I build physical things. My workshop is well stocked. Name a tool, I have one. Lathe, check. Router, check. Wire brushes, palette knives, rasps, sanders. I know the difference between hammers and I just counted seven of them that are actually put away. Who knows how many more are around here? I know how to build… Read More »[FBT] on Saws and Stupid

_This blogpost is adapted from a transcript of my talk given atBreakwater Festival in Gdańsk. You can find the slides here._ I am an Internet plumber. I’ve been an Internet plumber in many organizations, including journalistic ones. I’ve also done information security work for media organizations, for example in the run up to and during the Panama Papers. What I am not is a journalist. I have not studied journalism in any formal way. I’ve been writing for OKO.press and other outlets for several years now, but I don’t feel that alone makes me a member of that club. I still see myself mainly as a techie. So I beg your forgiveness, for I – a person with arguably no real journalistic credentials – will now have opinions on journalism, with you, actual journalists, present in the room. This might end up being a phenomenal demonstration of the Dunning–Kruger effect. I do hope you’ll at least enjoy the ride. My one saving grace here is that I will focus on the interplay between journalism and technology. I will be making some generalizations; please bear with me. If your organization is one of the few that are the exceptions, thank you for that, and I’m sorry. ## Media ecosystem is in crisis¶ I think it’s fair to say the whole media sector is in crisis. Media organizations and journalists are hurting, and have been hurting for a very long time. There are obviously many, many reasons for that, most of them outside of media organizations’ control. But not all. There are three aspects of this hurt that I want to focus on: money, eyeballs, and trust. I don’t think it’s controversial to say journalism cannot thrive without these three. The point I want to make to you today is this: **Media organizations have materially helped create the crisis they currently find themselves in, by being uncritical and naïve about the tech sector and power dynamics of its products and services.** ## Unchecked power¶ I don’t think I need to convince anyone in this room that tech sector’s power is currently not checked in any meaningful way. Heads of state wait hat in hand on its leaders, legislation is being shaped by its interests to the detriment of everything else, regulatory action takes years if not decades, and usually ends up with a slap on the wrist. President of the European Parliament meets with Zuck on his own terms, takes a publicity photo with the creepiest Meta product so far prominently displayed – and proudly posts that on Zuck’s social media platform. Complete and utter capture. Tech companies release and operate services that cause real, measurable harm to living, breathing people. Executives of these companies are aware of this, often having been warned early about these effects, and yet nothing changes in any meaningful way. Political parties push for privacy-hostile legislation under the guise of fighting child sexual abuse materials online, and post about this on Twitter, a social network where generating child sexual abuse materials – from real photos of real children – was not a bug, but a paid feature. And one that doesn’t even apply the most basic filters to remove well known child sexual abuse materials. The lowest of bars to clear. This is a good moment to pause and ask: are you on X/Twitter? Are you paying for it? We’ll get back to this. A decade ago a person torrenting a few movies could end up in jail. Kids got sued for millions of dollars for downloading a couple dozen songs. Today tech leaders complain that if they were to pay the licensing fees for having downloaded literally every piece of digital content out there, that would kill their business model. A business model which is so successful, by the way, that my tiny one-man company made infinitely more profit last month than OpenAI ever has. If you’re confused by that look up division by zero. Information is power, and both journalism and the tech sector deal in information. They directly compete in the attention economy. But only the tech companies seem to be aware of this. For the technology sector to have gained the effectively unchecked power it now wields, for it to have become the antidemocratic behemoth that it is today, for Zuckerbergs and Musks and Thiels and Bezoses of this world to become the all-powerful global tech broligarchy, the tech sector had to subdue, suppress, and subvert journalism. And so it did. But not without help from the media itself. ## Money¶ Funding journalism has always been difficult, but at least for a while advertising was a relatively effective way to do so, even once the Internet became a thing. Until, that is, ad networks consolidated into what is effectively a duopoly of Google and Meta, controlling their respective surveilance ad marketplaces end-to-end. This allows them to extract as much rent as they feel like: > The Google/Meta duopoly sucks up 51% of display advertising revenue – more than triple the historic take for advertising intermediaries (buyers, brokers, agencies, etc).” Media organizations didn’t have a lot of power over that process of consolidation. But they did have –- and continue to have -– a choice in whose ads they carry. They did have and continue to have a choice of whether they expose their readership to creepy targeted advertising – sending data wholesale to surveillance capitalists – or choose a membership and subscription model, or maybe go with contextual ads instead. Like New York Times has done soon after the GDPR went into force: > The publisher blocked all open-exchange ad buying on its European pages, followed swiftly by behavioral targeting. Instead, NYT International focused on contextual and geographical targeting for programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals and has not seen ad revenues drop as a result, according to Jean-Christophe Demarta, svp for global advertising at New York Times International. Media organizations did have, and continue to have, a choice whether they continue to feed and nurture these behemoths with valuable data, by using tools like Google Analytics on their websites, or integrating Meta’s intrusive personal information harvesting libraries into their mobile apps, thus having to force obtrusive and manipulative consent screens upon their readers. They also often dive head-on into every shady hype-driven get-rich-quick scheme out there. That’s also a choice. Remeber Civil, the cryptocurrency that was supposed to “save journalism” through, among others, micropayments? Here’s Wall Street Journal had some nice words about them in 2018: > Civil applies the tenets of cryptoeconomics – the practice of powering online marketplaces with digital currency logged on encrypted ledgers – to the financial challenges facing the news industry. It did not save journalism. It went defunct somewhere in 2020. That was not a surprise to anyone critically scrutinizing the cryptocurrency space. “Why can’t journalists join the NFT party, too?” asks the New York Times in 2021. “Because it is a scam,” I’d have responded. NFT bubble popped about a year later. Loads of money was lost, with a few people getting obnoxiously rich off of the bubble. It was not a surprise either. Many media organizations have tied themselves to surveillance capitalists so tightly, that they push for measures that give them even more power. Like “link tax”. What are the power dynamics of link tax? Who ends up controlling the money faucet? What happens if a media organization funded largely through link tax starts writing critically about the very companies that are paying it directly? Will the money well conspicuously dry out? The incentives are perverse. By all means, tax these companies to the ground, and give the money to journalists! But do so in any of the myriad ways that does not end up giving them even more power over the information ecosystem. Because they will wield it to your detriment. Besides, link tax or no link tax, Big Tech can just stop linking to media organizations. Or, meddle with where media links end up in the user interface. Or can start limiting reach and charging for restoring it – or for the ability to post links at all. In fact, they did all of these things already. Click-throughs from Google are drying out. So are click-throughs from Facebook, and from X/Twitter. These companies do not care about you and your content anymore, because they don’t have to – Google said it outright. They even did a little experiment to prove their point. Meta is actively pushing for auto-generated slop and polarizing disinformation instead of promoting actual journalistic content the same way TV stations have been pushing reality shows when they figured out they don’t have to pay scriptwriters. How did they become such powerful gatekeepers? ## Eyeball silos¶ Facebook can shut down your account. Your hosting provider can shut down your website. These are not the same. If a hosting provider shuts you down, you find another hosting provider, and everyone can reach you again. It’s a few hours, maybe a day of disruption and you’re back up and running; your previous provider has no say over this. All your readers need in order to continue to read you is a web browser. When Facebook shuts you down, that’s that. Nobody can reach your Facebook page. Moving to another social network does not solve the problem, because your Facebook followers are on Facebook – they would have to set up an account on a new service, learn a new app, accept new Terms of Service. Which they won’t. Big Tech services are designed to be like that on purpose. To be centralized, to be vertically integrated, and through that to be de facto monopolies. Centralized, vertically integrated services are silos. Monopoly is the business model. Gatekeeping is how value is extracted. “Competition is for losers”, as Peter Thiel said in 2014; he is one of the first investors in Facebook… and a recipient of 2026 Axel Springer award. Hosting providers compete with one another because their services are standardized. This makes switching relatively easy. Same with e-mail providers. Or Fediverse instances. I am not saying “market will solve it”; it won’t. But I am saying: ability to easily switch providers is a crucial safeguard in the context of any service. Instagram is not competing with TikTok in the same sense as one hosting provider competes with another, because these are both vertically integrated, centralized platforms, even if the functionality is somewhat similar. To follow your Instagram account your readers must necessarily have an Instagram account and submit to Instagram’s Terms of Service, and to follow your TikTok account they necessarily need to have a TikTok account and submit to TikTok’s ToS. ## Core issue behind the crisis¶ And I get it. This is boring. Nobody wants to constantly think about protocols and silos and centralization and vertical integration. But nobody wants to think about ownership structures and shell companies and money laundering schemes. And yet we do, because we recognize that is important. This is just as important. This is the core reason why these platforms can be the gatekeepers they are today. This is one of the core reasons behind the spread of disinformation, the dwindling click-throughs and ad revenues, and ultimately behind tech companies explicitly, insolently telling news organizations they don’t matter. Journalists and media organizations by and large refused to acknowledge and understand and act upon for two decades. And continue to. ## Eyeballs in the silo¶ An eyeball silo is no good without filling it with eyeballs. That’s not trivial… unless you get a bit help. Media organizations have been promoting Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter for years, relentlessly. Not so long ago, every article on every media site out there had to have “Like us on Facebook”, “Share on Twitter”, Facebook-powered comment sections, and other similar UI elements. Many still do. Most news sites still cannot imagine publishing an article that does not embed content from X/Twitter or Instagram. Most still have little icons promoting these platforms on their websites. How much would any other company have to pay for placing a small logo on a large news site? How much more for the logo to appear under every piece published on that site? X/Twitter gets it all for free. Just consider what this means. A reader is on your website, engaging with your content on your terms, via infrastructure you actually control, hosted on a service you can switch providers of at will – and what you do is send them over to some locked-down third party silo instead. Not only that, but at some point media sites started removing RSS/Atom feeds and shutting down their newsletters. Two phenomenal channels of direct communication with your readers, both relying on services that do not lend themselves to becoming gatekeepers, gone. Is it any wonder that Google killed Google Reader? Standards-based services that do not lend themselves to siloification are not in Google’s best interest. But they are in yours. Through media’s own choices relationship with their audience suddenly had to be mediated by social networks, and generally the only social networks journalism treats seriously are only those controlled by the tech giants openly hostile to it. Consider these two pieces from the same seasoned tech reporter, Lance Ulanoff, former Editor in Chief at PCMag-dot-com: 1. **Can Google+ Survive the Hype?** > Google+, the presumptive Facebook killer, shows tremendous potential. As someone who warms up to any social network with the alacrity of a Galápagos tortoise, this, for me, is saying something. 2. **Six reasons Mastodon won’t survive** > William Shatner couldn’t find me on Mastodon. > This was a problem. > (…) > And, no, Mastodon cannot live on hype alone. There are a few important differences between the two social networks, and between how each is covered. Google+ was an eyeball silo, Mastodon is standards based, with thousands of providers. Google+ got plenty of positive press, Mastodon (and more broadly, the Fediverse) is still today being treated as a butt of a joke. Google+ had corporate backing and infinte money, Mastodon is a tiny project run by an NGO. Google+ got killed years ago. Mastodon stubbornly survives, already years longer than Google+ had existed. Media had the power to tell people where to look for information, and exercised that power. Is it at all surprising that eyeballs went where it pointed them to? ## Trust¶ The reason why click-throughs from Google Search are drying out is because Google largely replaced search with a slop generator. I don’t think that’s news to anyone at this stage. It is no longer a tool to find reliable sources of information on a topic, it is a tool to get some extruded text that sounds human-like and authoritative even though it might be complete, sometimes outright life-threatening, bullshit. It is mathmatically impossible for language models not to hallucinate. Text they generate cannot be trustworthy in any meaningful sense, full stop. This is a huge advantage media organizations have over Big Tech’s slop generators, which are being weaponized against them. Where chatbots extrude untrustworthy slop, journalists meticulously investigate and fact check. This is something to build on. A foundation for a strategy to push back and reclaim some eyeballs, and thus power, from Big Tech. Instead, media organizations keep promoting Google – the company that so eloquently explained how news sites are irrelevant – while helping train the very slop generators that are eating their cake, through Google Preferred Sources. The _“Add as preferred source on Google”_ buttons are showing up on plenty of media sites. Yet again media is pointing eyeballs towards a tech silo. But it gets worse. A lot of media sites directly provide slop summaries! For example Yahoo! News, with this added warning: > **✨ Key takeaways** > > Powered by Yahoo Scout. Yahoo is using AI to generate key points from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. (…) Consider what this signals to the reader: instead of differentiating trustworthy media from untrustworthy Big Tech chatbots, it does the exact opposite. It puts the untrustworthy slop right there in front of the reader on the very news website the reader is already on, and even calls that slop out for being untrustworthy! A reader might ask: are chatbots as trustworthy as the media organizations, then? If they are, why wouldn’t the reader limit themself to whatever chatbot they are already most used to? No need to visit your site anymore! And no need for Google to even link to it. Media thus dilute their own trustworthiness, while at the same time improving the perceived trustworthiness of slop generators. Another type of silo emerges, one that even more completely locks the reader in. And finally, between SEO-optimized clickbait headlines and distracting auto-play videos that are unrelated to the article content, many media websites signal outright hostility – if not contempt – towards the reader and their preferences. The relatively recent (and likely illegal) forced-consent banners only strengthen that feeling. And again, these consent banners are a _choice_ , stemming from other choices – using Google Analytics, showing creepy tracking ads, and so on. In fact, trust itself has been outsourced to the gatekeepers. X/Twitter’s checkmarks, formerly highly-coveted by journalists and a point of pride as a sign of clout, turned into a meaningless rent extraction scheme. Journalists gave a corporate platform the power to decide who’s trustworthy and who is not, and now they literally and figuratively pay the price. And yet you persist there. After Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency killed your funding, after the hand gesture, after Grok-generated child sexual abuse materials scandal, after Musk called an interviewer “a traitor to the west” for pointed questions, and fantasized about killing other journalists. Can it be any more clear that Musk and his platfom sees you, the media, as his enemy? How can people trust you if you stay there? What would it take for you to leave? Is there anything at all? ## ✨ Key Takeaways¶ I know you’re still there because “everyone else is”. But this works both ways: for how many of your readers you being there is the reason _they_ stay? For how many fellow journalists? For how many politicians? Your very existence on these toxic platforms lends them credibility and builds their importance. You bear responsibility for where you point the eyeballs. Here’s the good news: you helped push people into these toxic places, so you can lead them out of there. You can close your accounts, or at least you can limit your posting there. You can point the eyeballs elsewhere. Even if you stay in some of the silos, the way you use them matters. Are you pulling more people into them? Or are you crafting your use such that it pulls people out of them? But remember there are no silver bullets. Interrogate the power dynamics of new tools you use and promote. Do they lend themselves to gatekeeping? Are the companies or organizations behind them trustworthy? Is switching a provider easy in case your current one becomes problematic? Newsletters are making a comeback. That’s great, as long as we’re not talking about wannabe silos like Substack. You wouldn’t publish an article without thoroughly investigating and fact-checking it. Why not apply the same standard to tech companies and services you use and promote? The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative outlet I had worked at during Panama Papers, recently announced a “strategic partnership” with W Social. If they did apply the same standard of investigation and fact-checking as I know they do to their stories, they would perhaps learn that W Social is basically a fork of Bluesky, a US-based social media platform. I don’t want to bore you with technicalities but this basically means W Social is dependent on some of Bluesky’s infrastructure. While branding themselves as a “European” social network. They also use misleading messaging to pretend Eurosky – another Bluesky fork – does not exist. Not to mention the Fediverse. OCCRP would also learn that the company artificially manipulates comment counts to make it look more active – which does not exactly sit well with W Social’s tagline, “trust your feed”. We know this, again, because W Social is a fork of Bluesky and so you can get access to the same data via Bluesky. Finally, speaking of Bluesky… if one were to in turn do some due diligence on them, one would learn it’s another VC-funded company, whose main investor is Blockchain Capital. Technologically, Bluesky is really trying to create a silo that doesn’t immediately look like a silo, but will inevitably end up being one. After all, venture capital expects massive return on investment. And competition is for losers. So, silos are the name of the game. Thirteen years ago I was warning against silos, specifically calling out Facebook and Twitter. And Google+, which is pretty quaint today. Today I am warning you about Bluesky and its forks, like W Social. I am warning you about Substack. I am warning you about LLMs. I am begging you to pay attention to the red flags, critically scrutinize tech companies and services they offer, and make the difficult decisions that might be required to not fall into the same traps again. You are spending your time, energy, money and trust capital to get people from one silo to another. You are promoting the very systems whose purpose is to make journalism irrelevant. The way this ends is very predictable. As it was with everything else I talked today about. How do you know if a tech service is a potential silo? If the question of “I need to be there because others are there” makes any sense in the context of a single provider, it is one. What are the power dynamics? Are there other providers? What happens if the owner pulls a Musk? Can it be owned at all? Who is the owner? What is their track record? Follow the money! Also, can we have RSS/Atom feeds, please? There is no reason why feed readers can’t make a comeback and become first-class citizens on our devices. You can help make that world happen, and you will regain another direct channel without a gatekeeper, and without having to roll (and then maintain) your own mobile app. Incidentally, podcasts are based around RSS/Atom feeds. “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a revolutionary statement. Talk about protocols, not platforms. Public debate needs public spaces, not private shopping malls. Regain trust, reclaim eyeballs, and hopefully money will follow. We need strong, independent, resilient journalism. That is not going to happen as long as techbros are in the driver’s seat. The sooner media organizations understand that and start acting on that, the better. We can’t afford another decade of this.

The Assignment Legitimacy Manifesto — Write a manifesto stating why my art is legitimate. How to Write a Manifesto Step 1: Roll your eyes Another manifesto? Really? Don’t we have more than enough “manifestos” on the Internet? Can we call it something else, would that help? Or does procrastinating the assignment by scrolling through a… Read More »A6: Validity Notice

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* What am I doing? Not a Masters (NaM) * Unit 1: The Stories I Tell Myself ## The Assignment > _Legitimacy Manifesto — Write a manifesto stating why my art is legitimate._ ## How to Write a Manifesto ### Step 1: Roll your eyes Another manifesto? Really? Don’t we have more than enough “manifestos” on the Internet? Can we call it something else, would that help? Or does procrastinating the assignment by scrolling through a thesaurus mean the professor was right about making us write these legitimacy manifestos? God, I hate this kind of shit. Do you have any idea how many actual guides to writing manifestos exist? So, so many. This is not a real guide to writing a manifesto, it’s going to be an actual manifesto just as soon as I’m done complaining about it. ### Step 2: Reflect on historical events Every manifesto ever came as the result of what exactly? Usually some group of people getting together and deciding that the world didn’t understand them and they needed to write in clear language who they are and what they believe. A lot of times those people writing manifestos are racist, murdering psychopaths. Pol Pot, Mussolini, and Osama Bin Laden all wrote manifestos. So did the Unabomber, remember? How about I call this a notice? ### Step 3: Rename the assignment Legitimacy Notice. While we’re swapping out words, do you think we should change the word “legitimacy”? Throughout this unit, I’ve been reflecting on a sort of in the marrow-of-my-bones-knowing that has nothing to do with social legitimacy. > “Artists live in two worlds – a practical place where economic viability and social acceptance push their decisions and perspectives and a different more mythical place, where a deeper instinct and calling dismiss practicalities and lead to the creation of real art.” Stories we tell ourselves My mythical instinct, as it were, is probably more important to call upon than some sort of…legitimacy? What if we use the word “validity” instead? detail from a book I made a long, long time ago ### Step 4: Rename the assignment Validity Notice That feels better. No more weird connotations with mass murdering despots and white supremacists. Thesauruses are pretty great. ### Step 5: Congratulate yourself We’re getting started, so congratulations to us. Or to me, I guess. ## Validity Notice ### My art is valid. I always wanted to be an artist. One of my mom’s favourite childhood stories about me is about how at three years old, I was splayed out on the kitchen floor, as three year olds tend to do, drawing. She asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up Laura?” I replied with an indignant look, “I AM an artist.” Extracurricular activities were predominantly art focused. Calligraphy class, painting classes, craft activities, theatre. Arty. As I got older, in middle school and high school, I kept taking art classes. Every free slot in the schedule. But I also wanted socio-economic status. I decided when I was still in my teens that I would study art but not pursue it. I, despite feeling that fine art – painting, sculpture, installation – was a calling, told myself that it was too hard to excel at, I’d struggle to pay rent, I didn’t have natural talent and would therefore have to work harder to be successful. Writing was the same, but different. From a young age, I was told that I had a natural talent for writing. It was not encouraged as a career path. Being creative is not economically viable. So I went another way. I made the decision and went another way. Have I arrived yet? My history, though, my education in art, digital design, media, culture and education, the creativity I’ve displayed in both personal and professional projects and endeavours – all of these things prove that my art is valid. ### Implications that my art is not valid will not be tolerated. Art is a subjective reality. We do not all appreciate or understand art in the same way. Sometimes, we do not like someone’s art and that is ok. Destructive criticism is an implication that a piece of art, or indeed the artist themselves, is not valid. Such criticism is intolerable and will be responded to in the harshest possible terms. ### My brain monsters are misinformed about the validity of my art. from my Maybe Zombies storyboard, I’ve written two books. My brain monsters can STFU To be honest, I am as surprised as you are at how deeply we have all been wounded in the pursuit of creative endeavours. While I very much wish it all came naturally, I struggle with public acts of creation. This first unit of my not a Masters was intended to get me unpicking the stories my brain monsters tell me about art, writing and my own legitimacy. Sadly, we are our own worst critics. We need reminding that what we do and make and show matters. This is why angels, fairies and goldfish congregate around people who give constructive criticism, positive feedback and simple encouragement. I will continue to struggle, but I will return to this manife…ahem, notice… and remind myself that my brain monsters are little fuckers. I will work to remember that they are just high on sugar and telling me gibberish. They have nothing better to do than pick at our old wounds. The little, misunderstood monsters in our brains are trying to protect us. By picking at old wounds, they are reminding us that we were wounded. We should not wish to get rid of the monsters, but we can remind ourselves that old stories might never have been true in the first place. * * * _Header image is Jackson Pollock’s 1947 painting Lucifer,photographed by Rob Corder_

## The Importance of Art Education with or without AI Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that modernity is characterized by fluidity and that “the job of critical thought is to bring into the light the many obstacles piled on the road to emancipation.” (Bauman, 2000, p. 51). The social and political discourse around AI in art and AI in education is nothing new. For centuries humans have been blindsided by technologies that caused structural rupture and shifted entire societies. Often associated with late capitalism specifically (Mandel, 1975), structural crisis broadly defined occurs when predominant social norms and customs are forced into widespread change. Anthropologically, when humans settled into agricultural communities or when the steam engine spurred the Industrial Revolution, ways of life, cultures and traditions shifted alongside the developments in production. Mass media has a long and varied history, and there are touch points that illustrate the structural shifts that have led to the world we live in today. The release of AI tools for mass consumption may be one of these touch points, but it is not a force that is changing what education is nor what an education should entail. AI is created and bankrolled by billionaires and fund managers who explicitly threaten our emancipation – these are the forces working to change what education means and who has access to it. We face multiple, interconnected crises – climate change, economic inequality, social fragmentation – and these crises are shaping the conditions for education. AI may be _one_ technological response, but it is not a panacea. AI’s predominant data collection model reflects an extractive system that prioritizes efficiency and production over social justice and equity – a trend that deepens existing inequalities. The issue of power plays heavily into the development, deployment and use of AI tools and systems. # AI in Art Education Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, El Lissitzky 19191 Educators and artists have historically been people who help us to break outside of the hype of technological advancement, helping us to understand its implications, showing us what challenges to power can look like and encouraging us to return our focus to human development and connection. They are the people who work to ensure inclusivity and extend the fundamental belief in education as a basic human right. While AI may be a worthwhile tool for creative expression, art education continues to be a human rights issue as “Culture and the arts are essential components of a comprehensive education leading to the full development of the individual.” (UNESCO, 2006). AI can allow an artist to reimagine their expression, but the initial neurological relationships and concepts are what make art, art. This was always an underlying lesson in Art Education, an endeavour which includes an attempt to understand the unique neurological connections that help a person explain complex feelings and connections. > “[the] emphasis on the development of cognitive skills, to the detriment of the emotional sphere, is a factor in the decline in moral behaviour in modern society…Without an emotional involvement, any action, idea or decision would be based purely on rational terms…Arts Education, by encouraging emotional development, can bring about a better balance between cognitive and emotional development and thereby contribute to supporting a culture of peace.” (UNESCO, 2006). Artists have long employed themselves or been employed to process social emotional positions and to imagine futures. Russian artists Kasimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky were artists who believed that art was a spiritual venture, while they had contemporaries, like Alexander Rodchenko, who rejected “art for art’s sake” and insisted that art was political. (Meggs, 2006). Russian Suprematism and Constructivism explored the relationships between art and power early in the twentieth century. Indeed a related art movement directly after the Russian Revolution in 1917, Productivism, sought to image a utopian future. The Russian avant-garde artists embedded themselves firmly in society designing festivals and concerts, and participating in civic society to imagine the future. (Gardner, 2005). De Stijl, an artistic movement around the same time in Holland, had members who also explored utopian ideals, writing and making art that sought to transition from individual “consciousness” to a collective one. Bauhaus taught artists, architects and designers how to build for society and anticipate the needs of the 20th century.(Gardner, 2005). During the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, black artists like Nina Simone and Jean-Michel Basquiat used art as a tool for cultural affirmation and resistance against systemic oppression. Indigenous artists use traditional crafts, performance art, and digital media to assert their cultural identity, document their struggles, and advocate for environmental protection. Punk Rock artists used lyrics and aesthetics to challenge social norms, criticize political corruption, and promote DIY culture. Indeed, it is recognising, processing and articulating _feelings_ that likely leads to behavioural change (Burtynsky, 2022), and it is the purpose of _art_ to interweave this lesson as a tactic in progressive change. # AI and the Sustainable Development Goals Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, Piet Mondriaan, 19302 The United Nations’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) “provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.” Big Tech, multi-billion dollar companies insist that it is AI that will put us on a path to progress on global problems (Hilliger & Belshaw, 2025), yet they are actively working against each and every one of the SDGs. The pursuit of individualised data and learning through AI risks further deterioration of social bonds and emotional development, and can reinforce existing inequalities. This undermines the SDG goal of “equitable access to quality education for all”. We must look at the issue of AI in education from the perspective of the socio-political and economic systems within which we live. A proactive educational position on any form of AI uses critical analysis to understand the context within which a particular AI tool has been developed and trained. Such a position will also take into account the associations between the SDGs and the AI tools we use. In the call for think pieces on AI and the Future of Education, UNESCO’s IdeasLAB wrote that AI “technology is forcing educational institutions across the world to reconsider what knowledge, skills, values, and behaviours are most important for life and work.” This piece argues that they shouldn’t be, rather it is the technology, if anything, that should be reconsidered. The history of the SDGs details the values with which we, as a global community, agree upon. The knowledge, skills and behaviours important for displaying and working on those values remain abstracted from the “technical skills” associated with technology in general. Education is a process that comes from ambiguity and uncertainty. Art-making is a process much the same, filled with ambiguities and uncertainties. Wolfgang Klafki, a German educational theorist, wrote that there are three central tenets to being educated (Klafki, 1993): 1. **Self-determination** : the ability to decide one’s own relationships and meanings in the interpersonal, professional, ethical, and religious spheres. 2. **Participation** : the ability to participate in societal-political relations and take responsibility for that participation. 3. **Solidarity** : the understanding that the claim to self-determination and participation is only justifiable if efforts are made to represent the rights of those who lack these rights. There has always been nuance about the purpose of education. While Klafki believed in the tenets above, Martin Luther King, Junior thought that “the function of education…is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.” (King, 1947). Educated use of AI therefore requires a “human in the loop” because Large Language Models (LLMs) are unable to self-determine, participate without human intervention, or show solidarity to others. AI may be gifted with reason, but it has no morals as moral philosophy and thought requires the ability to think. AI may infer, or be programmed to, establish positions from other thoughts, but the ability to string together into new and interesting ideas and information remains uniquely human. As we have not solved our global problems and doing so requires new and interesting innovations and approaches towards the SDGs, we cannot rely on AI, now or in the future, to find the solutions for us. # AI as a Fascist Aesthetic Untitled, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982.3 Art has often been a visceral rejection of mainstream values and a call for radical change. Artists recognised that art exists within a contextual and cultural space, as does technology. Walter Benjamin wrote that “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual…the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.” (Benjamin, 1936). AI has given us the ability to regurgitate and visualise techno-solutionist values without acknowledging the lack of consensus on those values. We live in a world of algorithmic radicalisation where a tiny minority insist that their ideas, values, skills and knowledge are authoritative. In short, a fascist, technologically deterministic moral philosophy. AI is a reflection of a “fascist aesthetic” – a system of imposed values. Walter Benjamin also wrote that “[our own] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.” Indeed, we know what many of the solutions to global problems are, but our social and political landscapes make it improbable to enact these solutions. It is the ethical responsibility of educators, policymakers, and technologists to ensure that AI is used in ways that promote social justice and sustainability, or, given the current societal context, not used at all. As the conversation around AI becomes a steady drumbeat of insistence that it will, whether we want it to or not, change our entire social and cultural landscapes, educators and artists must remain firm on the true value of education and of art. In harmony with our collective goals for sustainable development, we must resist the temptation to completely redefine critical literacies through the lens of AI and remember that our human neurological connections and social contexts help us create equity, inclusion and justice. # Acknowledgements This article was written and submitted as a response to a UNESCO call for think pieces. Thank you to Bryan Alexander, Helen Beetham, Doug Belshaw, Ian O’Byrne, and Karen Louise Smith for conversations that helped with the development of this article. Check out their responses to UNESCO’s call on AI and the Future of Education: * Several Futures for AI and Education by Bryan Alexander * How the right to education is undermined by AI by Helen Beetham * Marching Backwards into the Future: AI’s Role in the Future of Education by Doug Belshaw * Reimagining AI in Education: From Threat to Cognitive Amplifier by Ian O’Byrne * Building warm expert expertise to mitigate against data harms in AI powered edtech by Karen Louise Smith # Footnotes 1. El Lissitzky 1919 _Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge_ The political piece shows the red wedge (a symbol of the Bolshevik Army) slashing through the “white” forces that were in power. The text dynamically floats around the image, reinforcing movement of the cause. A student of Malevich, Lissitsky was perhaps the most prolific Constructivist. His work transformed Supremacism into the political statements Constructivism became known for. He believed that the Russian Revolution would create a new world order in which technology, art, social engineering and communism would provide for society and its needs. ↩︎ 2. Piet Mondrian, 1930 _Composition (Blue, Red, Yellow)_ The right angel in this work takes on great importance because the Mondrian’s philosophy is based on two ideas the platonic forms and yin-yang; underlined order, pure forms, this idea led to the development of “neoplasticism“, “pure plastic art”. Movement is observed because the lines don’t go all the way to the edges. He wanted to create dynamic equilibrium and dynamic harmony. He felt yin-yang was too soft. Pure geometry/ platonic clarity, colors have certain weight. It uses very simple means but there are variations to a particular idea such as reductive extraction, primary colors, squares, and lines. Mondrian lived his life how he painted, his apartment and belongings were completely geometric and he was obsessive compulsive. Mondrian believed nature is a fake copy of the true idea. ↩︎ 3. Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982 _Untitled_ This 16 foot wide painting features reference to Basquiat’s cultural and social heritage. As a painter, Basquiat often used symbols and textual elements to pay homage to various subcultures and social activities. This particular painting was created along with seven others when Basquiat was invited to do a show in Modena, Italy. The show was ultimately canceled, and the 8 paintings where separated until a gallery show at the Fondation Beyeler in 2023. Photo cc-by-sa Laura Hilliger ↩︎ # References * Benjamin, W. (1936) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Schocken/Random House, ed. by Hannah Arendt. * CBC. (2022, June 10). Edward Burtynsky on the power artists have to inspire climate action. _CBC Radio_.https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whatonearth/edward-burtynsky-on-the-power-artists-have-to-inspire-climate-action-1.6484615 * Gardner, H., Kleiner, F. S., & Mamiya, C. J. (2005). Gardner’s art through the ages (12th ed). Thomson/Wadsworth. * Hilliger, L., Belshaw, D. (2025). _Harnessing AI for environmental justice_ Friends of the Earth. Retrieved April 23, 2025, from https://policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/reports/harnessing-ai-environmental-justice * Klafki, W. (1993). Neue Studien zur Bildungstheorie und Didaktik : zeitgemäße Allgemeinbildung und kritisch-konstruktive Didaktik. Weinheim [u.a.]: Beltz. * “The purpose of education” | the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Retrieved April 10, 2025, from https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/purpose-education * Ernest Mandel, _Late Capitalism_ (London: New Left Books, 1975). * Meggs, P. B., & Purvis, A. W. (2006). Meggs’ history of graphic design (4. ed). Wiley. * UNESCO. Road Map for Arts Education, 2006. Retrieved April 10, 2025, from https://www.unesco.org/sites/default/files/medias/fichiers/2022/12/Lisbon_Roadmap.pdf

"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions."

You know what? Writing curriculum is freaking BORING. You know why? Because educators are taught that learning requires specific activations in the brain. Long-term memory encoding happens through meta-cognitve processes. For information to be truly learned, various centers in the brain need to be activated. Educators are aware of the psychological strides needed for a learner to _really_ learn something (ie learn it and know it for the rest of their lives). Thus, educators create curriculum with the actual psychological learning process in mind. Snore. Boring. **_Necessary_.** It’s important to know WTF you’re trying the learner to have in the long run, and the pieces and parts to get there. It’s important to know what individual skills are that make up the bigger picture. It’s important to present this information in a way that actually activates working memory processes. Yep, it’s boring, but it’s also necessary if you want anyone to learn anything. **My theory is that the reason traditional curriculum is stiff is because whomever was writing it stopped at the halfway point.** They said “Oh, here, someone can learn this now. Done.” But there’s more to do!**Inject the fun, making, and play into the boring** , and not only is the curriculum not boring anymore, the learner will have better retention rates (it’s been proven, fun, hands-on, making, playing, discovering – these thing matter). **Compare and contrast:** 1. I want Tristan to learn robotics. I give Tristan a refrigerator box full of random pieces and parts, everything he would need to build a robot. I say “Here, start making a robot.” 2. I want Tristan to learn robotics. I prepare a guide on building robots. It’s very basic, but enough to make a differential drive robot. I give him a refrigerator box full of random pieces and parts, everything he would need to build a robot. I give him the pointers I wrote. I say “Here, start making a robot.” **Here’s the likely results:** 1. Tristan might make a cool sculpture, but without any other input, it’s about 99.9% that Tristan will not learn anything about robotics. It’s fun, he’s tinkering and making, but the competency I’m _trying_ to teach him is lost. 2. Tristan can begin exploring that box of pieces and parts and putting things together. When he gets stuck, he references the guide. He begins to understands the basics and builds on that knowledge all by himself. Tristan will make a robot and in the process, he’ll learn varying aspects of robotics. (And, in the end, his robot is so rad, he’ll be interested in taking his knowledge further.) I’ve written the boring for the Web Literacy skill “**Designing for web** ”. And now I get to get creative with the learner. All I have to do is think up the refrigerator box. What’s in there for the learner to play with and how will the learner build on the basic knowledge contained in the boring and get creative constructing her own knowledge? How will we inspire play when so much theoretical knowledge is contained within the skill? I think the Hack Book is a really good start to this “refrigerator box”. I’m looking forward to building this out with fun learning experiences, and when a learner needs it, the reference pieces. I’m thinking up ways to present the theoretical without the learner _realizing_ they’re learning best practices or design theory. And, as always, I’d love to hear your feedback on my process :)

_What am I doing? Not a Masters (NaM)._ Falling into what might be called female intuition, the legitimacy of art, and archetypes of the modern world, I am starting with a scan of lessons I’ve absorbed over the years about art and writing. ## Unit Readings: 1. Old in Art School — Nell Painter 2. Women Who Run With the Wolves — Clarissa Pinkola Estés ### Why these two together Nell Painter wrote a memoir of her experience in studying art later in life. She was in her sixties when she decided to go to art school, and in the book she is told both implicitly and explicitly that she doesn’t belong. Women Who Run with Wolves is a collection of stories and texts that Clarissa Pinkola Estés pulls together to examine archetypes and associations with feminine perspectives. With these archetypes and the myths surrounding them, Estés starts to make an argument for the reconnection of creative instincts to ancient intuitions. Reading these together started as accidental, but within the one I see institutional and instigated stories of illegitimacy and in the other mythical stories that seek to repair disconnections. Artists live in two worlds – a practical place where economic viability and social acceptance push their decisions and perspectives and a different more mythical place, where a deeper instinct and calling dismiss practicalities and lead to the creation of real art. ## Reflections: ### Legitimacy: Institutional & Personal * ✅ _The Gatekeeper Story_ — Find a way to write about the moments when people discouraged my creative work. Think about times parents, teachers, authorities told me my work doesn’t count or were dismissive of it. What did I do in the moment? What is still left over from that? * ✅ _Credentials vs. Instincts_ — Nell Painter enters art school with a PhD in history and is still treated as a beginner. Why does non-fiction and internet expertise fail to transfer legitimacy to my own creative writing? What does “validation” look like? ### Archetype & Intuition * ✅ _Overriding intuition_ — Write a story about ignoring a creative or life instinct because it seemed illegitimate, irrational, or inconvenient. * ✅ _Choosing Your Own Archetype_ — In her introduction and first chapter, Estés describes the wolf-woman/wild-woman archetype and introduces other common archetypes (e.g. the Old Woman/Crone/Sage, Great Mother &Father, the Divine Child, the Trickster, the Sorceress, the Maiden and the Youth, the Heroine Warrior and the Fool). Nell Painter uses the archetype of The Artist as she reflects on her own legitimacy. Translate and describe these, thinking of other commons stories that implement them. What archetype might describe our own internal drive? ### Archetypes in the Modern * _Technology & Pop Culture vs. the Ancient Archetype_ — Where has tech and pop culture reshaped or commodified or flattened an ancient archetype? Think about the algorithm, influencer culture, AI, our current branding of “authenticity,” etc. Is anything gained in all this reshaping? * _Legitimacy Manifesto_ — Write a manifesto stating why my art is legitimate.

Sunday’s election could bring in Germany’s first far-right state government since the Nazi era

The Assignment Overriding Intuition – Write a story about ignoring a creative or life instinct because it seemed illegitimate, irrational, or inconvenient. The Inconvenience of Friendship Midori was sweet. Too sweet. Everyone loved her. She was talented too. Too talented. Everyone thought she would go far in life. Midori was the type of girl Kimiko… Read More »A3: Overriding Intuition: The Inconvenience of Friendship

The H-Index by Martin Weller

A register of publications on the textures of attention, the architecture of thought, and the patterns we mistake for productivity. Issue 001 exhausted. Later entries withheld.

* What am I doing? Not a Masters (NaM) * Unit 1: The Stories I Tell Myself ## The Assignment > Overriding Intuition – Write a story about ignoring a creative or life instinct because it seemed illegitimate, irrational, or inconvenient. ## The Inconvenience of Friendship Midori was sweet. Too sweet. Everyone loved her. She was talented too. Too talented. Everyone thought she would go far in life. Midori was the type of girl Kimiko had no business living with. Kimiko was shy. Too shy. No one ever talked to her. Kimiko was plain. Too plain. No one even remembered meeting her. Midori and Kimiko were paired together in the freshman dorms. Midori, sweet as she was, took Kimiko under her wing. Kimiko went to parties with Midori. They walked to classes together. Kimiko kept mostly quiet, concerned that Midori would realise that she wasn’t nice enough, wasn’t actually cool, wasn’t actually meant to be in that dorm. When Midori decided to move to Queens, Kimiko figured it was the end of their friendship. She didn’t ask to go with her. She kept mostly quiet. It was a miracle when Midori asked her if she wanted to move in. Kimiko knew that Midori had problems finding an affordable flat and that was the only reason she was asking. Still, it was a miracle and though Kimiko didn’t feel like she belonged, she said yes. Paiheme Studio Traveling back and forth to the Brooklyn campus was going to be tough on Kimiko. While Midori had a lightweight, afternoon based schedule that would lead one to believe she had a decade to finish her degree, Kimiko needed to finish her studies within four years. She couldn’t afford otherwise, so she loaded her schedule. She needed to be in Brooklyn at 8am three days a week and 9am the other two. The move to Queens would be inconvenient to say the least, but Kimiko figured that true friendships aren’t always convenient. The first time Midori didn’t have the rent money, Kimiko didn’t think anything of it. She happily paid their rent and told Midori not to worry. Midori came from a wealthy family, the check was surely in the mail. The second time was months and months later, and again, Kimiko didn’t think anything of it. She didn’t see it as a pattern. Her things started to disappear. First she couldn’t find her grandmother’s necklace and then she seemed to have misplaced her two hundred dollar history textbook. Kimiko was sure she’d left it on the coffee table, but Midori hadn’t seen it. Then utensils, a bowl and a vase went missing. Kimiko kept mostly quiet. She didn’t believe that Midori had anything to do with her misplacing her things. It barely registered in her mind as a possibility. Two months later, Midori once again said that she needed Kimiko to lend her some money. Once again, Kimiko told Midori not to worry. As her things continued to disappear, Kimiko found ways to keep dismissing the thoughts that Midori was anything less than too sweet. She was her best friend. Her only friend. Kimiko took over the rent payments, and Midori wired her money. Sometimes. She transferred the lease into Kimiko’s name, which helped Kimiko feel as if she were in control. Midori sent her money. Sometimes. The commute to and from, to and from Brooklyn took up a lot of Kimiko’s energy. Every morning she had to deal with people invading her space on the trains, every evening she returned home exhausted. She and Midori, though, often had a pleasant meal or a few minutes to chat on the couch. The day Midori disappeared, Kimiko had a full day of classes. When she returned to their flat, it was empty. Everything that had been inside was gone. The furniture, the books, the jewellery, her clothes. Nothing was left. She logged into her bank account. That too was empty. Ten years later, Kimiko saw Midori at a conference in Anaheim. Kimiko was elated and walked up to Midori and gave her a large hug. Midori smiled warmly and asked her how she was. Kimiko asked if she wanted to have dinner. Midori said yes. At dinner, they rehashed the old days and gossiped about their lives. Neither of them said a word about Midori’s disappearance. They spoke as if the immediate fall out hadn’t nearly destroyed Kimiko all those years ago. Kimiko didn’t say a word about the intrusive investigation or the fact that she had needed to take on a full time job and significant debt to make it through school. She didn’t mention that the missing thirty thousand dollars had caused her father to have a heart attack or that her mother had taken a third job to make sure Kimiko could finish. Kimiko kept entirely quiet about all of that. Instead, they drank and laughed and talked about failed dates and shopping excursions. They talked about TV shows they’d seen and business trips they’d been on. They talked about everything else but betrayal. Midori asked Kimiko where she was staying, and Kimiko said she had been planning on taking a red eye. She told Midori that if she left right that second she might even make it. “Nah, you can just stay with me tonight! I’ve got a suite!” Kimiko smiled and agreed. She could take a flight in the morning. After dinner, they went to the suite. They drank and talked and drank into the early hours of the morning. Kimiko knew she’d would be taking a later flight still and she didn’t mind. Sometimes friendship is a little inconvenient, but it is worth it to have such a good friend. Futakuchi-onna (unknown artist) When Kimiko woke up in the bathtub, she didn’t immediately register that it was full of ice. Her head was pounding. She could feel her entire body. As she sat up, she felt the cold and a pull on her back. Something wasn’t right. She took a deep breath. Her left fingertips felt the stitches, they were as rough as fishing line. It felt like there were a lot of them, too many. One was too many. The ice behind her to the left was pink. Next to her was a little stool with a bottle of pills and a note. The note said “Take one a day for ten days, they’re antibiotics,” and nothing else. Kimiko struggled to stand and climb out of the tub. She wrapped herself in a towel. She looked in the mirror. Kimiko began to cry. There was a knock on the door. “Yes?” Kimiko said. “Housekeeping!” “Please come in,” and then Kimiko sat down and waited to ask the housekeeper to call an ambulance. * * * __Exquisite header_ image is by Paiheme Studio in a project for Wolfgang Violet. _

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