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  • Using generative AI to analyse your writing

    This is Claude’s stylistic analysis of the guest blogs and articles I’ve written over the last year: Precise and analytical: You present clear arguments structured by logical reasoning and supporting analysis rather than rhetorical flourishes. There is a scholarly exactness to how you build your case and anticipate counterarguments. Contextually grounded: You situate analysis in…

  • Lovely review of The Public and their Platforms

    There’s a lovely account of The Public and their Platforms in this brilliant review essay by Douglas Hartmann. It’s so nice to read an expert in the field who so completely gets what we were trying to do with the book: Carrigan and Fatsis’s book, whose title cleverly plays off John Dewey’s classic The Public and…

  • My 10 favourite films of 2023

    I’ve had a crap year personally but my god has it been a good year for cinema:

  • What I’m ultimately interested in

    I’m interested in how the technological reflexivity of academics links sociotechnical change as object of research with sociotechnical change as a condition for reflexivity. How change in what we study feeds into change in how we study. Social epistemology & political economy of knowledge production makes it weirdly difficult to hold both changes in the…

  • Never trust a Tory

    Never trust a Tory, they’ll betray you when it matters They will scramble to the top and then they’ll kick away the ladder Never trust a Tory, or a Tory in disguise, yeah You can see it when you look them in the eye So just make sure you look the bastard in the eye

  • The ability of ChatGPT to generate a fake dataset

    This is a really interesting experiment reported in Nature. The research used ChatGPT to create a fake but realistic dataset. This is how they described the implications of the capability they demonstrated in the paper: “Our aim was to highlight that, in a few minutes, you can create a data set that is not supported…

  • Are children the biggest users of generative AI in the UK?

    This is fascinating from this year’s Ofcom report. Saved here to look in more detail later: In June 2023, three in five (59%) online 7-17 year olds said they had used any of the following AI tools: ChatGPT, Snapchat My AI, Midjourney or DALL-E65. While there was no difference by gender at a total level,…

  • Time to get the seeds into the cold ground. It takes a while to grow anything.

  • DragonBot and Shelly the Turtle: the robotic future of primary education

  • When Elon Musk and George Osborne were forced to confront that people hate them

    Watching this video for the first time reminded me of this earlier video of George Osborne:

  • What’s the use of starting if you must stop?

    What’s the use of leaving if it is to return home? What’s the use of starting if you must stop? Pyrrhus and Cineas, Simone de Beauvoir The brevity of life lends urgency to the pursuits of desire: our time will end while we continue to seek one unworthy object after another, each the proxy for…

  • The best Gaslight Anthem show I’ve found on Youtube

    I’ve seen them 15+ times live and watched every HD show on YouTube more times than I can count. This one from New York 2012 (only uploaded in full last year) is without doubt the best though: In part because of how they fit a cover of Bon Iver’s Bloodbank into Angry Johnny and the…

  • Generative AI for Academics

    Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, fascination and fear have permeated the university system in response to the remarkable capability of this chatbot to produce sophisticated text in response to natural language prompts. There has been a widespread belief that this development represents an existential threat to long established academic practice. While alarm…

  • The best National show I’ve found on YouTube

    I don’t think there’s a band I’ve listened to this much online without ever seeing live. I’ve watched countless shows but this one I just stumbled across is the best: Not least of all because it’s the first time I heard Once Upon a Poolside: This is the closest we’ve ever been And I have…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #35

  • The rise of sociophobia

    This is a lovely expression by Richard Seymour for something which an emerging political trend: This, combined with a ludicrously inflate fear of ‘socialism’ (Milei claims that ‘cultural Marxists’ theory are responsible for the feminism and environmentalism that is dragging Argentina into socialism), and a pervasive cultural ‘sociophobia’ wherein any claim made on behalf of…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #34

    There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time…

  • Four vague accelerationist hypotheses about scholarly publishing

    Vague accelerationist hypothesis #1: there’s a continual expansion in the range of social phenomena which change at a faster rate than academics can undertake and publish research on them. Vague accelerationist hypothesis #2: without a corresponding increase in the speed of research and publishing – or some meta-epistemological strategy to obviate problems of obsolescence –…

  • The moral economy of automaticity: sociological and psychoanalytical perspectives

    I’ve been struck over the last two years, as I explored psychoanalytical theory more seriously than I had previously, how many concerns it shares with sociological thought but how differently it construes them. This is most stark with regards to agency and automaticity. In sociological thought there’s a tendency to equate the valorisation of the…

  • What does it mean to be composed?

    I’m reading a novel in which the author has the irritating tick of using the adjective ‘composed’ every few pages. This repetition has left me newly aware of what an interesting word this is: calm and in control of your emotions https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/composed#google_vignette But why does it mean that? To ‘compose’ means ‘to produce music, poetry, or formal writing’. To be…

  • The future’s not what it used to be

    Where is the “city of comrades” we are supposed to see after disaster? Where are Rebecca Solnit’s “disaster communities”? Such utopias exist, but are forged in the afterglow of disaster only where community, mutualism and self-help already exist, and where the people are not already set in deadly hate, one against the other. What happens,…

  • The agonies of humiliation involved in submitting to contigency

    From R.D. Laing’s Divided Self Pg 84: Since the self, in maintaining its isolation and detachment does not commit itself to a creative relationship with the other and is preoccupied with the figures of phantasies, thought, memories, etc.(imagos), which cannot be directly observable by or directly expressed to others, anything (in a sense) is possible.…

  • I can’t steal you

    The individual is frightened of the world, afraid that any impingement will be total, will be implosive, penetrative, fragmenting, and engulfing. He is afraid of letting anything of himself ‘go’, of coming out of himself, of losing himself in any experience, etc., because he will be depleted, exhausted, emptied, robbed, sucked dry. R.D. Laing, The…

  • Does ChatGTP feel ontologically secure?

    If you’ll excuse the exercise in speculation, I thought this was an interesting thought experiment. Imagine that, say, GPT 5 introduces some capacity for the system to represent its own states in a way that provokes internal reactions which recursively spiral as they in turn become part of the system’s own objectified states. If the…

  • Lu You’s (1183) cat poetry

    From Open Culture:

  • Current mood in AI generated images #33

  • New Horizons in Generative AI:

  • The Role of Professional Bodies in the Development of Sociology

  • The Luddite predicament in the 19th century and the 21st century

    This is great from Brian Merchant about the common situation facing workers in the 19th and 21st centuries which fuelled the development of the Luddites as a movement: Imagine dedicating years of your life to learn a difficult job that was supposed to guarantee you a good living—playing by the rules, you might say; going…

  • So if I go down, Lily, I’m going down believing

    And maybe we believed in very, very foolish things Maybe these songs kept us breathing another tomorrow And we were always very sure we were never gonna change the world I never held any grudges or kept any pictures And what did it mean for all these years I spent chasin’ them ferris wheels That…

  • We’re getting a divorce, you keep the diner

  • Turning ghosts into ancestors

    From Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein pg 200-201: The psychoanalyst Hans Loewald wrote of transforming the ghosts that haunt patients into ancestors, through tasting what he called the “blood of recognition” in the relationship with the therapist. He asserted that the ghosts must be led out of the unconscious, reawakened through the intensity…

  • Stuart Hall: “I would do without theory if I could. The problem is I can’t.”

    From the transcript of this event: I would do without theory if I could. The problem is I can’t. You can’t, because the world presents itself in a chaos of appearances. And the only way in which one can, as it were, understand, break down, analyze, grasp– in order to do something about the present…

  • Digital education and conjunctural analysis

    In fascinating lecture by Jamie Peck on conjunctural analysis. It’s left me thinking about the problem of context in digital education: ignored or seen as immutable in much orthodox ed tech research but fixated upon in critical ed tech as something ‘out there’ which explains what happens ‘in here’. What’s lost is the sense of…

  • ‘The Public and Their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media’ is now open access

    Access it online here: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/display/book/9781529201062/9781529201062.xml

  • ‘Promises Promises’: The OECD, Promissory Legitimacy and its Strategic Re-Negotiation of Education Futures – Nov 22nd, Manchester

    Wednesday 22nd November 2023, 4pm to 5:30pm. Room C5.1 in the Ellen Wilkinson Building. Feel free to get in touch if you need advice about finding the place. Promising lines of scholarship have emerged on how International Organisations deploy anticipatory techniques aimed at colonising the future as a means of governing in the absence of…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #32

  • Leaving a camera on at online academic workshops

    Do you leave your camera on at academic workshops? I rarely do with lectures or seminars but I usually do at workshops, largely because I realise how draining it is to face unresponsive blank screens in a putatively interactive session. It feels strange to me that we’ve yet to establish clear professional norms about this,…

  • Chatbots that walk and talk

  • Do you bury friendship along with a friend?

    From Seneca’s letter to Lucilius: Grief like yours has this among other evils: it is not only useless, but thankless. Has it then all been for nothing that you have had such a friend? During so many years, amid such close associations, after such intimate communion of personal interests, has nothing been accomplished? Do you…

  • The bodily foundation of selfhood: from appetite to breathing

    I’m finding Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epistein an incredibly thought provoking read. Underlying the book’s exploration of the intersection between psychoanalysis and Buddhist psychology is an account of the shift from “the breath-based experience of fluidity and change to an appetite-based one of gratification or satisfaction” (pg 146). The former is a temporally…

  • A TED talk on pet loss

    “Thank you you’ve been great but I never want to see you again” is almost exactly what I said to my vet on Friday 😢 There’s a lot going on in how I’m reacting to this. But I will eventually write something more analytical about the cultural marginalisation of the experience of euthanising a beloved…

  • Video: How is AI changing the teaching and academic landscape?

    Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the higher education sector is abuzz with the ramifications of easily accessible AI. This webinar is an opportunity to discuss how AI is changing the teaching and academic landscape, covering topics including moving beyond assessment integrity, student voices, rules and requirements and the wider tensions of algorithmic thinking.

  • Current mood in AI generated images #31

    Not known, because not looked for But heard, half heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always – A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything). And all shall be well and All manner of things shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded…

  • How platforms shape the parameters of agency

    Engagement might take many forms—a like, a retweet, a view, a share, a comment, a post—and these forms needed to be, on the one hand, flexible enough to accommodate a satisfying range of expression—for social media to work, it must feel genuinely social—but structured enough to be easily interpretable by software. As the theorist Philip…

  • Why I don’t trust research comms agencies who contact individual academics

    If you’re contacted by a research communications agency offering to increase the visibility of your work, ask them how exactly they will do this. This model tends to involve co-producing content with the academic then placing it on a random website with no real promo plan. It’s waste of time/funding. If you have the time…

  • Hold it ’til you feel it there. As dark, and dense, and wet as earth. As vast, and bright, and sweet as air

    When time pulls lives apartHold your own When everything is fluid, and when nothing can be known with any certaintyHold your own Hold it ’til you feel it thereAs dark, and dense, and wet as earthAs vast, and bright, and sweet as airWhen all there isIs knowing that you feel what you are feelingHold your…

  • A frog jumps into the water

    The old pond, A frog jumps in: Plop! – Matsuo Bashō A black cat, Reclines outside Basking 🌞 – Me

  • The inner adult and the inner child

    From Mark Epistein’s Thoughts without a Thinker pg 109-110: Meditation is ruthless in the way it reveals the stark reality of our day-to-day mind. We are constantly murmuring, muttering, scheming, or wondering to ourselves under our breath: comforting ourselves, in a perverse fashion, with our own silent voices. Much of our interior life is characterised…

  • The preciousness of what is already broken

    From Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective: “You see this goblet?” asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it…

  • How I miss you, how I miss you. And it’s good to be alive

  • The GAI-driven future of the book

    This is very interesting: https://goatgreatesteconomistofalltime.ai/en/chat it’s interesting this doesn’t work in a way that reflects the author’s direct intentions, in the sense that I very quickly got the book to engage in auto-critique about the author, his views and the style. I suspect that will be a constraint on the normalisation of the format but…

  • The strange intimacy of marginalia

    I find it hard not to feel oddly close to the person who has scrawled* throughout the book I’m reading. Not only do I admire their style, leading me to wonder why I didn’t have the idea of writing in a rectangle about the page, they are repeatedly having the same reaction to the text…

  • The hungry ghosts

    The Hungry Ghosts are probably the most vividly drawn metaphors in the Wheel of Life. Phantom-like creatures with withered limbs, grossly bloated bellies, and long, thin necks, the Hungry Ghosts in many ways represent a fusion of rage and desire. Tormented by unfulfilled cravings and insatiably demanding of impossible satisfactions, the Hungry Ghosts are searching…

  • Gabor Maté on grieving as compassionate inquiry

  • Nature’s aim for everything includes its cessation

    Nature’s aim for everything includes its cessation just as much as its beginning and its duration – like someone throwing up a ball. How can it be good for the ball on the way up and bad on the way down, or even when it hits the ground? How can it be good for a…

  • I am a weatherman watching the skies, trying to read you

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #30

  • 🐈‍⬛ Farewell my silent comrade

    I said goodbye to Molly this lunchtime after almost 15 years together. I’ll write a longer post about this over the next few days, but it’s brought me great comfort to collate these photos and see how a once stray kitten fending for herself in a field in the west midlands lived a long and…

  • What will the automated university look like?

  • Generative AI in higher education: what comes after the assessment crisis? 

    Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 engagement with generative AI in higher education has understandably been preoccupied by the challenge it poses for assessment integrity. Immediate calls for outright bans and returns to in person assessment have thankfully given way to a more nuanced debate involving assessment reform and incorporating AI literacy…

  • Michigan, 1975

    ‘Cause if I could be free Why would I stay chained? And if that makes you sad You should be ashamed And maybe I’m not the one to blame after all

  • Who actually reads this blog?

    Over the last few years, I’ve changed my relationship to my blog. Whereas I once saw it as something public which I often sought to promote through social media, I now see it as something quasi-private which I make no effort to promote. Other than the recent Bluesky post, I can’t remember the last time…

  • How the concept of platform shaped my research

    Notes for a brief talk I’m doing later, in case anyone is interested In the early 2010s, helping academics use social media became a big part of my work. For example, I ran a funded academic podcasting project, a large sociology blog, and was an editor of one of the LSE blogs in their public…

  • Video: Building the post-pandemic university

  • And everybody’s hurt, and mine ain’t the worst but it’s mine and I’m feeling it now

  • Whenever we speak, we are unconditionally asking to be heard

    From Bruce Fink’s Lacan on Love loc 1412: Ultimately, as Lacan puts it, all speech constitutes a demand for love. Whenever we speak, we are unconditionally asking to be heard (Lacan, 2015, p. 356), we are asking for our request to be recognized, we are asking to be responded to, we are asking to be…

  • Peter Thiel at the Oxford Union

    Did not know this had taken place until Susan Robertson pointed it out to me:

  • We circle round the sun until someday we won’t, and on and on and on it goes

  • The evident satisfaction with which cats inhabit their skins

    This is a lovely short piece from John Gray, about a book which oddly failed to grip me and which I never finished: A sense of uneasiness about their place in the world seems innate in humans, whereas contentment is the default condition of cats. The evident satisfaction with which cats inhabit their skins is…

  • 🐈‍⬛ On the coming loss of a companion animal

    I’m spending each day sitting with Molly, my fifteen year old cat, watching her grow weaker and fade away as her liver fails. At the moment she’s still taking joy in life (the pleasure of food, albeit with some difficulty, as well as the pleasure of company) but it’s likely to be days rather than…

  • If AI was like a hammer

    HT Christiane Grünloh on LinkedIn

  • Theorising permanent instability and volatility as necessary rather than contingent features of the environment

    I’ve found James Meadway’s account of how instability and volatility have become necessary features of the environment immensely thought provoking, particularly with regards to how this troubles the mainstream categories of economic analysis: The difficulty we face, collectively, is that natural disorder of the kind presented by covid is only likely to get worse as…

  • The bleak future of AI tutorials

    I explored using ChatGPT’s new voice functionality to interact with students during my education futures class on Friday. I was surprised at how effectively it was able to converse with the class, particularly given it was placed on my iPhone at the front of the room. The students took turns asking it questions and it…

  • Platform & agency: becoming who we are in a digital world

    Writing a book proposal is so much more interesting when you’ve already written the book, particularly when you’ve been working on it in one form or another since 2008: This book argues that the rise of digital platforms represents a significant shift in the architecture of society, requiring new conceptual tools to adequately analyse contemporary…

  • 🔥🐉 The power of the dragon flame

    I’m at that agonising stage of the writing/editing process where I get the desire to listen to symphonic power metal on endless repeat, as loudly as I can. I would love to say I’m never going to do this again, but I know that I’ve got another 95% finished book to complete immediately after I…

  • From social media to generative media: a first lecture on my next project after Generative AI for Academics

    I was terribly sleep deprived when doing this and it was a bit incoherent as a result. But I enjoyed putting this together and it left me excited about moving onto this project, once Generative AI for Academics is finally done. (Though I did realise I said “someone close” to Musk said he sees himself…

  • Urban exploration YouTube channels

    I’m getting really intrigued by this genre of blogger. It’s a weird mix of poverty tourism, ethnographic curiosity and (sometimes) reactionary politics. At its worst it’s truly off putting, but at its best there are some fascinating interviews in these videos. I’ve yet to see an academic urbanist produce videos like this but I find…

  • I have fairly rapidly argued myself out of enthusiasm for Bluesky

    I have fairly rapidly argued myself out of my enthusiasm for Bluesky. Imagining the enshittification of social media is driven by having bad people in charge is like imagining that the world be fixed if you elect the right people. You can’t solve complex problems simply by replacing the people at the top of the…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #29

  • Destroy what mutilates life

    I came across this gem when flicking through Deleuze’s Foucault earlier. It’s a reflection on the mood of Foucault’s oeuvre, but I suspect I’ll have the phrase “destroy whatever mutilates life” rattling around in my mind for some time. Provided the hatred is strong enough something can be salvaged, a great joy which is not…

  • Webinar: How is AI changing the teaching and academic landscape?

    Time and Date: Nov 6, 2023 03:00 PM (GMT)  Register free here. All registrants will receive a recording of the event. Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the higher education sector is abuzz with the ramifications of easily accessible AI.  This webinar will be an opportunity to discuss how AI is changing the teaching and academic landscape, covering topics including moving beyond assessment…

  • Everything’s a deadline when you’re trying to find some sleep

  • Claude: how can you help me analyse open response questions on surveys?

    Huge issue about (1) reproducibility (2) data governance which might rule this out, but otherwise there are interesting possibilities here: I’m not sure when I’ll get round to it, but I’d like to explore generative AI for digital methods next year. There’s the practical use which can be made of it, as well as the…

  • I want to unfold

    I’ve been experimenting with what DALL-E 3 does with modernist poetry. Here’s one of my favourites, Rilke’s I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone, and the slightly Rorschachy result: I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough to truly consecrate the hour. I am much too small…

  • The apparition of these faces in the crowd.

    In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. – Ezra Pound

  • ChatGPT: how can academics use the new voice conversation and image analysis features?

    Voice Conversation: Image Analysis:

  • Generative AI for Academics: 13 principles

    I’m long past the creative exuberance which I felt over the summer as the bulk of Generative AI for Academics poured out of me. It was a strange experience to have a full book pop into my head fully formed, as opposed to being something I discover through the act of writing. I’m now deep…

  • Where Lacanian psychoanalysis meets Buddhism

    I’ve spent the year cobbling together a working understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis. I’ve found this tricky because I still find the Seminars largely unreadable (though it’s improving with time) but I also don’t think you can adequately grasp a thinker through secondary sources. This has left me extremely cautious about how I understand Lacan. For…

  • Synthetic humans as research instruments

    Lots of obvious problems with this (cost, reliability, unpredictability etc) but fairly certain this will be a massive thing within a couple of years:

  • Smallville: ChatGPT NPC Life Simulation. Emergent conversation

    This is a pain to setup at the moment and costly to run, but it gives a sense of how GAI might find its way into gaming in the not too distant future.

  • I will finish this book by Nov 12th ✊

  • The evolution of the prompt in Twitter’s compose tweet bios

    There’s a lot going on in these shifts over seventeen years.

  • Elon Musk on deautomation

    I hate myself a bit for listening to the audiobook of Walter Isaacson’s genuinely quite terrible biography of Musk. But I found the discussion of deautomation in Tesla genuinely interesting. I completely missed it at the time but this was a news story from 2018: Elon Musk has admitted that automation has been holding back…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #28

  • The secret origin of NESTA

    I was fascinated to learn earlier that the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts (NESTA) was originally conceived by Labour because they had a space in their pre-election media grid, as well as £250 million in public money from the national lottery which they needed to allocate. This is such a brilliant example…

  • On returning to music

    I wrote last December about the pleasure of returning to novels you have previously read. What fascinates me about this experience is how the same novel can seem so different upon your return. The novel has not changed but you have; in encountering it again you bring something different to it and get something different…