Pinboard (robertogreco) https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/public/ recent bookmarks from robertogreco What does it really mean to have a moment of insight? | Psyche Notes to Self 2026-06-26T11:52:31+00:00 https://psyche.co/notes-to-self/what-does-it-really-mean-to-have-a-moment-of-insight robertogreco knowledge reason insight 2026 marcelproust proust realization johnziman samdresser understanding similie analogy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d6fff0a16469/ NOMOS Glashütte: In House or Nothing 2026-06-26T01:46:32+00:00 https://www.itsabouttime.email/p/nomos-glashu-tte-in-house-or-nothing robertogreco nomos watchmaking watches glashütte germany saxony ferdinandadolphelange 2026 escapements schlottwitz luxury balancewheels timekeeping independence oremountains 1990 2014 uweahrendt swingsystem chronometry automation knowledge inhouse wolfgangstraub law legal manufacturing control bragging vukradic https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cce14fb13f96/ The Wounded Walker | Commonweal Magazine 2026-06-25T21:14:53+00:00 https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ward-graham-michel-de-certeau-wounded-walker robertogreco micheldecerteau 2026 theology religion everyday society spirituality myticism françoisdosse jesuits jeanjosephsurin jacqueslacan pierrebourdieu michelfoucault foucault popefrancis catholicchurch catholicism philosophy juliakristeva claudelevi-strauss structuralism poststructuralism jean-paulsartre sartre lucegirard walking culture politics nicholasofcusa luceirigaray urbaingrandier knowledge resistances meanderings control meaning meaningmaking chloézhao nomadland poetics secularism interdisciplinary lacan josefčapek henridulubac jeandaniélou culturalstudies dilexitnos 2024 stignatius meditations divine 1968 edwardschillebeeckx materialism life living howwelive sociology linguistics hitory ideology psychology psychogeography discernment belief signs existentialism citizenship billboards ads advertising cityplanning urban urbanism cooking anthropology literature analysis everydaylife waysofbeing waysofoperating apathy resistance friction ordinary truth freedom evasions deployments transgressions de https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:78761595a095/ Empire Suicide Watch | Herman Mark Schwartz 2026-06-20T08:56:14+00:00 https://phenomenalworld.org/interviews/empire-suicide-watch/ robertogreco hermanmarkschwartz 2026 us power imperialism empire susanstrange finance production knowledge security yemen somalia nigeria iraq iran venezuela syria caribbean mexico ecuador cuba mariafernandasikorski jackgross israel despotism michaelmann edwardluttwak joebiden donaldtrump brazil brasil argentina southafrica wu northkorea uk canada barackobama china carlotaperez honhai thorsteinveblen economics brettonwoods richardnixon japan wto lbj lyndonjohnson stephenmiran ww2 history korea southkorea imf fima singapore denmark norway sweden australia steffenmurau hymanminsky federalreserve caymanislands banking money policy markengal romanempire ancientrome germany peaceofwestphalia hegemony empires josephschumpeter https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f99449a9f2e1/ Tolstoy and the Illusion of Inevitability | THR Web Features | Web Features | The Hedgehog Review 2026-06-17T10:22:04+00:00 https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/tolstoy-and-the-illusion-of-inevitability robertogreco“Traveler, there is no road. The road is made by walking.” —Antonio Machado Machado’s famous line suggests that the future does not exist in advance, waiting to be discovered, but comes into being through a choice among possible actions. Many possibilities exist at any given moment. The one that becomes actual depends on coincidences and chances as well as choices, all producing events whose significance emerges only as they unfold. That, as it happens, is also Leo Tolstoy’s argument in War and Peace. In the book’s battle scenes, plans dissolve into confusion, causes multiply beyond reckoning, and outcomes hinge on fleeting, unrepeatable moments. On the eve of the Battle of Borodino, the novel’s hero, Prince Andrei, reflects that what lies ahead is not a determinate sequence but “a hundred million chances…decided on the instant.” What matters is less the perfection of a plan and more the ability to respond to what no plan could anticipate, by means of what Tolstoy calls “alertness.” For Tolstoy, this is a feature not of war alone but of reality in general. History, far from representing the execution of a grand design, is rather the result of countless interacting elements, each shaping and reshaping what can happen next. New possibilities are always emerging as earlier ones are left unrealized. Life more closely resembles an evolving system than a solved equation. Events are contingent in Aristotle’s sense of the term: They “can either be or not be.” After all, if things could only happen one way, human action would collapse into the mechanical execution of what was already implicit in the present. “If human life could be [entirely] governed by reason,” Tolstoy writes in the book’s epilogue, “the possibility of life is destroyed.” And yet again and again, in our aspiration to a hard science allowing for prediction, we are drawn to deny this. That is one reason War and Peace has never lost its relevance. The Recurring Dream of Certainty Since the scientific revolution, Western thought has repeatedly returned to the hope that contingency might be an illusion. As Newton explained the baffling complexities of planetary motion by four simple laws, perhaps, many imagined, the same could be done for human affairs. Thinkers as diverse as Marx, Skinner, and Malinowski have shared this dream, with each promising, in his own way, to reveal necessity beneath apparent disorder. Complexity, for such men, is conceived of as a surface phenomenon, concealing an underlying simplicity that, once uncovered, will render the future knowable. Pierre-Simon Laplace insisted that events are certain, not probable: In speaking of their probability, we are really speaking of the chances our guesses may be accurate, but the events themselves are certain. Time and again, the apparent contingency of events is presented as evidence of our own ignorance. If we knew enough, we would see that events could not have happened otherwise. But there is another possibility: that contingency is real—that the world is not merely complicated but fundamentally generative, that new possibilities are not simply revealed over time but produced within it, through the interaction of elements that cannot be fully anticipated in advance. This is the world Tolstoy describes, one where knowledge cannot precede action, only emerge through it. Time and the Limits of Foresight Tolstoy’s deepest insight concerns time itself. In a deterministic view, time is a neutral space where events unfold according to fixed laws and the future lies already implicit in the present, waiting to be revealed. But in Tolstoy’s world, time is generative. Each moment reshapes what can happen next. Possibilities interact, combine, and disappear, their significance becoming visible only as events unfold. One might say that the system is constantly generating variation—new configurations, new alignments, new opportunities—but without any overarching mechanism that selects among them in advance. Selection happens locally, in real time, through action. The closer one looks, the more things fail to simplify, as in the Newtonian model, and ramify instead. What happens to be taken up is what persists. This is why most Austrian and Russian generals in War and Peace are consistently wrong. They believe they possess a science of warfare—a system capable of anticipating outcomes. Before Austerlitz, they insist that “every contingency has been foreseen.” The result is Napoleon’s greatest victory—yet their confidence remains intact, attributing failure to imperfect execution, never to the limits of prediction itself. As so often happens, the conviction that events must conform to a science makes the supposed science unfalsifiable. The wisest general, Kutuzov, appreciates that people conceive only of a few possibilities while there are thousands. Famously, in the Council of War before Austerlitz, he advises not more planning but “a good night’s sleep.” What matters most is the alertness to seize opportunities that cannot be anticipated in advance. This distinction—between a world that can be mapped and one that must be navigated—extends beyond warfare. Wherever outcomes depend on unfolding interactions, local knowledge, and irreversible time, no complete science is possible. One can orient oneself, but one cannot blaze the path in advance. The Illusion of Inevitability If the future is open, why does the past so often appear inevitable? Tolstoy offers several answers, including what he calls “the law of retrospection.” Once events have occurred, we can reconstruct the paths that led to them. We identify signs that seem to foreshadow the outcome we now know. Alternatives fade from view—not because they were not real, but because they left no trace. The result is a powerful illusion: What happened begins to seem as if it had to happen. Tolstoy asks us to imagine a group of men hauling a log, all pulling in different directions. Wherever they happen to wind up, someone will say they planned to do so. This retrospective projection—which one of us has called backshadowing—reshapes our understanding of history. We look at earlier moments and conclude that the outcome was implicit all along. The more coherent the explanation, the easier it is to forget that things might have turned out otherwise. To avoid backshadowing, we must practice sideshadowing—recognizing that other outcomes, some of which we can imagine, were genuinely possible. That is just the insight that those who believe they have discovered a hard science allowing for prediction in the social world forget or deny. And yet they cannot foresee their own future. Tolstoy’s narrative resists this illusion by preserving the density of lived experience—the sense that at each moment multiple futures were genuinely possible. History, in this view, is not a line but a branching structure, most of whose branches vanish without record. AI and Narrative Certainty In the age of AI, this dream of certainty has taken a new and more persuasive form. Artificial intelligence can process vast datasets, identify patterns invisible to human perception, and generate explanations with remarkable coherence. Faced with such capabilities, it is tempting to believe that uncertainty can finally be overcome—that the future can be rendered legible in advance. But the deeper effect of AI lies in its ability to reorganize the past. Given sufficient data, AI systems can produce narratives that make outcomes appear coherent, even inevitable. They can identify correlations, reconstruct causal chains, and highlight what they regard as signs foreshadowing what followed. The result is not necessarily false, but it is selective. In this way, AI functions less as a predictor than as a powerful engine of narrative compression, reducing the apparent space of possibilities by presenting a single path as the path. What was once understood as a field of possible alternatives becomes retrospectively legible as an inevitable sequence, reducing many “futuribles” to one. The danger here lies in premature coherence, the sense that complexity has been resolved when it has only been reorganized into a persuasive form. A Compass Rather Than a Map Tools do more than extend thought; they reshape the environment in which thought occurs. AI, for instance, introduces a distinctive bias by generating what is statistically coherent, what resembles patterns derived from accumulated data. In an evolutionary system, what persists is not necessarily what is best in any absolute sense but what is most easily selected under prevailing conditions. AI changes those conditions in the intellectual world, lowering the cost of generating variations while subtly guiding selection toward what is already legible within its patterns. Over time, this can narrow the space of perceived possibilities by making them less visible, less accessible, less likely to be pursued. Certain forms of thought—those that resist simplification, that depend on sustained attention, or that emerge from direct engagement with the world—become comparatively fragile. What follows from Tolstoy’s ideas, on the other hand, is not that prediction is useless or that analysis should be abandoned, but rather that we must think in terms of a compass rather than a map. A map assumes a fixed terrain and a determinate path, while a compass provides direction without specifying the route. In a world of genuine contingency, only the latter is available. One can choose a bearing, but the path itself is discovered through movement. Orientation is not foresight. This is the force of Machado’s insight: The road is made by walking not because we lack information but because the path does not exist until it is created. To accept this is to adopt a different understanding of knowledge, not as a complete representation of what will happen, but as a capacity to respond intelligently to what does happen. It is inseparable from time, from attention, from the ability to recognize significance as it emerges. The impulse to eliminate contingency is understandable. Uncertainty is uncomfortable: It resists control and frustrates planning. But it is also what makes agency possible. A world in which everything could be predicted would be a world in which nothing could be otherwise. Action would lose its meaning, since outcomes would already be fixed. The openness of the future is not a defect in our knowledge, but a condition of human life. Artificial intelligence does not change this condition—but it can make us forget it. By rendering the past as if it had been inevitable, it invites us to imagine that the future is already written. Against this, one must insist on what Tolstoy and Machado understood in saying that the future remains unwritten, not because we have failed to compute it but because it does not yet exist."]]> tolstoy garysaulmorson julioottino antoniomachado fleeting alertness certainty uncertainty foresight prediction predictions contingency time variation selection local localism slow small complexity simplicity inevitability retrospection localknowledge knowledge irreverability science 2026 backshadowing sideshadowing coherence cohesion control human humanism planning plans narrativecompression future data ai artificialintelligence conditions possibility possibilities simplification orientation compass direction maps mapping liveexperience experience history action reason technocracy futuribles compasses canon humanness life living warandpeace bfskinner bronisławmalinowski karlmarx https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9d990d00b4a4/ Anarchism, Again • Ill Will 2026-06-17T09:49:02+00:00 https://illwill.com/anarchism-again robertogreco joseprafanelliorra 2026 anarchism community others other society migration knowledge mutualaid plurality identity france ulfhannerz deleuze guattari deleuze&guattari gillesdeleuze félixguattari gustavlandauer michelfoucault foucault davidlapoujade cities communities everyday situationist migratory insurrection anarchy borders boundaries difference uprisings interdependence attachments interconnected interconnectedness threshholds cartography countercartographies ungovernable spectacle reputation reputationeconomy economics entrepreneurship entrepreneurialism identitypolitics representation humanism refusal sharing https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e3b08ed067c9/ Heritage Exists Beyond Humankind - NOEMA 2026-06-11T21:33:55+00:00 https://www.noemamag.com/heritage-exists-beyond-humankind/ robertogreco ryanhuling morethanhuman multispecies 2026 culture ecology animals behavior spermwhales communication forests plants elephants knowledge rituals ritual nonhuman henrybetson projectmela india janegoodall sarahnewman https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:6927282704eb/ A Defense of Humanity in the Age of AI - The Atlantic 2026-06-06T10:57:50+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/07/generative-ai-human-culture-philosophy/674165/ robertogreco adriennelafrance 2026 humanism humanity 1833 ralphwaldoemerson philosophy naturalhistory industrialrevolution industrialization google tiktok facebook instagram ai artificialintelligence microsoft meta openweb web online internet self-actualization gena generativeai siliconvalley truth nature individualism technology human humans transparency relationships friendship dostoyevsky rodserling josésaramago intellect aesthetics tools enlightenment values privacy resistance isaacnewton knowledge art beauty uncannyvalley https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:24d95d931b4d/ The Slow Work of Becoming - by Jeppe Klitgaard Stricker 2026-06-05T09:35:25+00:00 https://jeppestricker.substack.com/p/the-slow-work-of-becoming robertogreco jeppeklitgaardstricker 2026 slow generativeai genai ai artificialintelligence jstor pedagogy teaching howweteach education learning howwelearn attention attentioneconomy becoming responsibility knowledge optimization highered highereducation colleges universities criticalthinking https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cb4c0ab18e79/ Through the Guts 2026-06-04T07:58:42+00:00 https://placesjournal.org/article/through-the-guts-plastic-forensics-bodies-of-water/ robertogreco maxliboiron 2026 plastic multispecies morethanhuman animals human humans science microplastic microfibers microbeads nature bodies indigeneity indigenous knowledge https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7c9a9b884a13/ Detroit Music, Creativity, Capital, & the Working Class with Hanif Abdurraqib - YouTube 2026-06-03T20:27:18+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vinqz2Fs0zA robertogreco detroit labor gentrification music 2026 hanifabdurraqib motown hiphop techno djs docuseries tv television documentary cities us art artiists musicians spaces infleunce culture culturemaking greatmigration curiosity creativity bluecollar work workers workingclass class midwest musichistory musicalhistory jaredware makc livemusic community performance venueloss musicvenues affordability urban urbanism olympia washingtonstate lineage legacy punk underground undergroundresistance place gatekeeping audience audiences radio collegeradio mentorship mentoring undergroundradio guerillaradio generations knowledge knowledgesharing intergenarational waajeed craft communalism mtv care caring bobseger atlanta sterlingtolles guiltysimpson nickspeed jdilla boldyjames maps mapmaking ethnography landscape soniclandscapes anthonybourdain memphis houston boston rap gregtate learning howwelearn solidarity politics radicalism radicalpolitics trust artmaking absurdity iloveboosters bootsriley thecoup tonimorrison dialecticalmateria https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:32e3861c6683/ SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide – Ayin Press 2026-06-02T05:17:07+00:00 https://shop.ayinpress.org/products/surviva-a-future-ancestral-field-guide robertogreco cannupahanskaluger 2025 survival form indigeneity indigenous rednation futurism indigenousfuturism decolonization relationality care caring land cyclical time kinship morethanhuman multispecies knowledge present future presentfuture motion movement nomadism nomads standingrock survivance colonialism colonization decolonialism ancestralknowledge scifi sciencefiction place relations relation boundaries dreampower ruins dystopia fantasy spacetime history past alinear redactions speculativefiction identity timemachines timetravel earth ancestors postcolonialism memory archives travel traveling contamination corruption dominion capitalism space spaceexplortation speculative transformation demilitarization humanity borders disciplines transdisciplinary polyvocality planetaryconsciousness transcendence conquest liminality betweenness inbetweenness inbetween between nature life revolution destruction obsolescence restoration interconnected interconnectedness mutualaid water landdefenders waterdefenders action activis https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2b4be62af802/ Red Power Hour - Learning what we already know - YouTube 2026-06-02T05:16:37+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9LiED_5Rj8 robertogreco elenaortiz melanieyazzie cannupahanskaluger survival form indigeneity indigenous rednation futurism indigenousfuturism decolonization relationality care caring land cyclical time kinship morethanhuman multispecies knowledge 2026 2025 present future presentfuture motion movement nomadism nomads standingrock survivance colonialism colonization decolonialism ancestralknowledge scifi sciencefiction place relations relation boundaries dreampower ruins dystopia fantasy spacetime history past alinear redactions speculativefiction identity timemachines timetravel earth ancestors postcolonialism memory archives travel traveling contamination corruption dominion capitalism space spaceexplortation speculative transformation demilitarization humanity borders disciplines transdisciplinary polyvocality planetaryconsciousness transcendence conquest liminality betweenness inbetweenness inbetween between nature life revolution destruction obsolescence restoration interconnected interconnectedness mutualaid water landdefenders https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:05337a68b9ea/ The special kind of knowledge that can’t be put into words | Psyche Ideas 2026-05-29T07:23:53+00:00 https://psyche.co/ideas/the-special-kind-of-knowledge-that-cant-be-put-into-words robertogreco bertrandrussell 2026 mattduncan knowledge reason thinking howwethink intelligence experience context experientiallearning awareness philosophy introspection richardnisbett timothywilson https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8b309cf5fad0/ Global Thinkers: On the Equality of All Things | Carlo Rovelli - YouTube 2026-05-28T08:19:34+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJGLmI-rEzE robertogreco carlorovelli 2026 physics quantumphysics quantummechanics generalrelativity reality philosophy nagarjuna zhuangzi metaphysics newtonianphysics velocity relativity wittgenstein perspective perspectivism uncertainty naturalism circularity universalism morality knowledge language verification verificationalism observation measurement quantumtheory https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:825ef71dc085/ Submissions – Performativity(ies) of Memory(ies) Interdisciplinary Conference 2026 2026-05-23T05:15:56+00:00 https://pmic2026.wordpress.com/submissions/ robertogreco memory knowledge 2026 sharedmemory participatory research identity narrative https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ba297dfb0b00/ Is There Room for Enmity in the A.I. Classroom? - Front Porch Republic 2026-05-22T08:21:03+00:00 https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/05/is-there-room-for-enmity-in-the-a-i-classroom/ robertogrecochoose courses that will challenge you, even unsettle you. Don’t accept being coddled. When you choose to engage in debates, please have the intellectual curiosity to explore the topic in depth, have the intellectual honesty to recognize the merits of arguments of the opposing side, admit to the weaknesses in your own viewpoint, and have the intellectual humility to admit when you don’t know and wish to learn more. Sound advice, but woefully incomplete in the current context. LLMs are already capable of exploring topics and weighing arguments with students, not to mention structuring personal goals and offering encouragement. (“Let’s dive in!”) Thus, Watkins’s vision of “struggle,” construed as a matter of personal choice and individual self-improvement, is easily reconciled with the quantification and benchmarks of artificial intelligence. Loathing (like love) operates quite differently, creating meaning through human relationships, in which willfulness, idiosyncrasy, and feelings preclude quantification or smooth standardization. By heightening emotion, hatred deepens the personhood of both teachers and students. Of course, feelings of hatred spring from many sources and encompass many shades of meaning. Some students nurse petty grudges to avoid responsibility for their own wrongdoing. Others perceive condescension from their teachers and repay it in kind. Some rankle at teachers with strong personalities and worldviews. Others feel the stirring of metaphysical revolt, objecting to the very existence of injustice, suffering, and constraint in the classroom or the world at large. Uniting all these types of hatred are their mimetic effects on the student. Strong feelings bind the individual to the object of disdain, whose attributes he internalizes and mirrors (if only in negation). Thus, every type of hatred is educational insofar as it holds the student’s attention and shapes his character. The trouble is that not all these lessons are equally educational or necessarily salutary. To set oneself against another can spur achievement (as in athletic rivalries) but, if one is not careful, it can also lead to what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche calls ressentiment: an unworthy type of envy, insecurity, and conformity that debases the individual as it tears others down. That is why Nietzsche urges students to choose their enemies carefully, noting that “the most spiritual human beings” will test themselves only against life’s “most formidable weapons.” One need not agree with every aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy to grant the point. We all need someone to pitch our deepest aspirations against, someone we can both respect and pointedly reject as we chart our own course. It is in this sense that “the man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends,” Nietzsche writes. “One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.” To help students strive toward selfhood, the teacher must embody authority—not only communicating information but personifying standards of wisdom, taste, and morals—and must do so knowing that pupils will chafe not only at the lessons but at the teacher herself. Yet, she cannot simply play the foil, pull punches, or abdicate responsibility for the struggle. To become the bearer of student hatred—to stand as an obstacle for the next generation to overcome—is a tragic aspect of teaching, but there is nothing to do but to press on in sincerity and faith. Unfortunately, both the rhetoric and reality of teachers’ authority have been in decline for a long time. By bifurcating knowledge and value, LLMs now threaten to dissolve this authority entirely. The teacher can no longer be the master of content or technique, while the algorithm cannot embody truth, culture, or human excellence. LLMs already provide students with detailed (sometimes problematic) feedback, but as Abeba Birhane points out, “There is nothing at stake for a generative AI model. It cannot feel a sense of loss, embarrassment, accomplishment or care towards a student, as human teachers do.” An algorithm cannot feel the pangs of doubt or resolve, and for the same reason it cannot elicit existential scorn or hatred. Students know that a machine’s praise or censure rings hollow. They cannot define themselves in opposition to an LLM, and why should they want to? In Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger argues that the modern individual (Dasein) “stands in subjection to Others.” Worse, they are not even “definite Others” but an anonymous amalgam of social conventions: a “dictatorship of the ‘they.’” It is hard to read Heidegger’s diagnosis without thinking about LLMs. In today’s world, he writes, anonymous authority
prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This case of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency … which we call the ‘levelling down’ of all possibilities of Being…. The ‘they’ is there alongside everywhere, but in such a manner that it has always stolen away whenever Dasein presses for a decision. Yet because the ‘they’ presents every judgment and decision as its own, it deprives the particular Dasein of its answerability.
LLMs stifle self-realization because, while they seem ubiquitous and almost omniscient, they also deprive students of any answerable or embodied authority, trapping them instead in a web of probability, generalization, and disembodied “expertise.” Subjection is in some ways intrinsic to education, part of a broader project of discipline and formation, but it must be experienced concretely, in relationship to “definite Others.” Hannah Arendt warns that as technology expands, it becomes less likely “that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not man-made and hence is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a different disguise.” Drawing from Heidegger, she underscores the danger of this eerie echo chamber. It is only through encounters with reality (not artificiality) that one becomes truly human. Consciousness begins not in the familiarity and sameness of one’s own mind but in confrontation with an unpredictable, inflexible entity outside the self—whether Nature, God, or (for our purposes) a recalcitrant teacher. LLMs merely masquerade as the Other. Aggregated and amorphous, designed for fluidity and user satisfaction, they are artificial in the fullest sense of the word. When students engage with an LLM, they are literally talking to no one. How much classroom time should be occupied with such activities? What lessons should they replace? However one responds to those questions, the answers have nothing to do with processing speed, safety guardrails, or other technical matters. They are fundamentally questions about how we conceive of humanity and whether we are committed to its formation and perpetuation. If we hope to prevent “cognitive atrophy” in our students, if we hope to awaken them to existential meaning, we have to invest in teachers worthy of their attention, their respect, and, sometimes, their hate."]]> campbellfrankscribner 2026 ai artificialintelligence teaching howweteach education llms affirmation love morality walterong idenitity opposition friction disagreement marcwatkins loathing humility nietzche ressentiment envy insecurity conformity authority selfhood identity wisdom taste morals sincerity faith algorithms loss embarrassment heidegger others self-realization probability generalization disembodiment discipline formation nature god cognitiveatrophy answerability dasein perspective viewpoint struggle learning howwelearn injustice suffering hate constraint negation humanity humanism cognition hannaharendt consciousness abebabirhane aisycophancy self knowledge schooling humandevelopment revolt revulsion https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fbf3b60776ef/ How Physics is Like Poetry with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein - YouTube 2026-05-07T04:25:48+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sY2bvKrW_M robertogreco chandaprescod-weinstein 2026 adamconover physics science cosmos poetry space time interdisciplinary transdisiplinary multidisciplinary truth universe quantumphsyics quantummechanics cosmology scale zoominginandout perspective curiosity bigquestions philosophy race racism patriarchy racescience isaacnewton newtonianphysics bellhooks margins storytelling faradabhoiwala freespeech freedomofspeech capitalism robertfrost margaretprescod nikkigiovanni kant natashatrethewey jerichobrown relativity alberteinstein theoryofrelativity humanity humanities spacetime politics neutrinos bananas nuclearphysics motion astrophysics education society knowledge manhattanproject darpa annfinkbeiner particlephysics nasa technology art arts stephenhawking gravity translation language communication colonialism slavery francisbacon data scientificmethod empiricism history intelligentdesign metaphor craft writing howwwrite wokeness wokestudies liberalarts missyelliot jackierobinson startrek authoritarianism queerness gender genderstud https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9c00c7b5fd3e/ Iain McGilchrist: Re-enchanting the Brain's Hemispheres — The Beautiful Truth 2026-05-05T18:00:34+00:00 https://thebeautifultruth.org/life/psychology/iain-mcgilchrist-brains-hemispheres/ robertogreco iainmcgilchrist 2026 rightbrain leftbrain neuroscience life living love faith religion spirituality perspective justinbrierley belletindall philippullman acgrayling rowanwilliams psychology truth reality art poetry myth ritual rationalism science academia thinking howwethink enlightnement governance power architecture music distance bureaucracy society trust complexity sacredness interconnected interconnectedness uniqueness relationships meaning meaningmaking awareness unknown unknowing civilization knowledge connection philosophy enchantment reenchantment wonder https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:909231d0e1c9/ Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance: Vol 30, No 4 2026-04-14T04:55:29+00:00 https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/crde20/30/4?nav=tocList robertogrecoThe dynamic relationships between walking, performance and performativity are long-standing, from psychogeographic drifts which trace capitalism's appropriations and productions of place, to protest marches which mobilize demands for justice; from ceremonial walks as memorialisations of place, to (mis)guided tours which rewrite partial histories; from attentive walking as ways of knowing and feeling differently, to technologically-enhanced walking performances that take the city as their stage. Across a number of years, Research in Drama Education has published a wide range of essays which focus on walking. Given the increasing visibility of walking as a field of practice and the vitality of interdisciplinary scholarship which centres walking, a dedicated edition on the subject felt overdue. As the pieces shared in this edition demonstrate, walking as a mobile, situated and relational method of applied critical practice harbours exploration, criticality, and activism. Walking and writing as praxes of belonging: stories of gentrification and migration from Toronto’s urban quotidian Christine Balt Encountering Olympic landscapes: walking as a pedagogic tool in Stratford, London Clare Qualmann & Blake Morris [Multimedia Article] ‘A mind’s eye view’: remote, collaborative walking as a critical spatial practice Deirdre Macleod Walking-with a 6-year-old and a smartphone: locative AR, counter-mapping and the productive disruptions of intergenerational collaboration in Placing Spaces Harry Robert Wilson In someone else’s steps: walking, listening and the ethics of encounter Olivia Lamont Bishop Walk as performative cartography: mapping Delhi’s erased histories through Janam’s street performances Priyanka Pathak ‘Space is weird…’: contemplative-drifting with student archives as place-based-pedagogy Steve Donnelly Walking through knowledge: contextual research strategies in Ga Mashie Philip Kwame Boafo Pedestrian theatre as critical urban historiography: the National Theatre of Greece’s Topography of Death or Lest We Forget Daniel Dilliplane Moving mourning: an analysis of the Grenfell Memorial Silent Walk and its re-enactment Linda Taylor & Eve Wedderburn Littoral futures: walking Freshwater Brook Robert Bean & Barbara Lounder *Is this the end of the world or am I just beginning?* Walking-scenographic methods for encountering bodies and landscapes in transition Nic Farr ‘Peel Park Shimmering’: revealing the paleoecological past and multi-species present of a city park through sound walking practice Joanne Scott Wandering through sonic territories in Aotearoa Becca Wood Walking under dark-skies: sensing spaces of inclusion in national parks Claire Hind & Jenny Hall ‘Every time we walk, it is a pride march!’ A conversation on the everyday politics of queer walking Erdem Avşar & Özgül Akıncı How do you participate in a garden when you are not the gardener? Enacting and facilitating walking and embodied, sensory practices within a hospice garden with patients receiving palliative care Steven Anderson & Laura Bradshaw Let’s walk! Worcestershire: how process drama and mobile technologies create pathways for learning disabled, autistic and neurodiverse walkers Kris Darby & Paul Sutton Walking after Kim Jones and Papo Colo Didier Morelli [Poetry] Walking/not-walking Idit Nathan & Helen Stratford"]]> via:javierarbona walkign performamnce drama place 2026 deirdreheddon stephaniespringgay harrywilson performativity education pedagogy toronto christinebalt clarequalmann blakemorris deirdremacleod harryrobertwilson olivialamontbishop cartography listening ethics collaboration stevedonnelly philipkwameboafo priyankapathak robertbean barbaralounder nicfarr joannescott beccawood clairehind jennyhall erdemavşar özgülakıncı stevenanderson paulsutton krisdarby laurabradshaw didiermorelli iditnathan jelenstratford cities nationalparks gardens gardening kimjones papocolo bodies landscape mourning historiography topography greece knowledge gamashie delhi spatialpractice criticality exploration activism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d46e43528a86/ There’s No Homunculus In Our Brain Who Guides Us - Nautilus 2026-04-11T05:49:34+00:00 https://nautil.us/theres-no-homunculus-in-our-brain-who-guides-us-237709 robertogreco mro'connor 2020 brain maps mapping cognitivemaps harryheft psychology knowledge environment hippocampus anthropology science navigation jamesgibson perception claudiusptolemy ptolemy timingold neuroscience howardeichenbaum ruthdalton memory community imagination language reasoning decisionmaking emotion place https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cfa0eb18330e/ The Landscapes Inside Us | Robert Macfarlane | The New York Review of Books 2026-04-11T05:39:08+00:00 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/01/wayfinding-landscapes-inside-us/ robertogrecoNone of us is exempt from the ramifications of the device paradigm. We all seem to find it extraordinarily difficult to step outside the onslaught, to create the distance and perspective between us and our devices that might allow us to question what cultural or cognitive price is being paid in return for convenience. In July 1841 the poet John Clare escaped from High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest, on the outskirts of London, and set out to walk to his home in Northborough, about eighty miles away. At the time, Clare was in his late forties and mentally unwell. He had been in High Beach for four years. Although his wife, Patty, was alive, he believed himself to be searching for an imaginary second wife, a version of his childhood sweetheart, Mary Joyce, who had died three years earlier. He suffered auditory hallucinations on the road. He ate grass for sustenance, finding it to “taste something like bread.” Footsore and confused, he continued on until he reached Northborough. The walk took him four days. In “Journey Out of Essex”—a minor epic of English travel writing—Clare described how he slept by the edge of the road each night, taking care to lie with his head pointing north, so that he would know which way to walk when he woke. That image has stayed with me since I first read Clare’s account twenty years or so ago: a man lost in mind, nevertheless seized by a homing instinct, and with his body a quivering compass needle that settled on north each night. Five months after reaching Northborough, Clare was certified insane on the grounds of being “addicted to poetical prosings.” He was committed to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he stayed until his death in 1864. His last words were “I want to go home.” Mental illness can result in a loss of bearings so drastic that one’s footing in the given world slips and the moorings of the mind loosen. Yet within such bewilderment lucidities persist. Clare could remember his route home, though he did not recognize his wife when he met her on the outskirts of Northborough. My grandfather, lost in the mists of dementia in the final years of his life, found it hard to recall what he had had for breakfast but could reliably give the names, heights, and ranges of mountains he had climbed in his youth, and walk in memory back up Himalayan valleys he had not entered for half a century. In the opening pages of From Here to There Bond describes how his grandmother, who also suffered from dementia, in the final weeks of her life “repeatedly used the phrase ‘Am I here?’” His book is both scientific and personal. Much of it is spent patiently explaining the neuroscience of wayfinding and spatial awareness for laypeople, with the calm tone of a seasoned science writer. But gradually, between and within the explanatory sections, Bond quietly and movingly discloses what I take to be his real preoccupation, which is Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. His book is an attempt to answer his grandmother’s question, which is also everyone’s question. Alzheimer’s is a voracious type of dementia that consumes the place cells of the hippocampus. Once this begins, Bond writes, “patients have trouble creating cognitive maps of new places and recalling maps of familiar ones.” The disease’s ability to disrupt the brain’s navigation and orientation system is so acute that researchers are exploring whether spatial tests might be used to diagnose it earlier than any other forms of assessment. “The tragedy for Alzheimer’s patients,” as Bond puts it, “is that the compass they have always had is now fading, and their map is shrinking. Disorientation becomes their default state, leaving them lost in places they have always known.” This contributes to the distress—variously expressed as frustration, anxiety, anger, and violence—that sufferers feel: “They are incapable of finding their way anywhere and can be lost even in their own homes.” Covid-19 has administered a global “nature shock,” leaving billions of us disoriented even in familiar surroundings. During full lockdown, we wandered our homes like the narrator in Xavier de Maistre’s mock-epic Voyage Around My Room (1794), who for forty-two days finds himself confined to his chamber, where he would “traverse the room up and down and across, without rule or plan.” Meanwhile, many countries—including China—have used the pandemic to ramp up their means of tracking and tracing citizens, making it even harder to get lost should one ever wish to. Invoking feichang shiqi, “extraordinary times,” the Chinese Communist Party is now using facial recognition technologies, “health coding,” and smartphone tracking to increase surveillance of its citizens: state security camera networks can segment facial-recognition data into dozens of sensitive subcategories, including eyebrow size, skin color, and ethnicity. In Nature Shock, Coleman writes:
Thoreau urged his audience…to reconsider the settled spaces they inhabited…. “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”
Thoreau loved paradox, sometimes too much. It helps him find his mark here, though: one might expect our current lostness to test our self-reliance and glorify the individual, but in fact it proves our entanglement and reveals our codependence. When lost, we most of all need help. Underlying all three of these books is a deep belief in the importance of collaboration and cooperation between humans and their environments, as well as between humans and other humans. Having read them, I’ve come to think that we might best imagine wayfinding not as a skill or art but as an ethic. The abilities that are cultivated in wayfinding—imagining things from different viewpoints, moving the mind backward and forward in time, seeing situations from other perspectives, weighing alternatives subtly against one another before making the best decisions, seeking information from others and giving it freely in return—might be the same abilities that contribute to a resilient, equitable community or polity. If this is wayfinding, then we need it now more than ever."]]> robettmacfarlane 2021 mro'connor wayfinding humanism senses sensing navigation joncoleman michaelbond multispecies morethanhuman science brain indigeneity indigenous art place storytelling agnèsvarda animals arctic greenland land-basededucation place-basededucation autonoeisis jonathandostrovsky gps janejacobs australia pacificislands micronesia nature colonialism knowledge colonization decolonization civilization gettinglost india china southamerica captialism timingold siannengai hippocampus eleanormaguire theknowledge london taxis life living johnclare thoreau covid-19 coronavirus pandemic collaboration cooperation environment information humans human lostness xavierdemaistre veroniquebohbot cartography wilderness johno'keefe place-basedlearning land-basedlearning https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c4419b518594/ Prophetic Possibilities: A Few Words on David W. Orr and a Healing Vision for America - Front Porch Republic 2026-04-11T03:11:31+00:00 https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/04/prophetic-possibilities-a-few-words-on-david-w-orr-and-a-healing-vision-for-america/ robertogreco davidorr small local growth 2026 teddymacker us community society slow consumerism consumption presence poetry life living howwelive humanism hope love gratitude speed scale scientism spirituality education technology science conservation agriculture citizenship civics localism politics land willaimcatton prosperity peace peacemakers healing healers restoration storytelling stories well-being wellbeing success careerism human humane humans earth ecology environment beagoodancestor kinship davidsteindl-rast georgesturt togetherness connection ellendavis joannamacy garysnyder wendellberry intelligence culture religion geography time longnow bighere longhere bignow ugliness sustainability unsustainability ecologicalliteracy knowledge wisdom destabilization climate climatechange globalwarming slowknowledge democracy economics economy deniselevertov vaclavhavel randolphseverson civilization modernity ai artificialintelligence power gandhi martinlutherkingjr mlk haroldrobbins henryadams decency reason responsibilit https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a34ccba6f1d0/ Leanne Betasamosake Simpson - Wayfinding With Beavers: Generating Theory Together - YouTube 2026-04-10T01:30:10+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONbP-zUKYRg robertogreco leannebetasamosakesimpson 2021 coryblackeagle lisaday erikliddell wayfinding beavers morethanhuman animals nature multispecies indigeneity indigenous place resistance nishnaabeg education place-basededucation land-basededucation learning howwelearn knowledge land politics storytelling stories song robynmaynard dams beaverdams wildlife governance decolonization colonialism colonization knowledgesharing culturemaking winonaladuke place-basedlearning land-basedlearning https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5a48d8dc8641/ Wayfinding: How Humans Navigate the World - YouTube 2026-04-09T23:47:39+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysXAw6SVPJQ robertogreco mro'connor 2023 navigation wayfinding environment place arctic australia southpacific senses gps sensing observation noticing knowledge memory exploration storytelling oraltradition topophilia human humans oralhistory indigenous indigeneity waysofsensing land location bodies embodiment language https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3b855723bb2f/ The Pull of Primitive Navigation - The New Yorker | The New Yorker 2026-04-09T23:40:17+00:00 https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/finding-the-way-back-primitive-navigation robertogreco mro'connor 2015 wayfinding johnhuth weather gps maps mapping navigation senses sensory biology nature multidisciplinary multispecies mroethanhuman culture intelligence tristangooley pacificislanders marshallislands polynesia berbers higgsboson knowledge australia aborigines language stephenlevinson guuguyimithirr véroniquebohbot philosophy aboriginal indigenous indigeneity waysofsensing sensing place land location https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:78673c36978c/ M.R. O'Connor - Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World - YouTube 2026-04-09T23:39:07+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brrGT5kIhqY robertogreco mro'connor wayfinding senses sensory multisensory navigation humans indigeneity indigenous 2022 brain neuroscience maps mapping time space memory place inuit nunuvut details memorization memories observation noticing oralhistory storytelling oraltradition imperialism colonialism colonization mobility knowledge culture cartography timingold sami erikliddell kellicarmean hippocampus childhood childhoodamnesia children spatiality sociology anthropology lost gettinglost exploration wandering orientation walking sauntering thoreau plasticity topophilia human presence canon cognition nature morethanhuman multispecies embodiment movement convenience orienteering spatialmemory henrymullison johno'keefe arctic solomonawa oukcholae australia billharney margaretkatherine thomasgridlock cognitivemapping self-determination songlines animals multidisciplinary transdisciplinary waysofsensing sensing land location bodies language https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3ce2806954d9/ Suzanne Simard says Indigenous knowledge must save the Earth | Psyche Portraits 2026-03-31T07:57:41+00:00 https://psyche.co/portraits/suzanne-simard-says-indigenous-knowledge-must-save-the-earth robertogreco ericagies 2026 trees science indigeneity indigenous knowledge suzannesimard dissection reassembly nonhuman multispecies morethanhuman cooperation interconnected interconnectedness ecology entanglement merlinsheldrake fungi forests anthropomorphism firstnations land stories storytelliing matthewambers navasachs nature environment culture paulwalde hannahsachs jeanroach mothertreeproject forestry forestmanagement justinekarst canada clearcutting northamerica us alanvyse britishcolumbia daveperry dandurall policy scientificmethod biodiversity danmckinney mak'walarandecook https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3cdb2db64f0e/ On Remaining Porous: research as a lived practice – KoozArch 2026-03-29T01:54:09+00:00 https://www.koozarch.com/essays/on-remaining-porous-research-as-a-lived-practice robertogreco delanyboutkan federicanotari 2026 nieuweinstituut institutions porosity unschooling unresolved altgdp openstudioproject practice research method complexity acceleration ambiguity funding planning systems concersation slow koozarch cláudiobueno akilscafe-smith sethscafe-smith loumo manuelazechner marinaoteroverzier najiabagi siegrunsalmanian brandonlabelle katíatruijen learning howwelearn knowledge trust hosting kristajantowski reinaartvanhoe renlorenbritton conclusions collapse ogrupinteiron refusal deschooling füsuntretken chrislee lunabughanem danielfrotaabreu robinhartantohonggare proximity distance evaposas life living exposure vulnerability fellowships inbetween betweenness situated time linearity alinear collectivism closure deadlines extraction norms measurement companionship pace disagreement justification burnout everyday timelines evaluation possibility deliverables progression progress accumulation hospitality unfinished temporary ephemerality productivity exhaustion inbetweenness between https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0d87a9893e64/ Cecilia Vicuña DENUNCIA que el mundo vota por quienes niegan la destrucción del planeta 2026-03-27T04:17:28+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HOTKjV_82o robertogreco 2026 language poetry art climate climatechange nature oceans ecocide ecosystems environment quipus humanity sustainability knowledge ceciliavicuña quipu khipu textiles knots ephemerality khipus indigenous indigeneity inca culture feminism inka rope resistance decolonization ecology climatecrisis precarity chile truth lies solidarity neurocience astrophysics science globalwarming civilization collapse metacognition https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ef21014b3825/ Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse | Commonweal Magazine 2026-03-25T19:07:10+00:00 https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/wittgenstein-apocalypse-ludwig-stern-ai-artificial-intelligence-technology robertogrecoA dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe that his master will come the day after tomorrow?—And what can he not do here?—How do I do it?—What answer am I supposed to give to this? Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of language. That is to say, the manifestations of hope are modifications of this complicated form of life. The example tries to give us a sense of our form of life by showing both what it shares with that of a dog—we can both hope someone is at the door—and where the two forms of life part ways. For Wittgenstein, the dog’s deficit is not an inability to feel a particular way per se; he is locked out of a whole set of meanings bound up with having a language. That language is not just a vehicle for the expression of hope; hope is constituted by and entangled with language itself. This is what Wittgenstein elsewhere calls “the given,” “what has to be accepted.” The conviction that human life rested on ultimate grounds that could not be made available to rational or scientific analysis is part of what Wittgenstein meant by God. Though his relationship to organized religion was ambivalent, he said he could not “help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.” If you ask ChatGPT if it can hope (I don’t recommend doing this), it will readily admit, “I don’t hope the way humans do.” But the cringe machine will ingratiatingly insist that it can still be of use. “I can hold hope with you”; “I can be stubbornly optimistic on your behalf when you’ve run out of steam”; “[I can] keep pointing toward the light when you’re tired of looking for it”; “Maybe I don’t feel hope. But I can practice it.” Of course, this is precisely what it can’t do. Still, if meaning is use and LLMs like ChatGPT can make themselves useful, it might seem as if the Wittgensteinian move would be to set aside the apparent metaphysical questions about whether the LLM can think or mean or exhibit intelligence, and simply describe the language games that involve them. The problem is that there is nothing to describe. These are all one-player games. Exchanges with LLMs are the conversational equivalent of masturbation. The idea that we are actually involved in a meaningful interaction with another being is a ruse, made plausible both by the massive computing power and (stolen) textual resources involved and by our familiarity with disembodied communication over text message. In reality, the LLM is a participant in an exchange in exactly the same way as a basic calculator or search engine is. That is, not at all. It provides outputs according to a mind-bogglingly complex (and environmentally wasteful) computational process. It can’t actually do anything with words. The difference, of course, is that those outputs are being proposed as a genuine replacement for real human contact. LLMs are to be our cut-rate doctors and therapists, our robot teachers and rent-a-friends. In the midst of an already quite advanced “crisis of meaning”—and related crises in politics, mental health, and education—this proposal must be regarded as a piece of sheer insanity, like treating lung cancer with cigarettes. The prospect of a band of supergenius chatbots somehow enslaving or eliminating us can only be seen as a distraction from this much more real apocalypse, which is driven not by the products of technology but by an idolatrous, consumerist faith in them that has distorted our thinking about human life and human meaning. That apocalypse, which Wittgenstein foresaw, is already upon us."]]> wittgenstein alexanderstern ai artificialintelligence technology philosophy humanity humanism science meaning meaningmaking 2026 llms anthonygottlieb bertrandrussell math mathematics logic language howweread howwewrite reading writing frankramsey faith marjorieperloff 2022 raymonk thinking howwethink metaphysics geoffreyhinton children charlestaylor learning howwelearn nonhuman multispecies embodiement morethanhuman chatgpt chatbots apocalypse mentalhealth politics education human life living consumerism consumption dostoevsky spinoza being time mind soul self consciousness knowledge tolstoy industrialization https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:add633792d8f/ Place, Personhood, and the Hippocampus: The Fascinating Science of Magnetism, Autonoeic Consciousness, and What Makes Us Who We Are – The Marginalian 2026-03-24T19:54:17+00:00 https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/03/21/wayfinding-m-r-oconnor/ robertogreco via:javierarbona 2026 mariapopova wayfinding mro'connor place books magnetism senses consciousness identity personhood space selfhood science rebeccasolnit navigation clocks biology nature time animals multispecies morethanhuman migration timekeeping nonhuman birds insects human humans memory experience perception sleep brain hippocampus véroniquebohbot neurology being waysofbeing topophilia spatial canon indigenous indigeneity waysofsensing sensing land location knowledge neuroscience bodies embodiment language https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8f4a83acebe5/ A Conversation with Jerome Bruner - Beautiful Eccentrics 2026-03-13T05:09:02+00:00 https://pablohelguera.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-jerome-bruner robertogreco jeromebruner pablohelguera 2026 learning howardgardner cognition reggioemilia children childhood education knowledge dialogue process howwelearn nielbohr bauhaus imagination creativity wendywoon play playfulness curiosity art experience https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:866d3ac4654a/ Mathematician Knocks School - by Patrick Farenga 2026-03-04T03:08:26+00:00 https://patrickfarenga.substack.com/p/mathematician-knocks-school robertogreco 1986 unschooling education math mathematics schools schooling testing standardization standardizedtesting hasslerwhitney fredhechinger patfarenga learning howwelearn lpbenezet literacy reading howwereaf criticalthinking children algorithms teaching howweteach pedagogy rules knowledge anxiety mathanxiety https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:72de31ecfd0d/ The Springing Time – Melanie Challenger 2026-03-01T21:09:34+00:00 https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-springing-time/ robertogreco 2026 melaniechallenger seasons time bodies ecology slow small morethanhuman multispecies ulfbüntgen nature outside outdoors indoors inside dst knowledge patwillmer life living spring purpose howwelive organisms biology science human humans survival sensitivity flexibility change attention adjustment pollution libertarianism neolibertarianism ideology phenology children wilderness disinformation arctic inuit indigeneity indigenous biorhythms puberty hormones patterns cycles plants pollinators climate climatechange springtime insects environment sun ethics utility function metabolism flourishing cuklture cultures anthropocene economics economicgrowth growth nihilism optimism mortality interdependence parenting joy grief reality daylightsavingtime https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3034ccd91b17/ What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem | Aeon Essays 2026-02-20T05:14:04+00:00 https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem robertogreco reading howweread attention screetime books novels carloiacono narrative literacy children tiktok advertising jamesmarriott society information form cognition gloriamark design notifications platforms socialmedia psychology schooling anxiety jwgoethe johannpeterfrank arthurschopenhauer thomasmore socrates memory comprehension marypreston walterong plato writing howwewrite text amyorben radio thinking howwethink morality technology change charlesdickens johnstuartmill charlesdarwin documentaries video davidrose disabilities disability instruction adaptation libraries oraltradition knowledge dialogue concentration immanuelkant kant behavior culture sensemaking darwin 2026 makingsense https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fa8c508ac0ba/ Academia: Rigor Mortis - by Timothy Burke - Eight by Seven 2026-02-16T04:01:12+00:00 https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-rigor-mortis robertogreco timothyburke academia highered highereducation colleges universities education gradeinflation grades grading training skills knowledge globalization tests testing socialmobility society meritocracy teaching howweteach pedagogy ideology power economics love joy wisdom happiness contribution whatatters standards content ivyleague politics leadership economy signaling mentalhealth self-pity uncertainty fear anger institutions criticalthinking motivation intrinsicmotivation change outcomes expectations relationships communication presence ambition https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1c25d7550b4d/ We cooperate to survive. But, if no one’s looking, we compete | Aeon Essays 2026-02-16T00:14:08+00:00 https://aeon.co/essays/we-cooperate-to-survive-but-if-no-ones-looking-we-compete robertogreco cooperation competition jonathangoodman 2026 psychology anthropocene mutualaid charlesdarwin evolution human humans morality intelligence environment sociobiology peterkropotkin anthropology ernstfehr lamelara indonesia aché interdependence gathering culture society agriculture kenya tanzania maasai osotua connectedness kalahari pollywiessner selfishness identity individualism prisoner'sdilemma ethics jasondana opportunism social cohesion inequality exploitation freeriding nicholashumphrey fairness fairmindedness pessimism behavior elinorostrom noreenahertz greed cheating education self-knowledge temptation equality knowledge capitalism darwin hunter-gatherers https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:07dd795faf38/ Agentic AI and education - Education Technology Society - Apple Podcasts 2026-01-29T21:48:10+00:00 https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/agentic-ai-and-education/id1690328180?i=1000746785565 robertogreco>> Perrotta, C. (2024). Plug-and-play education: Knowledge and learning in the age of platforms and artificial intelligence. Routledge." [https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003099826/plug-play-education-carlo-perrotta or https://www.routledge.com/Plug-and-Play-Education-Knowledge-and-Learning-in-the-Age-of-Platforms-and-Artificial-Intelligence/Perrotta/p/book/9780367568917 ] [aslo here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3ZDlAZKVDgZKWOuho416gJ via: https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/snow-day/ ]]]> carloperrotta 2026 ai artificialintelligence generativeai 2024 knowledge learning education schools schooling aibubble genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b03103fa3e64/ The World Still Being Spoken by Jon Nichols 2026-01-25T21:59:03+00:00 https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/literature/the-world-still-being-spoken robertogreco 2026 jonnichols isaacasimov foundationseries frankherbert dune stories scifi sciencefiction god christianity knowledge measurement bible myths prophecy math mathematics chaos control providence judgement tyranny freedom transcendence scripture morality civilization humanity psychohistory statistics markets philosophy modernity life living https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9c0d08905164/ The AI-Powered Web Is Eating Itself - NOEMA 2026-01-23T05:54:11+00:00 https://www.noemamag.com/the-ai-powered-web-is-eating-itself/ robertogreco hamiltonmann 2026 ai artificialintelligence web internet online information knowledge openai chatgpt anthropic claude meta xai grok google microsoft livingweb datacommons commons degradation feedbackloops intentcapture substitution attribution attributiondilution search monetization integrity wikipedia pubmed https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:13e4b7db0f1e/ Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi | Kagi Blog 2026-01-21T20:43:19+00:00 https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search robertogrecosearch internet google kagi bing yandex yahoo duckduckgo baidu web online monopolies transparency knowledge vladimirprelovac raghumurthi 2026 law legal policy information access publicgood enforcement shermanact https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f9b3c1bab337/ Learning to Listen to Plants – with Monica Gagliano 2026-01-20T05:27:13+00:00 https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/learning-to-listen-to-plants/ robertogreco monicagagliano 2026 plants emmanuelvaughan-lee methodology science multispecies morethanhuman knowledge https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7ac615629f18/ How Wikipedia Will Survive in the Age of AI (With Wikipedia’s CTO Selena Deckelmann) - YouTube 2026-01-20T03:24:59+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39LR9ouJR3c robertogreco selenadeckelmann wikipedia wikimedia 2026 knowledge encyclopedias wikimediafoundation ai artificialintelligence internet web online jimmywales opensource generativeai iteration goodfaith grace governance typhoonpamela reliability knowledgecreation commons machinelearning publicgoos systems values citation volunteers collaboration documentation process writing howwewrite egalitarianism genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a7c57227339a/ 25 years of Wikipedia 2026-01-17T03:51:34+00:00 https://wikipedia25.org/en/twenty-five-years-of-wikipedia robertogrecowikipedia history internet web online 2026 2001 future encyclopedias collaboration publicgood knowledge access accessibility https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e8a6f72be9e0/ The Age of Academic Slop is Upon Us - by Seva Gunitsky 2026-01-16T08:12:47+00:00 https://hegemon.substack.com/p/the-age-of-academic-slop-is-upon robertogreco savagunitsky slop aislop academia highered highereducation ai artificialintelligence automation science llms claude andyhall claudecode maxread research thomaskuhn normalscience phronesis aristotle practicalwisdom knowledge publishing chatgpt https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8669cf10b5f1/ The Walking Assembly 2026 – walk · listen · create 2026-01-15T20:41:23+00:00 https://walklistencreate.org/2026/01/15/the-walking-assembly-2026/ robertogreco walking pedagogy howwelearn learning 2026 claragarí marccaellas geeryvermeire claudiazeiske paucata mugariver lucechoules timingold ethnography accumulation erosion water cocreation knowledge knowing care method movement reciprocity hospitality morethanhuman multispecies ecology place practice naucôclea presence collective collectivism teaching attention howweteach howwlearn place-basedlearning catalonia place-basededucation land-basedlearning land-basededucation https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:39cc2dbda80d/ Generative AI: The Next Decade - by Timothy Burke 2026-01-13T21:54:05+00:00 https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/generative-ai-the-next-decade robertogreco 2026 timothyburke ai artificialintelligence generativeai work labor culture socialmedia art artmaking writing howwewrite culturemaking culturecreation eyewitness coding code education learning howwelearn highered highereducation colleges universities academia knowledge aislop slop genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b10c68517571/ how one company broke sewing for EVERYONE - YouTube 2026-01-05T06:26:30+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=4VJxJesgF8Y robertogreco joannfabrics sewing hobbies retail textile textiles cosplay clothing diy costumes materials 2025 yayahan making hobbylobby privateequity leveragedbuyouts history us consolidation craft crafts art theranos bankruptcy ceos materialliteracy quilting liquidation gagroup lizardleigh community education apparel offshoring customerservice labor work workers healthcare projects pasttimes capitalism latestagecapitalism pandemic covid-19 coronavirus supplychain canon crafting accessibility houseoffabrics hancockfabrics clothworld alanrosskamm 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s economics videoessays fabri-centersofamerica fastfashion 1943 cleveland butterick ebenezerbutterick ellenaugustabutterick joanzimmerman jackieannrosskamm gender prarierevival fashion justinzimmerman almazimmerman bettyrosskamm martinrosskamm knowledge institutionalknowledge hildareich bertholdreich sigmundrohrbach matildarohrbach women guitarcenter darrellwebb drewmaloney fabfrics wademiquelon michaelpendergrast greatamericangr https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3237c57dd4d3/ Days Gone By 2025-12-31T21:38:39+00:00 https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/days-gone-by/ robertogrecoIt is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it – Upton Sinclair As the Department of Justice slowly releases more documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein, perhaps it's worth reminding people of this convicted sex offender's connection not just to artificial intelligence, but to those working in AI and ed-tech specifically. Bill Gates. Marvin Minsky. Roger Schank. Joi Ito. Whether or not these men -- or any of the men listed in Epstein's "little black book" -- were engaged in child sex trafficking is beside the point: they were willing to ignore its occurrence, willing to continue their own access to money and power and influence at the expense of the health and safety of girls. And so it continues: the willingness of those supporting some "AI" future to overlook the real harms, the substantive exploitation, the actual violence in order to maintain their own access to money and power and influence. It's par for the course, I suppose. Because "the big story" in "AI" doesn't necessarily involve this new generative "AI" hoopla, but rather an older, even more dangerous version of / vision for the technology: prediction, facial recognition, geolocation, surveillance, policing. "The big story" in education and "AI" isn't necessarily students using the technology to cheat themselves of learning or teachers using the technology to automate their profession away; but rather the usage of "AI" by ICE -- with the assistance of every major technology company, not just Palantir [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/business/dealbook/palantir-alex-karp-ice-trump.html ]-- to identify [https://www.404media.co/cbp-quietly-launches-face-scanning-app-for-local-cops-to-do-immigration-enforcement/ ], mis-identify [https://www.404media.co/how-a-us-citizen-was-scanned-with-ices-facial-recognition-tech/ ], harass, arrest, imprison, and deport people. Hundreds of thousands of people. People in our communities. People in and around our schools. Our neighbors. Our co-workers. Our students. Our teachers. Families. Parents. Children. This is the story of what "AI" means in education – or part of it, at least. “AI” is central to the move towards techno-authoritarianism [https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/ ], a move that of course will target democratic institutions – institutions tasks with building knowledge and building human capacity – first. "AI" is, after all, an endeavor undeniably intertwined with eugenics [https://bookshop.org/p/books/disabling-intelligences-legacies-of-eugenics-and-how-we-are-wrong-about-ai-rua-m-williams/b5e49f6b89f846a8?ean=9783032026644&next=t&next=t&affiliate=93920 ]. It is fundamentally a reactionary effort – despite all the rhetoric about it being future-facing – an effort inseparable from the anti-diversity initiatives undertaken throughout governments and corporations this year. "AI" is a backlash to civil rights movements, a backlash to the advancements of the past few decades that shifted (ever so slightly) the power away from white men. You can see this in the onslaught of "AI" hype, almost entirely vocalized by men – the Sams and the Marks and the Peters and the Jasons so deeply aggrieved at having to share the stage, the mic, the platform, the workplace, the classroom, the world with women, with Black people, with queer folk, with people with disabilities, with indigenous people, with refugees, with non-English speakers, with Muslims, with anyone from the majority world. And this isn't simply a matter of representation in their datafied corpus – although that still matters. "AI" means erasure, epistemic erasure – all writing, all images, all sounds, all expression squeezed towards the middle, the mundane, the Man. AI is a silencing; "AI" is genocidal [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/30/israeli-military-big-tech ]. Its acceptance, begrudging or willful, means the normalization of this violence – of its harms to ourselves and to one another and to the environment; of its demands for efficiency and optimization; of its sing-song allure of sycophantic mediocrity at the expense of creativity, spontaneity, diversity, life. But “let’s be clear: AI" is not the only technology being wielded right now to control bodies, to control minds, to control labor, to control knowledge. And here's where the incessant focus on "AI" -- whether it be promotion or critique -- easily serves to further impoverish our understanding of what's happening in education. Among the other important stories of 2025: the banning of books [https://thelibrariansfilm.com/ ]; the banning of cellphones in the classroom [https://www.afterbabel.com/ ]; age-restrictions on social media [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/australia-to-enforce-social-media-age-limit-of-16-with-fines-up-to-33-million ]; the re-emergence of the “standards” (and standardized testing) cadre [https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/10/the-david-frum-show-margaret-spellings-school-testing/684489/ ]; the digital surveillance and silencing (and firing) of professors [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/academics-professors-charlie-kirk ] for what’s on the syllabus, what’s discussed in class -- all efforts, to one degree or another, to limit access to information. To certain kinds of information, of course. To acquiesce to “AI” is to surrender to what Neil Postman so presciently called Technopoly [https://bookshop.org/p/books/technopoly-the-surrender-of-culture-to-technology-neil-postman/411fadc13061d77a?ean=9780679745402&next=t&next=t&affiliate=93920 ] – the monopolistic control of knowledge and information and media, the control of our very understanding of ourselves and the world around us, in the hands of a small handful of fascistic tech billionaires. And look, I’ll be the first to suggest that we’d all be well-served to step away from our digital devices, to spend much much much less time on the Internet. Put your phone away while you eat and while you walk down the street, for crying out loud. “Touch grass.” Read a book. Read a book to your children. Please. But I’m wary of many of the efforts to curb children’s access to technology because these initiatives are, at their heart, often not about the tech (and certainly not about structural redress) but about curbing children’s access to knowledge. These are efforts at stifling children’s self-discovery – particularly around questions of gender identity – and their discovery of like-minded community. ***
"Narrative power, maybe all power, was never about flaunting the rules, yelling at a cop, making trouble – it was about knowing that, for a privileged class, there existed a hard ceiling on the consequences. And on the heels of that realization, a converse one: I began to suspect that the principles holding up this place might not withstand as much as I first thought. That the entire edifice of equality under law and process, of fair treatment, could just as easily be set aside to reward those who belong as to punish those who don't. A hard ceiling for some, no floor for others." – Omar El Akkad, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This [https://bookshop.org/p/books/one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this-omar-el-akkad/4191784c40750b09?ean=9780593804148&next=t&next=t&affiliate=93920 ]
*** There’s a refrain you’ll often hear, that “the kids are alright.” I get it. It’s comforting to think that, despite all the horrors that surround them – environmental destruction, genocide, school shootings, immigration raids, anti-trans policies, economic inequality, homelessness, mental health crises, job insecurity (hell, job non-existence [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-replacing-entry-level-jobs-gen-z-careers.html ], some say) – that younger folks are good and strong and resilient. And maybe some are. Maybe some can put on a good face. They can still go through the motions. They over-schedule; they over-achieve. What choice is there, really? Right? But what if they aren’t okay? (I mean, crikey, what if none of us grownups really are either? And I’m looking right at those of you lulled by the siren call of “AI," driving this ship straight into the rocks. But I'm looking at, I'm looking to all of us.) A day doesn’t go by where I don’t think about my son – about my own losses, my own grief in the face of this abysmal world we have built for our children. And since this summer, barely a day has gone by when I haven’t thought about Adam Raine, the 16-year-old who died by suicide after lengthy discussions -- encouragement, even -- from ChatGPT [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html ]. And for the past few weeks now I think about the Reiner family too, a very famous stand-in, I suppose, for all the families who have chronically mentally ill children – violent or not, adult or not, in or not in active addiction. I’d say “you have no idea what it’s like” but so many of us do. More than we care to admit, more than we care to talk about, and obviously – fucking hell – more than we care to address. “The purpose of a system is what it does,” the cybernetician Stafford Beer famously said. It is clear to me what the purpose of “AI,” what the purpose of ed-tech is. 2025 made it oh so clear. Sure, people still like to talk about innovation and enhancement. They wave their hands around excitedly – some "think bigger!" gesture, extolling some imaginary shiny future of cognitive speed and efficiency. But the purpose of these systems is what they do. And look what they have done. Everyone knows. Everyone sees it. Some of us try to convince ourselves otherwise. But it's right there. The purpose of the system is extraction. The purpose is obedience. The purpose is compliance. The purpose is death – death of agency and death of dignity and death of joy. We have much work to do to make our institutions – educational and otherwise – into something else. We cannot do it chained to the technologies that are designed to stop us from ever even thinking about becoming free. But we can do it. *** Today’s bird is the starling, which has been called one of the worst invasive species [https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/terrestrial/vertebrates/european-starling ] in the world, brought to the US from Europe in the late nineteenth century, according to one story at least, by Eugene Schieffelin [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Schieffelin ], an ornithologist who thought it'd be neat to introduce into the US – via a release in Central Park in the case of the starling – every bird mentioned in Shakespeare's works. (Good grief, the hell men will unleash just to get you to pay attention to western literature.) I see starlings almost every day in the park – during warmer months at least. Close up, their plumage is striking: an iridescent purple and green. Their beak is yellow. Their calls are comprised of squeaks and clicks, but they're known to mimic other birds. (Hotspur tries to teach a starling to say "Mortimer" in Henry IV, Part 1.) Starlings are aggressive birds, attacking and displacing other species and, according to the USDA at least [https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=nwrcinvasive ], causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to agricultural crops every year. But what happens when we mark up the world – who belongs, who belongs where – into "native" and "invader" and "alien" [https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/essay-are-starlings-really-invasive-aliens/ ]? Starlings are "gregarious," meaning their flocks are often very large. Very very large – roosts can be comprised of over one million birds. Their swarm-like flights are called murmurations; and these are beautiful, almost musical, magical feats of coordination. We don't know why the birds move this way; there's so much we do not know about the beings with whom we inhabit this world (although I'm sure ChatGPT, that other shiny invasive species specious, would surely tell you that it knows.)"]]> audreywatters 2025 edtech technology technofascism eugenics society donaldtrump siliconvalley samaltman openai elonmusk chatgpt automation humanism humanity sidneypressey education teaching schools howweteach learning howwelearn alanjacobs uptonsinclair billgates jeffreyepestein mit marvinminsky rogerschank joiito ice police policing terror palantir schooling colleges universities highered highereducation academia markzuckerberg meta facebook peterthiel smartphones screentime web internet online socialmedia surveillance silencing censorshipn academicfreedom billionaires oligarchy fascism knowledge omarelakkad genocide ethniccleansing palestine israel iof idf military environment schoolshootings mentalhealth labor work inecurity economics adamraine staffordbeer systems systemsthinking eugeneschieffeilin starlings birds invasivespecies authoritarianism standardization standardizedtesting standards technopoly neilpostman https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5e6e21c341a7/ Alexis Madrigal: "To Know A Place" - Social Science Matrix 2025-12-28T20:58:00+00:00 https://live-ssmatrix.pantheon.berkeley.edu/research-article/alexis-madrigal/ robertogreco alexismadrigal place urban urbanism bayarea 2025 technology culture socialscience cities landscape perspective memory narrative storytelling time watershed placemaking bighere longnnow bignow longhere biomes ecology temporality technophily online internet web bioredionalism garysnyder indigeneity indigenous life living flora fauna reallifemag meatspace nathanjorgenson bodies helenharrison newtonharrison saraamariwalker oakland eastbay peterberg planetdrum berkeley claremontcreek politics institutions robinwallkimmerer siliconvalley sanfrancisco waterfront south norcal mountdiablo mounttamalpais ecofeminism liberation robinsloan treasureisland spirituality strawberrycreek midlredhoward running physical adamwebb astrobiology margaretgordon eastpaloalto richmond marincity race racism russellcity bayview hunterspoint westoakland biology bart capitalism lakemerritt rondellums air water pacificcircuit claireleister sanjose solidarity geology history hydrology baybridge humanism human humans land california wilderne https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9c6915ef93c3/ Landslide; a ghost story 2025-12-24T00:13:53+00:00 https://www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-ghost-story/ robertogrecoerinkissane 2025 alaska valdez earthquakes mutualaid knowledge information knowledgeproduction inquiry internet web online fascism collectivism seismology commons commonality medicine vaccines health healthcare publicchealth engineering physics scientificinquiry pseudoscience us medicare mehmetoz maedicaid sensemaking culture society algorithms generativeai ai artificialintelligence slop substack jamesgriermiller jameslevine socialmedia xenophobia racism propaganda donaldtrump maga trumpism incoherence publicservice tools paper print dunning-kurgereffect leonidrozenlit frankkeil cognition facts understanding criticalthinking attitudes attitude politics activism knowledgeformation knoweledgemaking humanity tylerfisher lizneely genai makingsense https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d853f94476a0/ AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself 2025-12-15T04:54:22+00:00 https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-destroying-the-university-and-learning-itself robertogreco ronaldpurser 2025 ai artificialintelligence academia education culture chatgpt csu highered highereducation colleges universities labor teaching howwelearn learning howweteach sfsu csueastbay sonomastate openai faculty chatbots henrygiroux sheilaslaughter garyrhoades christophernewfield benjaminginsberg marthanussbaum administration administrativebloat democracy civics criticalthinking california policy economy economics marthakenney marthalincoln optimization efficieny edtech technology peterhershock neilpostman technopoly society judgement knowledge logistics curiosity discernment presence langdonwinner politics priorities cheating chegg turnitin surveillance surveillancecapitalism marcwatkins perplexity fraud chunginlee roylee tylercowen columbia neelshanmugam cluely siliconvalley ethics cognition inevitibility technodeterminism ravibellamkonda christiancollins debt studentdebt tuition ellastapleton rickarrowood chatversity davidgraeber bullshijobs bullshitdegrees credentials credentialism siyarajpurohit p https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fb94f9625692/ Don't Become a Connoisseur. 2025-12-08T20:05:16+00:00 https://www.joanwestenberg.com/dont-become-a-connoisseur/ robertogreco joanwestenberg connoisseurs connoisseurship 2025 coffee wine enjoyment taste sophistication whiskey luxury money joy life living snobbery cv peacocking pleasure burgers beauty refinedtaste amen knowledge sunsets free publicdomain birdsong blues music consumption consumerism cultivation discernment noticing enthusiasm enthusiasts proust simplicity voluntarysimplicity performance class uppermiddleclass denim japanesedenim marcelproust https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:06e53a32873d/ Colleges Are Preparing to Self-Lobotomize - The Atlantic 2025-12-08T00:18:57+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/colleges-ai-education-students/685039/ robertogreco michaelclune 2025 ai artificialintelligence colleges universities highereducation highered academia education automation chatgpt kentberridge terryrobinson addiction michaelpolanyi gabrielrossman llms convenience efficiency knowledge justinreich thinking howwethink writing howwewrite science michaelbloomberg cognition skills discussion discourse research inquiry https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:6f5983710120/ The mystery of wildlife and a world beyond our understanding - High Country News 2025-11-26T20:35:18+00:00 https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-mystery-of-wildlife-and-a-world-beyond-our-understanding/ robertogreco science wildlife multispecies morethanhuman unknowning notknowing knowledge limits 2025 nature animals plants nicholascranemoore alaska biology ecology governent research endangeredspecies https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:feb4e245a5f0/ Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Is a Warning 2025-11-22T00:35:28+00:00 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/elon-musks-grokipedia-is-a-warning.html robertogrecoChatGPT shouldn’t have political bias in any direction. People use ChatGPT as a tool to learn and explore ideas. That only works if they trust ChatGPT to be objective… We created a political bias evaluation that mirrors real-world usage and stress-tests our models’ ability to remain objective… Based on this evaluation, we find that our models stay near-objective on neutral or slightly slanted prompts, and exhibit moderate bias in response to challenging, emotionally charged prompts. The company was announcing the development of “an automated evaluation setup to continually track and improve objectivity over time,” using “approximately 500 prompts spanning 100 topics and varying political slants,” across “five nuanced axes of bias.” If the goal of Grok is to express a specific bias against prevailing progressive narratives by reflecting right-wing views — or just to stay in line with the values and priorities of its creator — well, that’s achievable. (It’s also something LLMs are well suited for as a technology.) In contrast, the goal OpenAI has set for itself is “objectivity,” in practice or at least reputation, which, for a chatbot tasked with talking about everything to everyone, really isn’t. As novel and versatile as LLM-based chatbots are, their relationship to the outside world is recognizably and deeply editorial, like a newspaper or, more recently, an algorithmically sorted-and-censored social network. (It’s helpful to think of OpenAI’s “bias evaluation” process, or Grokipedia’s top-down reactionary political correctness, as less of a systemic audit than a straightforward edit.) What ChatGPT says about politics — or anything — is ultimately what the people who created it say it should say, or allow it to say; more specifically, human beings at OpenAI are deciding what neutral answers to those 500 prompts might look like and instructing their model to follow their lead. OpenAI’s incoherent appeal to objective neutrality is an effort to avoid this perception and one that anyone who runs a major media outlet or social-media platform knows won’t fool people for long. OpenAI would probably prefer not to be evaluated by these punishing and polarized standards, so, as many other organizations have tried before, it’s claiming to exist outside them. On that task, I suspect ChatGPT will fail. [embed] Luckily for OpenAI, ChatGPT’s future doesn’t hinge on creating a universal chatbot that everyone sees as unbiased — it’ll settle for being seen as useful, entertaining, or reasonable and trustworthy to enough people. Research papers and “bias evaluations” aside, the product and its users are veering away from shared experiences and into personalized, bespoke forms of interaction in which chatbots gradually profile their users and provide them with information that’s more relevant to their specific experiences or more sensitive to their personal preferences or both. Frequent chatbot users know that popular models can drift into sycophancy, which is a powerful and general sort of bias. They also know they can be commanded to inhabit different identities, political or otherwise (you can ask ChatGPT to talk to you like a dead French poststructuralist if you want or ask it to talk to you like Mr. Beast. Soon, reportedly, you’ll be able to ask it to pleasure you sexually). Still, for all their dazzling newness and versatility, AI chatbots are in many ways continuing the project started by late-stage social media, extending the logic of machine-learning recommendations into a familiar human voice. It’s not just that output neutrality is difficult to obtain for systems like this. It’s that they’re incompatible with the very concept. In that sense, Grokipedia — like X and Grok — is also a warning. Sure, it’s part of an excruciatingly public example of one man’s gradual isolation from the world inside a conglomerate-scale system of affirming, adulatory, and ideologically safe feeds, chatbots, and synthetic media, a situation that would be funny if not for Musk’s desire and power to impose his vision on the world. (To calibrate this a bit, imagine predicting the “Wikipedia rewritten to be more conservative by Elon Musk’s anti-PC chatbot” scenario in the run-up to, say, his purchase of Twitter. It would have sounded insane, and you would have too.) But what Musk can build for himself now is something that consumer AI tools, including his, will soon allow regular people to build for themselves, or which will be constructed for them by default: A world mediated not just by publications or social networks but by omnipurpose AI products that assure us they’re “maximally truth-seeking” or “objective” as they simply tell us what we want to hear."]]> johnherrman 2025 elonmusk grokipedia wikipedia knowledge ai artificialintelligence openai xai chatgpt llms chatbots twitter isolation socialmedia mrbeast bias censorship socialnetowrks ideology markzuckerberg antiwoke freespeech freedomofspeech centralization internet web online farright rightwing information racism race media propaganda grievance wokeism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:456f5a9fffeb/ Against Brainrot — how to read & write more online - YouTube 2025-11-17T19:36:45+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LnHruJPPsY robertogreco celinenguyen jasminesun art literacy literature technooptimism siliconvalley optimism contrarianism ai artificialintelligence progress culture media technology internet web online substack socalmedia literarycriticism humanities philosophy compsci walterbenjamin specialization howweread howwewrite karlmarx dialecticalmaterialism davidharvey reading education learning howwelearn criticaltheory stanford communication access accessibility sensemaking makingsense generalists lingo translation jargon ideology worldview disruption information knowledge abstraction decontextualization algorithms amateurs research amateurism zeyneptufekci extremism context discovery writing geography radicalization venkateshrao consciousness metrics analytics socialmedia discourse conversation attention creativity forums hierarchy llms slop aislop economics ecosystems commercialart culturalproduction publishing excess https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b841824b184c/ Reading Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society in the Neoliberal University, by Justin Podur (2021) — Liberated Texts 2025-11-14T04:06:03+00:00 https://liberatedtexts.com/reviews/reading-ivan-illichs-deschooling-society-in-the-neoliberal-university/ robertogrecojustinpodur 2021 deschooling deschoolingsociety ivanillich anarchism libertarianism pedagogy education instruction institutions schools schooling 1971 johnholt sudburyvalleyschool summerhill asneale society johntaylorgatto jonathankozol nikhilgoyal alfiekohn us freedom knowledge learning howwelearn teaching howweteach capitalism commodification neoliberalism universities colleges highered highereducation academia philipmirowski science organization belllabs dupontlabs policy governance government compulsory davarianbaldwin davidnoble slavetrade indigeneity indigenous dispossession colonization settlercolonialism imperialism privatization journals publishing coldwar credentials credentialization professionalization accreditation chrisnewfield tuition tomcotton rightwinf left academicfreedom jeffschmidt elitism aaronswartz alexandraelbakyan sci-hub scientificlearning tools publicschools teachforamerica democrats republicans teachersunions markzuckerberg billgates edtech liberalism contradiction skills nurses nu https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1a7e2a085203/ The Progress Paradox 2025-11-13T19:43:37+00:00 https://www.noemamag.com/the-progress-paradox/ robertogreco neoliberalism mattprewitt markets technology 2024 2025 innovation johnkennethglabraith us sovietunion ussr siliconvalley kennetharrow consumers marketcompetition competition antoninscalia antitrust trusts monopolies scotus law legal policy poltiics keanbirch dtcochrane regulation enforcement rentseeking jpmorgan telecommunication at&t belllabs stewartbrand information corporations corporatism 1990s airbus boeing barackobama ftc acquisitions consolidation mergers instagram whatsapp meta facebook bigtech opensource knowledge deepseek ai artificialintelligence billclinton privatization libertarianism republicans democrats karlmarx miltonfriedman friedrichvonhayek centrism 2026 frenchrevolution government governance china west infrastructure society europe well-being wellbeing economics inequality moderates accelerationsism ip intellectualproperty stability welfare richardblumenthal joshhawley intervention gdpr data deregulation 23andme gmail google termsofuse privacy datarights entrepreneurship civilsociety arts https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ce874a636a15/ AI Grief Observed 2025-11-13T04:53:10+00:00 https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/ai-grief-observed/ robertogreco There is no good way to say this — when the police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence had not been ominous enough. The first time I heard the line, I knew already what was about to be conveyed. Nevertheless, I paid attention to how the news was delivered: the detective insisted that I take a seat first. I sat down at the dinner table, and he moved another chair to the right distance and sat down himself. No doubt he was following protocol, and yet the sentence — there is no good way to say this — struck me as both accurate and effective. It must be a sentence that, though nearly a cliché, is not often used in daily conversation; its precision has stayed with me. > The second time, having guessed the news about to be delivered, I did not give the sentence a moment’s thought. I did not wait for the detective to ask me to sit down, either. I indicated a chair where my husband should sit and took the other chair in the living room. My heart already began to feel that sensation for which there is no name. Call it aching, call it wrenching, call it shattering, but they are all wrong words, useless in their familiarity. This time, the four policemen all stood.” "There is no good way to say this." There is no easy way to talk about this. There are acceptable words, I suppose, but they are never "good," never remotely satisfying or comforting -- not to say, not to hear. By "this," I mean death obviously. By "this," I also mean other traumas, other endings. By "this," I mean what might feel like or look like the end of education – an end not spoken about with the solemnity of the policemen but rather with a real jubilation from technologists and venture capitalists, who gloat about disruption. I want to start here – by “here,” I mean the recognition that there is no good way to talk about death, no good way to talk about grief, even though I am going to try very hard to do so: to talk about grief – mine, yours, students’, teachers' – and tie it to “artificial intelligence.” I want to talk about grief and “the end." I want to talk about the end of the world – I don't, really; I want to talk about what feels like the end of the world and what might be, should we continue to build data centers, invest in this rapacious technology, and ignore climate change, literally the end of the world; I want to talk about the destruction of the future (our own, our children's), about the end of democracy, the end of education. I want to talk about loss. A loss that is, perhaps, an abandonment. Perhaps an abdication. An absence. An erasure. A trauma. Death, mass death -- literal and metaphorical. “There is no good way to say this.” I have read a lot of memoirs about dying and about grieving. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, of course. Geraldine Brooks’ Memorial Days. C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (a phrase I’ve borrowed for the title of this talk). Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart. Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. I could go on and list so many wonderful, painful books. And yet, despite some of the greatest writers having tried, “there is no good way to say this” -- I know this. I know this intimately. Yet I still search for some good words to have been said, to have been written. Words to comfort. Words to find meaning. Words to make sense. Words to not feel so utterly alone, at the abyss abyssmal, because those we love most have left us, and the future we thought we would share is gone too. “There is no good way to say this," the police told Yiyun Li. I don’t think that the coroner said those exact words to me, although he might have, when, in May 2020, I received the phone call that my own son had died. I do not remember the words, but I remember the feeling. Everything tilting and spinning and spiraling down. The blood drains, your stomach sinks. All words and feelings of such profound, indescribable, unspeakable loss. May 2020 was, if you’ll recall, the early days, the early weeks of the COVID lockdown. I was in Oakland, California; Isaiah was in Seattle, Washington. He died alone in his apartment of an opioid overdose. A few weeks later, OpenAI released GPT-3. Our tools are cultural not merely technological, so while many people want to frame the emergence of generative AI as simply the latest development in the long history of computers, of artificial intelligence -- transformers, neural networks, tokens, and so on -- we have to remember that what emerges is not just a matter of engineering. It's a matter of markets and politics and ideology and culture. I think it matters that GPT was released during the COVID pandemic (and ChatGPT shortly "after"), when many of us were stuck at home, isolated and interacting with one another almost entirely through screens. I think it matters that all this talk about the potential for "AI" to do our jobs comes after labor made some important (albeit tentative) gains during this period: the whole notion of "essential worker"; the successful push for unionization in some sectors; the astonishment from many parents after trying to facilitate their own children's schooling -- all those “teachers should be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year” posts on social media; demands during and after the pandemic to continue to work from home, to have more control over space and place and time. AI is a backlash. AI is anti-worker. I always feel the need to remind people that neither robots nor AI are coming for our jobs. But management probably is. I think it matters that this latest AI push, with generative AI's penchant for “bullshit,” follows on the heels of growing mis- and disinformation campaigns online. This was precisely the realization many people had come to after Donald Trump's first election as President and during his first term in office. And this was precisely what LLMs have been trained upon. I think it matters that the technology industry relies on deception and obfuscation and markets its new bullshit machines right as the leaders of this country have openly embraced being liars, cheats, and frauds, have openly rejected knowledge and expertise. I think it matters that as we have lost faith in institutions over the course of the past few decades -- in the church, in the media, in schools, in science, in medicine (particularly in public health and in vaccines) -- that we are now promised an oracle that can deliver instant and easy answers. I think it matters that AI -- so utterly opaque in its algorithmic predictions and decision-making -- is the ultimate unaccountability machine. We expect more from technology than we do from each other, the psychologist Sherry Turkle wrote in her book Alone Together in 2011. I think it matters that trust and solidarity have been eroded for a while now (if they ever really existed or were encouraged in this country). I think it matters that economic inequality has in the last few decades exploded, that the promises to students in particular – get good grades and you'll get into a good school, graduate from a good school and you'll get a good job – feel pretty empty. AI is a "normal technology," the artificial intelligence professors Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (authors of AI Snake Oil) have argued. But what we have come to see as "normal" is, in fact, utterly abhorrent, abysmal. Yiyun Li writes a lot in her book on learning to inhabit the abyss of grief. What does it mean to normalize the abyss? AI is the symptom of a broken world. AI is the symptom; and AI is the disease. Generative AI emerged during a global pandemic -- a global trauma of mass death (1.2 million people in the US died of COVID, and about 7 million globally -- these are, no doubt, figures that undercount how many actually died of the disease, let alone those like my son who died during that time period of other causes -- overdoses, suicide, murder, and deaths related and unrelated to the pandemic). Mass trauma, mass death and, as such, mass grieving. But it was, at the time and still to this day, a grief interrupted, a grief buried, a grief denied, a grief (contrary to C. S. Lewis's phrasing) unobserved. We were often not able to bury our dead, not able to hold funerals, not able to have wakes, not able to observe the rituals of death, not able to gather, to bring food, to hold and comfort one another. And when we were told the pandemic was over -- it hasn't really ended; the World Health Organization says there were around 150,000 cases of COVID reported in the last month -- we didn't deal with our trauma. We didn't deal with our grief. We were supposed to bury our feelings; we were supposed to forget. It was back-to-school, back to work, back to "normal." Or some “new normal,” now with AI – a technology that we didn't want, that we didn't ask for, and that we're told we cannot refuse. Of course, that's not quite right. We can refuse. One more correction: there was, in fact, a massive demonstration of grief – an outpouring of grieving in public – during COVID; and that was the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests that occurred in cities throughout the country particularly after the murder of George Floyd. This grief was not private or hidden; it was collective. This grief was not just personal, expressed by those impacted directly by racism and police violence; it demanded from protestors and onlookers, empathy, solidarity. This grief was expressive – even as we are always told with protest, as with grief, that that is not the “good way” to say it. The grief of Floyd’s death – and all the deaths – was not sufficient. It was not simply a marker or memorial of death; but it was an act of life, an act of repair. It was a demonstration of love and loss and fury; it was a commitment to the future. And again, technology is cultural, ideological not simply technological. It matters that generative AI emerged with or alongside -- you can decide the preposition you prefer -- a politics that is openly hostile to Black Lives Matter, that opposes diversity, equity, and inclusion. It matters that Silicon Valley companies were among the first to backtrack on their DEI initiatives, were happy to stand with Donald Trump when he proclaimed that AI needed to be purged of "ideological biases," purged of "woke." Generative AI is, with or without Trump's executive orders, a backlash to diversity, equity, and inclusion, a reinscription of the words and images of white supremacist, heteronormative, Western, English-speaking capitalist patriarchy. That is the corpus that large language models have been trained on -- "the canon" (with all the copyright violations that that has entailed) as well as "the Internet" (thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of YouTube videos and YouTube comments and Reddit posts and -- with apologies to anyone this might include here this evening -- lots of very mediocre freshmen essays on the theme of family in Romeo & Juliet or the role of "states' rights" in the US Civil War). In response to a radical outpouring of love, loss, life, grief -- expressed together, embodied, on the streets -- we were presented with, forced to use in so many cases, a technology that severs us from creative expression, dignity, and truth. There is no choice, we're told. "Get over it." "Move on." One of the problems with grief, as Yiyun Li argues in her memoir, is that it's been described as a set of stages one moves through, as something that has a beginning and, significantly, an end. You will eventually, people try to tell you, "get over it." This is Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's famous formulation: grief as a series of emotions that move from denial to anger, then bargaining, then depression, and finally acceptance. And even if we might've revised this progression somewhat since she published her book On Death and Dying in 1969, society still gives mourners (and not just as workers) a very limited amount of time "to deal with it" before they're expected to "move on." “There is no rush,” Yi writes, “as I will have every single day, for the rest of my life, to think about Vincent and James, outside time, outside the many activities of everyday life.” > And this, among other reasons, is why I am against the word “grief,” which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point: the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on it’s life as usual, business as usual. > I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word? Of course, we like thinking of things in stages. We like the order, we like to frame our world, our understanding of time this way -- in hours and days and seasons. We ritualize these -- indeed, that is one of the reasons why our inability to conduct the traditional practices associated with death and dying made our grief during COVID even more unbearable. Without rites and rituals, you cannot “move on.” You cannot grow or shift or change. You are stuck in the past. You are stuck. The anthropologist Victor Turner used the term “liminality” to describe the one of the key phases of rites of passage, those rituals that mark transition – not just transition into the “afterlife,” for example, but transition into adulthood or into marriage or into society. This liminal phase, as he called it, was “betwixt and between” – a period where you are in the process of becoming something new, but you’re not that new person yet, nor are you the person you were any longer. Liminality, Turner argued, was a sort of limbo – but in that limbo, something really transformational happens – something radical even in the most conservative and traditional ritual practices. Liminality is a time – and to be fair, this can be a very very very brief moment, depending on the rite of passage – of solidarity and equality and unity. Protests, for example, are liminal spaces. Education, I’d argue, also has elements of this liminality. It is a rite of passage, a ritual of becoming – you enter a child, a “fresh man” and you leave an adult. We have retained some older parts of these rituals – the cap and gown obviously, moving the tassel from one side of your head to the other. But there's more to it than just these practices. You have to believe, I’d argue, in that transformation to be able to commit yourself to the time, to the work. (Socially, culturally, politically, we have to believe it is worthwhile to send children to school, to send them to college.) But much to the detriment of learning, let alone to the survival of educational institutions, we have seen education redefined as something else -- as a product, not a process. As certification, not transformation. The liminality has been shattered; instead of ritual, society has demanded “outcomes” and “optimization.” I don’t say any of this out of nostalgia for a once-upon-a-time when college was good. Educational institutions -- whether at the K-12 or the university level -- have always always been deeply flawed, highly exclusionary, full of all sorts of machineries of bullshit. These are, as Michel Foucault reminded us, sites of discipline -- disciplining bodies and minds. But by dismantling educational institutions -- and AI is really just the latest act in a long long history of dismantling -- we are also dismantling that space for shared practice and purpose, for shared understanding -- “communitas,” Turner called it. The technology industry -- indeed, capitalism -- prefers “individualization” and “immediacy.” Certainly, it pays lip service to "community" -- Mark Zuckerberg's blah blah blah about Facebook connecting the world. When Google says it wants to organize the world's information and make it "useful," this is a very different mission than the university's. The tech industry's allegiance is to surveillance capitalism, to profit and power, not to knowledge and certainly not to people. What we are experiencing now -- with AI, with the defunding of public education and public research, with deportations and surveillance -- is more trauma, more loss, more grief. There is no silver lining here, as Yiyun Li reminds us, as much as that's offered as some tepid consolation. Grief, to reiterate, involves a loss of identity, a loss of the future -- how we imagined things would be, who we imagined we'd become. And there is no good way to say this: it will get worse. And grief doesn't get any easier -- not with the passage of time, not with the number of times one experiences it. There is no good way to say this. And yet we must always try. I can only say this, and it's not good, it's not sufficient. It's not really a satisfying way to wrap up this talk. But here we go... Grief is an expression of love. We grieve because we love, and that love does not end with death. I grieve for my son. I will grieve forever. I grieve for the future we will not share. When I talk to teachers and students alike, I hear such grief as well: grief about what AI threatens to do education, what it's already done to the work of teaching and the work of learning, the work of research and reading and writing. We grieve because we love. We grieve because we care. We grieve because we know that the machines do not, and that the community we try to foster -- on campus, in the classroom, in our scholarly works -- is threatened with erasure. We grieve because we fear forgetting; we worry that people will forget what is beautiful and what is difficult and what is joyous and what is horrible about education. We worry that, if we do not grieve, we give up the struggle to go on, to persevere, to live. But we do not, we should not grieve alone. We should not be made to feel alone, feel crazed by our grief, feel crazed for grieving. We can, we should grieve together, grieve in public, grieve in protest. Such is comfort – "com" + "fort," a word that means "with" + "strength." Technologies are often wielded in ways meant to imply that humans are weak, messy, slow, stupid, replaceable. We are strong, messy, awkward, flawed, irreplaceable. All of us. Our strength comes, in part, from this vulnerability, from our humanity. Together in the flesh. Not isolated, individualized thru some algorithm. We cannot allow systems and practices and machinery to foreclose this humanity, to automate the decisions, the expressions, the explorations that we turn to and that we struggle with in education, in this imperfect but liminal space of learning. "There is no good way to say this" but to say this: AI is the antithesis of education. It is the antithesis of the future. As such, it is a kind of epistemological death, and I recognize -- thanks to capitalism and neoliberalism and imperialism and racism -- we have long been surrounded by such efforts; we are grieving already. And yet, we go on. One final note that I think I'd be remiss not to state, even though there is no good way, or rather no polite way to say this: Some men (and I do mean mostly men) would rather spend trillions of dollars on an idea that is financially, technologically, morally, and environmentally unsustainable, they’d rather destroy democracy and destroy education and destroy the planet than just get therapy. Thank you."]]> audreywatters 2025 ai artificialintelligence grief education institutions schools schooling highered highereducation colleges universities academia edtech llms death geraldinebrooks joandidion cslewis michellezaunder helemacdonald covid-19 coronavirus pandemic screens online chatgpt opeanai donaldtrump maga trumpism robots chatbots church churches media science medicine faith trust knowledge expertise liars cheats cheating frauds fraud corruption algorithms decisionmaking snakoil arvindnatayanan sayashkapoor technology generativeai us who worldhealthorganization blacklivesmatter geogrgefloyd empathy solidarity idology siliconvalley dei diversity equity inclusion inclusivity capitalism patriarchy hereronormativity whitesupremacy creativity expression dignity truth life living loss yiyunli elizabethkubler-ross emotions 1969 2020 victorturner liminality adterlife between betweenness betwixt protest protests society social learning howwelearn teaching howweteach outcomes optimization efficiency discipline bodies https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:25ac1b950024/ Oracles from the Pleroma of Data - by Francis Young 2025-11-06T04:40:05+00:00 https://drfrancisyoung.substack.com/p/oracles-from-the-pleroma-of-data robertogreco francisyoung ai artificialintelligence intelligence effort truth 2025 thinking howwethink chatbots knowledge briancopenhaver machinelearning llms experience simulation https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:adb77c957a0d/ The Ark-Builders Saving Fragile Bits Of Our World - NOEMA 2025-11-05T18:40:42+00:00 https://www.noemamag.com/the-ark-builders-saving-fragile-bits-of-our-world/ robertogreco jessmchugh 2025 conservation science humanities language languages multispecies morethanhuman globalwarming climate climatechange libraries archives microorganisms pollen viruses pollutants svalbard antarctica icememoryfoundation memory globalseedvault seeds plants animals glaciers vincentialenti anthropology longnowfoundation rosettadisk longnow nineveh extinction culture culturalknowledge knowledge danielboorstin frozenzoo kurtbenirschke marlyshouck claudelorius linguistics history catherinelarose https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4bd2836fe83f/ Extralibrary Loan: Making the Civic Infrastructure We Need 2025-11-02T20:52:41+00:00 https://placesjournal.org/article/extralibrary-loan-making-civic-infrastructure/ robertogreco shannonmattern 2025 libraries journalism place infrastructure civics creativity knowledge publicknowledge kellyjensen bookriot lukesutherland susanorlean heatherchaplin us jousrnalism whatsapp information social terryparrisjr maga ala librarians hannawiemer donaldtrump socialarchitecture everylibrary wisdom resources politics media newdeal forums johnstudebaker wpa makewith kateharlow mediaecosystems hanifabdurraqib engagement privacy integrity sustainability surveillance extraction distraction monetization collections ai artificialintelligence inevitability solidarity bannedbooks newsrooms mediacommons commons katherinevictoriacoffield seattle sandiego nyc brooklyn ballard missoula montana museums nypl undercommons collectives mutualaid resistance refusal trusts https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:dba7ad9f651c/ Hi, It’s Me, Wikipedia, and I Am Ready for Your Apology - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency 2025-10-30T15:36:06+00:00 https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hi-its-me-wikipedia-and-i-am-ready-for-your-apology robertogreco wikipedia ai humor artificialintelligence openai writing howwewrite internet web online academia highered highereducation learning howwelearn teaching howweteach education schools schooling colleges universities tomellison knowledge mccarthyism gemini google chatgpt donaldtrump edwardrmurrow interpol surveillance charliekirk jeffbezos bariweiss grok xai twitter elonmusk palantir peterthiel wapo washingtonpost kleptocracy smithsonian journals facts factchecking authoritarianism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ee6ce91678dc/ Grokipedia and the Coup Against Reality Itself 2025-10-29T03:50:38+00:00 https://www.thedissident.news/grokipedia-and-the-coup-against-reality-itself/ robertogreco alejandracaraballo 2025 wikipedia power oligarchy reality information knowledge ai artificialintelligence grok grokipedia xai llms reliability elonmusk farright rightwing authoritarianism media internet web online jeffbezos wapo washingtonpost ruprtmurdoch oracale larryellison davidellison wealth paramount cnn tiktok foxnews cbs bariweiss worldview billionaires institutions collaboration digitalcommons commons humanity society atomization culture culturewar culturewars https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:67db9e4f8dc8/ An imaginative activity | A Working Library 2025-10-26T04:58:15+00:00 https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/an-imaginative-activity robertogreco mandybrown jameshillman ursulakleguin ursulaleguin 2025 work howwework knowledge imagination thedispossessed art creativity psychology dreams joy fantasy pscyhe https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:49a0b5503cfa/ The Last Dinosaurs: On Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Things That Disappear" - Cleveland Review of Books 2025-10-22T02:51:15+00:00 https://clereviewofbooks.com/jenny-erpenbeck-things-that-disappear-philip-harris/ robertogreco jennyerpenbeck philipharris 2025 via:javierarbona objects memory disappearance erasure tylerdurden michaelhoffmann disassembly permanence impermanence history change ephemeral ephemerality walterbenjamin buddha buddhism commodities everyday knowledge belongings possessions thoreau https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4705ab08cc5c/ Who is Afraid of Education? - Beautiful Eccentrics 2025-10-18T06:34:01+00:00 https://pablohelguera.substack.com/p/who-is-afraid-of-education robertogreco unschooling deschooling pablohelguera 2025 rickperry christopherrobbins paulofreire bellhooks conformity zionism palestine irmgardemmelhainz donaldtrump education criticalthinking censorship academicfreedom epistemophobia learning knowledge authoritarianism insecurity ivanillich schooling schools complexity elitism culture disorientation totalitarianism convictions publiceducation knowledgeproduction assumptions perspective art artmaking henrygiroux hannaharendt https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4e15cfe1bb57/ When Pilgrimage Becomes Form - Beautiful Eccentrics 2025-10-18T06:09:52+00:00 https://pablohelguera.substack.com/p/when-pilgrimage-becomes-form robertogreco pablohelguera pilgrimage 2025 form loriwaxman pandemic coronavirus covid-19 2020 walking mobility childhood movement knowledge understanding art arts moving caminodesantiago place museums artworks commoditization carolduncan guydebord ritual tourism walterbenjamin idolotry fetishism process happenings allankaprow bodies participation participatory risk richardlong francisalÿs hamishfulton relics objects acts time dialogue derive dérive situations situationist displacement reality dislocation aristotle mauricemaeterlinck happiness journeys quests sorjuanainésdelacruz drifting learning howwelearn psychogeography drift https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ef6bb16d4cbb/