🔗 Classroom Technology Was a Mistake - by Paul Musgrave:

For every minor friction that technology has removed, a giant weight of superfluous expectations has been added. If the net impact is still positive, it is much less so than the boosters promised—so much less so that one wonders whether we would have gone all-in on this. And I also find myself wondering if at least some of the lack of grit that many of the younger generations display when confronted with an obstacle has to do with being raised in an environment in which everything just works—where you never have to slap the side of a TV to fix the image, or when you never have to parse “Abort/retry/fail” when trying to load a program. To the extent that computers do make everything “just work”, they do so by bounding the ability of users to ask for anything — limiting their requests, and their imaginations, to what’s easiest to deliver. But that is far from what’s possible and often remarkably distant from what’s desirable in any given case.

(Yeah, I know—a Substack link. Substack sucks and I wish people didn’t use it. But a lot of them still do, and so here we are.)

I think Musgrave is both right and wrong here.

I think he is right in that the introduction of connected, platform-based, digital technology into all corners of our lives has introduced at least as much superfluous junk as it has removed, maybe more, and that on balance, we might have opted for something different had more people listened to any of the people raising red flags about all of this along the way.

Where I think he is wrong (or at least misguided) is in his suggestion of a “lack of grit” in younger generations. Even as An Old—I am full-on Gen X, sorry—I am just innately skeptical of any argument that smacks of “kids these days.” Beyond that, though, I think maybe the problem lies entirely in the realm in the bounding of the ability of the users to ask for anything that Musgrave references. When so much of the tools and process with which we interact are controlled and constrained by powers beyond us, it limits not only the horizon of what is possible, but our own conception of what we can do about any of this stuff.