Read this alongside The Bluest Eye. Finished reading: On Morrison by Namwali Serpell 📚
Reading Timothy Chester’s reflections on last week’s Canvas incident. As institutions increasingly outsource the technical load to cloud service teams, IT incident response becomes about communication.
Why I'm broadly skeptical of device bans in K-12
Watching a local phone ban policy snake through the community this week. Like others have already said, my concern is mostly related to enforcement, as we know enforcement for all school policy lands unevenly across school populations at the expense of Black students. But also, my experience is that the local school system is not communicative in a way that reinforces student and parent desires for two-way communication, especially considering the logistics of having kids who need transportation and after school arrangements.
When I was young, there was a pay phone on every corner and a central landline in every home. We don’t live in that world anymore – in our world, phones and other personal devices are part of our daily processes for school, work and family logistics and communication with friends, family and the broader world. Same for kids with devices.
None of this means screens are neutral or that Jon Haidt is entirely wrong about attention and comparison dynamics. But Haidt et al diagnose a genuine social problem and locate the cause as technology design, then arrive at solutions that are driven by individual consumer behavior. Ultimately he does not call for taxing and regulating algorithmic platforms, regulating algorithmic amplification of distress, regulating algorithmic amplification of marketing, reducing economic precarity, or doing anything about climate change linked to tech. All of the behavioral changes indicated (device bans, Faraday bags) set up fights between kids and adults on phone access at the individual behavior level, fights with consequences that generally land harder on certain students.
While this issue roils locally, my kiddo’s locker was broken for two months this year, and while waiting for repair, she got dinged for having her device in her pocket in class when the locker wasn’t a secure option. She had shoes stolen from her locker in the meantime, proving the point.
I spoke with my kiddo at length to get her thoughts. Her takeaway as an 8th grader is that kids have second and third secret devices that they hide from parents and teachers already – often, mom and dad’s old devices slipped from a junk drawer and connected to wi-fi. She suggested we adults don’t fully appreciate the kids’ ingenuity around their devices, and how they view their phones and tablets as the means to get and stay connected with one another.
While talking, I was reminded of the dance between students and the school system’s IT department during the COVID-19 shutdown. In our community, the kids were in remote learning for a full year and a half, and the IT department chased them around their approved digital tools like a game of whack a mole, shutting down access to chat and collaboration. In the meantime, almost no socialization happened between students that wasn’t directly observed by teachers, on camera. By 2021, the kids were engaged in secret, digital note-passing, chatting within Google docs and slide decks to avoid teacher surveillance. Where there is a will, there is a way.
It’s like the phrase “turtles all the way down,” but turtles are marketing.
A new group is attempting to map influence in the AI industry, with the goal to “produce a structured, shareable, and dynamic resource that identifies who is working on what, where the gaps are, and which partnerships might form across ideological and organizational lines.”
A new study suggests that people who use AI for writing are more able to detect AI writing than automated scanner tools. My current LLM pet peeve is how they use language like load-bearing, structural and legible to describe most ideas.
A quarter of the way in and already exhausted/confounded. Currently reading: Adult Braces by Lindy West 📚
“Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two AI ‘hosts’ discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.”
I’m seeing grunge icons L7 in concert with Amyl and the Sniffers this summer and have been reading a lot about the ’90s indie rock era in the meantime. One frame I keep encountering positions grunge as regional punk musicians navigating a global, corporate pop mainstream – awkward, crass and vulgar, but in the big leagues all the same. Reading the Auf der Maur bio reminded me that a lot of the punk scene was steeped in ideas about social roles and archetypes and oriented around upending them – or at least giving them a healthy challenge. This subculture was also populated by poets and artists in the classical sense. The retro polish around ’90s pop culture has flattened that texture, but it was genuinely a thing.
The era also introduced the woman rock star, introducing women who wrote and performed with full creative authority, not just as muses, groupies or singers. The reception from fans and critics was mixed, and the discourse around Courtney Love in particular was gross and volatile. Most of the positions she was vilified for read as entirely unremarkable today. I was a teenager during all of this, too young to meaningfully participate, but the aesthetic dominated my early adolescence. At the time I loved Tori Amos and PJ Harvey like kids now love Chappell Roan. What I forgot over time is how literary the era was, and how romantic, both in the literary sense and in relation to the New Romantics of the 1980’s. Big culture lessons for a starry-eyed teenager.
L7’s music is not that deep – it’s metal for meatheads, by design – but their politics and presence were. While poking around, I found that L7 was one of four bands featured in the 1995 documentary film Not Bad For a Girl, which was co-produced by Love and Kurt Cobain. The film focused on several all-female indie punk bands and won Best Documentary at the New York Underground Film Festival in 1996. I’ve never heard of it before now. It got middling reviews from critics then, and it’s not available streaming in full in English, unless you’re viewing it here at this dubious Google Drive link – which I will do and report back.
It looks like Wordpress has produced a short-form blogging app that duplicates the model we are trying over here on the even-more-indie web. I might give it a spin.
I’m reading about trends in book and phone bans in American public schools, and reminded that reading novels was once considered an idle and immoral pasttime, just as internet use is today. This 2016 article from JSTOR goes into the history of reading books and the fear that it “enfeebled the mind.”
“A.I. is less regulated in America than sandwiches,” said Mr. Tegmark, who is also a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You can’t open a sandwich shop without having your kitchen inspected. But you can release an A.I. girlfriend for 11-year-olds and that’s fine.”
Adventures in AI: I asked a Claude agent (new Opus, Pro plan) to build a Google Doc template with multiple tabs, using an existing doc as reference. It failed three times over two days, burned thru tokens, never worked with Drive. Eventually it spat out text for me to paste into a doc I made myself.
Some initial review suggests that a staggering amount of Substack content is written by AI.
If folks want quality first-person writing about age and aging, I highly recommend the newsletter magazine Oldster, which explores “the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures.” Bonus: Oldster is run by Sari Botton, formerly the longtime essay editor of Longreads.
Here’s one way to use an AI summary function: stress testing opinion pieces against the facts. I ran the latest essay from local urban development curmudgeon Paul Fanlund through Claude and asked it to stress-test his arguments about ageism and city development in Madison, WI. Here’s what it says:
“On housing, Fanlund implies that development pressure is ideological overreach and that its critics skew old. Neither holds. Madison has a genuine supply problem — the city is targeting 15,000 new homes by 2030, and opposition to density isn’t age-sorted; it cuts across longtime homeowners who feel the planning process has been opaque.
“On streets, the column is flatly at odds with the evidence. Road diets reduce crash frequency and severity, and decrease pedestrian exposure to traffic. Older adults are among the most vulnerable pedestrians — street calming protects them more than it inconveniences them. Framing lane reductions as an anti-senior policy inverts what the safety data actually shows.
“There’s also a structural irony: Fanlund criticizes generational stereotyping while using “older residents” as shorthand for a specific political position on cars and density. That’s the same move, just pointed in a direction he agrees with.”
I served for two years on a traffic commission, and in my experience the civic tension between “road diets” and other road calming methods is real. The problem with advocating for traditional interventions like signage over modern interventions like road diets and roundabouts? Nobody listens to them.
NYT writes about the surge of “slopaganda.”
Finished reading: Even the Good Girls Will Cry A ’90s Rock Memoir by Melissa Auf der Maur 📚
Fellow Madisonians, someone pulled together a website ranking local businesses in Madison by how local they are (by what criteria, idk). In my experience, this is one way we’re likely to see AI used in the next couple of years, via prototyping and/or executing ideas that result in dynamic websites.
Digital humility stitch: A new AI tool puts typos back in your emails, so they don’t look like they were written by AI.