Because endless growth and data collection is the foundation of their business, and that necessitates doing gross invasive things to their users.

They need you to feed the beast, and they certainly don’t want you to think about it. So they use cartoon animals and sneaky happy paths to make sure you stay blissfully ignorant.

Using software is inherently a handshake agreement between you and the service provider. It’s not unlike paying for a physical service.

The problem is, many of the dominant software makers are abusing your handshake in increasingly dastardly ways. They treat their customers like sitting ducks — just a bunch of dumb animals waiting to be harvested. And when growth slows, they resort to deceptive and creepy tactics to keep the trend lines pointing skyward.

Source: How You’re Being Manipulated By Software – Signal v. Noise

I told her that I don’t believe in hope and I don’t believe in hopelessness; I believe in compassion and pragmatism. Hope can be lethal when you are fighting an autocracy. Hope is inextricable from time, and as anyone who has studied the entrenchment of dictators knows, the longer they stay in, the harder it is to get them out. Every day passed is damage done.

We were never going to be okay because America had never been okay. In January, 2017, America emerged from an election that not only brought an unworthy leader, but exploited every pre-existing crisis in U.S. history: racism, income inequality, geographic inequality, misogyny, xenophobia, battles over surveillance and privacy, and so on.

Source: The resistance to Donald Trump is not what you think – The Globe and Mail

A good history teacher takes away your innocence about information.

Google is in a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with the people who try to game it. So that’s a piece of knowledge that’s important for people using the internet to fact-check or to think about the quality of information.

Fact-checkers know that in a digital medium, the web is a web. It’s not just a metaphor. You understand a particular node by its relationship in a web. So the smartest thing to do is to consult the web to understand any particular node. That is very different from reading Thucydides, where you look at internal criticism and consistency because there really isn’t a documentary record beyond Thucydides.

Source: Sam Wineburg, Stanford history professor, on the problems with how schools teach history today.

It is because of an evangelical culture awash in this kind of teaching that Kavanaugh’s series of assaults can be excused as youthful indiscretions. Men are expected to slip up and violate their purity, and it’s all okay as long as their penis didn’t actually enter a vagina. It is his future wife’s duty to forgive, and no one else should pass judgment on sins that are in the past.

The language of consent is not a language that evangelicals or their heroes speak.

It is the evangelical MO to ignore the testimony of women.

Source: This Is Why Evangelicals Don’t Believe in Sexual Assault

I have no desire to be one of the “Watch DOGS”. Yuck to that branding.

Fundraisers and volunteer opportunities at schools often come with wearing and promoting outside groups, many of them with questionable marketing and practices.

My brand is public education.

The impetus to protect oneself fell on the girl. The impetus to say no fell on the girl. The work, the labor, of purity: it was all girls’.

And if she failed in this — if she sparked a boy’s lust (let alone a girl’s — the compulsory heterosexuality of this message deserves an entire post in and of itself) — the failure was hers. And she had not only failed herself, and her “Christian brother,” but God. It was a sin, but a particularly grievous sort of one. For even though the actual bible teaches that all sins may be forgiven, or that all sins are equal before the eyes of God, under evangelism, there is no sin more horrifying than sexual impurity. (I truly believe this — spousal abuse, pedophilia, even murder, all of it pales to the way the church talks about the wages of sexual sin).

Source: the shame is ours

I used to tell my students that ideology never announces itself as ideology. It naturalizes itself like the air we breath. It doesn’t acknowledge that it is a way of looking at the word; it proceeds as if it is the only way of looking at the world. At its most effective, it renders itself unassailable: just the way things are. Not an opinion, not the result of centuries of implicit and explicit messaging, not a means of upholding a power structure. It just is.

Source: the shame is ours

The assurance that “the child will be the customer” underscores the belief – shared by many in and out of education reform and education technology – that education is simply a transaction: an individual’s decision-making in a “marketplace of ideas.” (There is no community, no public responsibility, no larger civic impulse for early childhood education here. It’s all about private schools offering private, individual benefits.)

This idea that “the child will be the customer” is, of course, also a nod to “personalized learning” as well, as is the invocation of a “Montessori-inspired” model. As the customer, the child will be tracked and analyzed, her preferences noted so as to make better recommendations to up-sell her on the most suitable products. And if nothing else, Montessori education in the United States is full of product recommendations.

Source: ‘It’s Like Amazon, But for Preschool’

The image of data-intensive startup pre-schools with young children receiving ‘recommended for you’ content as infant customers of ed-tech products is troubling. It suggests that from their earliest years children will become targets of intensive datafication and consumer-style profiling. As Michelle Willson argues in her article on algorithmic profiling and prediction of children, they ‘portend a future for these children as citizens and consumers already captured, modelled, managed by and normalised to embrace algorithmic manipulation’.

The tech elite now making a power-grab for public education probably has little to fear from FBI warnings about education technology. The FBI is primarily concerned with potentially malicious uses of sensitive student information by cybercriminals. There’s nothing criminal about creating Montessori-inspired preschool networks, using ClassDojo as a vehicle to build a liberal society, reimagining high school as personalized learning, or reshaping universities as AI-enhanced factories for producing labour market outcomes-unless you consider all of this a kind of theft of public education for private commercial advantage and influence.

Source: The tech elite is making a power-grab for public education | code acts in education