Bonum Certa Men Certa

GAFAM Against Higher Education: Toxic Tech

Guest post by Dr. Andy Farnell

In this mini-series:

  1. GAFAM Against Higher Education: University Centralised IT Has Failed. What Now?
  2. YOU ARE HERE ☞ GAFAM Against Higher Education: Toxic Tech
  3. GAFAM Against Higher Education: Fixing the Broken Academy
  4. GAFAM Against Higher Education: Digital Crash Diet

Andy FarnellSummary: Dr. Farnell tells tales he has encountered in academia, seeing that the infrastructure and the software are being outsourced to companies such as Microsoft

To avoid parroting the earlier article I'll more quickly summarise these areas and then move to speak about changes.

Disempowering technologies take away legitimate control from their operator. For example, not being able to stop a Windows upgrade at a critical moment. I've quit counting the classroom hours lost to inefficient and dysfunctional Microsoft products that ran amok out of my control while students stared out the window.

"I've quit counting the classroom hours lost to inefficient and dysfunctional Microsoft products that ran amok out of my control while students stared out the window."A graduate of mine started work on an NHS support team for IT and security. I made a joke about Windows running an update during a life or death moment in the emergency ward. He looked at me with deadly seriousness, to say "you think that doesn't happen?"

Entitled seizure of the owner’s operational sovereignty is one aspect of disempowerment. Another is discontinuation. The sudden removal of support for a product one has placed at the centre of one's workflow can be devastating. Google notoriously axe services in their prime of life. Weep at the headstones in the Google Graveyard.

Students education is suddenly "not supported". They experience risks from software with poor long-term stability - something large corporations seem unable to deliver. By contrast my go-to editor and production suite Emacs is almost 50 years old.

"...my go-to editor and production suite Emacs is almost 50 years old."
Dehumanising devices that silence discourse operate at the mundane level of issue ticketing and "no-reply emails". But more generally, dehumanising technology ignores or minimises individual identity. It imposes uniformity, devalues interpersonal relations and empathy.

When unaccountable algorithms exclude people from services - because their behaviour is deemed "suspicious" - it is not the validity of choices in question, rather the very conceit of abdicating responsibility to machines in order to make an administrator's job more "convenient".

So-called "AI" systems in this context are undisciplined junkyard dogs whose owners are too afraid to chain them. Is it even debatable that anyone deploying algorithms ought to face personal responsibility for harms they cause, as they would for a dog that bites?

In other dehumanising ways, enforced speech or identity is as problematic as censorship or disavowal. So technology fails equally as a drop-down form forcing an approved gender pronoun, or as automatic "correction" of messages to enforce a corporate "speech code". Sorry computer, but you do not get to "correct" what I am.

"In other dehumanising ways, enforced speech or identity is as problematic as censorship or disavowal."Systems of exclusion proliferate on university campuses, which are often seen as private experimental testing-grounds for "progressive" tech. Software developers can be cavalier, over-familiar and folksy in their presumptions. A growing arrogance is that everyone will choose, or be forced to switch to their system. Yet if they are anything universities ought to be a cradle of possibility, innovation and difference. They are supposed to be the place where the next generation of pioneers will grow and go on to overturn the status-quo.

That fragile creativity and diversity evaporates the moment anyone assumes students carry a smartphone, or a contactless payment card for the "cashless canteen". Assumptions flatten possibility. Instruments of exclusion always begin as "opportunity". Callous "progressives" insist that students "have a choice" while silently transforming that choice into assumptions, and then assumptions into mandates.

Destroying "inefficient" modes of interaction, like cash and library cards that have served us for centuries, gives administrators permission to lock their hungry students out of the refectory and library in the name of "convenience". They are aided by interloping tech monopolies who can now limit access to educational services when administrators set up "single-sign-in" via Facebook, Microsoft, Google or Linked-In accounts. Allowing these private companies to become arbiters of identity and access is cultural suicide.

"Allowing these private companies to become arbiters of identity and access is cultural suicide."Systems of extraction and rent-seeking are also flourishing in education. Whether that's Turnitin feasting on the copy-rights of student essays, or Google tracking and monitoring attention via "approved" browsers, then serving targeted advertising. Students are now the product, not the customers of campus life.

The more we automate our student's experience the more brutal it gets. Systems of coercion attached to UKVI Tier-4 attendance monitoring seem more like the fate of electronically tagged prisoners on parole. How anyone can learn in that environment of anxiety, where a plane to Rwanda awaits anyone who misses a lecture, is hard to fathom 1.

Gaslighting and discombobulation is psychological warfare in which conflicting and deliberately non-sequitur messages are used to sap morale, undermine confidence and sow feelings of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

That could hardly be a more fitting description of university administrators and ICT services whose constant mixed messages and contradictory policies disrupt teaching and learning.

"That could hardly be a more fitting description of university administrators and ICT services whose constant mixed messages and contradictory policies disrupt teaching and learning."We must inform all students by email - except where that violates the "bulk mail" or "appropriate use" policies. Staff should be readily available to students, except where it suits ICT to disable mail forwarding. We are to maintain inclusive and open research opportunities, except where blunt web censorship based on common keywords thwarts researchers of inconvenient subjects like terrorism, rape, hacking or even birth control.

Time-wasting technologies are those that force preformative make-work and bullshitting activities. They offer what Richard Stallman calls "digital disservices". For example; copying data, row by row, from one spreadsheet to another might be justified in an air-gapped top-secret facility. It is unacceptable where administrators, following a brain-dead "policy", have stupidly disabled copying via some dreadful Microsoft feelgood security "feature". This is the kind of poorly thought out "fine grained" drudge-making security that Microsoft systems seem to celebrate and the kind of features that power-hungry, controlling bosses get moist over. It is anti-work. This lack of trust is grossly insulting to workers toiling on mundane admin work under such low security stakes.

"...my university-approved Microsoft Office365 running on a Google Chrome browser seems designed to arrest my focus and frustrate all attempts to concentrate."
Technologies that distract are pernicious in education. Nothing saps learning more than tussling for the attention of students and staff as they try to work. Yet my university-approved Microsoft Office365 running on a Google Chrome browser seems designed to arrest my focus and frustrate all attempts to concentrate. Advertisements and corporate spam have no place in my teaching workflow, so I refuse to use these tools which are unfit for purpose.

Finally, only the military is guilty of more gratuitous waste than academia. To see garbage skips filled to the brim with "obsolete" computers, because they will not run Windows 11 is heartbreaking. Crippled at the BIOS level, they are designated as e-waste due to the inability of IT staff to use a simple screwdriver to remove hard-drives containing potential PII. Meanwhile students beg me for a Raspberry Pi because they cannot afford the extra hardware needed for their studies.

Footnotes:

1

Except for those overseas students who might appreciate a free
flight back home for Christmas.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Brett Wilson LLP "Takes it Personal" (Character Assassination, Not Professionalism). Everybody Can See That.
On behalf of violent men
Pissing Contests and Pissing Off Everyone
people who came from Microsoft are trying to vex and divide the community
Microsoft Repeats the Mistakes Made by the EPO After We Exposed a Major Microsoft/EPO Scandal 10 Years Ago
That scandal was all over the media, not just in English
Turns Out LLMs for Code Don't Save Time and Don't Improve Quality
Neither legal nor useful
 
Links 14/07/2025: Arresting Photographers, Threats to Revoke US Citizenship Over Criticism
Links for the day
More EPO Leaks on the Way
We hope that Mr. Rowan will actually try to refute what we say and show, not merely point the finger at the messengers
Decommodification is a Corporate Strategy Against Communities
systemd is led by Microsoft and hosted by Microsoft
People Who Assault Women Are Not Victims of "Distress"
It seems like an American tradition. In a country with almost 50 presidents, not even one was a female.
copyleft.org 'Hijacked' by the People Who Attack the Person Who Created Copyleft
So far there's nothing "tasteless" in copyleft.org, but that can change at any time in the future
Asking People to Take Down Articles and Videos Only Makes These More Popular and "Viral"
If you do something bad, one of the worst things you can possibly do it try to silence those who speak about it
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 13, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, July 13, 2025
Two-Thirds Towards FSF Goal, Richard Stallman to Give Talks in Europe
There are 67 left before reaching the target
Gemini Links 14/07/2025: Politicised Tech and "Leaving GitHub"
Links for the day
The Demise of LLMs
We've just checked BetaNews again. They've dropped all the slop and went back to human authors.
Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Sonpo Museum of Art and FCEUX
Links for the day
Links 13/07/2025: UnitedHealth's Censorship Campaign, Australia Wary of China
Links for the day
Firing Away With Nonsense
Or fighting fire with fire
Links 13/07/2025: Climate Crisis, GAFAM Poisoning the Water
Links for the day
The Microsofters Will Have an Obligation to Compensate Us
This story isn't just about Microsoft. It's also about corruption, there are many women victims, there is abject "abuse of process", and many more scandals to be illuminated in years to come.
Reproducing at the EPO Instead of Producing Monopolies for Foreign Monopolies With Their Price-Fixing Cartels
Does the EPO recognise the need of well-educated Europeans to bear kids?
Valnet Inc. Dominates Real (Not LLM Slop) GNU/Linux Coverage in 2025
And likely in prior years, too
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Fund Raiser Goes on
Later this month we'll expose another OSI scandal
EPO Staff Representatives Issue a Warning About Staff's Health and Inadequate Care
Even the EPO's own stakeholders (money sources) are openly protesting against what the EPO became
Links 13/07/2025: Partly Assorted News From Deutsche Welle and CBC
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Board Games and Battle Styles
Gemini Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 12, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, July 12, 2025
Plunder at the Second-Largest Institution in Europe
cuts, neglect, health problems, even early deaths
Links 12/07/2025: Political Developments, Attack on Opposition, Climate Actions
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/07/2025: Melodic Musings and Small Web July
Links for the day
Links 12/07/2025: Jail in China for Homoerotica, South Korea Discriminates Against Old Workers
Links for the day
If Only Everything Was Rewritten in Rust, We'd Have No More Security Issues?
Nope.
Links 12/07/2025: Birdwatching and Fake/Misleading Wall Street 'Valuation' Figures
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/07/2025: How to Avoid Writing, Apps for Android
Links for the day
Using SLAPPs to Cover Up Sexual Abuse and Strangulation
The exact same legal team of the Serial Strangler from Microsoft and Garrett already has a history fighting against "metoo"
EPO Staff Committee on Harassment in the Workplace
slides
Adding the Voice of Writers to UK SLAPP Reform
The journey to repair antiquated (monarchy era) laws will likely be long
EPO Takes More Money From Staff for Speculation (Pensions), Actuarial Study Explains the Impact
"The key change in this year’s Actuarial Study, due to cascading the new “risk appetite” from the financial study, is a significant increase of the total pension contribution rate of 5.7 percentage points, up to a total of 37.8%. This is driven by an unprecedented decrease in the discount rate of 105 bps down to 2.2%."
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, July 11, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, July 11, 2025