I think you’ve just landed on Alpha School’s next PR campaign.
“Your child will learn twice as much in two hours using our AI platform *and* they’ll grow exponentially more numb to those pesky polycrises unfolding all around them!”
If I’m selling out, it’s going to be for way more than that!
Alternatively, perhaps I attend an upcoming information session for parents, raise my hand, clear my throat, and say, “Yes, can you please provide further details about the ways your dystopian surveillance hellscape is going to prepare my children for limitless futures?”
Oh...oh no.
"At Alpha Chicago, *kids love school*. We’re not just preparing students for tests; we’re preparing them for limitless futures. Alpha Chicago is launching in Fall 2026."
You know, if this whole working in academia doesn't work out...I kid! I kid!
Oh! What's the book's title? And yeah, not great that union leadership is far too happy to partner with Big Tech.
Today in small joys: spending the last day of class eating French pastries, discussing speculative design, and hosting @miasshaw.bsky.social to chat about her work. Also, a huge thank you to @suraju.bsky.social, @zhoum56.bsky.social, @morganavickery.bsky.social, and Michael Chang for visiting too!
On the one hand, this is massively dystopian, foretelling an end to all of our livelihoods. But on the other (more important) hand, I could not have invented a better anecdote to illustrate my book’s thesis.
And here's the article in today's NY Times about caregivers raising their concerns about (ed)tech in schools:
A screenshot from today's New York Times. At the image's top is an advertisements for Instagram teen accounts. At the image's bottom is the headline, "iPads in Kindergarten, YouTube on Breaks: The School Screen-Time Battle".
I'm here for the growing caregiver resistance to educational technology. And while I disagree with how some caregivers construct their arguments about when, why, and how to use tech in school, I hope we can agree that Meta are a bunch of ghouls and teen accounts aren't the answer. #PairedTexts
"BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that we affirm the rights of students and teachers to refuse to sign up for, prompt, or otherwise use generative AI in the writing classroom."
College writing teachers have spoken, y'all.
The CCCC resolution affirming students' and teachers' right to refuse generative AI in the writing classroom passed by an overwhelming majority at the #4C26 Annual Business Meeting this past Friday, March 6.
Link to the full resolution below.
New preprint from me: 'AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum' zenodo.org/records/1890... - "This paper treats AI as a diagnostic for deeper, nihilistic changes in the existing order of things. It proposes instead decomputing as a decisive turn towards infrastructuring the common good."
Hey how’s bedtime going for all you caregivers out there so great right I love me some daylight savings 😩
I think one way you can celebrate International Women's Day every day is through your citation practices, which are political and pedagogical choices, and that's my addition to today's trending topic.
If you're wondering how to engage students and teachers with questions about technology and place, this lesson is for you. It explores how “sound journals, community, and placemaking invites students to compare the way they describe their community with the way AI describes their community.”
New to me: Dirty Data, a collaborative project featuring 40 journalists across Asia, Latin America, and Europe investigating data centers, their impacts, and how communities are fighting back against data center construction. The website includes original reporting and an interactive map.
👀
CfP: Topical Collection on AI Resistance, Refusal, Reclamation and Reimagining: Ethical Imperatives and Emerging Practices
Seeing ppl circulate projects whose NEH grants were canceled by DOGE reaffirms my argument about AI as a permission structure. Some grants were canceled w/o a “no” from the generated summary. DOGE had a mandate to slash humanities funding & AI gave them the veneer of a rationale for their actions.
Also, I'm really curious to see how Disney/Pixar are going to softly critique Big Tech in Toy Story 5 while maintaining firm technological capitalist narratives.
One thing about Hoppers, which I took my kids to see today, is that it presents an opportunity to begin discussing settler colonialist logics that view success as shifting climate-destroying infrastructure elsewhere as a success rather than, say, destroying the unnecessary highway altogether.
An LLM does not need to pull a trigger or automate a missile to serve the cause of war. It can work to make obscene violence feel justified and rational — to give you the illusion that you have “thought the matter through.” 🧵
Gone are the days when “cloud” as a metaphor could hide the material impacts of data centers, so now they are sold with AI hype.
New report “suggests that leading AI companies are doing little to police how developers who pay for access to their AI models are using them. One consequence, the group warns, is that AI toymakers can ship products to children that are powered by AI models that are only intended for adults.”
OpenAI’s push to become crucial infrastructure in education should not and cannot be separated from its broader entanglements with the US military and mass surveillance that includes students and teachers.
Today in who can destroy the planet fastest:
"The collapsed talks [between Oracle and OpenAI] created an opening for Meta Platforms Inc. to step in and consider leasing the planned expansion site...Nvidia Corp., the leading AI chipmaker, helped facilitate Meta’s discussions with the developer..."
pervert glasses. so apt
As I get older I’m coming to increasingly radical views like “eradicating peoples jobs is bad, actually” and “a necessary part of having skills is taking responsibility for the outcomes of those skills”
They want to get rid of faculty so bad, they are like slavering at the prospect
"The task of AI education, then, is not merely to teach technical competence, but to cultivate the political imagination and collective capacities necessary to contest and reshape technological power," write Jan‐Philipp Siebold, Annemarie Witschas, and Rainer Mühlhoff.
