The Technology That's Taking Your Freedom

It's more than AI. A Q&A with Matt Seybold.

There are a lot of different threads and moving parts when it comes to the present-day threats to academic freedom and freely operating institutions. In my view, one of the underappreciated threads is the way enterprise technology has been insinuated into the day-to-day work of the institution.

I previously explored how AI is an academic freedom issue, but really, it’s more than that. The imposition of AI is following previous patterns, which have led to institutional capture and individual disempowerment.

Matt Seybold is someone who has been thinking about these issues much longer and much harder than me so I wanted to get his take on things, which he has graciously done in this Q&A.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies, as well as Director of Media Studies, at Elmira College, where he is also resident scholar at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. He produces and hosts The American Vandal Podcast, one of the most downloaded academic podcasts in the world, which recently finished its 27-episode 11th season, “A Tale of Today,” inspired by the 150th anniversary of Twain’s The Gilded Age. He is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018), serves on the AAUP Committee on Artificial Intelligence & Academic Professions, and has recently published on EdTech in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and his own blog. He is currently working on a book about the triangulation of private equity, education technology, and neoliberal university administration, tentatively titled “Deliberate Deliteracy.”

John Warner: I want to move towards a tangible discussion about what faculty should be doing right now, but since we have an audience of a lot of academics, let’s ground this a bit in theory. Give us a little precis on “technofeudalism.”

Matt Seybold: Technofeudalism is the term I prefer, following Yanis Varoufakis and Cedric Durand, but it’s closely related to what Jodi Dean calls neofeudalism and McKenzie Wark calls vectoralism. Each of them is arguing that we are entering, perhaps already have entered, not just a new phase of capitalism, but a transformation of the hegemonic economic system, after which many of the laws of capitalism no longer apply. This was a major arc in the podcast series I produced last year, and there’s a lot more to say about the nuances and variations of the theorists and their critics, but for educators I think the very pressing threat comes from what I, following Deirdre McCloskey, call capta, that is, elements of our attention, identity, and intellectual labor which are are neither freely given nor exchanged for a wage, but are being captured and coerced from us, then monetized in ways that facilitate further coercion, extraction, and behavioral modification. Technofeudal economies are not comprised of labor, investment, and exchange so much as of surveillance, enclosure, and control.

JW: I think one of the things it’s important to appreciate is that the presence of technofeudalism is not new with the arrival of AI. It’s been part of the institutional operational landscape for a long time, right?

MS: One way to conceive of the technofeudal transfiguration is a gradual collapse of the distinction between money and information, a collapse which is fundamentally digital. For me, one of the major moments in our transition to technofeudalism is the popularization of the Bloomberg Terminal and other computerized data vendors networked with financial transaction infrastructures, such that an increasing proportion of what was happening on Wall Street in the ‘90s and 2000s was just strings of code passing back and forth between servers at banks and brokerages. Large amounts of capital could exist for long periods of time, as nothing more material than the tables and graphs, which would only be accessible via these proprietary terminals that cost $100,000/year or more. Computer networks and cloud software are integral to technofeudalism generally, as well as central to technofeudal education.

EdTech has been a resiliently strong sector for venture and private equity funds because there are two types of information that flow through colleges and universities which seem primed for capture and monetization: academic research and the private data of young adults at the beginning of lifelong tenures as workers, consumers, and voters. What can actually be done with this data? Answering that question hasn’t been nearly as important to EdTech investors as merely creating mechanisms for extracting it. But certainly, as Eric Hayot and I argued in The Chronicle a few weeks ago, it could be used to fine-tune microtargeted advertising, to increase the leverage of potential employers over entry-level employees, to train LLMs and other AI tools, and theoretically to automate some types of knowledge work.

JW: One of the promises of this data at the outset was that it would help us teach better or provide sufficient intelligence to keep students on a particular degree path, but none of this seems to have panned out. I remember sitting in a training with an LMS company rep who wanted me to get excited about being able to see if any students were accessing my class powerpoints and for how long and wasn’t that incredible?

It was not incredible. It meant nothing to me. I understand the potential benefits to the enterprise side of an institution, but is there anything the rank-and-file faculty and students have benefited from here?

MS: The EdTech revolution has been an unmitigated disaster for education outcomes with no longitudinal peer-reviewed studies or meta-analyses showing any benefits from the adoption of computer hardware, cloud software, and mobile applications into instructional environments, which would not have been greater if that money had been spent in other ways, like on teacher retention or building maintenance. It isn’t just that some studies show adverse effects from mobile phones in the classroom or gamification software; it’s that technology spending, even when it has modest benefits, is almost always treated as zero-sum. If you commit to a laptop for every student, you might have to sacrifice classroom renovations or cost-of-living raises. Those things will do more for student outcomes than the laptops will. And EdTech marketing often promotes zero-sum budgeting, promising school administrators that SaaS subscriptions will save them money elsewhere or MOOCs will reduce the number of teaching assistants required per student.

JW: Maybe it would help to ground some of this in specifics around issues of teaching/learning/academic freedom. Help us see how something like Canvas (or any other learning management system) is integrated into these systems and at work day-to-day in how faculty labor?

MS: Before I answer that question, I think we need to make a quick note of the fact that Canvas (via its parent company, Instructure) was acquired in late 2024 for $4.8 billion by a venture capital firm, Dragoneer, and a private equity firm, KKR. Dragoneer is one of the primary venture investors in OpenAI, and KKR is one of the oldest and largest private equity firms in the world. Shortly after they acquired Instructure, Canvas signed (or extended) partnership agreements to integrate AI models - OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Amazon’s Bedrock - into the LMS. At this point, I think we aren’t so much wondering what Instructure itself is doing with Canvas, as what Dragoneer, KKR, OpenAI, and their other strategic partners and co-investors are trying to do with it.

KKR is a deceptively simple operation. It almost always does one of three things with its portfolio companies. It saddles them with debt, performs dramatic cost-cutting to boost the stock price, then sells them off to one of their competitors at a profit. Instructure is no longer a publicly-traded company, so this is unlikely to be the strategy.

Alternatively, it “strips them for parts,” selling whatever portions of the company are most valuable, squeezing as much revenue as possible out of existing customers, then pushing the remaining husk into bankruptcy or selling off the brand. This is very possibly part of the plan for Canvas, which is the most popular LMS in the United States. Many schools are locked into contracts for up to five years. Which means KKR and its partners can cut Instructure’s workforce and enshittify the tech with limited impact on revenue. In my opinion, from the perspective of students and educators, this is the best-case scenario.

KKR is also a maverick of the “one firm” approach. In some cases, they covet a portfolio company because they can use the information and services generated from it to create competitive advantages across their entire firm. Instructure might be seen as an asset supporting other investments in for-profit schools, fintech, surveillance tech, AI, etc.

I believe that many EdTech investors are in the sector because they believe it has the potential to yield the next technofeudal fiefdom (or “cloud fiefdom,” as Varoufakis puts it). They foresee a future in which, as the head of ChatGPT Edu put it, their enterprises are part of the “core infrastructure of higher education” with exclusive access and aggregation powers over the vast troves of data that students and educators share with each other and with their institutions.

JW: It would be quite the shame if we fall for this push for an outside company like OpenAI to become part of the education infrastructure, given that we’re experiencing the harm of already turning over a chunk of the infrastructure to outsiders. I know that some folks are arguing that it’s imperative for higher ed institutions and the whole of the sector to take ownership of this, make their own models, their own shared, free infrastructure. How do you like those odds?

MS: I agree with the underlying premise. I am particularly enthusiastic about the long-running efforts from digital humanists, designers, and IT specialists at CUNY to create institutional alternatives to commercial EdTech, some of which they are developing into freeware. I wrote a little utopian thinkpiece a couple of months ago about how if City Hall invests in these initiatives at CUNY, Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City could have massive consequences for all of education. When I use an LMS for my courses, I use one I built out of the CUNY Academic Commons.

So, I agree with Ted Underwood in principle, as I see his call to “get our hands on the steering wheel of AI” as reconcilable with Chris Newfield’s call to “seize the means of knowledge production.” BUT, you said “the odds.” At present, a much more common circumstance is that administrators or boards of trustees, sometimes riddled with conflicts of interest, contract with commercial AI developers without consulting instructional or IT staff. And whether they force adoption or those tools go largely unused, they create black holes in the budget and foreclose alternative strategies like internal development.

JW: And how do you view the academic freedom aspects of these conditions?

MS: They are so multitudinous, it’s hard to know where to begin, especially in a Q&A like this, where a bit of brevity is required. Earlier, I said that one way of thinking about technofeudalism’s origin is through the collapsing distinction between information and money, which coincides with digitization. Well, at least inside and between the technofeudal enterprises, I think that collapse is almost complete. Proprietary data and/or capta is a currency unto itself. So, if capta (and especially capta in natural language form) is the reserve currency of technofeudalism, you can expect the technofeudal enterprises to be protective of the control they currently enjoy over that currency. They are the money printers. And it is in their interest to enclose existing corpuses of information, to monopolize the creation of new information, to crush competing or new entrant information producers, and to use their monopoly powers to create artificial shortages which drive up exchange values.

Colleges and universities are an existing, durable infrastructure for creating information. Many of the sources of value for technofeudalists, from computer networks to encryption to LLMs, were made possible by the U.S. public university infrastructure. From a feudalist or monopoly power perspective, that is a rival that cannot be allowed to continue to persist unmolested. It must be colonized, absorbed, controlled, or destroyed. If you accept that premise (and I know not everybody will), so many of the threats to education, let alone academic freedom, follow directly and almost become self-explanatory.

JW: In a recent episode of your The American Vandal Podcast, you talked through some of these issues with Dominique Baker, Anna Kornbluh, and the participating faculty at the University of Illinois Chicago, but maybe it would help to boil this down a bit to specifics. What, specifically, can and should faculty be doing to resist these infringements on their freedom?

MS: I also have an essay, quite possibly the most-read thing I have ever written, which offers some tenets for resisting technofeudal education. And Eric and I cover this question in another way in that Chronicle piece I mentioned earlier. I fully understand that people are looking for concrete actions, but I also want to acknowledge that I think one of the best things about U.S. higher education is its heterogeneity. So, what works for a faculty member at one type of institution might be less effective or even irrelevant somewhere else. Three overarching aims, I think, should be 1.) the organizing of campus workers, faculty included, but not faculty exclusively; 2.) deepening solidarity with students and with fellow educators in the primary and secondary schools; and 3.) faculty autonomy over technology in their research and teaching, transparency of institutional technology contracts, and faculty involvement in the technology contract and renewal process.

For me, personally, what Brian Merchant dubs “the Luddite Renaissance” has been aligned with all three of the above aims. Over the past two years, I have dramatically scaled back the use of not only AI, but all EdTech, in my classes. In some cases, I have delivered courses entirely with paper: physical texts, printouts, handwritten note-taking and assignments, Blue Book exams, paper gradebooks, etc. This does not eliminate, but it does greatly reduce the capta my students and I are producing for technofeudal monetization and enclosure. The slogan I coined on The American Vandal: “Print is a rent strike.” I realize that there are lots of teachers who don’t have the option to choose a fully analogue pedagogy. But I would urge all of them to be as mindful and purposeful as possible with what technology they use and how they use it, and have candid discussions about their choices with their students, especially when they are making choices that then mandate students turn over markers of identity, intellectual labor, and private correspondence.

JW: We can’t part without talking about how this is just one aspect of a much larger and broader cluster of systemic forces that are bearing down on institutions, faculty, even society. It can seem sort of overwhelming when you consider the scope. How do you maintain a capacity and desire to keep fighting even when these forces are trying to demoralize us?

MS: Hope is precisely what the facts refuse. That’s how Mark Twain defines it. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot in recent weeks, particularly given what’s been unfolding in Minneapolis, Kyiv, Tehran, Caracas, Gaza, etc.

But I actually think, in the case of higher education, the facts are not nearly so stacked against us. Authoritarianism has always targeted public education, the free press, and other institutions of unsupervised knowledge production. Those infrastructures must be destroyed for authoritarian governance to get a foothold. If authoritarians are afraid of education and academic publishing, it must not be as powerless as it sometimes seems.

Consider these facts. Since the pandemic, the infrastructure of U.S. higher education has been the object of continuous attack. There have been attacks on our funding through state budget cuts, federal grant freezes, reductions of federal student loan eligibility, legislatively-enforced Ponzi austerity, and other types of private capture of public funds, visa denials, and deportations of tuition-paying international students. There have been attacks on our labor force through hiring and salary freezes, erosion of tenure protections, program discontinuations, continued adjunctification, labor intensification, politicized interventions in curriculum and promotion decisions, and targeted political harassment of prominent university leaders and scholars. There have been deep-pocketed efforts to create competition through for-profit colleges, online micro-universities, and unaccredited partisan parallel institutions. And there has been a continuous culture war against student, faculty, and administrative constituencies, which has often garnered bipartisan support and been amplified equally by legacy media outlets and new media influencers. Every effort has been made by a powerful coalition of politicians, pundits, and billionaires to paint U.S. higher education as a woke, broke, broken, bad investment.

And yet, college enrollment is up.

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The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.