Collective conference myopia

Learning at the speed of light...while failing to see what's in front of your face

The forthcoming The Disagreement podcast on whether college is “worth it” was spicy, look for it soon

Well, that was weird.

I’m sitting here typing this in a dark hotel room in San Diego, California, having just experienced a surreal two days at the ASU+GSV conference. For those who don’t know, this is the Death Star of education technology gatherings, a massive sprawling behemoth of an event with hundreds of speakers (including me this year) and thousands of attendees. The purpose is pretty straightforward: Bring together people who have lots of money (the venture capitalists and philanthropists) with those who want it (entrepreneurs and grifters) and boom, education will be revolutionized.

The thing is, though, there’s an actual revolution happening in the United States right now, a right-wing techno-fascist one, and virtually no one at this conference was talking about it. Whether up on stage or in private conversation, at most people would make vague allusions to the “current situation” and then move on to more pleasant subjects, such as how AI will soon be able to “know your hopes and dreams,” which is an actual thing that Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s VP of Education, said multiple times as I silently screamed.

Here is my hope and dream, Leah: That American democracy will not completely crumble in the next two years—and that you and everyone else at the hyperscaling AI companies will be out of job. (ChatGPT responds: “It’s an intense wish.”)

What is going on? I mean, what the fuck is actually going on? America 2025 is Germany 1933, people are being disappeared by our government, political prisoners are being taken as I’m typing this, the economy is teetering on massive self-inflicted recession, due process and the rule of law no longer apply, and yet somehow nearly everyone here is acting as if this is an unpleasant fart we’d rather just pretend we can’t smell. I sat in on one session where some idiot tech administrator for the California State University system, the one that formed an odious partnership with OpenAI to force AI down the throats of faculty and students, claimed they needed to mainline AI lest they be left behind, or something. Meanwhile as this was happening the Trump Administration was stripping more funding from targeted universities and guess what CSU dude, you’re in a very blue state, so guess who’s coming for you soon.

On the second day of the conference, which is to say yesterday, a group of protestors gathered outside, maybe 30 at their peak. I joined them. Interestingly, there were at least five active teachers among them, which is more than I can say for all of ASU+GSV as I experienced it. One of the lead organizers, Frances, was fearless in marching them around the event, leading chants for hours, as somewhere inside conference hotel our Secretary of Education, a former wrestling executive, met with press in 10 minute increments to tell them that maybe they’ll keep a form of state testing going while they gut the Department of Education from within.¹ Wheeeeeee.

This is my world now, truly. Perhaps it should be yours.

My presentation was audio recorded and my friend Alex Grodd made a video, so hopefully I’ll be able to share that soon. Suffice to say I did not ignore the wave of fascism rolling over this country and at least a handful of attendees appeared grateful for my having pointed out the obvious. A visitor from Switzerland came up to me afterward and said, “in Europe all we can talk about is what’s happening to your country, but here…no one seems to be noticing?” He was completely baffled by our utter indifference to what’s taking place right in front of our faces. Yeah, me too my man, me too.

It's hard to care about any of the AI-in-education stuff right now, given the enormity of the larger authoritarian project. But back to Belsky: She delighted in sharing this little data nugget, that fully one-third of all college students are now using ChatGPT. What do you think they are using it for? (I posted this question on BlueSky and someone chimed in, “writing the most annoyingly verbose drivel since Anne Rice described a fog bank?” and that gave me a laugh when I really needed one.) Belsky later said, and this is an almost but not quite verbatim quote, that “my daughter will need to use a coding agent and LearnLM to interact with whatever scientific idea she's using."

I will need more alcohol to interact with whatever ludicrous idea is being shared in that incoherent statement.

Enough about OpenAI and AI. Every patriotic American who cares about this country needs to get in, and get in now, in the fight against fascism. On my end, I’ve joined the founding board of Stand Up for Science, the grassroots movement mobilizing people to defend the idea and institutions and people that comprise our scientific community. Having just organized a massive nationwide protest last month, you’d think we could take a breather, but nope, we’re mobilizing again at the end of this month on campuses across the country—details here. The Hands Off rallies this past Saturday demonstrated that, for all the wealthy sleepwalking zombies at ASU+GSV, there remains hope that We the People will stand up to American tyranny and stop the right-wing revolution in its tracks.

If science isn’t your thing, pick something else, but get involved. Do something. Yes, the challenge is daunting. But trust me when I say capitulation will be far, far worse.

Why are so many fiddling while America burns?

1. I was told by one conference attendee that in her public remarks, Secretary Linda McMahon repeatedly misread “AI” from her teleprompter as “A-1,” like the steak sauce. I really want this to be true so I am not fact-checking it.