This was my first time at Explore DDD, I finally made it here after years of aspiring to.

Since moving to Turtle Island in January 2021, I have struggled a bit to find my tribe, work-wise. I felt very much at home earlier this year at Agile Open Northwest and this felt very similar. People exploring the intersection of software architecture, extreme programming and AI, all in a human-centric way.

I met up with some old friends, and made a bunch of new ones.

It’s one of those wonderful conferences where speakers attend each other’s sessions, very much a level playing field with a huge amount of cross-pollination of ideas. Lots of workshops, and a good sprinkling of really thought-provoking talks. I got to see Jessitron deliver her latest iteration of this talk live. Elizabeth and I ran our workshop on “non-authoritarian team practices” and none other than Woody Zuill showed up!

Thanks to Rebecca, the conference included a hands-on “Design Storm” where the whole conference self-organized into teams and were introduced to two domain experts from Denver Water. This was an opportunity to practice our techniques together, learn from each other, and solve an actual problem for a mission-led organization. The presentations this afternoon were just awesome, and I could see the folks from Denver Water were blown away.

But the highlight for me was probably the open space, which blossomed on this final day of the conference, with a bunch of us staying in the room, after the conference had closed, right up until we got kicked out of the room!

From left-to right:

• Steven Diamante, who co-hosted the workshop on building your own coding agent with me.
• Paul Rayner, founder and organizer of the conference.
• Marco Emrich, who has build a fascinating framework for evaluating different agentic coding setups, especially their performance at TDD.
• Chris Lucian, of the Mob Mentality podcast.
• Ted Young, of the JitterTed YouTube channel.
• Lada Kesseler, who was showing us her TDD Skill as we took this photo
• Mike Clement, who facilitated the open space

Some of my take-aways, off the cuff

People still care about getting agents to do TDD. There’s a lot of research going on here about how we might get agents to follow a really fine-grained TDD process. We had some deep discussions about the value of TDD (keeping the cost of change flat) and how most popular skills that claim to get agents to do TDD really don’t. We talked about the trade-offs with longer wall-time and token spend compared to one-shotting. I’m curious to see how these techniques might work with dumber, faster models.

Paul runs a great conference. I’ve known Paul for years, and he is a great facilitator. The vibe of the conference was super professional and a polished experience yet also very down-to-earth and collaborative. We finished the event with a big retro where we all left feedback for the organizers on sticky notes. I think everyone felt like a participant not just an attendee.

DDD is more relevant than ever. As LLMs get increasingly sophisticated at writing code, these timeless patterns for integrating human knowledge and decision-making into software, and making strategic decisions about the architecture are fundamental. With people like Matt Pocock and Gergely Orosz talking about this stuff, we’re starting to reach a mainstream audience.

Visual modelling is the future. This is a group of people that love to use visual models to represent ideas. We played with a bunch of home-rolled tools people have been building. I’m excited to see some of these folks at ComoCamp next year and dig deeper into these topics!

Thanks to everyone who made this event happen, I’ve had a wonderful week here in Denver.

Late this afternoon I had the pleasure of listening to a loud conversation celebrating the “bold greatness” of he who is going to drive me to homicide by the very people he's going out of his way to crush. Thank you for that, thin walls of my dwelling. The dissonance is real, and my brain is woefully shattered. My heart? My soul? My...patience.

I'm attempting a smidgen of diplomacy in my scrawl, when I really want to be dropping f-bombs left and right and banging my head numb against a brick wall. Just for reference, I don't really bang my head against walls. I respect their right to remain erect and grant me the privacy to be naked in my own home too much to do that. However, in my itty bitty noggin, I am a headbanger extraordinaire. Especially when the batshit crazy invades my space.

Fucking hell! I just don't get it. Unless you're a pasty, rich, white guy who has dipped himself in Cheeto sludge in an attempt to get mistress number four to look past the latest STD you got while getting banged by Ronny in the truckstop head after a late night meet-n-greet with Jesus because you went and blew your kid’s college fund on some crypto scheme, what in the ever loving Hello Kitty makes you fall for that idiot's bullshit?

Where is an asteroid when you really need one?

Also, quit calling and texting me. I get that the election is a big deal where I'm at, and people are working themselves into a tizzy because oopsiedoodles the red sleight-of-hand fudged things up a bit too much. I'm just going to block. Know your audience. There's plenty of public writing with my actual name on it to clue you fuckers in on if I want to attend anything that has the names you're mentioning.

No. Just no.

They did the whole “send them to an island” thing. I wanted to open my door and request a one way plane ticket. A remote island where I'd need not be aware of the extraordinary amount of hatefulness, greed, and intentional ignorance in the world sounds like paradise. One of the young women in the group even passionately expressed that she hoped women's voting rights would be taken away because “she ain't got time fer that.”

Clearly.

I am now going to go make myself some healthy ice cream, pop a few glycine, slather myself in magnesium, begin the eight Dungeon Crawler Carl book, and hopefully sleep the night away. This shitshow needs to stop before all of the fumes ignite. (I'm looking at you, Supreme Court of the Useless and Deranged.)

I was perusing John French’s 1650 English translation of a text by Michael Sendivogius and found a tale of a poor alchemist who was visited once in a dream by an old man, and then spends his days trying to initiate another visit. He, the poor alchemist, returns to the place where he had the vision of the old man where he “counterfeited a sleep, and lay with his eyes shut expecting the old man.” In the context of the text, caunterfeit means to feign, but it also means to forge by striking false coin, to pass metal off as gold. He tries to counterfeit his way back into an encounter as a forger would metal into gold.

Fittingly, his feigned sleep is answered in kind. Maddened “by alwaies thinking of the old man,” the alchemist receives “a false vision, in the likenesse of the old man.” Falsehood met with falsehood. Elsewhere the book gives likeness its greatest weight by stating the reader is “created after the likenesse of the great world, yea after the image of God.” One word names both our making and the bedside forgery. The text traces the false old man to the alchemist’s wanting, but never says what in a likeness would confirm or betray it, only that the false old mad mirrors the falsehood performed by the alchemist.

The text hides as much as it reveals by never really telling us the ways of knowing a true encounter from illusion, or madness. But it does hint at the consequences for those who try forcing or faking their way into spaces that open only by invitation.

#Philology #Anomalous

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By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Here I am, starting something new and just a few days late with the documentation. I was pondering how to fully start this journey, and thought I'd give the digital platform a go. SO, here goes nothing: “100” days of learning/doing/creating something new. 100 days before the year ends (technically 98 now). I guess this is the “newness” of day three. Starting an online blog to document the rest of my journey, keeping tabs on myself, and documenting in a new and creatively driven way.

It feels good to look at my screen and type away. Only seeing as much as I wrote, with no major intention of where this actually needs to go, and blank space below. I've handwritten all of my personal experiences for so many years. Keeping a paperback journal, notes on pieces of paper, and always taking notes in school through pen and paper- another new feeling to try out in this experimental time...Do I feel more connected to my words as they flow through me in the way of typing, seeing each word be sprawled out across my screen, or do I have a deep devotion to my pen & paper? Flowing with the ink hitting the page and my hand feeling into my words in a completely different way? Something to sit with, I suppose.

Let's get into this, shall we? The commitment is 100 days of learning something new, educating myself on topics, taking notes, getting into a study for a minimum of an hour each day. This could also look like physically trying something new, a creative endeavor, a sport, or something I've always wanted to physically try. Or just trying on something new and really taking time to document this journey of the last 100 days of the year. This timeline puts us at the last three or so months of 2026; some would say the time of the “Great Lock-In,”.. which in some way resonates with what this is feeling like for me. Those last few moments to crush what you've wanted for yourself all year long, filling the longing of “wish I would've” and complete or accomplish something for yourself within the last season of the year. Before I get ahead of myself, this is only the third day of the commitment to one hundred.

I will share what the first two days looked like, and make this first post my accomplishment for day three. Between doing some research on which site to settle on, starting my personal account, and writing a bit, I think I'll feel pretty complete with this as day three's New. It's exciting to feel compelled to continue forward with something before you know what form it'll truly hold. This could turn into so many potential outcomes, and all of them feel fruitful. Whether that be becoming more educated on topics or studying more throughout the day... glorious for my brain! It could also bring me into so many new spaces, physically and mentally! Working on new skills, sharing my stories, and connecting with others through doing this are hopeful outcomes for me. Lastly, it gets me DOING... A Major feeling of actively working towards and being active with this 100 day doing keeps me on a continual journey of actively participating with myself and within my life in a new way. SO, here I am, actively trying a new way of sharing myself, my experiences, and this commitment of 100 days. Let's see how this flows, to 98 more days ahead!

The block is enforced by web-filtering software called Lightspeed. A pupil at a Los Angeles Unified school opens a district Chromebook, types a chatbot's address into the browser, and gets a page saying the category is not permitted. If she picks up her own laptop but is still signed into her district profile, the same page appears. There was no letter home, no press conference. The filter simply went up, and the school year began.

It stayed quiet until the morning of 2 September 2026, when the district's new Generative AI Ad Hoc Committee met at 333 South Beaudry Avenue and a room full of parents worked out, in real time, that what they had come to argue about had already happened.

“Just based on the facial expressions of folks in this room, many parents, some of whom work at the district, some of whom don't, I don't think it's well-publicised,” board member Nick Melvoin said. “I would encourage us to do more.”

Kelly Gonez, who chairs the committee, confirmed the state of play in one sentence. “Currently, there is no access to generative AI for any student.”

That same day in New York, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar H. Samuels announced what the mayor's office called the broadest generative AI moratorium in the nation. The two largest school systems in the United States, between them responsible for well over a million children, spent a single Wednesday reversing a technology policy they had spent three years building.

Nobody has explained why it took three years to adopt and one summer to undo. That asymmetry is the story.

What Was Actually Blocked and What Quietly Was Not

Start with the numbers, because several of the ones in circulation are wrong.

New York's moratorium is not a ban on artificial intelligence in schools, and it does not cover a million students. It suspends student-facing generative AI for 2-K through eighth grade for one year, reaching close to 600,000 pupils, roughly two-thirds of enrolment. State education data recorded 793,300 pupils in the city's K-12 grades in 2025-26, with the widely used 900,000 figure arriving once 3-K and pre-K are included. It is comfortably the largest district in the country. It is not a million children, and the moratorium does not reach all of them.

The exemptions matter more than the headline. Assistive technology for pupils with disabilities is exempt, as are tools for multilingual learners, required computer-based assessments, career and technical education, and, in a phrase doing enormous load-bearing work, centrally approved instructional programmes. Teachers may keep using generative AI for planning, though not to grade work, determine promotion, or counsel a child in crisis. Officials intend to switch off AI features inside 38 citywide software contracts, including the Amira reading tutor used in 222 schools, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Into Reading, and Google Gemini on Chromebooks.

High schools are exempted almost entirely. Up to 50,000 pupils may join pilots of five vetted products, with startlingly specific time caps of fifteen minutes a week for Quill and twenty for Edia. Every high schooler will sit two 45-minute AI critical thinking modules a year. Screen time gets its own ladder: no one-to-one devices through second grade, thirty minutes a day in grades three to five, forty-five in middle school, and no guidance at all for high school.

One provision reaches every grade with no carve-out, and it received a single sentence in the announcement and almost no coverage. Companion chatbots are prohibited outright, across all grades. Of everything in the policy, that is the piece with the clearest evidentiary case behind it, and it is the piece nobody discussed.

Los Angeles is blunter and narrower at once. There is no grade cut-off and no pilot programme: generative AI is blocked for all students on district-issued devices for 2026-27, full stop. Teachers keep access. The previous policy let pupils aged thirteen and over use approved tools at a teacher's direction after completing a digital citizenship lesson. That is now void.

The affected population has been reported at roughly 378,000. Higher figures circulate, including 497,105 for 2025-26 in the state's data portal and a count approaching 565,000 that sweeps in independently operated charter schools, early education and adult programmes. The often-quoted 565,000 is not the number of children hitting the block page.

Both cities were widely reported as acting on 4 September. Both acted on 2 September, and Los Angeles was arguably first, since its filter had been running since the start of term.

Thirteen Undergraduates and a Policy for Four-Year-Olds

The evidentiary case for these decisions leans on three recent preprints, all worth reading. None says quite what it is being used to say, and not one involves a child.

The first, posted to arXiv on 24 April 2026 by Abeer M. Hasan and Sayed A. Mostafa, is “Perceptions and Utilization of GenAI Tools among Data Science Students and Faculty”. It surveyed 119 students and 14 faculty at a historically Black college or university. Students used generative AI heavily, mostly ChatGPT, for coding and writing, and reported limited confidence in interpreting what it gave back. The authors conclude there is “a gap between AI adoption and AI literacy” and recommend structured training.

It is a useful survey. It contains no measure of critical thinking, no control group and no children. It cannot show that overreliance reduces critical thinking, and it does not claim to. Its recommendation is more training, not less access.

The second, posted on 29 June 2026 by Keith Tran, Colton Harper and Thomas Price, is titled “Why Put in This Much Effort?” and asks how the availability of AI shapes motivation in introductory programming. The method is thirteen semi-structured interviews with engineering majors in a MATLAB course with a bespoke chatbot. The findings are genuinely interesting: students questioned whether their time was well spent, doubted the lasting utility of the skill, reported less satisfaction when the machine bypassed productive struggle, and described a confidence that evaporated when the tool was unavailable.

But it measures nothing. It is a qualitative study of thirteen undergraduates, reporting no effect sizes because it was never designed to. Its concluding sentence points in precisely the opposite direction to the one the policy debate has assigned it. “Our findings,” the authors write, “complicate the assumption that students need external constraints to protect their learning.” The students who managed the tension found motivation in the process of learning itself. The paper's recommendation is to redesign courses to value how students learn rather than what they produce. That is an argument about assessment design, not an argument for a filter.

The third is the most interesting and the most badly misread. Shahin Hossain's “Four Types of LLM Reliance and Their Predictors Among Undergraduate Writers”, posted on 27 June 2026, draws on 382 undergraduates at a public minority-serving R1 university, plus 14 interviews and 396 open-ended responses. It identifies four reliance types: Strategic at 34.3 per cent, Instrumental at 30.9, Dialogic at 30.4 and Dependent at just 4.5. A further 13 per cent or so declined to use AI on ethical rather than practical grounds, a category existing frameworks miss entirely.

The paper does not find that students who use large language models show lower critical thinking than those who do not. Its striking result is almost the inverse. Strategic users, the ones engaging most deliberately and showing what the author calls “the greatest independent thinking”, scored lowest on standard outcome measures. Hossain's reading is that the instruments are broken. They “index AI's contribution rather than writing quality”, rewarding dependence and penalising students doing their own thinking. That is a paper about measurement failure at university level. It has been recruited into a debate about eight-year-olds.

This is not a small problem. Two of the largest school systems in the country have restricted a technology for children as young as four, and the research most frequently invoked studies undergraduates, in samples of 13, 119 and 382. There may be good reasons to keep chatbots away from a six-year-old. These papers are not among them.

Cognitive Debt and Its Discontents

The wider literature is stronger, though nowhere near as strong as the citations suggest. The paper everyone reaches for is “Your Brain on ChatGPT”, released as a preprint in June 2025 by Nataliya Kosmyna, Pattie Maes and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab. Participants wrote timed SAT-style argumentative essays while wearing EEG caps, split into three conditions: ChatGPT, a search engine, or nothing but their own head. Brain-only writers showed the strongest and most distributed neural connectivity, search engine users sat in the middle, the language model group weakest. Model users struggled to quote their own essays back. The paper supplied the phrase “cognitive debt” that has since escaped into every school board meeting in the country.

The caveats are considerable, and they compound. Fifty-four people took part in the first three sessions, divided across the three conditions: roughly eighteen per condition, already below the norm for EEG work in a field worrying about underpowered designs. Then the attrition. Only eighteen of those fifty-four returned for the fourth session, the one in which participants swapped conditions, which leaves about six people per group. The thinnest part of the study is the part carrying the most interpretive weight. Participants were Boston-area adults aged eighteen to thirty-nine writing twenty-minute essays. The paper was a preprint at release, not peer reviewed, and a formal comment challenging its interpretation has since appeared. Whatever “cognitive debt” describes, it was not observed in a child, in a classroom, over a term.

Michael Gerlich's 2025 study in Societies, the most cited quantitative claim about cognitive offloading, drew on 666 participants and reported a significant negative correlation between frequent AI use and critical thinking, with younger participants faring worst. It is correlational. It cannot establish that AI use degrades thinking rather than that people who think less reach for AI more, and the journal issued a correction in September 2025 after a table was duplicated.

The most methodologically satisfying entry is Yizhou Fan, Dragan Gasevic and colleagues in the British Journal of Educational Technology, whose paper gave the field the phrase “metacognitive laziness”. Their learners using ChatGPT improved short-term task performance without gains in intrinsic motivation, knowledge acquisition or transfer, and showed fewer metacognitive processes such as evaluation and orientation than those working with human experts or a checklist. That is a real, peer-reviewed finding about mechanism, and it points somewhere specific: the problem is not the machine's presence but the collapse of the evaluative step, which is a pedagogy problem rather than a network filter problem.

Taken together the evidence supports a cautious, adult-supervised, assessment-redesigned approach with young learners. It does not license the confidence with which either the adoption or the restriction was carried out.

The Sun With a Face

To understand why Los Angeles reached for the filter, you have to understand what it is still recovering from.

On 20 March 2024, at the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho unveiled Ed, an AI chatbot personified as a cheerful round sun, built to pull student records, assignments, grades, recommendations and mental health referrals into a single portal. “Simply put, Ed relies on the information that the district already possesses, analyses, personalises it to the needs of each student and then builds a pathway,” Carvalho told reporters. The contract with a Boston start-up called AllHere Education, signed on 20 June 2023, was worth up to about $6.2 million over five years. The district paid roughly $3 million.

Ed was switched off on 14 June 2024, less than three months after launch, when AllHere furloughed most of its staff. Chief of Special Education Tony Aguilar said the district had no warning until the day it happened. AllHere filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy later that year. On 19 November 2024, federal agents arrested the company's founder and chief executive, Joanna Smith-Griffin; prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged her with securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, alleging she had told investors in 2021 that AllHere had generated about $3.7 million in revenue, including contracts with the New York City and Atlanta districts, when the true figure was around $11,000 and the contracts did not exist. Those remain allegations.

The consequences travelled upwards, though not by any route that has yet been established in public. In February 2026 federal agents arrived at Carvalho's home and district office in the early morning, and at the Miami property of a Florida consultant with long-standing ties to him who had helped bring the technology to the district. Reporting at the time indicated the raids may be linked to the AllHere deal; that link has been suggested rather than demonstrated. A source with direct knowledge has since said the investigation concerns allegations of kickbacks dating to Carvalho's earlier tenure running the Miami school district, and that it predates the current administration. He is not named in the case against Smith-Griffin and has not been charged with any crime. He was placed on paid leave on 27 February and resigned on 21 June 2026, saying that “placing students first has always guided my work”. Andrés Chait succeeded him on an acting basis.

None of which requires Carvalho to have done anything wrong. The argument does not turn on what the investigation concludes, because what follows is a sequence of institutional events rather than a verdict: superintendent champions a chatbot, contract signed, product launched with a press event, dead in eleven weeks, vendor bankrupt, founder indicted, superintendent raided and gone, and two months after his resignation the district blocks the technology for every child it educates. That is not a district responding to research. It is a district responding to a scandal.

Everything Old Is Procured Again

Los Angeles had run this loop before, in a version so similar that the main difference is the price.

In 2013, Superintendent John Deasy launched a plan to put an iPad loaded with Pearson curriculum into the hands of every student, some 650,000 devices, at a projected cost approaching $1.3 billion. The rollout collapsed almost immediately. Pupils bypassed the security restrictions within days, teachers had not been trained, and the content was incomplete. A federal review later noted that Deasy had given the district only a few months to produce a plan before putting the work out to bid, and emails surfaced showing he and a deputy had been in close contact with Apple and Pearson before the contract was awarded.

The FBI seized twenty boxes of records in December 2014. Deasy had resigned that October, and his successor Ramon Cortines cancelled the Pearson contract the day after the seizure. Federal investigators closed the inquiry without charges in February 2017.

Set the two episodes side by side and the pattern is legible. A charismatic superintendent identifies a transformative technology. Procurement moves faster than evaluation. The product ships to hundreds of thousands of children with no pilot worth the name. It fails within a school year. Federal law enforcement arrives. The leader departs. The district retreats. Twice in thirteen years, in the same building, the reversal has been triggered by a criminal investigation rather than by a study.

Rachel White, associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Texas at Austin, put the dynamic carefully when the district's leadership imploded in June. Carvalho “was always willing to make big, ambitious bets”, she said, “and that boldness can sometimes cut both ways”. Natalie Milman of George Washington University offered the mundane fix that neither the iPad programme nor Ed received: “Before rolling out any tool, [educators should conduct] some testing with a smaller group, getting some feedback from the actual people who will be using it, and then getting that public comment.”

Ed went from contract to citywide launch without that. So did the moratorium that replaced it.

The Chancellor Who Changed His Mind

New York's record is a purer specimen, because it contains a completed round trip.

In January 2023, weeks after ChatGPT became generally available, the New York City education department added it to the blocked list on school networks and devices, citing academic integrity and accuracy. The ban lasted four months. On 18 May 2023, Chancellor David Banks announced the reversal in a Chalkbeat op-ed, the same institution discussing the same technology from the opposite direction.

“The knee-jerk fear and risk overlooked the potential of generative AI to support students and teachers,” Banks wrote, “as well as the reality that our students are participating in and will work in a world where understanding generative AI is crucial.” He promised the department would “encourage and support our educators and students as they learn about and explore this game-changing technology”.

Three years and three months later, a different mayor and chancellor announced the country's broadest moratorium. “Children need teachers and human connection in order to learn and grow,” Mamdani said. Samuels framed it as parental protection: “As Chancellor and as a parent, I believe our job is to protect what makes learning work.”

Both statements are perfectly reasonable. So was Banks's. That is the problem. In under four years the same school system has banned generative AI, unbanned it while calling the ban a knee-jerk reaction, spent three years encouraging it, and banned it again for two-thirds of its pupils. At no point did a decisive piece of evidence about children and chatbots arrive. What arrived, in order, was a moral panic, a wave of vendor and federal enthusiasm, and then a political constituency of organised parents.

The enthusiasm phase is worth pricing. In April 2025 an executive order titled “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth” created a White House Task Force on AI Education, directing agencies to build partnerships teaching K-12 pupils AI literacy. In July 2025 the American Federation of Teachers, with the United Federation of Teachers, announced a National Academy for AI Instruction underwritten by $23 million over five years from Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, aiming to train 400,000 educators from a Manhattan facility, beginning with New York City.

The Academy is a few kilometres from the chancellor who has now suspended student-facing generative AI for 600,000 children. The union whose president has publicly criticised the moratorium's enforcement gaps is the same union that co-founded it.

Seven days after the moratorium, that observation acquired a sharper edge. On 9 September 2026, Randi Weingarten of the AFT, Michael Mulgrew of the UFT and Brad Smith, vice chair of Microsoft, jointly announced a National AI Safety and Privacy Standard for schools, framed as legally enforceable rather than advisory. Student and educator data cannot be used to train AI models, sold, or repurposed. Schools keep control over how long data is retained and when it is deleted. AI systems must carry human oversight and cannot make decisions without it. Families must be given clear information about how AI is being used. “Anything less than legally enforceable provisions is simply a wish list,” Weingarten said. Mulgrew presented it as a debt being settled: “This agreement gives families and school districts the information and privacy protections they have been demanding.” Microsoft's own announcement says the standard builds on New York City's screens and AI policy.

The Academy and the Standard are separate initiatives, and that distinction is worth stating plainly. The sequence is still striking. Within a week of telling the city it had not explained how it would make purchased products comply, the union president was co-announcing enforceable national protections with one of the companies underwriting the Academy. The terms on which several hundred thousand children meet generative AI are being set in the language of data retention and model training, because that is the language a negotiation between a union and a vendor produces. None of it is a finding about what the technology does to a nine-year-old. The vacuum is being filled by the parties who were already in the room.

Meanwhile the adoption curve ran fast and unevenly. RAND's surveys found the share of districts training teachers on AI more than doubled between 2023-24 and 2024-25, from 23 per cent to 48 per cent, while only about 35 per cent of district leaders reported providing pupils with any AI training. Nearly 60 per cent of principals reported using AI in their own work; only 18 per cent said their district had issued guidance on staff or student use. The technology entered American schools through the staffroom, without a policy, and the policy is arriving three years late in the form of a switch being flipped.

The Strongest Case Against the Filter

The argument against these moratoriums is not vendor lobbying and should not be dismissed as such. It has three legs.

The first is equity, and it is the one that ought to worry the districts most. Blocking generative AI on district devices does not remove it from children's lives; it removes it from the children whose only reliable device is the district's. Common Sense Media's 2026 census of 1,204 American children aged nine to seventeen found 86 per cent already using AI in some form, close to a quarter of them daily, and more than four in ten saying no parent had ever talked to them about AI safety. Pew Research Center has consistently found that teenagers in lower-income households are less likely than wealthier peers to have a home computer or tablet, even as smartphone ownership approaches universal.

The distributional consequence is straightforward. A child in Brentwood or Brooklyn Heights with a family laptop and a parent who has views about prompt engineering will keep using these tools at home, unsupervised, with no critical thinking module attached. A child whose access runs through a district Chromebook will meet the technology first at sixteen, or at work. RAND's figures already show the gradient: by the start of 2025-26, district leaders estimated that almost all low-poverty districts would have trained teachers on AI, against about six in ten high-poverty districts. A blanket device-level block does not close that gap. It formalises it.

Richard Buery Jr, chief executive of the anti-poverty organisation Robin Hood, made the point precisely. The moratorium for younger grades, he said, is “not the right call”, and should not extend beyond the coming school year. “In an understandable effort to protect students, I fear we're rejecting uses that could help them.”

The second leg is that blocking a tool is not the same as teaching judgement about it, and only one of those is education. New York gestures at this with two annual 45-minute modules for high schoolers, ninety minutes a year of formal instruction about the most consequential general-purpose technology of their working lives. There is no equivalent for K-8 at all. BetaNYC's Noel Hidalgo noted that the policy provides no AI literacy instruction for the banned grades. Hossain's finding is directly relevant: what predicted the type of reliance a student adopted was not access, but AI literacy. Value and cost beliefs predicted how much they used it; literacy predicted whether they used it well. A policy that reduces access without increasing literacy is optimising the wrong variable.

The third leg is that the ban may not be a ban. The Parents' Coalition for Student Privacy argues that most real classroom applications fall into a vague middle tier left to teacher discretion, and organiser Kelly Clancy says the policy “may be less restrictive than it appears”. Liat Olenick of the AI Moratorium Coalition, which wanted two years rather than one, was blunter: “There are a lot of holes in the policy. If we're honest, there's a lot of unanswered questions. Too many exceptions.” UFT president Michael Mulgrew said the department has not explained how it will make purchased products comply, and that educators should not have to “figure out after the fact” whether their school is in breach. There is no published complaint mechanism, no public directory of which tools run in which school, and vendor non-disclosure agreements shield product details from scrutiny. State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's August audit found the city holds no complete inventory of its AI systems.

In Los Angeles, Anya Meksin, deputy director of the campaign group Schools Beyond Screens and a district parent, sits on the committee reviewing the moratorium and does not think a pause is the point. “I think the current policy needs to be discarded completely,” she said, “and we need to start from scratch with the foundational question of what is the benefit of these tools in education?”

That question was never answered before the tools arrived. It is not being answered now that they have gone.

The Asymmetry Nobody Is Measuring

What the two speeds reveal is not what either side wants it to be.

Adoption was fast because adoption is a purchase. It needs a superintendent, a procurement officer, a vendor with a demo and a board vote most people in the room do not understand. Ed went from contract signature to a launch event for hundreds of thousands of children in nine months. Nobody had to be persuaded of anything difficult, because the persuading happened in a few meetings with a few people.

Restriction was slow because restriction is a politics. It requires a constituency. In Los Angeles that was organised parents who spent the spring campaigning on screens and were rewarded in June with a board vote phasing device use by grade. In New York it was a coalition of parents, a new mayor and a new chancellor with an interest in demonstrating they were not the last administration. The evidence base moved barely at all. What moved was the coalition.

Chicago is that mechanism happening in real time and on a ballot. Of the 42 candidates standing for the city's school board this autumn, 24 back a temporary moratorium on AI as part of wider limits on screen time, including all fifteen endorsed by the local teachers' union. Restriction has stopped being a position a district arrives at and become a position a candidate runs on. No new study produced that. A constituency did.

That is why the reversal looks abrupt and is not. The chatbot has been in American classrooms for three and a half years, and the restriction took that long to assemble because it had to be built out of people rather than contracts. People organise more slowly than budgets spend.

And because the constituency is local, so is the direction. While New York and Los Angeles were switching the technology off, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the third-largest district in the country, signed a partnership with Google to bring Gemini into its classrooms. The first, second and third largest school systems in the United States looked at the same absent evidence base in the same few weeks and moved decisively in opposite directions. If research were setting the direction, that could not happen. Districts of that size do not read different literatures. They have different politics, different scandals and different vendors in the room.

Which leaves the genuinely damning observation. Both decisions, the adoption and the reversal, were made without adequate evidence about what generative AI does to a nine-year-old, because that evidence still barely exists. The preprints being waved around study undergraduates. The EEG study has eighteen adults per condition, and six by its final session. Nobody has run the long-run trial with children that would justify either the enthusiasm of 2023 or the certainty of 2026, and both institutions acted at full scale anyway, in opposite directions, on the same absent evidence.

The problem is not that districts were too fast then and too slow now. It is that both speeds were set by something other than knowing.

Building an Institution That Can Change Its Mind Cheaply

If there is a defensible version of what these two cities have just done, it lies in a distinction neither has made explicitly: the difference between a decision that is reversible and one that is not.

New York's moratorium runs for one year and comes with a Technology in Schools Coalition of students, educators, parents, officials, union partners and researchers, charged with assessing impact and publishing recommendations. Los Angeles has a committee, six scheduled meetings running from September 2026 to April 2027, and an obligation to report to the board before the year is out. The dates are 2 September, 21 October and 9 December, then 20 January, 3 March and 7 April. Which means the meeting this article opens on was the first of the six: the parents working out in real time that the block had already gone up were sitting in session one of a process meant to produce, in Gonez's framing, AI policy recommendations the full board could vote on next year. Gonez has been careful not to oversell the permanence. “I wouldn't expect necessarily that there would be a pause for forever,” she said. “But this provides us the opportunity to really think through what does our policy look like moving forward.”

Time-limited, reviewable, with a named body and a reporting date is a better decision architecture than a five-year contract signed after a demo. It is a shame it took two federal investigations to arrive at it.

What would make it credible is a handful of unglamorous commitments. Publish the inventory of which AI-containing products run in which schools, which is exactly what DiNapoli found New York lacks. Pilot before scale, with the small-group testing and public comment Milman described, rather than a launch event at a named high school. Write reversibility into contracts, so a vendor's failure does not become an emergency for 378,000 children. Fund the literacy alongside the restriction, because Hossain's data says literacy determines whether reliance becomes dependence. And commission the research on the actual population, because a district of half a million pupils is better placed to run that study than the universities currently supplying the citations.

Melvoin's complaint at that first meeting was, in the end, the most important thing said in either city. The district changed the terms on which several hundred thousand children encounter the defining technology of their era, and did not tell their parents. The substance may well turn out to be right. The process was the one that bought the iPads and the sun with a face: a decision taken by a few people, at speed, and explained afterwards.

A ten-year-old in Los Angeles will hit a Lightspeed block page this week. In four years she will be expected to use these systems competently in a workplace that assumes she grew up with them. Between those two facts sits an institution that has now shown, twice in three years in one city and twice in thirteen in the other, that it can move extremely fast in whichever direction the last scandal points.

Speed is not the failure. Direction without evidence is. The block page, whatever else it does, buys time to find some.

Sources and References

1. NYC Mayor's Office, “Mayor Mamdani and Chancellor Samuels Put Students First with Nation's Broadest Generative AI Moratorium in Schools”, 2 September 2026. https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani-and-chancellor-samuels-put-students-first-with-nat
2. Chalkbeat New York, “NYC's new school AI ban explained: What students and teachers need to know”, 2 September 2026. https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2026/09/02/what-to-know-about-nyc-public-schools-generative-ai-ban-screen-time-limits/
3. Noel Hidalgo, “NYC's DOE AI Ban? Here Is What the Policy Actually Says”, BetaNYC, 4 September 2026. https://www.beta.nyc/2026/09/04/nyc-paused-ai-in-its-classrooms-here-is-what-the-policy-actually-says/
4. Governing, “New York City Put Limits on AI in Schools. Are They Enough?”, September 2026. https://www.governing.com/artificial-intelligence/new-york-city-put-limits-on-ai-in-schools-are-they-enough
5. LAist, “How will LAUSD students use AI? Here's how you can help decide”, September 2026. https://laist.com/news/education/lausd-ai-committee-first-meeting-tech-in-schools
6. Education Week, “LAUSD Adopts Moratorium on Student AI Use, Another Big Move to Limit Tech Use”, September 2026. https://www.edweek.org/technology/lausd-adopts-moratorium-on-student-ai-use-another-big-move-to-limit-tech-use/2026/09
7. California Department of Education, Enrollment by Grade, Los Angeles Unified, 2025-26. https://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/dqcensus/enrgrdlevels.aspx?agglevel=District&year=2025-26&cds=1964733
8. New York State Education Department, NYC Public Schools enrolment data, 2025. https://data.nysed.gov/enrollment.php?instid=7889678368
9. Abeer M. Hasan and Sayed A. Mostafa, “Perceptions and Utilization of GenAI Tools among Data Science Students and Faculty”, arXiv:2604.22998, 24 April 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22998
10. Keith Tran, Colton Harper and Thomas Price, “Why Put in This Much Effort?”, arXiv:2606.30480, 29 June 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30480
11. Shahin Hossain, “Four Types of LLM Reliance and Their Predictors Among Undergraduate Writers”, arXiv:2606.28749, 27 June 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28749
12. Nataliya Kosmyna, Pattie Maes and colleagues, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task”, MIT Media Lab, arXiv:2506.08872, 10 June 2025. https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
13. Michael Gerlich, “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking”, Societies, vol. 15, no. 1, art. 6, 2025, with Correction, 10 September 2025. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6
14. Yizhou Fan, Dragan Gasevic and colleagues, “Beware of metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative artificial intelligence on learning motivation, processes, and performance”, British Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 56, no. 2, 2025, pp. 489-530. https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjet.13544
15. Government Technology, “LAUSD Shutters New AI Chatbot As Developer Goes Out of Business”, 2024. https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/lausd-shutters-new-ai-chatbot-when-developer-goes-out-of-business
16. US Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York, “CEO Of Artificial Intelligence Startup Company Charged With Defrauding Investors”, 19 November 2024. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/ceo-artificial-intelligence-startup-company-charged-defrauding-investors
17. EdSource, “FBI raid of Los Angeles Superintendent Carvalho's home, office may be linked to student AI chatbot”, February 2026. https://edsource.org/2026/fbi-raids-home-and-office-of-los-angeles-unified-superintendent-carvalho/752038
18. Education Week, “Lessons Learned About Bold Tech Initiatives From the LAUSD Chief's Departure”, June 2026. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/lessons-learned-about-bold-tech-initiatives-from-the-lausd-chiefs-departure/2026/06
19. Governing, “A Cautionary Tale for Any Government IT Project: L.A.'s Failed iPad Program”, 2015, https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-tablets-los-angeles-ipad-apple-schools.html; and EdWeek Market Brief, “Feds Drop Investigation Into Los Angeles District Over $1 Billion iPad Purchase”, February 2017, https://marketbrief.edweek.org/regulation-policy/feds-drop-investigation-into-los-angeles-district-over-1-billion-ipad-purchase/2017/02
20. David C. Banks, “ChatGPT caught NYC schools off guard. Now, we're determined to embrace its potential”, Chalkbeat New York, 18 May 2023. https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2023/5/18/23727942/chatgpt-nyc-schools-david-banks/
21. American Federation of Teachers, “AFT to Launch National Academy for AI Instruction with Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and United Federation of Teachers”, 8 July 2025. https://www.aft.org/press-release/aft-launch-national-academy-ai-instruction-microsoft-openai-anthropic-and-united
22. Microsoft Source, “AFT, UFT and Microsoft announce 'National AI Safety & Privacy Standard' for schools to protect students, families and educators”, 9 September 2026. https://news.microsoft.com/source/2026/09/09/aft-uft-and-microsoft-announce-national-ai-safety-privacy-standard-for-schools-to-protect-students-families-and-educators/
23. RAND Corporation, “AI Use in Schools Is Quickly Increasing but Guidance Lags Behind: Findings from the RAND Survey Panels”, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4180-1.html
24. Common Sense Media, “The Common Sense Media Census: AI Use by Tweens and Teens, 2026”, 8 June 2026. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/2026-ai-use-by-tweens-and-teens-1.pdf
25. Ray Schroeder, “Big School Districts Pause AI Access at School”, Inside Higher Ed, 16 September 2026. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/online-trending-now/2026/09/16/big-school-districts-pause-ai-access-school

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

M. se convirtió en un monstruo. ¿Cómo imaginar que eso podría ocurrir? Pasó. Está babeando melaza con el rostro desfigurado y los ojos muy pequeños por la inflamación de las venas y las arterias que rodean los ojos. El objetivo del día consiste en permanecer sentada e ignorar el venado sanguinolento que se pudre bajo la silla, las patas delgadas con cascos negros se extienden rígidas debajo de la mesa, no te atreves a agacharte para ver el rostro del animal, lo adivinas… algo congestionado y probablemente con la quijada desviada por un golpe. Más allá del plato está la rueda de la fortuna, el bullicio de los meseros. Luego, te sorprendes moviéndote entre callejones diminutos y demasiado iluminados, te mueves a través de ellos con mucha agilidad, como si los conocieras de siempre, y descubres, mientras el ruido de muchas lenguas te ensordece, que estás siguiendo a alguien y te mira de reojo a cada momento. M. vomita desde una ventana, lanza esputo y pareciera querer maldecirte. Reconoces la transfiguración perniciosa de M., ella habla desde su monstruosidad y cuando intentas adivinar sus palabras, las cuales resuenan en tu cuerpo como un nuevo corazón que late a diferente ritmo, solo hay un gran hocico humano con inmensos dientes. Corres hacia la nieve mientras gritas que es el camino correcto y percibes, sin decirle a nadie, que la pequeña casa de madera desapareció. Corres entre la nieve e intentas llegar a la playa. Decides permanecer de pie y observas como tus pies se ponen púrpuras, el color asciende desde las uñas, del púrpura pasa al negro. Permaneces de pie porque te fascina la idea de aprender a reptar e ingresar al mar helado siendo una inmensa serpiente negra.

In Summary: * Today was very full, doing pre-move prep here at the house in the morning, and signing the lease agreement (all 59 pages!) at the leasing agent's office this afternoon.

Listening to relaxing music on the radio now while waiting for tonight's MLB game to start. Don't know if I'll stay awake for the full nine innings, but I will wrap up the night prayers before heading to bed.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 225.53 lbs. * bp= 146/87 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 04:15 – 1 banana, * 04:40 – 1 McDonald's Big Mac sandwich * 07:30 – another McDonald's Big Mac sandwich * 12:00 – sesame beef lunch plate, egg drop soup,fried rice, trangoon

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 03:50 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 05:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 05:30 – load weekly pill boxes * 10:00 – listen to Jack in 60 Minutes * 11:45 to 14:45 – lunch with the wife at a favorite restaurant, take care of business with leasing agent * 15:00 – listen to the Jack Riccardi Show * 17:00 – listening to relaxing music while waiting for tonight's MLB Game

Chess: * 08:00 – moved in all pending CC games

Why do we learn new things? Interest or curiosity. Somebody else tells us to. It serves some sort of a purpose in our lives. It’s needed for survival.

The part we struggle with in schools is what we tell kids they need to know. If it's interesting to them, they'll learn it anyway. If it fills a meaningful purpose, they'll probably learn it anyway. But just because the curriculum says so is a much harder thing to convince a student to go along with.

For the most part, the content that gets taught in schools has not meaningfully changed over time. We have changed emphasis, language, sequencing, outcomes, and sometimes the tools students use. We have added things like digital literacy, Indigenous perspectives, media literacy, coding, financial literacy, and more explicit attention to critical thinking. But the core academic structure is quite stable: reading, writing, arithmetic, science, social studies/history, and then progressively more specialized versions of the same subjects.

Kindergarten through Grade 8 is generally where foundational skills are taught. While I absolutely believe that there is room to question what we're teaching and why at those levels too, I think there is a far more profound change that needs to be made at the high school level.

High school is where we need to seriously question how easy access to information has changed what we teach and why we teach it. If the student is using AI to write the 500-word history essay for them, the question is why?

It's easy to just say they are lazy. But if we go back in time, who were the kids that traditionally didn't write essays or had somebody write it for them? Why was that happening then? We never actually fixed the underlying problem. Now that it's getting easier to get the essay written, the problem is just more obvious.

Does the student have the skills to successfully write the essay themselves to begin with? Is the student just not interested in the topic and therefore wants to avoid the essay? How do we resolve boredom in the classroom? How do we make sure kids have the skills or have access to the help that they need to be successful in the classroom?

One problem calls for instruction, scaffolding, practice, and support. The other calls for reconsidering the task itself, the topic, the purpose, the audience, or how much choice the student has.

What is the purpose of the essay? Regurgitation is boring. Writing for the sake of writing is also boring. Checking a box on a list of outcomes may be meaningful to you as the teacher, but has no value to the student.

What is the value to the student in learning the information? If the information is easily accessible anytime, anywhere, then we have to question how that affects a student's desire to learn, write about, or memorize the information.

Why is this being taught? Nice to know? Needed to function as an adult in the world? Somebody decided it was important in 1980 because walking to the library was inconvenient?

There are things worth knowing even when the information is easily accessible because knowledge provides context, judgment, cultural literacy, pattern recognition, and the ability to evaluate new information. You cannot critically assess everything from a completely empty head. But that still does not justify every fact currently sitting in every curriculum.

It's time to reconsider the value and importance of the information we're teaching. As technology makes it easier for students to avoid assignments, schools have the difficult job of determining what's still important and what's not, while finding ways to keep students engaged in a world where information is increasingly cheap.

Why is information cheap?

Easy access to anything makes it less expensive. That works in retail. It works in manufacturing. Mass-produced anything is generally cheaper. The Internet and AI have made information something that is mass-produced.

It’s not a question of whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It simply is, and that’s the part we just have to get okay with. We can’t go back to the world where information was hard to get. That’s like trying to convince people that we should stop streaming and go back to 8-track tapes and Walkmans. It’s not going to fly. The nostalgia will continue to exist, but the world has forever changed.

So how do we renegotiate learning and education around cheap, mass-produced information? Or how do we convince kids that cheap doesn’t mean unimportant?

A can of beans is cheap, but that doesn’t make food unimportant. A pair of socks can be cheap, but it doesn’t make clothing unimportant. The two things can coexist. It also provides a useful lens. What parts of the curriculum are still important even though the information itself may be easy to get?

Our individual valuation of importance is not what matters. If you don’t like beans, it doesn’t matter that they are cheap; you’re not going to buy them anyway. But that doesn’t mean nobody else likes them or needs them. A love of a given subject or topic doesn’t necessarily mean the information is more or less valuable or needed by anybody else.

In my opinion, there are specific criteria for determining what makes information important.

• Do I need the information to function as an adult? Is it going to help me order food, budget, find a place to live, or be successful in a career I may not have chosen yet?
• Does it help me critically assess new information I come across?
• Does it expose me to new ideas, opinions, or interests?
• Is it something I’m already interested in?
• How likely am I to need that information in the near future? What is the likelihood that in 5 or 10 years I will forget that I ever learned the information because I never used it?

We can all think of plenty of topics in the curriculum that we never used again outside of the classroom we learned it in. That matters in a world where information is easy to get because it increases the likelihood that students will use AI to get around the assignments. They already know, as we did when we were their age, that the information would be of little value in the long run.

“When am I ever going to use this?” is one of the most valuable questions we can ask when determining what information matters in education and what doesn’t. “I might need it in university or college” isn’t good enough anymore. Post-secondary institutions have an obligation to teach the skills that are not important until that specific degree/diploma/certificate is wanted or needed. That information includes a certain amount of high school history/social studies, math, language arts, and science.

We can no longer assume that a student will graduate high school, choose a career, and stay on that path for the next 40 years. Kids often graduate high school with no idea of what they will do with their lives. I tell my own kids to make a 5-year plan. They just need to be doing something. It doesn’t have to be permanent. If they try enough things, eventually the breadcrumb trail leads to a possible long-term career option that makes new knowledge valuable.

High school needs to lead from that same place. Expose kids to as much information as we can without requiring them to memorize and regurgitate all of it. Teach for interest. Teach for a love of learning instead of mastery of every subject area, and then let students decide what they want to continue learning about.

All information can have value, even information we aren't particularly interested in. The interests students already have are valuable too. We can build on them. But not if we're stuck teaching something that happened 100 years ago simply because “everybody needs to know the history of our country.” That isn't enough of a reason on its own. In fact, it may be a very good reason for a disengaged student to get AI to write the essay.

That doesn't mean history isn't important. It means history needs to be learned in context and without the inflated valuation we sometimes give it simply because it has traditionally been part of the curriculum.

Yes, it's important. But not knowing a particular historical fact probably isn't going to dramatically change the course of most students' lives either. Both things can be true. And we need to be able to hold both ideas at once when deciding what students genuinely need to know in a world where information gets cheaper and easier to access every day.

The shortest sci-fi story ever.

1

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1. Well, you know what I mean.

Top: Denis Mukwege, below: José Andrés. Both photographed at the Atlantic Council, 18 Sept. 2026

New photos of respected humanitarians and news media leaders are now available in the TechNewsLit portfolio at the Alamy photo agency. We took both sets of images at events in Sept. 2026.

Dr. Denis Mukwege, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, and World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés discussed their work at an Atlantic Council event on 18 Sept. Mukwege works with wartime rape victims in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and surrounding countries, treating not only their immediate wounds but also addressing the underlying social, cultural, and legal causes. World Central Kitchen, begun by chef Andrés, serves thousands of meals to people affected by wars and natural disasters worldwide.

Top: New York Times Washington reporter Carl Hulse. Below: Former CNN anchor and bureau chief Frank Sesno. Both photographed at the National Press Club, 14 Sept. 2026.

New York Times correspondent Carl Hulse and former CNN journalist Frank Sesno recounted their stories of covering the terrorist attacks on Washington, DC on 11 Sept. 2001. Both journalists were in Washington at the time, and told their stories to a packed National Press Club event on 14 Sept. 2026. The discussion quickly evolved into the deteriorating climate for press freedom in the U.S. under the Trump administration.

All image sets are available from the TechNewsLit portfolio at the Alamy photo agency.

Copyright © Technology News and Literature. All rights reserved.

I’m listening to Iggy Azaleah, sitting in the bar of my own kitchen. A fire is burning in the fireplace.

I’m back again to my old self!

It took only two or three years?

She’s pretty bad, but I know now that a Loubouiton is a shoe.

It’s never a bad thing to gain knowledge. The point is, you never know which curveballs life throws your way; the more you know, the higher the probability of sucess

Just gather it all in the head

And lo and behold, it’s just like a junk room up there

With Loubouiton’s, C#, weather stations and Pokémon.

#nonfiction #books #politics #socialism

The Left excels at diagnosis. There is no shortage of books, articles, papers, podcasts, documentaries, reports and more decrying the ills of late-stage capitalism. From deepening inequality to the breakdown of the biosphere, we can argue convincingly how capitalism fails us. What, however, is to be done about it?

Here we are on substantially weaker ground. Marx famously declared that he was not in the business of writing the cookbooks for the post-revolutionary workers’ state, and this injunction against utopianism has hung like a shadow over socialist writers ever since. The nature of actually existing socialism limited the imagination even further, equating post-capitalist society with dreary authoritarianism. Yet even where alternative futures are being imagined, such as in visions of degrowth or solarpunk, the question of how we get from here to there often remains unanswered. Attaining the future we want is not merely a matter of having the right ideas, it is also about building the power to get there.

Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st century directly grapples with this question. Wright’ final book, it builds on decades of Marxist sociological research and activist practice, distilling these into a delightfully short primer on how to change the world. It is not an instruction manual for building a community group or trade union along the lines of Jane McAlevey’s Organising for Power and similar works, but a guide to what anti-capitalist organisations can do to move us closer to a better future. Although the book contains some policy ideas, it is not a catalogue of nice but unachievable policy prescriptions either, but instead presents a strategic framework that organisers can use to assess whether their efforts are likely to erode capitalist dominance.

Ecosystem socialism

While it might be assumed that readers picking up a book titled How to be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century would already be persuaded of the evils of capitalism, Wright nonetheless starts off with a succinct overview of the arguments against it. As an Analytical Marxist, Wright has disavowed Marxism’s original foundation on the teleological movement of history and the exploitation of workers through the extraction of surplus value. Wright’s case against capitalism is instead purely moral, grounded on capitalism’s inherent tendency to undermine equality, freedom and community. It is an elegant first chapter, and while traditional Marxists may well find it too milquetoast for their liking, it will appeal to a much wider left-wing readership. The availability of multiple arguments against capitalism in any event strengthens rather than weakens the case.

Wright’s Analytical Marxism similarly excuses him from the search for a revolutionary subject charged to be the sole agent of historical progress, something much left-wing writing has been agonising over after the failure of the traditional proletariat to usher in the socialist new dawn. Hopes have been pinned on revolutionaries in the global periphery, other oppressed groups such as women or ethnic minorities, students, or a new generation of ‘networked workers’. Not that hope in the working class has been fully abandoned either: there are still those yearning for a return to the centrality of the working class led by a reinvigorated communist party to act as the revolutionary vanguard. Wright avoids this fruitless search for a single historical subject, and instead roots his analysis in a recognition that capitalism harms people in many different ways, leading them to organise against it for different reasons and with different goals. It is diversity instead of uniformity, and to Wright this is a strength rather than a weakness, although he does not downplay the difficulties of organising across an ecosystem of groups, communities and movements. In this, he his much closer to writers like Rodrigo Nunes who in Neither Vertical nor Horizontal also advocates for ecosystemic approach, than to Jodi Dean’s argument in Comrade for a return to the traditional communist party. Or, as revolutionary poet Diane di Prima explained:

NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.

If I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here

Once you recognise that it will take a multitude of us shoving at the thing from all sides, the logical next conclusion is that it will also take a multitude of methods. Wright thus takes the holistic view that an ecosystem of actors will deploy a range of strategies to bring about the demise of capitalism, depending on their situation, capacities and preferences. How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century identifies five types of strategy: smashing capitalism through revolution, dismantling it by political means, taming it to limit its worst effects, resisting it locally, or attempting to escape it altogether. Discarding revolutionary rupture on the grounds that it is neither likely nor desirable in advanced democracies, Wright concludes that a combination of the other four strategies must be used to erode capitalism.

Selecting ‘all of the above’ may look like a trite way out of an analytical quandary, but Wright’s assertion is deeply considered and its value lies precisely in its ability to pragmatically transcend both the sterile argument about an ideologically ‘correct’ course of action and the fatalistic sense that because revolution is not on the horizon everything is futile. It cannot be denied though that Wright’s assertion here rests in large part on faith. In essence, Wright’s gambit is to replace the belief in an inevitable historical telos with a hope that the strategic combination of the four strategies remaining to us will be sufficient to carve out a path beyond capitalism through gradual change. This is of course not a novel position. Reformist or gradualist approaches have been advocated for as long as there have been socialists, with the most famous proponents of this approach probably the British Fabian Society. What How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century adds is a recognition that parliamentarianism alone is also not enough, but that it will require the combination of political advances, grassroots campaigning, and the nurturing of anti-capitalist modes of living in the interstices of the capitalist system to secure victory. By pointing at the interdependency of these strategies, Wright prompts us to identify opportunities to deploy them in mutually reinforcing ways: changing laws or institutions to make cooperatives more viable, or using grassroots action strategically to extract political demands. Although not explicitly referenced, How to Be an Anti-capitalist In the 21st Century bears the influence of André Gorz’ non-reformist reforms: changes that don’t just deliver immediate material gains, but change the terrain on which class struggle plays out to our advantage.

The ecumenical perspective may not appeal to all, and traditional Marxist or communist readers will likely take issue with absence of dialectical materialism or the endorsement of market socialism. For socialists wedded to revolutionary rupture, I imagine that Wright’s alternative will feel either too soft, too utopian, or both. Wright does not dispute that eroding capitalism is not going to be easy. He is well aware that conditions are far from optimal, the road long and arduous, and success far from certain. Yet for anyone who accepts that revolution is either unlikely or undesirable, How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century gives a lot of useful food for thought. This is true even if the reader does not wholly agree with Wright’s premises or conclusions, and that is precisely because Wright’s proposal is expansive and accommodating of different approaches and perspective. In essence, Wright’s strategic programme is a contemporary rearticulation of Laozi’s ancient wisdom that water is stronger than stone:

There is nothing softer and weaker than water, And yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things. For this reason there is no substitute for it.

At ~150 pages, How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century can only give a cursory introduction to many of the concepts and strategies discussed, though it is a testament to Wright’s mastery as an academic and writer that he does everything he covers a great degree of justice in the limited space available. It is a great tragedy that Wright was never able to write the intended, more extensive companion book for How to Be an Anti-Capitalist In the 21st Century due to his death to acute myeloid leukemia in 2019. Instead, How to Be an Anti-capitalist will have to be a starting point or roadmap for those who want to engage more with socialist thought, rather than a detailed compendium in itself. But its real value lies in what it was always intended to do: offer activists not only a framework and a theory of change to take into the world and act, but also the hope to do so. The purpose of philosophy is not, after all, to merely understand the world, but to change it.

Notes & Suggestions

• None of this is to say that anti-capitalism is easy, and the capitalist system has both direct and indirect ways of facing off challenges. Some of the very direct tactics were exposed in Confessions of a Union Buster, whereas Hegemony Now! analyses the more subtle methods by which consent and compliance are maintained.
• One attraction of Wright’s approach is that it doesn’t lock you into one specific form of activism on the ground that this is the One True Path. You don’t have to stand outside your local library flogging badly stencilled pamphlets. On the other hand, this does mean that you have to work out for yourself what you can do. Wright’s strategic outlook accommodates a multitude of approaches, so if you are unsure, see if there are campaign groups active in your local area, or based on issues that are important to you. If you are in work, always join a union, or set one up if there isn’t one yet. If you want to influence national politics where you live, join or donate to a political party to support them. How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century tells you that you don’t have to do everything yourself. All it asks is that you find ways for your actions to clear the way for others.

Lydia's Weekly Lifestyle blog is for today's African girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things that may interest today's African girl.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi. This week's subjects: London Fashion Week, Odd Fashion Shows, Films, Water, Canoe Beach Sushi & Grill, and Full Moon this Saturday

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London Fashion Week. Forget the runway. London was the runway—and darling, the pavement was fully booked. Give London a little rain, a few black cabs, a red double-decker and a fashion crowd dressed like they’re late to something extremely important—and suddenly the whole city is serving Fashion Week. From Soho to Hyde Park, trench coats were flying, boots were marching, sunglasses were appearing in questionable weather, and the Tube was basically transporting fashion editors from one outfit change to the next. London wasn't just hosting Fashion Week. It was wearing it. London Fashion Week 2026: London, Take Your Bow !!! The runway was everywhere. From September 17–21, 2026, London Fashion Week turned the capital into one giant fashion set—and the pavement was just as important as the catwalk. More than 220 designers brought collections, presentations and experiments across the city. Paul Costelloe opened with a nautical-inspired collection, while outside, the street-style crowd was already serving: oversized tailoring, dramatic coats, boots, statement bags and sunglasses—because apparently grey skies are no excuse for bad accessorising. Then came Olympia London, where H&M brought the star power with names including Lila Moss and Alex Consani. Outside? Another runway. Cameras flashed as fashion editors, models and influencers moved between shows. Across London, Burberry, Simone Rocha, Alexander McQueen and Mulberry pulled the fashion crowd from venue to venue—and every journey became another street-style moment. Meanwhile, Fashion Scout's 20th anniversary season brought emerging-designers energy, while Art Hearts Fashion transformed St. John's Church in Hyde Park into another fashion destination. And naturally, London supplied the special effects. Rain. Wind. Wet pavements. Black cabs. A coat billowing dramatically in the breeze? Editorial. A puddle reflecting a perfectly styled outfit? Content. Hair slightly ruined by the weather? Call it texture. Meanwhile, the Accra fashion girl is watching from 30°C thinking: “Gorgeous. But please show me the linen version.” The venues brought the fashion. The streets brought the attitude. The weather brought the drama. And London turned the whole city into a runway. Odd Fashion Shows. Currently we have all these big fashion shows: New York, London, Milan and Paris and then Glitz Fashion show and Accra Fashion Week coming up. And last week we had an unusual one: a garden show. Among the flower displays at Efua Sutherland Children's Park, garden plants, pots and whatever else you can think of, and opened by H.E. the Vice President Naana Jane Opoku-Agyeman, a fashion show was held with the theme “Flowery.” One wonders. Nevertheless, the show featured 15 designers, with 7 designers from foreign countries, representing Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia. Among the Ghanaian participants was Dizgrace Fashion, an upcoming fashion brand, alongside designers such as Adetutu from Nigeria and Roderm Arts from Benin, established adding a strong international dimension to the showcase. Dizgrace Fashion

Films. Often when I ask people what they do in their free time, the answer is: “Watching films.” And, like fashion, there are film festivals: Cannes and Venice. There used to be Ouagadougou as well. Here, unusual films with big potential are shown, and often films from countries you hardly knew existed come to the forefront. Cinema is much bigger than Hollywood. The rise of South Korean cinema is a good example of how films from outside America can reach and influence audiences around the world. Directors such as Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho have brought distinctly Korean stories and perspectives to international audiences, with films such as Oldboy and Parasite. Cannes has also played an important role by giving films from different countries a prestigious international platform. Parasite, for instance, went on to win the Palme d’Or in 2019. Its story is deeply rooted in Korean society and social class, yet its themes are easily understood across cultures. This shows that audiences do not only look to Hollywood for compelling stories. European, Asian, African and Latin American filmmakers all have their own voices, experiences and ways of telling stories, making world cinema far richer than the American film industry alone.

Water: Simple: water. But it is less simple than we think. Typically, one needs to drink 2–3 litres of water per day in Accra. You can ask AI: “What is the daily water requirement for a 60-kilogram woman who mainly works indoors?” and you get quite detailed answers, including whether you use air conditioning or not. And if you don't drink that much water? AI will tell you that you will automatically drink sufficiently because your body tells you when you are thirsty. I disagree. We have learned to override that thirst feeling. If you do not drink sufficiently, you may get headaches, have difficult or hard stools, feel easily tired and become irritated more quickly. A good yardstick is the colour chart below: every time you urinate, just check the colour and, if necessary, drink more. A small side step: around 40% of women in Accra have a UTI (Urinary Tract Infection) so be careful which toilet you use. You can even get it in our hospitals. Now, the water we need to drink. Since about 30 years, sachet and bottled water have become popular. The cost? Say three sachets a day — that is roughly 1.5 litres. The rest of your water probably comes from the food you eat. At GHC 1.50 per day, that is about GHC 550 per year. Assuming you live until 65, that would be around GHC 35,000 over a lifetime. Would that buy a car? What happened before sachet and bottled water became popular? People drank from the tap, and there were water sellers on the streets. They carried a tank on their back, rather like a spraying machine, and sold you a glass of water on the spot. Also for just a few pesewas. Water from the tap? Yes. The Ghana Water Company disinfects the water seriously, using chlorine. That is one reason we have relatively few cases of cholera in Accra. Drinking water from the tap would also reduce our garbage problem. Thousands and thousands of tonnes of plastic end up in our landfills — and we paid dollars to import that plastic in the first place. Water. Simple.

Canoe Beach Sushi & Grill. 19th 4th Circular Road, Paul Weijer Street, Cantonment, Accra. The place is run by a real Korean fisherman, born here, with a real fishing boat. Tema used to be full of Korean fishermen and still is. And they didn't only catch fish. The restaurant has a cozy outdoor area and a very chic interior. The prices are chic wherever you sit, and our tablecloth was sheer luxury. We had white-fish carpaccio, which turned out to be hammer fish, at GHC 375. It was decorated with sweet oranges, which made for a nice combination. Then came sushi octopus at GHC 295 — indeed, something very special. The lobster was GHC 480, but it could have been fresher, and the sauce did not improve it. The little fried fish were nice. There was no barracuda. A big Club beer — they didn't have small ones — goes for GHC 77. And be careful: on top of all this, there is an 8% service charge, like it or not. The prices put me off, but the quality was above average.

Full Moon this Saturday. Nice beach walk at Laboma beach to admire the results of building without a license if you have no friends.

2nd October is grandparent's day. Don't forget.

Lydia...

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Just checking to see if this works. If so, this afternoon's mood tunes. I can't dance on my feet, atm, so I shall dance while sitting.😸

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Rz9ydImMz_c&si=7JgjuOIntWMXg85KA

Friday's MLB Game of Choice.

Can't say how much of tonight's game I'll be able to catch, we may have a busy afternoon / evening today followed by an early start tomorrow morning. But surely I'll be able to manage a few innings at least. My Texas Rangers will be traveling to Target Field in Minneapolis to play the Minnesota Twins. The game is scheduled to start at 7:10 PM CDT. As usual I'll be following the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.