Harold Jarche

“ironic points of light”

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Rights aren’t rights if they can be taken away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: A bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news, even badly, you know that the list gets shorter and shorter” —George Carlin

“GenAI sits at the intersection of fascism, capitalism, labor, climate change, and environmental degradation. It is the quintessential technology of our time, the epitome of our current struggles. Defeating it is the key to defeating capital.” —Ben Lockwood

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learning really is the work

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Knowledge flows at the speed of trust. What happens when we cannot trust the sources that inform our knowledge? How much information is now polluted with AI slop? Was that image we just saw manipulated or created by generative AI tools?

In this world of mass information manipulation, learning really is the work. That learning is becoming more dependent on trusted relationships with other people. As organizations large and small rely more on generative AI tools to produce media, we need to become story skeptics. As we continue to encounter more disorientation we have to rely on communities and networks of trust to make sense.

But communities can have their dark sides — they can strengthen bias, reinforce prejudice, and even make hate socially acceptable. Diverse knowledge networks can counteract the group-think that may emerge in communities. To make sense of our complex, chaotic, and fake-media-rich world, we need both networks and communities.

Finding and participating in communities needs to be coupled with a willingness to explore messier networks to understand different perspective. Real learning is not abstract. It can be painful. It requires engagement with others. Real learning is how we are going to somehow get through the messes we all face today — it’s called personal knowledge mastery.

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disorientation and exploration

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“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” —Father John Culkin (1967) A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan

Disorientation and exploration are essential for human learning. By using Generative AI (GPT/LLM) are we bypassing these two stages of learning in search of efficiency and robotic productivity?

“John Nosta, founder of the NostaLab think tank, says AI trains humans to think backward by providing answers before they understand.” — link via Archiv.Today

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sleepy subversion

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Over ten years ago I wrote that we need to flip the office. Instead of going to work, we should be going to socialize, converse, and collaborate. Productive solo time is not for the office. Knowledge workers can be productive anywhere but at the office. This is just as pertinent today. There are times when people need to be together, though with video conferencing and proper meeting management we can get a lot done with distributed work.

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better than good enough

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In 2012 Ross Dawson observed that “in a connected world, unless your skills are world-class, you are a commodity”. Fast forward to the dawn of 2026:

Here’s what AI did. It drove the cost of nearly every signal to zero. Resumes used to cost time and thought. Now they cost a prompt. Cover letters used to reveal how someone thinks. Now they reveal which model they used. But companies did the same thing. They replaced judgment with AI screeners. Now you have two AIs talking to each other. One generating signals. One evaluating them. Neither connected to anything real. —David Arnoux

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both sides

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

RETRACTED: Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans

via @Jan Wildeboer

The article’s conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate are solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto, which have failed to demonstrate tumorigenic potential. The handling (co) Editor-in-Chief also became aware that by the time of writing of this article in the journal, the authors did not include multiple other long-term chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies, that were already done at the time of writing their review in 1999. —Science Direct [undated retraction but assumed to be recent, after 25 years since original publication]

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Viktor Frankl

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learning as rebellion

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Is human learning now an act of rebellion?

Since 2017 I have made this observation — For the past several centuries we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us, and surpassed humans, with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute.

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continuing to step aside

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I am not ignoring new technologies in the ‘AI’ field, but I believe there is a real need for people to get better at communicating and making sense with other people. Well that is what I wrote early last year in stepping aside. What have I learned since then?

I still have not found any use for generative AI in my own work.

The rush to implement generative AI in the workplace is leading to massive job cuts especially amongst software programmers. The perfect storm of neo-liberalism and automation continues to tear up 20th century social contracts.

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writing by humans, for humans

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Recently I have found it difficult to maintain my writing pace of +20 years. There are 3,700 blog posts published here but few in the last year. The fact that large language models (LLM) have scraped my website and continue to do so has had me feeling less motivated to share my thoughts. But maybe the best act of rebellion against AI slop is to keep writing and not let the silicon valley bastards grind me down.

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the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The real power of PKM shows up not at the end, but in the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing.” —Bonni Stachowiak

“America putting most of its eggs in the generative AI basket, China going hard into green tech. When history looks back on this period, someone is going to look awfully stupid.” —Nicholas Grossman

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