The News, Weakly
Apologies, I'm a day late to my weekly round-up of education/technology news. I've been a bit under the weather this week. Is it a cold? The flu? COVID? Or perhaps just that generalized depression and overwhelming sense of doom – I do not know. But I didn't want to let the week go by without sending you an email because there is just so much to talk about.
It's all intertwined, too -- okay, maybe not my illness (I did get a flu shot and COVID booster this fall) but the rest of it: this relentless push to undermine democracy, a hatred of schools and teachers (indeed, of all workers in all fields everywhere), the ridiculously hype about the techno-magic of "AI" (that always always always always turns out to be a con of some sort), the hyper-masculinist violence, the proud policies of eugenics, more revelations about all those visitors to Epstein island, and on and on and on and on. But then I write that long sentence and my god, doesn't it all just seem insane?! It's so big and awful and almost too pat too convenient too easy to say this villainy is all connected, like some grand conspiracy theory.
Certainly Garbage Day's Ryan Broderick started to feel that way when, as he was exploring those recently released Epstein files, he found links between Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Thiel, Steven Bannon, and 4chan creator "moot" and efforts to push cryptocurrency and populism to destabilize the global order through online shit-posting (etc). After following the paper trail through various techno- twists and turns, Broderick concludes:
Epstein, possibly the most prolific sex trafficker in human history, spent the last decade of his life investing in technology that would help Russia, as he wrote in a 2013 email, “leapfrog the global community by reinventing the financial system of the 21st century.” He was fascinated by websites like 4chan and technology like Bitcoin and was personally invested in the success of far-right politicians in the US and Europe. He believed he was months away from ushering in a new world order that would allow him to continue with his monstrous passion projects, like creating a super-race of children with his own DNA and building fascist nation states to manage overpopulation and climate collapse. And he wined and dined the world’s most powerful men (none of whom seemed to have an issue with these ideas), inviting them to his island and his ranch, and made sure they were surrounded by an endless supply of young girls. And I’m just not sure what we’re supposed to do with that knowledge. (emphasis mine)
(Might I suggest "Yeet them all into the sun." I mean, that's one way to make sure we have no more billionaires. There are other ways, no doubt – ones that require policy changes not projectiles.)
What are we supposed to do with this knowledge?
I do think, particularly in education and education technology circles, we really must really examine how the policies and priorities of the last few decades have been shaped by these very men – by their philanthropy and their politics. "We all live in Jeffrey Epstein's world," as journalist Carole Cadwalladr put it. We've been raising generations of students into it.
Perhaps now -- what with the mass firing of journalists at The Washington Post this week -- apparently the largest media layoffs in history -- it’s more apparent that the techno-oligarchs are fully committed to the destruction of democratic institutions. (Of course, for journalism, that should have been apparent decades ago – when Peter Thiel went after Gawker, when cyberlibertarians convinced everyone that everything should be free online (or rather, everything should be ad-supported – “surveillance capitalism,” as Shoshana Zuboff called it), making it incredibly difficult for anything but the largest media companies to survive.)
And in education circles, this has been obvious for a long time too, although few people seem to want to admit it. The Epstein-connected oligarchs have worked diligently to reshape policies for schools at both the K-12 and college level for decades. Philanthropy is already bad enough, already profoundly anti-democratic, steering schools towards not just towards a highly technocratic vision of teaching and learning, but towards purchases and contracts that line the pockets of these very wealthy benefactors. I mean, even Melinda Gates knew it was time to sever ties with Bill after the Epstein revelations resurfaced in 2019; when will education technology do the same?
All of this strikes me as both a grotesque structural failure – again, there should be no billionaires – as well as a deeply moral one. The Epstein files are full of mentions of powerful (and less-than-powerful) people who were clearly eager to associate themselves with wealth and power and willing to overlook the child sex-trafficking that was happening right in front of them. And here we are today, with too many people seemingly quite comfortable with the exploitation and violence wrought by the technology industry as long as they think it gives them personally a boost, as long as it positions them “at the table.”
The whole table is rotten. And I’m just not sure what we’re going to do with that knowledge.
Assigned Readings:
Tressie McMillan Cottom cautions that “ICE is watching you”:
The gun and the phone are both weapons, one a tool for violence and the other a tool of control.
We understand what the gun is intended to do. That’s why, finally, opposition to the Trump administration seems to be coalescing around a rallying cry: “Abolish ICE!” It’s another way of saying, control the hand that holds the gun. It is the gun that produces the spectacle of violence from which we cannot, in good conscience, look away. Yes, we must pay attention to the gun.
But, we must also pay attention to the phone.
That phone represents a greater power, one that could outlast Trumpism. ICE knows that it cannot shoot us all. But the Department of Homeland Security is close to being able to track us all.
“How ICE Already Knows Who Minneapolis Protesters Are,” Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik report.
“ICE’s Assault on a Minnesota School District” -- Jessica Winter in The New Yorker.
“Fear, arrests and know-your-rights: How one school district is grappling with ICE coming to town” – Alexandra Villarreal for Hechinger Report.
Via The New York Times: “Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’.”
"How the men in the Epstein files defeated #MeToo” -- Liz Lopatto in The Verge.
“Students Are Skipping the Hardest Part of Growing Up” -- Clay Shirky on what sycophancy does to students.
“The College Board Is Banning Students From Using Smart Glasses During the SATs,” Gizmodo reports.
The Dartmouth college newspaper reports that the school “approached a student to promote Evergreen.AI — the College’s wellness artificial intelligence project — in an op-ed in The Dartmouth and edited the article before submission to the paper.”
Via KQED: “OpenAI-Backed Ballot Measure Draws Scrutiny From Child Safety Advocates.”
The San Francisco Public Press reports that “School District Approves OpenAI Contract, Bypassing Board and Raising Student Privacy Concerns.”
“Silicon Valley’s Mythology of Human Amplification” by Tim Requarth.
Michael Pershan on “Understanding and Habit”:
...[W]hat’s most confusing about teaching is what’s most confusing about being a person: how to get a handle on our instincts and steer them in the right direction. If you want to learn or change, there’s no way to avoid engaging with the invisible, ‘mindless’ stuff; but it’s not necessarily going to be easy, so I get why you’d want to try.
“Educator Fired for Reading ‘I Need a New Butt!’ to Students Must Be Reinstated, Mississippi Court Rules.” The end. ;)
Today’s bird is the swan – and I know! I know! I featured the mute swan just a week or so ago. So here's a photo of a trumpeter swan, just to mix things up:
I particularly like this photo because it's a wee bit awkward, which is rarely the depiction we get of the swan – a bird that symbolizes beauty and grace and regality.
That said, I chose the swan today less because of the bird and more because it makes me think of Camille Saint-Saëns’s famous “The Swan” – a piece of music I love despite struggling to learn to play on the flute. But even more than those recollections of diaphragmatic breathing and phrasing, "The Swan" makes me think of Johnny Weir and his silver-medal winning short program in the 2006 Olympics. And dammit, I fucking love Johnny Weir.
The world is very much shit, but at least we get Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir (and sure, yes, of course, obviously, duh, a lot of talented contemporary athletes) commentating on TV for the next few days. (Bonus: they're on The Traitors this season too. Fingers crossed, they win it all.)
Tune in Monday – if you're subscribed to my personal newsletter at least – for more thoughts on sports and technology and breakfast and stuff. I should be feeling better by then, right? RIGHT?
