Only one joke got an audible laugh from me in the Barbie
movie. When America Ferrera and her daughter disappear into the Barbieverse,
daughter asks about what her dad is going to do, and Betty who was never ugly
says “he’ll be fine.”
Cut to the feckless white dude on the couch.
(Happy chime sound, owl flips wings in joy)
Because that’s the degree to which Duolingo has become part
of the zeitgeist. You know the person who’s “brushing up on their Spanish” or
“dusting off their French.” Or you know someone who, just for the fuck of it,
decided that Romanian or Norwegian was the way to go.
And into that context, a little over a decade ago, I too
decided to dust off my French.
It was another era, back then in the second Obama term, when
I learned about Duolingo from some article or forum post back at a time when
Cracked and Gawker seemed to be the wave of the future. Widespread pessimism
had not yet transmogrified into widespread nihilism, and the question was what
to do on the internet that wasn’t just a waste of time. So Duolingo was the
answer, back when it was just a plucky little startup without a premium option
(as I recall), and as was the standard at that time, the path to monetization
was vague.
Which says something about how optimistic the technological
environment of the time was. People –including, tentatively, myself, as ashamed
as I am to admit it – fully believed that Twitter had brought down Hosni
Mubarak. I never fully embraced technical solutions to political problems, but
the mere fact that I was not a full-throated enthusiast made me an outsider.
And when I discovered professional buzzkills like Evgeny Morozov and Nicholas
Carr, it felt like I wasn’t the only one who disagreed with the Obama-era
consensus but also wasn’t some conservative mouthbreather.
It was a time when many technologies indeed seemed like
“tools for conviviality,” as Ivan Illich put it. Who needs long-distance phone
calls? We got Skype now! And WhatsApp for sending each other dumb memes. And
even a skeptical fuck like me thought that maybe, just maybe, things might get
better.
And re: Duolingo, I was Duo-brained. To the max.
Well, Duolingo did, actually, show us the way – it all turns
to shit.
As for when and how the decline started, different users
have different opinions. Real heads would point to the increasingly heavy hand
of investors during Series E and Series F funding in 2015 and 2017, and the
consequent decline in the expansion of quality course material, but most would
peg it around the time the “tree” model of language learning – modules one
after another, but with some flexibility as to how that is approached -- was
abandoned in favor of the “worm” model – do this, one after the other, with the
option to just press skip if so desired -- in 2022. While this may seem
trivial, it actually is pretty important. The former is a structure designed to
guide language learners through a series of steps, with some options for
individual patterns, but a focus on building the basics. The latter is a pure
gamification. At the same time, forums were discontinued, meaning that users
could no longer comment on the quality of the lessons or interact with one
another, but were forced to simply play the game.
And this is perhaps the crux of the issue, something we
never noticed, but should have. If you gamify learning, the goal ceases to be
to learn. The goal becomes to win the game. I’m not the first to observe this.
Nassim Taleb coined the term “ludic fallacy” to describe the misapplication of
game-theoretic concepts nearly 20 years ago.
But the thing is, as I’ve learned as Duolingo has
enshittified, I don’t give a fuck about the game itself, or the dumb challenges
and different types of points and health bars and shit. I just want to improve
my French and Spanish. I really, really don’t care whether or not I’m beating
Slytherin1990 in the Diamond Tournament or whatever.
Despite this, things continue to be getting progressively
worse. Consider the memo by CEO Luis Von Ahn several weeks ago in which he
announced his intention to replace as many human workers with AI as possible,
and the following dragging in the media, which he seems to be walking back in a
panic, given how quickly the exuberance over AI is fading, although I doubt
that that any reconsideration will amount to anything more than rhetoric.
“One of the most important things leaders can do is
provide clarity. When I released my AI memo a few weeks ago, I didn’t do that
well.”
The pod-person phrasing doesn’t assuage my skepticism.
But this is hardly the first time that shitty AI has reared
its ugly head. I’ve noticed more and more illogical translations, some of them
laughable (“y” in a French sentence, meaning, for instance, “there,” pronounced
as “i grec,” the French word for the letter Y). And with the option for
Duolingo “Max” users (anything max is bound to be maximally crap) to have
conversations with the cast of Duolingo cartoons (whom I also once found hentai
of, SAD!) as AIs almost certainly being worse – not like I’d ever pay them a
dime to test that hypothesis. Or, even more sinisterly, mistakes made while
learning now prevent learners from moving forward, unless they pay for a
premium subscription, functionally preventing anyone without a preexisting
knowledge base of the language being learned from making any kind of progress.
As with all products being undergoing this Ludovico technique, the
self-consciously quirky humor (Duo died lol OMG Youtube-face) makes the
ugliness all the more jarring. Please don’t show me Duolingo as a wrinkled old
man or a fatass unicorn again.
But this is what happens when you take a good product, and
let the private-equity goons have their way with it. This is what happens when
you have an economic system that financially rewards the pillaging of the
temple and disincentivizes building anything long-term which might negatively
affect the profit margin this Q2. Those innovators and trailblazers – the ones
who get treated with hagiographic praise at every keynote speech, state of the
union address, and graduation commencement – either become con men, or reveal
themselves to have been con men at their core, or are quietly marginalized by the
professional con men.
At least Tesla had the fortune to die before he could see
what products his name was being slapped onto.
