The Extra Mile

One of the downsides, I guess, of waiting until Sunday afternoon to write my "Extra Mile" newsletter is that it feels like everyone else has already published their "take" on the week's news. So anything I have to say feels like a repetition of others' analysis (and depending on how tired I am, a poor one at that). Indeed, it feels like a repetition of my own analysis, as – whether it's Donald Trump's selection of JD Vance as his running mate or the proliferation of AI in education stories – I feel like I've written so much about all of this already (for years now) – about the tech industry's fascist tendencies, about fantasies (very old fantasies) of automation. "The Pigeons of Ed-tech" and whatnot.

And while it's exhausting to have to repeat oneself, it's not necessarily disheartening.

If nothing else, it should serve as a reminder that Silicon Valley was built on ideologies of neoliberalism, libertarianism, hypercapitalism, racism, and war. (Read Malcolm Harris's Palo Alto.) None of this is new, even if it is new to you or to a handful of journalists, tech pundits, and otherwise. We should certainly be alarmed that men like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, et al are willing to throw their financial weight around to build a techno-authoritarian future. But they've been at it a while, with varying degrees of success (shutting down Gawker) and a whole lotta failure (MOOCs. Cryptocurrency. Self-driving cars. Theranos. Juicero. AltSchool. I could go on). If you look at these fellows' track records, they really are not the engineering or investing masterminds that they believe themselves to be – that they want us to believe. I'm not saying they're not dangerous; they're kind of like Bond villains – their elaborate plans for world domination usually fall apart because they're just so self-servingly dumb.