The Raw and the Cooked
You know how last week I had some good news? Yeah, well... that was nice, wasn't it. Because this week – Happy Fourth of July! LOLSOB – everything isn't just bad, it's dire.
Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" will provide tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, while gutting what remains of the social safety net. According to the Congressional Budget Office's calculations, some 12 million Americans will lose their health insurance, and the cuts to Medicaid won't just harm those no-longer-recipients, but will devastate the health care system that everyone relies upon, particularly in rural areas already struggling to keep hospitals open and medical offices staffed. Food stamps and student loans are also going to be slashed. And while apparently there is no money for food or school – Milburn Pennybags shrug dot gif – there is plenty for the growing police state, including billions and billions of dollars to fund the military and police – making ICE the most well-funded federal law enforcement agency in the country's history; billions of dollars for accelerated (AI-enhanced) surveillance and mass deportations; billions of dollars to build concentration camps, one of which has already opened in Florida.
There've been a series of devastating decisions from the Supreme Court too: its decision in the birthright citizenship case doesn't just undermine the constitutional right to citizenship but limits the judiciary's ability to curb presidential power. It has upheld Tenneessee's ban on gender-affirming health care for children, limiting parents' and transgender patients' ability to control their own bodies; but at the same time, it has affirmed parents' rights to opt their children out of school lessons that contain LGBTQ themes or characters – parents only have rights to hate, not to heal.
It's an all-out war on democracy. It's an all-out war on education. It's an all-out war on children.
University after university has caved to the Trump regime – Harvard. Columbia. UVA. Northwestern. Cornell. Princeton. Penn. The New Republic says all these efforts are part of "The Republican Plot to Un-Educate America" but it's actually much more ominous, I'd argue. Along with Penn's agreement to ban trans athletes, the school will scrub its records of any mention of swimmer Lia Thomas – a literal erasure of her existence. This isn't just un-education; it is the erasure of people's knowledge, of their existence.
This week, Trump told states that he was withholding some $6.8 billion in education funding. (Illegal, unconstitutional, but the law does not matter anymore. The US is no longer a democracy.) The funds were earmarked for migrant education and for English-language learning services, as well as for before- and after-school programs. Every state will now lose about 10% of their funding – funding that they had every expectation they'd start receiving July 1. Funding that was supposed to go to programs that aid the nation's neediest students.
Why go after these programs? Why target these children? As Jennifer Berkshire argues, the current regime views "inequality as not just inherent but desireable, [and] anything aimed at making the world less unequal is a waste or misguided ‘social engineering.’" It's the return of race science, in which "genius" and "intelligence" are hereditary, the reestablishment of a racist hierarchy and social order that ranks everyone (and ranks everyone below straight white men).
This is eugenics. And this is the underpinning of "artificial intelligence." This is why we are seeing "AI" re-emerge now – because of the rise of techno-fascism as much as some heralded breakthrough in transformer technology. "AI" is profoundly anti-democratic. "AI" is part of a ruthless reactionary politics – a violent response to political progress on issues of race and gender and neurodiversity, particularly in education.
(Note all the recent hubbub about Meta and OpenAI and their battle for "talent" – a word that is very much bound up in this eugenicist legacy, as are the educational programs and practices that track and sort and rank and exclude.)
Over and over educational institutions capitulate to Trump, just as they capitulate to "AI" – it's all intertwined. As James O'Hagan argues, with news of a White House "AI Education Pledge" signed by 60 some-odd companies, "AI education is being shaped by vendors, not voters." (Um, WTF are you even doing, Randi Weingarten, by putting your name, your union's name on this announcement – particularly alongside OpenAI's Chris Lehane, who lobbied for the (now removed) provision in the budget bill that would have banned AI regulations for 10 years?!)
"AI" users capitulate too, and not just the ones who appear in these lurid stories of delusions and psychosis. Sam Apple's recent article in Wired on "My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them" still rests on this notion that those who insist they're "in a relationship with 'AI'" are a little weird and, just as importantly, the exception. But I am beginning to wonder if almost everyone I see touting "AI" in some way/shape/form – whether for casual or professional use – isn't also "in a relationship with 'AI'" and isn't also being psychologically (not just cognitively) malformed, teetering on the brink of being thoroughly "radicalized" by the product.
Or as the kids would say, kinda "cooked."
Elsewhere...
"A Tech-Backed Influencer Wants to Replace Teachers With AI" – Katya Schwenk on MacKenzie Price's private schools that promise 2-hour learning with "AI" tutors and have – surprise, surprise – all sorts of political and business connections to the right-wing.
"All gen AI is inherently theft," James O'Sullivan argues. I am curious how the "open education" movement – particularly those who have embraced "AI" – manages to thread the needle here and retain its sense of righteousness particularly as "AI" accelerates the often unexamined exploitation and extraction already embedded in some "open" practices.
"Chinese Students Feel a Familiar Chill in America" – I've never liked the framework of "China and technology: authoritarian / US and technology: freedom." But Lavender Au writes in The Atlantic that "surveillance, censorship, detention were things to worry about back home," and now these issues face international students in the US. (Or perhaps now in the US the relationship between technology and authoritarianism are simply more apparent.)
"What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?" asks Hua Hsu in The New Yorker. Like all the stories in this "college students using ChatGPT"genre, there are a lot of moments of "yikes." One takeaway: every time someone sneers with some cliche about "the factory model of education," I think I'm going to stop pointing out that that is shoddy history. I'm just going to say that it's very clear we no longer want "factory workers." Students are being trained as consumers – trained by tech to be consumers of tech.
"Grammarly wants to become an ‘AI productivity platform’," The Verge reports. Worth considering how "sticky" the tools are that students get socialized to use in school – "productivity tools" that shape how students read and write and think. How does Grammarly or how does TurnItIn prepare students to devalue their labor, at first at school and later at work?
Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas write about how AI-created videos are taking over YouTube. We've been hearing for over a decade now that YouTube is going to "reinvent education." Maybe with AI slop, it really will!
Jo Napolitano's reporting on immigrant students is unmatched. Her latest: "‘I Don’t Want Any Light Shining on Our District:’ Schools Serving Undocumented Kids Go Underground." To hide, to obscure – it makes sense. It seems safe. But again, we return to the theme of erasure: whose existence is being scrubbed from the Web, from the records? How do we make sure that those "underground" can still grow and flourish? What happens when people's existence is erased, erased from "AI"? How do we make sure that the absence from data, algorithms, "AI" is an act of resistance and not eradication?
"Data is the last frontier of colonization" – Keoni Mahelona (cited in Karen Hao's Empire of AI)
And finally, I've noticed lots of invocations of Situationist theory and praxis lately: "Mind Invaders." "Psychogeography: A Purposeful Drift Through the City." A whole issue of Making and Breaking on "Psychogeographies of the Present." [This is the place where I'd insert some smart commentary if I weren't so utterly exhausted.]
Thanks for reading Second Breakfast. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber – your financial support enables me to do this work, which includes rereading Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle but not rewatching his films because yikes, you only need to do that once.
