Audrey Watters

Oakland, San Francisco

writer, formerly ed-tech's Cassandra, and Twitter quitter long before it was cool. Mastodon: [email protected] (but not really there either)

Articles

Second Breakfast: Computing Versus Democracy

4 weeks ago | nepc.colorado.edu | YearBy Year |Audrey Watters

The Gates Foundation, we learned this week, is backing away from its environmental efforts, slashing staff and funding for projects that sought in part to address global climate change. Bill Gates is "retooling his empire for the Trump era," as The New York Times put it.
Second Breakfast: The Plagiarism Machine

1 month ago | nepc.colorado.edu | YearBy Year |Audrey Watters

If you don't mind, I'd like to return to that other big story that appeared recently in The Atlantic.
Technologies of Individualization Are Technologies of Inequality

1 month ago | 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com | Audrey Watters

The 74 published an op-ed this week, penned by an AI industry consultant, invoking Sputnik and claiming that "AI education is the new space race." I'm going to set aside its problematic call for "AI literacy" for another day; and although it's really the main gist of the author's argument, I'm not going to engage too deeply either with its xenophobia.
Breaking the Spell

1 month ago | 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com | Audrey Watters

The dire wolf is not back. The New Yorker tried to convince us otherwise this week, with an article that surely makes one wonder what happened to its famed fact-checking department. Extinct, I guess, much like the Canis dirus which lived in the Americas until about 10,000 years ago. The photos of the admittedly very cute little pups – photos supplied by the genetics startup Colossal Sciences and reprinted with incredulity by multiple publications – are not photos of any resurrected species.
The War on the Imagination

Mar 3, 2025 | 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com | Audrey Watters

There were numerous news items last week about surveillance and algorithmic decision-making in the workplace. These kinds of stories aren’t new, of course.
AI Foreclosure

Jan 31, 2025 | 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com | Audrey Watters

— 7 min read "AI Will Empower Humanity," says Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist, OpenAI funder, co-founder of Linkedin, and member (along with Peter Thiel, David O.
Second Breakfast: 12 Years and 60 Minutes Later

Jan 29, 2025 | nepc.colorado.edu | YearBy Year |Audrey Watters

This will be the last Friday you'll receive a Second Breakfast newsletter in 2024. I'm not writing my usual "year-in-review" series either, as easy as it could have been to just copy-and-paste "artificial intelligence" a thousand times over and call it good.
Luddites Win

Oct 10, 2024 | 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com | Audrey Watters

Happy Friday! What's good? I've picked up many, many new subscribers to Second Breakfast this week. Welcome. And thank you all for making me feel like my decision to re-enter the ed-tech fray and write another book is a good one. I started Second Breakfast because I very much didn't want to do either of those things, but thanks to time, therapy, and some real dangerous and dumbass stuff I've read lately from various ed-tech luminaries, I feel like I should. I feel like I can.
The Extra Mile

Oct 6, 2024 | 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com | Audrey Watters

It's really happening! I mean, I even updated Hack Education with the news. Here'a little bit of what my book-writing process looks like: I read. A lot. I read stuff online, sure, sure. I already lament not having access to academic journal articles. So for now, I'm reading books – books in print and out-of-print. I read. I underline. I make notes in the margins.
The Return

Oct 5, 2024 | hackeducation.com | Audrey Watters

read Week in and week out, there are a litany of stories that, if I were paying attention to education technology, would prompt me to say “I told you so.” Why look, just in the last few days: coding bootcamps, pretty shady; Udemy, very shady. Google Notebook LLM in the classroom, totally and completely fucked up. But the industry's cheerleaders keep cheering. I’ve spent the last few years trying my best to ignore all this stuff. After Isaiah’s death, I simply could not handle more grief.