Passivization

I recently read an article about how teachers deal with AI at school. The short answer is they are having a hard time. I’ve always admire the job of teachers and seeing such difficulties in this critical field of our society gave me food for thought.

Context

When browsing the Internet, I often see amazing stuff made by amazing people: OSS projects, drawing tutorials, gardening advice, film review, tech blogposts, song analysis, trip recommendations… You can learn and do so much! Why am I still on YouTube looking for other awesome analysis of films that I will never try to watch to give a personal review? So why am I still hopping between tech blogpost and github projects without actually coding anything?
Why am I always looking for inputs without having any outputs?

The answer I give to myself is often the same: not sure it’s worth my time, maybe something better will pop in the next video, maybe it’s not THE Big Idea… Well, there is a lot to unpack here!

Activation step

One year ago, I was still sitting on the bench of my cybersecurity master, and curiously I had a similar behavior. In classic french masters, you often have two different types of class:

• Lectures: 200 students in an amphitheater, listening (or not) to the teacher with few interactions
• Labs, where students actually practice learned skills in exercises or projects, with several teachers available in the classroom to debug stuff or answer question.

As far as I remember, I didn’t feel I was learning that much during lectures, because I had a hard time staying focus more than ~1h, even during my favorite classes. I was convinced the best classes was labs.

However, during lab sessions, I often struggled getting into the swing of things. In fact, that was the case for any kind of exercises that requires me to do something else that listening passively to my teacher. Usually, it took me a lot of energy and time to manage to get into the exercise, and then, nobody could stop me.

The point I’m trying to highlight is that I feel that with the years, my activation step is getting harder and harder to pass when I want to start an activity.

TODO: Drawing?

Aren’t you just lazy?

At first sight, you could think this is just laziness. But let’s define it a bit better:

• I was ok with attending lectures even if I think they were sometimes boring. I was also ok going to the lab courses and looking at the teacher doing live correction. But I didn’t want to do the exercise.
• I’m ok with following a drawing tutorial, or reproducing what the guy is doing in live. But I’m not ok when he says “Now pause the video and do few sketches of several objects around you as we just learned!”.

So it looks like a very specific laziness of actions that require active thinking, and decision making. Actions that are not just listening or reproducing stuff. Passive actions.

I’m not saying that this attraction for passive actions is new. I get that it’s natural that we try to turn off our brain sometime, and switch to passive mode. Especially when we are doing something we don’t want or like to do. However, I feel like its harder and harder to fight against this.

Passivization

What is influencing this activation steps growth? Let’s talk about tech! What is the common point between lifestyle youtubers, doomscrolling and AI chatbots? They are all passive actions that replace active ones:

• With lifestyle vlogs, you can passively enjoy moments of someone else’s life instead of actively trying to live some. You can also passively take advice from influencers on how you should live your life instead of actively take a moment to think about it by yourself.
• With doomscrolling, you just become a passive individual that absorbs random content from opaque algorithms instead of looking for content that you like by yourself on the web
• AI chatbots are the worst: they are currently promoted by the tech bros to simply replace any active task with a passive question

Hence, it appears we live in a world where tech became the synonymous of a passivization of our society. Today, the trend is to optimize passive mode time in our lives. And if we become more and more passive, we loose the habit to do active things, which could explain why these activation steps become higher and higher.

Passive mode

But after all, why should we fight passive mode?

When we are in passive mode, we don’t take decisions. We let others do it for us.

• The AI chatbot is choosing for you the keypoints of the article you asked it to summarize.
• The Spotify algorithm is choosing for you what are your musical tastes by cooking your daily mix.
• The X algorithm is choosing for you your point of view about this specific political topic by promoting particular accounts. And guess what the tech bros are wanting to control the most to gain power and make money? Your decisions. If they can predict it or even control it, they win the game.

Something else that is killed by passive mode is creativity. The creative process is based on making choices. Not necessary rational ones, but still making choices. Creating is putting a color on a white page, playing a sound above the silence, sharing ideas with the right words… Creating is choosing something and exploring from it. And as we lake creativity, I think we become less and less sensible to art. Again, even Spotify knows better than me my favorite artists, and I continue to pay them to remind me who they are in my annual wrapped.

Teaching passive students

Of course, young people are more exposed to this phenomena because they are more exposed to tech. And I think what the 404media article is showing is that teachers are now facing classes full of passive students:

My kids don’t think anymore. They don’t have interests. Literally, when I ask them what they’re interested in, so many of them can’t name anything for me.

We are interested in nothing but everything at the same time. As long as we just have to open our hears and passively listen. We delegate every decisions. We wait for spoon-fed opinions without trying to make one by ourselves. We became bottomless bags of knowledge, looking for more and more content to suck in, without being able to do anything with it.

Towards activation

I’m not interacting enough with children and students to talk about solutions here. But I think being conscious of this insidious push to passive mode is important to understand the world we live in. I think it is an interesting exercise to list all the active and passive actions you have done these days to realize how much you take and wait for input, to satisfy a never ending starve, without even thinking what you could concretely do with it.

For me, writing this blogpost is one of the most active thing I’ve ever done since a long time. And it feels good.