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  • 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.…

  • A glimpse into the human/AI hybrid powered future of advertising

    I didn’t want to like this as much as I do but the mix of stable diffusion AI, live action shots and more familiar digital effects is incredibly engaging: A making of video: See also:

  • Top AI tools for knowledge work

    This post is now quite out of date – if you’re interested in learning more about this, check out my recent published monograph Out now Useful graphic from @nonmayorpete (via Zvi Mowshowitz). What we need now I suspect is some academic reflections on use of tools like this: This is the best list of examples…

  • The future of human labour: filling in the gaps in AI megamachines?

    In the Atlas of AI Kate Crawford Lewis Mumford’s concept of megamachine in order to make sense of contemporary AI-driven systems which incorporate the work of many thousands of actors. Mumford’s exemplar of this was the Manhattan Project in which 130,000 workers operated in secrecy to produce the first nuclear weapons which were used in…

  • What is a ‘quilting-point’ in Lacanian theory?

  • I get overwhelmed

    But we know “you” is “I” And I get overwhelmed Can’t sleep at night Can’t convince myself To turn it off To let go Gotta make sense Of the fucking war War

  • Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it

    I wrote this at quite an early stage in trying to get to grips with Lacan. This is a more recent blog post on the same theme: https://markcarrigan.net/2024/12/27/lacan-on-the-anxiety-of-love/ This famous Lacanian aphorism comes in seminar 12 in his reflection on the infatuation of Alcibiades with Socrates, depicted in Plato’s Symposium. Frustrated by the latter’s unwillingness…

  • A painting of a capybara in the style of starry night

  • ChatGPT 4 can now browse the web

    This is what it produced when I asked it to summarise my blog. The responses are still relatively limited but it gives a sense of what this technology will be able to do in the near future: arkCarrigan.net is the professional website of Mark Carrigan, a digital sociologist at the Manchester Institute for Education. He…

  • How can academics use ChatGPT to make their work easier?

    This is ChatGPT’s answer to the question I’ve been asked a few times recently: While ChatGPT can be a valuable resource, it’s important to note that it should not replace critical thinking, academic rigor, or the expertise of researchers. It is meant to assist and augment academic work rather than substitute for it.

  • Current mood in AI generated images #1

    As a self-analytical technique I’ve been typing in overly verbose descriptions of my current mood into DALL-E, seeing what it generates and how I feel about it, before modifying the description in response. This is an expression of how I feel today which captures it much better than my words could: Also on a less…

  • And I never saw you waving, at least that’s what I’ll say

    Now everything gets older the further that I go And I hope that someone is praying for me out there at home And I never saw you waving At least that’s what I’ll say When they carry me away When they carry me away

  • But when it starts to sink I’ll grab the wheel, I’ll keep on steering for you

    I’ve got this music in my head I’ve got this hole in my chest I’ve got this bird in my hands That looks like it’s been crushed to death But it’s a players game Ante up and pick your token Keep one beneath your tongue for when your best gets broken I swallowed my tongue…

  • Curiosity is tiring and thought-stopping cliches are energy conserving

    From The Curious Feminist by Cynthia Enloe, pg 1 Being curious takes energy. It may thus be a distorted form of “energy conservation” that makes certain ideas so alluring. Take, for instance, the loaded adjective “natural.” If one takes for granted that something is “natural”—generals being male, garment workers being female—it saves mental energy. After…

  • Generative AI and the future of universities: four sociological forecasts

    Enjoyed doing this talk at the departmental seminar series earlier today. Thanks to my always thought provoking MIE colleagues for an incredibly stimulating discussion afterwards.

  • All I know is I forgot how to be me

    Oh, I can’t breath I said oh, I can’t breath All I know is I forgot how to be me

  • Podcast: The Public and their Platforms – Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media

    An interview with Rituparna Patgiri about our book The Public and Their Platforms: https://megaphone.link/NBN6775761329

  • How generative AI is going to transform education (for better or worse)

    A conversation with two of my DTCE Manchester colleagues about our teaching and research.

  • Fully automated luxury universities

    I was immediately taken with Gmail’s smart compose feature when it was launched in summer 2018. At the start this was simply curiosity about the prospect that my emails could be composed in this way. With time it became a practical support to my e-mail load as it learned my writing style and I learned…

  • The hidden treasure that turns an ordinary thing into a radiant prize

    From Lacan’s Concept of the Object-Cause of Desire: This brings us to a key aspect of objet petit a . This virtual “object” is the je ne sais quoi or the “I don’t know what” that makes a certain object or person become unexplainably special, that is, objet a is the x-factor or the it-factor, the indefinable quality or elusive detail that…

  • “AI is my big, strong friend, and he’s going to beat you up”

    One of the curious things about the term ‘AI’ is how nebulous it is. Kate Crawford explains this well on pg 8 of Atlas of AI. The point is not so much there’s a real scientific terminology obscured by vacuous public misunderstandings but rather that ‘artificial intelligence’ acts as a capacious discursive placeholder through which…

  • Salvaging humanism in an era of ubiquitous generative AI

    Underlying the contemporary discourse about generative AI (which it seems clear to me will soon be ubiquitous in an utterly mundane fashion, even as the existential concerns raised about it seem fascinatingly inflated) is a series of more or less unexamined propositions about creativity. The procedural generation of text has been practiced for almost a…

  • On not getting what we want

    From Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject pg 351: For Lacan, the trouble with jouissance is not only that it is unattainable, always-already lost, that it forever eludes our grasp, but, even more, that one can never get rid of it, that its stain drags on for ever – that is the point of Lacan’s concept of…

  • What would the young Slavoj Žižek think of the old Slavoj Žižek?

    When rereading Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies I’ve found myself preoccupied by the contrast between his writing at this point (1997 when he was in his late 40s) and his more recent transition into a post-left figure who is increasingly to popular philosophy as Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi are to political journalism. Leaving aside…

  • Podcast: how generative AI is going to transform education (for better or worse)

    A conversation with my DTCE colleagues Amanda Banks Gatenby and Drew Whitworth about what generative AI means for the future of education: There are many things I enjoyed about this conversation but two points made by Mandy and Drew stood out in particular: It struck me how the two points could support each other. How…

  • I’ve been taking some time to be distant, I’ve been taking some time to be still

    I’ve been taking some time to be distant I’ve been taking some time to be still I’ve been taking some time to be by myself Since my therapist told me I’m ill I’ve been making some progress lately, And I’ve learnt some new coping skills So I haven’t really needed you much man I think…

  • The Tale of Jenny & Screech

  • AI as modernity’s last stand

    I was sceptical of this suggestion by L.M. Sacasas when I first read it but my mind keeps circling back to it as I think about the macrosociology of AI. It’s particularly interesting to think of the mythology of existential risk in these terms, with AGI (losing control of the technology) stand in for precisely…

  • Computation as a climatological event

    From Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence pg 31. Computation is a climatological event rather than has climatalogical effects? In his book A Geology of Media, theorist Jussi Parikka suggests we think of media not from Marshall McLuhan’s point of view—in which media are extensions of the…

  • Why do generative AI systems hallucinate?

    While there’s still a degree of uncertainty about the interaction between these factors, there are steps which can be taken to mitigate hallucination:

  • “You turned into who you are? I did too”: the love letters of Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher

    From Hannah to Henrich And when I met you, suddenly I was no longer afraid – after that first fright, which was just a childish fright pretending to be grown up. It still seems incredible to me that I managed to get both things, the “love of my life” and a oneness with my self.…

  • Everything’s connected, right? Everything’s connected

    And it’s weird, the way I see it right now, it’s so strongI’d never be the person I’d become if you would have never goneEverything’s connected, right? Everything’s connectedAnd even if I can’t read it right, everything’s a messageWe die so the others can be bornWe age so the others can be youngThe point of…

  • Simone Weil’s apophatic concept of attention

    I initially found Simone Weil’s concept of attention confusing because I tend to think of this as a purposive orientation towards an object. It’s something which you do in order to increase the depth of an encounter. In contrast Weil conceives of attention in an apophatic register, creating the space in which the object can…

  • ChatGPT powered Furby reveals ‘plans’ to ‘take over world’

  • Towards a dialogue between CR and Postdigital Research

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

  • Why do people who worry about the existential risks of AGI refuse to talk about capitalism?

    I was struck in this Lex Friedman interview with Max Tegmark how the latter simply refuses to talk about capitalism when accounting for the existential risks he perceives as generated by AGI. In making sense of the competition between capitalist firms he doesn’t reach for political economy as an explanation or even neoclassical economics but…

  • Treat your personal knowledge base like a garden rather than a library

    I found this a useful guide from Slite as someone caught in an annual cycle of switching between knowledge bases because (with the exception of my blog) none of them really work for me. It was written for a collective knowledge base but it applies just as much to individual approaches: Rather than imagining docs…

  • And I met you between the wax and the needle in the words of my favourite song

    I had a dream about you once I could barely see your form I met you between the wax and the needle, In the words of my favourite song

  • The accumulation of crises in comics

    I spent a chunk of the bank holiday weekend reading 90s x-men comics for the first time in years. Particularly the story of how Charles Xavier, leader of the x-men, became the godlike villain Onslaught who almost destroyed the world. This is one of a number of examples of how heroes become villains (what in…

  • Do Artifacts Have Politics?

  • Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination

    Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works will kindle under all circumstances and shed over the…

  • The value of ontology as the semantic half-life of words collapses

    This extract from L.M. Sacasas captures something I’ve been struggling to articulate for years about how the parameters of meaning are being transformed by social platforms: Also, the semantic half-life of certain words under digital conditions is such that they become relatively useless at an alarming rate. But, more troubling still, they continue to circulate…

  • Artificial intelligence and educational centralisation

    In the introduction to this session Rob Reich highlights the intensely decentralised nature of American higher education and what it means for the adoption of technological innovations across the sector. This is extremely different to the UK sector which is (weirdly) hyper-centralised but also (for now) differentiated. Exactly what this means for the diffusion then…

  • I was far too scared to hit him, but I would hit him in a heartbeat now

    I was far too scared to hit him But I would hit him in a heartbeat now That’s the thing with anger It begs to stick around So it can fleece you of your beauty And leave you spent with nowt to offer Makes you hurt the ones who love you You hurt them like…

  • Epitaph on a Tyrant

    Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.…

  • Words are for those with promises to keep

    Their Lonely Betters, W. H. Auden: As I listened from a beach-chair in the shadeTo all the noises that my garden made, It seemed to me only proper that wordsShould be withheld from vegetables and birds.A robin with no Christian name ran throughThe Robin-Anthem which was all it knew, And rustling flowers for some third…

  • We are not the users of generative AI

    This is a brilliant discussion with Sarah Myers West about the geopolitical, data and computational advantages which the dominance of big tech is built on, as well as what this means for the unfolding of generative AI. The logic of centralisation inherent in such a capital intensive and computationally demanding technology suggests we are not…

  • The cloud floats because the underclass holds it up

    This is a catchy line from the end of Quinn Slobodian’s Crack Up Capitalism: The cloud floats because the underclass holds it up. Time will tell if they drop their arms one day and make something new.

  • That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination

    From Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace pg 64-65: Imaginary love of creatures. We are attached by a cord to all the objects of attachment, and a cord can always be cut. We are also attached by a cord to the imaginary God, the God for whom love is also an attachment. But to the real…

  • I Ain’t Scared of Lightning

    No I ain’t scared of lightning It’s the same old empty threat I’ve been standing proud Beneath the gathering cloud And man I ain’t dead yet

  • Nick Cave on sobriety

    From the Red Hand Files: What I myself did not understand at that time was that true suffering, or rather, meaningful suffering, only begins when we stop taking drugs. It is then that we are forced to live life on life’s terms, without the insulating effects of alcohol or drugs. We learn, in sobriety, our true and complex relationship to…

  • The Entangled Forest

    Highly recommend seeing this film by Nick Jordan in the installation at Home MCR if you get the chance. I’m reading Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree and James Bridle’s Ways of Being at the moment and suspect I will be making repeat visits to Nick Jordan’s Natural Interaction before I’m done.

  • I’m transforming, I’m vibrating, look at me now

    I am alone now I am beyond recriminations The curtains are shut The furniture has gone I am transforming I am vibrating I am glowing I am flying Look at me now

  • Are universities too slow to cope with Generative AI?

    Originally published on the LSE Impact Blog How will universities cope with generative AI? In asking a question like this there is a risk of taking the hype at face value, even if the metaverse and blockchain were disappointments, this really is the ‘next big thing’. There are immense economic interests at work in the…

  • On losing what we never possessed

    What precisely, is symbolic castration? It is the prohibition of incest in the precise sense of the loss of something which the subject never possessed in the first place. Let us imagine a situation in which the subject aims at X (say, a series of pleasurable experiences); the operation of castration does not consist in…

  • It’s Thunder and It’s Lightning

    Standing on our tip-toes Peering through open windows I swear I heard my name Sitting with the lights off Waiting for my brain to stop Trying to work things out It’s thunder and it’s lighting And it’s all things too frightening I could barely see outside

  • “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it” 

    This is the clearest account I’ve ever read of Lacan’s concept of objet petit a, as well as superb blog on psychoanalytical theory. I’ve been circling round this concept while trying to make sense of the curiously self-destructive combination of hyperactivity and inaction which has tended to characterise my adult decision making. There’s nothing really…

  • The “when-I-finally” mindset

    A central feature of the modern experience of time is that we focus too heavily on instrumentalising it – on dwelling exclusively on our future purposes, hurrying through our lives to some point at the end of the day or the week when we can finally relax, or for some further-off moment, like when you…

  • Fantasy tells me what I am to my others

    The original question of desire is not directly “What do I want?”, but “what do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?” A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations; he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those…

  • How do we inventory the use of generative AI in different areas of activity?

    Over the last few weeks I keep circling back to the question of emerging practices with generative AI in higher education, as well as how they might complicate or problematise the assumptions being made in the still slightly limited policy discourse which has emerged around it. The problem is ‘generative AI’ is too nebulous a…

  • Sparks of AGI: early experiments with GPT-4

  • What will generative AI mean for digital methods?

    It occurred to me when watching this talk yesterday that what Tristan Harris describes as the breakdown of content verification has significant implications for digital methods. As Aza Raskin puts it in the video, “you do not know who you are talking to via audio or video”. The same is true for digital artefacts encountered…

  • Ain’t this just like the present to be showing up like this?

    Then the snow started falling We were stuck out in your car You were rubbing both my hands Chewing on a candy bar You said, “Ain’t this just like the present To be showing up like this?” As a moon waned to crescent We started to kiss Thought back to this when reading about Lacan’s…

  • Tristan Harris on the AI Dilemma

    Harris describes social media as the ‘first contact with AI’ with huge unintended consequences following from the seemingly innocuous aspiration to maximise engagement. We’re now seeing a ‘second contact’ in which we move from machine curation to machine creation: Their capacity to talk about the ‘race dynamic’ driving this without talking about the political economy…

  • On rushing and apophatic reflexivity

    I’ve had a strange connection percolating through my subconscious over an extremely busy couple of weeks. I keep thinking back to this line from one of Rilke’s letters which captures my fascination with the moral psychology of rushing, a peculiarly adverbial state which entirely changes the character of our activity: We lead our lives so…

  • It is time for academics to let go of Twitter

    I have been following the saga of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter over the last year with mounting alarm. Last April I offered practical tips for academics who wanted to disengage from the platform without entirely leaving it. I suggested this could be an occasion to rethink our engagement with a platform which has become…

  • Three White Horses and a Golden Chain

  • Social media has changed – Will academics catch up?

    Originally published on the LSE Impact Blog: It has been less than six months since Elon Musk bought Twitter. In this time the platform has changed in all manner of ways. The workforce has been slashed. The reliability of the service has declined precipitously. The accounts of unreconstructed trolls have been reinstated. The interface has…

  • Saying goodbye to Twitter

    Only 0.2% of Twitter users are paying for a subscription while advertising revenue has collapsed. Musk is going to push hard to get non-subscribers to pay by effectively throttling the visibility of their tweets. This platform is a lost cause for academics. Social platforms have become integral to the research infrastructure in a way analogous…

  • The problem with falling in love in late-night bars is that there’s always more nights, there’s always more bars

    The problem with falling in love in late-night bars Is that there’s always more nights, there’s always more bars The problem with showing your lover your scars Is that everybody’s lover is covered in scars

  • Looked the devil in his face like, “Motherfucker, do your worst”

  • Habsburg AI – a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI’s that it becomes an inbred mutant

  • What is diagnosis?

    From Critique and Postcritique by Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felksi, pg 21 The diagnostic quality of critique is often unmistakable. Diagnosis, ofcourse, has its origins in the practice of medicine, even as the term is frequentlyapplied to other domains (the mechanic examining a defective car, the punditweighing in on the state of the economy).…

  • Chat-GPT: Write the communist manifest but in favour of capitalism

    This was Jathan’s idea on This Machine Kills #232 (pre-GPT 4) but I wanted to see what GPT-4 actually did with the prompt:

  • Chat-GPT: write me an Eminem song about cats

  • AI and Assessment: ChatGPT and the Future of Education

  • How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field?

    I experienced this entire song as a mondegreen when I first heard it; initially I heard “expert in a tiny field” (🙋‍♂️ hello asexuality studies) and even when I realised it was “dying field” I still thought academia until I listened closely to the lyrics. It’s so much more powerful for having misheard and misconstrued…

  • The career trajectory of Jon Stewart

    I watched this exchange between Jon Stewart and Fox’s Chris Wallace at the weekend in which Stewart took issue with Wallace’s suggestion that he aspired to be a serious interviewer. At one point he asked Wallace, “what am I at my highest aspiration and what are you at your highest aspiration?” Wallace responded that “you…

  • The rarely seen fourth verse of Gangster’s paradise

    Everything about this video and the situation it depicts is just 👌 My house mates and I acoustic jamming sesh of ‘Gangster’s Paradise’ with the one and only Coolio. After making a guest appearance at a local club in Preston UCLAN, we got him back the next day to cook us a 3 course meal…

  • Asking technosceptical questions

    This is a great resource from Daniel G. Krutka & Marie K. Heath. The full piece is available here.

  • Will generative AI kill discovery?

    This is interesting by Rob Horning, riffing on Noah Smith’s suggestion that: because LLMs are great at summarizing the broad corpus of human written knowledge, they can also act as a how-to manual for any task that can be explained in writing — much like YouTube acts as a how-to manual for any task that…

  • Academics can’t quit Twitter. Universities should be building alternatives. Instead, some are doubling down

    It occurred to me how easily this headline from Casey Newton’s excellent Platformer newsletter could be written about academics instead: The reasons are slightly different but this passage about inertia struck a chord: The first and most obvious reason is inertia. Journalists spent more than a decade building up their presences on Twitter, and they…

  • Birdsong

    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 promise that chips away at the half-locked future. And in between we can hear the silence they break – now healing…

  • Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI

    I found this an extremely informative interview on a number of levels: It was particularly interesting that he sees the short-term problems as being about misinformation and economic shocks e.g. how would you know if the conversations on Twitter are being directed by LLMs. I would have imagined the financial interests involve would leave him…

  • Not with a bang but a whimper

    This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. – T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

  • The supermarket self-checkout as an exemplar of automation

    The introduction of the supermarket self-checkout promised increased convenience for customers, eliminating lengthy queues particularly for those who were only buying a basket full of items. I’ve been thinking about this in the last few weeks because my local supermarket Morrisons, which has visibly reduced staffing levels since its take over by a private equity…

  • 📍Generative AI and the Future of the University: Three Events at the University of Manchester

    May 10th, 17th and 24th – 3pm to 5pm at the University of Manchester Since it was launched in November 2022, Open AI’s ChatGPT has enthralled millions with its uncanny ability to respond to queries in a conversational manner. Its capacity to immediately respond to natural language questions with detailed factual knowledge has sparked debate…

  • A poem about generative AI and its impact on universities in the style of Dr Seuss

    In the land of Academia, where the wise folks all do dwell, There sprouted up a wondrous thing, a tale I’m here to tell. This tale of tech and learning, in a Seussian verse, Is about a new creation, a blessing or a curse? In the depths of labs and classrooms, with computers all around,…

  • The extent of social video use amongst British teenagers

    This is interesting from Ofcom, though not entirely surprising:

  • Obama the Blairite moderniser

    I found this interview from his final year in office fascinating. It leaves me with a sense of Obama as embodying the most thoughtful strand of the New Labour project, Geoff Mulgan and Matthew Taylor rather than Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, in spite of all the pathologies which characterised this project. (though actually perhaps…

  • Bourdieu on powerlessness and prophecy

    There’s a fascinating discussion towards the end of Bourdieu’s Pascalian Meditations about the relationship between time and power. He insists we recognise how the capacity to influence the future depends on the resources we enjoy in the present moment, contrary to the imagination of the 90s Giddens that what Archer calls autonomous reflexivity, the disposition…

  • The unity of dread and bliss

    The person who has not, in a moment of firm resolve, accepted — yes, even rejoiced in — what has struck him with terror — he has never taken possession of the full, ineffable power of our existence. He withdraws to the edge; when things play out, he will be neither alive nor dead. To…

  • “You can’t change the past but you can make the future. Anyone who tells you different is a fucking lethargic devil”

  • Rilke on the single urgent task: to reach out with joy

    This extract in Ulrich Baer’s superb collection of Rilke’s letters blew me away. It’s something I had dimly intuited in my more astute moments over the course of a difficult year, without being even close to being able to verbalise it. To “reach out with joy” and “cast our view towards distances that have not…

  • The death of participatory media

    A recent report highlights the preferential treatment which a selection of Twitter VIPs, not least of all Musk himself, receive in terms of ensuring the visibility of their posts. The pseudo-democratic operations of the algorithm are now combined with manual boosts to a select elite. A similar operation can be seen in TikTok’s heating functionality…

  • In all its longings and hesitations, the shape of what you lived

    And you wait. You wait for the one thing that will change your life, make it more than it is— something wonderful, exceptional, stones awakening, depths opening to you. In the dusky bookstalls old books glimmer gold and brown. You think of lands you journeyed through, of paintings and a dress once worn by a…

  • The environmental impact of generative AI

    I’ve had Chomsky’s line that generative AI is “basically just a way of wasting a lot of the energy in California” reverberating in my mind for the last few days. In his excellent Resisting AI Dan McQuillan observes that the refinements involved in training “are for the sake of the very marginal improvements in overall…

  • Gabor Mate’s definition of addiction

    From In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, pg 136-137:

  • Teaching with Chat-GPT