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  • What’s been sticking in my eye? I got something sticking in my eye

  • Crypto is Vegas without the drinks, the dinner or the show

    At least when you go to Vegas you know the odds. There’s a long list of rules and regulations a casino must follow. There’s also entertainment value in the experience. Gamblers may win or lose money at the tables but at least they’re comped a few drinks, they can have a nice dinner and catch…

  • To be traumatized is to be unable to innovate, or improvise, or surprise oneself

  • A Lacanian approach to ChatGPT

    What does iterative interaction with conversational agents mean for the chain of discourse which manifests phenomenologically during the writing process? How do the formal structures of language at scale (the LLM) intersect with the formal structures of language in the subject (the Lacanian unconscious) in the context of ongoing interaction? Certain words and expressions present…

  • When the earth opens up in front of you

  • Nothing is more entertaining than fucking with words and their arrangement

    From Lacan by Lionel Bailly pg 124: There is just as much, if not greater jouissance in the functioning of the mind than in the functioning of any other bodily part. The ability to cross the bar of metaphor, to operate in the symbolic realm – to conceptualise, to analyse, and to rationalise – are…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #14

    And you wanted more and you got less, and it hurt Oh, but it could be worse, yeah Things could be so much worse

  • And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know that place for the first time

    We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The…

  • Ontological and cultural humanism

    One of the interesting things which came out of the Centre for Social Ontology’s four year project on humanism (this was the volume I edited) was a clear distinction between an ontological commitment to humanism and a cultural commitment to humanism i.e. a conceptual affirmation of the irreducible properties and powers of the human and…

  • The ontology of the unconscious

    From Lacan by Lionel Bailly pg 49: Rather than the topological representations used by Freud, one may think of the unconscious as the force field that orientates the molecules of a liquid crystal, where the molecules are the signifiers. The analogy of the liquid crystal is useful when describing the relation of signifiers inside the…

  • Beneath the waves an ocean

  • The radicalisation of landlords

    This is such an interesting discussion of the ideological implications of macro-economic shifts for the 2.74 million landlords in the UK. In a low interest rate environment buy-to-let felt like a remarkable opportunity for essentially passive income, facilitated by a service economy to eliminate the labour involved in the process. What happens when the taps…

  • Personal change as paradigm shift

    I found this interview when searching for videos with the psychiatrist, philosopher and literary scholar Iain McGilchrist. I was initially put off by the fact Jordan Peterson was the interviewer, as I suspect many readers of my blog will be, but this is a genuinely fascinating interview. McGilchrist conceives of the two hemispheres of the…

  • The powerful cultural pull to the right which has been felt in parts of the left

    As is often the case Richard Seymour perfectly captures a diffuse thought I’ve been troubled by for months, particularly with regards to what can usefully be talked about as the post-left. This is not a new tendency, consider for example Steve Hall and ultra-realist criminologists in the 2010s, but it has certainly built up a…

  • Paz Lenchantin’s cover of Venus in Furs

    How spectacular is this cover? I hadn’t listened to the original for years but I think I prefer this to it.

  • It’s time for academics to let go of Twitter

    Imagine discovering that a colleague was regularly posting on Gab, Parler or Truth Social. These alt-media platforms became notorious over recent years as spaces parallel to the mainstream of social media where the reactionary right has gathered. Defining themselves in opposition to the asserted liberal dominance of social platforms, where censorious moderators are accused of…

  • And maybe that’s what getting older is, an accumulation of loss that turns you into a different sort of person

  • Chat GPT and Assessment Reform: A Practical Introduction

    Video of a session I did with my DTCE colleagues in May:

  • The old web is dying, while the new web struggles to be born

    This feels like an extremely important article by James Vincent about how rapidly AI generated text is swamping the web, as well as what this means for its longer term evolution. It hinges upon something I’ve been preoccupied by, namely that generative AI has emerged at exactly the point where the (possibly) mature business model…

  • Have you used Social Media for Academics in your teaching or training?

    Have you used my book Social Media for Academics in your teaching or training? If so would you mind telling me a little bit about how you used it? Either in comments below or by sending me an e-mail.

  • Digital convenience as an engine of routinisation

    This is an important point in Rogers Brubaker’s Hyperconnectivity and its Discontents which runs contrary to the assumption that digital technologies in the lifeworld are inherently generative of reflexivity. From loc 609: Convenience resets expectations, forms habits, and insinuates its way into our routines. And these expectations, habits, and routines are unobtrusively but powerfully world-transforming.…

  • The impending automation of grant writing

    I was slightly unsettled to be sent details of this impending webinar about automated grant writing using generative AI. I have no doubts it can be used effectively in this way as a means of supporting an existing process, particularly with regards to discerning and reproducing a best guess as to the form which a…

  • In universities, a stir, ​automation is to occur

    In hallowed halls where scholars thrive, In chambers where keen minds arrive, There stirs a change, an unseen tide, That soon may sweep far and wide.​ The gears of progress turn and whir, While innovations fast occur, ​ In universities, a stir, ​ Automation is to occur.​ Robes of data, silicon brains,​ Programmed not to…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #13

  • Industrial action and the broken funding system in higher education

    This is a great piece jointly authored by York UCU and the York VC which captures the immense pessimism which has been growing in me over the last 6 months. There simply isn’t enough money in the system to resolve this dispute and until there’s a new political settlement it’s going to run endlessly, possibly…

  • Oscillating between technopessimism and technooptimism

    I often feel like I’m oscillating wildly between believing (a) generative AI is a slow motion car crash that is going to destroy enjoyable work, human culture & public knowledge (b) we are in the early stages of an unprecedented expansion of human intellectual and creative capacities which is making me reevaluate my hostility towards…

  • How to use blog length prompts to ask ChatGPT 4 complex conceptual questions

    Over the last month I’ve become far more enthusiastic about ChatGPT as I’ve learned to write blog post length prompts. I’ve often feeding blog posts I’ve written into it to have a conversation about the ideas. Here’s an example of what a freshly written long form prompt looks like: I recently read an anthropologist and…

  • “I try not to look ahead at the moment. If I don’t look ahead I don’t worry”

    This quote from the recent Guardian Politics Weekly podcast by John Harris (see the accompanying piece here) about social insecurity in the fashionable and prosperous market town of Frome connects to Bourdieu’s point towards the end of Pascalian Meditations about the relationship between economic security and a sense of the future. To have expectations about…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #12

  • The disavowed uncertainty of Kierkegaard’s eternal love

    From Bruce Fink’s Lacan on Love loc 3440: Although ordinary love has eternity within itself, it can nevertheless wane over time (Kierkegaard, 1995, p. 31). But a change in the form of love can occur: “when love has undergone the change of eternity by having become a duty, it has gained enduring continuance, and it…

  • In a financialised economy raising interest rates actually causes inflation

    This is a really plausible, if counter-intuitive, suggestion by Richard Murphy that the extent of financialisation in the British economy (e.g 92% of cars bought on finance, 19% of households in the private rented sector) means that rapid raising of interest rates can actually cause inflation, as the burden is passed on through debtor/creditor relationships.…

  • Social platforms as a machine for generating apophenia

    Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.[1] The term (German: Apophänie from the Greek verb ἀποφαίνειν (apophaínein)) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia.[2] He defined it as “unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness”.[3][4] He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential over-interpretations of…

  • What happens when we all become vulnerable?

    I’m currently reading Julia Ebner’s Mainstream about the normalisation of far-right conspiracies and their societal implications. She asks “what happens when we all become vulnerable?” early in the book when reflecting on the susceptibility of vulnerable people towards radicalisation. It’s not a new idea but I’m not sure I’ve heard the link between social suffering…

  • How to avoid shiny new thing syndrome

    It’s taken me a long time to get here but I’ve finally realised that saying ‘no’ in higher education is partly a matter of simply realising that being interesting is an insufficient reason to commit to something. There are many interesting things we could be doing and I’ve started to perceive the opportunity costs involved…

  • The impact of the cost of living crisis on the educational experiences of international students

    This is a worrying finding which substantiates a concern I’ve had in my interactions with international PGT students this year: The Advance HE/HEPI Student Academic Experience Survey 2023 found that 50% of EU undergraduates in the UK said that they feel their studies have been impacted by the cost of living ‘a little’, while 27% said it has impacted…

  • Nick Bostrom’s curiously exaggerated expectations of government regulation of AI

    I’m not a fan of Bostrom’s work but he’s clearly an astute analyst in many ways. I found this expectation from Superintelligence pg 213 thought provoking in its political naïveté, not least of all expressed in the assumption that technology firms aren’t already bound up in the national security infrastructure. An important question, therefore, is…

  • What Do Artificial Intelligence Systems Mean For Academic Practice?

    I’m looking forward to this SRHE workshop next month. Register here.

  • “Well, given that we’re screwed in all of these conceivable ways, what would you want to do? Not, what do you have to do to survive, or appease the Other, but what would you just want?”

    I often find that it’s going through the pessimism, the darkness, the struggle, that you wind up creating a pocket where there is no other option but joy. The way it comes up with many clients is getting to a place of, ‘well, given that we’re screwed in all of these conceivable ways, what would…

  • The technological infrastructure of beatboxing

    I’ve vaguely wanted to write about Beardyman for years. I don’t think I have the expertise to do it but his continual exploration of the technological infrastructure for extending, mutating and controlling his voice is something which fascinates me:

  • Cliodynamics and social collapse

    I feel quite ambivalent about the idea of cliodynamics, torn between a left-accelerationist enthusiasm for it and a theoretical scepticism about ‘quantitative history’, but this is extremely interesting nonetheless:

  • Current mood in AI generated images #11

  • The ‘decided desire’ of the post-analysis neurotic

    From Bruce Fink’s Lacan on Love loc 2641 The hallmark of neurosis is doubt and uncertainty, particularly with regard to love; the neurotic is full of ambivalence regarding love matters, and is never certain (the way a psychotic can be) of his or her love, except perhaps after analysis, after his undecided desire has become…

  • I should’ve found a way out so everyone can find a way out

  • “She says, I’m not your enemy. I said, that sounds like something that my enemy would say”

    She says, I’m not your enemy I said, that sounds like something that my enemy would say Instead of playing off the chemistry she said, you’re being difficult I said, I’m being guarded, you’re a quarter mil in debt, I get more guidance from my barber Look, I’m not good at this, I grew up…

  • ChatGPT as responding to markers of ‘intelligence’

    There’s a lot to unpack sociologically here but I’m saving it for future scrutiny, from Zvi Mowshowitz’s AI newsletter. I suspect the kernel of truth in this is that the internally consistent use of domain specific terminology rapidly establishes the context which your prompt is inquiring into.

  • Two decades as the sweet spot for prognosticators of radical change

    From Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence pg 37-38: Two decades is a sweet spot for prognosticators of radical change: near enough to be attention-grabbing and relevant, yet far enough to make it possible to suppose that a string of breakthroughs, currently only vaguely imaginable, might by then have occurred. Contrast this with shorter timescales: most technologies that…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #10

  • The Lacanian theory of trauma

    From Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject loc 19662: One of the faces of the real that we deal with in psychoanalysis is trauma. If we think of the real as everything that has yet to be symbolized, language no doubt never completely transforms the real, never drains all of the real into the symbolic order;…

  • Visualising The Real

    From Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject loc 18789: So too, Lacan’s real is without zones, subdivisions. localized highs and lows, or gaps and plenitudes: the real is a sort of unrent, undifferentiated fabric, woven in such a way as to be full everywhere, there being no space between the threads that are its “stuff.” It…

  • Niklas Luhmann’s critique of organisational sociology

    From Hans Joas and W. Knöbl’s Twenty Lectures in Social Theory pg 254: Luhmann thus conceives his functional-structural systems theory quite explicitly as a ‘systems-environment theory’ (ibid.), allowing him to extend his analysis of organizations beyond their internal mechanisms to include a broader context. This also enables him to drop one of the core hypotheses of…

  • The unconscious as overflowing with other people’s desires

    From Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject loc 12236: Many people sense at times that they are working towards something they do not even really want, striving to live up to expectations they do not even endorse, or mouthing goals they know perfectly well they have little if any motivation to achieve. The unconscious is, in…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #9

  • When-I-finally get hold of objet petit a

    It struck me during my current Lacanian explorations how well this notion from Oliver Burkeman maps onto the objet petit a. It is that outcome we imagine will bring completion, make possible a fullness to our existence which was previously foreclosed, that suggests the lurking presence of the objet petit a: A central feature of…

  • Reddit’s API changes and the new business model of social media

    I’ve written a lot recently about the shift underway in the business model of social media. The sudden lurch to a subscription model has been provoked by a number of exogenous shocks (changing investment climate, digital ad market going into retrenchment and Apple torching part of the infrastructural basis for surveillance capitalism) but it also…

  • Science and scholarship in a changing Europe, July 3rd

    I’m looking forward to this hybrid event in early July. I’ll be taking part in a debate about generative AI and the future of academic publishing. Full details here. Academia Europaea is a unique pan-European academy of sciences, humanities and letters, created as the means to express ideas and opinions of scientists and scholars from…

  • The list of things I used to be is longer than the list of things I am

  • We are what we care about, we are what we lack

    I was struck when reading Bruce Fink’s superb Lacan on Love how orthogonal this tradition of thought is to the approach to human agency I’ve tended to work within. Whereas Margaret Archer argued that we are what we care about, the Lacanian approach would suggest we are what we lack. We are defined by our…

  • Is AI a threat to academic publishing?

    I’ve been thinking about this topic in advance of an event next month, though I’m struggling at present to get beyond ‘maybe, maybe not’ as an answer. Here are some thoughts:

  • I am not in Kansas, where I am I don’t know where

    I’ve always hated the Shard but there’s a spot on the north bank (I had somehow never discovered previously) which provides the most spectacular view of it. I’m not sure how this song fits but I felt the most profound sense of peace, sitting in the sun and listening to it for the first time…

  • The humanistic roots of systems theory

    I was intrigued to discover from Hans Joas and W. Knöbl’s Twenty Lectures in Social Theory that Arnold Gehlen’s concept of Entlastung, which I’ve been fascinated by since I was introduced to it by Pierpaolo Donati, influenced Niklas Luhmann’s development of systems theory. This notion of unburdening conceives of institutions as freeing individuals from the…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #8

  • Twenty-to-one, look at the time, it’s twenty-to-one

  • The return of fascism in Europe

  • Margaret Archer (1943-2023)

    I first met Maggie Archer as a philosophy student in my early 20s. I arrived at the University of Warwick for an MA hoping that the continental philosophy the department was renowned for would prove less stultifying than the analytic philosophy I had studied as an undergraduate. After this experience the core module she ran…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #7

  • What will a radical wave of automation look like in higher education?

    I’m increasingly preoccupied by the prospect a radical wave of automation will sweep universities over the coming years. The political deadlock over university funding in the UK means there is little prospect of a radical shift in the amount of public money entering the system, leaving institutions trapped between a reliance on international PGT students…

  • Lacan on Love: An Interview with Bruce Fink

    This is such a good interview from the Freud museum: https://www.podbean.com/ep/pb-dwkv3-6753df It’s particularly fascinating on the contemporary nature of reciprocity in love. He reflects on classical ideas of the lover and the beloved as distinct roles, reflecting heterogeneous experiences of love, in contrast to a modern sense of romantic love predicated on the ideal of…

  • The Lacanian Left, Self-Help, and the Family

  • Magpie funerals

    I’ve become fascinated with magpies over the last year, since I moved into a house with magpies living in one tree alongside blackbirds and pigeons in the other. In between trying to stop them killing the blackbirds, attacking the pigeons and bullying my cat I’ve started to realise what complex creatures they are. It took…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #6

  • Margaret Archer’s late papers on artificial intelligence

    It’s struck me recently how incredibly prescient and thought-provoking Margaret Archer’s late papers on artificial intelligence were. They were a philosophical exploration of the “potential for active collaboration with humankind in research, therapy and care” with a view to understanding the nature of the relationality that might exist between a human agent and, say, ChatGPT:…

  • ChatGPT: analyse Margaret Archer’s four modes of reflexivity in terms of Lacanian theory

    Analyzing Margaret Archer’s four modes of reflexivity—communicative, autonomous, meta-reflexive, and fractured—in terms of Lacanian theory provides insights into the interplay between subjectivity, language, and self-awareness. By examining Archer’s modes of reflexivity through a Lacanian lens, we can appreciate the intricate relationship between language, subjectivity, and self-awareness. Lacanian theory highlights the role of the Other, the…

  • ChatGPT and the future of communicative reflexivity

    I’ve been having an interesting conversation with ChatGPT recently about the possibility that itself and similar chatbots could be cast as external interlocutors, in Archer’s sense of external agents who complete and confirm internal dialogues. I’m increasingly finding that if you keep a thread open so it progressively accumulates domain specificity it can be a…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #5

  • Current mood in AI generated images #4

  • I remember pretty faces so severe & lyrical

    Praise the heavens, call the cops. Relax. There’s no cause for alarm Diamond rings & little babies, ‘startlements’ & miracles I remember pretty faces so severe & lyrical

  • AI and the politics of productivity in a crumbling UK

    I’ve been reading Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism this week in order to better understand the economic transition which is currently underway, beyond the enticing yet slightly vacuous claim that we are leaving neoliberalism and entering something worse. The factor I’m particularly interested in understanding, given its rhetorical and economic significance to the…

  • CfP: Social media in Higher Education: What’s happening?

    JIME special collection – call for papers The Twitter interface famously prompts users to submit content by asking the question, ‘What’s happening?’. Given the recent turmoil surrounding the platform, it is a timely question to reflect back on itself, and social media more broadly. While the relationship between social media and higher education is far…

  • ChatGPT: How have different disciplines defined the campus in different way?

    The definition and understanding of the campus can vary across different disciplines. Here are a few perspectives: These are just a few examples of how different disciplines have defined the campus in various ways. The interdisciplinary nature of the campus concept allows for diverse perspectives and insights into its multifaceted nature. What is the problem…

  • Generative AI and the digital divide

    I blogged a few weeks ago about the possible divide opening up between the generatively rich and the generatively poor i.e. between those with access to expensive generative AI tools (and the skills to use them) and those who are reliant on free alternatives. The lesson of social media should be that free access should…

  • Theorising as a psychodynamic process

    I’ve often been preoccupied by the question of why people are drawn to certain theoretical approaches. While it would be mistaken to reduce this into the psychodynamic, I nonetheless agree with Craib that there is a psychodynamic aspect to ways of theorising. In representing the social world in a conceptual vocabulary they open up or…

  • Where did you go? I would say that to myself often

    Where did you go? I would say that to myself often Like I was dressing up for a coffin to lie down in I can’t say I know I was overcome in the distance I was lost in my own incidents in my mind Were you calling me from outside of a dream? I wanna…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #3

  • Walking in the air

    I woke up thinking about the classic scenes in Road Runner where Wile Coyote falls off the edge of a cliff. What makes them stand out, as Zizek pointed out somewhere, is the moment in which he acknowledges his fate; until he looks down he floats freely but when he recognises there is nothing underneath…

  • I’m looking for a voice in the white noise

    I’m looking for a voice in the white noise I’m trying to make a choice with the right boy To lay me down into bed Leash the hounds in my head Somebody (somebody) to finally see me through it Somebody to remind me that I’m the quantum unit Of a treaty and a handshake An…

  • Reading the Archers

    This afternoon I sat down in sun to start rereading what Frédéric Vandenberghe once called ‘the Archers’ from start to finish. I did this once in 2009 and it was the most intellectually formative experience. Let me know if you’d like to join me in this, through the critical realism network perhaps.

  • Talking to ChatGPT about my PhD

    I’m currently having a weirdly informative conversation with ChatGPT about my PhD, via the AskYourPDF plug in. This is how it summarises the concept of personal morphogenesis: Here’s how it suggests these ideas could be applied to digital media, basically predicting the entire second half of Platform & Agency, which makes me wonder if there’s…

  • The unsettlingly close future of creating your own automated information ecosystem

    Almost a decade ago I wrote about how the service IFTTT (similar to Zapier) posed profound questions about technological reflexivity, through the capacity it opened up to organise your own information environment. It enables different services to be connected through simple logical statements: if X (event in one app) then Y (action in another app).…

  • Digital tools for each of the six learning types

    Thanks to Peter Kahn who introduced me to this helpful graphic from Sophie Gahan inventorying digital tools relevant for each of Laurillard’s six learning types:

  • A collection of video lectures and interviews with Margaret Archer

  • Current mood in AI generated images #2

  • Be more kind, my friends. Try to be more kind

    History’s been leaning on me lately; I can feel the future breathing down my neck And all the things I thought were true When I was young, and you were too Turned out to be broken And I don’t know what comes next In a world that has decided That it’s going to lose its…

  • Some thoughts on generative AI

    Once you get used to GPT-4 in sense of iterative dialogues consisting of paragraph long prompts, GPT 3.5 seems positively dense in comparison. I was firm member of Team Stochastic Parrot (as Zvi Mowshowitz put it) but I’m increasingly convinced GPT-4 is genuinely intelligent. I find this deeply unsettling and I’m going to spend next…

  • ChatGPT: how could generative AI improve the flow of information within the unviersity system?

  • This country is nothing but an offshore laundry for turning evil into hard currency

  • How can ChatGPT be used to support learning theory?

    This was ChatGPT 4’s answer, after a lengthy and stunningly impressive conversation with it about Lacanian theory. I’m particularly persuaded by the point about explaining something in your own words which is exactly what I was doing in order to test my understanding of a number of Lacanian concepts.

  • I don’t control life, but I control how I react to it

    Learning, yes, reflecting on what matters People, impermanence, lack of attachments It’s space and time, a couple of man-made distractions The measure of a spirit that no human can ever capture Church, this booth is my Vatican I don’t control life, but I control how I react to it Student of the breath, brick beats…

  • The living dead of obsessive habit

    From Slavoj Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies pg 113: Within the domain of psychoanalysis, the compulsive neurotic provides an exemplary case of the reversal of the relationship between life and death: what he experiences as the threat of death, what he escapes from into his fixed compulsive rituals, is ultimately life itself, since the only…

  • How blogging is different from tweeting

    Over the last few years I’ve gradually given up on Twitter. This has been a long term process because of how deeply my professional and intellectual life was embedded into the service. Not only was it the place where a fragmented professional identity cutting across research and practice was drawn together in a way that…

  • Our past changes as our future unfolds

    What is realised in my history is not the past definitive of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming. – Lacan, Écrits, P.…