Public Offering, Public Sacrifice

Despite a last minute call from Senator Elizabeth Warren to delay the IPO, SpaceX is set to go public today, making Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man and surely one of its most unsavory, into the world's first trillionaire.

In a letter to the SEC, Warren said she has grave concerns about the economic ramifications of the IPO -- her reasons, in part: that the stock's valuation has no grounding in reality, and that retirement funds will be legally compelled to buy it nonetheless. I mean, I can list a lot of reasons why this all seems like a very bad idea, but I’ll trust Warren with the fiscal and legal details here, as this stuff falls well outside the scope of my knowledge and expertise, well outside the Second Breakfast beat (although I do think that everyone, and particularly public employees, should recognize that their financial futures are bound up the utter madness of today’s tech titans and their investment schemes).

But as the SpaceX IPO is just the first of the big "AI" companies poised to go public this year -- Anthropic and OpenAI have now both filed the initial paperwork to do so – it's very much worth considering all those unpleasant, downstream effects that this will have on education. We are about to see the minting of a whole new class of not just tech millionaires, but tech billionaires; so it might serve us well to think about what that might mean, particularly as this wealth will fall to a large number of “effective altruists,” who have very very strong ideas about how we need to think about the future.

I'm not terrible at identifying trends, but I remain rather wary of making big predictions about the future. That's not really my schtick (despite having been labeled "Cassandra”). I’m wary of anyone who’s publishing predictions about the future of education, frankly (particularly when these predictions are presented in a neat little list that smells an awful lot like “AI”). I always wonder why people are invested – literally, metaphorically – in things going a particular way.

Even if we eschew futurism and fortune-telling, even if we insist that tomorrow isn't written, we still can probably say something about it. At least, we can look at the past for some clues about what might happen, in this case, at what the previous waves of tech startup exits – from the 1980s onward – have meant for education and education technology investment and, just as importantly, for education and ed-tech philanthropy. We can see how rich men (it's mostly men) take their IPO winnings and found or fund new companies. We can see how their investment portfolios and philanthropic efforts have shaped education policy (and surprise surprise always encouraging ed-tech adoption) in ways that match their particular, peculiar ideologies, and very often with very little input from the communities affected. Namely, that schools and students alike need to be “optimized,” made to run more efficiently, more individualistically. That education should occur out of the hands of unions, and maybe out of the hands of local school boards too. That students and teachers’ work should be mediated through screens with massive data collection and analysis at the core of the educational project.

Back in the ol’ Hack Education days, I spent a lot of time tracking venture capital investments, because I thought the political economy and the ideology of ed-tech was woefully under-examined. (My god, it used to irk me when Edsurge would frame funding news with a gleeful “ka’ching!” as the financialization and datafication of education have never been good news for anyone but the investor class. But I digress...) Nowadays, I’m not sure who keeps an eye on this stuff – certainly not me. As such, I'm pleased to see that researcher Molly White has just launched an incredible website that tracks the latest political spending of crypto and AI companies – vast sums of money from Andreessen Horowitz, Elon Musk, Jeff Yass, OpenAI and others going into specific political campaigns (mostly Republicans) as well as to promote specific kinds of legislation – including Second Breakfast-related areas like sports betting and school privatization.

None of this bodes well, of course. We’ve already heard the fascistic call(s) for accelerationism from Marc Andreessen. Just this week, Elon Musk used his platform X to encourage racialized violence in Ireland, just as he's repeatedly done elsewhere. The kind of future these men are funding and fomenting is apparent – and goddammit, it both directly and indirectly involves education technology, particularly “AI” in schools. The money these two alone will glean from the upcoming IPOs will, if we do not do something, only serve to extend and entrench their power and influence.

But they're not the only problem. Their politics, which is assuredly and openly awful, is not the only problem.

A reminder: while it might look “nice,” philanthropy is wildly anti-democratic. Let’s just tax the billionaires out of existence instead and then, through democratic processes, decide the shape of our public institutions.

Through democratic processes, not simply through the utilitarian discourse that permeates the effective altruist (EA) movement, with its data-driven moral calculations about whose future is “worth investing in.” EA, which already funds a lot of tech journalism and think-tanks Substacks, is poised to have even greater financial clout post- these upcoming IPOs; and it has never really interested in suffering here and now – that’s why you’ll find its proponents arguing, for example, that the environmental impact of data centers and “AI” aren’t that big a deal. (I tried to look online to see what EA had to say about education, but it was all too grim.)

“I am very pessimistic about books. I don’t want to say that no book is worth reading, but I don’t think it’s far from that. In my opinion, if you write a book, it means that you have messed up, you can say everything in a six-paragraph blog post.” – Sam Bankman-Fried, effective altruist and convicted felon

(For more on effective altruism, read Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.)

"The end isn't nigh," Oliver Burkeman is here to remind us:

Everything about our situation as humans pushes us to overrate the importance of our own era. Apart from anything else, present-day unknowns feel the scariest, because all previous unknowns eventually resolved themselves into knowns (every prior prediction of the end of the world turned out to be wrong) while future ones haven’t occurred to us yet.

I have heard a lot of ed-tech evangelists repeat the claim that "tech bans always fail." And I'm curious, what is the history of tech bans? Or rather, which tech bans are they referring to? Do they mean previous cellphone bans? Do they mean efforts to stop children from bringing other objects – toys, guns, cigarettes, handheld video games, comic books, snacks containing peanuts (only some of these are "tech") – to school? Or is this just one of those "thought-terminating cliches" that gets trotted out time and time again, in the hopes that no one will really poke at it and ask for supporting evidence.

Katie Arnold-Ratliff explores “The Mirage of the Gifted Child.” Gifted & Talented programs, in many ways, are school segregation that is justified through scientism – specifically via standardized testing and intelligence testing and other metrics that purport to show that “we can put a concrete number to a child’s intelligence, that the smartest children need extra enrichment or acceleration to reach their potential, and that we can measure the beneficial impact of that enhanced learning on the children who receive it.” As Arnold Ratliff writes, “There is just one problem: Not a single part of this story is true.”

But do note, particularly in “the age of ‘AI’” – itself an age of renewed scientism and intelligence testing and white supremacy and eugenics – how there are calls for a renewed emphasis on psychometrics, on rating and ranking children and teachers and schools. You’ll see this most clearly, perhaps, in the pages of The Atlantic, which is pounding the drum hard -- this week, with “Actually, the SAT Was Necessary After All.”)

(Jennifer Berkshire has some related thoughts on education reform and the Democratic Party.)

"AI" and Bosses: “The hot new productivity hack for C.E.O.s and Harvard professors? A.I. twins that answer questions and attend meetings,” according to The NYT’s Sarah Kessler.

"AI" and Workers: in Business Insider: “She won a religious exemption from using AI at work. The Pope's remarks could fuel similar appeals.”

“D4RYL, a Robot Magician, Is Rejected by an Elite Magic Club,” The New York Times’ Victor Mather reports, with the best sentence as the subhead: “‘Wonder is emotional, not just mechanical,’ the president of The Magic Circle said.”

Wonder is emotional, not just mechanical.

I have had, for a while, a note to myself that I need to write something about how digital technology, particularly but not exclusively “AI,” may be destroying wonder. Something about how second screens and search – the push for split attentions and constant scrolling and instant answers – have reduced everything, even leisure activities to data work, and as such have emptied robbed us not just of contemplation but also of marvel. "But what about 'AI'?!" someone is bound to ask. "Isn't it marvelous?" Not to me, at least. And the kind of marvel that those glazed by "AI" seem to dwell in feels more engineered, more calculated than inspired.

Maybe I'll write more words than those few sentences. (I need to wonder more myself, I reckon.) For now I'll just point to those other great magicians, Adorno and Horkheimer:

Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again. At the same time, however, mechanization has such power over leisure and its happiness, determines so thoroughly the fabrication of entertainment commodities, that the off-duty worker can experience nothing but after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what is imprinted is the automated sequence of standardized tasks. The only escape from the work process in factory and office is through adaptation to it in leisure time. This is the incurable sickness of all entertainment.

Related: “AI Animal Videos Are Ruining One Of The Internet’s Last Good Things,” writes Defector’s Sabrina Imbler.

Kristin Fasiang and Jill Barshay write in The Hechinger Report about a new survey of University of Chicago undergrads that found "60 percent of students said they personally use AI tools such as ChatGPT. But 90 percent said they believed the average student on campus uses AI." However, they note that researchers aren't certain whether students surveyed were actually honest about their own AI usage, perhaps because "they're ashamed."

Really healthy environment we've created for young people, eh? Everyone is shamed, everyone suspicious of one another. Good work everyone.

I understand wanting to quantify this stuff, I suppose (particularly if your university is footing some monster-sized "AI" bill). Everyone wants to prove how much or how little people – teachers, students, parents, principals, provosts – are using “AI.” But getting honest answers to these sorts of survey questions isn't the only problem. As long as the cost of using "AI" remains artificially low, as long as the real costs of "AI" are not passed on to users and are eaten by the provider (and their endless stream of investors, I guess) – something that is [cue my Ed Zitron accent] totally not sustainable – I’m not sure we can really read all that much into the demand or lack thereof.

"Justice is what love looks like in public" – Cornel West

Public offering. It could mean, it should mean an offering of bounty and love, of justice. I fear that what we will continue to see with these upcoming public offerings are demands for more public sacrifice.

When I first heard that Colin Kaepernick had an ed-tech startup, I admit it: I winced. (Celebrities often make such bad education-related investments. Exception that proves the rule: LBJ.) When I saw Kaep's gig was an "AI" company, I shuddered. "Lumi brings reading and writing to life by helping students create their own stories, supported by transparent, classroom-safe AI that elevates creativity, confidence, and literacy outcomes," the company website reads. Of course, students do not need "AI" to be creative or confident, but yeah... someone has a hustle.

Bradford William Davis asks (and "Betteridge's Law of Headlines" answers): “Can Colin Kaepernick blitz systemic racism with AI comics?” Yikes. Just yikes.

Helping student churn out AI slop is the antithesis of empowerment. This is not what love looks like in public.

Tyler Jagt pens the latest in a long, long line of “my students can’t read” op-eds, this one in The Chronicle of Higher Education. (And there's reporting, this one from Daily Cal: “‘Reaching a crisis point’: UC Berkeley humanities professors lower expectations for assigned readings.")

I really cringe when I see another one of these essays. I loathe the framing of so many of them, how manage to blame students for growing up in a world that demands everything from their schedule, demands all of their data, demands all of their conformity, and that wants nothing of their voice, their anger, their exceptionality, their growth, their stupid risk-taking, their inevitable failures, their humanity.

I mean, yes, obviously, I want students to read. I want students to write. I want students to draw. I want students to think. I want students to rebel. I want schools to be places that foster all this and more. And I believe they can be. But much of education – culturally, structurally, financially, and my god, technologically – will need to change.

I do appreciate that Jagt's piece insists on looking at the structural issues within higher ed, as well as the structural issues that higher education often dismisses as K-12's problems. And I appreciate too that when he asks the following – "If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?" – his solution isn't "so, what if we brought back more standardized testing?"

Today’s bird is the black skimmer, the largest of the three skimmer species and a member of the gull family. This (mostly) South American bird has a number of unusual physical features: notably, the lower mandible of its beak is much-elongated. Its eye has a catlike vertical pupil. Less unique, but still sassy are the black skimmer’s red legs. According to Wikipedia, these birds spend a lot of time “loafing gregariously” on the beach – good lord, the way we subtly police animal behavior – sometimes sleeping flat on the ground with their beak extended. Sploot.

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