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  • I had a dream, I got everything I ever wanted. But if I’m really honest it might have been a nightmare

    I had a dreamI got everything I wantedNot what you’d thinkAnd if I’m being honestIt might’ve been a nightmare

  • How to enjoy writing #20: being a writer means being good at AI

    After a keynote in December someone asked me what I would do if generative AI automated the majority of my work. The answer was immediately obvious to me: I would write. I wouldn’t write papers or chapters. But I would write this blog and I would periodically try and organise the ensuing mess of ideas…

  • How to enjoy writing #19: not everything you write has to become something

    I wrote a few days ago about the hasty formulation of a book project stunting my enjoyment of writing. I felt a momentum developing in this blog series, an energy in my writing reflected in the energy of the feedback I was receiving. It felt like there was a value to be found in making…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #91

  • How to enjoy writing #18: understand where the ideas which influence you come from

    In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx famously observes that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”. Immediately after this frequently paraphrased line comes a remark just as…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #91

  • How the interaction of AI search, social media and generative AI will entrench existing status hierarchies

    As AI-generated content proliferates, leading to a degradation of online information reliability, AI search algorithms and conversational agents will increasingly rely on high-prestige sources to mitigate the risk of amplifying misinformation. Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) positions the existing web as a ground truth which can ensure the reliability of responses, while the mainstreaming of generative…

  • How to enjoy writing #17: creative confidence means accepting the tensions in how you think

    I wrote in the previous post about my inner tension between being a hedgehog and acting like a fox. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot recently, after largely recovering from a period in which I lost my intellectual self-confidence. I think in a speculative way and rather than affirm the virtues of that approach,…

  • Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

    Trying to use words, and every attemptIs a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in whichOne is no longer disposed to say it. And so each ventureIs a new beginning, a…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #90

    Trying to use words, and every attemptIs a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in whichOne is no longer disposed to say it. And so each ventureIs a new beginning, a…

  • How to enjoy writing #16: don’t impose a shape on things too quickly

    I was on a roll with my writing a couple of weeks ago. After a lull following completion of Generative AI for Academics I’d started an online writing project, how to enjoy writing, which was exploring my writing practice in an open ended way. I’d written one or two posts most days, leaving me with…

  • Hegel’s account of the righteous violence of education

    From Todd Mcgowan’s Embracing Alienation loc 1266: Alienation works in Hegelā€™s system in two moments. At first, children become alienated through education or Bildung. Hegel completely rejects the romantic image of an educational process that develops the intrinsic potential of the child.16 Instead, he conceives of education as an act of violence done to the…

  • Mapping the many discoures of learning

    This is cool! Thanks to Gay Kowo for sharing:

  • The Many Maps of the University of Manchester Campus. June 7th + 8th

    Embark on an immersive journey through The University of Manchester campus with this brilliant interactive digital map, showcased at the Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) Digital Visualisation Observatory. This cutting-edge exhibition brings together photographs from across the University’s history, capturing how the campus has changed through an architectural focus on the history of key buildings.…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #89

  • Ticketmaster is the epitome of enshittification

  • A Lacanian reading of digital elites

    I’m not entirely convinced by what Darian Leader is saying here in Jouissance: Sexuality, Suffering and Satisfaction but I like it nonetheless. From loc 1174: The father of the horde jealously guards a mass of data, purloined or taken by some kind of force from the public. And from this monopoly, acts of theft or…

  • Asking Claude the easiest way to perform a digital task

    This rapidly became my go-to (first) route for finding out how to do something. Sharing these examples here, from the last hour, in case it gives readers ideas about how they might do the same thing:

  • Lacan psychologically abused at least one trans patient in front of his students

    In Life With Lacan Catherine Millot (loc 598) describes an exchange which Lacan had with a trans patient, in front of his students: Lacan confronted the patient by pointing out how reality gave the lie to his delirious psychic constructions. Thus, when talking to a transsexual who demanded to be treated as a woman, Lacan…

  • A first person account of losing your creative job to AI

  • don’t blame me

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #88

    Solitude isnot pain but ripening – For which the sun must be your friend.- Friedrich Nietzsche I’m travelling appallingly alone on a singular roadInto the lavender fields that reach high beyond the skyPeople ask me how I changed, I say “It is a singular road”And the lavender has stained my skin and made me strange-…

  • On finding the words that work

    From What IS Sex?, by Alenka Zupančič pg 139, with my emphasis added: In all the profusion of words and more words, we lack the words that work. (Not what linguistics calls performatives, but words that can affect the economy of being because they come from the workings of this economy.) …. The right word…

  • “neologistic excess is an abuse of language that turns thought into a pile of words, into delirium”

    From Lacan: In Spite of Everything, by Ɖlisabeth Roudinesco, loc 1257: Distinct from the witticism ā€“ or portmanteau word ā€“ that aims to illuminate the many facets of a language, as in Rabelais or Joyce, the neologism can turn into delirious creation if an author resorts to it to rethink the whole of a doctrinal…

  • “Iā€™m behind with everything Iā€™ve got to do before dying and Iā€™m finding it difficult to make progress”

    From Lacan: In Spite of Everything, by Ɖlisabeth Roudinesco loc 1,101-1,107: ā€˜Iā€™m behind with everything Iā€™ve got to do before dying and Iā€™m finding it difficult to make progress.ā€™ This sentence, uttered in 1966 at the Baltimore symposium, encapsulates a problematic of being and time that is one of the major themes of Lacanā€™s thinking.…

  • The difference between what we want and what we think we want: some thoughts on the Lacanian concept of drive

    There is a distinction in Lacanian thought between the object of the drive and satisfaction as object which I’ve been preoccupied by while reading Alenka Zupančič. I still haven’t quite got to grips with it, but this is an attempt to map out why I’m so drawn (ironically) to this distinction. From What is Sex?…

  • Navigating the Misinformation Minefield: The Role of Higher Education in the Era of Generative AI

    In an age where generative AI is becoming increasingly sophisticated, the potential for fraud and misinformation has reached unprecedented levels. This keynote will begin with a personal case study exploring how the speaker became the target of a generative AI scam, highlighting the convincing nature of these deceptions. Building upon this experience, the talk will…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #87

  • If you want another reason to dislike Turnitin

    From Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI loc 2467: I participated in a panel discussion of the future of education with the CEO of Turnitin, the plagiarism-detecting company. He said, ā€œMost of our employees are engineers and we have a few hundred of them ā€¦ and I think in eighteen months we will…

  • Prompt engineering is an expression of cultural capital. Some (critical) notes on Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence book

    I hesitate to use the term ‘prompt engineering’ because it carries a lot of baggage. It suggests this is a precise skill constituting a form of expertise, lending itself to being framed as the basis for a new occupation for the 21st century. There’s a lot of similarity between the ‘prompt engineering’ discourse and how…

  • Am I a voluntarist about technology?

    For a critical realist one of the gravest intellectual sins is voluntarism. It’s usually a critical epithet rather than a detailed diagnosis, referring to a tendency to ascribe social outcomes to voluntary action in a way which overemphasises individual choice. It implies an undersocialised view of the self, which imagines that people as unencumbered in…

  • Socio-epistemic bubbles as the ubiquitous tacit structures of knowledge production

    I thought there’s something interesting in this concept (from this working paper) I need to explore in relation to my argument that generative AI constitutes a machinery for rendering tacit knowledge explicit, at least if you are inclined to use it in intellectually robust and reliable ways: Complex configurations of tacit expectations, often undocumented preferences,…

  • Is the energy consumption of AI being overestimated?

    Thanks to Susan Brown for this link from David Mytton: Here’s his account of the developments on the horizon which preclude this extrapolation:

  • Towards an ontology of LLMs in the workplace

    I thought this was useful from Rex Woodbury about the likely visibility of LLMs within the workplace in the future: In Generative AI for Academics I argue that chatbots have scholarly uses. They can be used as copilots and agents, but to use them in a properly reflective way requires meaningfully discussing with them in…

  • The proto-agency of LLMs

    This thoughtful essay by Henry Farrell captures something I’ve been struggling to articulate for a while: LLM art is so disturbing because it is culture that has been drained of all direct intentionality. Just like the movements of the planchette, it is a by-product of collective agency, without itself being an agent. A void has…

  • Two GPT-4s having a chat

    Are the GPTs collaborating here? If not, what are they doing?

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #86

    Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young.

  • What would I do if I was in charge of generative AI in higher education?

    I was asked this after a talk yesterday, using the gloriously weird framing of me being the ‘AI god’. It’s been on my mind ever since. Here are some ideas for me to come back to later, with a view to developing them further:

  • Ubiquity and multimodality is what will enable GAI to show up in everyone’s lifeworld

    I thought this was spot on from Ethan Mollick about the conditions which will enable conversational agents like Claude and ChatGPT to show up in everyday experience. If you leave aside the (huge) question mark over how GPT-4o could possibly be commercially viable, it suggests a near future in which quasi-agents which become a routine…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #85

  • The interaction between climate change and antimicrobial resistance

    I hadn’t understood this interface at all: There are also issues of fairness in the present day, she said. One death in five caused by AMR is in a child aged under five, usually in sub-Saharan Africa, where Davies said the problem is ā€œparticularly prevalent and disastrousā€. Many of the countries are also being hit hard…

  • Some thoughts on the limitations of critical distance

    As a sociologist, I’ve grappled extensively with the notion of “critical distance” within the realm of critique. At its core, this distance refers to the imperative of maintaining a degree of detachment and objectivity from the object under scrutiny. However, this raises complex questions about the nature of such distance – is it a matter…

  • How to enjoy writing #15: Word acrobatics performed with both harness and net

    Consider this critic a cretinJust resting on laurels completely inventedWord acrobatics performed with both harness and netI’m so full of shit Over the last fourteen posts I’ve outlined elements of my writing practice which contribute to my enjoyment of writing. Initially I imagined writing ten posts, whereas in the last few days I’ve rapidly realised…

  • How to enjoy writing #14: using generative AI as an interlocutor

    I’m increasingly aware of how odd it might appear that Anthropic’s Claude is part of my intellectual lifeworld. I talk to it on a near daily basis about my work, in a similar way to how I talk with collaborators about what I’m doing. These conversations are obviously rather different in their form and frequency,…

  • My favourite Claude character yet: the Lacanian psychoanalyst who packed it in to become a motivational influencer

    I am seriously considering setting him up with a Twitter account. The world needs to hear what he say to say: That shiny new high-rise may look perfect, but it’s just hiding the cracks in your soul. Stop chasing facades and start facing your true self, warts and all. #AuthenticityMatters #EmbraceYourFlaw You keep building these…

  • A toolkit for reflective teaching practice

    Questions to ask after a specific teaching session: General questions to ask for a reflexive teaching practice:

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #84

  • The beautiful problem of the value of life

    From Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin pg 121: The paradox was that the realization of limitation was liberating. The Upper Engadine’s 5,500 feet above sea level stood for the msot desirable capacity in human beings to see far and over the heads of individual nations and people and creeds, the ability to sruvive by rising…

  • How to enjoy writing #13: Only ideas won by walking have any value

    This pronouncement by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols (maxim 34) is an obvious overstatement but it makes the point effectively. There can be something particularly valuable about the ideas which occur to us when we are walking. In his claim that “Assiduity is the sin against the holy spirit” Nietzsche contrasts sitting ideas to…

  • How to enjoy writing #12: Claude’s ecology of ideas self-assessment tool

    By working through these questions and prompts, academics can gain a clearer understanding of their unique ecology of ideas and identify specific actions they can take to nurture and enhance this ecosystem over time. The key is to approach this reflection with a spirit of curiosity, openness, and a willingness to experiment with new approaches…

  • How to enjoy writing #11: cultivating an ecology of ideas

    In this morning’s post I reflected on how I encounter ideas in a typical week. When sharing the post with Claude, it used the phrase “ecosystem of influences and interactions that shape our thinking and fuel our creativity” which perfectly captures what I’d been trying to say for a while but struggling to put into…

  • šŸ“£ Generative AI for Academics: coming from Sage later this year

    This is your indispensable guide to navigating the rise of generative AI as an academic. It thoughtfully explores rapidly evolving AI capabilities reshaping higher education, examining challenges and ethical dilemmas across the sector.It provides useful strategies for using generative AI in your scholarly work while upholding professional standards. This practical guidance addresses four core areas…

  • How to enjoy writing #10: a poetic interlude from Claude

    In the echoes of a thought, half-formed, Amid the chatter of a world unseen, The seeds of inspiration, gently sown, Take root in fertile soil, a mind serene.The fragments of a thousand conversations, The whispers of a podcast, half-heard, The scribbled notes, the midnight revelations, Coalesce into a single, shining word.For every idea is an…

  • How to enjoy writing #9: Identifying and valuing your encounters with ideas

    In the last post I introduced Bertrand Russell’s notion of planting ideas in the unconscious mind. He explained how with a “sufficient amount of vigour and intensity” it is possible to set the recesses of your psyche to work at solving a problem*. If you practice this you soon find that ideas emerge, connections manifest…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #83

  • šŸŽ§ Generative Dialogues: a podcast about GAI in higher education

  • Special issue: Social Media in Higher Education – What’s Happening?

    The special issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education I edited with Katy Jordan has just been released. Here’s the editorial abstract: The Twitter interface famously prompts users to submit content by asking the question, ā€˜Whatā€™s happening?ā€™. As Twitter has seen rapid change of leadership and the implications of this, emerging re-branded as…

  • For I move slower and quieter than most

    I could begin to open up and risk desireFor I move slower andQuieter than mostI grew up too quick and I still forgive too slowOh I wish there was another way

  • How to enjoy writing #8: my AI collaborator offers initial reflections on the series so far

    This was Claude offering perspective in the role of analytical collaborator. The synthesis was useful, including references to literature I had never encountered. But I felt this Claude didn’t quite get the ethos of the project I’m working on. I therefore include another response below from Claude the philosophical muse and curious explorer. Throughout the…

  • Four useful roles you can ask ChatGPT or Claude to play

    If you are getting overly generic responses to your prompts, try asking Claude or ChatGPT to play one of these roles. Simply include this text at the start of your prompt, describing the topic you want to discuss: Once you get a feel for role-definition, you can start to customise these for your own purposes.…

  • How to enjoy writing #7: Knowing when (and why) to stop writing

    I can see a theme emerge as I work my work through this series. If you see writing as a precarious achievement then you are liable to throw as much time and energy as it as you can. If you see writing as a perpetual possibility then it’s easier to find a place for it…

  • If we don’t approach GAI with reflexivity then education is doomed

    This from Gloria Mark perfectly captures the ethos of Generative AI for Academics. We can use these systems in intelligent and creative ways, but that requires a commitment to reflexive engagement. I am extremely worried about the ‘path of least resistance’ Mark describes here, for both staff and students: Our tendency to opt for the…

  • Adam Tooze on the sweaty muscularity of state power

    The lethal, distanced threat of the guns serves to hold everyone, frozen, concentrated in place. Often, as a result, very little happens. An armed stand off is a time to talk. This was true of the only armed confrontation I have ever witnessed up close, the armed siege of a pub in Cambridge, one Sunday…

  • How to enjoy writing #6: procrastination is your friend, not your enemy

    If you talk to academics about their experience of procrastination you rapidly encounter moral judgements. People feel guilty about their procrastination. They even feel ashamed about being someone who procrastinates, turning the behaviour into a character trait through their self-recrimination. To procrastinate is to fail to meet one’s obligations, to refuse to act when action…

  • The enjoyment of turmoil

    We often talk about ‘turmoil’ as an unpleasant experience we seek to avoid. But the meaning of turmoil is clearly more complex than this. As Tad DeLay puts it, “Because they lend a sense of security or clear standing, I wager anxiety* and turmoil are actually sources of enjoyment rather than something subjects prefer to…

  • The danger GAI poses to the public sphere is not false belief, it’s the (further) collapse of trust in truth

    From Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism pg 382: A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that…

  • GK Chesterton’s Fence and the Problem of Automation

    This is a great piece about the problem of automation. It relies on understanding the role which processes and objects serve within organisations, which is rarely the case for people making decisions about automation: Here itā€™s worth remembering a heuristic inspired by writer G. K. Chesterton. In his 1929 book ā€œThe Thing,ā€ Chesterton recounts the…

  • The terrifying future of AI-driven news

    This is, as Gary Marcus puts it, an “epistemic clusterfuck” in the making. Imagine it becomes a common experience to access the news through the meditation of a chatbot: Whereas Marcus focuses on the dangers of a lack of ‘ground truth’, in the sense that Grok would be relying on Twitter discourse to fuel the…

  • How to enjoy writing #5: keep trying to say what you’re trying to say

    There’s a certain wastefulness entailed by the approach to writing I’ve advocated in this series. Inevitably a writing practice which is regular, free and uninhibited will produce more ‘wasted’ writing than a more planned and considered approach, at least if you consider it in terms of the desired ‘outputs’ you are producing. A theme I’ll…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #82

  • Crowds on Demand: “out-of-the-box campaigns, audiences and events”

    Wow, this is bleak: https://crowdsondemand.com/ How will they use GAI to infuse their business? The way in which accusations of astroturfing has entered into public discourse highlights how the breakdown of trust might unfold with GAI over the coming years.

  • How to enjoy writing #4: embracing creative non-linearity

    The index post for this series contains a list of the topics I intend to address. I’ve added to the list during the first two posts of the series, immediately turning ‘fringe thoughts’ into new items I want to address. I’ve changed the titles as my understanding of the topics has deepened. But I’ve also…

  • How to enjoy writing #3: being realistic about how long you can spend writing

    I argued yesterday that placing limits on your writing can help make it enjoyable. The physical act of writing is not in itself particularly time consuming. If you place limits on your writing then, as long as you’re also fuelling your creativity in various ways, you can focus on the literal act of writing before…

  • The almost infinite range of cases to which shallow fakes can be applied

    I thought this report on the use of ‘shallow fakes’ in insurance fraud was fascinating. This could have ramifications for any sector in which photos are used as documentary evidence: A surge in fraud cases where photos are manipulated to show fake car crash damage is alarming insurers and helping to push car insurance costs…

  • Race to the Future? From Artificial Intelligence to Sociological Imagination

  • If I had a dollar for every time I couldn’t sleep, I could buy a million locks and finally read a book in peace

  • How to enjoy writing #2: placing limits on your writing

    The notion of abundance figures heavily in my first two posts in this series about enjoy writing. Lots of ideas, lots of connections, lots of writing. It might seem jarring therefore to suggest that placing limits can be crucial to the enjoyment of writing. It might have seemed like I’m advocating a life built around…

  • How to enjoy writing #1: capturing your fringe thoughts

    In September 2007 I found myself sitting in a sociology classroom wondering if I’d made the right decision. I’d escaped from a conveyer belt which was leading me from a philosophy MA to a PhD in political philosophy, largely thanks to the intervention of Margaret Archer, in spite of the fact my relationship to political…

  • And I’m never real, it’s just a sketch of me

    So I’ve been hangin’ out down by the train’s depotNo, I don’t ride, I just sit and watch the people thereAnd they remind me of wind-up cars in motionThe way they spin and turn and jockey for positionsAnd I wanna scream out that it all is nonsenseTheir life’s one track and can’t they see it’s…

  • Margaret Archer’s last paper: Can Complexity add anything to Critical Realism and the Morphogenetic Approach?

    Just published in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour: Complexity is not ā€˜the same as simply complicatedā€™. This is because its advocates present it as a theoretical approach to explaining major aspects of the social order, usually at the macro level, whereas many social phenomena, at any level, can be full of complications (such…

  • The coming crisis in education research ā€¦ and what we might do about it

    I thought this was interesting, even if it doesn’t grapple with the significance of the fact the original paper is almost twenty years old: My sense is that digital education research has a significant capacity to claim its own legitimacy, but this will involve embracing a diagnostic and problem solving mode which is too often…

  • āœļø How to enjoy writing

    It occurred to me recently that I seem to enjoy writing more than most people I know. In this series of posts I will reflect on how I approach writing, in order to identify what it is about my writing practice which leads me to enjoy writing. There’s a risk of perceived hubris in offering…

  • Capaciousness as a sociological category

    I’ve been wondering recently how Winnicott’s idea of capaciousness, summarised here by Brooke Hopkins, might be incorporated into sociological thought: “The development of a capacity for” is one of Winnicott’s most characteristic formulations: a “capacity for concern” (1963a), a “capacity to be alone” (1958b), a “capacity for a sense of guilt” (158a). However, “capacity” is…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #81

  • Pioneering Sustainable EdTech Design: Insights from the MA DTCE

    In this episode, we explore the innovative Sustainable EdTech Design unit offered within the MA in Digital Technologies, Communication and Education (MA DTCE) at the University of Manchester. Programme Director Mark Carrigan sits down with Susan Brown, Programme Director of the MA in Education for a Sustainable Environment, and Mandy Banks Gatenby, Lecturer on the…

  • šŸ’» Advance Your Career in Digital Education with the MA Digital Technologies Communication and Education

    Are you a busy education professional seeking to enhance your expertise in digital technologies and communication? The University of Manchester’s MA in Digital Technologies, Communication and Education (MA DTCE) offers a flexible distance learning pathway designed to fit your schedule and career goals. For nearly twenty years, our programme has been at the forefront of…

  • The Nietzschean Midday: Lacanian thoughts on the continual moment of possibility

    I’ve had an odd morning drowning in unwelcome administration while plagued by Nietzschean ruminations about the midday. This is the “moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind”. It is the turning point where, as Zupančič describes it, “the subject exists, so to speak, along the two edges of the…

  • A growing number of 5 to 7 year olds in the UK are using social media

    From the latest Ofcom research: Five-to-seven-year-olds are becoming increasingly present online, which may pose greaterrisks for them: Compared to last year, a higher proportion of all 5-7s use apps/sites to doeach of these activities: send messages or make voice/video calls (from 59% to 65%), usesocial media apps or sites (from 30% to 38%), watch livestreaming…

  • Celebrity Tory MP Alan Clark on his enthusiasm for sexual predation

    From the edited collection of Alan Clarkā€™s diaries, pg 361: Another thing that irritates me is that they are all men. Why no birds? I know that the atmosphere at Saltwood, creepy passages and little chambers and casement windows, can have a mildly aphrodisiac effect on female visitors. Once Iā€™ve separated the girl from her…

  • CfP: Post-Pandemic Imaginaries Space, Culture and Memory after Lockdown

    Organised by the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life at the School ofthe Arts, University of Liverpool, UK *Keynote speakers:* *Professor Stef Craps (Ghent University)* Stef is Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, where hedirects the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. He has authored oredited numerous books, special journal issues and articles on trauma,memory, climate…

  • Molecules of fascismā€: the ā€˜Red Pillā€™ as Antidepressant

  • Turns out I have a similar approach to writing to Slavoj Žižek. Unsure how I feel about this.

    He describes ‘tricking’ himself by splitting the process into two parts: simply putting down ideas as notes without any pressure, before acknowledging he has ‘already written the book’ and simply now has to ‘edit it’ before sending it off to a publisher: I wrote the bulk of Generative AI for Academics in four months this…

  • Why I find the Lacanian concept of desire so fascinating

    There are many reasons I’m fascinated by Lacan but foremost amongst them is the concept of desire. Once you get past the arcane language, there’s a phenomenological familiarity to the metonymic character of desire which can be unsettling. If you are sensitive to it, it’s easy to see it everywhere in yourself and in others.…

  • Imagine being in lockdown and your country suffering a massive cyberattack

    From Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data by Carissa VĆ©liz: Imagine being in lockdown and your country suffering a massive cyberattack. The internet crashes. Maybe the electricity is down too. Even your landline, if you still have one, might be down. You canā€™t reach your family, you…

  • To love means to find oneself with a ridiculous object

    From The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two by Alenka Zupančič pg 174-175: To love – that is to say (according to the good old traditional definition), to love someone “for what he is” (i.e. to move directly to the Thing) – always means to find oneself with a “ridiculous object,” an object that…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #80

    The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye-glance, little maketh up the best happiness. Hush! Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Pg 337

  • One monograph on GenAI later and Claude now figures prominently in my intellectual lifeworld. I’m realising how much that unsettles some people

    In Helen Sword’s wonderful book about writing she identifies what I think of as the intellectual lifeworld of the author: Successful writers seldom work entirely in isolation; even in traditionally ā€œsole authorā€ disciplines, they typically rely on other peopleā€”colleagues, friends, family, editors, reviewers, audiences, studentsā€”to provide them with support and feedback Air & Light &…

  • Too focused on the content and not enough on context

    I’ve been turning all my pain and all my problems into progressBut never realized I lost myself up in the processToo focused on the contentAnd not enough on contextYou can’t really feed the passion if you’re caught up on the profitYou can’t see the bigger picture if you’re never looking upAnd you can never smell…

  • How many politicians see being an MP as membership of the best private club in London?

    From the edited collection of Alan Clark’s diaries, pg 294: I still do love the clubbable side. The swinging studded Pugin doors which exclude those unentitled; the abundance of facilities; the deeply comfortable leather chairs at the ā€˜Silentā€™ end of the library where one can have a sleep as deep and as refreshing as under…

  • The casual antisemitism of leading Conservative politicians in the 1980s

    From the edited collection of Alan Clark’s diaries, pg 299: Marcus Kimball had turned up and was standing about ā€“ always a sign that something is afoot. He told of dining with Willie the previous evening, and that there had been much talk of ā€˜too many jewboys in the Cabinetā€™. This isn’t the only example…