Alan Jacobs

The Resonant Computing Manifesto:

Regardless of which path we choose, the future of computing will be hyper-personalized. The question is whether that personalization will be in service of keeping us passively glued to screens—wading around in the shallows, stripped of agency—or whether it will enable us to direct more attention to what matters.

In order to build the resonant technological future we want for ourselves, we will have to resist the seductive logic of hyper-scale, and challenge the business and cultural assumptions that hold it in place. We will have to make deliberate decisions that stand in the face of accepted best practices—rethinking the system architectures, design patterns, and business models that have undergirded the tech industry for decades.

See further reflection on these issues by one of the authors of the Manifesto, the brilliant Sam Arbesman.

What Terrence Malick’s movies ask us to do.

Ars Technica: “Meta is building an artificial intelligence version of Mark Zuckerberg that can engage with employees in his stead.” I wonder if anyone will be able to tell the difference. 

After decades of business email, many people still default to Reply All when they’re talking only to the person who sent the original message. (I am also grieved by how many original senders fail to use BCC to deter the reply-allers.) You’d think people would have this sorted by now.

What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens - The Atlantic:

Education, Kane knows, is profoundly and stubbornly social. “There are a lot of students who need accountability,” he said. The answer is not more surveillance, but more companionship in the struggle. “Students benefit from being in a room with a bunch of other people who are learning the same thing, the collective effervescence of all trying to make progress together,” he said. “And they benefit from an adult who knows them, who is in the room, who says ‘I care about your learning.’”

Screens, Kane noticed, had made it easier for students — and, if he’s being honest, for teachers — to opt out of that contract. “Chromebooks can be a classroom-management strategy,” he said. “Students tend to be a little more docile with a screen in front of them. And it was just so easy for me to sit behind my screen and watch the little dots marching across the dashboard and not really teach.” He’s noticed that teaching in an analog environment is more demanding. “I’m more fatigued,” he said. “But I’m happy with that.”

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, in a superb essay:

The Effective Altruist mode of understanding the “good” served by philanthropy relies on quantifiable metrics focusing on, for instance, the numbers of lives saved in selecting causes to be supported. This appears at first a noble notion (who wouldn't want to save lives?) but one that calculates the “value” of those lives in terms of their future productivity. A life saved is not saved for the pleasure of the one who lives it, or the people and communities they touch, but rather for their economic value, for their potential contributions to the capitalist production, extraction, and funneling of wealth into the hands of what coincidentally turns out to be the donor class.

What I want us to take a look at is the degree to which higher education, its leaders, its benefactors, and even its publics have knowingly or unknowingly gotten interpellated into this mode of thinking about the work we do on campus and the students we do it for. Our students have long since been redirected away from understanding themselves as anything like academic citizens — full members in a shared community of learning — into becoming consumers of of a commercial product designed to deliver an individual benefit. 

And that “individual benefit” likely is calculated only in monetary terms — the value of a university education determined solely by the annual income of the degree-holder. 

My ST:TNG posts continue with a reflection on powers of Q.

I wrote about why I started a new project on the open web rather than on Substack.