The Gates Foundation, we learned this week, is backing away from its environmental efforts, slashing staff and funding for projects that sought in part to address global climate change. Bill Gates is "retooling his empire for the Trump era," as The New York Times put it. No mention in that story of AI, surely one reason why, as the article notes in passing, that the "demand for electricity is rising sharply" – a phrasing that relies on the passive voice construction to obscure the deep ties between the computing and the fossil fuel industries, between Gates's immense wealth and the destruction of the planet.

We are in the midst of a "war on the future," as Jamelle Bouie put it – a war against education, the environment, science, healthcare, a war against our very survival. And philanthropy won't save us. Indeed, the purpose of philanthropy has never been thus. At the end of the day, it's always been just a tax dodge.

I do confess, however: I am always sort of shocked that, somewhere along the way, we forgot that Bill Gates and Microsoft are the villains in this story-line.

This couldn't have been more clear in the 1980s and 1990s, I reckon – the US government's anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft was perhaps the culmination of this widely held belief that the company was just bad. The lawsuit challenged Microsoft's monopolistic behavior with regard to how its operating system's handled (or not) competitors' web browsers. But there were other signals that Gates's and Microsoft' dominance were problematic economically, technologically, culturally. Microsoft was the Borg, for crying out loud. And when Bill Gates became the richest man in the world in the mid-1990s, both he and his software company were reviled. Reviled.

Of course, Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft soon after to focus on his philanthropic efforts, and he's been incredibly successful at laundering his reputation. His name is probably more synonymous now with his foundation's work than with his company's shady and litigious business practices or its shoddy, bloated software. That's what being a billionaire gets you, I guess. (Or once got you. I like to believe this is one of the things that makes Mark Zuckerberg so damn mad: he's rich and ostensibly "charitable," and everyone still hates his guts.)

Some time in the final decades of the twentieth century – was it before or after that anti-trust lawsuit, I'm not sure – American society gave up on taxing the wealthy, gave up on funding and extending the New Deal security and stability to everyone – lured by the false promise, no doubt, that big business and philanthropy would handle the things that Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman insisted government could not. We were all told that, sure, there'd be no more social safety net, but everything would be okay: we had computers now, we had the Internet.

Rather than vanquishing Microsoft (or tech billionaires), we've bent many of our practices towards its products, its ideology. Microsoft Office and its various competitors' clones have become utterly ubiquitous in the white-collar workplace and in the classroom, and we've completely surrendered "work" to the company's mundane vision of productivity software – tools that produce "bullshit jobs" in turn; tools that, it's worth noting, have done nothing much at all to boost actual productivity (at least as economists measure it) in the intervening decades. Somehow we're all busier than ever clicking on things; but we're not getting much more done. We're all relatively poorer too, while billionaires like Bill Gates are richer than ever before.

Long before this country's recent turn toward techno-autocracy, Bill Gates has wielded his power – the power of an oligarch, which to be crystal clear is fundamentally an anti-democratic power – to "reform" public education; and certainly no one else has been as influential in shaping American education policy, bending all policy towards technology policy – whether in instruction or assessment. Bill Gates gave us InBloom. Charter schools. The Common Core. He gave us Sal Khan and Khan Academy, the latter of which is now synonymous with education technology and certainly with AI-as-instruction. And what a coincidence: Khan Academy's AI product Khanmigo runs on ChatGPT, the main product of OpenAI, whose largest funder is Microsoft.

We live in the future that Bill built; and it's a future that will never challenge oligarchy, because – I hope people will someday start to notice – computing technology itself has embraced and enabled neoliberalism, has accelerated inequality and autocracy. The industry has explicitly targeted some of the pillars of democracy for "disruption": journalism most famously, but also so clearly public education.

The glitzy TED-talk future of individualized, video-based instruction and chatbot teachers is, of course, decades and decades and decades old now, so maybe we've just grown accustomed to its rollout. Much like Microsoft Office, a few buttons and commands just get moved around and relabeled every couple of years, and still everyone is compelled to buy a new license for the "upgrade."

Gates' vision and thus, his foundation's grant-funding patterns have been pretty consistent since its launch, with some of his language simply updated to match the latest hype cycle – what once was "adaptive learning" is now "AI." Since the late 1990s, he has dreamed of (and funded) a world of "personalized education," unlocked via algorithmically-driven content-delivery systems that enable "lifelong learners" to "move at their own pace" through standardized curricula, with immediate feedback from some sort of "pedagogical agent" – once upon a time from Clippy and now from a different ChatGPT interface.

None of Gates' vision for education has ever really worked as promised – I mean, look around, for crying out loud. But of course, it doesn't have to (and not simply because, under Trump, we're apparently no longer going to collect the data with which we might assess such things).

As with the whole "vibe coding" story-line that tech reporters have breathlessly repeated in recent weeks – that AI now magically "speaks things into existence" – these ed-tech reform initiatives just have to feel like they work. It's storytelling, not science. And to a certain extent, this is the rationale for almost all ed-tech initiatives, that always fall short of their revolutionary marketing promise. We have long pretended that sitting children in front of screens – be they film screens, TV screens, or computer screens – is good and necessary because it feels like the very most modern way to educate them.

But now, the screens will chat back, and we're being prompted and nudged to reject expertise, to reject knowledge, to reject research, to reject our own lived experience, to reject one another, and to embrace ignorance. It's more expedient for oligarchy, I reckon – and that's about it. That's the vibe: the very anti-democratic, anti-future vibe we're being presented with.

For Whom the Bell Tolls:

"The Labor Theory of AI" – Ben Tarnoff reviews Matteo Pasquinelli's The Eye of the Master.

Neil Selwyn questions whether GenAI will really be a labor-saving technology for teachers.

"Workers know exactly who AI will serve," writes Brian Merchant. Spoiler alert: management.