At the northeastern edge of La Línea de la Concepción, on a scrubby Mediterranean beach called El Burgo–Torrenueva, there is an old battlement-tower, La Torre Nueva, and not much else. It was part of the system of coastal watchtowers during the 16th century that would defend the area against the incursion of the Barbary corsairs. The coordinates are 36°12′36″N, 5°19′27″W. Walk the tideline and you would never know that buried two metres beneath the sand, a fibre-optic cable comes out of the sea here and turns into the internet. It’s the start of a line that runs across the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta, on the African coast, and on toward two continents. Nearly everything you do online that crosses an ocean passes through a cable like this, ending, in most cases, underneath a similarly unremarkable patch of coast.

When we talk about the internet we do so as if it were air. Ambient, ownerless, and everywhere. In reality, however, it is the exact opposite, because international data doesn’t (normally) travel by, let’s say, satellite, despite what most people might assume. It travels through roughly 1.5 million kilometres of very real (and very owned) fibre-optic cable lying on the seabed, surfacing at a small number of carefully chosen landing points.

For these landing points you normally need a gently sloping seabed, mild currents, and little marine traffic, so that anchors and trawlers don’t sever the line. Suitable spots are scarce enough that the same beach usually becomes the shared landfall for several cable systems at once.

Cables? What cables?

Unlike what you might be thinking of at first, submarine cables aren’t your run-of-the-mill Ethernet or fibre cable. The hardware that does the heavy lifting out in the deep ocean is about as thick as a garden hose with roughly 25mm across and weighing in at around 1.4 tonnes for every kilometre. The part that carries your data is a small bundle of glass fibres, each one around the same thickness as human hair, sitting in the very middle.

Everything else wrapped around those fibres is there to keep them alive in a deeply hostile environment. Working outward from the core, the fibres sit in a water-blocking gel inside a thin copper or aluminium tube, which is sheathed in polycarbonate, then an aluminium water barrier, then a layer of stranded steel wires that give the cable its tensile strength, then a wrap of mylar tape, and finally an outer skin of polyethylene. The copper is for power, because the cable doubles as a very long extension lead, which we will get to in a moment. Closer to shore, where trawlers and anchors roam, the whole thing gets one or two further jackets of galvanised steel armour wire, swelling it to 50mm or more in diameter and several times the weight. Hence, the cable that surfaces on our Spanish beach is buried a couple of metres down and not simply left lying on the sand.

The reason a copper conductor runs the entire length is that light, no matter how pure the glass, slowly fades as it travels, and so every 50 to 80 kilometres the cable is interrupted by a repeater, which is an optical amplifier that boosts the signal back up before passing it along. Each repeater needs electricity, and because the fish sadly still didn’t manage to install power sockets on the ocean floor, the shore stations at either end have to feed a direct current of anywhere between 3,000 and 15,000 volts down that copper core, to literally power the cable from both ends at once.

On top of the amplification, modern systems lean on a stack of clever tricks to keep the signal intelligible across thousands of kilometres of glass, including wavelength-division multiplexing to cram many separate colours of light down a single fibre, coherent detection to read them back out, and forward error correction to repair whatever gets garbled along the way.

Length, then, is mostly a question of power and amplification rather than of the glass itself. Shorter hops can dispense with repeaters entirely, hence an unrepeatered span will happily run to around 250 kilometres on amplifiers at each end alone, which is roughly the length of the line we started this post with. At the other extreme, a single system can stretch across an ocean, and the longest of them, like the 2Africa cable encircling the continent it is named after, run to tens of thousands of kilometres.

Who is laying cables?

The actual manufacturing and laying of these cables is, perhaps a little surprising for something the entire global economy rests on, the business of only a small handful of companies. The bulk of the world’s submarine cable is built and installed by just four suppliers, namely the American SubCom, the French Alcatel Submarine Networks, the Japanese NEC, and the Chinese HMN Technologies. They own and operate the specialised fleet of cable-laying ships, which aren’t exactly the kind of boat you would recognise from a harbour, but more like a purpose-built vessel carrying thousands of kilometres of cable coiled in enormous tanks below deck, rolling it out over the stern at a steady walking pace as they crawl across the ocean.

Deploying a new system is a multi-year effort that begins long before any ship leaves port. First somebody, these days increasingly a content giant rather than a phone company, decides a route is worth having and assembles the money for it, either alone or as a consortium of several owners sharing the bill. Then comes a marine survey, in which a ship maps the intended path along the seabed to find the gentlest, safest route around wrecks, trenches, and other people’s cables, followed by the permitting, which is the paperwork of securing landing rights and concessions from every jurisdiction the cable so much as touches. As we are about to see on the Spanish beach, this can generate a remarkable quantity of bureaucracy.

Only once all that is settled does the cable get manufactured to length, loaded onto the ship, and laid, with the vessel simply lowering it onto the seabed in deep water and a sea plough burying it a metre or two beneath the sediment closer to shore, where the danger from fishing and anchors is greatest. A working ship covers somewhere in the region of 100 to 200 kilometres a day, so an ocean crossing takes several weeks at sea.

A transatlantic system running some 7,000 kilometres typically costs in the order of 250 million USD, while a longer trans-Pacific route can easily climb towards 400 million, and the cable itself runs anywhere from roughly 6,000 to 20,000 dollars per kilometre, depending on how many fibre pairs it carries and how heavily it is armoured. Keep in mind that the spending does not stop once the cable is lit, because a submarine cable has a design life of only around 20 to 25 years and on top of that there are somewhere between 150 and 200 faults occurring across the world’s cables in a typical year. The overwhelming majority of them are not caused by sabotage or sharks, but by the combination of fishing gear and dragged ship anchors. Each break has to be mended by sending out one of a small number of dedicated repair ships, that are on permanent standby under regional maintenance agreements, to grapple the cable up off the seabed, haul both severed ends to the surface, splice them back together, and lower the repaired thing back down. This is slow and weather-dependent work that is quite expensive.

Who owns the cables?

With the data provided by TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map I have put together a list of the (co-)owners of undersea cables and sorted it by the number of cables each individual company has a stake in. The full dataset runs to some 473 distinct owners, the overwhelming majority of which are obscure national and regional carriers you will never have heard of, so rather than just dumping the entire list here, I limited it to the hundred most prolific (co-)owners:

(Co-)Owner	# of Cables
Google	34
Orange	29
BT	22
Sparkle	22
Vodafone	20
Meta	19
Telekom Malaysia	19
Liberty Networks	18
Singtel	18
Tata Communications	18
Telkom Indonesia	18
AT&T	17
Telefonica	17
China Telecom	16
Chunghwa Telecom	16
NTT	15
Telstra	15
Telecom Egypt	14
XLSmart	14
China Mobile	13
China Unicom	13
GlobalConnect	13
Arelion	12
EXA Infrastructure	12
Verizon	12
e&	11
KT	10
Moratelindo	10
Softbank	10
Telxius	10
Altice Portugal	9
center3	9
KDDI	9
National Telecom	9
PCCW	9
Bharti Airtel	8
Globe Telecom	8
PLDT	8
Telin	8
Zain Omantel International	8
Djibouti Telecom	7
GCI Communication Corp	7
Indosat Ooredoo	7
Mauritius Telecom	7
Microsoft	7
Rostelecom	7
Colt	6
Entidade Administradora da Faixa (EAF)	6
Hawaiian Telcom	6
Setar	6
TDC Group	6
TIME dotCom	6
Triasmitra	6
Viettel Corporation	6
Zayo	6
Amazon Web Services	5
Bayobab	5
Camtel	5
Cyta	5
Dhiraagu	5
euNetworks	5
FLAG	5
Grid Telecom	5
Liquid Intelligent Technologies	5
Maroc Telecom	5
Ooredoo	5
OPT	5
OPT French Polynesia	5
Sri Lanka Telecom	5
Telkom South Africa	5
América Móvil (Claro)	4
Antel Uruguay	4
Bell Canada	4
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL)	4
Bulk Infrastructure	4
Lebanese Ministry of Telecommunications	4
Libya International Telecommunications Company	4
Mobily	4
Okinawa Prefecture	4
Ooredoo Maldives	4
Pakistan Telecommunications Company Ltd.	4
Reliance Jio Infocomm	4
Starhub	4
SUBCO	4
Syrian Telecommunications Establishment	4
Tampnet	4
TeleYemen	4
Unified National Networks (UNN)	4
VNPT International	4
Vocus Communications	4
Whidbey Telecom	4
Algerie Telecom	3
Angola Cables	3
Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNET)	3
Bahamas Telecommunications Company	3
Bandwidth and Cloud Services (BCS)	3
Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited (BSCCL)	3
BW Digital	3
Cabo Verde Telecom (CVT)	3
CANTV	3

What jumps out, at least to me, is the name sitting right at the top. For most of the history of this infrastructure the owners were telephone companies, the _BT_s and _AT&T_s and _NTT_s of the world, laying cables to carry one another’s calls and, later, traffic. Google now has a stake in more submarine cables than any traditional carrier on the planet, with Meta not far behind, and Microsoft and Amazon both slowly accumulating their own share. The companies that fill those cables with traffic have, over the past decade or so, decided that they would rather own the pipes than rent them.

The other thing the numbers tell you is just how long the tail is. Of those 473 owners, some 260 appear on exactly one cable, and more than 340 of them, north of seventy percent, on no more than two. These are the world’s national telecoms, each one buying a slice of the handful of consortium cables that happen to land on its particular stretch of coast, which is also why so many of the big international systems list a dozen or more co-owners apiece. The internet, seen from this angle, is less of a single network and more of a mix of local operators, all chipping in for a share of the same few very expensive ropes across the ocean.

Going back to the beach in Spain

To see what it looks like where the cable actually meets the land, let’s head back to that beach in La Línea.

The cable that surfaces there is called Dos Continentes, it belongs to GTD, a Chilean telecoms group, and it’s a relatively small regional system consisting of two armoured fibre cables looping across the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the African coast that depended on a single ageing link before this one was built.

I went looking for exactly where it comes ashore, and the paper trail gives an idea about how invisible this infrastructure actually is. The cable lands in Spain, but the public Spanish government map of coastal concessions doesn’t seem to show it, because it looks like coastal permits in Andalusia are devolved to the regional government. The landfall instead shows in a regional registry, in a signed resolution buried under an expediente number. That document pinpoints where the cable enters the public maritime domain, at grid reference X=290,935, Y=4,009,603, just seaward of the beach manhole. The cable then runs inland, buried as the permit insists (“no exterior element above ground level”) to what is presumably a network node, where traffic is fed into GTD’s pre-existing terrestrial dark-fibre network, from where it’ll eventually travel to one of the actual GTD data centres in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao/Sopelana, and Sevilla.

On its way out to sea it crosses three older cables already lying on the seabed, namely Europe India Gateway, ATLAS, and FLAG. As can be seen (or, well, actually not) even an empty-looking patch of water off a Spanish beach is layered with other people’s infrastructure.

The Dos Continentes cable (Segment I, La Línea - Ceuta Sur ramal), owned by GTD Cableado de Redes Inteligentes, S.L.U., the Spanish arm of the Chilean GTD group, has a total length of ~105 km and is in service since 2020 under the signed concession resolution from the Junta de Andalucía (Dirección General de Calidad Ambiental y Cambio Climático), expediente CNC02/19/CA/0009, dated 14 January 2020.

The two key points, as given in the resolution’s coordinate table are:

Point	UTM X	UTM Y
Arqueta / beach manhole (BMH, in servidumbre zone)	290,929	4,009,602
Entrada en DPMT (cable crosses into public maritime domain)	290,935	4,009,603

To convert the UTM coordinates I used the official Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN) Calculadora Geodésica with the following settings:

• Transformation type: Transformación de Datum
• Reference system: ETRS89
• Input coordinates: UTM
• Huso (zone): 30

ETRS89 and WGS84 differ by only centimetres in practice, so the resulting coordinates (WGS84-equivalent) can be dropped straight into any consumer map or GPS app:

Point	Lat/long (DMS)	Decimal	Map links
Beach manhole (the buried structure, navigate here to stand on the spot)	36° 12′ 31.25″ N, 5° 19′ 32.41″ W	36.208681, −5.325669	Google Maps · OpenStreetMap
DPMT entry point (waterline crossing, ~6 m seaward of the manhole)	36° 12′ 31.29″ N, 5° 19′ 32.17″ W	36.208692, −5.325603	Google Maps · OpenStreetMap

Both points sit on Playa de El Burgo–Torrenueva, beside the Punta de Torrenueva tower, at the northeastern (Levante / Mediterranean-facing) edge of La Línea de la Concepción, against the municipal boundary. The resolution describes the route as passing “muy cerca de la torre-faro existente en la Punta de Torre Nueva”.

As you can see, however, you see nothing. :-) The permit requires the whole installation to be subterranean (“no exterior element above ground level: No manholes, splices, connections or terminals.”), hence you can stand exactly on the landfall, but it’s a point in the sand by a tower, and not a structure. On the afternoon I was there, a couple of dozen people were spread out on that stretch of sand under parasols, probably not even knowing that somewhere underneath them the link that carries an entire enclave’s traffic to another continent came out of the sea.

It is interesting to see that what has changed most over the past decade isn’t the technology itself, but who pays for it. For a century these systems were built by carriers selling capacity to one another, which made the network something close to a shared utility with many owners. Today, however, the largest (co-)owner of submarine cable on the planet is an advertising company. It probably makes sense in their position, however it is a change in how the network is governed, and, more importantly, it seems to have happened almost entirely out of public view, which is worrying.

If you live anywhere near a coast, there is a decent chance one of these things lands within driving distance of you, and the TeleGeography map will get you to roughly the right bay. Getting from there to the actual patch of sand takes some amount of digging through concession resolutions, planning registers, environmental reports, and sometimes the local newspaper archive. It took me an evening of reading to narrow it down, but I can recommend to do this exercise if you’re curious about the world that you’re living in and, more importantly, the hidden infrastructure surrounding you.

PS: Maybe we picked the wrong word and should have called it the trench rather than the cloud?

In a random sample of 10,000 webpages collected in July 2026, one-in-ten show signs of being written or substantially edited by AI.

A reporter for The New York Times, Streitfeld often writes about technology. This article appeared August 18, 2016.

Social media is bad for children.

That was the blunt verdict in a recent spate of high-tech court cases in California, Kentucky and New Mexico. At a moment when Silicon Valley has never been more dominant or ambitious, one of its signature products has all the allure — and the lawsuits — of cigarettes circa 1990.

On Tuesday, opening statements begin in Oakland, Calif., for the latest social media trial. California and other states have brought a case against Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, saying the company “harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage and ultimately ensnare youth and teens.”

Meta denies the allegations. But you know who else has some issues with social media, screen time and the addictive nature of devices? Quite a few of the tech executives in Silicon Valley, at least when it comes to their own households.

“I don’t generally want my kids to be sitting in front of a TV or computer for a long period of time,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, once said. Interacting with people is good, but passively consuming content — “just going from video to video” — was not associated with “the same positive benefits,” he explained.

When Mr. Zuckerberg’s second child was born in 2017, he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, wrote in an open letter to her that “it’s important to make time to go outside and play.” Smelling flowers got a shout-out. So did picking up leaves. Nothing digital rated a mention.

Tech executives like Mr. Zuckerberg don’t talk about their own families often. When they do, however, they usually make clear their wariness of tech. For their children, tech does not play the same role it does for the rest of society: teacher, babysitter, all-purpose distraction and, increasingly, constant companion. It seems barely there at all.

The executives’ comments are generally off the cuff and are snapshots of a moment. Mr. Zuckerberg, for instance, talked about his children seven years ago and has said little since. A Meta representative declined to say anything more.

Peter Thiel, who was the first outside investor in Facebook and a longtime board member, said he limited his children — then 3½ and 5 — to “an hour and a half a week” of screen time. When he mentioned this at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2024, the audience gasped. Many children that age experience that amount of screen time in a day, or even a morning.

But Mr. Thiel said he was a typical Silicon Valley parent.

“There are probably a lot of people in tech who do something quite similar for their own families,” he said, adding pointedly, “There’s some questions that that might lead you to ask.” Mr. Thiel did not respond to emailed questions.

Even as the new Meta case was heading to trial, British researchers raised new alarms about tech and young children.

“The benefit of digital screen exposure for babies is negligible, while the potential risks of use on physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development are substantial,” the interdisciplinary Action on Digital Device Immersive Conditions Team, a group of university academics, said in a May report.

Tech people seemed to realize this from the beginning, said Mara Fath, an artist and bookseller who recalled the influx of programmers into her Upper Haight neighborhood in San Francisco 20 years ago.

“All our neighbors worked for those firms — Facebook, Google and Apple. None of them would let their children interact with any screens,” Ms. Fath said. “They all knew how addicting they were and how to protect their own children.”

Cautions and caveats from tech leaders piled up over the years. “We didn’t give our kids cellphones until they were 14,” Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates said. When Sundar Pichai’s son was 11, the Google chief noted he “still doesn’t have a phone,” adding that “our television is not easily accessible.” Apple’s Tim Cook said he would not let his nephew on a social network.

By now, it’s a cultural cliché. In “The Audacity,” Jonathan Glatzer’s new AMC series, a girl at a Silicon Valley party is surprised that a boy has a smartphone. “Arms dealers don’t give their kids land mines,” she explains.

Phones are banned at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, two miles from Google’s headquarters. “No phones means no distraction, no social media anxiety, and no constant comparison. Just real childhood,” the school explains on its website. Waldorf’s price for a real childhood: as much as $47,500 a year.

Several Waldorf board members are professionally focused on artificial intelligence, but at the school machine learning is minimized in favor of “human learning.” The goal is to train the future elite to think clearly.

“While machines optimize tasks and automate decisions, our graduates develop the uniquely human capacities that will define leadership in 2030 and beyond,” the school says.

Snap’s chief executive, Evan Spiegel, has credited a low-tech home environment for his success in running a high-tech firm. Growing up in the 1990s, Mr. Spiegel wasn’t allowed to watch television until he was “almost a teenager.” He eventually realized that was a good thing. “I spent a lot of time just building stuff and reading,” he said.

Mr. Spiegel aimed to carry on that tradition: only 90 minutes of screen time a week for his 7-year-old, he said in a 2018 interview. He now has four children with his wife, Miranda Kerr.

“For the 2-year-old, it’s like zero screen time,” he said on a podcast in April. “We really just want to essentially read with him and play, explore outside, and those sorts of things.” The 6- and 7-year-olds are “infrequent movie watchers, but other than that again, we don’t give them phones or anything like that.” The 15-year-old, however, is “all-in on technology.”

Steve Chen, a co-founder of YouTube who sold the video company to Google in 2006, told students at Stanford last year that he was worried that his children would end up unable to watch anything longer than 15 minutes.

“The modern digital environment trains kids to expect everything to be summarized into a 280-character tweet or a short-form video clip,” Mr. Chen said in a message. His goal was to make sure his children “know how to do things the slow, hard way.”

With A.I., Silicon Valley’s latest product, tech is less a passive broadcast device than a direct substitute for human interaction. It doesn’t come between the parent and child. It replaces the parent.

Consider a new app that Meta is testing, StoryKit. Your child is demanding you make up a story at bedtime? No problem. The app will take the child’s name and a few details and quickly spin a personalized tale. “No more guilt about screen time,” the app promises.

Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in an essay that “my 8 year old daughter can already code her ideas and produce videos.” When they bake together, he said, A.I. “orders the ingredients, and then offers suggestions.”

Others are as cautious with A.I. as they were with social media. “I asked my 16-year-old son what I should say to you,” YouTube’s Mr. Chen wrote. “He responded, ‘Please tell them that I read books and watch movies and that I dislike A.I.’”

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has his own “cool use case” for A.I. and kids. He recently suggested on X connecting family calendars to ChatGPT. On the drive to school, ChatGPT could “make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.,” he posted.

Using A.I. to talk to your family is something for others to embrace, though. As a new father, Mr. Altman finds his own attitude toward technology becoming more resistant.

A thing that has changed hugely is how I feel about algorithmic feeds and iPads in small children’s hands,” he said in April on the podcast “Mostly Human With Laurie Segall.” As for A.I. and his son, “I don’t know when I would let him talk to A.I., but I’d rather be on the late end of what’s reasonable there, not the early end.”

Like other tech executives, Mr. Altman said he was often bored as a child, which at the time he hated. His new view is that boredom was “super valuable in all of these strange ways.” He said he looked forward to sending his child outside to play in the dirt.

An interesting mechanism in YouTube I just learned of.

If you right click once, you get their context menu:

If you right click again, you get the native browser menu:

This is clunky and not discoverable, but I can see YouTube team’s bind here. As far as I know, it is not possible to extend browser’s native right click menu (even with user’s consent), or invoke it in some other way (so that, for example, they could have an entry point to the native menu in their menu).

At the same time it does feel like the correct use of a right click menu, to host quick functions like Miniplayer or Copy Video URL At Current Time or Copy Embed Code – and, you can also see how Chrome’s own menu has a lot of cruft in it.

In a way, this might be what is often called a “progressive enhancement.” It is better than blocking the native menu altogether, and I cannot think of any smarter alternative given the constraints. But it is clunky, as things often are when websites venture out to become web apps.

#mouse #web

It's a saying that appears in multiple iterations across multiple slide decks and cited in multiple books, all extolling some sort of highly technological future of education: something about the need to constantly be learning, relearning, unlearning.

I roll my eyes whenever I see this, particularly when it’s incorrectly attributed to the futurist Alvin Toffler. It’s not something he wrote, or not exactly -- but that's just part of the reason why its repeated invocation irks me to no end.

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

Toffler did assert in his bestselling Future Shock that knowledge was increasingly "perishable," that "today's 'fact' becomes tomorrow's 'misinformation." Students do not need to learn specific things anymore as much as they needed to learn how to learn, he argued.

And maybe this sounds good to you -- cliches like this are incredibly common, and sadly quite appealing to a certain group of people, no doubt because they bypass all the complexities of how learning actually works. “Learning” in this Toffler-esque bromide is reduced to a Kenny Rogers' lyric -- "you've got to know when to hold 'em / know when to fold 'em / know when to walk away / and know when to run" -- and too many folks, vaguely familiar with the tune, will just smile and hums along.

"By instructing students how to learn, unlearn, and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education” -- those are Toffler’s actual words in Future Shock. And in the next paragraph, he cites psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy: "Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn."

The tomorrow that Gerjuoy and Toffler were gesturing towards is really not our tomorrow, or even the tomorrows of the twenty-first century that now lie in the past. First published in 1970, Future Shock still had decades of tomorrows in the twentieth century to imagine and invent and fret over. Toffler coined the phrase “future shock” -- “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time” -- even earlier, in 1965. That some pundits and meme-makers still fixate on this particular narrative, one that is now at least fifty years old, that they still cite (and mis-cite) Toffler as an augur of the future should serve to remind us how much of this “futurist” imagination remains firmly stuck in the past.

But there's something not just antiquated but sinister about the calls these days for everyone to embrace "unlearning," particularly when they're connected to full-throated praise for "AI.” “AI” may be one of the biggest threats to teaching and learning, to epistemology and pedagogy that society has ever faced.

I heard someone say this past week that "AI" will force us to "unlearn everything." Indeed, perhaps that is the goal. But to be clear, this is not some sort of effort that strengthens our abilities to know and understand ourselves and the world around us. Rather, this “unlearning” of “AI” involves cognitive surrender and cognitive atrophy. It involves dependence and perhaps even (if you accept this medical and moral framework) addiction. It involves the monopolistic control and, so damningly, the erasure of knowledges.

Toffler’s call for an education system that prioritized learning, relearning, and unlearning was meant to prepare students for a world of unpredictability and precarity. (Instead of, say, creating not only a school system, but a whole society in which their dignity and safety could be more assured.) “The present curriculum is a mindless holdover from the past,” Toffler asserted. (Why study English or algebra, he argued, when we should be teaching cadres of young people how to live in submarine communities or in outer space? Why indeed.)

For the past fifty years (at least), people have been demanding that education reorient itself towards “the future” -- a particular kind of future, no doubt, one full of gizmos and gadgets and cliches about speed and innovation, one where meaning is only in data and markets and money. Of course schools have always been bound to the future -- to suggest otherwise is to ignore all the practices and rituals that constantly mark beginnings and endings and the passage of time, that promise and caution about “what’s next”: the next chapter, the next test, the next grade, the next school and so on.

To call for a future in which “AI” demands “unlearning” is to unmoor everyone from time and place and body -- who we were, who we are, who we can become. To embrace its version of “unlearning” is to surrender all learning (all agency, all accountability) -- about yourself and the world to someone else’s algorithm. The constant “unlearning” that “AI” demands is actually the foreclosure of any future where learning is possible at all.

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A Technology of Unlearning

“We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility” by Emanuel Maiberg from 404 Media. The production of this technology quite literally involves the destruction of knowledge.

Also from 404 Media: “Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing” by Jason Koebler.

“Does AI stop children from learning?” asks The Economist, and while the research cited sure points to “yes” the article still ends with pablum about “using the technology correctly.” Because The Economist, I suppose.

“Data Centers are a Public Education Issue” writes Jennifer Berkshire.

“Texas Tech is using A.I. to cut left-leaning content in its curriculum,” The New York Times reports. Again, "AI" is a technology that prevents learning, and those who embrace it know that.

“5 Ways AI Is Cutting Into Students’ Ability to Learn” -- The 74 on the latest survey data from Common Sense Media.

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High Tech Disaster Movie

It’s been, what, four years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT? And now, now, “OpenAI Introduces ‘ChatGPT for Teens’ as Safety Concerns Grow.”

“Google Turns On Gemini A.I. for Students Using Its Classroom App,” Natasha Singer reports in The New York Times.

“Meta’s Big Reckoning Is Here,” says Wired, on the “landmark case that could force signficant changes to core features of Facebook and Instagram.”

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Ed-Tech is Still “Cop Shit”

“Black & Brown kids need an AI moratorium” writes Kaliris Salas-Ramirez in the NY Daily News. Meanwhile, in Australia: “Why alternative schools are not rushing to bring AI into classrooms.”

The FCC is seeking comments on whether to end the E-Rate program, which gives eligible (read: low income) schools and libraries a discount on Internet services.

The AP recently reported that ICE officers would be equipped with gloves that administer painful electric shocks. Turns out, school cops will get these too: “Omaha police unveil shock gloves for school resource officers.”

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I hardly know where to begin to write about Jason Arday, even though I have not stopped thinking about him all week -- about the ways in which, well before this latest onslaught of “AI”-related epistemic violence, there were powerful forces both inside and outside of academia that worked incredibly hard to silence and destroy people.

Lots of things smart things and my god a lot of truly awful things have been written about Arday this week. I’ll just link to this one: Lauren Michele Jackson on “The Real Meaning of the Jason Arday Scandal.”

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Today’s bird is the Tennessee Warbler, which my Merlin app tells me is “heading my way soon” – fall migration. You can sort of feel the shift in seasons in the air (fingers crossed) -- but maybe that’s just my mood at the end of my birthday week. (I’ll write more about that in my personal newsletter tomorrow or Monday.)

The Tennessee warbler breeds in the north-eastern parts of the US and Canada before heading south to Central America and the Caribbean for the winter. A “dainty” bird, according to the Cornell bird lab, it’s not a particularly colorful warbler – kinda gray; females a little yellowish. Nor does this bird have anything to do with Tennessee, but hey, that’s the name Alexander Wilson gave the bird back in 1832 and no one seems willing to unlearn that.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Students and school children are increasingly using artificial intelligence. A survey last year by Chegg, an ed-tech firm, found that 80% of rich-world undergraduates used it in their studies. More recent polls put the figure at 94% in Britain and 93% in Germany. Such widespread adoption has fueled concerns about the impact the technology might be having on learning. Teachers report marking identikit essays that they suspect are churned out by ChatGPT. Yet firm evidence on AI's educational effects has been lacking. David Stromberg of Stockholm University and Victor Lei and Wu Yanhui of the University of Hong Kong set out to fill the gap. They tracked 27,000 pupils aged 12-18 in China, where AI adoption has been fast. Around 80% reported using models such as Doubao and DeepSeek; the other 20% formed the control group. The results are eye-opening. After six months, pupils using AI saw their average homework score rise by 18% across all subjects. The time they took to complete each assignment fell from an average of 64 minutes to 45. But come exam time, the same students scored 20% below their classmates who had not called on AI's help. Homework scores once predicted exam performance; now those who score highest are, perversely, more likely to do worse in exams. The takeaway: "AI can boost learning productivity, but only for those who use the technology intelligently," reports The Economist. "Students must resist the temptation to reach for an AI-generated answer before thinking things through for themselves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.