The internet is on the horizon. It is happening. This internet is a technology that is going to change the world, alongside the World Wide Web. It is going to be huge. Knowledge beyond measure. The world will be not as we know. A superpowered information superhighway is being established. Soon we will all be surfing the ‘net and finding our footing in a grand new interconnected world. We will look back years from now at a time before the internet and wonder how we survived. How, as a species, we operated lacking such an instant, world-spanning source of information and communication.

Every child will grow knowing no world other than one where an infinite library awaits them at any moment. Sure, personal computers are expensive now, but with all the efficiencies the internet will allot us, the price will fall swiftly. Think of the productivity increases. No more waiting days for responses in the mail, or having to wait for the morning newspaper to hear yesterday’s news, or having to make expensive long-distance phone calls during business hours. The length of work weeks will fall as productivity increases reduce the time required for labour. Entire industries will transform, and automation will position people to do not stressful work under difficult circumstance but, instead, fulfilling work under positive contexts.

We will be able to connect on a scale as yet unseen. Love and hope among humankind shared the world over and perhaps eventually even with other worlds entirely. With everyone connected at once without limits, borders will fall. A new age of global relations will blossom and bloom. Xenophobia may take a while to fall, but I’m sure it will, for a world where we interact with everyone from every background at every moment will be one where trivialities such as race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity are irrelevant.

Books will become antiquities, as digital goods take over physical ones. A digital page can have the text expanded to sizes appropriate for the reader’s sight, and images can be expanded for inspection. A ‘book’, in the concept it will be known, won’t be limited to static material but will instead include interactives and videos. Concepts and ideas will be hyperlinked, such that a network of interconnected pages will be established. Project Xanadu and other display means like it will change how we view, interact, visualise, and manage content.

Entertainment will grow more ambitious. Individuals will have the knowledge to create and the means to distribute, such that limits are no longer for their creative realisations. They will be able to establish themselves independently on a global scale for a global audience. Enterprises will be inundated with a wealth of new self-taught talent, leading to greater ambitions in the face of competing with the swathes of indie genius. New and groundbreaking media will be created with quality as yet unseen, out of necessity to compete.

Everyone will have a website – a special type of place on the internet where a person can upload and publish things – to interact and grow on the web. People are already establishing their presences and carving out their own cyber homes. They’ll all be linked and organically self-categorising, so discovery shall be no blocker. Some websites will be dedicated entirely to the categorisation and curation of great works, but no one curation site will dominate. Ideas and concepts will move so fast, and the lack of an initial centralising source will breed a thousand self-sustaining niches capable of thriving in isolation and association.

Wrongs will be righted, as every website exists on an equal playing field, and citizen journalism explodes with power and ubiquity. Every injustice will be documented by a chorus of voices and amplified by a magnitude more. There will be no monopolies, for there will be no monoculture. Everyone will specialise and experience their interests, such that they are fulfilled. The open-source movement which has been gaining traction will explode, as anyone anywhere can contribute. Software will become a collaborative, living canvas, freed from corporate gates and improved daily by the global collective. Perfection will be reached towards out of passion.

A thousand thousand colonies will swarm around the hive and between others in a rush to create and polish. The goal is to make things better for everyone. Everyone will share what they know, however they can. Knowledge will not be gated, but open to anyone. With the sharing and accessibility of information, everyone will upskill. In a world where everyone can know and learn without hindrance. Uncommodified information and communication.

The barrier to entry will be a device and a connection. The devices will evolve, becoming a part of every activity and endeavour, and the connections will improve. Connections will be faster, will carry more data, and will become more widely available. Eventually, there will be no tether, as infrastructure is established and wired becomes wireless, allowing anyone anywhere in the whole world to log on.

Natural disasters and events of terror will be avoided, for the threat can be broadcast with ease and everyone will be elevated to conditions such that they don’t feel they must resort to extremes. Those that are bedbound or limited, unable to physically access the world, will be reconnected with it. They might be unable to go to where they wish, but they can visit through cyberspace. Doctors will be able to assess situations remotely, for people far away or restricted in movement. The rapid evolution of the technology will bring more people power and be the great bringer of equality.

Of course, every technology carries with it new abuses, new threats, and new cruelties. Yet even so, the promise outweighs the fear. The foundation is open, and collectively regulators and we as a people would have to allow the closing and control. We would have to roll over and allow their foot to crush us, and that is something we will not do, for our independence and control are our mostly strongly held values as humans.

The internet, and the web that it is establishing, is in its juvenile infancy. I’m certain there will be some pains, but this is sure to be big. It is certain to change the world, and I welcome the change with open arms. I’m excited for this great new world, even if I may only live long enough to see the first reaping of crop. The internet is sure to be a greatness and I welcome its advancements.

Every spring, we get a flood of stories about college graduation ceremonies -- typically full of tut-tutting about inappropriate behavior or inappropriate speech -- always presented as synecdochical of all of higher ed. Oh sure sure, there’s often the odd tale of triumph: someone’s service dog gets a diploma; someone in their 70s finishes medical school. But mostly these stories serve to reinforce other, more dour narratives about college students -- unprepared, entitled, intolerant -- and about college itself -- irreverent, irrelevant.

This year, despite a brief attempt to gin up controversy surrounding NYU’s selection of Jonathan Haidt as its commencement speaker – sigh, yet another tale of "the coddling of the American mind" – the coverage has focused on the chorus of boos whenever speakers heralded this glorious "AI" future students are poised to step into.

And perhaps it’s a little ironic that this graduating class, a group that we've been told time and time again has spent the last four years using ChatGPT to cheat their way through college, would display such sour sentiment towards "AI." But as most commencement speakers seem duty-bound to repeat, graduation marks the entry into adulthood; it is "the beginning of your life"; "the future is now" – that sort of thing. And just these students are now officially adults, they’re being told a very different story: that there really is no future. There are no jobs. And whatever thing they might have learned to do or learned to love in college, whatever career they might have believed they were preparing for, "AI" is going to destroy all of that.

No wonder they boo.

Here these young people are, having just done everything they were told to do to be successful. They got good grades in high school. They did all the extracurriculars. They scored sufficiently well on the SATs. They were admitted into college – maybe not their first choice, but they got in somewhere, and dammit, they stuck it out for four maybe five years. They completed all the coursework, sat through all the Zoom lectures and the in-person lectures and through all the AI-proctored and in-person exams. They checked all the digital boxes, submitted their homework through the LMS portal's plagiarism-checker, responded to at least two classmates posts on the LMS discussion boards. They used "AI," fine sure but fuck it, because the technology sure used them too. They handed key decisions over to algorithms – not just what YouTube videos to watch while they scrolled through the digital textbooks but what courses to take so that the whole effort of the degree was manageable. Because along the way, the majority of them also worked at one or more jobs; and the majority of them went into debt.

They were promised that if they did all this, if they received a bachelor's degree, then they'd be able to get a good job and make a decent living to support themselves and support their families. But now, even before their diplomas are in hand, they're discovering that the promise was a lie. There aren't any jobs for college graduates, they're being told. All this is supposedly thanks to "AI," a technology that these students know probably better than any other group out there, churns out the most laughably banal bullshit.

The whole "digital natives" trope is undoubtably hogwash -- the ridiculous idea that young people, by virtue of being born into a world of computational machinery are more adept at its manipulation. These students have spent their whole lives being taught, cajoled, entertained, and surveilled by computers and algorithms -- in and out of the classroom. (But importantly, in.) But they recognize now -- if they hadn't already -- as rejection letter after rejection letter hits their email inbox, that they're being spurned by this same machinery that they’re supposedly most in tune with. “Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis,” as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Player Piano -- not really a message you want to hear on graduation day, a ritual that’s meant to mark beginnings and possibilities. But nor do you want to hear someone hyping the very technology that has just sent you some stale, autogenerated text denying you yet another job interview.

All mention of “AI” does is remind them of the political economy from which this monstrous extractive machine has emerged, remind them that their options and their opportunities appear to be utterly foreclosed.

They have no choice. They have no agency. They must comply. The future is written, these smug (and affluent) "AI" boosting graduation speakers have the audacity to tell these students. Just suck it up. Deal with it.

It's this sneering attitude, I'd argue, that is driving so much of the pushback against "AI" and against ed-tech -- it’s Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” plus a lot of infantilization. People are sick of being told that these technologies are inevitable, particularly when they can see, because they have experienced, the damage they are causing (all while these technologies are generating the wild profits for a small handful of billionaires).

Welcome to adulthood, the graduation speakers always say. But now, they echo the messaging that Silicon Valley has churned out for years now: you'll have to learn to enjoy the digital immiseration because there's nothing you can do about it. There's no turning back, no getting rid of computers, no option for analog, no alternative.

Students boo because they know it's bad. They boo because they know it's wrong – wrong ethically, wrong politically, wrong historically, wrong economically, wrong environmentally.

It's bad. It's wrong. And it's also untrue, all these pronouncements about technological inevitability. The future is not yet written. No doubt, much like the "digital native" trope, these tales do sadly seem to provide comfort and cover (and conversation-ending cliche) for those whose jobs still entail spit-shining the gadgetry.

In the past, Americans mostly haven't minded this story, because Americans sure love their shiny gadgets. But more and more, I think, they've come to recognize that the shininess barely masks the shit. The promises of techno-solutionism – that any sufficiently complicated problem can be magically fixed with technology (not quite what Arthur C. Clarke said, but close enough) – is less and less believable.

The powerful forces of industry and government (and yes schools) seem keen to strip people of their agency, to prevent them from having any say in the conditions of their work, leisure, learning, life. And not just keen but absolutely thrilled to do so.

But the growing pushback against "AI," and the growing pushback against ed-tech more generally, is not simply a rejection of technology. These efforts are, as Astra Taylor and Saul Levin recently argued in The Guardian, a rejection of the profoundly anti-democratic practices that have pushed technologies into all aspects of our lives without our consent and often in the face of our outright opposition. These technologies have been marketed to us as solutions to all sorts of social problems -- and have done so, in no small part, by bypassing and undermining the very public sphere in which debate and discussion can take place: schools, libraries, the arts, the media.

The adoption of education technology, "AI" or otherwise, has been anti-democratic in practices both big and small. Despite all the talk of progressive education and ed-tech, it has been experienced as something else entirely. Throughout the country for the past few decades Gates (via the Gates Foundation), other billionaire philanthropists, and giant companies have shaped education funding and policy through a combination of technology and testing.

At one point, perhaps, people were willing to welcome devices into schools, into the classroom. They believed the stories, not just that "this is the future," but that future meant something better for everyone. “Access” signaled equality. But as the tech billionaires have embraced authoritarianism and inequality, and as their apocalyptic rhetoric about not just the "end of work," but quite literally the end of the world grows louder and louder -- all while they amass more wealth than anyone in history -- it is quite apparent that their promises about the future do not include us. Their vision of future does not make any space or allowance for our children to choose their own futures.

In their essay in The Guardian, Taylor and Levin chastise the liberals and progressives who have recently been vocal in their criticism of datacenter opponents. (It's an analysis that can readily be mapped to education technology, where many people still insist that their politics are progressive, all while wrapping themselves in the same rhetoric as technology's most authoritarian boosters, insisting there's nothing people can do about the material conditions of their lives other than obey obey obey.) "As usual, ordinary people are ahead of their leaders," Taylor and Levin write, with a nod to Antonio Gramsci. "The remarkable organic growth of the datacenter resistance movement across geographies, economic interests and ideology reflects the myriad harms that come with AI infrastructure and growing anger at the tech elite. The tremendous energy unleashed by these fights, and their sensible and unifying demands, have the potential to form the foundations of a new and powerful populist coalition, one poised to help define a working-class agenda that meets this moment and resonates with disaffected voters. This excellent organizing should be cultivated rather than dismissed."

How do we meet this moment with disaffected students? Probably not by insisting that they need to suck it up and keep using Canvas, eh?

Elsewhere:

"Even If You Hate AI, You Will Use Google AI Search," reads the headline in Wired on the changes Google plans to make to Search. (Spoiler alert: they're gutting it.) This is precisely that anti-democratic impulse that I talk about above, an impulse that permeates the tech industry and its marketing: the language of inevitability and dismissive attitude towards any sort of resistance – "this sucks but you have no choice but go along with it." More via Garbage Day: “An internet after search engines.”

“How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart” by 404 Media’s Samantha Cole. “Video shows ICE violently arresting Oregon farm workers and using facial recognition” via The Guardian. These are how many communities are experiencing "AI," and if you are advocating for more "AI" in schools, I hope you can recognize that this is what people hear you're calling for.

“What Schools Are Forgetting in Their Race to Embrace A.I.” by David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times.

“My Son’s Math Homework Is Essentially Just Pokémon” writes Will Oremus

“A Technical Deep Dive Is Not a Crisis Response” -- Phil Hill on Instructure's response to its recent data breach.

“The Surveillance Classroom” by Andrew Cantarutti. 404 Media’s Joseph Cox” reports on how “Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI.”

“Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence” by Myra Cheng et al.

“A Year Ago, Experts Worried About NAEP’s Future. Now, the Test is Expanding” reports The 74. Those who are advocating the expansion of testing right now are just wildly out-of-touch. You cannot separate testing and technology, and the latest anti-ed-tech efforts are part of an ongoing resistance to the ways in which all aspects of school have bent towards the demands of standardized testing. "We're going to test your kids even more" is not a winning political message, certainly not if you're interested in democratic educational practices.

Brian Merchant writes about the unionization of IT workers in the University of California system.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued new guidance on the importance of recess -- “for the first time in 13 years," as the AP notes. Everyone needs to take more breaks. Everyone needs time and space for play, no matter your age.

Today's bird is the vulturine guinea fowl, the largest bird in the guinea fowl species. Guinea fowls all have unfeathered heads, but the particular shape of the vulturine guinea fowl's bald head and neck is, well, vulture-like. The bird – both male and female – has a cobalt-blue body with long black and white feathers. There are far too many websites IMHO that seem to sell the birds (which breeders promise do well in captivity), and I guess the elimination of Google Search will take care of that online business. Wheeee.

Thanks for reading Second Breakfast.

“A woozle effect…occurs when frequent citation of previous publications that lack evidence misleads individuals, groups and the public into thinking or believing there is evidence, and non-facts become urban myths and factoids.”

The 13 circuits of the U.S. federal courts of appeals operate with a fair amount of independence, including their typographic choices. I was reminded of this today while reading the aforelinked decision from the Ninth Circuit in Epic v. Apple, because the Ninth Circuit sets their decisions in Times New Roman — a font that came up back in December in the context of the Trump State Department.

Long argument short, Times New Roman isn’t bad, but it isn’t good. It is the median choice. But most of the circuit courts use it: the Third, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh. It could be worse: the First and Fourth not only use Courier New (the worst version of Courier, so of course it’s the one Microsoft shipped with Windows), but fully justify their text — contrary to the nature of a monospaced font. It could be better: the Second and Seventh use Palatino. (Note how much better that Seventh Circuit decision looks than the Second’s, with its wider margins creating a narrower column of text.)

But it can be much better. The Fifth Circuit was long typographically superior to its peers, using Century Schoolbook — a highly legible font with great tradition and the right vibe. But in 2020, the Fifth Circuit upgraded, switching to Equity, Matthew Butterick’s excellent type family. Here’s a before and after tweet noting the change. The results are typographically sublime (including improved margins).

The gold standard is the U.S. Supreme Court, which uses Century Schoolbook. Yes, I just praised the Fifth Circuit’s change from Century Schoolbook to Equity as an upgrade, but tradition and consistency have their place. The Supreme Court’s typographic style has been stunningly consistent for — no pun intended — well over a century. (If only that were true of their recent decisions. Rimshot.) Here is last month’s Louisiana v. Callais decision — the gerrymandering/redistricting case. Here is 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education. I’d give the nod to the older one, which made better use of proper small caps, but the overall consistency is obvious.

Here is the 2026 edition of the Rules of the Supreme Court. Not only does the Court use Century Schoolbook for its own decisions, it requires submissions to the Court to use the same (p. 44):

The text of every booklet-format document, including any appendix thereto, shall be typeset in a Century family (e. g., Century Expanded, New Century Schoolbook, or Century Schoolbook) 12-point type with 2-point or more leading between lines. Quotations in excess of 50 words shall be indented. The typeface of footnotes shall be 10-point type with 2-point or more leading between lines. The text of the document must appear on both sides of the page.

Every booklet-format document shall be produced on paper that is opaque, unglazed, and not less than 60 pounds in weight, and shall have margins of at least three-fourths of an inch on all sides. The text field, including footnotes, may not exceed 4⅛ by 7⅛ inches.

Why the extra one-eighths of an inch instead of just 4 × 7? I don’t know. But 4⅛ × 7⅛ is exactly the size of the text field in the court’s own decisions.

Now compare the current 2026 rulebook to this edition printed in 1910 (with rules adopted in 1884). The consistency is striking — but, once again, the older version makes better use of small caps and just has a bit more vim and vigor to it. Just look at page 44, for example. It’s perfect. The current Court’s document formatters should aspire only to more closely ape the confidence and sturdiness of this older one. A century from now, U.S. Supreme Court decisions should look as similar to today’s as today’s do to those from a century ago.

The various circuit courts using lesser typefaces, looser margins, and lazier formatting should follow the Fifth’s lead and get their shit together. Tuck your shirt in, comb your hair, straighten your tie, and pop a mint in your mouth. If you’re a United States federal court, your typographic style should reflect that.

Back in 2020, Butterick took a well-deserved victory lap when the Fifth Circuit adopted Equity.¹ He quoted Fifth Circuit Judge Don Willett, a typography fan who spearheaded the restyling project, on its rationale. Willett wrote:

[Why] did the circuit devote finite judicial energy to swapping typefaces and widening margins? Simple answer: Our job is not just to present clear opinions, but to present our opinions clearly. Getting the law right is, of course, our tip-top priority. Nothing matters more. ... But good enough is never good enough. Our work is consequential, impacting the lives and livelihoods of real people walloped by real problems in the real world. The stakes are high, and we must present our best opinion, not merely a passable one. And that presentation begins before the first word is ever read.

Journalist and author Steven Rosenbaum has more reasons than most to distrust AI.

His new book, The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, is all about "how Truth is being bent, blurred, and synthesized" thanks to the "pressure of fast-moving, profit-driven AI." Yet a New York Times investigation this week found what Rosenbaum now acknowledges are "a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes" linked to his use of AI tools while researching the book.

These quotes include one that tech reporter Kara Swisher told the Times she "never said" and another that Northeastern University professor Lisa Feldman Barrett said "don’t appear in [my] book, and they are also wrong." Rosenbaum is now working with editors on what he says is a full "citation audit" that will correct future editions.

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