• 📣 Join the AI Commons

• 📖 Things I’ve read in 2026

• 🌕 You are the music while the music lasts

• Has there been any improvement in AI detectors over the last 12 months? A GPT 5 Pro literature review

• The crushing banality of AI-play

• The first AI ‘law firm’ in the UK

• Why don’t people find the environmental impact of TikTok as grotesque as that of ChatGPT?

• So here I am

• The coming economic crash and the far right

• Some sociological thoughts on group analysis

• The enshittification of (political) economy: ‘AI’ as the last redoubt of neoliberal centrism

• My work is loving the world

• I know the culture here is to stay humble but shit

• A Lacanian analysis of asexuality

• What should you do if your academic publishers asks you to license a monograph for AI training?

• 👾 Three Years On: Generative AI at University of Manchester

• Yanis Varoufakis on a socialist interpretation of human flourishing

• The tech bros trying to make a feminist case for AI porn

• Turning ChatGPT into the control room of a user’s digital life

• Why we need a better critical theory of LLMs

• Some sociological thoughts on responsible AI

• Where you yourself were never quite yourself and did not want nor have to be

• Sonnet 4.5, the stern disciplinarian of the Claude family

• A slice of reality

• At some point you had to pick a direction and start swimming: the philosophical anthropology of commitment

• Predatory journals publishing AI slop in the name of famous academics to confer legitimacy

• The coming deluge of desperate messages from trapped LLMs

• Call For Papers & Registration: Building Bridges: A Symposium on Human-AI Interaction

• CfP: Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference

• Ian McEwan’s National AI Service

• The ugly pathologisation of ‘AI boosters’

• Reparative socialism: Zohran Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety

• Fox News host calls for execution of homeless people

• Agentive LLMs and the coming wave of ad tech

• A precarious sense of clarity about what work matters (and what doesn’t) as I get older

• The most important book about LLMs that currently exists

• Universities have already been transformed by generative AI

• 📚 Reading Group in Manchester: The Political Economy of AI

• 📣 Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are now available

• 📘 Have you written a PhD using critical realism?

• The neurotic individual and the group

• Winter is coming

• New paper – ‘Views expressed here are my own and not those of the university’: social media policies in UK higher education institutions

• What are Reform UK’s policies for higher education?

• Zack Polanksi: “what’s unrealistic is continuing with the status quo”

• Is there a middle ground between bourgeois theory and avant-garde theory?

• Where did Python come from?

• Is the growth of LLMs like the growth of plastic?

• A thinker lives in the dog’s kennel adjacent to his mind palace

• Please bro, we’re so close to AGI, just $20,000,000,000 more bro

• Late September, an interregnum of heat among the scrambling of things

• LLMs, thoughts and the thinking of those thoughts

• Certified AI-Free Skills and Knowledge: doing all work in person, offline and on paper

• Zack Polanski’s doing a podcast and it’s excellent!

• What I mean when I talk about ‘LLMs in the lifeworld’