I am in my late 30s. “Digital native” was first used for my age cohort in the early 2000s—and was riffing off of John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.” It is a USELESS term because its frame of reference keeps shifting to “kids these days” (and other reasons, too).

Interesting article here. I don’t read WIRED (or The Verge, or…) for the product reviews, but it’s not hard to see how generative AI can create issues for them in that way.

Gotta admit that I was tempted to put “Brendan Carr is a dummy” on my protest sign today so I could find the other Vergecast listeners in town.

Last Thursday, I listened to a recent episode of The Vergecast during my morning bike commute. The episode featured Paul Ford talking about his recent experience with Claude Code, and I was genuinely surprised to find some of his comments resonating with me. It helped that Ford wasn’t uncritical about AI (though certainly not as critical as I would have been), but some of it was just that I recognized some of the thrill that he was describing of using tools and resources to learn how to solve a problem. In fact, I found that thrill so contagious that a passing comment he made got me to spend some time once I got to the office converting my Twitter archive into a CSV that I could finally import it into the Day One journaling app that I use.

I’ve been sour on Ring for a long time, but literally everything their CEO is saying to Nilay Patel in these interview clips I’m listening to makes me even angrier at the company.

I appreciate that The Verge is reporting on the government tear gassing kids, I appreciate the transparency of The Verge’s reporters as they do so, and I appreciate the nerdy details of this specific disclosure.

Cory Doctorow has a bit he returns to in a lot of his writing about how tech billionaires aren’t geniuses, just power-hungry people who got lucky, and now I will always wonder if he got it from this movie. I’m a huge fan of Cory’s, but Rian Johnson’s having Daniel Craig rant about how dumb Edward Norton’s tech billionaire character is in this movie is perfection.

Also, super good cameo appearance by The Verge.

This morning, while getting ready for the day, I spent some time catching up on podcasts, including Nilay Patel’s interview of Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekhar on a recent episode of Decoder (a podcast I’ve spent a lot more time listening to since it went ad free for subscribers). I ditched the Stack Exchange network a year and a half ago over digital labor concerns—I was literally being prevented from deleting my own content from the site, which is bonkers—and I’m honestly not sure why I bookmarked the interview for listening a few days ago. I think it was more than a hate listen, though: For all of my own feelings about generative AI, I make an effort to be open minded, and I was interested in the headline for the interview: “Stack Overflow users don’t trust AI. They’re using it anyway.”

In the ~2 months since The Verge launched ad-free podcasts for subscribers, I’ve listened to more of their audio content than in all the years that I’d been reading them previously.

One of the great “be careful what you wish for” stories is The Monkey’s Paw in which a family receives a magic item that grants wishes but discovers to their horror that all the wishes are granted in terrible, horrible ways. I can’t remember when I last read the story (though I’m confident I have—maybe in high school?), but monkey paw has stuck in my brain as the metaphor for this idea that wishes can go terribly, terribly wrong, so you really ought to think them through.

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’ll admit that I haven’t read much on all of this, but I can’t imagine any coverage better than this article.

Some powerful stuff in here.

Just had a student explain that such-and-such a file wasn’t in a specific folder, it was just on their computer, in case anyone was wondering how digital native rhetoric is holding up. Need to bookmark that 2021 article from The Verge.

Perhaps most interesting thing here is official comment from Reddit. It’s not quite “auto-reply with a poop emoji territory,” but it might actually be worse?

Is he serious? Does he really think this is a good idea? Also, I love the increasing sass that The Verge and other outlets are putting into their comments about Twitter no longer having a communications team to respond to requests for comment.