I.

When you get older and build responsibilities as if they were some level 4 hoarder fascination, unknowingly causing structural damage to your life, you are lucky to remind yourself that a lot of this stuff we deal with every day exists because we believe it exists. Something like the Force, if you want to get all nerdy about it.

I may be biased as someone who really never left school–I’m a teacher–but this realization is akin to that of a teenager, scrutinizing the hypocrisy of adulthood and all of that. A Holden Caulfield state of mind if you will. A wrestle with meaning that could go to nihilism if you get all dark about it.

I was in this state of mind the other day when I realized we often introduce new technologies into our habitats and then decry some loss that, on further scrutinization, is not really a loss at all.

For instance, now that I have a 2-year-old, the term “iPad kid” has a slightly fake resonance. I would like to instill my son with politeness, but I must admit that a restaurant is not a natural habitat for tiny humans to learn that very important trait. A restaurant is an artificial environment. The culture of such an environment dictates that a two-year-old must be silent and self-contained and not messy and all of that. And for good reason. Restaurants want to be a welcoming place and customers want to be welcomed. But I get why parents put a screen in front of their children in public places. But we must admit it is a tool for an artificial environment.¹

This year, I used this 21 year-old article, “Society is dead, we have retreated into the iWorld” by Andrew Sullivan for students to pair with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. It was written back when the individual bubble we could put over ourselves in public was beginning to be complete, this with the universality of iPods and cellphones, though yet pre-iPhone.

In the article, Sullivan writes:

Technology has given us a universe entirely for ourselves…. Atomisation by little white boxes and cell phones. Society without the social…. Human beings have never lived like this before. Yes, we have always had homes, retreats, or places where went to relax, unwind, or shut out the world.

But we didn’t walk around the world like hermit crabs with our isolation surgically attached.

But we also never had to exist in cities with long commutes either. We evolved to live in small villages, and modernity has made us do things our bodies were not designed to do.

I’m not saying Sullivan doesn’t have a point. We can muffle our awareness by being too passive, much like Mildred does in Fahrenheit 451 with her always-in earbuds. Parents can put a tablet in front of a kid automatically so that a toddler never has a chance to join and learn the nuances of invented public atmospheres such as restaurants. But we sometimes oversimplify new technology to be truly inhuman when what they are saving us from is already inhuman.

As this year closed out, I was thinking about this a lot in terms of the technology in my room.

II.

When it comes down to it, the classroom is quite the artificial environment. For one, its contained. Perhaps we evolved to seek out caverns for their safety, but claustrophobia is most assuredly one of our top fears. For another, we know teaching happens best in the parent/child paradigm. Essentially, the tutor paradigm we think about today. When we are in large groups, its easy for us to feel lost in those numbers, uncared for. And that makes it easy for us to dip out of the experience, even if we are present and seemingly doing the work.

But the classroom is a compromise in efficiency. No matter how much we would love to decrease student to teacher ratio–make class sizes smaller–I’m not sure we are willing to pay for it. But what we are willing to pay for is tech, and the modern classroom is full of it.

The modern school now has digital grading systems and payment systems and student laptop loan programs and reliable network systems and projectors and just a lot of stuff.

When I began teaching, projectors were already a mainstay in the classroom. But it was textbooks as a technology that made quite the impact. The curriculum was locked in to such an expensive device, for they were expensive. In fact, the textbook I used when I first got into teaching almost 20 years ago is still the one I have in my classroom today. I taught Romeo and Juliet out of it last year and all the years before that.

But the tech that really influences school today is more a corporation than a single edition of a book full of anthologized works. And that company is Google.

III.

Back when we were trying to figure out which search engine was the best, Google seemed like a no-nonsense option. It had none of the flashy-flash advertisements that internet browsers began to sport.

Before that, before Google absolutely won the search wars, before even Gmail came out of beta, I was rocking a Linux desktop.

I was and still am a nerd, but not at all the type of nerd that knows how to program or would be interested in vibe coding. But I was nerd enough to take stance on software back in the day.

This was when the internet was yet a place without the negative stigmas we associate today. I could go on about it, but I think Cory Doctorow does a great job in Chokepoint Capitalism and Enshittification. Basically, it took a while for the internet to reach the marketplace, and when it did, it didn’t go as planned.

If I was going to make one point, it would be the first major point Doctorow brings up in Enshittification, that the internet was supposed to free us from the “middle men”–to bring music, writing, movies, TV, and communication–and make information more accessible and less costly, if not free.

I cannot really impart the sense of idealism we felt. Perhaps it is the same sort of idealism people feel with AI, but I’m not so sure. When the internet was young, it had no history to tarnish its utopian machinations besides the fact that it was first devised for the military.

When Google Docs became a Thing, I was very much an early adopter. I just couldn’t believe its efficiency. Here was something you could type into on whatever computer you were on, wherever that computer was, and then switch computers and continue working. Most magical was the power to see, in real time, other peoples’ text cursors move across the screen, adding text at will. Or that someone could share a “doc” with me, and I could see clearly (with Revision History) what they did with the document. Even more crazily, everything saved automatically. As someone who remembers the days of your fingers auto-magically contorting to hit two keys simultaneously on a keyboard in a Word document, Command+S or Control+S, it was the future.

I was the tech guru at my first school, even though when I arrived, I was an interim teacher. And the meager boost in real teacher pay helped me barely afford the technologies that I had wistfully seen others use: an iPhone and a Mac. I even bought my own copy of Microsoft Word, which really didn’t do much different than the OpenOffice I was using. But it was “official,” which meant something to me.

I stopped using my Linux computer even though I missed the scrappy identity I had with it. But I had no time for fiddling with software anymore. And I really didn’t. In my first year, I remember staying at school until 7 p.m. sometimes, dashing out work or grading, overdoing it in that way first year teachers do.

In my haste to participate in the shininess of good hardware and software, I forgot the whole ethics of it. Or never understood it in the first place. For instance, I had long assumed that Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra and its good graces in giving people free stuff was all part of the open future, where information was more accessible and noble in its access.

The idealism was so high that I went to a mandatory county-sanctioned professional development workshop at my school’s central office to use this new social media site called “Twitter” in my classroom. It was a packed room of variously seasoned professionals trying to reach out into the future if not to stay relevant.

Needless to say, inserting social media or even a digital backchannel of discussion into the classroom was not to be sustained.

We all know now that it’s almost intrinsically hard to pay for things when the services you are paying for don’t have a direct human behind it. We know that and companies know that. We constantly forget that we don’t live in the same environment that we evolved in. It is naturally easy for us to distance ourselves from people we don’t see every day. And it is easy for us to feel for the people immediately around us, even if we don’t respect their opinions. We are a social people, and we “have it soundly” (to quote Mercutio). But we can also turn it off when we have no human face to judge us. Therefore, it’s hard to feel the compensation of something like software.

And so software companies have leant into that idea. Hence we have Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification. But we also have a specialized form of capitalism going on in education.

Google has come a long way from a search engine to becoming an affordable Apple-like educational competitor. A lot of our lives are now spent on Google: from the Chromebook students use growing up to the search bars that we use as adults numerous times a day.

And in education land, my whole classroom is basically Google–Google Drive, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets, Google Forms, Google Chrome, and Chromebooks galore. We live Google. And for my students, Google is far more normalized than Microsoft Word ever was to me.

Google is where we store our files; it’s the source of all printing; it’s where students go to find instructions, and it’s where teachers go to grade papers; it’s presentations and spreadsheets; my classroom library runs of a Google Form and spreadsheet. Not to mention it’s how we communicate. It could be our entire Learning Management System, but our district does not officially use Google Classroom. And, most recently, it is a first stop for AI. Google can read into all of the things I use it for and synthesize the work I have done pre-AI, a time when I wasn’t thinking such things were possible.

The thing with software is that people just want it to work. It’s why Apple made it so big. Many tech companies made geeky toys that looked however they needed to look for the engineering to work, but Apple took these nerdy devices and made them into sleek devices that were inviting and intuitive to use.

Sure, we may have fallen in love with a type of pen (for me it was Parker pens) or a type of notebook (like ye olde composition notebook), but any craft school tool was hardly as much of a moneymaker or a thing in someone’s life as software. And that’s the business model because the software that is hooking us is largely free, and we know what that means.

Did it start with Microsoft Office back in the day? Before that, I don’t think there were pen, paper, binder, or backpack conglomerates that was trying to lock-in schools and their students with lifelong loyalty.

For my classroom, Google isn’t the only thing. We have tons of competitors out there. But only nerds like me will use them.

We could go open source at school. We could use Docs or CryptPad. Maybe think about using grading systems that are open source too, with simplicity at the forefront.

Or we could just go back to paper very easily. One of the major advantages being that we haven’t figured out to put AI in a piece of paper yet.

But that would get rid of the convenience we have now. And convenience is a nonnegotiable when it comes with software adoption. As I said before, we are not all nerds.

But it’s so odd that the software suite I use to grade papers can also be the software suite students use to cheat on them. And, probably, once Google buys a company that is now making money off teachers by offering AI detection services, what we do in the classroom could have more in common with our recycle logo than anything else.

Turns out the Chromebook was perfect for AI, a slave device that lets the internet mostly do its computing, ready for the transition (no new innards needed!). Not even AI’s terrible popularity (though most people use it in some measure, I suspect) will push it away from education.

If we are all about educating our students with the proper ethics and morals so they can figure out how to learn from our mistakes and steer society to better heights, we are sure doing a weird job showing them the healthy components of capitalism and government.

IV.

One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that not everyone would ever be as excited about what you could do with technology than I was.

Of course, I am just one of many that has happened on such an idealistic path. We are, in fact, a species that adores tools and such. It’s just that sometimes people go too hard. I went too hard, and it wasn’t until I was almost 10 years into my teaching career that I realized pragmatism was something I was not really following.

In a sense, I’ve joined the pragmatism movement. It’s been 15 years since I had Linux on my computers. And I can’t much muster more in terms of EdTech than the Google Suite and whatever video/audio editor is needed for special projects.

That doesn’t mean I don’t like a good piece of software. It just means that my evangelism for the new has waned. Perhaps this is aging (or should I say the gaining of wisdom?), but perhaps it’s also a realization that there are more important things to worry about in education. I hope it’s the latter.

That reliability, that ease, that’s what is keeping us in the hold we have right now.

The thing that is kind of crazy is that we are constantly forced into a lock-in kind of situation, a la Corey Doctorow’s “enshittification.” I can’t use the autosave function on Microsoft Word without subscribing to OneDrive and keeping my files on its servers. Also, I can’t put my own epubs (a file format for ebooks) on my Kindle because Kindle “doesn’t support” epubs and must translate them into KFX files (Kindle’s “native” file format). Amazon has no interest in the standard format of ebooks, or even participating, because they’d rather lock you in. Google Docs will open a Microsoft Word file online, but it won’t allow you to open a Google Doc in Microsoft Word.

With all the MacOS versus Windows versus Chromebook file formats, the internet has become the place for normal people (not nerds) to use software that’s easy and “just works.” And the internet isn’t free because servers cost money.

I can buy a MacBook or a PC and basically use most of its basic software without purchasing anything, but when you add cloud storage or internet anything, costs need to be accounted for.

In fact, I’m now all for education systems buying cheap laptops and using Ubuntu, a version of Linux. If it accesses the internet, then it has everything a Chromebook would have. Probably not as much control. And it divorces us from a bit of branding we could sorely do without.

V.

There is this charming ad campaign that the Norwegian Consumer Council called “A Day in the Life of an Esh*ttificator.” At the time of writing this, it’s 3 months old. That means you probably know all about it. But I’ll tell you anyway.

It’s a narrative pastiche of a guy whose family profession is to go into people’s living spaces and to take perfectly good products and create defects in them so either one has to buy a new one or spend money to repair it.

It looks like hard work: sawing part of a table leg off while a family sits at a meal, using a hairdryer to dry out markers, waiting under a bed for a guy to put his socks on and then cutting the toe off one of them.

And then the internet comes, and we see a shot of the enshittificator not in his usually crumby overalls, but in a suit, legs up on a table, typing on a computer in some nice and modern-looking glass-walled office space.

In that office, affecting way more people at way less effort, the enshittificator is able to add popups to websites, add ad-breaks to videos, and add updates to phones to take up more space on the phone’s hard drive so that you have to upgrade. If there is an alternative service that vows to make things better, the enshttificator buys that company.

It ends with a mock TedTalk where the enshittificator talks renaming pre-existing tech in cars as “premium features,” only turned on with a small monthly fee. (This exists in real life.)

It’s a charming video, and it speaks to all of us. And, yet, there is nothing we can do about it. I often think that I’m going to go back to Linux and ban Google and unsubscribe from Amazon Prime. Or just be more mindful about the digital companies I spend my money on. It was easy when I was a bachelor, when I didn’t have much money in the first place, and had responsibility only for myself. Now with a job and a family, it’s too expensive in both time and money to not take part in enshittification. And, really, how much is my lonely opt-out going to affect these powerful tech companies anyway? I’d need an army of opt-outers.

Which brings us back to education. Schools should be models for how we want citizens in our country to live. If schools themselves become havens of enshittification, well then, what are we teaching?

1. Though this is not an argument to place children’s experiences in any environment behind a screen. Toddlers especially are on their own timeline, and there are behaviors that indicate that sitting in a chair without quiet intervention is not an option. ↩︎