Summary:
The backlash against technology in education focuses on concerns about how screens affect neurological development of children and adolescents.
But schools have another problem: after years of inexpensive devices, free platforms and massive investments in digitization, technology has become embedded into every aspect of teaching. Schools now face the recurring costs of maintaining systems that have become extraordinarily difficult to leave.
Cory Doctorow's concept of enshittification provides a useful framework for understanding how we got here.
I am a middle aged man. I have mostly embraced my evolution into a curmudgeon. I don't sit around all day yelling at the news but I totally get why this is such a popular pastime.
The idea that "everything is going to hell in a hand basket" is something that every generation feels.
We have lots of potential culprits to blame;
- Lots of people stick with blaming the political team they oppose.
- Some people blame the cultural war.
- Many people have come around to the idea that technology plays a very large part in the problem.
Authors like Jonathan Haidt have, correctly in my opinion, highlighted how social media in particular has had a pernicious effect on child and adolescent development. But Cory Doctorow has a slightly different take on the issue - one that I didn't think of but once he highlighted it I can't help see it everywhere now.
Doctorow calls the problem "Enshittification."
Enshittification refers to the process by which technology is deliberately made worse in an effort to improve the marginal profit for the company that makes the product. The word is beautiful because it is catchy and it clearly summarizes its premise.
Doctorow brings up multiple examples but the clearest example is the evolution, or devolution, of search engines. Googles early motto "don't be evil" was quietly removed from its opening page in 2018.
Google's original algorithm, that ranked pages by back links, giving it a fairly objective way of measuring the value of a particular web page to its audience, has changed over time. Over time, page ranks have changed and adjusted in ways that optimized Google's profit at the expense of both the customer and the businesses that pay for advertising.
Throughout the book Doctorow finds patterns across businesses that manage to create monopolies.
- Start with a valuable product
- Lock customers in so they can't easily leave
- Extract more value and offer a worse and worse product.
If Doctorow is correct then it explains a big part of why we collectively feel like so much of society is getting worse as over the past two decades more of our commercial life is dependent upon digital monopolies.
Whether it's Google's search engine, Meta's social network monopolies, Amazon's product purchasing and Uber's ride sharing... so many of the commercial organizations we deal with started by offering great products, artificially supported by a large amount of investment funding, only to offer a worse user experience when we all locked in.
This idea was tremendously insightful. Once I understood the insight it is impossible to not see it everywhere. Doctorow focused on our commercial enterprises but I see how this has had an equally pernicious effect on education.
In 2021, the federal government gave over 190 billion to schools. Approximately 40% of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) money money went to Ed Tech.
School districts are now on the hook to maintain the millions of Chromebooks, iPads and other tech. They have poured millions into training teachers to use these products and encouraged teachers to use these to get their money's worth. These digital products continue to cost more but districts were essentially locked in to these products because starting over would cost more. The end results is that schools spend more of their money on digital monopolies they can't extract themselves from.
It seems inevitable that the quality of teaching will decrease as more more and more time and energy is spent on maximizing the digital aspect of education.
This follows the enshittification pattern described by Doctorow:
- Create a monopoly
- Lock customers in so that the pain of quitting is too high
- Increase profit margins
Doctorow explained something that I have intuited but didn't have the language to express. Unfortunately, Doctorow offers little in terms of solutions. He talks a lot about how monopolies need to be legally dismantled but that doesn't help me on an individual level.
How do I break my Google addiction? I've stopped using Google Chrome and carry a USB drive to save materials instead of relying completely upon the cloud, but changing my email and actually dealing with my limited data storage feels nearly impossible.
Is there a better alternative to Apple and their predatory practices? I have no idea and I don't have the mental bandwidth to do the kind of research necessary to figure out a decent workaround.
If the problem is overwhelming for me, how do we address it at the school or district level? I don't want to be the principal that tells teachers they need to upend their teaching to break their dependence on the Google suite.
Does this mean that we just have to accept continuing enshittification?! I hope not!
One of the most important articles in ed tech I ever read discussed how silicon valley executives send their kids to deliberately low tech schools like the local Waldorf school. Low tech schools use their limited budgets to focus on the schools and the faculty and it seems to be working. I don't know if going back to a lower tech baseline is even possible. Some schools are experimenting with it and I hope they succeed. Ultimately I think the best option for individuals and for schools is to recognize that we have been hooked on a subpar product that is not furthering our needs as we slowly wean ourselves from making technology the highlight of education.
This is going to be difficult. We have a whole generation of students who have grown up equating a screen with engagement and learning. My students fight me for the first three weeks of the school year as they beg me to make a Kahoot quiz or do some other kind of screen based educational activity.
We also have a whole generation of teachers that haven't had much experience without technology as the center of education. Our dependence on Learning Management Systems is a topic for another day though...
Long story short - I generally prefer it when the author offer some kind of realistic solution to whatever problem they are highlighting. Doctorow has not done that in this book as far as I can tell. Despite that I think Doctorow has done his audience a tremendous service by helping us see the problem. And as they say...
If this discussion made you interested in reading the book, here's where to find it.
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