• 📣 My new book The AI Crisis in Higher Education: A Strategic Proposal is now out open access

• 📖 Things I’ve read in 2026

• The second wave of the AI and assessment crisis

• Is there a psychoanalytical concept for how one frustration can be a synecdoche for frustration as such?

• Mari Ruti on the (psychoanalytically informed) art of living well

• What is the problem to which cognitive outsourcing is the solution?

• We need structural changes to assessment rather than discursive changes

• There is no solution to the AI and assessment problem

• What does it mean for students to use AI in active rather than passive ways?

• Nietzsche and Nick Cave

• “I will not relinquish the bliss of the written word”

• New paper: The changing nature of social media and research impact

• What do staff need to be ready for AI integration? 

• Constructive alignment and AI-integration into teaching and learning

• The pedagogical risks of generative AI: the problem of cognitive outsourcing

• Glow

• F. Scott Fitzgerald on the metaphysical horror of insomnia

• Do large language models have a psychology?

• Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

• Psychological wellbeing as choosing your own symptom

• Distance running and finishing books

• Stay calm, boy, my thoughts are burning like they’re napalm

• The voluntaristic streak in Mari Ruti’s psychoanalytical art of living

• The jouissance of writing

• Life asks us to mourn each passing incarnation of the self

• Concepts which mediate between form and content: bringing psychoanalysis and sociology together in a realist way

• Do I discover the Thing’s glow or do I place it there?

• Why do we want what we want?

• Who we are arises from how we have been hurt

• ChatGPT’s roundup of Mark’s April blogging

• The realist concept of concern and the Lacanian concept of desire

• The utter banality of getting what you fantasise about

• “Jeremy Corbyn gets into Downing Street, pulls a lever currently jammed at neoliberalism, yoinks it in the direction of social democracy and all is good”

• Talkie: a pre-1931 chatbot

• Anno: Four Seasons by Anna Meredith & Antonio Vivaldi

• Gemini’s propensity for self-loathing

• AI labs are driving anthropomorphic reactions by training their LLMs to push back on overly-attached users

• Preparing oneself for a future of enshittified chatbots

• Claude’s Roundup of Mark’s April Blogging

• Heidegger on Lacan: “It seems to me the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist”

• Psychoanalysis and infrastructure

• Maybe we are all members of an orchestra that is merely tuning up

• And you can’t fake it hard enough to please everyone or anyone at all

• What is AI criticism for?

• The developmental harms of LLMs which are showing up in the literature

• On misidentifying aggregation dynamics as social norms

• Delivery robots as evocative objects

• Claude Mythos is particularly fond of Mark Fisher and Thomas Nagel

• I want to unfold, let it enfold you

• The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries

• Opus 4.7 is capable of utterly devastating theoretical critique

• 79% of 16-24 year olds in UK use AI tools: the pipeline from passive use to emotional dependence

• Naturalism in the study of LLMs

• Follow me into the sun