I thought for sure that I would be more critical of this the second time through, but I found (again?) that the last third of this is the interesting part, even if the leading up to it feels confusing.

It’s very interesting to read this after having reread Dawn of Everything and after reading There Never Was a West for the first time. I can better see the connections between those three pieces—and how they might inform my future writing.

This story is full of twists and turns, and what I think is most important is how generative AI creates a new environment.

I think students using generative AI to cheat is super dumb. I also think that using AI detectors is super problematic. Independent of what did or did not happen here, I’m struck by the way that the mere existence of these kinds of technologies creates a multilayered climate of suspicion and distrust.

I just got rotated off my grad program’s data science class, where I spent a week on the importance of theory, etc. If I were still teaching it, I’d add in this gem of a paragraph on surveillance pricing:

It’s “theory-free.” You don’t have to discover why a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don’t have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM – you can just automatically jack up prices on them without knowing or caring that you’re gouging parents of young children who are re-ordering essential supplies while trying to get their kids to school in the morning.

Rereading The Dawn of Everything finally pushed me to use an on-hand Libro.fm credit to get this in audiobook so I could give it a try. I find Graeber to be a bit uneven (I appreciate most of what he writes, but I don’t find all of his arguments totally convincing), and so I waffled on whether to give this full marks.

Ultimately, I went with the more generous rating, because even if some of his ideas didn’t land with me, it’s useful to have so much of his thinking captured in one place. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll need to get a print copy of this for the same research project that Dawn of Everything had me thinking about.

I’ve mentioned a few times recently across my different subblogs that importing my Twitter archive into the Day One journaling app has been interesting for my ability to go back into my past in ways that I wasn’t able to before. Yesterday, going through Day One’s “On This Day” feature turned up a tweet from five years earlier that stood out to me:

Also, this started as a silly idea while biking to campus one morning, but I increasingly want to write something on Mormonism, technology, and authority that a) discusses interplay between “tools” and “systems” (both as tech) and b) uses Hiram Page and seer stones as an example.

I wasn’t expecting to count this as a “work read” when I decided to reread it a couple of months ago, but wow, did it ever help make sense of some ideas I’m kicking around for a potential book project.

Like my last read, I have to admit that I’m ill-suited to evaluate the historical or anthropological claims. I really appreciate the framework it brings to its inquiry, though, not least for the way it echoes similar ideas in Jacques Ellul’s work. This gets me thinking about anarchist commonalities between these authors, which is something I want to explore more.

I always pay attention to Josh’s perspective on things, and this post really stood out to me.

I think I have an idea for a book, but a book doesn’t make professional sense for at least two years, BUT this means for the first time in my career, I have an idea of a true research trajectory instead of repeatedly stumbling into cool projects.

Nothing annoys me more than an academic argument whose conclusion I want to agree with but is constructed in a sloppy, superficial way.

This CFP has been up on the journal website for a while now, but with our second “rolling deadline” of September 1st coming up soon, I thought it was time to start sharing it a little more personally. In short, I’m thrilled to joining Spencer Stewart and Rosemary Avance in editing a special issue of the Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association on Platformed Mormonism. Here’s a quick blurb on the issue, and please check out the link above for more details:

Later this week, I’ll be presenting for the first time at the International Jacques Ellul Society. My paper is called Image and Word in Mormonism’s Foundational Media Events, and I’ll be using Ellul’s image and word framework in The Humiliation of the Word as an explanatory framework for how the founding events of Mormonism can be understood by scholars and believers as either the sure-and-certain image or the ambiguous and fleeting word. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Latter-day Saints and their leaders tend to prefer the image over the word, and I think Ellul’s writing helps understand why this is (beyond the obvious reasons)

For my entire career, I have resisted demonizing students and have sincerely believed in the need to adapt assessment to context rather than police student behavior. Yet, this kind of thing is untenable:

Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

One perk of using Markdown/HTML-based slides is that I can work on them from my phone’s text editor when sitting a few rows back from kiddo at a summer library event.

Kiddo is at a half-day summer camp this week, which is freeing up my mornings for work. However, the camp is across town from where we live, so rather than driving all the way home for a couple of hours of work, I’ve been driving to a nearby branch of the Lexington Public Library to set up my laptop and get some work done there. It has been really nice!

Recently, I’ve been thinking about Jacques Ellul’s image/word dichotomy as more broadly applicable than to media—as applicable to the whole technical phenomenon that he criticizes. That is, by virtue of its seeming objectivity, the technical phenomenon enjoys trust that is not warranted when one digs into the details and sees the fuzziness and subjectivities and artifice that prop the whole thing up. Doctorow’s critique here seems firmly in that vein.

Currently, I am experience the specific academic joy of receiving a peer review invitation that feels like recognition of a specific research reputation I have been trying to cultivate for a few years.

I dunno, seems bad.

If edtech doesn’t include this horrifying monstrosity, the field isn’t being broad enough in its inquiry.

Reviewing reference works that I largely skimmed always feels silly, but it’s my website, and no one can stop me.

I’m not a historian, but this historical context was really useful for me for a paper I’m writing on Ellulian perspectives on “media events” in early Mormon history. I appreciated having easy access to documents related to events I was writing about, and as I eventually expand the paper, I expect that I will come back to this volume.

Very glad for 404 Media’s podcast, because I somehow missed when they published this horrifying story.

Here’s a gift link. Jacques Ellul argued that you can’t separate the good aspects of technique from the bad. In that context, this paragraph stands out:

Optimists about generative AI have high hopes for its ability to produce future scientific breakthroughs — accelerating discovery, eliminating most types of cancer — but the technology is currently undermining one of the pillars of scientific research, inundating editors and reviewers with an endless stream of papers. Paradoxically, the better the technology gets at producing competent papers, the worse the crisis becomes.

Marketing yourself as “the tech in edtech” is not at all a flex like Infinite Campus seems to think it is. Like, all edtech is tech—that’s the point. I don’t know that I’d agree with “the ed in edtech” either, but I’d at least get what they’re going for. This just boggles me.

My decision a few months ago to import my Twitter archive into my journaling app has been a mixed bag. I’ve been deleting a lot of orphaned references and truncated posts, but also, now I have a record of the time I picked a fight with an LMS CEO about privacy, and that’s fun.

Ben’s perspective here is useful.

It’s amazing how much I struggle to write a single sentence during time I’ve set aside for writing, but when I’m in the middle of grading, I can “pause for a second” to jot down an idea and wind up with three draft paragraphs.