Audrey Watters may be our most articulate critic of tech obsession. I enjoy her regular posts, and her ability to connect birds with events. Open this link to see what I mean.
She begins every post with a bird and finds a way to connect it to what she is thinking about.
In this post, she begins with:
This week’s Columbidae is the Gallicolumba luzonica — the Luzon Bleeding Heart Dove. The bird, which is endemic to the island of Luzon in the Philippines, is listed as “near threatened” due to habitat loss.
This bird has something to do with the term “bleeding heart liberal.”
She briefly critiques one of the latest proclamations about technology, then links to a piece about the dangers of Ring in the home, which can be hacked. The link refers to a story that circulated widely on CNN and in other major media about a man hacking into a little girl’s bedroom where her parents had installed a Ring for her protection. Scary stuff.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Really bad ideas in education are typically preceded by clauses like “If we only. . .” or “If we just. . . .” I was so pleased to see clickers on Ms. Watters’s list of bad ed tech that was once purported to be revolutionary.
The proliferation of bad technical solutions in business consultancy led to the creation of an industry group I used to belong to called the Sociotechnical Systems Group. These were consultants brought together by their annoyance at tech “solutions” that hadn’t been thought through, usually because the folks hyping them hadn’t thought through their actual consequences, and especially how they would affect the day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives of workers and their managers. Years ago, when I was a baby editor overseeing editorial development teams, I discovered PERT and GANTT charts. Wow, I thought, I can use these to track projects VERY PRECISELY! Then I found that I was spending so much time with my stupid charts that I was missing a lot of what was going on. I threw the software in the trash and went back to management by walking around, talking to people.
OK. I’ll start with a bird.
Years ago, I had an office with a reception area that had floor-to-ceiling, plate-glass windows overlooking a porch and a marsh. One day, I heard a weird knocking sound. I went to investigate and found a portly, statuesque seagull, standing on the porch, repeatedly slamming his beak into his own reflection in the window. He would slam the beak against the window, reel backward, ruffle up his feathers, and do this again. And again. And again. I drove him away to save him from himself.
Kind of like Ed Deformers/Distrupters calling for more depersonalized education software after failure after colossal failure of this expensive junk. Kind of like the geniuses at the Fordham Institute for Payment of Big Bucks to the Officers of the Fordham Institute calling for us to “stay the course” with high-stakes standardized testing and VAM and merit pay and third-grade retention and the Common [sic] Bore, though these have a) not improved educational outcomes by their own numerological measures, b) not closed achievement gaps, and c) vastly distorted US mathematics and ELA curricula.
These policies aren’t working out, so let’s do more of them.
Ed Deform: what would happen if a handful of avian predators could pay and arm starlings to carry out their predation for them.
One Ring to rule them all
One Ring to find them
One Ring to bring them all
And in the techness bind them
–JRR Techian
In the Valley of Silicon, where the techies lie
Tech is a bunch of hocus-pocus: great for fiction, not so much for the real world. Turn not to sorcerers, mediums and necromancers, nor to source coders, social mediums and techromancers.
Wrapped around my ringer (parody of Sting)
You consider me a techy genius
Homo Techians, a higher genus
Hypnotized by technomagic store way
Staring through the Ring that’s at your doorway
I have only come here seeking data
Just to monetize, what could be greata?
I can see the destiny you sold turned into a shining band of gold
You’ll be spied upon by ringer
You’ll be wrapped around my finger
Mephistopheles indeed’s my name
Jeff is what you call me just the same
I will spy with Ring for Inquisition
You will see it come to its fruition
You’ll be spied upon by ringer
You’ll be wrapped around my finger
Devil and the deep blue sea behind me
Vanish in the air you’ll never find me
I will turn your face to alabaster
When you find your servant is your master
You’ll be spied upon by ringer
You’ll be wrapped around my finger
You’ll be wrapped around my finger
I like this version MUCH better than the original….it’s “greata”
When you find your servant is your master! Perfect fit.
The best parodies are the ones you have to change the least.
Just my opinion.
And “when you find your servant is your master” is indeed a perfect fit.
Watters seems to be arguing with E.O. Wilson, but he’s basically right. Yes, our brains have evolved cognitively, but the structures that control emotions are the oldest structures in the brain and often the more powerful. Humans are much more hard-wired to be reactive than to be contemplative. Throughout most of our history, that was evolutionarily advantageous – you don’t want to stop and think too much when there’s a saber-toothed tiger on your tail.
And our institutions too have evolved somewhat, but if you really look at medieval military and judicial institutions in particular, we’ve mostly just gotten better at punishing and killing people. Much, much better.
Our technology has indeed far outstripped our cognitive and institutional capacity to contain it.
Crud, I realized I made a terrible ASSumption. I have no idea if E.O. Wilson is male or female. Apologies.
From what I have read, smartphones, smart cars, and smart devices are all easy to hack probably because of all the spy apps that tracks everything we do and where we go and reports back to the corporations that then sell that info to info gatherers so they can sell it to political parties and other corporations that want to inundate us with endless ads through our phones and e-mail accounts.
For that reason, I don’t have a smartphone, only a dumb phone, and do not have an iPad or another portable smart tablet device.