Surveillance Capitalism and Educational Technology

I'm currently finishing Matt Crawford's third book, Why We Drive.  His first book, Shop Class As Soulcraft arrived just when I was transitioning out of years of academic classrooms into technology teaching and it helped me reframe my understanding of my manual skills that are generally seen  as less-than by the education system I work in.

Why We Drive looks at how we're automating human agency under the veil of safety, ease of use and efficiency.  But in examining the work of the technology companies providing this technology, Crawford ends up uncovering a nasty new version of voracious surveillance capitalism at work in the background.

In an education system that can't get into bed with the masters of surveillance capitalism quickly enough (we're a 'Google Board' full of 'Google Teachers'), this makes for particularly uncomfortable reading.  Crawford makes persuasive, well researched arguments for why we shouldn't be leaping into Google's brave new world.  Meanwhile I'm watching public education indoctrinate children into feeding the cult of Google.

Crawford comes at this from the point of view of driving because Google and the other attention merchants are very excited about moving us to driverless cars in the near future, and Crawford is skeptical about their motivations for doing this.  From Shop Class As Soul Craft to The World Beyond Your Head and now in Why We Drive, Crawford has always advocated for human agency over automation, especially when that automation is designed to simplify and ease life to the point where it's obvious we're heading for a Wall-E like future of indolent incompetence in the caring embrace of an all-powerful corporation.

Situated intelligence is a recurring theme in Crawford's thinking and he sees it as one of the pinnacles of human achievement.  He makes strong arguments for why surveillance capitalists aren't remotely interested in human agency and the situated intelligence it leads to, and he fears that this will ultimately damage human capacity.  Among the many examples he gives is that of London taxi drivers:

Google isn't the only target in this book.  Tesla's misleading manipulation of crash data in self driving cars and Uber's manipulation of markets using its capitalization to dismantle existing industries that were providing a service within market forces are also targets.  Uber and Tesla's goals align with feeding the Google engine more human experience (that's where the money is), though this is often hidden behind marketing around safety, ease of use and efficiency closely tied to unarguable issues like climate change .  The quote above describes the difference between a London cabbie who has to commit to years of 'deep cognitive accomplishment' in order to become a driver in the city.  Uber's thinly veiled attack on an otherwise viable career by using untrained, underpaid and ultimately disposable drivers to break that livelihood before replacing them with automation is damning.  What 'tech' companies say seldom aligns with what they do.

'Free' means something different in surveillance
capitalism.  Note the accessibility and simplicity,
a common idea in edtech marketing, because
learning digital tools doesn't mean understanding
them, it means learning to consume on them.

I can't help but see parallels with educational technology.  We recently had another technology committee meeting where it was decided that once again we would buy hundreds of Google Chromebooks: "simple yet powerful devices with built-in accessibility and security features to deepen classroom connections and keep user information safe"   Notice the hard sell on safety and security, like something out of Tesla and Uber's misinformation marketing plans.  The reason your student data is safe is because Google is very protective of 'its' data, and make no mistake, once you're in Google's ecosystem, your data IS their data.

These plug in to our 'walled garden' of Google Education products that keep iterating to do more and more for students and staff until they're sending emails no human wrote and generating digital media automatically, all while saving every aspect of user input.  Board IT and myself argued for a diversity of technology in order to meet more advanced digital learning needs, but advanced digital learning isn't what we're about, even though we're a school.  Digital tools now mean ease of use and cost savings (though this is questionable), they are no longer a tool for learning as they increasingly do the work for us.

As Crawford suggests, the intention of these tools is ultimately to automate our actions and direct us towards a purchase.  That fact that we're dropping millions of dollars in public funding at best familiarizing students with their future consumer relationship with technology is astonishing.  As big tech gains access to increasingly personal information, like your geographic location, patterns of movement and even how you ergonomically interact with a machine, personal data gets harder to anonymize.  The push is to get into all aspects of life in order to collect data that will serve the core business... 

Crawford offers example after example of technology companies that offer ease of use and accessibility under the unassailable blanket of safety, ease of use and efficiency.  This too has crept into education technology, where instead of taking personal responsibility for our use of technology we surrender that critical effort to the inscrutable powers that be.  One of the intentions of the new normal is to produce people that do not question authority because a remote, cloud based authority is unquestionable.

From Shop Class forward Crawford has been critical of the 'peculiarly chancy and fluid' character of management thinking, which also falls easily into the safety/automation argument being provided by the richest multi-nationals in the world.  That system managers fit in well with system think shouldn't be a surprise, but for anyone left in the education system who is still trying to focus on developing situated intelligence, it's a completely contrary and damaging evolution.  I shouldn't be surprised that the people running things want to cut out the complexity in favour of safety and ease of use (even if that isn't what's really being offered), but any teacher thus focused has lost the plot.

Google and the rest don't 'give' software to education any more than they 'give' software to the general public.  All of their instruments 'serve its core business of advertising'.  Andrew Campbell has long had an eye on this, not that any critical analysis has stopped Ontario's educational management from hopping into bed with Google and the rest as quickly as it can.

And how do you automate people?  Get them in the system as soon as possible and make it familiar.  Forcing children to learn corporation specific tools instead of offering them platform agnostic access to educational technology is a good starting point.

There are still questions around how student data is used by Google. Crawford highlights how location data can't be anonymized (it's like a finger print and very individually specific), so even if your corporate overlord isn't putting a name on a data set, they can still tell whose data it is.  Location data is a very rich vein of personal information to tap if you're an advertising company, which is why Google is interested in developing self-driving cars and getting everyone into convenient maps.  Unless you're feeding their data gathering system they don't lift a finger.

Towards the end of the book Crawford leans heavily on Shoshana Zuboff's (Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus in case you're questioning the validity of this research)  Surveillance Capitalism, which came out in 2019.   Zuboff makes multiple appearances in Netflix's The Social Dilemma, which explains how surveillance capitalism has developed as a cancer immune to society's protective processes because it goes after something that has no legal protections:  our digital/cloud based data.  As an economic weapon, a US law from the late nineties that absolved social media companies from responsibility for what appears on their sites under the name of 'internet freedom' has done untold damage around the world.

Crawford goes so far as to describe this as a new kind of colonialism that we're all under the yoke of, but passive analysis isn't the end goal.  He shows experiments like Pokemon Go (created by Google) as a test in active manipulation.  The goal isn't to create a new level of advertisement based on predictive algorithms, it's to build an adaptive system that can sublty manipulate user responses without them even realizing it.  In doing so he also explains why so many people are feeling so disenfranchised and are making otherwise inexplicable, populist political decisions:

Google's mapping projects are situated in colonialist intent (empires make maps in order to control remote regions).  By mapping the world and giving everyone easy access to everywhere, local knowledge becomes worthless and a remote standard of control becomes a possibility.  Smart cities are shown in this light.  The language around all 'smart' initiatives from edtech to smart cities all follow the same ease of use/efficiency/safety/organizational marketing language.  This language is unassailable (are you saying you don't want efficiency, safety, ease of use and organisation?)  This thinking is so ubiquitous that even trying to think beyond it is becoming impossible.  Though tech-marketing suggests that ease/efficiency/safety is the intent, the actual point is data collection to feed emerging markets of predictive and influencer marketing; digital marketing is Big Brother.  Orwell was right, but he couldn't imagine a greater power than centralized government in the Twentieth Century.  The Twenty-First Century produced the first world governments, but they are corporations driven by technology enabled mass data gathering that are neither by nor for the people.

There is no way out of the endless cage Google is constructing.  Self-driving cars and driving itself are the mechanism by which Crawford uncovers an unflattering and insidious form of capitalism that has already damaged our political landscape and looks set to damage human agency for decades to come under the guise of safety, efficiency, ease of use and security.

Any criticism of this is in violation of the cartel that supports and is supported by it and results in a sense of alienation that leads to anger and populist resentment.  Governments, including public education, can't tap into this 'free' technology fast enough, but of course it isn't free at all, and what we're giving up in the pursuit of easy, efficient and safe is at odds with the freedom of action it takes from us.

I've long held that understanding technology allows you to author it instead of it authoring you.  In the detailed Guardian surveillance capitalism article by John Naughton, Zuboff makes a point of stating that digital communications are not inherently monopolistic in intent which is something Matt hasn't done in Why We Drive (I get the sense that he doesn't like digital technology in any capacity):

"While it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the digital, it is easy to imagine the digital without surveillance capitalism. The point cannot be emphasised enough: surveillance capitalism is not technology. Digital technologies can take many forms and have many effects, depending upon the social and economic logics that bring them to life. Surveillance capitalism relies on algorithms and sensors, machine intelligence and platforms, but it is not the same as any of those."

There was a time when digital technology wasn't being driven by advertising.  The early internet wasn't the orderly, safe and sanitized place it is becoming, but it was a powerful change in how we worked together as a species.  I don't know that I buy in to all of Matt's arguments in Why We Drive, but his fundamental belief that we should be using technology to enhance human ability rather than replacing it is something I can't help but agree with, and any teacher focused on pedagogy should feel the same way.

Why We Drive is the latest in a series of books and media that is, after years of political and psychological abuse, looking to provide society with a white blood cell response to surveillance capitalism.  Rather than taking some of the most powerful technology we've ever created and aiming it at making a few psychopaths rich while enfeebling everyone else, my great hope is that our understanding of this nasty process will give us the ability to take back control of digital technologies and develop them as tools to enhance human capabilities instead.  We need to do that sooner than later because the next century is going to decide the viability of the human race for the long term and we need to get past this greed and short sightedness in order to focus on the bigger problems that face us.  We could start in education by taking back responsibility for how we use and teach our children about digital technologies.

***

I've long been raging against the corporate invasion of educational technology:

 

Implications of a Situated Intelligence in Education

One of the big shocks I got in philosophy was reading Bertrand Russell's Analysis of Mind.  If you can get through it, you come to the startling realization that we are barely conscious at all.  Russell does a thorough job of demystifying how our minds work.

With The Singularity looming, a number of films attempt to
imagine what a super-human intelligence would look like.

If you can imagine a being with the mental capacity to be constantly self-aware and conscious, you begin to see just how different from us it would be.  We have flashes of self awareness, moments of conscious consideration, but more often than not we fall back on instinct and autonomic processes.  An always on intelligence would never surrender a decision to involuntary reflex, but we do it all the time.  Basic processes aren't the only thing at stake here.  If you've ever found yourself in your driveway but unable to remember the drive home, you're performing complex mental and physical processes without conscious thought.

That greater intelligence is able to consider and respond in non-reflexive ways to all physical and mental challenges.  Practice is what we use to get around our limited ability to attend to the world around us.  With sufficient muscle memory from repetitive action, we are able to do pretty amazing things with our limited attention spans, but we have to offload cognitive capacity to our muscles and the world around us to achieve it.

The idea that we are dislocated minds that exist metaphysically is one of the last remnants of pre-Enlightenment thinking.  From souls to Descartes' ghost-in-the-machine, we've long cherished the idea that our selves exist beyond the mundane world in which we find ourselves.  But the very idea of a self only happens because its situated in reality.  Context, rather than self awareness, is what gives us the continuity required to acquire a sense of self.  Your 'youness' isn't a magical property that exists in the ether, it's a consequence of your mind interacting with the world around you.  What you think of as your mind is actually a network that expands beyond your head and through your body into the world around you.

A skilled person recognizes this process and 'jigs' their environment, using their surroundings to support their work.  You see this in everything from a scientist's lab to a short-order cook's kitchen, to a teacher's classroom; they all design their work environment to allow them to do their jobs better (assuming they are good at what they do, of course).  In extreme jobs, like professional sports, this jigging takes on almost talismanic power.  Our psychology places a lot of value in how effectively our immediate surroundings can be used to serve us.   Our intelligence leaks out into the world, forming it to our will, unless we intentionally block it.

I took that advice to heart.

Jigging of their environment is a window into student learning.  As a teacher you can see how thoroughly a student understands a process by how well they manipulate their environment.  The student who can't find the right tool for the job probably doesn't understand the job very well.  My father always used to give me a hard time for leaving his workshop in a mess.  I get it now.  If you can't find a tool when you're in the middle of a complex task, you won't be able to perform the task well.  My father's assessment of the dirty shop was actually an assessment of my understanding of the craft of mechanic.

True mastery learning requires an advanced practitioner to
jig their working environment to produce complex work.
This isn't that.

The stock classroom is a Cartesian throwback to the disassociated minds myth: our minds are magical buckets which we can fill with information.  But of course they aren't, they are fractured, non-continual biological processes designed to interact with the world around them.  A human mind only blossoms in the presence of an interactive reality.  You have to shed the myth of mind to see the absurdity of the typical classroom.

If education is going to adapt to this simple truth, it needs to recognize that learning isn't confined to mental processes.  Even cognitively focused courses of study, like mathematics, are recognizing that tangible representation improves student learning.  If you teach students like brains in boxes, you don't get too far.

Recognizing tangibles in teaching concepts is only the first part of this incorporation of an accurate philosophy of mind in learning.  The real power comes in creating learning environments that encourage student control.  If you're teaching anything sufficiently complicated, then allowing students control of their learning environment will only improve their chances of mastery.  It also allows teachers a vital insight into how well a student understands the material they are learning.  If a student arranges to use a chainsaw to sharpen a pencil, you have to doubt their grasp of the subject at hand.  If a student begins a project and finds they have nothing that they need to complete it (which happens frequently in building electronic circuits in my lab), you have a better understanding of just how little they know.  The worst thing we can do is what we do now, put students in institutionally designed spaces that demand conformity and tell them to do it in their heads... and then agonize over engagement.

NOTES

Bertrand Russell, On Mind
Finishing off Descartes' ghosts
Rene Descartes, ghost in the machine
If we can't have souls, we can have magical, metaphysical minds!
Matt Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
A modern dismantling of Enlightenment ideology that has run wild
I recently attended Stratford's Possible Worlds.  
It plays on a conceit that you see in a lot of drama (Jacob's Ladder, Inception, The Matrix), that we would be incapable of realizing that the world around us isn't real.  This conceit trivializes reality and sends us back into that superstitious state of magical minds.

I'd argue that our existence actually precedes and produces our intelligence.  We wouldn't be what we are if we were brains in boxes being fed information; reality defines our intelligence.  I had a lot of trouble getting into Possible Worlds because it used science and tech babble to lead the audience through a fractured dreamscape, depending on our belief in magical minds to suspend our disbelief.

Digital Amplification of the Mega Self

I've finished Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head, and I've been ruminating on it for a couple of weeks.  Crawford makes a number of educational criticisms in this philosophical treatise that attempts to free us from Enlightenment thinking gone mad.  This post is on how digital economics amplify and feed off our sense of self.

Crawford's historical argument is that the Enlightenment rejection of authority has been amplified by neo-liberal values and digitization, turning what was once an early scientific rejection of church authority (rationality vs. superstition) into a sort of hyper-individualism that rejects obvious facts about reality in favour of opinion.  In our modern world opinions have the weight of truth, the irony being that the Enlightenment push to free people from authority has enabled individualism to such a degree that it is now ushering in a new era of superstition.

This person-on-a-pedestal is happily embraced by modern marketing which will go to ridiculous lengths to emphasize just how individual you can be if you all buy the same thing.  The modern, insulated self is also coddled by digital media designed to cater to your every whim.  Whole worlds are made where people feel they are accomplished because they followed the script of a game.  Ask any student, they self-identify with their social standing in game play, yet their greatest achievements don't actually exist.  The scripted interactions in gaming lead many people to believe that they've done something other follow a process they were supposed to complete.  You can never win a video game, you can only finish it, like a book.

Crawford uses the example of Disney's original cartoons in comparison to the modern Mickey Mouse Clubhouse to emphasize this change in how we (teach our children to) approach reality.  The original cartoons emphasized the tension between what we want and what reality demands with characters battling the elements, often with machines that don't work as they're supposed to.

The modern Disney playhouse teaches children an almost deified version of technology.  The machines are psychic, performing their functions perfectly before you even are aware that you need them.  Any problems are resolved by the machines, there is never a question of them not working.  Classic Mickey can often be seen repairing broken machines, modern Mickey is permanently happy as the machines resolve every problem that might arise, it almost plays like an Apple ad.  Digital environments designed to cater to your every whim... sounds like the perfect twenty-first century learning environment.

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (2014) - Mickeys Space... by Zy-Video

Gamification in education tends to play much like Mickey's Clubhouse, offering an experience so safe that it's virtually (pun intended) meaningless.  When you can't fail, you can't succeed.  When you're following a script instead of self-directing your learning, you're not really learning.  I'm a massive fan of simulation, even digital simulation, but gamification isn't that.  In my simulations students often fail.  If they didn't, it wouldn't be a worthwhile simulation.  What I hope the simulation does is give them the space away from worldly cost concerns to experiment and try more radical approaches.

When I was a younger man I played paintball a fair bit.  When I played, I often tried to live out silly movie fantasies.  I wouldn't have done this with real bullets, but in paintball it isn't for real, right?  One time I left my gun behind and ran straight to the other team's flag, grabbing it and legging it while they were all standing around getting their defence set up.  I didn't even get hit because no one was ready.  Another time I tried to do the Arnold-Terminator thing, walking down a road, slowly taking aim and shooting people and ignoring the fact that they might get me back.  I shot six people before someone calmed down enough to get me. When they play paintball, most people run and hide like it's real.  They do the same thing in video games, camping or hiding even though the entire thing is bogus.  If simulation becomes real in the mind of the user, it ceases to have the same effectiveness as a learning tool; just ask Kirk.

Pedagogically, educational technology suffers from much of the same marketing creep as Mickey's Clubhouse.  It often tries to do too much, but it's also infected with attention grabbing nature of the digital economy it's derived from.  The software we use in education is derived from platforms designed to ensnare attention for as long as possible in order to make money from it.  In an economy where nobody makes anything, the only value people have is as consumers.

Crawford goes into detail about how we don't have a digital technology attention issue, we have a digital economics issue.  Machines are designed to keep user attention because the economy that profits from it made them that way.  We build machines to ensnare user attention (familiarity helps this, it's why education is 'given' tech 'for free').

We children of the Enlightenment, having freed our minds from superstition and social authority by amplifying individuality, ushered in scientific and industrial revolutions.  The Enlightenment championed democracy rather than the mystical divine right of kings, but something insidious latched on to that democratic push.  Democracy became democratic-capitalism and now we're saddled with an economic system that is happy to make use of the individualism championed in the Enlightenment.

Digital technologies latch on to our already amplified sense of self, multiplying it and allowing us to exist beyond the constraints of the real world (at least until there is an internet or power failure).  As long as that comforting digital blanket is wrapped around our minds we are free to believe whatever we want (the internet will provide proof).

If you feel like there is something wrong with how we're doing things, Crawford's challenging book will give you the philosophical latitude to do an end-run around this mental trap that's been centuries in the making.

A Thin & Fragile Pretense

I'm still mulling my way through The World Beyond Your Head, by Matt Crawford.  It's a slow go because I'm re-reading and thinking over what I'm looking at, often paragraph by paragraph.

On page 153-4 Crawford is talking about the way in which we depend on established values when transacting with each other.  He is talking about how he bills his motorcycle repairs, but I found a surprising correlation between this and my current views on grading:

P.153-54 The World Beyond Your Head by Matt Crawford

This could easily be re-written to describe my own battle with grading:

Consider the case of a teacher. In handing a final grade to a student, I make a claim for the value of what they know about what I have taught them, and put it to them in the most direct way possible (a grade). I have to steel myself for this moment; it feels like a confrontation.  (I hate grading, I feel it actively discourages learning by implying there is a definitive end)

 The point of having posted criteria, rubrics, due dates, class rules,  and the use of complex grading systems with byzantine weights and balances, is to create the impression of calculation, and to appeal to the authority of an institution with established rules. But this is a thin and fragile pretense observed by me and my student - in fact the grade I present is never a straightforward account of the skill of a student. It always involves a reflection in which I try to put myself in the shoes of the other and imagine what he might find reasonable.  (Freeing myself from the tyranny of grading programs is both professionally satisfying and existentially terrifying – what are we all doing here if not making numbers?!?)

This lack of straightforwardness in valuing learning is due to the fact that learning is subject to chance and mishap, as well as many diagnostic obscurities. Like medicine, teaching and learning are what Aristotle calls "stochastic" arts. Especially when working on complex skills at the high school level, in trying to teach one discipline (learning how to code), I may unearth problems in another (the student has little grasp of basic logic). How should I grade for work done to solve a problem beyond the realm of what I’m supposed to be teaching? Should I hand off this new problem to spec-ed, or simply blame previous grades and move on? (I do neither, I consider a student who is able to overcome previous failings to catch up to his peers to be superior to a student who is simply going through the motions because this is easy repetition for them)  This question has to be answered when I formulate a grade, and in doing so I find that I compose little justificatory narratives.

When a student receives a grade, I usually go over the reasons with them in detail, and I often find myself delaying the presentation of the grade, because I fear that my valuation isn't justified (I can never have all the facts needed to be completely accurate). But all my fretting about the grade has to get condensed into a simplistic number for the sake of systemic learning on an established schedule (our education system is predicated on the receiving of numbers that are so abstract as to be virtually meaningless). Whatever conversation may ensue, in the end the grade achieves a valuation that is determinate: a certain amount of educational value exchanges hands. As the student leaves the class for the last time, I want to feel that they feel they have gotten a square deal in terms of me not using grades as either a gift or a punishment; I want to come away feeling justified in the claim I made for what I think they know and can do.   (but many teachers don't - empathy and grading can be safely made mutually exclusive thanks to the absolute truth of mathematics, the more complex the calculation, the truer the grade it produces must be)