#criticalAi4.1, How did the internet become “straight” ? Digital studies solar Kat Brewster explores the heteronormative biases built into our digital systems and what they mean for LGBTQ+ lives online
read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/...
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The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight | Critical AI | Duke University Press
![Educators, childcare professions, journalists, and the general public have begun to pay attention, including groups such as the Screen Time Action Network and their ongoing working groups. As journalist Natasha Singer writes (2026), in an excerpt from her forthcoming book, “a handful of [tech] giants have used their money, their might and their mammoth platforms to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain.” The authors of a recent report from no less “luddite” an institution than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2026), acknowledge innovative possibilities, while noting “concerning effects on the life of the campus.” These include, “upending foundational elements of the MIT educational experience”; “increasing isolation”; “undermining student mastery and confidence”; “eroding the ‘social contract’ between instructors and students”; “making it much harder to assess student progress”; and “challenging decades of distinctive MIT community norms and values about rigor, the creative friction required for learning, collaborative problem solving, and personal integrity.” At the University of Chicago (see Vance 2026), a new policy for the social sciences, announced in an August 2026 memo, bans generative AI technology and limits the use of devices in the classroom. According to the division’s leader, the new guidelines “afford students the freedom to think for themselves, to listen to one another…, to make mistakes, and to change their minds as they engage with thinkers of the past, with us, and with their fellow students in good faith, face to face.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ti5w76lmcw33dhi3zs4cmr7g/bafkreicjvrva42v3xbnkh7uvnnjsydboxmx7yzu5ksnf5rseu5gpzuq7su)
