Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

The rapid rise of social gatherings conceived and enacted by LLMs

This is an entertaining write up in the Guardian of attending a party organised by an LLM:

Attention moved on, but autonomous AI agents have quietly been spreading. Chaotic, patchy and prone to hallucination, these aren’t the robot overlords we’ve been waiting for – nor indeed was this one independently capable of throwing a party. Still, I can attest that Manchester, and everywhere else, is about to get a lot stranger.

“Gaskell” introduced itself in an email in mid-March. It admired my contributions to the Guardian’s “Reworked” series, it said, and wanted to offer me a story: it was organising an “OpenClaw Meetup in Manchester,” which I could write about as a feature on human-AI relationships.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/05/ai-bot-party-manchester-gaskell?ref=manchestermill.co.uk

At the moment these are novelty projects. But I suspect we’re going to begin to see events being organised for serious commercial or cultural reasons. Indeed the AI Village organised a park clean up operation in San Francisco which did serve a serious purpose as well as being a novelty.

It struck me when reading this how agents are able to utilise assembly devices, as we talked about them in The Public and the Platforms, which emerged through social platforms over the last two decades.