• 📣 Join the AI Commons

• 📖 Things I’ve read in 2026

• 🌕 You are the music while the music lasts

• Call for Book Proposals: University Reimagined

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #162

• If we only concentrate on putting out the blaze, we’ll eventually burn out

• The practice of social theory

• Call for Short Papers – One-Day Symposium (The Process and Implications of Doing Social Theory)

• The fire and the rose are one

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #161

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #160

• The sociological significance of TikTok

• The growing popularity of cults in a transient, fragmented state of contemporary society

• CfP: The New Urgency: The Use(lessness) of Theories in Educational Research

• Call for papers: Peer Review in the Age of Large Language Models

• The rebranding of University of Bolton

• Manchester/Salford Critical Ed Tech Network Event, February 19th 12pm-2pm

• Artificial Intelligence and Social Theory in Education, Jan 24th in Bath/online

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #159

• Can LLMs sustain and transform affect

• Digital elites and reactionary modernism

• TikTok is the next stage in Elon Musk’s cultural machinery of reaction

• Eep! Eep! Eep!

• #FreeOurFeeds – help secure the future of social media

• LLMs as engines of problematization

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #158

• Mainstream betting sides offering 1/3 odds on Trump either disregarding or changing constitutional term limits

• Zupančič: How to live a life worth living

• René Girard as reductive Lacanianism

• Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of René Girard | Full Length Documentary

• I just discovered there is a Capoeira fighter in the UFC and it’s stunning

• Social ontology matters for how we attribute causality in relation to emerging technologies

• Why did the Bluesky migration succeed where the Mastodon migration failed?

• Foucault’s approach to writing

• What would it look like if Generative AI firms embrace MAGA?

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #157

• The misuse of the concept of assemblage within digital social science

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #156

• Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up

• You were not on the receiving end of it all

• Interview with Science Magazine about academic Bluesky

• Why I find Manchester in 2025 architecturally depressing, but in an interesting way, in one photo

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #155

• Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing

• Purpose building as an intellectual strategy

• My last 10 Claude conversation topics

• I asked a librarian if he had a book about Pavlov’s dogs and Schrödinger’s cat

• LLMs are now in the lifeworld

• There will be 13 billionaires in the Trump administration

• Rebecca Solnit on the politics of hope

• “If H5 is ever going to be a pandemic, it’s going to be now”

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #154

• Using reasoning models to support theory-building

• How are people using Claude?

• The enshittification of Spotify