It’s been a wild week, y’all. One that’s had me retracing some steps, trying to see how we got here.

~~I was in a conversation a few months ago with a tech bro (who had, he insisted) a heart of gold. “Kelly,” he told me, “they’re laughing at you guys behind closed doors every time a moratorium comes up. I don’t say anything, because I want to be able to let you guys know what they’re saying about you.” Not too scared to stand up for us, but the hero of his own story.

~~A few weeks ago, I was on a call with some of the AI integrationists that my tax dollars pay for. “Kelly,” one said to me, “tell your people that a moratorium is not on the table. Let’s talk about what could be real.”

~~A few days after, I was sitting at the incredible PEP meeting, listening to these ed tech vendors defend AI for four-year-olds. “Teachers tell us that kids can’t even put it down!” The crowd roared, the chats lighting up my phone from the folks following along at home. “He’s saying the quiet part out loud!” One person texted. “He’s just full-on admitting that these products are ADDICTIVE!” someone chimed in.

~~And then, our friends in LA accomplished something incredible: system-wide limits on ed tech.

~~In the past week, the dam has fully broken, and there’s been a grand and bizarre reckoning around ed tech in general, AI in particular. No less than the surgeon general’s office (in abstentia, since the seat is vacant), the pope, and the president of the teacher’s union have professed changes of heart. And our chancellor joined in—not offering any policy solutions, but issuing an apologia of sorts (here’s our press release in response):

As he put it, NYCPS leaders “didn't communicate in a way that showed our community that we understood and that we were worthy of being trusted to protect young people.” He described AI as “the most invasive technology we’ve ever seen,” one that has created “a lack of trust in institutions, a lack of trust in our security mechanisms, and a deep skepticism of ed-tech companies.” 

~~It keeps striking me how much the ground has shifted, even in the past six months, in how we talk about these things. Engaging technology—> is now addictive technology. AI is inevitable—>AI is invasive and dangerous. And the chancellor has been feeling the winds of change too, musing at several recent public appearances that, in 2012, it was cool to go to Google GSV, and now those conferences are toxic—he just didn’t see the “techlash” coming.

These shifts—the turning tide—has elicited a great cry from the depths of Silicon Valley: in the great tradition of “not all white people” or “not all men” or, as a treat, “not all white men” comes “not all ed tech!” Don’t throw the baby (good tech! whatever that may be!) out with bad (the slop we tried to sell you!)

To be clear, there has been nary a ban, not a single screen taken from the hands of a single child (despite our best efforts). And yet, across the internet, come protests from the most privileged companies in America who are all of a sudden paragons of virtue, warning against the extremism of the anti-tech.

And so here we are. First they ignore you (check!) then they minimize you and make fun of you (check!) then they try to put you in your place and tell you it’s impossible (check!) and then they tell the world that you’re actually the oppressor and they’re the victims (check!) and then you win (waiting for it!).

We know why we’re fighting. It’s for the high schooler who stood up and testified that, whenever she asks her teachers a question, they tell her to just ask ChatGPT. And it’s for the mom who came to my CEC meeting to say that one day her second-grader had daily independent reading, and the next day books were taken away from him and he was forced to interact with a chatbot every day instead. And for the teacher in Queens who was handed a set of iPads when a bunch of immigrant kids enrolled in her school, and told that the only good class was a silent class. And for all of the kids who Google has termed a pipeline of users, because we know that in New York City that pipeline runs parallel to the school-to-prison pipeline, only they figured out they could extract data from those kids along the way.

The way I see it, there’s time for sorting later. For answering the question: “what is the use case for this?” But for now, we have a moratorium to win. Thanks for all you’re doing to help us win.

xoxo

Kelly

PACES

PS—Buttondown doesn’t have the social media infrastructure Substack does (also, refreshingly, gives fewer platforms to Nazis) but that means we need you to forward this to friends who might find it useful!