Stephen Downes

I like it when the authors make the main point in the first sentence: "Careful and consentful models of digital education are being replaced by Authoritarian EdTech." There are two threads to this: ed tech is " increasingly centralised, less open and more powerful" and through generative AI, "it is less truthful, less trustworthy and more epistemologically nihilistic." As a result, "Authoritarian EdTech revolves around the oppressive foreclosure of choice, consent, debate and deliberation via constituent technologies that are not only all-powerful and all-seeing but that never seek to hide power and instead actively pursue ways to display might as both effect and cause of their authority." On the other had, write the authors, "Authoritarianism is never inevitable." See also Truthout from last August, which makes a similar point, and Global Focus, which addresses the same issue in business education.