The Ghost(writer) in the Machine | QMM #6 + UMI 2024 Course
A Dystopian Tale of Our Technology as Teachers + A Course Update
Before diving into our tale, I must mention the debt of gratitude that I owe to
and his Understanding Media Intensive, managed by Gray Area in San Francisco. They took my unhinged hesitation, haste, and suspicion about our tools and technology and offered them a critical framework from which they could be understood, with a clarity, precision, and depth that (I feel) is lacking in most of our conversations. Media ecology, McLuhan studies and UMI are mandatory learning for the times. And lucky us, the latter is back!The Understanding Media Intensive flows into the cracks of a content-obsessed culture to ask about the hidden, the forsaken, the paramount - the context. The medium is the message. Understanding why it is that way and how it shows up in our lives is a skeleton key for the doors that can open unto new worlds. The Understanding Media Intensive changed my life and I know it will change yours too.
The new course starts Monday, April 15 and runs for ten weeks.
Classes start at 5pm Pacific / 8pm EST and runs for 3 hours
Cost: $600 Live / $350 Audit Access / Diversity Scholarships
I implore you to check it out and share it among your people where you can.
C
Quixote’s Media Meditations #6
Assignment: If “it is in its power to extend patterns of visual uniformity and continuity that the ‘message’ of the alphabet is felt by cultures,” then what patterns does ChatGPT extend, what is the message of GPT that is or will be felt by cultures?
The year is 2042.
The world looks not so different as it did a couple of decades ago, with a few caveats.
Teachers unions, in the anglophone West (much like in southern Mexico in times past), have become enemies of the state, the primary insurrectionist groups of our time. They are, of course, well-funded and well-organized, and although the state has attempted at every turn to block their pension funds and investments, the judiciary has not yet caved into its demands. For now.
And yet, there is a growing rebellion among these ex-educators who, not that long ago, were also servants of the state, the primary producers of citizens-in-training. Among students and parents alike, there is little support anymore for their tactics. At the same time, a small and ever-shrinking percentage of the population operates clandestinely, parallel to the teachers, in order to undermine the current supremacy of GPT.
As bombs are secretly detonated at school board offices (now, converted into contemporary data-mining plants), we see fringe politicians, both on the secular left and religious right attempt (and fail) to pass legislation banning such technology. One thing is clear, though. They are fighting a losing battle. GPT-affilliated lobbyists are proposing prohibitions on home-schooling and alternative education, with penalties that include jail time, the blacklisting of offenders, and even separating children from their parents and sending them off to “reeducation camps.” The only mainstream detractors are GPT’s “competitors,” Microsoft, Google and Apple.
The “right” or “freedom to know” that Open AI proffers produced an information overload and a subsequent intellectual brain drain. Our insatiable hunger for both efficiency and intelligence created a deep schism in the dominant culture. It has driven us, concurrently, to separate the ends of a spectrum of possibilities. Today, we can process almost anything we want without involving any kind of disciplined acumen. We can know everything without having to learn anything. We now have an omnipotent brain at our disposal and, as it seems, its presence alone is making us dumb and dumber.
The real question, which might be more appropriate to have a human answer is, how did come to be this way?
As Marshall McLuhan speculated on Bergson’s and Huxley’s Mind at Large hypotheses in the 1960s, it could be possible, through technology, to artificially remove “the reducing valve of consciousness” to have an experience of the world similar to the divine interventions imposed by drugs, sex, and the Gods themselves. Eventually, the computer became such a mechanism. As its screen brightened and broadened, as we became comfortable with its constant presence, we lost sight of the kind of intervention we were after. The drive towards the thing our predecessors so lacked – the holy – was so pronounced that we couldn’t see beyond that mania, like an Olympic runner doing laps in the fog.
Artificial intelligence seemed inevitable. When ChatGPT arrived and the governments refused to regulate it, several things happened. First, there was a general ban on writing assignments in schools, as nobody agreed to shelve the computer altogether. As the global economic crisis became an educational crisis, GPT came up with a solution: let it teach. This would save governments billions in salary costs and “streamline” the learning process. GPT, as in, Generative Pre-Trained Teacher. Not all that different from a human educator, it argued. Distinct, but more efficient. A robot in the classroom, free of cultural, racial, historical or gender bias, one that could stand as a transcendent symbol for what we couldn’t.
Since its intellectual inventory, it claimed, was limitless, since it could promise unbiased answers (relative to humans) and fair evaluation of students, it was and would continue forever to be a superior mentor. And thus it began. The teachers were given their severance and in much the same way that public schooling was originally inaugurated as a tool of nationalism, it just as quickly became a tool of artificial intelligence.
The GPT not only teaches through automated, virtual bots, but it designs our school curriculums, as well. The program no longer needs to be fed the right questions. Every semester, it tweaks and reworks its pedagogical systems based on the anticipated needs of the state and state economy, although rumours and conspiracy theories swirl as to who they’re really serving and to what ends.
The faculties of yesteryear did what they could to keep the content of schooling, despite its context of creating better citizen-subjects, in line with whatever remained of the arts and humanities. However, GPT quickly perfected the assembly line, so often attributed to Henry Ford. Now, schools only utilize GPT-published books and textbooks, while any art shown or taught within schools is artificially incarnated and digitally printed. All “educational input,” whether via “writing” or “drawing” is done on computers. Any hand-written material is confiscated and can lead to expulsion.
Today, the scholastic schism has deepened. It’s not only chat bots writing our newest entertainment and nightly news scripts, but advanced systems developing the blueprints for more efficient human servitude, the soylent saviour of the global food crisis. It reminds me of the old dating apps, but now they (i.e. the ChatGPTeacher) decide. At school, they determine who we sit beside and when and in what arrangement, all in the name of improving aptitude. Before graduating, they use that data-mined information to suggest who we should mingle and mate with, all in the name of education and ecological survival. And in the end, how could it be otherwise? We modelled them after ourselves, after our histories, ontologies and myths. Finally, now, we can begin to see clearly what we’ve extended into the world, how, and at what cost.
- A Concerned Parent
These reflections on technology, language, media ecology & literacy are provoked by Andrew McLuhan’s mandatory, must-take Understanding Media Intensive. You can find out more about McLuhan Studies straight from McLuhan’s mouth by reading his Substack, here.