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- [00:00]
Alex
I have a screenshot of Encounter Prevention. Yeah, I'm looking at it right now
- [00:04]
Ben
that Taylor Harris has been blocked from meeting with Sophia Clarke. Sorry, you can't start this pass right now, because you can't. You're not allowed to be friends with another student. Basically, these students vape in the bathroom together.
- [00:18]
Alex
These. These students vape in the bathroom together.
- [00:22]
Ben
So are they doing fucking network centric warfare against the students? It's like one person puts in a data point. Like, we perceive vaping activity at this location, this date, time group. You know, it's all bathroom vape attempts have marked in Zulu time, just so we don't confuse them with time zones. All right. These two students were. They were engaged in vaping. And so they're just like. They've got. I don't know, you basically need someone to, like, sift this and analyze it and start entering in, like, patterns and stuff. Like, oh, this is insane. This sounds like fucking military, like, human intelligence stuff.
- [00:53]
Alex
So two things. Number one, it's weird that every time we've talked about technology going into schools, every time, it's always been roughly around the same theme, which is, damn, this seems like they're putting the army in here.
- [01:05]
Ben
Yeah. Be advised, we've got positive ID on vape clouds. They're fat as shit and really smells like strawberry. We think Harris and Clark have had another meetup.
- [01:16]
Alex
Like, we're going into the teen Shura and you go into the tent and then just a billow of strawberry smoke comes out.
- [01:25]
Ben
Doing a key leader engagement with the teens. You have to, like, well, this teen actually has a lot of influence on the other ones. So if we can get them on, then maybe they'll stop doing vaping meetups in the bathroom.
- [01:34]
Chris
So, so wait, this meet, this also, like, implies that, like, there needs to be somebody that's, like, sitting at the big board, like, watching all these, like, blips. Like the students, like, walking down the hallway. Yeah.
- [01:46]
Alex
Like a security operations center.
- [01:47]
Chris
Yeah. Smoking a. Yeah.
- [01:50]
Ben
Do they have, like. Do they have, like, local sources, though? Do they. Who is observing the vaping taking place? I mean, I'm going back to this example.
- [01:57]
Dana
Yeah. I was going to say, like, they must. They must also have, like, snitches and informers that have to, like, run this thing.
- [02:02]
Alex
Right. I have the answer. I actually have the answer. So on the basic tier, you get basic Encounter prevention, which is manual in an admin set. You need to know as a teacher, somehow you need human intelligence that Harrison Clark are going to go chuck clouds in the bathroom together if they can ever coordinate their hall pass times. However, you can if you get pro tier. If you get smart pass pro, there is an AI powered version that automatically surfaces social relationships and suggests blocked pairs. However, again, on its own terms, it barely works because on their FAQ it says I see overlap for students to going to rooms that are opposite sides of the school. Why is that? And they say currently detected encounters doesn't account for real world distances between rooms. We allow the administrators to make a judgment call on what is close and what is not. For example, two students might have overlapping passes to bathrooms on two different floors. This is a logical insanity because they could have passes for different places and go eat up and vape anyway. Like what's. It's, it's, it's nothing. It's. It's so easily circumvented its own stupid terms.
- [03:11]
Ben
Been a high school student who did try to do hall pass fraud periodically. Like, the idea of being able to do a pass and your friend does a pass from another class and you meet up in the same place is pretty logistically difficult. Like, more often than not, it's like it would be either during passing periods, during lunch, or like, because we were in the same class, be like, oh, we're gonna go. When I was in high school, like, we still used film cameras for yearbook. Like, oh, we gotta go drop off film. And it's like, yes, and we're also going to Hardee's and we're smoke weed afterwards. You know what I mean? Like that kind of a thing. But like the idea like, oh, we have to. We were convinced that these. They're plotting like down to like the minute group how they're going to meet up in the bathrooms. It's like, that feels really paranoid, quite frankly.
- [03:49]
Alex
It's insane. Also, they say you could also have a comprehensive digital record of missed class time. But also, don't forget these technologies are being rolled out at the same time that they're getting rid of fucking teachers.
- [04:02]
Chris
Yeah.
- [04:02]
Alex
So this is a class of 40 people and you're like, all right, well, it seems people are missing their like 40 person class. Hmm. What should we do about that? Should we get another. More teachers who can pay more attention is. No, no, no, no, no. Digital jail. We're going to put them in bathrooms.
- [04:19]
Ben
Toilet school is the reform school from Akira. But you're not allowed to go to the bathroom apparently.
- [04:25]
Dana
And this is where the end game is. Because it's like, okay, you're going to throw a bu kids in detention because they keep meeting up with each other to vape and then you check the detention room that you've put them in and it's just like one, they've just hotboxed it, right? And it's this weird sort of like bubble gum double apple blue guy.
- [04:40]
Ben
Some of the kids who are at automotive tech have invented like a hookah sized vape. They're basically like reinventing physics at this point.
- [04:47]
Dana
Yeah, I feel like this is a technology, this is more like the long term effect of it is just more annoying than anything else. Right. So like at a certain stage, at a certain stage you're just like, yeah, you may as well like go have five minutes to like vape with your buddy and just like, you know, I
- [05:03]
Ben
mean, because I've heard of corporate jobs doing this where like they make you. This is as I understand it, not really common across the board or maybe it's gotten worse, but like people having to clock out of their desks when they go to the bathroom at places like Bloomberg for example. I knew people who worked there and they said that like this was becoming a thing, not just badging in and out of the office, but literally like badging in and out of the bathroom. So like, oh, you spend too much time in the bathroom. Which seems insane, but the idea that that would just be the norm for students in school, nuts to me.
- [05:26]
Chris
Yeah. And not only that, but this is like any like the modern school, like the, the modern American school is, is, is like nine of these different half baked, half assed technologies that like barely work, different apps and platforms that's that teachers are supposed to use to share homework that like don't interface with each other. So in reality this will be like a multimillion dollar contract with the school that this company extracts from it. That adds to like a pile of other half ed tech startups that sold their wares. And yeah, you're absolutely right. It's just gonna, in the long term it's just gonna be a nuisance for everybody involved.
- [06:07]
Alex
A nuisance you say? Interesting. I wonder if different places that this has been trialed. Student newspapers have uniformly written excoriating takedowns of it as everyone thinks this is dumb. So this is from the St. Louis Park High School Echo from 2024. In my experience, the smart passes are not meeting expectations that were set. Students can and still do leave class without a pass. Monitors still don't know where everyone is. Teachers forget to end passes constantly making it look like a student is still out and doesn't let the Monitors know if someone's passed their limit. The passes also set arbitrary time limits on doing things. For example, students only get four minutes to use the restroom. The set time is non adjustable. And there are often variables like what if there are other people in the bathroom? It's also very common that a student's Chromebook might be dead or they can forget it somewhere. In these cases, the student is unable to leave the class at all. Teachers also often have to find stop lessons to find their computers and accept the pass. And there are plenty of other minor difficulties that should not be necessary to get a pass. So that they've done is they've made in trying to simplify and rationalize the hall pass thing, which itself by the way, is crazy. This company appears to have created a ludicrous minefield of technical technical challenges that will disrupt everything and bring everything to a screeching halt just so you can go have a piss.
- [07:30]
Dana
Welcome to Britain. I suppose.
- [07:31]
Chris
Yeah, wasn't the whole pitch of this. And it always is, this is how it always is. The pitch is that oh, this will, this will save teachers time and workload by not having to manage. But instead it's just like creating an order of magnitude more data, variable points.
- [07:52]
Dana
It's exactly that. But also it is also another example of how this technology only seems like a good idea if you're coming at it from the direction, from the purpose of believing that people are inherently distrust, you shouldn't trust them and that they are suspicious. And the technology justifies itself on the basis of saying look to the teachers. You have these shitty snot ridden children who hate you and they're sort of unionizing against you in the toilet. You don't know they do these big vape clouds so you can't read their lips. Right, which is why the Ripley lip reading technology doesn't work. And so what you need is this machine that presumably is kind of inspired by the US government trying to figure out Taliban relationships. Right, who's to sort of kill based on whose relationship? Who's connected?
- [08:44]
Ben
Taylor Clark is the shadow sub governor of the bathroom on the second floor.
- [08:48]
Dana
The logic isn't really that far removed, but it sort of comes and every sort of horrible AI production that sort of operates from this lens. And it includes the AI tech that is used to sort of monitor how much people are looking at their laptop screens at work, for example, or when they clock in and clock out. It works on the basis of you cannot trust your employees. Your employees are out there to get you. The people who are supposed to look after. They're actually out there to get you and to undermine you. And so all these inconveniences that are caused by this technology is all worth it because the alternative is having a few sort of snotty kids sort of spending 10 minutes in the bathroom rather than five. Right. It reminds me a lot of means testing software in the uk. It reminds me a lot of the sort of unnecessary complications of parking meters in the UK and how it is incredibly inefficient system that makes things worse and makes things angry. But underpinning it is this sense of you cannot Trust people.
- [09:47]
Chris
Yeah, 100%. This is Palantir for students who might vape in the bathroom. And the whole time that we've been talking about this or that you've been talking about this, I've been just thinking about like, what kind of a system, what kind of a, what kind of an economy, what kind of a culture, like, incentivizes the creation of this software in the first place. Like who, like the fact that. What is it? Thoma?
- [10:08]
Alex
Bravo.
- [10:09]
Chris
That's, that's behind all this. That's, that's creating that. Like, just think of how warped and how curdled the incentives to create, to create stuff in this country have become. Where this is, this is not only like an idea that, that had by one of these tech guys at this point, but is actually being pitched and accepted into the classroom. Like, I mean, it is. I think it's a remarkably telling sort of reflection of this moment in every way. I know we're going to get on to education and where it's on, but like that point that one of you made earlier on about how this is all happening at the same time that our public education institutions and the Department of Education are being dismantled to make room for stuff like this, fewer teachers, however millions of dollars a contract with this company is going to be to implement it. This is just such a snapshot of where everything's trending in the country right now.