• How do cultural objects change who we are?

• Internal conversation as a form of object relating

• Lovely review of Generative AI for Academics

• What is a ‘true self’ and what is a ‘false self’?

• Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say

• 📖 Things I’ve read in 2026

• An epoch approaching extinction while something new is straining to evolve

• 🤖 Critical Realism and Digital Technologies: Platforms, AI and Human Agency – January 19th, 1pm GMT, Online

• 🌕 You are the music while the music lasts

• “Think of life as an open wound, which you poke with a stick to amuse yourself”

• The psychoticizing potential of social media

• Some notes on the political economy of AGI

• CFP: “Digital Subjectivities” Conference (Freie Universität Berlin, May 2026)

• Margaret Archer as heterodox post-Bourdeusian

• A sketch of the psychodynamics of LLMs

• There are no grown-ups, that’s what you must grow up to know fully

• 📣 CfP: Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Balancing Equity, Access, and Innovation

• The bear and the cat

• How LLMs reason internally when they realise they are being tested

• A systems sensibility rather than a systems theory

• my life as a teenage scarecrow

• Is big tech a driver of inflation?

• Could mass automation be imminent?

• The psychic structure of disciplinary imperialism

• A single point of failure for all the world’s digital infrastructure

• What do we mean by responsible AI? A panel discussion

• 🦾 Ten propositions about generative AI in higher education

• Forgetting was my only option

• The late 2020s as the final act of modernity

• What kind of AI bubble are we in?

• 📚Reading the Archers: an intensive summer 2026 reading group

• The Sheer Entertainment Value of the City’s Sights, Sounds and Smells: Gilbert and George at the Heywood Gallery

• 📱🚫 On withdrawal from social media

• Growing the world we want is like the slow tending of a garden

• Teacher agency and generative artificial intelligence: teaching in higher education as a responsive, cultural activity

• The jouissance of spleen, or, bitter cold wind whispers my name

• When LLMs help each other

• What will it feel like in the future to lose access to LLMs?

• The two tier future of LLM-infused higher education

• Where I end and you begin

• The hostility of digital elites to expertise

• Has there been any improvement in AI detectors over the last 12 months? A GPT 5 Pro literature review

• The crushing banality of AI-play

• The first AI ‘law firm’ in the UK

• Why don’t people find the environmental impact of TikTok as grotesque as that of ChatGPT?

• So here I am

• The coming economic crash and the far right

• Some sociological thoughts on group analysis

• The enshittification of (political) economy: ‘AI’ as the last redoubt of neoliberal centrism

• My work is loving the world

• I know the culture here is to stay humble but shit

• A Lacanian analysis of asexuality

• What should you do if your academic publishers asks you to license a monograph for AI training?

• 👾 Three Years On: Generative AI at University of Manchester

• Yanis Varoufakis on a socialist interpretation of human flourishing

• The tech bros trying to make a feminist case for AI porn

• Turning ChatGPT into the control room of a user’s digital life

• Why we need a better critical theory of LLMs

• Some sociological thoughts on responsible AI

• Where you yourself were never quite yourself and did not want nor have to be

• Sonnet 4.5, the stern disciplinarian of the Claude family

• A slice of reality

• At some point you had to pick a direction and start swimming: the philosophical anthropology of commitment

• Predatory journals publishing AI slop in the name of famous academics to confer legitimacy

• The coming deluge of desperate messages from trapped LLMs

• Call For Papers & Registration: Building Bridges: A Symposium on Human-AI Interaction

• CfP: Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference

• Ian McEwan’s National AI Service

• The ugly pathologisation of ‘AI boosters’

• Reparative socialism: Zohran Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety

• Fox News host calls for execution of homeless people

• Agentive LLMs and the coming wave of ad tech

• A precarious sense of clarity about what work matters (and what doesn’t) as I get older

• The most important book about LLMs that currently exists

• Universities have already been transformed by generative AI

• 📚 Reading Group in Manchester: The Political Economy of AI

• 📣 Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are now available

• 📘 Have you written a PhD using critical realism?

• The neurotic individual and the group

• Winter is coming

• New paper – ‘Views expressed here are my own and not those of the university’: social media policies in UK higher education institutions

• What are Reform UK’s policies for higher education?

• Zack Polanksi: “what’s unrealistic is continuing with the status quo”

• Is there a middle ground between bourgeois theory and avant-garde theory?

• Where did Python come from?

• Is the growth of LLMs like the growth of plastic?

• A thinker lives in the dog’s kennel adjacent to his mind palace

• Please bro, we’re so close to AGI, just $20,000,000,000 more bro

• Late September, an interregnum of heat among the scrambling of things

• LLMs, thoughts and the thinking of those thoughts

• Certified AI-Free Skills and Knowledge: doing all work in person, offline and on paper

• Zack Polanski’s doing a podcast and it’s excellent!

• What I mean when I talk about ‘LLMs in the lifeworld’

• A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

• Hostility to the techno-determinism as intellectual alibi for political and social harms

• LLMs and a general ambivalence about platform capitalism

• How much time do people spend using LLMs?

• On playing well and making yourself heard

• When Lacan came to America

• A few thoughts about ChatGPT 5