Ralph Manak
@rmanak.bsky.social
musician, cabinetmaker, teacher, bricoleur
Pundit accounts always lack adequate description. Attention is the greatest currency:
The US is a semi-authoritarian state. Folks need to grasp that it's not all or nothing -- authoritarianism has a sliding scale. Different states repress in different ways; some are harder on commerce than on speech or vice versa. Pundits deny the complexity in order to dismiss real, growing threats.
October 5, 2025 at 6:52 PM
Pundit accounts always lack adequate description. Attention is the greatest currency:
Technology in education has always underpinned an impoverished view of learning, the shiny thing that has a diminishing effect on everyone it touches.
This is part of the reason I started @resistanceschool.bsky.social .. not only to get around the political repression around teaching about race.
But also to be free of AI colonization.
We need to get back to the essence of learning together in groups. With other humans!
But also to be free of AI colonization.
We need to get back to the essence of learning together in groups. With other humans!
We have allowed the lazy, grifting Silicon Valley charlatans into the front door, & in doing so, we have learned just how many of our own colleagues & administrators simply are not interested in the actual business of education. It's incredibly demoralizing.
bsky.app/profile/mcop...
bsky.app/profile/mcop...
September 28, 2025 at 1:14 PM
Technology in education has always underpinned an impoverished view of learning, the shiny thing that has a diminishing effect on everyone it touches.
Calling things what they are:
“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.
September 28, 2025 at 1:05 PM
Calling things what they are:
Read this before AI tries to convince you have it do your reading for you, too:
this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like
August 23, 2025 at 1:35 PM
Read this before AI tries to convince you have it do your reading for you, too:
The empty promise of AI is that its user is in some kind of control. The husband in this scenario gets to believe he's the king of his castle, but can't see that he's actually burning it down.
August 6, 2025 at 1:50 PM
The empty promise of AI is that its user is in some kind of control. The husband in this scenario gets to believe he's the king of his castle, but can't see that he's actually burning it down.
Accuracy.
A song written by AI isn't a song any more than dust is skin
August 6, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Accuracy.
It only has to be good enough to be profitable. The bar is extremely low. For people, AI is worthless, a desecration of humanity.
This is extremely important. Generative AI is not a tool developed to advance for human knowledge and understanding. It is a tool explicitly developed in service of corporate greed. AI’s core utility is to undercut the cost of paying workers and thereby increase profit margins for a select few.
That investment in AI is apathetic to the pedagogical success and social value of education because LLMs do not produce knowledge or critical thought, nor train others in that production. It is not a pedagogical tool, it is a product to address cost of labor under the pretense of productivity.
June 25, 2025 at 4:09 PM
It only has to be good enough to be profitable. The bar is extremely low. For people, AI is worthless, a desecration of humanity.
Think you know flyover country? Think again.
As NYC hard-right Zionists rant that Mamdani will destroy "real America", rural Missouri is enjoying the tasty new halal food at Stuckey's
A Stuckey’s in rural Missouri sells biryani and halal food to meet a growing demand
There are about 60 franchise stores left of the once dominant road trip stop, including one in rural Missouri offering a menu that is very different from what Stuckey’s is known for, but is meeting a ...
www.stlpr.org
June 25, 2025 at 2:51 PM
Think you know flyover country? Think again.
+1. Tech in education is a consistent abject failure, with the exception of turning children into profit centers.
Ed Tech is a Trojan horse for tech elite capture of public resources. Every time.
Twenty years in education and I have seen so many things that were going to "save teachers time" and then it got weaponized into "if you don't use this, you're ruining your students' future" and usually when that mindless zealousness comes around it's less than a year for that tech to collapse.
June 19, 2025 at 9:36 PM
+1. Tech in education is a consistent abject failure, with the exception of turning children into profit centers.
Crucial reading from a source of much more:
Against AI: sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-spookl...
May 7, 2025 at 12:53 PM
Crucial reading from a source of much more:
Apt metaphor.
I’m sorry but if your students use AI to write papers and you use AI to grade them zero school is happening. You are running together on a hamster wheel
Why even have a brain, any ideas, any ability to express them, any kind of communication with other people, any desire to solve problems or invent anything, any reason to learn, any use for your eyes or your heart, or any reason to teach or create
April 15, 2025 at 3:22 PM
Apt metaphor.
Welcome to the USA's Self-Harm Age.
March 4, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Welcome to the USA's Self-Harm Age.
Repost with the first album you bought with your own money.
February 23, 2025 at 5:57 PM
Repost with the first album you bought with your own money.
Attention is the greatest currency, and I'm turning some of mine to this opportunity. Maybe you will, too.
February 1, 2025 at 9:06 PM
Attention is the greatest currency, and I'm turning some of mine to this opportunity. Maybe you will, too.
If you don't know her work, make a plan—and follow through—to learn about it, be moved by it. Crucial in these times, as it always has been.
February 1, 2025 at 3:56 AM
If you don't know her work, make a plan—and follow through—to learn about it, be moved by it. Crucial in these times, as it always has been.
It's too bad a confirmation with reservations is not a thing.
January 7, 2025 at 4:57 PM
It's too bad a confirmation with reservations is not a thing.
Been here a while, waiting for the reconstruction. It's ramping up, and maybe something good will come of it.
November 13, 2024 at 4:19 AM
Been here a while, waiting for the reconstruction. It's ramping up, and maybe something good will come of it.