121. Navigating AI & Surveillance in the Classroom w/ Ryan Leack

Posted byDaniel DissingerPosted inUncategorizedTags:, , , , , , , , , ,

As higher education continues to navigate attacks from the Trump administration, it are also trying to figure out how to negotiate the increased use of AI in the classroom, by teachers and students. On this special episode of Writing Re:mix, Daniel Dissinger invites his USC Writing Program colleague Ryan Leack, host of the Live Theory podcast, to start unpacking the impact that AI and LLMs have had on the Humanities classroom, what they find to be the risks of an exponential increase in reliance on AI by students, why are students using AI, and how are teachers being impacted. They also comment on the USC administration’s decision to give ChatGPT Edu to all the students and faculty.

Something that Ryan & Daniel present is a pedagogy of slowing down as an act of resistance. This approach includes reducing workloads, designing assignments that are reflective, and leaning heavily into process-oriented writing work instead of product-oriented writing in order to open their students’ eyes to them being forced into branding and monetizing every part of their existences. They call on intellects like Foucault, Byung-Chul Han, Debord, Freire, bell hooks, and Baudrillard to deepen their conversation.

This episode was originally recorded an released for the 2025 Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival: “Untethering Surveillance Power Dynamics, Emerging Technologies, Social Control.”

Approximate Show Notes

00:00 Welcome and Collab Intro

00:37 Carnival Theme and Keynote

02:42 What Is Live Theory

03:38 Living Theory Meets AI

04:50 Productivity Pressures on Students

10:40 Time Saving Tech Trap

12:27 Tethered to Social Media

15:10 Anti Surveillance Assignments

19:15 Praxis and Rehumanizing Class

29:00 Arms Race and Slowing Down

33:00 ChatGPT Investment Optics

33:25 Social Media as Surveillance

35:30 Panopticon and Self Policing

40:07 Staged Culture and Dystopia

43:19 Sacred Space and Capture

45:09 Students Quit Social Media

48:56 Spectacle and Permission

51:05 Boredom and Dwelling

54:30 Teaching Less as Resistance

56:49 Where to Find Life Theory

59:47 Final Thanks and Sign Off

Dr. Ryan David Leack is Assistant Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California. His academic and poetic work have appeared in various journals, including Composition Forum and Chiron Review, and his instrumental music and scores have been featured in films available on Netflix, Amazon, and like services and retailers internationally, in addition to films and shows on CBS, CNN, HBO, Showtime, and other channels, and has been featured on radio stations in 50+ countries. He has a forthcoming book of poetry, Totality & Temporality: Elegies through Time and Space (Finishing Line Press, May 2026). He also Co-Hosts the USC podcast Live Theory: Living Writing & Rhetoric.

Dr. Daniel Dissinger is an Associate Professor in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California, poet, Kerouac scholar, and writing coach. He hosts the award-winning podcast Writing Remix, and The Nostalgia Test Podcast, and facilitates workshops with Inspired Belonging. He earned his PhD and MA from Saint John’s University, and an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Daniel’s poetry has been published in numerous journals and is forthcoming in the Altadena Poetry Review. His chapbook, tracing the shape, was published by Shadow Mountain Press. He co-created a global Humanities podcaster network, The Humanities Podcast Network, holding annual international symposiums since 2021

People, Texts & Podcasts Mentioned in the Episode

“With the onslaught […] of these types of emerging technologies [like ChatGPT], how do we navigate or reconcile this idea of a living theory and […] a technological theory that seems like it’s trying to mimic the living.”
-Daniel Dissinger

“This just seems like increasing the senseless hamster wheel of becoming more and more machine, right? […] I asked my students in the class like, what are we doing all this work for? […] Why do we have to go faster and faster and faster and more and more and more.”
-Ryan Leak

“I’m really concerned with the fact that […] higher education has changed to this […] training ground that creates workers even more so […] The humanities is this really interesting space that is trying to go, well, let’s not forget about the work that asks students to think about what sort of person that they want to be in the world and how they wanna live and how they want to interact with each other, and who are they deep within, right? Much of […] the technological advancements erases [those curiosities and] replaces it [with] don’t you want to be productive?”
-Daniel Dissinger

“We are now being taught, and younger generations are being taught to really tie themselves to this idea of not just like being on social media but branding themselves so that they become a product.”
-Daniel Dissinger

“ If we have a system where students are, in a sense, pressured to cheat, and where it matters so little that they will cheat, and there’s so little time that professors have to even check all the cheating, that seems to me to be a problem […] We’ve got something going on with our educational model that needs to be rethought here and I think that the issue of time is huge.”
-Ryan Leak

“The problem with a lot of these technologies is that we […] forget how to dwell. So […] even when the time opens up […] and my students noted this too in their projects that they would wanna reach for the phone […] for social media, because they’re bored. But that boredom as, Heidegger says, is a sign, it’s a revelation that you don’t know how to dwell.”
-Ryan Leak

Episode Reflection Questions:

  • For 5-7 minutes, reflect on and write about all the ways you have compromised parts of yourself for convenience. Be honest, no one will read what you wrote.
  • Search what you wrote in the first prompt and now reflect on the “why” of these compromises.
  • Reflect on and be honest if your life has become better, freer, and happier because of your technology and AI.

121. Navigating AI & Surveillance in the Classroom w/ Ryan Leack (Transcript)

121. Navigating AI & Surveillance in the Classroom w: Ryan LeackDownload

The theme song is “4 am” by Makaih Beats. You can follow the podcast & all social media: Linktree, join the newsletter/Follow Dan’s Medium & Substack for “A Note From Dan”, episode-specific writing prompts, and book recommendations.

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