why you should read Audrey Watters

For anyone who wants to understand the complex and ever-shifting relations between technology and education, especially higher education, in America, the one truly indispensable figure is Audrey Watters, who writes at Hack Education. Her most recent post exemplifies why her work is so necessary — and why far, far more people should pay attention to it.

Here’s what makes Watters unique: She writes about technocrats who hope and promise to transform education, which of course a great many people do, but she writers about these matters with the eye of a folklorist — which is her academic training. She writes,

I’m not terribly concerned about the accuracy of the predictions about the future of education technology that the Horizon Report has made over the last decade. But I do wonder how these stories influence decision-making across campuses.

What might these predictions – this history of the future – tell us about the wishful thinking surrounding education technology and about the direction that the people the New Media Consortium views as “experts” want the future to take. What can we learn about the future by looking at the history of our imagining about education’s future? What role does powerful ed-tech storytelling (also known as marketing) play in shaping that future? Because remember: to predict the future is to control it – to attempt to control the story, to attempt to control what comes to pass.

See, the technological-prophecy complex is a kind of culture, and like all cultures it tells stories. It accumulates lore. Watters is brilliant at noticing what that lore says and teaches — and, perhaps even more important, what it doesn't say, what it declines to look at, what it strategically forgets.

The people using technology to “hack education” are always trying to distract us from the presence of the little man behind the curtain. Audrey Watters is stubbornly insistent on pulling back that curtain. You should read her stuff, starting with this new post.

Pynchon and the "Californian Ideology"

In a recent post I wrote,

The hidden relations between these two worlds — Sixties counterculture and today’s Silicon Valley business world — is, I believe, one of the major themes of Thomas Pynchon’s fiction and the chief theme of his late diptych, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. If you want to understand the moral world we’re living in, you could do a lot worse than to read and reflect on those two novels.

Then yesterday I read this great post by Audrey Watters on what she calls the “Silicon Valley narrative” — a phrase she’s becoming ambivalent about, and wonders whether it might profitably be replaced by “Californian ideology.” That phrase, it turns out, comes from a 1995 essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. I knew about this essay, have known about it for years, but had completely forgotten about it until reminded by Watters. Here’s the meat of the introduction:

At the end of the twentieth century, the long predicted convergence of the media, computing and telecommunications into hypermedia is finally happening. Once again, capitalism’s relentless drive to diversify and intensify the creative powers of human labour is on the verge of qualitatively transforming the way in which we work, play and live together. By integrating different technologies around common protocols, something is being created which is more than the sum of its parts. When the ability to produce and receive unlimited amounts of information in any form is combined with the reach of the global telephone networks, existing forms of work and leisure can be fundamentally transformed. New industries will be born and current stock market favourites will swept away. At such moments of profound social change, anyone who can offer a simple explanation of what is happening will be listened to with great interest. At this crucial juncture, a loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age: the Californian Ideology.

This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, websites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich. Not surprisingly, this optimistic vision of the future has been enthusiastically embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futurist bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians across the USA. As usual, Europeans have not been slow in copying the latest fad from America. While a recent EU Commission report recommends following the Californian free market model for building the information superhighway, cutting-edge artists and academics eagerly imitate the post human philosophers of the West Coast’s Extropian cult. With no obvious rivals, the triumph of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete.

Putting this together with Watters’s post and with my essay on the late Pynchon… wow, does all this give me ideas. Perhaps Pynchon is the premier interpreter of the Californian ideology — especially when you take into account some of his earlier books as well, especially Vineland — someone who understands both its immense appeal and its difficulty in promoting genuine human flourishing. Much to think about and, I hope, to report on here, later.