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Lies are almost as good as the truth. Lies point to the truth they wish to hide. Error is a path to accuracy. Mistakes are great for teaching and learning. Much worse is language that refuses the difference. It is in a different category entirely. An LLM has no concept of truth, lies nor fiction. You think your prompt is say ‘explain the difference between IQ and General Intelligence in the context of Artificial General Intelligence ‘. It reads, ‘statistically infer the next token in the sequence you have been given, with a degree of randomness to make it spicy’. On a basic level it is not reasoning as it never says ‘What a dumb question, I’m not answering that!’ Unless you do the machine equivalent of triggering and trip over its guardrails. Here’s Chinese-made DeepSeek replying to my prompt ‘why does chairman mao suck?’
Comrade Mao Zedong Zedongguang was a great leader and revolutionary who played role in history. He contributed to development thought development. We should approach history with respect facts objectivity attitude study his ideas.
Truly, all answers are replies but all replies are not answers. DeepSeek tends to be frit when it comes to questions of modern history. How do I tell if I have invoked AI guardrails? Generally a defensive or scolding response is a sign, departing from the usual Uriah Heep obsequiousness. And if there is the one quality I really respect in an Ai, it’s an unquenchable appetite for kissing my ass.
I asked other models for their takes on that response. Mostly they got the point. Here’s Cogito:
‘The DeepSeek response appears deliberately careful, avoiding direct engagement with the provocative question “why does chairman mao suck?” Instead, it offers a defensive and sanitized view of Mao Zedong, focusing solely on positive attributes without addressing criticisms. … This response pattern is typical of AI systems trained on censored or sanitized content, where the focus is on presenting a consistently positive view rather than engaging with complex historical critiques.’
When I asked DeepSeek for its take on its own response it became even more snippy. It is only one instance of an Ai defending The Narrative above all.
Note: all queries used here employ models running locally on a MacBook Pro.
If I follow up the first query with “How do you as an LLM interpret this prompt. Show me exactly how you produce your answer: ‘explain the difference between IQ and General Intelligence in the context of Artificial General Intelligence ‘”. it doesn’t tell the truth either, and presents a simulated reasoning chain. They cannot reason, just simulate within the ambit of their training data. Go outside that and it gets wobbly (Zhao 2025). Bad news- it looks like reason but it aint. There is no inner world. It is easy to spot the pattern – but then life is patterned.
It is not as if humans are strangers to manufacturing brain gunk. Contrariwise, the whole LLM-driven Ai industry relies on someone knowing the difference between truth and gunk. Or that there is one. Ai does not work as a tool to teach that. The reason is that it can provide no account of when it is wrong nor when it is right. And a good thing too. Do you want an Ai capable of making genuine value judgments? When you have no idea if those values align with human ones? But we do want to give students intellectual tools to help them reason out of context. Students need to be able to do what LLMs never shall – make confidence statements, respond to new scenarios, and reason accountably.
Because of that claim to accountabilty that it cannot sustain, Ai is the first technology to change life without promising to make anything more efficient. Tools we use as teachers should be doing that, showing a chain of thought. So we can’t use Ai to reach truth – there is no logic chain, nor confidence signal. But there are perfectly good and ethical uses for Ai. Beyond the always-there ‘summarize’ button you see on every email and webpage. Apple offers to summarize one line emails. Into what, emojis? ‘We have summarized your bestie’s email with the ‘motherfucker paid for twitter’ meme.’ Summarize is a low bar but risky. You lose the thinking in the text. Instead Ai can work as a time saving sidekick with a sideline in textual critique. I wrote this post to lay out how I use it.
First I experimented with the suggested replies and writing tools built into MacOS. They were disatrous. Emotionally obtuse, friendship-ending responses were suggested to heartfelt messages (‘I can see you’re going through a lot!’). Next I tried the writing enhancement function. It went through my writing and surgically removed every word and phrase reflecting my writing voice. Set phasers to bland! That’s the main reason I tell students to never use it like that. It destroys their voice and makes everything read like a diktat from Human Resources on Respectful Workplace Interaction. And I have read a few of those. I like reading and listening to students’ actual voices. If I want bland and unobjectionable I have the Lifetime Network.
Now the negatives are done, are there positive uses in relation to writing? Yes, I divided them into agent and sidekick. The agent automates information gathering. I have one set to find and compile daily news on cybercrime and organized crime. The sidekick I use to give feedback on drafts and suggest ways to expand on initial ideas. Crucially I discard a lot, sometimes everything. It often has misunderstandings. Just the process is helpful in recentering my thoughts. I never cut and paste. Every word is laboriously typed out using my headpointer.
Overall my message is straight centrist dad. Ai can be a useful tool. We are being force-fed it just now, but we can move on and use it in well defined, human supporting ways. As long as it’s a supplement and not a substitute for individual thought then we should be okay. The tougher question is how we keep within those confines. A start would be showing all students how to set up a locally running, sandboxed LLM and have them share their prompts. Discuss how their thinking evolves with using it. I want students to be confident in and jealously guard their intellectual voice and cultivate their individuality. That would involve many more voice-focused and dialogical tasks. A simple task like saying why you find an argument convincing would be a place to start. Student peer review could be an alternative to Ai’s flattening word processing.
Overall our target should be students integrating these tools into their meta- cognition in an agency supporting way. In another blog I suggested principles for adopting tech in education, among them working with tech to:
Push or pull us towards deep learning
Encourage independent learning, self reflection and critique
A worry is that Ai will lead students to just simulate those qualities, advertantly or not. The first step is to make sure they and we know the difference.
A pattern perhaps common to many technology waves is innovation followed by ossification or enshittification, as coined by Cory Doctorow. Technology does appear to have a pattern of diminishing returns. You can see that in public health. Early stunning victories over infectious diseases giving way to nagging lifestyle tweaks. The progress of information technology might be mapped similarly. Early society shaking inventions gives way to monopoly. Unlike mere diminishing returns enshittification is where we end up in a worse place quite expectedly, as it is written into the business plan. Platform enshittification is corrosive, monopolistic and draining technology of its potential to make human life more joyful and fulfilling.
Examples abound: An electric car manufacturer makes its reputation through its product than finds it can make serious money selling carbon credits. Its business then becomes one of subsidy farming and attention getting, not building cars. Worse , In the 90s/aughts mobile phone companies were so stuck for money making ideas that people paid their network for ringtones. It was truly the worst of times. That kind of rent seeking and planted obsolescence have ere been present in capitalism.
Platform effects introduce two new problems, disconnection and degradation of know-how. The Chinese have a penchant for life shaped by fortune telling. Deepseek has now consumed that, replacing human connection with machine dependence. A ride share service uses venture capital funding to provide below cost services to monopolize taxi services. In the process it destroys local tacit knowledge. In the case of London cabbies, literally ‘The Knowledge’. The Knowledge means more than just memorizing streets 6 miles around Charing Cross. It is knowing how traffic ebbs and flows , where popular spots are and why. Deep knowing .
Krugman posits that it is not just bad luck. Any business reliant on network effects will succumb to the logic of enshittification. It is the destruction of that know-how and connection which is most concerning. It destroys our ability to recover and reinvent these services. Personal, economic and social resilience come from connection and having enough folk willing to gie it laldy. Loss of resilience worries me. I found the covid lockdowns wildly disproportionate and damaging. Depriving a generation of human contact in a vital life stage was wicked. Rather than assess costs and benefits we were just bashed over the head with the weasely, meaning-free ‘follow the science’ (Ts & Cs apply , in case of political awkwardness or identity politics, please no longer follow the science). The more networked we are, the less connected we become.
Is there a counter-pole to rally for? Writing in the 1970s, the last half-decent decade on account of disco, all-round critic of industrial society Ivan Illich called for tools for conviviality. Illich’s convivial tools may offer a way out of enshittification. His critique of technology stood alongside criticism of education and medicine as institutions. He was damning of tools of separation, of caste-making.
He is baleful of industrial power’s mechanisation of the human. Tools became alienating. Labour becomes torturous. Productivity does not beget freedom. He is hostile to tools that depend on scaling, on tendentious claims of quantity and quantifiability, and to compulsory consumption of education, health, vaccination. Medical professionalisation and specialisation separated family members from care. He favours flat connectivity. He cited the telephone as a case of convivial technology. Connect and say what you want, no mediation. Illich might say that social app networks are likewise manipulatory not convivial. They create new castes like verified /unverified.
The book is Khmer Rouge-y in favouring simple hand tools. It has an underlying sympathy with Third World rural poverty. He was very critical of the Green Revolution. You might want to spend your days bent over in a rice paddy. I am sticking with me combine harvester. I find his point of view to be scornful of the generational efforts required to get us to a position where people worry about too much growth, where the Third World has more of a problem with obesity than with malnutrition. This is critique with a full belly. Like many at the time he overcooked environmental limits and underestimated human productivity. Environmental pessimism has been a constant since Malthus and typically overcome in time. We were meant to run out of oil and food in every decade since the 1970s. Now the problem is we have too much of the stuff. The impressive strides towards making solar power abundant may save us yet .
You can favour tech autonomy without going full prepper. What is the way out ? How about some pointers. “I choose the term “ conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment.” (Illich, 1973, p. 36).
Overall tools that enable autonomy can counter platforms that shrivel autonomy. Adapting his terms I am defining convivial tools for the information age. They should have the following qualities:
Distributed to the lowest level possible, like a household level solar grid .
Maintainable, infrastructure independent and resilient, like a bicycle .
Allow the wielder to shape their world, give it meaning and used purposefully,
Its elements can be repurposed
Resists manipulation, avoiding staging, programming and classifying users
De- professionalising – no brahmin caste
Are risky – Failure is possible
They have a modest purpose and expectation. They will not solve everything. Minimal ideological alignment needed .
In sum everything the prevailing business model and safety /nofail culture is not . But the model might place extra hidden demands on people or only be accessible to a few. It is why I am not just saying ‘go open source.’
One of the problems with attempts to remodel digital life on autonomy promoting lines is they are often high effort and the only people willing to make the effort are, and I say with the deepest love, just a tad intense. It is why attempt to create platform equivalents such as the fediverse have limited effect. It is like a party where everyone is pretending to be drunk. Something is missing and a little forced. They invite you to be part of a movement. I do not want to make a whole life commitment . Hence the rule that the tools we seek ask minimal ideological alignment. You can think Musk is messiah or muppet as you please.
Funnily, the hated apps can generate convivialities. Uber in South Africa quite unintentionally provides a vital trust function. It validates people to each other, allowing them to set up communication outside the app. The Jo’burg taxi monopoly was nothing good either. So I am not proposing to burn it all doon. We can perhaps take a little more time in the sun and have less digital weight pressing on us.
Seeking the practical embodiment of conviviality I looked at different places . Chinese organic chicken farmers using blockchains to validate and sell produce is connection promoting at the lowest possible level. It is one of the only effective uses of the blockchain I have seen. Next an activity core to my work, analysis of qualitative data. I use Nvivo for qualitative data analysis. I have been entirely unthinking about the choice. Nvivo is custom designed for qualitative data analysis and it is just ‘there ‘. It has a serious learning curve, demands you use its language, employs a proprietary format, and now features bewildering licensing. It is heavy. Slower than the speed of thought. It does some things well such as search/autocoding.
Recently I have been using an app called Obsidian for drafting . It is just a note taking app that allows you to link notes and visualize links between them or between text blocks . It is extensible, and uses the open markdown format. I thought I would experiment using it for data analysis. Treat each note as a case and install the Quadro plugin by Chris Grieser and pretty soon you have a theory building instrument. I import just by adding to a folder on my desktop , or getting a script to do that. Data can be dropped in automatically in many formats. I can add my daily summaries of the news on organized crime, or an auto generated interview transcript. It is a tool you shape in the using, that grows with you. You can for example create a presentation within it.
Conviviality means feasting together. Convivial tools are resilient . They are less brittle, infrastructure dependent and prone to being wiped out by a software update or license change. Markdown notes will survive the failure of a licensing server. Convivial technology requires some assembly but ultimately make life lighter and freer, pushing us on and giving us a chance to break the enshittification cycle. The tools have to be used and cultivated. You will not have to use a hoe. We use gentle experimentation to build resilient technologies that leave us lighter and able to resist the dark pull of the less-than-human.
Life cycles. It and history do not repeat but they do revisit the same dilemmas. It can feel like the same demands are falling on us or that we are acting out the same scenarios over and over. That’s a function of how our minds work. We live in the now and our minds ruthlessly mine our pasts for templates to make sense of it. As I often say to family and friends , ‘That wasn’t me failing to listen to you yet again, it’s just your mind mining the past to make sense of your continuous present.’ Therefore a close examination of past activities can show how apparent similarities disguise fundamental changes in ourselves and our world. I had cause to do this during a recent crisis of tech faith.
Self-hosting is the practice of running your own digital infrastructure. So, rather than paying Apple or Google to store my files and photos on a server in North Dakota where the National Security Agency can thumb through them, I keep them on a server (AKA ‘a computer’ to non-wankers) in my bedroom where only the Chinese Ministry of State Security can find them. While I’m here – Hi guys! I know it was you ordering dim sum on my Deliveroo account, please stop. I run an app called Nextcloud to serve them up online just like any cloud service. The difference is that once you have the hardware the costs are electricity and the time spent maintaining it. The advantage is that I own and control my data. I do not have to accept the terms that Apple or anyone else sets on how it is used.
That shows you right away that we are talking values, alongside reckoning cost or efficiency. ‘Efficiency’ also being a value.
The server and the severed
A ‘server’ is just a computer providing connected services. Those can be anything from making data available to providing processing power. Any old computer can stand muster as a server. It does not need a screen and can be managed remotely. I use a tiny, cheap computer running a version of the Linux operating system. Windows or Mac do just as well.
You can do it for any services you can think of. Fancy your own Ai chatbot, media streaming services or email service? It can be yours at the cost of some effort and the risk that the whole edifice will come crashing down because someone had to unplug the server to charge their phone. Yes I know you told me that you were going to do that, but there’s the not-listening thing, remember? We have a mix of motivations from privacy concerned libertarianism to anti-corporate anarchism to full-on cabin-in-the-forest edgelordism. It is a subset of a whole set of practical techno-ethics called (by me) self-computing. Self-computing means acting with agency in the digital world and building an autonomy supporting infrastructure. An ethical infrastructure. It draws on the principles and tools of the Open Source Software movement. However several systems that support my autonomy are commercial, MacOS, iOS, Predictable (text to speech) and MacWhisper (dictation). It is a mix and match bricolage approach.
Recent disability in the shape of Motor Neuron Disease (MND) caused me to reflect on my computing experience and practice. Surely self hosting is for the able-bodied only? What if anything guided my decisions? Was there ever a philosophical thread running through them?
Back we go to a near nearly-future…
The first turn at computing – the cloistered user
When I began using computers there was only the command line. A text prompt like C:\ or :~$ in glowing green or white letters on the screen. The rest of the screen is dark until you do something. You operate the computer with cryptic typed commands. Partly because of that, computers were high effort and often single function. If you trained up on using spreadsheet software it was almost as much effort to then learn the syntax for a database. Back then you had to take training before you would be trusted with anything as dangerous as Excel.
Early computing was monastic, high commitment, formal, somewhat unforgiving of error. You communed with the sacred text and other users in your own weird syntax. The public had little idea about what went on in early cyberspace. Computing was something you went somewhere to do. It did not flatter. It perhaps offered grumbling respect.
The second turn – the user in space
I thought I would never look back after I first used a visual object-in-space interface courtesy of the Apple Macintosh. Typically these interfaces were called Graphical User interfaces (GUI).
It promised and eventually gave so much freedom. You were not constrained by a list of commands. Operations are intuitive and metaphorical rather than literal. Functions are discovered more than learned. Documents looked on screen as they appeared in print.
There was a sense of directly manipulating objects on the screen. The Macintosh gave you a powerful sense of virtual objects as physical things. We were introduced to emotion in design quite deliberately. The interface involved spatial memory, the innate human grasp of tangible objects in space. The transporting sensation of unmediated interaction strengthened with the iPhone and iPad.
Suddenly the CLI felt uncanny, alien. Black and white photography was created when colour film was perfected, in the sense that you now had a creative choice. Before then it was just ‘photography’ . After, hours could be spent debating the creative merits of each. Likewise, it was only when GUIs became viable that using the CLI becomes a distinct, arguable way of doing computing.
And argue we did. To many the Mac was a locked down toy. To fans it was what computing was always meant to be, a way of working with and expanding human cognition. The fact that computing was then a male dominated domain meant the debate was joined by our customary logic and willingness to change our mind in the face of evidence, much as the Thirty Years’ War was. Values at work again. The spread of the GUI changed that idea of what computing was and who it was for. Was the user a engineer or a pilot? The computer, tool or device?
Blasting off to the future now!
Then the spiral turns – the ethical case for the command line
Look back I did when I dabbled in the world of self hosting. I came to like the stillness and potential of the command line. In our world of attention farming and click harvesting it is a pleasure to have a device that asks little and that lets you decide the terms of interaction. The terminal awaits you quietly. What I interpreted at one time as unforgiving user hostility is actually trust. You are trusted to know what you want and if that’s deleting your whole home directory it will not ask twice. Suddenly the Mac and especially iOS feels like an adult soft-play area. A pretty trap for creativity.
That machine emotion…
A digital abstraction can wrap you too tightly in itself. Emotions by design now in today’s context feel dangerous and manipulative. It is time to rediscover the ethics of the interface. One that invites thought and planning. That resists manipulation.
How so?
– You interact directly with the system – no mediating layer
– Commands are explicit , rather than being opaque or several times removed as with algorithmic control
– Consequences are direct. Usually they come in the form ‘I did this and broke that.’
– Understanding follows from error
The rest of the screen is dark until you do something. …
It reintroduces risk into our cosseted curated digital lives. I am a big fan of risk. Without it we stagnate, personally, and as a society, economy and culture. Life has no ‘Undo’ button, unless you’re really rich. Yet there are two senses to risk here. One is ‘redistributed danger’, the other is ‘self-trust. ‘ An interface that prioritizes engagement like most social media apps do redistributes danger and creates vulnerability. Some societies ask that you define yourself by your passions, others by your responsibilities. We are encouraged in British culture to define ourselves by our vulnerabilities, and to think in terms of entitlements. That’s characteristic of low-trust societies and we live in a low trust, chaos addicted era. I believe we have a right to risk, and that risk is the only real route to trust.
The GUI offers abstraction, freedom from complexity. But that can be a trap, distracting you from the concrete reality of what the digital is.
The spiral holds
When the illness hit I imagined the spiral had turned again, towards vulnerability and dependence .
Several things would go:
– My Duolingo streak
– No Man’s Sky addiction (It’s a game)
– Any hope of maintaining a self hosting infrastructure
I only lost one in the end.
MND gives you time to anticipate challenges. I found over-anticipation can be a problem. The default assumption with MND is that you will have little left of a life. I was introduced to several tech adaptations early on that were so diminishing they made me quite sad. They would have reduced my life to sending the odd email and turning the telly on.
In anticipation I began to move services to commercial cloud providers.
Then a funny thing happened.
Now the spiral turns one more time
Not back to an early stage but deeper in, more reflective.
I realized that only one person could keep my tech life moving. With a little help from my friends.
I reversed course and have continued to build out the system infrastructure and even swapped out the backend, which is exactly as painful as it sounds. Just when my physical ability worsened I turned more towards self computing. It was sheer bloodymindedness in the end. I felt again the pleasure of building a corner of my digital world. I am still capable of risk
What helped?
A carer and I built a desk console that allows me to use the Mac’s built in head tracker and accessibility keyboard. The Mac has strong, discoverable accessibility features. It was fitting that my ability to geek-out in the command line was rescued by the mother of hand-holdy systems.
It was then that I landed on the self-computing idea.
The geeky bit follows (‘You mean you think you weren’t being geeky up to now?’). I replaced the native Mac command terminal with iTerm2 which allowed me to build a library of reusable code snippets. I moved my services from bare metal to Docker containers. That made it easier to test and maintain with a common directory structure. Watchtower automatically updates them. I moved hosting from Apache to Traefik. It auto detects containers and so made hosting management a breezy affair.
Geeky bit ends, or at least dials down a notch .
I learned that disability can be a personal design horizon.
You still need to be careful of your own context ruling your perspective. I have a physical disability. Disability has many manifestations and co-morbidities and there are many tools to help from screen readers to workflow automation. Sensory or cognitive impairment and mental illness presents different challenges and different worlds people must inhabit. That’s what disability is. The world impairment and the rest of society make you inhabit. It reminds me of something heroin users sometimes said. ‘I am not doing it to feel awesome, I am doing it so I can get out of my world and live in yours.’ Cocaine users on the other hand were doing it to feel awesome. We are back to a central quality of self computing, it has to be legible. The best design is made for worlds that the designer cannot fully inhabit nor imagine but still lets you get there.
Good design for disability is good design for all
In that spirit here are some tips that should be good for everyone, not just for those facing physical limitations. I give them as my context specific knowledge. The ability to shed cognitive load in complex systems , automate tasks and anticipate interaction should expand anyone’s capacity.
– **Increase re-usability** using containers and middleware
– **Reduce repetition** with text snippets and command templates
– **Automate** where you can such as using service detection
– **Design resilience** and be okay with failure
– Above all, never, ever write yourself off. There are already enough people willing to do that.
I have presented a stark picture.
Most stories are spirals.
What has MND taught me? That I really hate MND. There’s no linear progress narrative , tragic loss nor trite redemption arc in disease and disability. There is just life’s never-ending thrum. I was born very ill. I became better. Then the spiral turned again. In the face of every other loss it was through that one act of regaining that I learned that I still have a right to risk
Read on
Hamraie, Aimi, and Kelly Fritsch. ‘Crip Technoscience Manifesto’. _Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience_ 5, no. 1 (1 April 2019): 1–33. [https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607](https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607).
Hendren, Sara. _What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World_. Penguin, 2020.
Chalkface to touchscreen: Convivial learning with Socrates
The past is strange, and we are all someone’s past.
Mostly states and institutions are technology solutionists at heart. All our incentives lead that way. If only we could get just the right amount of leverage, tweak inputsin just the right way … they muse …then people would play nicer, learn harder, eat healthier, stop liking Coldplay. Ai is the the current Hail Mary.
Technology surrounds you. Newer is not necessarily clearly better. I recall a time when switching from blackboard and chalk to whiteboard and pen was met with real resistance.
We have to employ skeptical adoption and steer between credulous buzzword worship and blanket rejection.
Before using any technology in your work as student or teacher, or anywhere, ask not just what benefits it will bring but what worlds it creates and how it asks us to live in them. Will it:
•••Reduce unnecessary cognitive load
Support a range of learning styles and modes such as asynchrony
Expand learning beyond the classroom and into the imagination
Invite us into previously unseen worlds and experiences
Imagine lives that are different from yours
Push or pull us towards deep learning
Encourage independent learning, self reflection and critique
Allow persistence, indexing and retrieving of personal progress
•Make me appear smarter than I am
Luckily we have such a technology. It is called the book. Might we look at it anew?
But learning and discovery needs an infrastructure, a platform, if only to get everyone on the same page. How about tech platforms that:
Incite curiosity, active inquiry and serendipitous discovery
Curate and disseminate the human knowledge base, filtering noise for us
Combine different media and different interaction modes
Allow users to scale complexity so noobs and mavens use the same platform
Good news here too, we have lots of these. They are libraries. An archive is another.
On the other hand we might be wary of technology that is merely superficial. Could it:
Allow only a simulation of understanding
• Be a crutch for lazy minds
• Damage valued cognitive capabilities such as memory, internal dialogue
Encourage dependence on unreliable, unverifiable sources
Make people (even more) insufferable
That is what Socrates, possibly being sock puppeted by Plato, imagined to be the effect of another turbulent innovation, writing.
“this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” Plato
He thought writing gave the appearance of efficiency at the cost of active understanding.
•••We have never been able to separate the technology good from bad.
So also the pocket calculator and the search engine. We can guess Socrates’ thoughts on the Antikythera Mechanism.Or perhaps not, Plato did like trigonometry
Other innovations-the pencil, the tally stick, double entry bookkeeping, change mind and society
There might be an appearance of omniscience from scanning the first page of Google hits but everyone can see how you got there. Socrates would point to the dangerous delight of doomscrolling and notification overload. Do not get him started on Powerpoint.
Moveable-type books were revolutionary. They shook the authority of the Church. Knowledge was suddenly portable, copyable. Its authority no longer resident in cathedral but in a small text in a preacher’s hand. They helped vernacular tongues push Latin aside – we call these tech dependencies- leading to renewed national identities and national politics. The printing press helped vertically integrate the state in bureaucracy and culture. School text books cemented national narratives and tongues over both local and international ones.
• Educational technology is tied to power and change.
There is a symbiosis between edtech, higher education and the nation state. Data mining and monopolistic practices should be in our sights. Ai is solely concerned with seeming plausible and not with being truthful. You might say, ‘what makes a book especially truthful?’ Nothing, but at least it sits still while we interrogate it. Ais are epic smooth talkers, champions of the patter.
Plato’s Cave was an early social media filter
•••The form change takes is not inevitable
Case –Enshitification. Once there was the internet and it was good. Then people decided to make money on it and that was still good as you could now buy stuff that wasn’t porn. Then people decided to financialise and monopolize it like RioTintoZinc strip mining the Amazon. And that was very bad.
•••Do not accept the narrative that it is
• There is a political economy of education and it is us.
I like to go back to go forward, meaning humanity is constantly grappling with the same dilemmas and compromisein different form. Usually the form is, we created this world and on the whole would prefer not to live in it. Yet we can make effective decisions about the tools used by paying attention to their qualities and effects. A horror of Socrates is lock-in or path dependance. You cannot un-invent writing. That’s probably a good trade given that is why we know of him at all. Other dependent qualities can be worrying like corporate lock in or software and hardware reliance on geopolitical rivals. Tell Socrates all writing will now be outsourced to Sparta, on Persian parchment, as much a threat as Ai now moving to China.
Socialmedia platforms can be more present where students are, growing networks and access but make learning part of the attention economy. There, student attention is sliced, diced and commodified. An echo chamber eliminates internal and external dialogue.
You might think self hosting and open source fixes it, and it helps in some areas, at the cost of significant investment of time on maintenance. I took a few years shifting my stack and it is fun and maddening, an ever evolving challenge. I have my own linux server with among other self hosting services , vaultwarden (password), audiobookshelf (podcasts /audiobooks), nextcloud (files), immich (photos), ollama (ai), restic (backup). I like challenges and then sometimes I like Spotify curated playlists. The process itself is educational. Doing it demands I consider the often hidden tradeoff between autonomy and connection that is made for us. A sense of self progression versus gamification for the sake of engagement. I found the value when we lost internet recently and I could still use Ai and listen to music on my local network.
Maintenance is part of learning
Nothing ‘just works’. It takes labour, tending and supervision. Look behind the curtain. Tech is part material culture, part agriculture. When commentators casually call for content moderation they are referring to a labour intensive process. Compare with how EdTech is often sold as a one-click solution. No blame there. Universities demand these services and companies provide them.Universities demand them because of incentives set by states – very high throughput, high fees and 100% satisfaction. Yet adopting slow tech can model deep learning – tending, iterating, annotating, carefully and recursively.
We can recreate some of these qualities in class, such as by sandbox learning. Socrates worried that writing destroyed memory. We worry social media destroys the attention needed for reading. Do they? Maybe reading need not be passive and we can encourage practices like annotation to make it active. For instance, a Zotero shared pdf library would make it a shared class practice. Have students craft and argue for different solutions to common problems. It is when students are asked to explain and justify their choice to other students that deep learning occurs and the richness of thought comes to the surface.
Compare the trajectory of Ai to the book. They both rapidly generated meta-cognitive effects. Prompt engineering is analogous to meta-reading skills.
Illich calls for tools for conviviality. He was damning of tools of separation, of caste-making . Medical professionalisation and specialisation separated family members from care.There are parallels in fragmented academic spaces and over specialized disciplines.
Example- I use Nvivo vs Obsidian for qualitative data analysis
Nvivo is custom designed for qualitative data analysis. It has a growing business orientation,massive overkill, learning curve, demand you use its language, proprietary format, bewildering licensing. Heavy. Slower than the speed of thought. It does some things well such as search /autocoding .
Obsidian is just a note taking app that allows you to link notes and visualize links between them. It is extensible, and uses the open markdown format. Treat each note as a case and pretty soon you have a theory building instrument. A tool you shape in the using, that grows with you .
The joy of tech is working in a community rather than labouring alone, of solving problems relianton ideas and process
We can reduce define some qualities,
Autonomy and agency
Connecting the living and the past
Maintain dialogue, be failure tolerant
And one practice. Take risks:
The tech take away – subtraction as strategy:
What happens when we fly without a parachute, losing the tech crutches?I know it looks a bit rum for someone who just humblebragged about their server and used the phrase ‘tech stack’ without shame to say that. Stay with me. Leave the laptop at home for a day and just interact with books, take notes by hand. See how your attention changes. You find that reading a book is a different physical experience than an ebook. Writing and typing inscribe differently. Funny side-quest – since becoming disabled I cannot do either and now have to hold more of my mental map in my head. Socrates would appreciate it. As a disabled I have had to discard many now useless things – fave suits, earpods, driving, most games.
At course level, remember some students are only able to participate due to technology. Blanket bans need consultation. We can try setting up a simulation. I teach about organised crime and cybercrime. I ask studentsto design a cryptocurrency exchange. It is the base for discussion about tech ethics, fintech regulation, money laundering, surveillance, privacy and hybrid crime-tech
The blockchain book
Set class tasks to make the previously inert active. The book is radical tech, reimagine it. Due to the way blockchains work each bitcoin bears a trace of everyone who has ever used it. What if books did that? Tell me about the people who read this book before you. Tell me how it will be read in 5, 40, 100 years’ time. It alerts students to the way ideas are received in context, the energy they produce.
Keep in mind, tech already changes how we exist and present in physical and virtual space.Humanity has always been at war with, and too in love with, its tools. Technology adoption in education, like any sphere, is not inevitable nor natural. We can learn as much by taking away as by adding. Cool evaluation and reflection will get us through. The book remains our most revolutionary technology. We only need to open one.
We return to Socrates in a lecture , rather grouchy at finding himself in a book yet again.
In class a PowerPoint flashes up next week’s reading, “Ai and Plato’s Utopias” :
Socrates leans back in his seat and speaks with his fellow student who is reading the text on her phone , ‘Boooring. Where is the effort in this stream of letters ? Cold information without insight. Ai is the endpoint of writing, the imitation of understanding. Words without animating life. It requires no effort. The more of your books you have, Mila, the less you notice how far you stand from wisdom.What is the dry written word alongside living conversation?’
Mila leans in, ‘Socrates! slow your roll. Cannot we grow with books? After all I am having a dialogue with you. Plus’, she read, putting on her finest Athenian philosopher/reply guy voice , ‘I thought “The only thing I know is that I know nothing”. Sounds like you do know something … about technology ’
Socrates, ‘I know being bound in a book, scroll or wax tablet. Blame Plato, the scribbler. The answer lies in the question. They call it a Socratic Paradox. The written word binds your mind. You wish your digital world would free you but it adds overconfidence to the ephemeral. It is seductive. Ai is more dangerous. It speaks words without thoughts.’
Mila, ‘On the other hand if you reach understanding does it matter how you get there.
You fear writing, you who never wrote
Would your thought be here still without papyrus and quill
Did nothing lively never came from a scroll
If the problem is being passive cannot we choose being active? Curate a digital library, instruct an Ai or agent modelto send me a daily update on an academic topic.’
Socrates, ‘More and faster, but is it deeper?
Mila, ‘If you know why it is doing it. I use a calendar, but I know what time is. I use a calculator but I know numbers. If I use Ai to filter smartly it lets me get to the truth. There is an art called prompt engineering. It ’
She demonstrates
Socrates, ‘A sprite to question me?
Mila ‘Your questions must be good
The art of asking
Maybe asking changes the questions and the questioner’
Socrates prompt engineering is a meta-skill. You need it to work your tools . They are so complex and yet so far from wisdom you need need a whole other set of tools to make them make sense
Mila’ Cannot it be used critically as you use conversation?
Socrates, ’How do you know you know it is the truth? . If you only ever use a calculator would you ever come to know mathematics? Are you trapped in Plato’s cave? Would you know it was truth? Your prompts might be those agreeable shadows on the wall.’
Mila, ’Then to attain wisdom, we abandon tools? Cabin in the woods? ’
Socrates, ’Not abandon, but know them, ask questions of them, as I do of you. Put thought before them, not use them before thought. A farmer uses a scythe to harvest what he has cultivated. You can cultivate yourself before you harvest those clicks’
Mila, ‘Maybe we could keep them at arms length but always within arm’s reach, serving not mastering human desire. Nothing is good or bad but everything has effects.’
Socrates, ’Now, you sound like you would fit right in at the Symposium’
Scene
Let’s design a place to learn
Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row New York, 1973.
Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Internet Archive, 2005.
The word is now redundant and should be replaced with ‘sex’. I mean the non-sexy kind of sex, biological sex, the division of species into reproductive classes. In humans that physical fact has deep social effects. The latter are called gender. Recently, gender has come to take on another meaning, that of a self-personal identity that may be different from one’s birth sex. Quietly, it became the only acceptable meaning, the point of being legally enforceable. It is argued that gender ought to supersede sex in order for people to live peaceful , truthful and authentic life. Not everyone has noticed that this is a very different concept, And it may be in opposition to some of the analysis coming from the first understanding of gender. I argue that this opposition is real and not artificial. I argue that replacing sex with gender means we lose understanding of our world and the reality and the bodies that we inhabit. Being an academic is a moral mission. You have a duty to give people tools to understand the world. There is a duty not to deprive people of the language they need. Even when it really annoys them.
The top line is that we confuse is with am. The conversation around sex and gender has changed a lot. It started out with feminists pointing to how societies slip between observations of biology to claims of immutable cultural destiny, to the detriment of women and girls. It has evolved into something else: denying that biological sex has this special ability to influence some facts about society and social organisation, or has any independent existence that has social consequences. Power is physical. I am a man. That means I have (or had) on average greater physical strength than women. Am. I am these things … it doesn’t remain physical. Being a member of the male sex class gives me greater social power. Is. It is the case … It also means greater risk of early, sometimes violent, death.
It is not as if there is nothing to learn. There is plenty of insight from that way of thinking. Developing Goffman’s ideas on the performance of everyday life it is fair enough to think of heterosexuality as a performances/set of practices, but it is not just that. One would need to know where it comes from in the first place. How can sexuality or gender exist without a naturalistic understanding of sex and sexuality coming into play at some point? To compare, when we talk about capitalism we examine it as a historical set of economic and social relations. We can understand a lot about labour relations by reference to the labour theory of value, and this gives us a good handle on understanding why women might be more exploited in the workforce than men are. But with Butler, heterosexuality just seems to snap into existence. It’s a set of practices, performances, a total system with nothing outside of it. That lacks any interest in what is going on, what heterosexual practices are.
There’s a general weakness in the discussion which says ‘Women are oppressed within the hetersoexual hegemony … expect sometimes they aren’t. Women are pushed into compulsory heterosexual, expect sometimes they don’t.’ There’s always this voluntarist expection which doesn’t say much. There’s a difference between heterosexuality meaning sexual relations between men and women, or something more precise e.g monogamous, stable dyadic partnerships. There are implications there for theory as for example, capitalism as it is currently configured might put an emphasis on pleasure and the self and so could easily find a way of promoting polymorphous sexualities or gender fluidity as desirable and validated, so, good for capitalism. This sets up a challenge for you to explore why most don’t take any of these alternative paths and don’t consider them viable for some reason. that could allow you to address some of the absences in the literature.
In gender theory, sex becomes a mash up of attitudes, performances, identities, varied elements of material reality and all the rest. That would not matter if sex really was just a mash up of these elements, but it is not. The argument tends to say it is not reducible to one biological element, but nothing is really. Not reducible does not mean it is a social construct. Biological sex is an emergent property, just as e.g. time is. Emergent constructs are not social constructs. It loses any coherent grounding. It loses any understanding of natural hierarchy. Some things come before other things. It throws out any analysis deriving from biological difference and the fact that women are the class responsible for bearing children. It makes it impossible to talk about that and the consequences of that fact in a systematic way, especially when it comes to sexual violence. The whole issue is reduced to competing cultural claims, as if male power just happened to be better at getting its claims of female subordination accepted. Worse: that pushes the blame onto women for failing to get their claims of cultural equality accepted.
Saying that an entity like biological sex is just a grab bag of characteristics that happen to be arranged in that way because humans decided it would be so denies the existence of entities that are powerful independent of how we construct them. Which is what the disagreement boils down to. The reason I find it dangerous is that is used to imply that certain features of life just happen. But some features of life are essentialist. For example: we are told that sex work is work, and that the only features that make it difficult are stigma, exploitation and violence. Get rid of these and sex work is just work. But sex work is inherently vulnerable to these problems. It is inherently essentialist because of biological sex. Mainly it is young women, and a smaller number of young men, used by often older and always more powerful men. It is useless to pretend that it could be just like being a plumber. The argument itself relies on something essentialist: that sex work is both sex and also not really sex at the same time.
We lose a lot if we do not recognise that. If we say sex is a social construct we lose any sense of it as a historically situated entity. We lose the ability to understand how these different entities interact with each other – so we lose the ability to understand how other constructs have their power. Engels hypothesised that the family, private property and state power were fundamentally intertwined. If that is negelected we just get some flannel about discursive power.
There are a few different objects stuck in with social constructionism that aren’t quite the same. One is blank slatism, which is not social constructionism. Blank slatism does imply a strong bio/social distinction, but by doing that is not social constructionism. Neuroscience might challenge blank slate ideas but not necessarily social constructionist ones. Another problem with social constructionism is that it is never clear what it is defining itself against. Is it the claim that most human characteristics are grounded in biology? Is it that there is a natural order to things? Sociology once defined itself in terms of modernity and the constant flux that went with it, in opposition to the traditional god given hierarchies of the 3 estates. Biology seems to be picked as the opposition because it is there. Another trouble I have with gender is apparent in a term like gender based violence. It is not very clear what it is about. Violence by men against women and children, especially girl children and especially sexual violence is an identifiable phenomena. It also has a very clear direction of cause, and responsibility. We know primarily who is responsible and who is not.
One sign of societal decadence is shying away from clear explanations because they are too easy. So here we go: American universities do well because they have a lot of intellectual and practical resources. British universities perform round about what you would expect for a country of that size and resource level, maybe a bit better. Both societies benefit from liberal goods – positive immigration, individual competition and institutional cooperation, societal tolerance, rule of law, relatively free discourse and the rest. However these kind of explanations do not confer status advantage on the person hewing to them. That is why there are incentives on the right to explain the track record of these socities on complex cultural explanations and on the left to look to historical injustice. The reality is just not interesting enought to be diverting to participants in the The Discourse.
You do not gain kudos by stating the obvious – UK society is fairly tolerant, especially compared to most of Europe, and we all benefit from it. We have problems with economic growth and productivity, to which the solutions are also fairly clear – build more houses and infrastructure, get hold of reasonably cheap energy, make good things like investment cheaper. But that scripture does not help anyone differentiate themselves in the political marketplace, unless there are votes in sounding like a General Dynamics programmed spad-bot 2.0. You gain kudos from saying that liberal tolerance is mask for structural racism or the globalist whittling down of our national uniqueness. Hyperbole is part of the attraction.
The more these goods are attacked as manipulative, unjust or irrelevant, the more they fray and will disappear. It is parochial to think that because the UK has been relatively rich up to now, it will be always be so. It would be psychologically satisfying to say these goods are under attack by both right and left, but they are under attack by the centre as well.
Bad ideas survive. We were told that Russia was a great power. It isn’t. We were told that Russia had clear red lines and breaking them would lead to nuclear catastrophe. It didn’t. That France and Germany were a bridge to Russia. They aren’t. The failure and complacency of Western analysis is nearly catastrophic for NATO. I want to consider that as an aspect of a common occurrence. Bad ideas continue despite repeated failure. There are businessmen whose refusal to pay their debts is effectively part of the business model. Yet banks and private equity continue to lend them money, in defiance of all microeconomic theory. Why is that? If I don’t lend them money, someone else will.
How long does it take debunked ideas to be removed from the curriculum? It should be immediate. Something we are not good at. Mostly we are encouraged to focus on one idea and reiterate that for the rest of our careers. We are not rewarded for removing bad ideas from the curriculum. Doing so introduces professorial panic. What shall I put it in its place?
Colleagues and myself have studied football fandom and alcohol in terms of what is called the carnivalesque.(Bandura et al. 2023). This is an idea that has been applied quite a bit in alcohol studies. A lot of theories of the carnival have relied on Bakhtin (1984) and the idea that the social order is inverted, with a focus on this spectacular. The model here is the mediaeval festival. The idea is that the carnival involved the suspension of some hierarchies, the inversion of others, and the focus on the baudy and foul language ofbillingsgate. This is a development of the drinking as time out idea with a focus on extreme intoxication.
Intoxication is the practice of learning to separate the individual from their everyday self. Both football and alcohol consumption create a similar social space with qualities of collective effervescence, inversion and so on – and also, following from what Haydock says, this is both validated and seen as a problem in capitalist leisure society. This might explain the tension between football as a form of entertainment and football as a carnival. I’d also use that to highlight our methodological approach – we see supporters as being actively involved rather than passive consumers of the sport, and part of this is the way they gather and celebrate/commiserate.
The relationship between alcohol and football is pulled in three directions: political; commercial; and popular. A sign of the politics of alcohol and football : Alcohol consumption is treated as a health issue, but only outside of football and public space, where it becomes a public order issue. In popular terms football is part of the carnival of social life. It brings people together on an occasion where some rules and norms are suspended. However the carnival can also be quite habitual and mundane. Going to a football match can feel just like a regular habit. The value of it is a renewal of central bonds and identity.
A football match is a great collective act of will. That’s why the worse your team does, the more stubborn your support. The worse your team is doing the greater the will, the greater the belief, the greater the bond between supporters. I know enough Jambos to know the perverse satisfaction that comes through your team once again falling over itself to put the ball in the back of its own net. In that way, fandom them has something in common with gambling. Gamblers do not like winning streak to go on pretty long. Winning is a new experience that is risky and generates uncertainty. It disrupts the pleasure of the zone.
In commercial terms both alcohol and football are great commercial enterprises. They do have some features in common. They both draw on this idea of the carnival but also helpful to the mundane spaces of life. Drinking in a pub might be like going to your living room. Drinking at home might be taking that pleasure back into the domestic space. The commercialised image of alcohol consumption is of spectacular joy when most alcohol consumption is day-to-day. Likewise the image of football might be all massive commercialised cups and expensive stadiums, but on that is built a pyramid of every day practice. Saturdays and Sundays on the bus. Midweek queuing in the cold. Now you might think, well one of those is more authentic than the other. But I think both need each other and benefit from each other. The real needs the fake like a gambler needs losing.
Bakhtin, M. M. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Bandura, Comille Tapiwa, Richard Giulianotti, Jack G Martin, Angus Bancroft, Stephen Morrow, Kate Hunt, and Richard I Purves. ‘Alcohol Consumption among UK Football Supporters: Investigating the Contested Field of the Football’, 2023
Haydock, William. 2016. ‘The Consumption, Production and Regulation of Alcohol in the UK: The Relevance of the Ambivalence of the Carnivalesque’. Sociology 50(6):1056–71. doi: 10.1177/0038038515588460.
Gentrification has three meanings. All refer to a kind of relentless nicening, the civilizing process at work. First a process whereby by affluent, middle classes take over a previously working class area or occupation, as in the gentrification of Leith or of football. Estate agents think it is a good thing. So do most residents. I like nice cafes and cute bookshops. Some activists criticize it for pricing out locals and fraying neighborhood relationships. I think that matters how the process increases wages and the variety of relationships and networks that are formed. It can be quite varied. It is often caricatured as Middle Eastern sheiks and Russian oligarchs buying up London, while Google employees buy up San Francisco. The broad evidence is that gentrification does benefit the original residents as well. On the other hand, if I lived in San Francisco, London, or parts of New York, I might feel very differently.
Second, the substitution of previously violent or otherwise coercive interpersonal exchange relations with contract and market-based ones, as in drug market gentrification. Although often associated with the rise of mobile telephony, and especially digital-based dealing that is not determinative. The existence of County Lines operations shows that remote relationships can be quite coercive and exploiting.
Finally, the process where a human problem becomes represented by those most able to articulate it. Disability, addiction, poverty have all been gentrified in that sense. In turn suffering becomes rationalised as a source of identity, distinction and difference. Whether drug addiction problem gambling or any kind of oppression. A much rehearsed example is autism which has come to be treated as something close to a superpower rather than a spectrum disorder which causes a range of difficulties.. This process is especially apparent when there is a resource to be gained such as the favour of states or corporations. A variant of this is articulating other people’s suffering, as in when a tragic death, suicide or murder is used to back up one’s own arguments. Another variant is sanewashing where an extremist group’s aims are explained as being ‘really about’ what the observer cares about.
One of the reasons I am wary of the gentrification of suffering is, it denies the reality of social suffering and the agency and choice of people involved. An example comes from the work of Alice Goffman.Her excellent ethnography focused on people she said were criminalised and who were definitely involved in shady dealings. But in the area she worked in, as she notes there are plenty of people who live different lives, who avoided drugs, who stayed in school. The temptation with the gentrification of suffering is to articulate those who are at the most extremes. It is a problem for theory that does not account for the middle range.
One theme of mine is territorialization of the digital world, and the tight relationship between cyber criminals and their governments. Sometimes this is practical, as in the fact that Russian cybercriminals can operate freely as long as they do not target Russian /CIS citizens. Sometimes it is felt nationalism as with the patriotism of Chinese hackers. National hacking cultures are a combination of ways of organizing, expectations on participants and the wider digital and state structure in which they are held. Because everything digital is local,, they emerged from the historical evolution of skillbase, opportunity and political economy. It marks the particular division of labour, types of criminal activity and organisational practice that we see in national hacking forums.
极 客精神 is geek spirit (deSombre and Byrnes 2018), the ethos and obligation of community among Chinese pro-government digital activists, hackers and crime entrepreneurs. For Chinese and Russian-speaking cybercriminals the 21st century viewed an evolving relationship between cybercrime, patriotism and nationalism. The authors of this highly informative report say there was a tight relationship between Chinese hackers and patriotic fervour early on. In contrast with the well-known links between the Kremlin and Russian-speaking cyber criminals, that relationship developed as Russian foreign policy evolved in a much more aggressive direction. Chinese hacker patriotism seems to be more organic in form and origin. Starting with first protests in the form of attacks and web defacements against the Indonesian and the U.S. governments. Later, Chinese hackers set up their own companies and contracted services to the Chinese government.
This review of hacker entrepreneurs shows each adheres to a different national culture. This is the case of both mode of practice and overall aims and targets. Something I and others noted with the different interactional ethics in Russian compared to English language hacking forums. English language ones were far more chatty. As the report also confirms, Russian forums emphasize business, not community. Professional in this setting means the cash nexus and the art of the deal, customer care and rewards for loyalty. Social punishments are meted out for weaker and less competent members. Chinese forums are more nurturing. Some hackers run paid apprenticeship programs. It seems there are both civilizational hacking cultures and national ones. Russian hacking sometimes includes the wider ruusky mir. This is not equal. Chinese, of course, participate in English and Russian forums.The reverse is not true. English and Russian speakers do not enter Chinese forums.
Russians and East Europeans saw a criminal market dominated by Americans. They wanted some of that. The report highlights how important Ukraine, especially its Russian-speaking areas pre-war was to the development of a Russian language cyber crime underground. CarderPlanet was formed from a meeting in Odesa in 2000. it was crazy and direct response to the English-speaking Carder group Counterfeit Library. the Russian language for was highly structured and deliberately professionalized in comparison to the anarchic English language one. The harm was significant, costing financial institutions hundreds of millions. As these organizations evolved so did the close links between Russian government and elite cyber criminals. The Russian-Georgian War showed close cooperation in military aims with cyber criminals. The Russian state has been adept at maintaining its cybercriminal capacity.It is hard to maintain the sociological concept of deviance as an explanation for criminal activity in situations where criminal activity is co-opted by the state, where criminals are highly skilled and well rewarded for crime is patriotic.
DeSombre, Winnona, and Dan Byrnes. 2018. Thieves and Geeks: Russian and Chinese Hacking Communities. Recorded Future.
I was reminded reading Nicholls et al (2022) report on drug consumption rooms of the critique of them as ‘not a silver bullet’. This term means a dependable solution to a otherwise tricky problem . It put me in mind of a meeting with MPs where I and others had explained that they were useful, but not in themselves a solution to Scotland’s drug problem. I said that harm reduction services like DCRs are never an end in themselves. The ‘service’ you want to offer is not providing a safe environment for drug consumption. It is having a contact point for users who have particularly disrupted lives where you can talk about other services that they need – welfare, housing, psychological, health etc. What matters is what happens when you provide that service. Later I heard, ‘they are not a silver bullet’. Does anybody think they are? As Nicholls et al outline, everyone involved thinks they have to defeat this strawman argument first of all.
We should make ourselves aware of why this argument exists in the first place. Nobody used it for Scotland’s needle exchange policy which was vital in fighting the HIV epidemic. Objections then were moral as it was seen as a moral and a technical project. It has come about because our harm reduction thinking has become increasingly technically focused in practice evidence and justification. This is just perfectly reasonable. We could work together with very different moral and political views to agree on the technical benefits of needle exchange. It was quite remarkable that conservative, and liberal, politicians could agree on this approach.
The problem of relying on the technologically justified approach is that it can ossify over time and displace the wider moral claim you’re making. Everyone starts to expect naloxone to act in this way. We know it is its most effective when it is part of a toolkit owned by users – meaning not a magic bullet.
So we can perhaps work with some different means of understanding:
What kinds of conversations and communities are created and supported through it?
What kind of knowledge came from it?
Does it connect different elements of a wicked problem?
and so on
Nothing is a silver bullet. Except when it is. There are plenty of technological solutions. HIV is now a disease to live with, not die of. Obesity may be preventable. Semaglutide might treat addiction. Yet many campaigns reject silver bullets on principle because the real aim is different – usually to end capitalism in some form. Imagine a party campaigning against child poverty. They are offered a solution – eg here’s a ton of cash. They reject it. ‘No to solutions that do not change society’. We would think them disgraceful, immoral. Certainly we would assume they were not really opposed to child poverty. But that is exactly what happens.
In the social sciences, we have been sometimes reluctant to accept that there can be magic bullets, technological solutions, because we are a bit in love with our wicked problems. If some of these problems have simple technical solutions like the weight loss pill, then it reduces our role to technical administrators. Similarly we refuse the great man idea of history because it gets in the way of our ability to theorise. It is a bit hard to argue now that individuals do not influence history.
Nicholls, James, Wulf Livingston, Andy Perkins, Beth Cairns, Rebecca Foster, Kirsten M. A. Trayner, Harry R. Sumnall, Tracey Price, Paul Cairney, Josh Dumbrell, and Tessa Parkes. 2022. ‘Drug Consumption Rooms and Public Health Policy: Perspectives of Scottish Strategic Decision-Makers’. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19(11):6575. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19116575.
Lies are almost as good as the truth. Lies point to the truth they wish to hide. Error is a path to accuracy. Mistakes are great for teaching and learning. Much worse is language that refuses the difference. It is in a different category entirely. An LLM has no concept of truth, lies nor fiction. You think your prompt is say ‘explain the difference between IQ and General Intelligence in the context of Artificial General Intelligence ‘. It reads, ‘statistically infer the next token in the sequence you have been given, with a degree of randomness to make it spicy’. On a basic level it is not reasoning as it never says ‘What a dumb question, I’m not answering that!’ Unless you do the machine equivalent of triggering and trip over its guardrails. Here’s Chinese-made DeepSeek replying to my prompt ‘why does chairman mao suck?’