Another AI writing tell that annoys me is the preoccupation with describing what “exists,” and what is “structural” or “architectural” to an ephemeral idea. LLMs seem tuned to describing physical presence and connections even where they aren’t appropriate and don’t make sense.
Several years ago, NPR’s Code Switch did a great episode on Black Republicans and how they come to their politics. A good listen on partisan politics and how they intersect with complex identities and life experiences.
A couple of weeks ago I had an interesting convo with Jessica Grose on Threads about the rise of the “Luddite teen” trend. I largely suspect neo-Luddism is a class-related trend and will not be durable. In short, I remain unconvinced that the concern of white collar professionals and parents about the attention economy can be universalized to everyone in the actual economy. This weekend, the NYT reports that the “one laptop per child” goal we’ve been living with in public education may be on the way out, like I hinted in that thread. As the anti-AI backlash develops in real time, it will implicate other tech trends like so.
I’ve been dismayed to find out how much schoolwork happens in Google Classroom in 2026, especially since the COVID shutdown accelerated the shift. My kiddo has received a good deal of math instruction through digital modules, and I’ve learned that if I want her experience to be different, I need to be prepared to pay out of pocket for a private tutor (a scenario taken for granted by much of the commentariat). At the same time, I learned that our local school district is struggling to keep up with the costs of all the hardware and software it committed to over the years, ostensibly for educational continuity, equity and access. Do we need the tech or not? Who decides what it means and how it’s applied? Chicken, egg.
I think it would be foolish to throw up our hands and say the kids need paper and pencil and nothing else, and yet that’s where the discourse is going. I have low confidence that our current landscape will produce a sane and reasonable solution to this tangle – even Haidt is selling you a product here. Until then, we need to consider what it means to offload the costs, accountability, and responsibility for this technology onto school districts, parents, and children, many of whom do not have the time, resources, or know-how to curate an ideal tech experience on nights and weekends.
From 2024: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, on the durable limits of Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation.”
Looking at early feminist blogs and how they previewed the social critiques and economic problems present within today’s attention and publishing economies. What is old is new again.
From 2024, Anil Dash on why everyone needs to rethink Substack.
This post is mostly an excuse to talk about my latest playlist: Digital Animal. This one consists of about 200 songs across genres, all reflecting on our human relationship to science and technology, futurism, digital culture and the internet.
When I’m chewing over a big idea, I like to compile resources in and around that idea to help support my thinking. Embracing my angst about artificial intelligence, I started compiling songs that reach back to the early 20th century, tapping into prior generations’ anxieties about telephones, television and early networking technology, adding more contemporary concerns as I went. The playlist runs from David Bowie and Blue Öyster Cult and Kraftwerk to Zapp and Radiohead, then forward into modern takes on social media, cell phones, and the internet from Missy Elliott, Gillian Welch and Charli XCX.
I like a playlist because it’s convenient, and because songs are one place where meaning and feeling are created simultaneously, and because it’s easy to spot salient patterns across disparate sources. Scholars in interdisciplinary studies have long argued that you cannot fully understand a thing without understanding what it feels like to live with it, and that cultural analysis may get you there faster than surveys will anyway. Meanwhile most writing about technology separates feelings from form and function. Art and music compress all three, and have the potential to surface ideas that professional and institutional language can’t. Art and culture frequently peg an issue down before emerging best practices are formalized in business and academia.
For anyone working in technology communications, that lag between culture and practice has practical consequences. The language we use to describe technical systems shapes what people can think and do about those systems. An institutional frame — efficiency, access, innovation, value — consistently misses important dynamics that people living inside those systems are experiencing as users and as people. Art keeps the human subject inside the frame, functioning as both anecdote and data.
Plus, it’s fun and we should collectively think about art as much as possible. So, treat every song like a portal.
What does it mean to be both digital and animal? Some observations:
Is fretting about our relationship to tech and industry part of the human condition? Or is there something specific to tech that accelerates these anxieties and impulses?
A few favs:
In which the author summarizes artificial intelligence functions that might be reasonably regulated.
On the intersection of memoir, feminism and the Internet pile-on.
A write up on sycophancy in popular chatbots.
Many years ago, a writing professor told me to get out of academia and go live a life, so I’d have something beyond my own circles to bring back to the commentariat. Prescient advice then. It might be even more prescient for someone who seems wildly content speaking from an extraordinarily narrow slice of experience.
Regarding dinergoth, a rebrand of an old trope: “Alt kids are the social fabric of the most economically depressed, culturally conservative corners of America and have been for a very long time.”
A roundup of news stories on Meta and Google’s losses in court this week, where their social media business practices were found harmful to children’s mental health and in violation of consumer protection law.
Finished reading: Bog Queen by Anna North 📚
That was fast: Afroman cleared of charges. Also noticed that in an amicus brief, the ACLU argued that the deputies’ lawsuit was a classic SLAPP approach, referring to a type of lawsuit that seeks to discourage criticism of public officials by burdening individuals with lawsuits in retaliation for talking about state wrongdoing.
Speaking of autoethnographies, I just heard about Dorothy Roberts’ latest and it looks intriguing.
The belief that LLMs are intelligent is based on the idea that language and intelligence are equivalent. From November, this article from The Verge argues that idea is a misnomer, instead arguing that we should think of language as a cultural tool we evolved to share our thoughts with one another.
On AI and the value of “taste” in Silicon Valley. As a pretentious hipster reformed, I welcome the return of bad taste as a social dealbreaker. Except for when bad taste is good.