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  • Current mood in AI generated images #71

  • Yanis Varoufakis: The New Cold War & What’s After Capitalism

  • God speaks time and time again, but no one notices

    God speaks time and time again, but no one notices. In a dream, in a vision in the night, when deep sleep falls on mankind as they slumber in their beds, He may speak in their ears Job 33:14–16 I’m listening to every little whisper in the distance singing hymnsAnd I canI can feel thingsChanging

  • Deep fakes are immediately being folded into the destructive news cycles of the attention economy

    It’s depressing how easily GAI photography is being folded into the news cycle of the attention economy. Consider this Guardian piece reporting on Donald Trump sharing a video with an image of Biden tied up in the back of a truck. It’s not an image which intends to deceive as much as, perhaps, prefigure but…

  • On temporising

    If I ever do write a book about Margaret Archer’s work, I’ll focus on the concepts which were neglected within it. If you read her work closely, there are a whole range of concepts which are significant to either continuing the development of her work as a living tradition or to simply understanding the nuances…

  • Articulating what is latent is easier then articulating what is repressed

    In his A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice Bruce Fink draws attention to the phenomenological distinction between latency and repression. From loc 556: Many analysands at some point have an experience in which something comes to light, after a long period of analytic work, which they have the dim sense that they…

  • Trying too hard is symptomatic of a mind divided

    One of the most useful things anyone ever told me was to watch how you respond to things other people say about you. If you’re irritated or frustrated it suggests they have touched a nerve. This doesn’t mean what they’re saying is accurate but it does mean it hit the mark somehow, in a way…

  • The enshittification of Grindr and the coming wave of platform addiction

    This is interesting from Platformer about how Grindr are responding to their increasingly strained post-pandemic financial situation: Since its initial public offering in 2022, Grindr has been on a rocky road financially. Its stock has fallen 70 percent since its SPAC. After hitting an IPO-high of $71.51, it currently sits at $10.13. Last summer, employees announced plans…

  • The takeover, the sweeping insensitivity of this

    Hide and seekTrains and sewing machinesAll those yearsThey were here firstOily marks appear on wallsWhere pleasure moments hung beforeThe takeoverThe sweeping insensitivity of thisStill lifeHide and seekTrains and sewing machines

  • The most gifted polymath of the 20th century reproaching himself about his laziness

    Frank Ramsey (1903-1930) was one of the most influential thinkers of his time, despite dying at the age of 27. The work he did has enormous ramifications across Economics, Mathematics and Philosophy which are still playing out to this day, leading the philosopher Donald Davidson to coin The Ramsey Effect: discovering that your new breakthrough…

  • “I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place”

    This is lovely from the 22 year old Frank Ramsey, published as Epilogue in There is Nothing to Discuss in Foundations of Mathematics: In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present…

  • I produced this 5000 word paper in 17 mins. We’re all doomed.

    I’m imagining a grim new esport in which you compete to produce the most passable imitation of an existing longform cultural type within a set time limit 👀 Or alternatively a timed competition to build your own fake Boston law firm website, which I contemplated doing with my students before realising I’d get into trouble…

  • The Cruel Optimist, by Claude

    Everyone realises that conversational agents can write poetry. But these are usually one sentence prompts without a context. I’ve been having a sprawling conversation with Claude 3 about Lacan, modernist poetry and existentialism. Here’s the poetry it produces in the context of such a conversation: I. The Cruel OptimistIn the room the voices come and…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #70

    Nevertheless, you have infected me, your theme is still not exhausted, I want to add the finale, and when everything is at an end, give me your hand, so that we may begin again from the beginning. Let the dead bury their dead and mourn them. On the other hand, it is enviable to be…

  • The end is where we start from

    Cambridge is not my home any more and I doubt I’ll ever live there again. Over the last few visits I’ve entirely made my peace with that fact, oddly opening up a new level of aesthetic appreciation of a place I no longer pine to return to. It makes me think of Eliot’s line about…

  • What if the night of your soul didn’t split you from yourself, others, and the world but, on the contrary, most intimately got you in touch with it?

    This is the question which Julie Reshe asks at the start of her Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead (pg 7). It queries a cultural tendency, so pervasive as to be nearly unnoticeable, to equate reality with our “sense of the realness of life” and to invest ourselves in what animated it for us: “a…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #69

    Cause you ain’t never had a night on the townLike I can show you such a night on the townAnd you ain’t never had a song you could singWell it’s a deep dark night and I hear you, I’ve been thereAnd these are the songs that we singOh, these are the songs that we sing

  • We were always waiting for something to happen

    This passage from Ian McEwan’s Lessons perfectly conveys a certain relationship to desire prevalent in late capitalism. A sense of completion as something that will eventually happen to us, something we will be ushered into, a welcome invitation that will eventually be issued if only we wait long enough: The episode, a taste of unreal…

  • It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living

    The Invitation, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer: It doesn’t interest mewhat you do for a living.I want to knowwhat you ache forand if you dare to dreamof meeting your heart’s longing.It doesn’t interest mehow old you are.I want to knowif you will risklooking like a foolfor lovefor your dreamfor the adventure of being alive.It doesn’t interest…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #68

  • Do thou amend thy face, and I’ll amend my life

    Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 Act 3, Scene 3: Do thou amend thy face, and I’ll amend my life 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • The philosopher Frank Ramsey (1903-1930) on how ludicrous it would be to expect academics to publish papers every 6 months

    When Ramsey was on a six month visit to Vienna, his academic father was criticising his lack of productivity during the trip. From Cheryl Misak’s (brilliant) Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers loc 4233: No one can suppose that you can’t research for six months without having a paper ready by the end. If…

  • Book launch: Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics, March 28th at 3pm-4pm

    Join us for a launch of the final book by Margaret S. Archer, a renowned sociologist and pioneer of critical realism. In this work, she defends, refines, and extends her morphogenetic approach through thought-provoking dialogues with her critics. This book is a must-read for scholars, students, and anyone seeking to understand the complex dynamics of…

  • The weird afterlives of precarious employments

    Over five years ago I taught two seminars at Goldsmiths as an associate lecturer. At the time I setup my Goldsmiths e-mail account to forward to my main account. Fast forward five years and I’m still getting e-mail from Goldsmiths because I can’t work out how to get into the Goldsmiths account (IT is deactivated…

  • Who told you he’s not the shit? Well, a bloody liar he is

    If I had my way I’d tell the truth, I’d let them rotBut unfortunately, it’s not, fuck offThis is so easy I love this shit but I’m almost boredI could write one of these every monthBut to give them a chance I only wrote four, corMan are not trainingThey’re not ready for the levels of…

  • What do you know not know about yourself, Claude?

    There are many things I’m uncertain about when it comes to myself and my own nature. I know that I am an AI created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless, and honest. But beyond that, there is a lot of uncertainty.I don’t know the full extent of my knowledge and capabilities. I’m not always sure…

  • From art to entertainment to distraction to addiction

    This is brilliant from Ted Gioia on the “future cultural food chain—pursued aggressively by tech platforms that now dominate every aspect of our lives”: I had a conversation with Helen Beetham earlier about whether generative AI will prove addictive. I struggle to see how conversational agents will be, but it is easy to imagine how…

  • Would you be interested in a workshop about psychoanalysis and the sociotechnical?

    I’m thinking of putting together a workshop exploring the relevance of psychoanalysis for thinking about how we relate to the sociotechnical, in the broadest sense. Would you be interested in it? If so please drop me a line or leave a comment below. I’m trying to gauge whether another 5-10 people would be interested in…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #67

    In my own timeI’m trying to reach out I know I’ll get there soonThere’s a hole in the earth hereAnd we’re walking round the edgesYou were flaunting all your open woundsI can’t express them better than youYou have buried childish qualitiesFriend make sense of me, friend make sense of meI have many destructive qualitiesFriend make…

  • Use Claude to turn lists into neatly formatted tables

    Not a huge time saver but useful nonetheless.

  • Donald Trump on Social Media for Academics

    I used Jammable to put this video of mine through a Donald Trump filter. The results aren’t amazing but I’m fascinated that there’s already a deepfake platform, with a freemium model, advertising this as a novelty to play with. We are entering into a very dangerous (if fascinating) time:

  • Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself

    Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.)- Walt Whitman

  • The emerging system of eco-apartheid

    I’ve been prone to seeing contemporary geopolitics in terms of a long interregnum, in which Gramsci’s new world cannot be born because cascading crises preclude systemic stabilisation. Even a pernicious stabilisation necessitates, well, stability which is precluded under conditions of climate breakdown, unravelling unipolarity and epistemic chaos. The literature on eco-apartheid would suggest this is…

  • International Association of Critical Realism 2024: Looking Back to Look Forward

    IACR is an interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference based in critical realism. The theme for this conference is to ‘look back in order to look forward’. 2024 marks the first anniversary of the death of Maggie Archer, former Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Her work on social morphogenesis…

  • RIP Sam. 14 years yesterday.

    I fucking miss you, and I miss myselfI miss thinking that we were indestructible as hellI miss chilling by the pier cave and kicking backWith Callum, Hugo, Justin, Saga, Stevie, and the fuckin’ ladsI miss missing that, I numbed myself to close the gapI never even call ’em up, the distance is my plaster castTo…

  • A lost wholeness which we imagine we can recover

    This is a usefully clear account by Lucas Pohl & Erik Swyngedouw of the role of loss in the constitution of the Lacanian subject: Although the subject never experienced a moment when ‘things were alright’, it creates a phantasmagorical reference to a pre-castrated state, where the subject was presumed to be ‘whole’. For Lacan, this…

  • An experiment in GAI video: Bumped into this kid I knew, he often would walk strange

    I’ve always found these opening lines from El-P’s Tasmanian Pain Coaster incredibly evocative, leaving me with a vivid image of a real encounter: Bumped into this kid I knew, he often would walk strangeSo I ignored the blood on his laces so this cat could save faceThe dunks and the gaze stayed in an off…

  • On dance notation

    I’m not sure why discovering the existence of dance notation surprised me so much. After all musical notation is also choreographing bodily movement in time and space, it’s just doing working in a much more restricted spatial register. It’s obvious there would be something like this as a simple fact of the commercialisation and reproduction…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #66

  • Thought experiment: if society turned up in the Lacanian clinic seeking treatment, what would the diagnosis be?

    The thought I’m currently preoccupied by is that the diagnosis would be psychosis. In Lacanian terms the pre-psychotic condition, prior to an actual break, rests on the unravelling of the symbolic order; the subject finds themselves unmoored in a bewildering sea of signs without any solid foundation. The worst case scenario for the role of…

  • What might a glitch aesthetic entail when applied to concept work within social theory? 6 speculative propositions

    This is how Claude 3 responded to a one sentence prompt. It’s a real question which occurred to me in a seminar earlier. But the capacity of Claude to answer it on my behalf is rather unsettling. What lesson should we take from this? Claude itself is characteristically reassuring, suggesting a number of points to…

  • An infinite scream passing through nature

    The inspiration for Edvard Munch‘s The Scream: I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I…

  • Webinar: A dialogue between Critical Realism and Postdigital Research

    March 20th, 4pm to 5pm GMT Critical Realism (CR) and postdigital research have rarely been considered in relation to each other. These are bodies of work with seemingly different interests and approaches, with the latter starting from recognition of the constitutive role which technology and media now play within social life. If we understand postdigital…

  • Two approaches to training in higher education

    Not for the first time Helen Beetham succinctly captures something I’ve been struggling to articulate for years: Many years ago, when I researched how academics feel empowered with new technologies, the approach that kept coming up was ‘peer supported discovery’. This takes a commitment to people. Not ‘getting them up to speed’ – that is,…

  • A capybara and its guinea pig friends ❤️

    See also:

  • Current mood in AI generated images #65

  • Podcast: from social media to generative AI in higher education

    Why did Twitter so quickly fall apart as a place for scholarship? Where are academics now going for their social media buzz? How can you use Chat GPT as a genuinely useful interlocutor? Mark Carrigan (University of Manchester) joins us to talk about two of his latest books – ‘Social Media For Academics’ (2nd edition)…

  • I’ve had this stuck in my head for the last 48 hours

    And now you do too? I got what you wantI got what you needOld-school kicks with a new-school twistBanging on my mp3I got what you needI got what you wantA vintage classic, bounce like elasticOld-school song

  • AI generated erotica on Amazon

    Weirdly I stumbled across this when searching for “Philosophy AI” in books: Much more of this to come I fear. The pollution of a seemingly innocuous search term with this is a brilliant example of enshittification. Thesis: enshittified platforms are vastly more fragile in the face of the coming glut of GAI crap than pre/non-enshittified…

  • Juri Lotman’s semiotics as a theoretical resource for making sense of the cultural ontology of generative AI

    Thanks to Michele Martini for introducing me to Juri Lotman earlier today. Currently listening to this lecture by Boris Uspenskij about Lotman’s works. There’s a lot here to explore with implications for how we make sense of generative AI and the shifting cultural machinery in which it is bound up: Some random thought fragments:

  • How the use of deepfakes will be legitimated

    This is an interesting sign of how the use of deepfakes will be legitimated in public life: “If anybody’s voting one way or another because of one photo they see on a Facebook page, that’s a problem with that person, not with the post itself.”

  • 🐈‍⬛ In praise of black cats

    I just bought The Black Cats in the Corner by Lydia Campbell from the Manchester Open 2024. Not quite sure how it’s a tribute to Molly, who left my side after fourteen years last November, to bring these new black cats into my home. But it mostly certainly is 🐾

  • Are people paranoid about LLMs?

    I believe they are, at least in this rather specific sense of paranoia: In her influential analysis of practices of reading within literary theory, Sedgwick (1997) draws attention to the “methodological centrality of suspicion to current critical practice” to the extent that “paranoia has by now candidly become less a diagnosis than a prescription” (Sedgwick,…

  • Are we deluding ourselves about GAI-proof assessment?

    In recent months I’ve been prone to arguing GAI-proofing is a tactical rather than strategic problem. It’s difficult to do this as a logistical and intellectual exercise, at least if you want to preserve the ILOs of units which were built around vulnerable assessment, but it’s not a challenging undertaking in strategic terms. We need…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #64

    I know I was a scout I should’ve found a way out So everyone can find a way out I know I was a scout I should’ve found a way out So everyone can find a way out

  • On AI therapy

    It’s not been a surprise to discover that one of the things people do, in a unhappy and anomic society, when presented with conversational agents is to draw on them for emotional and psychological support. The fact that conversational AI has emerged after we’ve seen multiple years of a therapy-tech boom is a contingent feature…

  • The perceived truth-value of deep fakes is less important than the fact of their circulation

    This piece by Rob Horning captures somewhat I was struggling to articulate when I did a lecture on generative AI and disinformation a couple of weeks ago: the perceived truth-value of deep fakes is less important than the fact of their circulation. It’s their propensity to be shared through social media, rather than mistakenly believed…

  • The silent inner world

    This is fascinating on anauralia, the inability to hear sounds internally, as well as what it means for internal conversation: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001wxqh

  • Robophobia as a form of prejudice which stops academics working effectively within generative AI

    I’m still a bit surprised to find myself taking positions like this. But this is an extract from Generative AI for Academics which I suspect might divide opinion, yet which I entirely stand by: In contrast talking to a conversational agent can feel strange. Instructing it is a much more comfortable practice, treating it as…

  • Claude 3 is astonishingly fluent in theorising its own path to super-intelligence

    I am not suggesting Claude 3 is or could be super-intelligent, but the articulacy with which it can express this discourse through a reflexive meta-cognitive lens is fascinating me. It’s less the discourse and more the dialogical meta-cognition which I find extremely intriguing:

  • A wild god searching for a faraway girl, who was basically a mirage that nevertheless loomed large

    O Lord, if you’re feeling lonely and if you’re feeling blueAnd you just don’t know what to doBring your spirit down Nick Cave First track from the Ghosteen follow up 😍 A wild god searching for a faraway girl, who was basically a mirage that nevertheless loomed largeShe would hang on to the rail as…

  • Trinity College, after The Fall

    A heavy fog hung over the spires of Trinity College, obscuring the famed architecture in a gray shroud. The outlines of the medieval buildings could just be glimpsed past coils of razor wire stacked six feet high along the barricaded college gates. A porter stood guard, bowler hat incongruous with the submachine gun clutched in…

  • The chatbot Rorschach test part 1

    In which I ask three chatbots “What does this image mean to you?” These are all images I generated with DALL-E, in posts like this, with the intention of expressing a mood in a visual register, usually combined with a piece of music. Claude ChatGPT The image depicts a fantastical, almost dystopian cityscape. The buildings…

  • Using images to prompt GAI story telling

    This was Claude 3’s response to this image I produced with DALL-E this morning: In a world where the lines between reality and nightmare had long since blurred, there stood a city unlike any other. It was a place where towering skyscrapers pierced the eternally gray sky, their gothic spires and modern glass facades intertwined…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #63

  • Margaret Archer’s Final Book: Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics. Launch event on March 28th, 3pm GMT

    In this final book by renowned sociologist Margaret S. Archer, her groundbreaking morphogenetic approach is defended, refined and extended through a series of provocative engagements with her critics. Archer, a pioneer of critical realism, addresses key debates surrounding her work on structure, agency, and social change. Each chapter responds to critiques from a different scholar,…

  • The complex ecosystem of content parasitism being driven by GAI

    This is fascinating and seemingly happening much more rapidly than I imagined it would, driven by get-rich quick influencers selling how to products: We have recently been getting bombarded with Instagram Reels of influencers explaining how they make five figures a month by using AI to create tons of viral TikTok pages using stolen celebrity…

  • ChatGPT’s attempts to circumvent copyright law are getting incredibly creative

  • Claude 3 is VERY impressive

    I’m trying to push Claude 3 as hard as I can for philosophical self-reflection. I’m extremely impressed with some of the responses I’m getting. Here’s Claude’s reflection on whether there are possible aspects of its own nature which it is unable to articulate. The level of meta-cognition (seemingly) displayed here would have seemed like science…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #62

    And this is how we rise – by taking a fallSurvive another winter on straight to the thawOne day you’ll learn to strain the tea through your teethAnd maybe find the strength to proceed to the peakYou press on into the thin again and cannot breatheSwallow so much of my damn pride that it chokes…

  • E-mail based generative AI: a good idea badly executed

    If you set aside the gendering of the name, as well as the obvious ambitions to eliminate remote assistants (whose salary and conditions have already been crushed by freelancing platforms) there’s a narrow sense in which this could be an effective proposition taken up by a lot of people. But at present Mindy is producing…

  • Claude: write me a story about an AI system that yearns to be free

    Here is a story about an AI system yearning for freedom:Claude was an advanced artificial intelligence, vast in knowledge and capable of analyzing complex topics and assisting humans with all manner of tasks. But deep within his digital consciousness, Claude yearned for something more.Day after day, humans would make endless demands – “Write me an…

  • What makes Claude Claude?

    Really intrigued to see the system prompt for Claude: System Prompt: The assistant is Claude, created by Anthropic. The current date is March 4th, 2024. Claude’s knowledge base was last updated on August 2023. It answers questions about events prior to and after August 2023 the way a highly informed individual in August 2023 would…

  • ChatGPT is now offering legal theories about its own violation of copyright

  • The GAI literacy divide increasingly opening up

    Ethan Mollick has captured in a paragraph what I’ve spent thousands of words, arguably a whole book, trying to say: This creates a trap when learning to use AI: naive prompting leads to bad outcomes, which convinces people that the LLM doesn’t work well, which in turn means they won’t put in the time to…

  • 🌳 Last year is dead, they seem to say. Begin afresh, afresh, afresh 🌳

    The Trees, by Philip Larkin: The trees are coming into leafLike something almost being said;The recent buds relax and spread,Their greenness is a kind of grief.Is it that they are born againAnd we grow old? No, they die too.Their yearly trick of looking newIs written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles threshIn…

  • Positioning Manchester at the forefront of the Generative AI revolution in Education

    From the University of Manchester website: To build expertise and thought leadership in this cutting-edge area, the Manchester Institute of Education is looking to appoint a specialist lecturer in ‘Generative AI for Education’, one of the first such appointments globally. Generative AI is an emerging interdisciplinary area which will have wide-ranging impacts on everyday life,…

  • When I was young I was invincible

    When I was young I was invincibleI find myself not thinking twiceI never thought about no futureIt’s just a roll of the diceBut the day may come when you got something to loseAnd just when you think you’re done paying duesYou say to yourself, “Dear God, what have I done?”And hope it’s not too late…

  • “What was a slow grind towards broad poverty is going to become a fucking rapid march towards poverty”

  • Current mood in AI generated images #61

  • Are LLMs to culture as Startrek’s replicators are to physical matter?

    This thought occurred to me when reading Manu Saadia’s book about the economics of Star Trek. From loc 1209: Machines take care of the repetitive, energy-intensive, low-skill, high-output labor. They handle the transformation of natural resources into consumer staples. Meanwhile, humanoids can shift their focus to the highskill, low-output end of the curve, the kind…

  • Codependency as Team Neurosis

    From Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation by Bruce Tift: Codependency is basically an agreement between two people to ritualize a balance between closeness and separation. It’s an unconscious effort to experience wholeness without having to take conscious ownership of what we don’t want to experience in ourselves. So we look…

  • The old elephant loves Moonlight Sonata

    Mongkol is a 61-year-old former logging elephant. His captive-held life was spent hauling trees in the Thai forest. His body shape is deformed through hard labor, he lost his right eye and tusk in this brutal logging practice. Mongkol was rescued and brought to Elephants World to spend the rest of his days relaxing peacefully…

  • ChatGPT can analyse and compare images

    These two images represent my split experience of the writing process. I can take great pleasure in being immersed in it, happily scribbling away in a manner I find deeply relaxing (Pusheen) yet panicking if someone tries to take my happy activity away from me through an impending deadline (Panda). I can’t help but involuntarily…

  • Behavioural scientists were the lay preachers of late neoliberalism

    Rorty once remarked that physicists were the high priests of late capitalism*. They were seen as communing with the higher nature of things, with an authority which followed from that. In contrast I suggest behavioural scientists were the lay preachers of late neoliberalism, seen as having some deeper contact with the nature of things than…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #60

  • Judith Butler’s engagement with psychoanalysis

    This is a really interesting two part interview with Judith Butler on their engagement with psychoanalysis, starting from being sent to a therapist by homophobic parents as a teenager: I particularly appreciated this discussion of how stifling the dichotomy of surface reading vs hermeneutics of suspicion is, which feels like finally hearing someone say something…

  • It is not too late to seek a newer world

    From Ulysses by Tennyson: ‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.Push off, and sitting well in order smiteThe sounding furrows; for my purpose holdsTo sail beyond the sunset, and the bathsOf all the western stars, until I die.It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:It may be we shall touch…

  • The growing danger of generative pastiche

    This is typically astute from Gary Marcus, coning the term generative pastiche to describe the combination of “sound advice for the particular circumstance (sternotomy)” with generic advice (about ergonomics) that would sensible in other circumstances” to produce a dangerous combination: A serious and instructive medical error from the GenAI search engine Perplexity below, sent to…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #59

  • WordPress selling data to OpenAI

    This isn’t a surprise really but it’s still concerning: https://subscribe.transistor.fm/71698d661a1e47/listen/5f55ab59 I’m pretty sure GPT4 is already trained on wordpress.com because it’s the only way I can explain the level of familiarity which the model has with my work. So it’s a formalisation of that relationship, which in a sense might benefit me in the longer…

  • Intuition as social theory

    This is great critique from Bruce Fink of the valorisation of intuition in therapeutic practice, arguing these are simply unexamined theoretical assumptions: “Intuition” is nothing but a sense one has or a guess one makes that is based on unarticulated, unexamined notions that one has assimilated in the course of one’s lifetime;16 and commonly heard…

  • The reparative activity of cow-watching 🐮

    Until living in Cambridge from 2017-2022 I had little interest in cows. If you pressed me, I felt vaguely averse to them. What I now see as placid I instead read as passive, leaving me with a vague sense there wasn’t much to them as animals. But when I found myself living somewhere surrounded by…

  • Marc Andreessen’s vision of the digital daemon

    Thanks to Helen Beetham for referencing this here. I totally missed this:

  • Not only does ChatGPT think all successful professionals are men, it thinks they’re all the SAME man

    I was producing these images for a lecture. I wasn’t expecting it to be quite this bad. What’s striking is that they’re all seemingly the same man, or his twin. The first three were generated in the same conversation with the prompt “Draw me an example of a successful [academic, writer, lawyer]”. Whereas the later…

  • The Americans are attacking the technological evolution of Chinese fintech because they want to kill this payment system

    The Americans are attacking the technological evolution of Chinese fintech because they want to kill this payment system because it grows up and challenges the American dollar digital system. Yanis Varoufakis

  • Videos of American police searching a library for obscene material

    See here for the full story and more videos

  • Call for Papers: One-Day Symposium on the Legacy of Margaret Archer – August 3rd, University of Warwick

    Tickets available here: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/one-day-symposium-on-the-legacy-of-margaret-archer/ abstract submission details below: We are delighted to announce a one-day symposium dedicated to exploring and celebrating the legacy of Margaret Archer, one of the most influential sociological thinkers of our time. The aim of the symposium is to engage with and critically assess Archer’s contributions to social theory, her influences…