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  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #48

    Birds begin their calls to praise. And they are right. We stop and listen. (We, behind masks and in costumes!)What are they saying? A little report, a little sorrow and a lot of promisethat chips away at the half-locked future. And in between we can hear the silencethey break – now healing to our ears.-…

  • What’s the point of online conferences where people don’t actually meet?

    I was surprised earlier to see that the BSA’s online conference relies on uploading videos in advance. I can see the appeal of this from an organisational point of view, as it reduces dependence upon potentially unreliable chairs to negotiate technical difficulties on the day. But I still find it such a weird proposition to…

  • Chekhov’s gun in academic writing

    The principle of Chekhov’s gun suggests any element introduced into a story needs to serve a purpose. If you introduce a gun then someone should eventually use it. I increasingly feel the same point can be made about academic writing. In some fields there is a tendency to confuse the context of discovery with context…

  • Generative AI and the challenge for professionalism

    We are rapidly getting to a point where GAI tools can replicate some of the functions over which professionals once had unchallenged dominance. They might not be able to do it with the same skill, responsiveness or adaptability that professionals can. But they are cheap, at least once up and running, which is going to…

  • Two feet standing on a principle

    Two feet standing on a principleTwo hands digging in each others woundsCold smoke seeping out of colder throatsDarkness falling, leaves nowhere to moveIt’s spiraling downBiting words like a wolf howlingHate is spitting out each others mouthsBut we’re still sleeping like we’re lovers

  • Do people dismiss GAI-supported work because it doesn’t involve the sacrifice of time?

    From Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets by Todd McGowan pg 95: Commodities that require a greater quantity of labor have more value than those that require less. The laws of supply and demand cover small variations in price, but labor time remains the source of value itself and will quickly outstrip…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #47

  • Which of the three forms of creativity is GAI capable of?

    This is a useful summary from Margaret Boden in AI: Its nature and future. It seems clear to me that Claude and ChatGPT can do combinatorial creativity with a range and speed that exceeds human beings, can undertake exploratory creativity with sufficiently careful prompting but at a vastly sub-human standard and could potentially be capable…

  • The Borromean Knot of Jacques Lacan; Or, How to Beat Your Death Drive

  • The days are reeling past in such squealing blasts

    Ask your hands to know the things they holdI know the days are reeling past in such squealing blastsBut stop for breath and you will know it’s yoursSwaying like an open door when storms are comingHold

  • What happens when we can’t stay on the stage any longer?

    In what place does the a stand? At what level could it be recognised, if indeed this were possible? I told you earlier that to recognise oneself as the object of one’s desire is always masochistic, but the masochist only does so on the stage and you’re going to see what operates when he can’t…

  • Disavowal as a scholarly habit

    I’ve been wondering recently about disavowal, in the Lacanian sense of recognising yet rejecting a feature of reality, as a scholarly habit which shapes intellectual outputs. When I used to spend time following data scientists in the early 2010s, who were really keen on Twitter data at that point, you would often see a recognition…

  • The impending reality of the digital daemon

    This is an interesting read on what I suspect will eventually turn into something like a digital daemon: These ‘digital assistants’ of ours can gradually transition to automating our lives such that ads may one day target them rather than us. It may be a different form of ad, of course: we can’t assume the…

  • Is generative AI predicated on digital enclosure?

    This is how Mark Andrejevic describes the process of enclosure inherent in social platforms. From Infoglut pg 42: What is really novel, however, is the fact that because these forms of communication take place within what I have elsewhere described as a “digital enclosure” — the interactive embrace of networked devices that record everything that…

  • Derek Hook on diagnosis in Lacan

    This six part series is excellent. I think his starting point that being-in-the-world is equivalent to psychic structure would be contested by some, but this is exactly the direction I’m trying to go in with my reading of Lacan.

  • The starting point for my second attempt to write a novel: Trinity College Cambridge, after the crash 🌊☀️☠️

    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 psychodynamics of the post-left

    This is a really insightful interview with Jeff Sharlet on a subject that fascinates me. In particular he talks about the difficulty of swimming against the stream, acting in moral ways in a society unravelling into neo-fascism, suggesting there’s a certain pleasure to be found in just letting go in order to letter the torrents…

  • Capybaras and chess: together at last

    We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our exclusive Capybara Chess Set, the first chess set designed specifically for capybaras! This unique set features intricately designed pieces, each crafted to resemble a capybara, ensuring a truly immersive experience for capybara enthusiasts. Whether you’re a capybara looking to indulge in a strategic game or a human…

  • He pretends that he’s understanding and you know in the grand scheme of everything he’s probably called a nice man

    He pretends that he’s understandingAnd you know in the grand scheme of everythingHe’s probably called a nice manOr an ordinary kind of manOr a stereotype with strong handsI’m so sadAt how little joy I realised within my time with my ex guyBefore these statues arrived

  • A Lacanian spin on Margaret Archer’s concept of contextual incongruity: the meta-reflexive as hysteric

    In Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity, the notion of contextual incongruity plays a crucial role as a driver of meta-reflexivity. In contrast to contextual continuity (a stable environment) and contextual discontinuity (a changing environment) I’ve often found the notion of contextual incongruity more difficult to pin down. In the Relational Subject Archer and Donati define…

  • Nick Cave on the world, in its complexity, rearranging itself toward meaning

    From today’s Red Hand Files: When I stop to examine the major crossroads of my own life, it seems that the impelling force behind the direction of travel has almost always been intuitive, even accidental, without any serious consideration given as to whether it was the right decision or not. But accompanying those vague, arbitrary decisions was an…

  • What are the analytical payoffs of Margaret Archer’s realist social theory?

    A few notes for a much longer project:

  • Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too

    Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet…

  • What are your strengths?

    Despite being intuitively sceptical of personal taxonomies, I found this an extremely interesting process. It costs money and it’s time consuming but I came away from it with a more detailed understanding of myself, which I guess is the point of the exercise. It suggests my main areas of strength are strategic thinking and influencing…

  • 📍Digital Sociology Wikipedia Editathon/Meetup – Feb 1st in Edinburgh

    Join us on February 1st from 1-4pm on at the University of Edinburgh for an afternoon focused on improving the representation of digital sociology on Wikipedia. Recently, the distinct “Digital Sociology” page was folded into the “Sociology of the Internet” page on grounds that the fields are synonymous. As digital sociologists, we disagree with this…

  • What you’re doing to me now, ouch

  • Computational sociology of knowledge as a tool for redesigning the knowledge system

    This lecture blew my mind in the best possible way. It’s too late to reorientate Generative AI for Academics along these lines but I’m going to be spending a lot of time over the coming months engaging with James Evans and the work of the Knowledge Lab. Among other things I want to understand (a)…

  • Why did Giddens largely ignore Bourdieu?

    This is an interesting question and provocative potential explanation by Magne Flemmen: In the review, Giddens makes what might be an interesting concession, when he says that no one has contributed more to overcoming the objectivism- subjectivism divide than Bourdieu. Recall that this was also the stated ambition of Giddens’ own work. Should this be…

  • We need jungle, I’m afraid (I can’t accept drum and bass)

  • Epistemic relativism and the escape from the real

    I thought this description by Mark Bracher of a particular example of ironist cultural criticism could be applied much more widely: “a game in which the ego plays hide-and-seek with itself, trying, by repeating to itself its knowledge that knowledge is always complete, to repress and/or to reduce to the realm of knowledge what always…

  • How much are academics paid in different national systems?

    I’ve been curious about this since discovering Australian salaries are vastly higher than UK salaries. This recruitment site suggests that UK salaries are actually mid-tier for European higher education which surprised me. It also illustrates different salary ranges across systems. It seems to be sourced from different national associations though there’s at least one obvious…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #46

  • 📖 Books I’ve read in 2024

    Restarting an old habit in the hope it will encourage me to read more and finish more of what I read. Fiction not now included, partly because I’m I’ve finished ingesting trashy Star Trek novels at an embarrassing rate and they’d swamp non-fiction through numbers alone:

  • The myth of the ‘perfectly analysed’ person

    From The Importance of Disappointment by Ian Craib loc 724: Psychoanalysis carries some idea of a cure (even though many practising analysts might dispute this) and of the ‘perfectly analysed’ person, someone who has really got it together, remains in control of himself or herself, and is in some sense always right. This is a…

  • “I feel like I’m gaining some kind of power by expelling all of my inner thoughts and secrets to people in rooms”

    As much people can say I’m a wimp about many things, I feel like I’m gaining some kind of power by expelling all of my inner thoughts and secrets to people in rooms Elena Tonra

  • The Lacan gang

  • Mobile generative AI as the next stage of surveillance capitalism

    This was extremely interesting in the Qualcomm* CEO’s interview with the FT. In essence I think he’s saying that the consumer economics of GAI won’t work until it’s in mobile devices, but there will never be enough compute on a mobile device to match the performance of a cloud-based model, which means (a) the local…

  • The Gish Gallop as an academic technique

    The reliance on the ‘volume and rapidity of information’ called the Gish gallop technique can be seen in some forms of academic performance, particularly for celebrity theorists where it’s less ‘information’ and more ‘concepts’. The capacity to keep talking in a seemingly coherent and authoritative manner, with a continual accumulation of propositions is extremely powerful.

  • CfP: Symbolic Interactionism and AI

    This looks very interesting: Artificial Intelligence (AI), an umbrella term that includes any device capable of emulating or even exceeding human capabilities, emerged as computer technologies became more sophisticated and complex. While AI currently evokes frightened responses associated with human replacement, it has a history of being useful regarding human enterprises. For instance, mathematical analysts…

  • Procrastination

  • “You must have been subjected to another AI generated audiotrack, I never said any such thing”

    Much more of this to come:

  • The existentialist Lacan

    I was struck reading Mark Bracher’s Lacan, Discourse and Social Change how Lacan’s conception of the outcomes of analysis speak to existentialist concerns, even if the route through which one gets there is psychoanalytically specific: This process involves the recognition of the Other’s deficiency, the realization that the unconscious fantasies that have been directing one’s…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #45

    This process involves the recognition of the Other’s deficiency, the realization that the unconscious fantasies that have been directing one’s desire and contributing to one’s suffering are both relative and doomed to remain unfulfilled and, hence, that there is no transcendent meaning to be found for one’s existence, no ultimate object that will satisfy one’s…

  • See he saw me as a human, this one thinks I’m a slaughterhouse

    And in the nightIt was a drunken stutterStarted as a next to nothing conversationAnd then he’s tearing me outTaking me apart at my friend’s houseI was uncomfortableI was hurtStill with blue innocence in his eyesI felt my reasoning was harshWith every stab wound and exhaleI promised myselfThat I would never lose my youthful fears of…

  • I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing

    I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for…

  • Attention digital sociologists – HELP NEEDED with the Wikipedia page!

    As some of you may be aware, the fledgling “Digital Sociology” page on Wikipedia was recently merged into the “Sociology of the Internet” page. This decision fails to recognize digital sociology as the distinct interdisciplinary field that it is. This is the justification that was given for the merge: “I am, in fact, a professional…

  • The book scene from The Remains of the Day

    This is one of the finest scenes I’ve ever seen in any film: Currently searching for a Lacanian analysis of this scene to avoid having to write it myself. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen a more evocative portrayal of objet a in a film. Having listened to the Radio 4 play over the last…

  • Why does The National’s Matt Berninger write so many beautiful songs about divorce despite being (seemingly) happily married?

    I was wondering this recently when it occurred to me quite how many beautiful National songs there are about break ups, sometimes specifically divorce. I’ve attached some examples below. I was really intrigued by his explanation here about the therapeutic role which writing these songs has served for him: Finding somebody to connect with and…

  • To what extent is ketamine shaping the culture of Silicon Valley?

    This is a question I’ve had had on my mind recently. It’s discussed in this recent podcast in a serious way. I’m methodologically cautious about neurohistorical approaches which tend to overgeneralise (e.g. ‘coffee caused the enlightenment’) but I suspect if you went deeply into transmission, you’d find the overgeneralisation mostly being driven by popularisation. Much…

  • Lacan tried to save the subject from structuralism

    This is fascinating from Alain Badiou in this volume pg 8-9: Given all of this, Lacan—this is the second aspect of his singular position—does not go as far as the “hard” structuralists like Foucault or the Heideggerians such as Derrida, who consider the category of the subject to be the mere avatar of a defunct…

  • Will ChatGPT eventually be unmasked to its users?

    From ELIZA A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine by Joseph Weizenbaum: It is said that to explain is to explain away. This maxim is nowhere so well fulfilled as in the area of computer programming, especially in what is called heuristic programming and artificial intelligence. For in…

  • A Tour of Lacan’s Graph of Desire

    The Lacan Online YouTube channel is superb.

  • Are the economic shocks of 2021-2023 a temporary phenomenon?

    This is an informative piece by James Meadway about an issue I would dearly like to understand: are the economic shocks of 2021-2023 a temporary phenomenon? This has enormous sociological implications for how we understand the political economy of higher education and social change more broadly, particularly if recurrent exogenous shocks continue to be implicitly…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #44

    We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.- T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding

  • Lacan vs the situationist heckler (1972)

  • When we all fall asleep, where do we go?

    What do you want from me?Why don’t you run from me?What are you wondering?What do you know?Why aren’t you scared of me?Why do you care for me?When we all fall asleep, where do we go?

  • Platform capitalism, historciality and Andrew Abbott’s sense of modernist temporal ontology

    In his Processual Sociology Andrew Abbott reflects on the forms of historicality through which the past lingers on in the present in which the future is taking root*: corporeal historicality (bodies, buildings, infrastructure), memorial historicality (individuals and collective memories), recorded historicality (analogue and digital records) and substantive historicality (the continuity of a particular cohort). In…

  • A pop-punk cover of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

    This is rapidly becoming one of my favourite YouTube channels:

  • Total existence needs meaning and myth, many misjudged the way and got lost in the mist

    She said “Decode the languageUnfold the symbolsUntold disciples got lost in the hillsideFollowing intellect, they let go of wisdomAnd now they’ll tell you the soul’s a closed systemThey sacrificed instinct to phony ambitionAnd now what they hold in their fist has become all that there isBut total existence needs meaning and mythMany misjudged the way…

  • 10 highs and 10 lows of 2023

    This has been a strange year. Utterly horrific in some respects yet deeply formative and quite beautiful in others. Here’s an attempt to summarise in a tradition I’ll repeat next year and beyond: 10 highs of 2023: 10 lows of 2023:

  • Alex Garland’s Civil War film looks superb

    The aesthetic vaguely reminds me of Brian Wood’s DMZ which is one of my favourite graphic novels

  • Andrew Abbott on the practice of theorising

    From this weirdly detailed Sociological Job Rumours AMA: What kind of an effect does all this have? I don’t know. It probably does not influence my core thinking much. In fact, I haven’t read any other theorist systematically since the early 1980s. Once you begin to develop your own way of thinking about things, other…

  • What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do

    From Kierkegaard’s journal in 1835: What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except in the way knowledge must precede all action. It is a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth…

  • The sensory pleasure of ideas and the displaced joys of academic life

    I was asked by Johan Malmstedt after a talk about generative AI what I would do if my work was entirely automated. It immediately left me thinking about my favourite letter from C Wright Mills in which he tries to remind a struggling friend about the things in life one should be excited about: You…

  • CFP: Generative AI Governance – Special Issues in Information, Communication & Society

    CFP: Generative AI Governance – Special Issues in Information,Communication & Society Call for Papers for Special Issue in Information, Communication & SocietyGenerative AI Governance: Innovations, Institutions, Imaginaries Special Issue Editors:Fabian Ferrari, Utrecht University, f.l.ferrari@uu.nlJoanne Kuai, Karlstad University, joanne.kuai@kau.se  From democratic to authoritarian contexts, governments worldwide facethe challenge of setting up oversight mechanisms for generative AIsystems. The European…

  • Lacan on the biographical momentum of partial objects

    In Seminar X Lacan discusses* the developmental progression through a sequence of partial objects, stressing how “a residue remains” which “isn’t signifiable in the articulated register” (pg 66). The first objects were “located in the structure of the drive” whereas their later replacements can be characterised by an artificiality, which is both functional (insofar as it…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #43

  • How do we visualise an assemblage?

    There’s an interesting discussion in Simon Lindgren’s Critical Theory of AI (pg 37-38) about we imagine the assemblage. He quotes Tarleton Gillespie’s concern that the notion obscures “the people involved at every point: people debating the models, cleaning the training data, designing the algorithms, tuning the parameters” before quoting Nick Seaver arguing that we should…

  • Hannah Arendt on machinic rhythms and their power to consume our autonomy

    I found this an extremely evocative account from The Human Condition pg 146 on our intimate reliance on machines, the routines involved in this use and the subtle changes which they bring about in our work: What dominates the labor process and all work processes which are performed in the mode of laboring is neither…

  • If Blink 182 Wrote ‘Wonderwall’

  • Current mood in AI generated images #42

    And maybe we believed in very, very foolish thingsMaybe these songs kept us breathing another tomorrowAnd we were always very sure we were never gonna change the worldI never held any grudges or kept any picturesAnd what did it mean for all these years I spent chasin’ them ferris wheelsThat were always gone like visions…

  • I did not remember how frequently characters smoked in early 90s superhero comics

    I’ve been reading old x-men comics on Marvel Unlimited over the holiday. I grew up reading these but I honestly did not remember how frequently characters smoked in them, as well as how smoking was portrayed as a way of relating to the world:

  • The most popular posts on my blog in 2023

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #41

  • Online reading group: Margaret Archer’s Social Origins of Educational Systems

    As often happens when I genuinely stop working, I’ve been struck by an idea of something I would like to do which never occurred to me previously. Margaret Archer’s Social Origins of Educational Systems is the one major work by her I’ve never read in full. I’d like to finally get past the introduction next…

  • What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing?

    From Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations book 8: Do not disturb thyself by thinking of the whole of thy life. Let not thy thoughts at once embrace all the various troubles which thou mayest expect to befall thee: but on every occasion ask thyself, What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing? For thou…

  • What is social ontology? Margaret Archer’s introduction in 13 minutes

    And here’s another podcast with her I found when exploring my files:

  • Current mood in AI generated images #40

  • Is Musk trying to use Twitter’s failure to position himself politically?

    I’ve been instinctively sceptical of the theory that Musk has been playing 4D chess with Twitter from the outset. Instead I’ve ascribed it to a combination of hubris and dysfunction; the degree to which Musk’s erratic behaviour is being shaped by regular Zopiclone and Ketamine shouldn’t be underestimated, particularly when he’s tweeting late at night.…

  • Why do buildings feel the way they do for us?

    On a visit to Oslo I wandered rather aimlessly into the Opera house, before returning for each subsequent day of the trip. It wasn’t a reflection of an affection for opera but rather a fascination with the immense feeling of calm the building provoked in me, particularly the seating area outside: The concept for the…

  • Postmodernism: the anxious dreams of boomer theorists?

    I recently bought a copy of this book edited by Anthony Elliott and Charles Spezzano because it contained an essay about the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald which I wanted to read. I was struck when flicking through the wider book, Psychoanalysis at its Limits: Navigating the Postmodern Turn, what a glorious example this is of fin…

  • Now I’m ready to grow young again

    Well, now young faces grow sad and oldAnd hearts of fire grow coldWe swore blood brothers against the windNow I’m ready to grow young againAnd hear your sister’s voice calling us homeAcross the open yardsWell maybe we could cut some place of our ownWith these drums and these guitars I want to sleep beneathPeaceful skies…

  • My analyst looked up briefly.

    The Sword in the Stone, by Louise Glück: My analyst looked up briefly.Naturally I couldn’t see himbut I had learned, in our years together,to intuit these movements. As usual,he refused to acknowledgewhether or not I was right. My ingenuity versushis evasiveness: our little game.At such moments, I felt the analysiswas flourishing: it seemed to bring…

  • Āditta Sutta – The Fire Sermon

    Everything, monks, is burning. What, monks, is everything that is burning? The eye, monks, is burning, form is burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning. The feeling that arises dependent on eye-contact, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, that also is burning. With what is it burning? It is burning with the fire of passion, the…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #39

    It was graceStunned by the last lights of the sunWe were swimming in a green sea as deep as a drumThere are things I must record, must praiseThere are things I have to say about the fullnessAnd the blaze of this beautiful lifeThe beloved watch the world on its kneesWith an infinite degree of separation…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #38

  • Germany: The discreet lives of the super rich

    This interesting documentary led me to look at the distribution of billionaires in Germany. It has almost three times as many billionaires as Italy, France, Sweden and Switzerland. But the international list makes it seem as if they are on the lower end of the spectrum. Not quite minigarchs but mesogarchs?

  • Southpark on ChatGPT: “If everyone starts using ChatGPT then we lose our unfair advantage!”

    Enter the AI detector: “if there is ChatGPT being used here I will find it”

  • The grief, it gets me, and the weird goodbyes

    It finally hits me, a mile’s driveThe sky is leaking, my windshield’s cryingI’m feeling sacred, my soul is strippedRadio’s painful, the words are clippedThe grief, it gets me, and the weird goodbyesMy car is creepin’, I think it’s dyingI’m pullin’ over until it healsI’m on a shoulder of lemon fieldsThe grief, it gets me, the…

  • From social media to generative media: the confusing landscape of post-pandemic research communication

    Slides for my keynote at Advancing Research Communication next week:

  • You could still be what you said you were when I met you

    You could still be, what you want toWhat you said you were, when I met youYou’ve got a warm heartYou’ve got a beautiful brainBut it’s disintegratingFrom all the medicine

  • How to create a research agenda & develop your personal brand

    I enjoyed doing this webinar earlier:

  • Current mood in AI generated images #37

  • “You point your fucking finger. You racist, you bigot. But that’s not the problem, now is it?”

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #36

  • Donna Tartt reads The Secret History

    (Thank you Pat Thomson for sharing!)

  • The perennial challenge of the luddites

    From John Baker, Australian telecoms leader, quoted in Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine pg 109: The developing consciousness of the Australian trade unionist illustrates the old challenge of the Luddites to the factory-owners: “you haven’t any right to take over my tools and skills and build them into a machine [that] you, alone, own…

  • I think I like it here, so I’m gonna let them forget us

    There’s this one old idea I’m havingStuck in a car wash somewhere and you can’t stop laughingOff the rails and no one’s coming to get usI think I like it here, so I’m gonna let them forget us

  • Does anyone actually understand Lacan’s diagrams?

    My confidence in working with the texts themselves has increased a lot this year. If you read them as lecture transcripts for a predominately clinical audience by a self-consciously oracular thinker, they can be deciphered even if they remain hard work. You just need to follow up the self-references and sit with the puzzling bits,…