Authoritarian EdTech

Careful and consentful models of digital education are being replaced by Authoritarian EdTech. The pedagogical choices digital learning now offers, such as how to design assessment strategies in and around Gen AI, mask not just the opportunity costs of attending to a digital permacrisis, but the simultaneous enactment of EdTech's authority through its increasingly urgent demands on and for our attention. Educational technology has become, in its ontological infrastructures, increasingly centralised, less open and more powerful. Through GenAI, it is less truthful, less trustworthy and more epistemologically nihilistic. Authoritarian EdTech is examined here through examples such as Trump's relationship with AI in Education (AIED), wider AIED responses and the resultant features of consentless technologies that thrive on appeasement and higher education's new digitised monumental architectures. We end by suggesting that neither authoritarinism, EdTech nor Authoritiarn EdTech are inevitiable if we can recognise and remember that from which our only true authority derives.