Technology is at its best when serving toolbelt theory, workflow thinking, and niche construction and at its worst when serving behaviorism, “efficiency“, and techno-solutionism.

There’s a new tale that’s being told with increasing frequency these days, in which tech industry executives and employees come forward – sometimes quite sheepishly, sometimes quite boldly – and admit that they have regrets, that they’re no longer “believers,” that they now recognize their work has been damaging to individuals and to society at large, that they were wrong.

These aren’t apologies as much as they’re confessions. These aren’t confessions as much as they’re declarations – that despite being wrong, we should trust them now that they say they’re right.

The Tech ‘Regrets’ Industry

That’s the true sin of Big Tech: using deception and coercion to control users. Companies that gain this control can be reliably expected to use it in whichever ways they can get away with. They are paperclip-maximizing artificial life-forms bent on devouring the human race, not ethical actors.

Pluralistic: 14 Nov 2022 Even if you’re paying for the product, you’re still the product – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Tech Regrets and the Ethics of Ed-Tech

We’ve been following the humane tech and tech ethics beat for a long while.

Many tech workers are grappling with the ethics of what we have wrought. Pieces from high profile developers and designers on our ethical failures are regular features.

If we cannot ask why we lose the ability to judge whether the work we’re doing is ethical. If we cannot say no we lose the ability to stand and fight. We lose the ability to help shape the thing we’re responsible for shaping.

Technology companies call these people edge cases, because they live at the margins. They are, by definition, the marginalized.

We’re killing people. And the only no I hear from the design community is about the need for licensing. If why and no are at the center of who we are, and they must be, the center has not held.

We need to slow. The. Fuck. Down. And pay attention to what we’re actually designing. We’re releasing new things into the world faster than Trump is causing scandals.

Yes. You will sometimes lose your job for doing the right thing. But the question I want you to ask yourself is why you’re open to doing the wrong thing to keep your job.

Twitter’s profit came at the cost of democracy. When an American autocrat chose it as his platform of choice to sow hate, disparage women and minorities, and dogwhistle his racist base Twitter rallied.

Profit justifies everything. Silicon Valley, the engine that powers the end of America needs profit to survive, and it needs them at scale. We remain enamored with our ideas, and blind to their effects.

we’re just beginning to realize how dangerous software can be, especially in the hands of companies led by ethicless feckless men.

Source: Design’s Lost Generation – Mike Monteiro – Medium

Though many of these tech regrets are performative and lacking in apology, they’re something. Ed-tech needs to do this self-examination too, and do it better.

Because this is where we’re at.

The zero-sum games of attention and engagement…

Facebook’s DNA is that of a social platform addicted to growth and engagement. At its very core, every policy, every decision, every strategy is based on growth (at any cost) and engagement (at any cost).

Facebook is addicted to growth and engagement. Engagement gets attention, and attention is a zero-sum game. Time spent on Facebook (or Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp) means that’s attention not spent on Twitter, Snapchat, or anyone else who dares to compete with them.

Source: The #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change – Om Malik

…and the corruption of exponential growth…

There is no higher God in Silicon Valley than growth. No sacrifice too big for its craving altar. As long as you keep your curve exponential, all your sins will be forgotten at the exit.

It’s through this exponential lens that eating the world becomes not just a motto for software at large, but a mission for every aspiring unicorn and their business model. “Going viral” suddenly takes on a shockingly honest and surprisingly literal meaning.

The goal of the virus is to spread as fast as it can and corrupt as many other cells as possible. How on earth did such a debauched zest become the highest calling for a whole generation of entrepreneurs?

Exponential growth devours and corrupts – Signal v. Noise

…are not things to invite into public education, yet we have. We have reduced kids, learning, and childhood to a business model.

Our tech regrets must extend to ed-tech. So far, we’re not seeing much in the way of ed-tech regret from the tech side. Bill Gates, for example, hasn’t learned.

Millions of students harmed.

The damage done to public schools most likely unable to be repaired in my career.

Learn a lesson: Billionaires do not teach kids. Money does not teach kids. Businesspersons do not teach kids. Politicians are dumb as dirt on education issues.

Angie Sullivan to Bill Gates: No Thanks for the Sand | Diane Ravitch’s blog

much of the $15 billion Gates has put into education projects and programs since the organization was founded has gone to companies not schools (and that’s not counting the Gates grant money that schools have been awarded and then directed to companies too).

“Evolving.” Why make this speech now? Why does Gates want to project a willingness to learn? (I mean, other than everyone’s supposed to have a “growth mindset” these days.) Does Gates wish to differentiate himself and his organization from others in education reform? (And do others in education reform wish to differentiate themselves from the Trump Adminstration?) Who cares if you’re “evolving”? The damage is done. “Evolution” doesn’t undo that.

‘I Can Change’

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation could have saved itself millions and taxpayers billions if they had the humility to heed the rebel principals’ advice. However, even after the findings of the final report they have no regrets and instead blame the victim. In a statement to Business Insider, Allan Golston, who is in charge of the foundation’s education initiatives, said, “this work, which originated in ideas that came from the field, led to critical conversations and drove change.”

Change for the sake of change — the nearly $1 billion project in disruption. I wonder what “growth score” Golston will get in his evaluation this year.

How the Gates Foundation could have saved itself and taxpayers more than half a billion dollars – The Washington Post

So many technologists–particularly ones with billions–seem really bad at systems thinking. Their prescriptions for education never get beyond more deficit model, more assessment, more behaviorism, more mindset marketing, more surveillance, more “accountability”, more data, and more software to feed on all of it. Their solutions are always to look to psychology, behaviorism, manipulation, and compliance for ways to “fix kids” instead of fixing our systems. This is a total failure of empathy and imagination. Their pedagogy lacks any sort of confrontation with injustice. “It essentially boils down to whether one chooses to do damage to the system or to the student”, and mainstream ed-tech has chosen to damage students.

There is no path toward educational justice that contains convenient detours around direct confrontations with injustice. The desperate search for these detours, often in the form of models or frameworks or concepts that were not developed as paths to justice, is the greatest evidence of the collective desire among those who count on injustice to give them an advantage to retain that advantage. If a direct confrontation of injustice is missing from our strategies or initiatives or movements, that means we are recreating the conditions we’re pretending to want to destroy.

Paul C. Gorski – Grit. Growth mindset. Emotional intelligence….

Fix Injustice, Not Kids

Fix injustice, not kids. Channel tech regrets into building an indie ed-tech that confronts injustice instead of amplifying it. Let’s get structural, social, and equity literate instead of repeatedly, endlessly bikeshedding the deficit model with new coats of mindset marketing and behaviorism.

And I think there’s something about all these confessional narratives (and their hopes, I think, of becoming redemption narratives) that is also deeply intertwined with individual rather than structural change. These stories rarely situate themselves in history, for example, and as such really cannot offer much insight into how or why or even when things might’ve “gone wrong.” They rarely situate themselves among other thinkers or scholars (or activists or “users”). They are individual realizations, after all.

So then, I have to wonder: why should we trust these revelations (or revelators) to guide us moving forward? Why not trust those of us who knew it was bullshit all along and who can tell you the whole history of a bad idea?

The Tech ‘Regrets’ Industry

Techno-solutionism

“Technological solutionism” is the related tendency to identify simple answers — in all domains, not just the tech sector — “before the questions have been fully asked” or the problems fully articulated.

Take, for example: “the Internet has changed everything about how we teach and learn.” Thus, “education is broken.” And from there, “technology will fix it.”

Click Here to Save Education: Evgeny Morozov and Ed-Tech Solutionism

To assume that technology is going to de facto change school is a form of techno-solutionism. Often, it is techno-solutionism in the form of changing things like perceived “inefficiencies.” And that is not a subversive feature of the computer. That’s a dominant desire of the managerial class.

The Subversiveness of Ed-Tech

How do we distinguish between ed-tech as solutionist marketing (what you hear in (ed-)tech blogs that gush uncritically about every new app and every new investment) and ed-tech as contingency-in-practice (the ways in which students and teachers have always MacGyver-ed together the tools that they need — hacks for inquiry and pleasure, despite a regime that might demand otherwise)? Because do so — distinguish, dismiss, agitate — we must.

Click Here to Save Education: Evgeny Morozov and Ed-Tech Solutionism

Yet evidence is growing that the harms that accompany the deployment of new technologies in context are not simply the result of bias, but betray a fundamental mismatch between complex social issues and tech solutionism. Our fractured and deeply unequal society is facing compound, unprecedented challenges presented by climate change, rising authoritarianism, and ever-widening inequality. What if new technologies sold to solve social problems are simply ill-suited to the complexity of the environments where they are introduced? What if, sometimes, the answer isn’t technology?

Disrupting the Gospel of Tech Solutionism to Build Tech Justice

The first step in countering the gospel of tech solutionism is simply to question the presumption that new or revised technologies are the solution to any given social problem. Communities impacted by technology must be able to resist and refuse its incursions if and as they experience harm. If refusal is not an option, then we are still trapped in a vision of the future created by a small sliver of humanity: powerful investors, industry leaders, elite technologists, and special interests.

Disrupting the Gospel of Tech Solutionism to Build Tech Justice

Luddite Sensibilities

A Luddite Pedagogy/Practice/Sensibility is about wresting technology from the control of institutions and giving it to individuals. It’s about using technology for liberation instead of domination.

What Luddites refused to accept was not technology as such, but the form technology takes when corrupted by social relations of domination rather than liberation.

@jmbroad

Luddites are imagined as the “counterrevolutionaries” of the Industrial Revolution and as such the enemies of science and technology. The name “Luddite” is used as a pejorative to dismiss anyone who frowns at technology, anyone who’s perceived to be clinging to tradition over “progress.” But the Luddites have been unfairly maligned, I’d say, as this group of late 17th / early 18th century English textile workers — skilled, technical workers — were not opposed to machines despite their famed machine-smashing. What they opposed were the exploitative practices of the textile factory owners — that is, the emerging practices of capitalism. The Luddites’ tactic of what historian Eric Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot” was used by workers in other industries as well.

‘Luddite Sensibilities’ and the Future of Education

Recall, the Luddites emerged in the economic devastation of the Napoleonic Wars — they wanted jobs, yes, but they wanted freedom and dignity. As we face economic devastation today, we need some solidarity and perhaps even a little sabotage. We can look at ed-tech as something to smash knowing that what we aim for are the systems of violence, exploitation, neoliberalism, mechanization, and standardization ed-tech that demands.

This requires more than a Luddite sensibility. It requires a Luddite strategy. And for us, I’d say, it is time for a Luddite pedagogy. 

A Luddite pedagogy is not about making everyone put away their laptops during class — remember those days? Again, Luddism is not about the machines per se; it’s about machines in the hands of capitalists and tyrants — in the case of ed-tech, that’s both the corporations and the State, especially ICE and the police. Machines in the hands of a data-driven school administration. Luddism is about a furious demand for justice, about the rights of workers to good working conditions, adequate remuneration, and the possibility of a better tomorrow — and let’s include students in our definition of “worker” here as we do call it “school work” after all. 

A Luddite pedagogy is about agency and urgency and freedom. “A Luddite pedagogy is a pedagogy of liberation,” Torn Halves writes in Hybrid Pedagogy, “and, as such, it clashes head on with the talk of liberation peddled by advocates of ed-tech. According to the latter, the child, previously condemned to all the unbearably oppressive restrictions of having to learn in groups, can now be liberated by the tech that makes a 1:1 model of education feasible, launching each and every child on an utterly personal learning journey. Liberation as personalization — here the Luddite finds something that ought to be smashed.” A Luddite pedagogy doesn’t sneer when people balk at new technologies; it doesn’t assume they won’t use them because they’re incompetent; it finds strength in non-compliance.

A Luddite pedagogy is a pedagogy of subversion and transgression. It is a pedagogy of disobedience and dismantling. It is a pedagogy of refusal and of care. It is — with a nod to Jesse’s opening keynote — against models and against frameworks (quite literally, Luddites smash frames). It is wildly undisciplined.

Let us be Luddites, not pigeons.

‘Luddite Sensibilities’ and the Future of Education

Move Carefully and Fix Things

To move carefully and fix things, we must hear each other out before the future comes around.

We make things that help people, and we won’t make things that harm people.

Move carefully and fix things.

Technology should create opportunity, not deny it.

What if love said: Hear me out a bit before the future comes around.

Build with, not for.

A Computer Can Never Be Held Accountable; Therefore a Computer Must Never Make a Management Decision

Disabled, poor, and racialized people are least likely to benefit from advanced technologies yet are more likely to be victims of technological abuse.

Build with, not for. There can be no trickle down civic tech.

As If We Existed

What's the problem with my genius?
Too attached to ever leave it
Silent for the new achievement but
What I long to witness is the equal shift
Of lifted gadgetry to intuition by
Genius giving up its selfish tact
And bringing praise of spirit back (Hey)
Pay respect upon the debt incurred
By non-belief when soul was speaking
Called simplistic by a name familiar to
Those regulars who think intelligence a competition
Missing opportunity to be a real show embarrassment

The care is not
The care is NOT spewing tools to ax the problem
Rather asking have or how they aptly solve themselves
...
What if love said: Hear me out a bit before the future comes around
...
This isn't anger, no, it's passion so let's live the way we should
As if we existed

"As If We Existed" by Solillaquists of Sound

Further Reading