So, it turns out that spending time with Jacques Ellul’s mid-20th century critiques of systematization, abstraction, “productivity,” and “efficiency” does NOT make it any easier to write letters evaluating colleagues’ progress toward tenure.

This is a mess of a post blending thoughts on tech policy with religious ideas and lacking the kind of obvious throughline or structure that I’d like it to have. It’s also been in my head for a couple of weeks, and it’s time to release it into the world rather than wait for it to be something better. So, here it is:

I am frustrated with generative AI technology for many reasons, but one of the things at the top of that list is the knowledge that today’s kids are growing up in a world where it is possible—even likely—that their middle and high school experiences are going to involve someone using generative AI tools to produce deepfake nudes (or other non-consensual intimate imagery—NCII) of them. See, for example, this horrifying story from the New York Times last April.

Throughout my career, I’ve been a data-first researcher, and theory has always been one of my weak areas. This is not to say that I dismiss the importance of theory: I appreciate danah boyd and Kate Crawford’s critique of Chris Anderson’s “the numbers speak for themselves” in their 2012 paper Critical Questions for Big Data as much as I appreciate Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s similar critique in their book Data Feminism. It’s just that while I agree that theory is important, I’ve never been well-versed in it—except for the loose theoretical framework of sociocultural learning, multiple literacies, and social communities and spaces that I bring to much of my work (even that work that has gone beyond educational technology research.

I have mixed feelings about the digital library app hoopla—which offers access to ebooks, electronic comics, and other media that my library doesn’t necessarily carry in physical format—but it’s so dang useful that I keep using it despite some hesitations (see this post for some recent complaints). Tonight, though, as I tried to wrap up the introduction to the English translation of Jacques Ellul’s Théologie et technique (which I ought to just buy in French-language physical format, since its publishing house offers 5€ shipping to the U.S.), I noticed something that really made me mad.