Technology and Society

I’ve been thinking lately about how much can happen when you just keep showing up. Not in any dramatic way, just consistently, month after month.

I recently heard Cory Doctorow speak about enshittification, his framework for understanding how digital platforms decay over time. The talk was wonderful and thought-provoking in the way good author talks should be. Cory challenges my thinking regularly, particularly when we don’t see eye to eye. I actually agree with most of what he says about AI, though my personal experience leads me to draw different conclusions from time to time.

I’m getting nervous about my new web development class now that it’s just a few weeks away. It’s my first time teaching older students — tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders — for a full semester, and I’m doing it alone. Last year I dipped my toes in with a smaller group, learned some things, and made some mistakes. But this is different.

I miss Google Reader. That probably dates me, but I don’t care. Google Reader was one of those tools that fundamentally changed how I engaged with the internet. It made aggregation effortless. Find a good source, add it with a click, and suddenly everything you cared about was in one place. When Google shut it down in 2013, I was genuinely upset at losing something that had become essential to how I kept up with the world.

Last year, my students were hitting usage limits on free ChatGPT accounts mid-conversation. I was working hard on prompts to help them use AI as a thought partner rather than a shortcut or search engine, but I kept running into limitations.

Over the past several months my relationship with AI tools has shifted, and I think it’s a good time for an update.

There’s something almost sacred about setting up a new computer from scratch. I’m a total geek, and few things in my life generate the same excitement as unboxing a new machine. This feeling has been consistent since I got my Commodore VIC-20 at eleven years old in 1981. Every computer since then, from my Atari 800XL to various PC clones to Macs, has carried that same sense of possibility.

I found myself facing a familiar challenge recently: I need to be more thoughtful about my sugar consumption. Like many people trying to maintain good health, I’m always looking for sustainable ways to make better choices without turning my life upside down. When some recent testing suggested my blood sugar levels were creeping higher than ideal, I knew I needed to make some changes.

I’ve been thinking about how I approach video games, and it’s led me to realize something important about technology in general. Let me start with the games, because that’s where this insight really crystallized for me.

When a colleague teaching an intro to technology course approached me about her students’ interest in learning about AI and asked if I could teach it, I was excited. I developed a five-session unit centered around business development with an AI co-founder. What I discovered surprised me, and has implications for how we might think about preparing students for an AI-integrated future.