We're seeing possibly the worst attendance in history. Even in creative writing classes, where students generally want to participate and have their voice heard--they're not showing up, ignoring guidelines and feedback, and either describing expectations as "unclear" or simply refusing to comply.

We keep adjusting our goalposts, trying to meet students where they're at--but for some, that place is a kind of non-place, where they don't complete any work or engage with the class, but still receive a high grade. Emails are ignored. They can't meet a deadline or keep an appointment.

This is not a "students today" post--it's more "this is a new form of dysfunction" that doesn't look exactly like it's been in previous decades. It's more than just "first-year chaos." It's an across-the-board inability to process instructions, engage with longer texts, and *connect* with others.

And if you want techno-feudalism it would help greatly to have a population that are dependent and lack the ability to think critically. AI is a tool to facilitate the end-to-end wipeout of critical thinking.

Well timed, old friend. Dovetails nicely with my morning observances :)

bsky.app/profile/shoq...

live to see how bad it gets. I’m increasingly not sad about that. All that said, have a lovely day 🤧

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will recover from it.

Knowing this, the super-rich are building modern castles to protect them from we peasants in a new tech-feudalism they are actively encouraging as a way they can still profit greatly from this culture-rot we’ve allowed to consume civilization.

I won’t …

dark age of ignorance, greed, and collective disinterest in almost anything but the self.

And our dysfunctional politics (which is rapidly become our dysfunctional society) are only symptoms of it happening all around us. There are so many others. I have no idea how humanity …

anymore. A tiny fraction of people even read anymore, because instant gratification is so much more easily acquired in many other ways.

Capitalism, technology and popular entertainment have seduced us into a hedonistic, decadent stupor that is steadily evolving us into a new …

just one more symptom of humanity’s equivalent of bee colony collapse.

That pathetic shell of a human being has led me to my observation for today, which is that observations don’t mean much in a world where very few care about anybody else’s observations, insights or concerns …

video games, and Fox news. He sees the world in starkly simplistic terms (like the scripts in most tv shows and modern films), with mostly just himself having any value in it. He has no intellectual ability to know right from wrong and doesn’t know why he should.

But he’s …

@ms.now 😉