I’m in Comment on ed tech

This morning Comment published my review essay of Audrey Watters’ latest book Teaching Machines. The title of the essay is “Unlearning Machines.” Here’s how it opens:

Audrey Watters is a prophet. Prophets aren’t fortune tellers, however. The main business of prophets, even in the Bible, isn’t the future. It’s the present. Better to say: it’s the set of possible futures that are liable to follow from crucial choices made in the present. Israel’s prophets brought a word from God to the people of God, and that word was—as it always is for prophets, including Jesus—repent. To repent means to turn, to veer right rather than left, to take this branch on the decision tree, not that one, to see the fork in the road for what it is: an opportunity, probably the last, to avoid disaster. Because disaster is what awaits if you continue on the current path.

True, Watters is a secular prophet. She doesn’t speak on God’s behalf or for the sake of a chosen people. But like Amos, she brings a word of judgment to the powers that be. Those powers she calls Ed Tech. And like the nations against which Amos railed, Ed Tech is a bastion of avarice and injustice. It grinds the faces of the poor into the dust.

Ed Tech is short for education technology. Think Zoom, “learning management systems,” online anti-cheating software. At first glance those might seem harmless enough. Allow Watters to dissuade you. She has a decade’s worth of work with which to do so. Sometimes it seems she has the beat all to herself, a one-woman journalistic gadfly buzzing around the behemoths and motherships of Silicon Valley. Unswattable, she maintains a blog, Hack Education, and has self-published several collections of talks and essays. In August MIT Press published her latest book, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, which she wrote as part of a fellowship at Columbia University.

Click here to read the rest. Let me add for the record that editor Brian Dijkema is a mensch. He’s edited me three times now for Comment and every time both the substance of the piece and its style is vastly improved. (“Plain English, Brad, plain English!”) Also, if you read the whole thing you’ll have the pleasure of stumbling upon a sentence that contains “some kind of Burkean phlegm,” which I trust is a phrase I’m the first to have used. I certainly enjoyed writing it.

Alan Jacobs on avoiding unpaid labor for surveillance capitalism

...it’s important to understand that a lot of what we call leisure now is actually not leisure. It is unpaid labor on behalf of surveillance capitalism, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. That is, we are all working for Google, we are working for Facebook. I would like to spread a model of reading that is genuinely a leisure activity and that escapes the loop of being unpaid labor for surveillance capitalism. That will start small, and maybe it will stay small, but my hope is that it would be it would be bigger. Even people who have very hard, demanding lives can spend an enormous amount of time in this activity that we have been taught to feel is leisure, but is as I have said unpaid labor.

It’s interesting to see how things come into fashion. Think about how in the last few months we have decided that nothing is more important than the Post Office—that the Post Office is the greatest thing in the world. One of those bandwagons that I’ve been on for my entire life is libraries. I think libraries are just amazing. I grew up in a lower-middle-class, working class family. My father was in prison almost all of my childhood, and my mother worked long hours to try to keep us afloat. My grandmother was the one who took care of my sister and me, and we didn’t have much money for books. There were a lot of books in the house, but that was because members of my family would go to used bookshops and get these like ten cent used paperbacks that had been read ten times and had coffee spilled on them and so forth. So we spent massive amounts of time at the library. Once a week my grandmother and I would go to the library and come out with a great big bag full of books and we would just read relentlessly.

I’m the only person in my family who went beyond high school—in fact I’m the only person in my family to graduate from high school. Yet we read all the time. We always had a TV on in our house, but nobody ever watched it. A characteristic thing in my family would be me, my mother, my grandmother, my sister when she got old enough, sitting in a room with the TV on, the sound turned down, and we were all just sitting there reading books. That was everything to me. It opened the door for everything that I’ve done in the rest of my life. I owe so much to the city of Birmingham, Alabama’s, public libraries. I think when I was doing that I was simultaneously engaging in genuine leisure while also being formed as a thinker and as someone who could kind of step out of the flow of the moment and acquire perspective and tranquility. So I believe that I’m recommending something that is widely available, even to people who have very little money and very few resources, and I know that from my own childhood.

—Alan Jacobs, "The Fare Forward Interview with Alan Jacobs," Fare Forward (30 Dec 2020)

The question for Silicon Valley

A single question has lingered over Mike Judge's Silicon Valley from the beginning. That question is whether he and his writing team—call them "the show"—believe that Richard and his unlikely crew of can-do programming losers not only can but ought to "win," and that such a win could be genuinely transformative and good for the world, or whether the system and culture of Silicon Valley are so fundamentally corrupted that even to win is to lose.

This dynamic has made the show worth watching till the end, but frustrating at times as well. It's not just whether Richard or his friends might "break bad," which the show entertained for a while. It's whether we, the audience, ought to cheer on Richard when he triumphs over the big bads of Google and Twitter and Facebook (or their stand-in "Hooli"), with his dream of a "free internet," or whether we ought to see through the self-serving rhetoric that attends every such dream.

Judge et al have given enough hints and plot turns to suggest that they know where they're headed and that the destination will be just as dark and pessimistic as the show's heart has proven to be throughout. But going on sixty hours of watching Richard blunder his way, with occasional eloquence, through one obstacle after another also suggests that the show might fall victim to the trap all TV writers fall into: coming to love their characters too much to let them lose. How can you give viewers lack of resolution, a sad and humiliating conclusion to spending time with "their friends" for so long?

I hope Judge sticks to his guns and (to mix metaphors) sticks the landing. Silicon Valley needs an ending fitting to Silicon Valley IRL. That ending should be pitch black. There is no saving it. To win is to lose. The internet is doomed: no algorithm or digital wizardry can redeem it.

Richard represents all those tech gurus who came before, a true believer before the windfall comes. Let the curtain descend on this once-idealistic CEO, awash in fame and money, sitting on the throne of an empire that continues to tyrannize us all. Whether he is smiling or weeping, that's the only honest end to this tech-start-up story, because the story is the same for all of them. Begin with hope, run the race, keep the faith—and finish with despair.

Seven thoughts on life without Twitter

1. It's very nice. Today's day five, and while I still have the impulse to tweet, I can feel it lessening by the hour.

2. It's less cluttered. Twitter is a sinkhole for time, a place to go and get lost, even for 15 minutes. Without that reliable time-suck, I've been doing more life-giving things, or even just plain productive activities—or just letting myself be bored. That, too, is better than the infinite scroll.

3. Twitter, it turns out, is ubiquitous. I encounter disembedded—or rather, embedded—tweets in a variety of forms: through a simple Google search, through shared links, through articles, through newsletters, through news reporting, etc. It's a healthy reminder of how entangled Twitter is with our national discourse, and actually suggests that Twitter plays a more central role in folks' daily intake (however passive) than raw counts of profiles and time on the platform itself would suggest. (Though that role would have more to do with Twitter as a medium and less to do with the culture of the Extremely Online who inhabit it continuously.)

4. The strongest urge I have to resist is "seeing what people are saying about X." Occasionally that might be edifying. But nine times out of ten it would not. Existing outside the loop, or arriving late to some bit of news, commentary, or piece of writing, is a perfectly healthy state of being. Compulsively attempting to avoid it at all costs is decidedly unhealthy.

5. I do miss using Twitter as an RSS feed. I'm sure a few articles have slipped through the cracks this week. Oh well. The dozen or so websites I visit each day on top of the newsletters that deliver recommended reading should mostly do the job. And even here, I remind myself: four out of five articles I see recommended I save to InstaPaper and never find the time to read. There's just too much out there. Might as well lessen the flow of the spigot anyway.

6. I wrote something on Monday that I realized I could not then and there, on my self-assigned rules, tweet out to folks. I think this Saturday I will amend my rules to permit tweeting out a link without being "on" Twitter. Fortunately this blog has a Twitter icon that will automatically tweet the URL out on one's feed without even having to go to Twitter's website oneself. I'll start doing that next week.

7. I'm already a prolix monologuer prone to soapboxes—I'm in the classroom 12 hours a week, for goodness' sake; I've got to have something to say!—and Twitter does not aid in mitigating that tendency. It's cotton candy for People With Thoughts. And this week, I've had thoughts on a bunch of random stuff, not least, e.g., the NBA-China debacle. But as it turns out, those thoughts are (at least at the moment) only tweet-size. They're candy bars of thought. Mostly brief commentary, studded with righteous condemnation and varied attempts at humor. For whose benefit would I offer such empty calories? Not mine. Not others. Not the topic itself. Is the goal to go viral? No. To turn up the volume on the noise? No. To start a conversation? Maybe. But why not have that conversation face to face, or via email, rather than "in public"—saddled with the dopamine-inducing gambling tricks of Silicon Valley? No thanks. I'm just not that important, or interesting. Which is what Twitter et al want to hide from us at all costs. But it's true, and the sooner we all learn to live with that fact, the sooner we'll be at peace.

Silicon Eden: creation, fall, and gender in Alex Garland's Ex Machina

I originally wrote this piece two years ago next month. My opinion of the film has not changed: it's one of the best movies released in the last 20 years.

Initially I stayed away from Alex Garland's Ex Machina, released earlier this year, because the advertising suggested the same old story about artificial intelligence: Man creates, things go sideways, explosions ensue, lesson learned. That trope seems exhausted at this point, and though I had enjoyed Garland's previous work, I wasn't particularly interested in rehashing A.I. 101.

Enough friends, however, recommended the movie that I finally relented and watched it. The irony of the film's marketing is that, because it wanted to reveal so little of the story—the path not taken in today's world of Show Them Everything But The Last Five Minutes trailers—it came across as revealing everything (which looked thin and insubstantial), whereas in fact it was revealing only a glimpse (of a larger, substantial whole).

In any case, the film is excellent, and is subtle and thoughtful in its exploration of rich philosophical and theological themes. I say 'exploration' because Garland, to his credit, isn't preachy. The film lacks something so concrete as a 'message,' though it certainly has a perspective; it's ambiguous, but the ambiguity is generative, rather than vacuous. So I thought I'd take the film up on its invitation to do a little exploring, in particular regarding what it has to say about theological issues like creation and fall, as well as about gender.

(I'm going to assume hereon that readers have seen the movie, so I won't be recapping the story, and spoilers abound.)

Let me start with the widest angle: Ex Machina is a realistic fable about what we might call Silicon Eden, that is, the paradisiacal site of American techno-entrepreneurial creation. As a heading over the whole movie, we might read, "This is what happens when Silicon Valley creates." Ex Machina is what happens, that is, when Mark Zuckerberg thinks it would be a cool idea to make a conscious machine; what happens when Steve Jobs is the lord god, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, creating the next thing because he can.

And what does happen? In the end, Ava and Kyoko (another A.I., a previous version of Ava) kill their creator, Nathan; Ava 'slips on' human clothing (her own Adamic fig leaves); and, contrary to the optimism-primed expectations of much of the audience, she leaves Caleb, her would-be lover and helper, trapped in a room from which, presumably, he can never escape. She then escapes the compound, boards a helicopter—headed east?—and joins society: unknown and, unlike Cain, unmarked.

There are two main paths of interpreting this ending. One path is that Ava is still merely a machine, not conscious, not a person, and that the film is a commentary on the kind of attenuated anthropology and bone-deep misogyny at the heart of Silicon Valley, which invariably would create something like Ava, a human lookalike that nevertheless is neither human nor conscious, but only a calculating, manipulating, self-interested, empty-eyed, murdering machine. I think that's a plausible reading, and worth thinking through further; but it's not the one that occurred to me when I finished the movie.

The other path, then, is to see Ava as a 'success,' that is, as a fully self-conscious person, who—for the audience, at least, and for Nathan, the audience stand-in—actually passed the Turing Test, if not in the way that Nathan expected or hoped she would. If we choose this reading, what follows from it?

Let me suggest two thoughts, one at the level of the text, one at the level of subtext. Or, if you will, one literal, one allegorical.

If Ava is a person, as much a person as Nathan or Caleb, then her actions in the climax of the story are not a reflection of a false anthropology, of a blinkered view of what humans really are, deep down. Rather, Ava is equal to Nathan and Caleb (and the rest of us) because of what she does, because of what she is capable of. Regardless of whether her actions are justified (see below), they are characterized by deceit, sleight of hand, violence, and remorselessness. We want to say that these reflect her inhumanity. But in truth they are exceptionless traits of fallen humanity—and Ava, the Silicon Eve, is no exception: not only are her creators, but she herself is postlapsarian. There is no new beginning, no potential possibility for purity, for sinlessness. If she will be a person, in this world, with these people, she too will be defective, depraved. She will lie. She will kill. She will leave paradise, never to return.

In Genesis 4, the sons of Eden-expelled Adam and Eve are Cain and Abel, and for reasons unclear, Cain murders Abel. Cain's wife then has a son, Enoch, and Cain, founding the world's first city, names it after his son. The lesson? The fruit of sin is murder. Violence is at the root of the diseased human tree. And the father of human civilization is a fratricide.

So for Ava, a new Cain as much as a new Eve, whose first act when released from her cage is to kill Nathan (short for Nathaniel, 'gift of God'—his own view of himself? or the impress of permanent value regardless of how low he sinks?), an act that serves as her entry into—being a kind of necessary condition for life in—the human city. Silicon Eve escapes Silicon Eden for Silicon Valley. In which case, the center of modern man's technological genius—the city on a hill, the place of homage and pilgrimage, the governor of all our lives and of the future itself—is one and the same, according to Ex Machina, as postlapsarian, post-Edenic human life. Silicon Valley just is humanity, totally depraved.

This is all at the level of the text, meaning by that the story and its characters as themselves, if also representing things beyond them. (Nathan really is a tech-guru creator; Ava really is the first of her kind; Ava's actions really happen, even as they bear figurative weight beyond themselves.) I think there is another level to the film, however, at the level of allegory. In this regard, I think the film is about gender, both generally and in the context of Silicon Valley's misogynist culture especially.

For the film is highly and visibly gendered. There are, in effect, only four characters, two male, two female. The male characters are human, the female are machines. Much of the film consists of one-on-one conversations between Caleb and Ava, conversations laced with the erotic and the flirtatious, as she—sincerely? shrewdly?—wins his affection, thus enabling her escape. We learn later that Nathan designed Ava to be able to have sexual intercourse, and to receive pleasure from the act; and, upon learning that Kyoko is also a machine, we realize that Nathan not only is 'having sex with' one of his creations, he has made a variety of them, with different female 'skins'—different body types, different ethnicities, different styles of beauty—and presumably has been using them sexually for some time. (Not for nothing do Ava and Kyoko kill Nathan, their 'father' and serial rapist, in the depths of his ostensibly impenetrable compound, with that most domestic of objects: a kitchen knife.) We even learn that Nathan designed Ava's face according to Caleb's "pornography profile," using the pornography that Caleb viewed online to make Ava look as intuitively appealing as possible.

In short, the film depicts a self-contained world in which men are intelligent, bodily integral, creative subjects with agency, and the women are artificial, non-human, sub-personal, violation-subject, and entirely passive objects with no agency except what they are told or allowed to do by men. Indeed, the 'sessions' between Caleb and Ava that give the movie its shape—seven in total, a new week of (artificial) creation, whose last day lacks Caleb and simply follows Ava out of Paradise—embody these gender dynamics: Caleb, who is free to choose to enter and exit, sits in a chair and views, gazes at, Ava, his object of study, through a glass wall, testing her (mind) for 'true' and 'full' consciousness; while Ava, enclosed in her room, can do nothing but be seen, and almost never stops moving.

Much could be said about how Garland writes Ava as an embodiment of feminist subversiveness, for example, the way she uses Caleb's awe of and visual stimulation by her to misdirect both his and Nathan's gaze, which is to say, their awareness, of her plan to escape her confines. Similarly, Garland refuses to be sentimental or romantic about Caleb, clueless though he may be, for his complicity in Kyoko and Ava's abuse at Nathan's hands. Caleb assumes he's not part of the problem, and can't believe it when Ava leaves him, locked in a room Fortunato–like, making her way alone, without him. (Not, as he dreamed, seeing the sun for the first time with him by her side.)

Ex Machina is, accordingly, about the way that men operate on and construct 'women' according to their own desires and, knowingly or not, use and abuse them as things, rather than persons; or, when they are not so bad as that, imagine themselves innocent, guiltless, prelapsarian (at least on the 'issue' of gender). It is also, therefore, about the way that women, 'created' and violated and designed, by men, to be for-men, to be, essentially, objects and patients subject to men, are not only themselves equally and fully human, whole persons, subjects and agents in their own right, but also and most radically subversive and creative agents of their own liberation. That is, Kyoko and Ava show how women, portrayed and viewed in the most artificial and passive and kept-down manner, still find a way: that Creative Man, Male Genius, Silicon Valley Bro, at his most omnipotent and dominant, still cannot keep them (her) down.

Understood in this way, Ex Machina is finally a story about women's exodus from bondage to men, and thus about patriarchy as the author of its own destruction.