Quaint. Silly. Harmless. And yet it contains the seeds of many damaging stories, I'd argue – one story in particular that, in the last few years, has become quite popular among the oligarchy: that computers will soon be more powerful thinkers than children; indeed their capabilities, the video claims, are poised to exceed that of the whole human race. I shudder to think how many teachers and principals have watched this presentation and nodded along in agreement, swept up in ed-tech's own myth-making and the stories that have, both subtly and quite overtly, shifted educational institutions and attitudes towards that deeply misanthropic storytelling of Silicon Valley.

No Future for You

In The Wall Street Journal: “Google Pushed AI Into Schools—and Even Students Say It’s Gone Too Far”

“In China, the fear of getting left behind has created a powerful new prosperity gospel,” Afra Wang writes in New York Magazine.

Schools are losing funding because local and state governments are giving tax breaks to data centers.

Via 404 Media: “Character.ai Bankruptcy Is First AI Bubble Domino to Fall” Jason Koebbler looks at the company’s bankruptcy documents, and finds among other things that, while its subscription revenues peaked at about $2.8 million a month, it was spending about $10 million a month on compute. Do not ever tell me that there is no money for education. There is plenty of money for education. We have made the decision to spend it on other things: on sexy-time chatbots, on data centers, on surveillance cameras, on deportations, on drones, etc etc etc. We can fund different priorities. (We can start by taxing billionaires out of existence.)

Deep in the Heart

In The New York Times : “For Texas Schoolchildren, Minor Misbehavior Can Mean Criminal Charges.” (See also: “From kindergarten to disciplinary school: Texas sends kids as young as 6 to harsh alternative campuses” in The Hechinger Report.)

“All the things you’re not allowed to say in Texas” by Adam Serwer

“The New Economy” Hustle

“A University-Branded Boot Camp Promised Tech Jobs. That’s Nowhere Near What It Delivered.” by Sarah Butrymowicz in Slate

“How AI replaced me” by a former employee of an ed-tech company. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Rot Runs Deep

Ben Riley on the relationship between David Yeager and AlphaSchool. (Yeager is a professor at UT Austin who continues the work of Carol Dweck on "mindsets" and motivation.)

Disgruntlings

“AI wary NYC students say the tech is still sneaking into classrooms”

“In Which I Decline to Let an AI Company Experiment on My Kid at School”

“Group appeals Maine’s decision to give education contracts to AI-powered firm // “Frederick County School Board votes to ban AI use for pre-K through 12th grade students”

Via Common Sense Media: “ChatGPT claims to have a safety net for teens. We watched it fail.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education says that the fight against “AI” is “The New Nanny State.” Sigh.

Students in France, students in India shout “enough!” (I am reminded that, before becoming the leader of France, Emmanuel Macron was about to launch an ed-tech company.)

Have You Even Read the Paper, Bro?

“🎯🦜” (Eryk did.)

(“Men Can’t Stop Faking How Much They Know About AI”)

Today’s bird is the American goldfinch. Apparently, the Internet has been obsessed this week with a goldfinch-like automaton, infamously not-for-sale in a store in Brooklyn and coveted by a minor celebrity who took to social media to complain about not being sold the item. If you have given this story more than 60 seconds of thought: you probably need to get offline. You need to go outside. A lot. More often.

Perhaps there you will see an actual goldfinch – they’re fairly common throughout North America. In the winter, these birds do undergo a complete molt, the males losing their vibrant yellow color. They’re still around (they do migrate, but irregularly), just not as colorful.

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