Not that I’m worried about these American companies (though read Doctorow’s book!), but as a high school teacher mired in Google Land (heck, as a regular human mired in Google Land!), I do see the merit of keeping for-profit companies out of places where they perhaps should not be.
Took a break from Corey Doctorow’s *Enshittification* to read some light fiction on vacation but am back in it now and am wondering, sorry for the nerdiness of this post, what we shall do now that Europe is working to replace Google Docs and Microsoft Office with something called Euro Office.
Mental note: start summers by reading Westerns. I ate up *The River* by Peter Heller and am now consuming, without abandon, Charles Portis’s *True Grit*. This is my first Portis, and I feel like I did when I first read Elmore Leonard’s *Hombre* and *Valdez Is Coming* in quick succession: what have I been doing with my life?
I’m beginning to think that the way humans treat idealism is supremely important. As a high school English teacher, my job is most assuredly in the trenches of it.
I cannot tell you how much an inspiration Elisa Gabbert’s essays are. Just started *The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays*. We like to read our experts in science, history, and politics. But there are great observers of life who take the stuff of today and find the truth in equally salient ways. Start with her latest, *Any Person Is the Only Self*, and you will see what I mean.
Here is my nerdy first post of the summer: Yes, we are all meditating upon AI in the classroom for the fourth year in a row. But what about plain old software in general?
https://open.substack.com/pub/tjwilson/p/ai-in-the-classroom-got-you-down?r=2dkk7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=trueI’m reading Daisy Fancourt’s *Art Cure*. It’s solidly offsetting my other read: *Enshittification* by Cory Doctorow.
Here is a great line: “The arts marry objective and subjective experiences, such that we never have the same experience twice” (21).
We often say when we come back to a book, we change the book. This opens that much further.
Could someone please give me a stern critique of Cory Doctorow’s book *Ensh*ttification* so I can have a healthier view of the companies I pay money to?
Weird to start my summer with such a book of doom.
If you need a refresher as an English teacher or lover of writing/reading, this is your book:
“But the part of us that reads isn’t sensible. It craves danger.” -- Steve Almond, *Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow*
We need more considered debate like this thoughtful rebuttal to a rising voice. Virality sometimes plays to our baser binary feelings of the world—they even obfuscate the opinion of the one going viral. Considered discourse like this may never go viral, but we need it to at least go semi-viral:
https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewmarcinek/p/the-viral-video-thats-getting-edtech
The Viral Video That's Getting EdTech Wrong — Again
A neuroscientist’s Senate testimony has been viewed over two million times. Parents are showing up to school board meetings with copies of his book. Sixteen states have introduced legislation to restrict devices in schools.
