The Case for Technoskepticism in Schools and Society

I haven’t attended SOPHE in a few years so I want to provide a scholarly update.

This talk is a synthesis and remix of work that I have been doing with colleagues for nearly a decade. In that sense, I am treating these publications as an archive of a collaborative research program, tracing how a concept developed through recurring engagements with theory, empirical inquiry, and pedagogy. Much of what I will say today comes directly from things we have already published. I want to trace how our thinking about a concept we have aimed to popularize—technoskepticism—has emerged and changed over time. So often we write individual papers, but what does it mean to sustain inquiry across projects and papers for different audiences over time? It can also be a bit depressing how relevant some of the problems we name still feel today.

I am going to read directly from our published work. My hope is that this approach not only makes clear where the ideas came from, but also shows something about how our inquiry developed.

I want to begin with Google because I think it illustrates the problem.

Google is usually treated as a tool. But what if we turned our curricular gaze to Google as an object of inquiry?

In 2021, Ryan Smits, Troy Willhelm, and I published “Don’t Be Evil: Should We Use Google in Schools?” in the journal TechTrends. Google had already become ordinary infrastructure in many schools. Precisely because it had become ordinary and largely unquestioned, we thought it deserved more scrutiny.

Here is how we framed the problem in the abstract:

“Google is a multinational technology company whose massive advertising profits have allowed them to expand into many areas, including education. While the company has increasingly faced public scrutiny, the use of Google software and hardware in schools has often resulted in little debate. In this paper, we conduct a technoethical audit of Google to address ethical, legal, democratic, economic, technological, and pedagogical concerns educators, students, and community members might consider. We describe how Google extracts personal data from students, skirts laws intended to protect them, targets them for profits, obfuscates the company's intent in their Terms of Service, recommends harmful information, and distorts students’ knowledge.”

A few paragraphs later, we made the problem more explicit:

“Despite Google’s many troubles, there is scant criticism of Google in educational technology literature, and they have faced little scrutiny in schools where Chromebooks, browsers, apps, search engines and more are used by students. Just as with users outside schools, we are concerned with what Google is taking from students (e.g., personal data), how it is targeting them (e.g., advertising, product familiarity), and where it is directing them (e.g., search and recommendation algorithms).”

To this day, educators spend a lot of time on Google’s various apps, sites, and platforms. We still spend little time asking students to study Google itself.

Part of our concern was Google's business model. We wrote:

“Google has infiltrated schools by taking advantage of schools’ ‘dual ambition’ to improve technology and cut budgets by offering free software and inexpensive hardware. The company then profits from students’ personal data and brand loyalty among teachers (e.g., Google Certified Educator) and students.” (Lindh & Nolin)

And:

“Google appeals to educators with well-designed technology and to cash-strapped districts with affordable prices on the front end, but they then collect and extract information from students and educators on the back end.... Google positions the company ‘as a free public service, divorced from marketplace contexts and concerns,’ but this framing allows the company to obscure the intent to surveil students to create algorithmic identities. Google profits from securing future customers, profiling students for marketing, and extracting data.”

Our critique was not only about privacy or data extraction.

We became interested in what happens to knowledge when a private corporation mediates information for students.

We wrote:

“Google’s dominance throughout online spaces and school markets has resulted in an array of unintended and unobvious problems concerning knowledge, values, and possibilities.... Moreover, the market dominance of Google means that people may not even be familiar with differences across search engines. Google becomes knowledge for many people.”

One particularly disturbing example concerned Dylann Roof. We wrote that when Roof searched Google for ‘Black on White crime,’ the top results included disinformation from White supremacist groups rather than more accurate FBI crime data. Roof later referenced those search results as helping solidify the White supremacist radicalization that culminated in the murder of Black churchgoers in Charleston. This is a particularly consequential example of what it means to say that Google does not simply retrieve knowledge. It mediates it.

“‘Google becomes knowledge’ takes on new forms now that Google has integrated AI Overviews into its search engine, which already had its own problems with bias. These systems generate probabilistic outputs that often include errors that AI marketers like to call ‘hallucinations.’”

In our paper, we connected this to the roles of teachers and librarians:

“Google’s incursion into education threatens and devalues traditional roles of teachers and librarians as sources of wisdom and experts in pedagogy.... Educational technology companies may conflate knowledge with wisdom.... Learning can become re-defined by efficiency as students rush through assignments without any sense of purpose aside from productivity.”

And we argued that Google's presence could subtly reshape the purposes of schooling:

“Google also emphasizes an education where digital consumption, productivity, and surveillance may be prioritized over human dispositions such as curiosity, uncertainty, and privacy.”

Later in the paper, we say:

“Google’s constraints and drawbacks are rarely discussed in education.... Educators do not simply use Google’s technology, but are also used by it. Google’s ethos bends education toward its aims—namely productivity, quantification, surveillance, and learning online.”

And:

“Google has effectively become the arbiter of important, relevant knowledge and people can accept their judgment as correct without further investigation.”

We did not argue that Google offered no benefits as we wrote that:

“There are many good reasons why teachers, students, and the public use Google products. However, we offer a critical perspective that serves as a counter to the general optimism we have observed around the use of Google products in schools.”

And we ended with a question:

“We completed this technoethical audit of Google so educators and students might consider, should we use Google in schools? Schools should not be places where educational technology titans exploit students, test new products, or reimagine education through their own techno-corporate ideals of personalization, efficiency, and profits.”

That question, “Should we use this technology?”, captures much of what I mean by technoskepticism.

However, this 2021 Google audit grew from concerns that had developed throughout the 2010s.

2018: “It’s complicated”

Several years earlier, in 2018, I published a chapter simply titled “Technology” in a book I co-edited titled Keywords in the Social Studies. 

I began with my conflicted relationship with my smartphone. I wrote:

“At times, the array of apps can be distracting when I am trying to listen to someone else, fall asleep for the night, or read something longer than a tweet. The ways in which my smartphone beeps at me can cause anxieties when I want calm. And, I know my smartphone sends all my data to a variety of companies who then sell my information off for a tidy profit.... At times, I want to technofast and turn off, find zen, sign out.”

I then wrote:

“I guess I would describe my relationship with technology, in the lingo of Facebook, as: it’s complicated. In 2018, our affairs with technologies are some combination of incredible, complicated, and troubling, but too often in the social studies, we approach the topic with a dispassion that accepts technologies on their terms, not ours.”

Too often, I still think we “accept technologies on their terms, not ours.” 

I also analyzed how technology appeared in social studies curriculum.

Examining the Texas social studies standards, which were bad at the time and are about to get worse, I wrote:

“Taken together, the TEKS tell a story not only of technologies as inventions and objects, but they convey a narrative of technological progress.”

“These standards primarily present technologies as positive by directly pairing technology with innovation... or discussing technologies in terms of advancements, developments, or improvements to standard of living or quality of life.... There is not a single reference in the high school standards that specifically encourages students to critically consider negative effects and uses of technologies in the past or present.”

One example came from World War I. The standards referred to machine guns, airplanes, tanks, poison gas, and trench warfare as “technological innovations.”

I wrote:

“This standard takes dubious historical and moral stances. First, the standard directs our historical gaze on the military outcome of the Western Front with no mention of the impact of these ‘innovations’ on soldiers, civilians, and societies. Second, by labeling these technologies simply as ‘innovations,’ the standard authors do not seem to want us to deliberate on the technoethics of using such technologies in warfare.”

“Instead, the message seems to be, Invent things. Use them. Move forward. Don’t stop to ask questions.”

And I added:

“Invent things. Use them. Move forward. Our Western culture whispers this story to us relentlessly.”

I only realized later that I had actually used the term techno-skepticism in this 2018 chapter, even though I had forgotten that I had done so when my colleagues and I later began developing it more deliberately.

In a section discussing dystopian depictions of technology I wrote:

“When it comes to asking ethical questions about technologies, the social studies has much to learn from science fiction.... Michael Crichton’s chaos scientist Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park (1990) offers a particularly useful model of techno-skepticism.”

What interested me about Ian Malcolm’s character was his concern with unintended consequences and his demand for “humility before nature.”

I followed:

“What might it mean to show ‘humility before nature?’ Answering this question requires educators and students to step back from the immediate benefits of technologies... and consider their downside and unintended consequences.”

“My point is not to cast judgment on the morality of these technologies or the people using them. The effects around technologies, like my smartphone, are undoubtedly complex, but we must ask the questions.”

And then, drawing on Jurassic Park, Terminator, and Minority Report, I wrote:

“All of these science fiction examples—cloned dinosaurs, humanoid cyborgs, and precogs—prompt the same ethical question that should be central to social studies discussions of technoethics, even if we can, should we? And if we do accept technologies in our societies, how should we use them as individuals and communities?”

I later read Ruha Benjamin’s 2019 Race After Technology, where she points out that much dystopian science fiction places privileged White protagonists into futures in which they experience forms of oppression that subordinated groups already experience in the present. Over-surveillance and over-policing, yes, although I suppose not cloned dinosaurs.

In hindsight, the technoskepticism term emerged around this time—albeit unintentionally. Our academic and experiential encounters with technology criticism and resistance were turning into an emerging conceptual framework.

2020: Technology Won’t Save Us

In 2020, Marie Heath, Lance Mason, and I made the argument more explicit in our editorial, “Technology Won’t Save Us: A Call for Technoskepticism in Social Studies.”

We wrote:

“Similarly in schools, technologies sold as educational solutions often amplify surveillance of and data extraction from students, silo and profile students into ‘personalized’ learning tracks, and siphon public funding away from other needs.... Technological changes are occurring at a rapid speed, whereby ideas move from Silicon Valley and ‘disrupt’ citizens’ lives with few questions or regulations to protect them from harm.”

“Schools and society continue to suffer from a crisis of perception, whereby technology is viewed as progress without considering more long-term consequences.... Technology will not save us; technology does not singularly improve our lives.”

We then offered a more explicit account of technoskepticism.

“By employing a technoskeptical approach, teacher educators and scholars direct their attention to the downsides, constraints, or cultural characteristics that technologies extend, amplify, or create. Only after addressing the possible harms and unintended consequences of technology should we consider benefits. Technologies, media forms, and learning technologies are not neutral and neither are the societies into which they are introduced.”

The automobile helped us illustrate the point.

We wrote:

“In the early 20th century automobiles offered unmatched convenience for both businesses and individuals by making travel faster and easier. However, cities were subsequently redesigned for sprawl, and individuals were born into communities that required the purchase and upkeep of this 3,000-pound appendage to access community resources.”

And:

“This technological ‘innovation’ harmed health, as biking and walking have declined; racial equality as White flight, redlining, and highway design increased segregation; local economies as drive-thru franchises replaced local shops; and ecologies as pollution rose and concrete invaded animal habitats… humans created inventions like cars, and then they changed us.”
I can say that around the time of writing this article, my view of the downsides of cars outweighed the benefits and I sold my car. I have lived happily without one for 7 years now. Instead, I walk, I bike, and I ride public transportation where I encounter people and problems and possibilities in my community I wouldn’t otherwise. 

These experiences helped push me beyond thinking about technology merely as a tool.

My colleagues and I also challenged framings of technologies as neutral tools to be employed for good or bad because they exist in societies. 

We wrote:

“If a society or school is racist, sexist, or ableist, supposedly neutral technologies can amplify those bigotries.”

That led us toward Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Noble, Virginia Eubanks, Joy Buolamwini, and others whose work showed how racism, sexism, class inequality, and other structures of power can become embedded in supposedly objective technological systems.

2021: Questions were not enough

Our next realization was pedagogical. In ‘Black Mirror Pedagogy,’ Autumm Caines, Marie Heath, Bret Staudt Willet, and I opened not with a definition, but with a dystopian scenario.

We introduced Oya, a fictional first-year college student at a venture-capital-backed school. Oya is assigned a human ‘success guardian’ named Barbara. Barbara lives with Oya and ‘will observe and document everything Oya does and everywhere they go.’ She makes recommendations about Oya’s diet, sleep, study habits, time management, and social life. Oya does not have to follow her advice, but Barbara reports Oya’s choices to professors and the financial aid office.

We then wrote:

‘Oya’s story is fictional and may seem outlandish. The idea of a personalized college experience enhanced by a “success guardian” following a young undergraduate student to monitor and report their every action may seem absurdly intrusive and disruptive. However, many schools have deployed surveillance technologies that perform similar functions in the name of student success.’”

The Oya scenario is distinctive because it makes surveillance strange again by replacing invisible software with an actual person following a student around.

“Through sharing our experiences in conducting these technoethical audits, our authorship team eventually agreed that asking these technoethical questions of students did not always generate the deep, critical thinking about technologies we sought.”

We attributed part of the problem to a deeply embedded techno-optimism and technological solutionism.

So:

“We therefore sought out other approaches that could challenge students and teachers to confront such narratives of technological progress.”

That led us to dystopian storytelling and what we called “technoskeptical imaginations.”

The goal was not to teach students that technological futures would necessarily be dystopian. It was to make it easier to imagine that technological development could proceed differently from corporate marketing such as “Facebook would connect us.”

So rather than only asking students to analyze existing harms, we experimented with play and speculative storytelling. We created a dystopian MadLib. Students supplied a company, a company slogan, a group with institutional power, and several functions of a technology without knowing exactly how those choices would be used. We then inserted their answers into a dystopian corporate narrative that went like this:

“Some people say that profits get in the way of our mission to make the world a better place. Many critics have called our product a weapon of oppression.... But come on! Let the free market decide!... Technology is progress, and progress is good!”

Absurdity and humor become a bridge to serious discussion of students' lived technological experiences and to writing their own dystopian stories.

2022: “Technology inevitably involves trade-offs”

In 2022, Scott Metzger, Zack Seitz, and I published an empirical study in Theory & Research in Social Education titled “‘Technology Inevitably Involves Trade-Offs’: The Framing of Technology in Social Studies Standards.”  

We wanted to know whether the narratives of technological progress I had noticed in Texas were more widespread. So we analyzed K–12 social studies standards from 10 states. We identified 984 references in which students were expected to learn about technology.  

Our findings were both predictable and concerning. 

We wrote:

“Across these states, technology was primarily positioned as neutral, sometimes as positive, but rarely as collateral or negative.”

Of the 984 references, 69.4 percent were neutral and another 22.1 percent were positive. Only 7.3 percent asked students to consider what we called collateral effects, and just 1.2 percent framed technology negatively.  

So more than nine out of ten references framed technology either neutrally or positively.

And by “neutral,” we often meant statements that simply described the obvious, intended purpose of a technology. A typical example was: “Systems of transportation and communication move people, products and ideas from place to place.”  

The problem is not that this statement is false. The problem is how much it leaves out.

We wrote:

“Exclusively positive, or even neutral, narratives can render citizens as ‘sleepwalkers’ who view technologies as progress because they are not encouraged to investigate beyond intended, obvious effects.”  

One state provided an unusual counterexample. An Ohio standard stated:

“Technologies inevitably involve trade-offs between costs and benefits. Decisions about the use of products and systems can result in intended and unintended consequences.”  

We liked that sentence enough to make it the title of the paper.

Drawing from Neil Postman's work, we then turned five of his observations about technological change into technoskeptical questions. We argued that educators could use these with students, but that policymakers might also use them when writing curriculum standards.  

The first was:

“What does society give up for the benefits of the technology?”

In the article, we drew on Postman’s observation that ‘all technological change is a trade-off’ and that ‘we always pay a price for technologies that can otherwise appear to be “unmixed blessings.”  

Our second question was:

“Who is harmed and who benefits from the technology?”

Postman argued that “every new technology benefits some and harms others” and that there are always “winners and losers in technological change.” We connected that observation to more recent critical scholarship showing that those winners and losers are not randomly distributed.  

One historical example from the paper may be especially relevant here. We wrote:

“The intended purpose of railroads is as a tool to move people and goods, but students might also see railroads as weapons of settler invasion from the perspective of Indigenous nations in North America.”  

That is a relatively small shift in historical framing, but it changes the questions students might ask. A railroad is not simply transportation. Its meaning depends partly on where one stands in relation to it.

Our third question was:

“What does the technology need?”

This question reverses the usual relationship. We generally ask what technologies can do for humans. But Postman argued that technologies also carry what he called a “powerful idea.”

In the article, we drew on Postman’s argument that the “telegraphic person values speed, not introspection”; the “television person values immediacy, not history”; and the “computer person values information, not knowledge, certainly not wisdom.”

We argued that standards might therefore help students investigate “not only how humans use technologies, but also how they accommodate technologies.”  

The fourth question was:

“What are the unintended or unexpected changes caused by the technology?”

Here we drew on Postman's argument that “technological change is not additive; it is ecological.”

We wrote:

“Like dye dropped in water, new technology is of the world, not simply an addition to it. New technologies have a ripple effect that changes other things, and these changes can be unpredictable and enduring.”  

We described this kind of inquiry as “collateral thinking.” Rather than narrowing inquiry to the intended function of a technology, collateral thinking opens inquiry toward effects that appear elsewhere.

One of my favorite examples in the article had nothing to do with digital technology:

“Students might examine the unintended effects of Cultural technologies in homes (e.g., washing machines, vacuums). As Cowan (1983) noted, these convenience technologies resulted in ‘more work for mother’ because they increased expectations for cleanliness and shifted the burden of domestic work from the whole family to mothers.”  

The labor-saving technology did not simply save labor. It helped change expectations about what counted as an acceptably clean home and who was responsible for producing it.

Our final question was:

“Why is it difficult to imagine our world without the technology?”

Postman warned that technologies eventually become “mythic.” People begin to view them as though they were natural features of the world rather than human choices. He suggested trying to view even familiar technologies such as the alphabet or airplane as “a strange intruder” in order to make their effects visible again.  

Interestingly, we found something close to that idea in a Texas kindergarten standard that asked students to “describe how his or her life might be different without modern technology.” We argued that what may look like a simple question for young children is actually a rather sophisticated question for people of any age.  

That question also gets at why we can become obsessed with new technologies while barely noticing older ones. Artificial intelligence is visible because it still appears strange. Roads, clocks, air conditioning, writing, agriculture, and standardized testing can disappear into the background because we have inherited worlds already reorganized around them.

We concluded:

“If inquiry is to be a foundational purpose in the social studies field, these standards often do not position teachers and students to interrogate the complex effects of technology.”

And:

“A technoskeptical approach encourages inquiry, curiosity, and collateral thinking by bringing attention to technologies as causal or contributing factors to historical change, sometimes rapid and direct, but also collateral over the long term.”  

This study helped us move from arguing that schools should interrogate technology toward demonstrating empirically how rarely the official curriculum actually invited students to do so.

2023: What relationships do we want with technology?

By 2023, Jacob Pleasants, Phil Nichols, and I tried to articulate a broader vision in the Harvard Educational Review.

We opened:

“Previous generations were afforded centuries or decades to adjust to technological change. But it arrives much faster now.... These technological projects often seem to march forward at the whims of technologists, investors, and markets, giving people little chance to pause and consider, what relationships do we want with technology?”

We argued:

“Technology education ought to do more than provide students with technical skills; it should prepare them to critique the technical, psychosocial, and political dimensions of technology, both in relation to themselves and the communities to which they belong.”

And:

“Our schools generally prepare students to be consumers and users of technology more than thoughtful and empowered participants in public debates and decisions.”

For this audience, I especially want to emphasize that our argument drew heavily from much older traditions in history and philosophy of technology.

We returned to Neil Postman's conception of technology education:

“Technology education aims at students’ learning about what technology helps us do and what it hinders us from doing; it is about how technology uses us, for good or ill, and about how it has used people in the past, for good or ill. It is about how technology creates new worlds, for good or ill.”

Postman was building on thinkers such as Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Marshall McLuhan, and Lewis Mumford. We wanted to preserve that tradition while extending it through more recent critical scholarship.

We wrote:

“In the years since Postman’s writing, critical studies of technology have expanded into new conceptual spaces, especially regarding the roles that it plays in problems of social justice.... Benjamin, for instance, describes how racial discrimination is built into technologies ranging from Kodak’s Shirley cards to medical instruments to AI facial recognition software.”

And then we offered perhaps our clearest definition at that point:

“Rather than focus on technical skills, we view the purpose of technology education to be the development of a technoskeptical stance. This stance is not antitechnology, just as an art critic is not antiart. Instead, technoskepticism is a disposition toward and practice of asking skeptical questions about technology.”

We also wanted the critique to remain generative:

“A technology education that is oriented toward technoskepticism not only illuminates the profound roles that technologies play in injustices but also reveals alternative and more just ways of designing, utilizing, and relating to technology.

“Our vision for technology education therefore positions students as critical agents who can shape technological futures.”

In this work we developed our Technoskepticism Iceberg as a framework to help educators envision possible pedagogies.

We described it this way:

“The Technoskepticism Iceberg guides technological inquiry with respect to three dimensions and three layers. Attending to the technical dimension means understanding how technologies function in material terms.... The psychosocial dimension involves the ways that technologies affect how humans think, act, and live individually and collectively.... Attending to the political dimension requires thinking about who makes decisions about how technologies are designed, deployed, used, and regulated, as well as how those decisions are and ought to be made.”

The metaphor asks us to look beneath the visible tool:

“At the surface and most visible level, technologies are thought of as tools that are created for well-defined purposes that bring about intended outcomes.... One of the hidden layers of technology is its interactions with multiple technical, political, social, cultural, and economic systems.... The other hidden layer is the way technologies intersect human values.”

And, importantly:

“Technological choices and judgments can never be made from a ‘rational’ or ‘value-neutral’ perspective.”

The entire framework culminated in one question:

“What kind of relationship do we want to have with this technology, both as individuals and as a society?”

2024: Suspending judgment

Marie Heath, Jacob Pleasants, and I later offered more on the concept.

We wrote:

“Technoskepticism is a practice by which people and organizations suspend judgment and critically inquire into the unintended, collateral, and disproportionate effects of technology.”

I believe I stole the phrase “suspend judgment” from my mentor, Neil Houser, but I assume he got it from someone else. So it goes.

Technoskepticism asks us to interrupt the hype cycle long enough to interrogate. Marie Heath and I later described this as an approach that ‘replaces reaction with investigation.’

We opened this chapter with Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, whose Facebook activism helped mobilize protests during Egypt’s 2011 revolution. He once said:

“If you want to liberate a society, all you need is the Internet.”

And later said, “I was wrong.”

Ghonim had used Facebook to help mobilize the Egyptian Revolution. A few years later he reflected:

“the same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart.”

We concluded:

“It would be nice to think of this embrace and subsequent rejection of Facebook as a rare case of technological naiveté. However, this episode is characteristic of a common pattern where emerging technologies are hyped by industry and media, marginalized groups and those most harmed offer warnings, and harms are only recognized after damage is inflicted.”

That brought us directly to technological solutionism.

We wrote:

“Technologies are often described as capable of ‘solving’ societal issues by virtue of their increased technical capabilities.... But this perspective assumes that social and political problems are technical ones, even though this is rarely so.”

And:

“In sum, narrowly focusing on the technical capabilities of new technologies often leads to oversimplified and often overoptimistic narratives about what those technologies will do.”

Our definition became:

“We theorize technoskepticism as a disposition toward technology that serves as a corrective to technological solutionism. It is a cautious, though not pessimist, stance that continually examines the potential downsides of technology for individuals and societies.”

“Technoskeptical thinking imagines, investigates, and inquires into trade-offs and the ways technology changes the flow of life. Thus, the aim of technoskeptical thinking is to influence citizens to take informed and just actions in daily and civic life.”

Can technoskepticism be learned?

More recently, our inquiry turned empirical.

Jacob Pleasants, Xiaoning Gui, Charles Logan, Marie Heath, and I studied educators who already held critical perspectives on technology. We wanted to know how they got there.

Through surveys and interviews, we identified four orientations: questioning technologies themselves, questioning the narratives surrounding technologies, placing technologies in sociopolitical contexts, and engaging in reflective practice.

The developmental story was interesting to those of us who hope to teach toward critical technological consciousness.

We found:

“With one exception, all our participants described a turning point in the way they thought about technology.”

“It is noteworthy that formal education was deeply influential for so many of our participants, but those experiences overwhelmingly occurred in graduate school. Only two participants discussed educational experiences prior to graduate study.”

One participant described working in a technology-saturated school:

“Students would log onto a meeting, and there’s a teacher sitting in North Dakota who’s teaching 8,000 students, and you’re 30 of her students. And then there’s all these tech worksheets for you to do after she finishes. I was like ... that feels weird to me. And I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t want any part of that.”

Another described watching a technology organization debate whether equity and inclusion should be included in a personalized-learning framework:

“the group decided on a hard no. That discussion still haunts me because I see now how much technology development and implementation plans are founded on ableist, white supremacist, heteronormative assumptions.”

Another described graduate study:

“Grad school fortunately shifted that.... This is collective liberation. This is intersectionality. These are systems of oppression.... However, it wasn’t fully connected to technology until toward the end of my grad program when faculty kept saying things like ‘critical approaches are helpful in some spaces, but EdTech is neutral and these things don’t apply’—and that stopped sitting well with me, and I started challenging that belief.”

This begs an educational question:

Why should people have to wait until graduate school, professional disillusionment, or direct experience with harm before someone asks them to think critically about technology?

And now artificial intelligence

The latest iteration of this work has inevitably involved generative AI.

Marie Heath and I opened a recent chapter this way:

“The release of ChatGPT to the public in November 2022 set off a panic of reactions from the public and media.... Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) was framed as revelatory artificial general intelligence (AGI) that surpasses human capabilities like in dystopian science fiction movies such as Terminator or Her. There was a lot of panic bullshit.” 

In our chapter, we wrote:

“However, AI companies were surely thrilled with all the free press that helped push out the inevitability—while overhyping the capabilities—of their products to a wider audience. The dystopian AI hype also distracted from the very real problems AI is really causing already.” Not much has changed since then.

Both utopian and dystopian hype can serve technological inevitability.

We argued instead:

“Students in social studies classes should learn to be suspicious that anything is truly new. This isn’t the first time AI has generated concern. From 18th-century Mechanical Turk automatons to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the 1956 Dartmouth Conference to Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA to biased facial recognition today, the past offers plenty of historical opportunities to investigate AI debates.”

“Social studies teachers should teach students not to be reduced to the present moment and instead search out expansive lessons from the past.”

And then:

“Unfortunately, GenAI products do potentially deepen a number of social problems, just not the ones that generally garner attention. The only thing magical about AI is how technology entrepreneurs try to misdirect our attention from their capitalistic tricks.”

Our argument now comes full circle.

Technoskepticism is not a stance against technology. Our lives are shaped in many ways by technologies—even if we refrain from social media and Oura rings.

Technoskepticism is a refusal to accept technological change on the terms given to us by the people selling it.

It is a refusal to confuse novelty with progress.

It is a refusal to reduce political, social, ethical, and educational problems to technical problems.

From scholarship to a community of practice

I want to end by moving from scholarship to practice.

Several years ago, some of us began Civics of Technology, which has since become an educational nonprofit dedicated to cultivating critical perspectives on technology.

We aim to empower students and educators to critically inquire into the effects of technologies on their individual and collective lives. We conduct research, develop curriculum, and offer professional development. Our work seeks to advance democratic, ethical, and just uses of technology in schools and society.

One of the resources we share is the technology audit that grew from some of the work I discussed today. Rather than asking only, “How can I use this technology?”, the audit asks about environmental effects, design, business practices, laws and policies, intended effects, unintended effects, justice, learning, alternatives, and ultimately: Should we use this technology?

But the longer we have worked on Civics of Technology, the more convinced I have become that the community may be as important as the curriculum.

Our empirical work suggests that critical technological consciousness develops through dialogue, encounters with scholarship, professional experiences, and relationships with other people who help us see technologies differently.

So Civics of Technology has become a critical community of practice. We publish regular essays and blog posts. We host professional learning and book clubs. We bring together educators, scholars, journalists, and others interested in critical perspectives on technology. On Tuesday, we hosted educators from around the U.S. to discuss our friend and New York Times journalist Natasha Singer's just released book, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools, which engages directly with many of the questions I have raised today.

For me, the Civics of Technology community is one way of living technoskepticism collectively.

I began today with Google and the question: Should we use this technology?

I could ask the same question about smartphones, automobiles, standardized tests, air conditioning, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, nuclear power, or the printing press.

But I increasingly think the broader question we posed in 2023 is the better one:

“What kind of relationship do we want to have with this technology, both as individuals and as a society?”

And I will finish with a final question:

Who gets to decide?