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  • 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…

  • Some notes on projectification

    Notes on this paper by Mollie Dollinger for a reading group tomorrow: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562517.2020.1722631?scroll=top&needAccess=true Projectification refers to the temporal organisation of work into discrete time-limited projects. This involves an atomisation of work so that projects can be compared in terms of their process and outcomes. Dollinger queries what is lost, overlooked or squeezed out by this…

  • Proper old school academic hostility to social media

    I feel almost nostalgic to see this comment on something I wrote. I haven’t seen this kind of unabashed contempt for social media for years:

  • What if we have achieved postcapitalism but it isn’t socialism?

    I read the book last week. It’s extremely engaging but shallow in points. There’s a tedious academic dispute about whether this is postcapitalism or high platform capitalism. But this is an important intervention nonetheless:

  • AI, digitalisation and the crisis of post-pandemic capitalism

    There’s a lot in this but the main thing it’s left me preoccupied by is understanding generative AI in terms of a crisis of over-accumulation; there is too much capital accumulated by the transnational capitalist class for it to be profitably reinvested, leading to stagnation. Projected AI investment (~$150 billion according to Goldman Sachs) does…

  • Alan Levinovitz on empowerment epistemology

    I’m struggling to find an academic source for this but I’m book marking an idea I’m very interested in: ’empowerment epistemology’ as decisions to believe motivated by the feeling of agency which the beliefs in question give rise to. And then on top of that, the other thing about an empowering epistemology I think is…

  • “You just cannot trust someone who is publishing ten papers a year in top journals.”

    This line from a brilliant New Yorker essay about the current scandals in behavioural economics immediately jumped out to me from the page (context attached below). I’ve thought for a while about doing a project scraping Google Scholar data to test my hypothesis that the upper bounds of productivity have been steadily increasing over the…

  • When we get together, take apart my fantasy; when we are done, we’ll work on you

  • The coming wave of document forensics about to hit the university: the weak signals of generative AI

    It was interesting to read how much of Data Colada’s recent investigations rested on ‘data forensics’ which involves, inter alia, utilising understanding of the nature of file formats to make inferences about the behaviour of the user: A little known fact about Excel files is that they are literal zip files, bundles of smaller files…

  • Urban geometries

    I shut down my Instagram account a while ago but I’ll keep this collection here instead. The hobby has stalled until I get myself a proper camera and some training but it’s a really enjoyable way of engaging with the urban environment:

  • My 30 favourite films of the last two years

    Over the last two years I’ve been keeping a film diary on Letterboxd. Turns out I’ve watched 175 films since November 2021 and these are my 30 favourite, roughly in order. I’ve not included films I’ve rewatched during this time which would otherwise be near the top of the list e.g. Boyhood, Inside Llewyn Davis.

  • DALL-E 3: Draw me a picture of a capybara taking over the world

    What’s fascinating about this is how it articulates different interpretations of a deliberately ambiguous prompt to produce four quite different images:

  • Academic censorship on sexual misconduct and power abuse: Not in our academia

    Please consider signing this open letter:

  • I guess this is growing up

  • The impending wave of innovation in generative artificial intelligence

    I found this mind blowing from Ethan Mollock. I understood the three new modalities which are coming with GAI (machine vision, machine speech and connecting it your own data) combined with performance increases sparked by Google’s Gemini. But it hadn’t occurred to me that these things will be combined: We have these pieces which let…

  • CfP: The future of conspiracy scholarship: New epistemologies and imaginaries

    This looks absolutely fascinating. It’s one of those topics I’ve followed closely for years without serious engagement. I’m wondering if I should start. Special Issue Editors: Zelly C. Martin, Inga K. Trauthig, Alice E. Marwick, Samuel C. Woolley Conspiracy theories are increasingly present in mainstream American political discourse, from those around Covid-19 to the idea that…

  • You’re waiting for more than you can feel

  • Machine translation in higher education

    I’m doing this conversation starter session next week about machine translation in higher education: While chatbots like ChatGPT have dominated the conversation about generative AI, we have also seen remarkable advances in machine translation in recent years. This was a popular dissertation topic for DTCE students in 22/23 and this work highlighted issues raised by…

  • Can academic projects keep up with the UX expectations of students?

    I find myself worrying with ever greater frequency that students with UX expectations formed by mass commercial social media platforms will inevitably find projects developed by academics lacklustre. Academic projects will lack the resources (e.g. UX researchers, data scientists, masses of transactional data and the time/space/resources to exploit it for minute UX improvements) to create…

  • Some thoughts on Bluesky

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #27

  • How to think contextually about educational technology

    Skimming through this thought provoking book by Rob Stones on Social Theory and Current Affairs, I was struck by how his core argument could be expanded into how to think contextually about any social phenomena. I’ve added the bold below to illustrate the core steps he identifies which I would argue are essential to have…

  • Bhaskar’s concept of ‘present-moment awareness’

    Summarised on pg 127 of Jamie Morgan’s extremely useful review article: In the first instance, as a singularized embodied entity the individual is nowhere but where they are, doing what they are doing, at the very time that they are doing it. As such, the human tendency to dwell on the past, or to look…

  • To what extent was Roy Bhaskar’s later philosophy shaped by Theosophism?

    This is a topic I’ve intended to write about for years but I was reluctant to, in case it seemed like an attack on Roy Bhaskar rather than an exercise in intellectual history. But I was struck a long time ago by the obvious connection between Bhaskar being raised in a theosophist family and the…

  • Lauren Berlant on the couple form’s own ordinary dangers

    From On The Inconvenience of Other People pg 45: A foxhole is a place where one hides from bullets and strategizes the next aggression. In theirs, the desire for mutual flourishing in a world that would be worthy of the trust they longed to place in it turned out not to protect them from the…

  • Beyond ChatGPT: what next for generative AI in higher education

  • A list of human cognitive biases and the assumptions underpinning them

    Really interesting table from this paper:

  • Erfahrung: conspiracies, baking and the return of the repressed

    This essay by Rob Horning introduced to me to Benjamin’s distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis described here in an extract from Martin Jay’s book on Adorno: In a now celebrated distinction, Benjamin had divided experience into Erfahrung, the integration of events into the memory, of collective and personal traditions, and Erlebnis, the isolation of events from any such…

  • How Amazon define the difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted

    From this week’s Private Eye. It’s interesting to see how the murky grey area between human text and synthetic text is where policy is being made, contrary to the initial moral panic about the former being replaced by the latter:

  • The power of giving language to hidden things

    [W]hen a word is properly defined it loses its capital letter and can no longer serve either as a banner or as a hostile slogan; it becomes simply a sign, helping us to grasp some concrete reality or concrete objective, or method of activity. To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to…

  • The music of the data centre

    You walk down a hall of servers. The room is square, and long, with your only source of light being thin outlines of white reflective tape along the walls, and the blinking flashing lights of the servers. You know they hold data, information, tons and tons of it. The sound of hard drives and fans…

  • Interview with me in VoltEdu about academic social media after Twitter

    From this North American Ed-Tech magazine: Dr. Mark Carrigan is a digital sociologist at the Manchester Institute for Education, where he leads the master’s degree in digital education. He has spoken out about the question of whether it’s time for academics to let go of Twitter. He said Twitter had a significant impact on the culture…

  • Interrogating AI in education: when peeking inside the black box is not enough

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #26

  • “Go, you chicken fat, go!”

    This was a strange rabbit-hole to stumble down but the combination of ebullience and fat-shaming in this 1962 American public health song is quite something… (I also cannot get it out of my head. Hopefully it getting stuck in your head will free me)

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #25

  • Lauren Berlant on writing in a parenthetical voice

    From On the Inconvenience of Other People pg 29:

  • A few thoughts about the difficulty of living a reparative life

    Early in the pandemic I got preoccupied by a throwaway line from Zizek’s Ticklish Subject where he talks of “float[ing] freely in his undisturbed balance“. His point was that this narcissistic fantasy was defined by a “precarious imaginary balance” plagued by threats; in conceiving of myself as pure presence operating in my own gravity, I…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #24

    But love said “If you bring forth what is within you What you bring forth will save you But if you do not bring forth what is within you What you do not bring forth will destroy you” It was Grace Stunned by the last light of the sun Swimming in a green sea as…

  • The three forces that will drive the rollout of generative AI

    This is great from Dave Karpf in a critique of Ethan Mollick’s recent advocacy of the creative gains which can be accrued through working with generative AI. The problem I see is that the two sets of claims are not mutually exclusive, driving my current oscillation between creative excitement and sociological despair:

  • Societal collapse is a process rather an event

  • The hostility to earnestness in 90s/00s British culture

    This brilliant piece by Zoe Williams about Russell Brand powerfully captures something about the cultural environment I grew up in which I’ve always struggled to put into words: There was a baseline assumption that we were all laughing at the same thing. This was an era in which the highest value was in not taking…