It ended up a pretty good year for writing, all things considered. I’ve flailed around a lot, no doubt, with the direction for my newsletter, Second Breakfast -- moving off of the wannabe-conservative-media Substack right before the new year (and no doubt taking a hit with sign-ups by moving away from its growing “network” of writers), but hey, at least I still have my conscience!

Indeed, writing -- not just in content, but in the act itself -- feels increasingly like an act of resistance and refusal -- not just in a continued avoidance of social media, but in a vehement eschewal of all things ChatGPT and generative AI.

(There’s something about the way in which both the continued use of AI and of Substack are justified. I think people know that these technologies are deeply deeply “compromised,” but find themselves unable to unwind and detach as -- I'll try to be generous here -- they’re simply just trying to “cope.”)

I backslid too: I’m back to writing about ed-tech.

Once I decided this fall to return -- to start writing (again) about education, technology, and artificial intelligence -- things have felt like they’re falling into place. I’d hoped initially to have a book proposal done by the end of the year, but that’s not going to happen. I have a lot more reading and research to do before I feel confident in engaging in a book-level argument on the topic, and my thoughts and feelings are all still a jumble.

One of the things that technology (AI, social media, etc) has almost ruined for me, I think, is writing on the web. My early blogs and later my work on Hack Education gave me my career as a writer, but I am quite disenchanted with “writing online” insofar as my words have all been vacuumed up into various corpora, used in turn to train the algorithms that now tech entrepreneurs promise are going to replace writers. Culturally, not just technologically, we do not value writing; we do not value thinking.

So I’m leaning into the newsletter and its paywall. Email isn’t perfect (read Sarah Jeong’s wonderful The Internet of Garbage) but the inbox feels intimate and personal without being so exposed to the extraction machine. “Open” doesn’t just feel dangerous; it feels naive.

But here I am, blogging on my own domain. Silly me.

I don’t want to give up on the web. Elements of it remain part of a most wonderful techno-intellectual dream. (They are the tiniest of elements these days -- micro-particles of creativity, knowledge, and resistance.)

I recently made an update to Wikipedia, which ironically remains one of the few places on the web that isn’t utterly ruined -- a place I know I can still go without being overrun by AI slop and ChatGPT generated nonsense. A distance runner, Sarah Hall, had set a record at the Valencia Marathon, and I added the information to her entry. I’ve made a couple of small edits like this this year -- very small edits, very small gestures, no doubt, but still something, still contributions to an important (and “open”) intellectual project.

But whither Wikipedia in the age of AI, when “search” is broken, when we’re told we’re supposed to “chat” our way to knowledge discovery?

Wikipedia itself has been scraped, its entries wrested from the encyclopedia to feed the generative AI beast. Although the contents of its entries have been used to train AI, I’m not sure that some of the most unique elements of the site -- the “Talk” pages and the edit histories -- have been, however. Because, of course, despite that word “generative” that’s been appended to AI, this technological project is not about generating knowledge but rather about rearranging words in a statistically pleasing manner.

And “rearranging words in a statistically pleasing manner” is supposedly the future of writing.

I object, no surprise.

I’ve declared to the world that I’m writing a book. And I am, I really am (although truthfully, I’m still in the reading stage and will be for a while, I reckon). Mostly I’m writing a newsletter. I’ll be doubling down on that writing in the new year: more ed-tech criticism, and may the entrepreneurs and administrators and AI fans of the world sigh with frustration. And wow, look at this, it seems I’m blogging too.