Nicole: Back in September 2025, I spoke at WomenEd NI’s annual Unconference about a ‘Feminist Approach to AI’ and wrote a follow-up blog From Paralysis to Purpose: Processing the WomenEd NI Unconference and invited collaborators to contribute to a blog series:

1. Cultivate an intersectional lens.
2. Be a critical consumer.
3. Champion co-creation.

I’m delighted that three women I respect and admire reached out and this is the start of that series!

Introducing Virginia Méndez and the topic of being a critical consumer. With the tax year coming to a close and schools preparing how to spend their next budget allocation, this one seemed most timely to start with.

Virginia: Follow the money, follow the power. That is my North Star when I try to make ethical decisions. Look, I use AI. I am not here preaching, fingers wagging at you for firing up ChatGPT to draft an email or brainstorm lesson plans. AI is here to stay, and I would not dare, in good faith, to tell anyone to just avoid it.

This is about reflecting on how the same capitalist machine that has spent decades whispering (more like shouting) that we are never enough, not thin enough, productive enough, successful enough, networked enough, now dangles AI as the golden ticket. Finally, it purrs, tools to hack your way to perfection. Automate the grind, outpace the competition, be the upgraded version of you. But there is always a cost. And if the product does not cost money, then the product is you.

Nicole: Virginia is right - the same ‘capitalist purr’ that burns us out, only to sell us self-care, is now selling us cognitive offloading. It is all by design. In education, this feels like the pressure to be an AI pioneer - or worse, an ‘expert’ - just to keep our heads above water. But this pressure encourages our profession to outsource the very things that make us educators: our critical thinking, our contextual understanding, and the compassion needed to make decisions about our pupils.

Virginia: Those glossy promises rest on extraction. Datasets scraped from our lives, conversations, photos, searches, insecurities, all fueling models that mirror the imbalances of who collects, who curates, who profits.

Misogyny lives there because the rooms designing these systems still hold too few women, too few marginalised voices, too much unchecked power. Algorithms amplify stereotypes, erase bodies that do not fit the profitable norm, prioritise clicks over care. The labour stays invisible. Workers in the Global South label data for pennies. Creatives see their work train models without credit or compensation. When we follow the money, we see that it flows to giants who treat us as raw material, not partners.

Nicole: If we treat AI like electricity (another General Purpose Technology), we have to ask: is the wiring safe? As leaders and educators, we aren’t just consumers; we are the ones deciding which ‘utilities’ to plug our students into. If the energy source is biased and extractive, we are inadvertently teaching our children that this is the price of progress. We have to look at the ‘meter’ and ask what this is really costing our profession. Is there a maintenance plan for both the system and the workers? Is there a service schedule to check the balance between the promises made and the data being extracted?

Virginia: Here is the nuance I fight for. You are not the villain for using it. No more than grabbing that Primark jumper makes you the architect of fast fashion sweatshops, or skipping recycling sometimes crowns you a climate destroyer. Blaming individuals distracts from the system, the greed that gamifies our attention, commodifies our data, sells efficiency as salvation while widening the chasm. We all swim in this soup.

The problem is not your query. It is the default settings that demand surrender. What liberates us comes through agency.

You deserve to be treated like an adult who can handle hard truths. The accumulative weight of billions of "just this once" choices. You need to know it so you can draw your very own red lines.

Some questions we can ask, even if we really do not want to know the answers, so we can make better decisions…

• Whose pockets are we enriching? Can we move to open-source co-ops experimenting with fair data practices and indie tools from devs who prioritise consent instead of trillion-dollar titans who lobby against regulation?
• Does the privacy policy read like a waiver for your soul? Is our information the biggest asset they exploit?
• Are biases audited and owned, or waved away as edge cases?
• Who gets exploited to keep it running?
• What is the environmental commitment these companies have? In a world of limited resources already stretched thin.

Nicole: When we are looking at a new tool for our classrooms, the red flags aren't always obvious. Edtech marketing is incredibly persuasive so we have to be certain that the promise of serving our wants e.g. “save teachers time,” isn't at the expense of meeting our needs e.g. keeping children safe and protecting everyone’s right to privacy.

Look at the 'About Us' page for a company - is it a sea of the same faces designing for a world they don't fully represent? In schools, our 'digital feet' are heavy; once a contract is signed, hundreds of diverse students come with it. Our red line should be consent: if a tool uses student and staff work to train its profit-machine without a clear, easy opt-out (and ideally it should be an opt-in because who is actually reading the full Ts&Cs?!), that’s a 'power cut' to our ethics.

Virginia: We vote daily with our digital feet. We can make small decisions that become part of the accumulative positive change, like supporting platforms that align with feminist values: collaborative, inclusive, human-first.

This stays far from perfection or purity spirals. It is more an invitation to stay mischievous, stay human. Question everything and choose intentionally. Gain back your agency as a way of quiet revolution.

Nicole: Choosing to be a critical consumer might be slower. It might be 'inconvenient'. In fact, there’s not really a “might” here. It’s designed that way; to make you so reliant on efficiency, productivity and status, that you’ll tolerate the intolerable and stay silent and compliant to the status quo. That makes this 'quiet revolution' Virginia speaks of so appealing.

We know that the convenient path is often the one that leaves the most people behind. Resisting multi-billion dollar/pound campaigns is not easy. Yet many of us haven’t fully fallen for it. We see it, and now, with full permission, we can quietly ignore its desperate attempts to grab our attention.

We can flip the script on our consumption and become the creators of change.

We can make informed choices and invest in the communities that champion a better future.

One that works for everyone. One that recognises the harms of the past, the motives of the machine, and serves to finally bring about: “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls.” (United Nations theme for International Women’s Day 2026)

Virginia Méndez | @VirginiaMendez | LinkedIn

Nicole O’Connor | @DigiKnowNicole | LinkedIn

All images are licensed via Adobe Stock - Extended License