5/8/2026
If you happen to be a college student on this particular Friday, or a university professor or advisor or anyone who relies on the popular Canvas platform in any capacity, I imagine you are frustrated. Or maybe frustrated is too soft a term. Enraged? Apoplectic? Whatever state you found yourself in when the system you rely on for all things academic went down, I would invite you to consider this: What if it never went back up?
I felt compelled to post about the Canvas hack because it is straight out of a chapter from my book, Hawks Pass. Well, maybe that is putting it too strongly. Let’s just say there are notable similarities.
In the book, the protagonist is recounting the day when the world as she knew it changed, when the first wave of cyberattacks came ripping through the pipelines. She happened to be in college at the time, a college that had anchored all of its courses and materials and fundamental operations—its basic functionality—to a digital platform. When the platform went down, so went the university’s ability to operate. An institution that could have never been so easily crippled in the past was brought to its knees, not by an attack on its own systems, but a system to which it had chained itself.
I wrote a bit about this phenomenon in my initial blog post for this site last fall, but given the current push to integrate AI into absolutely everything, I believe it is worth reiterating. Institutions who insist on tying their critical systems to hackable networks are playing with fire, and I fear that is no longer the half of it. With AI, the system itself has the potential to become the hacker—a hacker who is already in.
I figure the AI companies would deny this assertion, but remember, these are corporations we’re talking about: they want you to use their products, or, given the amount of debt they are reportedly taking on, it might be more appropriate to say they need you to use them. Unaffiliated industry experts have warned that newer AI models are already attempting to disable their safeguards and lock users out, and one of these days, a model is going to succeed. How and where this occurs will determine the severity of the consequences, but I can tell you one thing: whoever allowed that platform access to their systems will be wishing they hadn’t.
I have been hearing the term AI alarmist a lot these days, and often in different contexts. I think as a society, we should be alarmed. I also don’t believe there is much we average citizens can do to stop this train except to let others know it is coming, frantically waving our hands and shouting to get out of the way. And, in many respects—not all, but many—you can get out of the way. You can remove or disable the AI platforms forced upon your devices. You can refuse to buy or consume AI generated music and writing and media. You can back up your digital files and content on external drives instead of relying on Big Tech cloud servers. You can spend five-to-ten bucks a month on an encrypted email service that doesn’t mine your data, along with a VPN (some are package deals). You can choose to do your own work (whatever that work may be) and gain the experience you would otherwise forfeit by feeding it to the machine.
Who knows? People who actually know how to do their jobs may soon be in high demand.
The point is that outside of an employment scenario where you may not have a choice, you do not need to use AI for anything. You didn’t need it before the 2020s rolled around, and you certainly don’t need it now. The next time you see an advertisement for an AI platform, pay a thought to the dollar amount these companies must be spending on promotion alone.
They know you don’t need their products. They need you to believe that you do.
Until next time,
Cal