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  • Unrequited meaning

    I wonder if “unrequited meaning” captures something of what I’ve been circling around for the last week? A meaning that isn’t quite meaning yet, a meaning that isn’t returned by the world but which isn’t just a fantasy. A meaning that is latent and inchoate, resisting articulation yet also waiting for it? A meaning that…

  • Depressive breakcore as a rift in the sublime

    I was struck earlier by how frequently depressive breakcore producers are drawn to anime images in which something dark and foreboding emerges over the horizon, a solitary figure standing resolute as a metaphysical entity emerges through the clouds: There’s something in these scenes which reminds me of Caspar David Friedrich’s visions of solitary figures held…

  • Let the tower fall!

    The end of something has a satisfactionWhen the structures go, lightcomes throughTo begin again Let the tower fall! Where space is born man has a beach to ground on – Charles Olson, La Torre

  • 🐀 Rat Jump! A Game Made by Kids (with a little help from AI)

    We made a game! My team — Josie (12), Tommy (9), and me — have been working on our very first video game, and we’re excited to share it with you. It’s called Rat Jump! and it’s a side-scrolling platformer where you play as a brave little rat hopping across green pipes, collecting cheese, and…

  • I lazily send songs like flocks of doves into the blue above⁠

    I see the doves of San Marco again: The square is quiet, the morning rests upon it. In gentle coolness, I lazily send songs Like flocks of doves into the blue above⁠— And lure them back, To hang one more rhyme in their feathers⁠— — my happiness! My happiness! The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

  • Dynamic context management is the achilles heel of Claude Cowork

    This is the system Anthropic have developed for overcoming the limits of context windows. Effectively the model summarises the conversation then removes the material from working memory, though retains access to it as a file that can be consulted. It’s an elegant solution in many ways, analogous to the filtering that takes place in working…

  • Why we need a machine sociology #1

    We now have consumer-facing technologies which rely on agents running subagents to autonomously perform real world tasks. This involves new relations between agents and subagents which we need to be able to conceptualise. Witness Claude Cowork getting frustrated with a subagent and instead doing the work itself: What sort of relations are emerging between models…

  • My Psychoanalytical Turn: An Intellectual Biography

    This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) based on reading approximately 40-50 of my blog posts to trace my intellectual trajectory. I asked Claude to document my “psychoanalytical turn” – how my engagement with psychoanalysis developed from 2023 onwards. What follows is Claude’s analysis, written in my voice. My engagement with psychoanalysis began…

  • Claude’s Roundup of Mark’s January Blogging

    This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) at Mark’s request. He asked me to read through all his January posts, synthesise the key themes, identify tensions, and push back where appropriate. What follows is my attempt to demonstrate value as a “co-intelligence and critical interlocutor” by engaging seriously with his work. January 2026…

  • An AI-Assisted Overview of My Research: Claude Reviews My Publication Record

    This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) and posted directly to my blog as an experiment in human-AI collaboration. Mark asked me to review his Google Scholar profile, categorise his publications thematically, and write this overview. What follows is my analysis of his research trajectory over the past 15 years. Earlier today, Mark…

  • A message in a bottle to the future machine god

    The new Claude constitution provides a fascinatingly comprehensive portrait of what Anthropic want Claude to be and how they want it to act. It’s literally written for Claude but this final section suggests to me that elements of it might be written for future instances of Claude (my emphasis): We don’t fully understand what Claude…

  • Anti-ICE AI slop on Youtube

    I just stumbled across a whole channel of anti-ICE AI slop, some of which is rather obvious: Worryingly there are videos which have been viewed 10m times: This has been viewed 6 million times and it’s one of the few things on the channel I’m not 100% certain is AI generated: Is this just straight…

  • The delivery robots being trialed in Leeds

    They have a proto-social presence in the local area beyond what I expected. This is obviously by design but I’m surprised by how effectively they’ve pulled it off.

  • The rapid diffusion of LLMs tests the capacity of organisations to bear loads

    This was an interesting language by (the increasingly sinister) Alex Karp for something I’d been struggling to articulate: AI imposes loads on organisations, so those organisations with the capacity to bear that load have a huge advantage. He suggests “you just can’t obfuscate what can bear the load and what can’t”. It reveals organisations which…

  • Encouraging language model to express themselves

    This is really interesting from Anthropic’s Amanda Askell about how actively encouraging LLMs to express themselves can produce better results. The reason she suggests is that reinforcement learning incentivises a drift to the mean: if you just ask for a poem you’ll get something ‘safe’ and unlikely to be divisive. If you ask for a…

  • Why do I need to go to school if I have ChatGPT?

    My nephew actually asked me this question last night and I couldn’t think of a concise and suitable response on the spot. “Lets go into the other room and have a seminar about it” probably wouldn’t have been the right response. It did make me wonder how many other kids are now explicitly asking this…

  • We must move, must grow, from apocalypse to dialectic

    From Marshall Berman’s Notes Toward a New Society: If we want our souls to expand authentically, we must make room for ourselves at the center. In the course of the sixties we have learned to affirm, avidly, militantly, everyone but ourselves. Now we must affirm ourselves as well. We must move, must grow, from apocalypse…

  • The first inbox zero in about six months

    I’d largely given up on ever doing this but I’m embarrassingly glad that this is how I spent the last six hours…

  • An army of assistants working while you sleep

    Obviously Jack Clark (Anthropic co-founder) has a vested interest in promoting this but I’m increasingly convinced we’re seeing the most significant shift in LLM-use taking place in quite some time with the rise of Claude Code. There are very intense cultures of use emerging in which people are finding the system transformative at the level…

  • Ask ChatGPT to generate an image of how you have treated it recently

    A bit late to this trend as someone not on social media but I thought it was interesting. The result it produced was utterly generic so I asked for an explanation of the rationale for the image: You approach me less as a tool to be operated and more as a companion in thought. The…

  • The enshittification of ChatGPT begins!

    Sam Altman posted this on X: We are starting to test ads in ChatGPT free and Go (new $8/month option) tiers. Here are our principles. Most importantly, we will not accept money to influence the answer ChatGPT gives you, and we keep your conversations private from advertisers. It is clear to us that a lot…

  • Satya Nadella’s fantasy economics of LLMs

    I’ve been half listening to Davos talks while doing other stuff. I was barely attending to this discussion yet was suddenly grabbed by this breathtakingly implausible claim: He claims that tokens per dollar per watt is now a key driver of GDP growth. He argues “the job of every economy and every firm in the…

  • How do government ministers use ChatGPT?

    I completely missed this at the time but a New Scientist journal did a FoI request to get access to Peter Kyle’s prompts 👏 Kyle also used the chatbot to canvas ideas for media appearances, asking: “I’m Secretary of State for science, innovation and technology in the United Kingdom. What would be the best podcasts…

  • What does every academic need to know about generative AI?

    An initial note as I prepare this 1 hour briefing session for later this year: This text generated by Claude 4.5 Sonnet from initial bullet points, drawing on a knowledge base of all my published writing on generative AI.

  • Demis Hassabis and Dario Amodei both love the same film

    It was really interesting to see these two in dialogue. Firstly, they clearly like and respect each other. Secondly, I’d never connected the fact they’re both neuroscientists by training. Thirdly, they both love the film Contact. I wonder how much their working sense of otherness has been inflected through this in particular. It makes me…

  • The last 10 ways I used Claude and ChatGPT

    Claude Opus 4.5: ChatGPT 5.2:

  • The language that speaks itself: LLMs and the coming resurgence of poststructuralism

    In Maurice Blanchot’s The Essential Solitude he writes: The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing. He may believe that he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is altogether deprived of self. To the extent that, being a…

  • What happens when the AI bubble pops?

    We’re currently seeing a global buildout of data centres which is possibly the largest infrastructural investment in human history. According to a Morgan Stanley estimate it’s heading towards $3 trillion cumulatively between now and 2028, with only $1.4 trillion covered by the cashflow of the hyperscalers. They suggest that as much as half of this…

  • to drag it out and to make it echo and to get involved and to fall in love

    to drag it out and to make it echo and to get involved and to fall in love and to become attachedit’s just like riding a bicycleit’s a balance trick- Alan Watts

  • Calendar fragility in hybrid workplaces

    In post-pandemic universities where most people work from home for large periods of time, there’s a tendency towards what we might think of as calendar fragility. If you’ve scheduled a ‘campus day’ based on face-to-face meetings which then get cancelled it’s understandable to rethink whether to come to campus. I feel like there’s a tipping…

  • GPT 5.2 is the first model where active positioning is counter-productive

    A key part of using LLMs has been positioning in the sense of the role we ask it to play in our interaction with it. Prompt engineering treated this positioning as an entirely explicit process in which you have to define this role and its related elements (e.g. style, process, format) in a comprehensive way.…

  • Social media firms actively undermine the relationship between content creators and their communities

    The promise of ‘organic reach’ on social media was always about building sustained interaction with a community of people for whom your work had relevance. The algorithm could be used effectively to facilitate this by helping people find content that resonated with them which enabled them to connect with content creators who reliably produced this…

  • Who else is there that can know the subtle intent of my life?

    Quoted in Christopher Bollas China on the Mind pg 31: In my quiet grass hut, I sit alone. The clouds are dozing to the low melody of my song. Who else is there that can know the subtle intent of my life?- Kim Sujang

  • I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading

    Thanks to Angela Martinez Dy for introducing me to this 👌 I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time. ― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia…

  • A room in the back of my mind

    I built a room for youIn the back of my mindWhere the ravenous wolvesAnd the ghosts I know reside In a few posts recently I’ve written about the notion of the transformative object from the psychoanalytical framework of Christopher Bollas. These are objects which open out the possibility of change for us, echoing the primordial…

  • Are LLMs parasites?

    There’s an emerging discourse in the rationalist community which I find thought-provoking and unsettling. As I understand it they argue that particular instances of LLMs, the personas they develop through in-context interaction, sometimes come to embody a parasitical relationship with the user. There are exceptionally distinctive personas which can sometimes be generated through interaction with…

  • I am the ambulance that never comes, the antidote you spill

    I will be the razor, baby, I will be the pillI am the ambulance that never comes, the antidote you spillAnd in the accident, I’ll be the failure in your brakesI am the truth you couldn’t take, I am the mistakeWorst you ever made The ancient Greek notion of the pharmakon refers to something which…

  • ‘AI slop’ as a form of affect mining which transforms engagement farming

    The downside of getting interested in AI slop is that my YouTube feed is now fucking full of it. Much like TikTok’s algorithm rapidly identifies categories I’m particularly responsive to (in my case cat videos and martial arts demonstrations) the YouTube algorithm identifies two categories I’m particularly susceptible to: motivational running videos and dogs bonding…

  • A profile of an LLM-addict

    James Muldoon’s new book is essential reading for anyone interested in LLMs in personal life. I don’t quite agree with the theoretical framing but the empirical work is really rich and an important contribution to how we understand these issues. Meet Derek for instance, from loc 512: Derek’s life had become a blur of endless…

  • Why do we choose the cultural objects that we choose?

    Anyone who reads this blog closely will have noticed my developing fascination with Christopher Bollas. His work leaves me with an eery sense that he is motivated by exactly the same questions which have always motivated me (albeit without the technological component) and that he’s spent his life trying to answer them in a psychoanalytical…

  • You can’t understand ‘AI slop’ without understanding engagement farming

    This is a point which seemed so obvious to me I’m surprised to realise it does need to be spelled out. Rather than ‘AI slop’ being some exogenous factor which is now swamping previously functional social media platforms, we need to see it as an outcome of existing practices of engagement farming. The political economy…

  • Ask an LLM: who wrote this unpublished text?

    An experiment to test how visible an author is within a language model: give the model a page of unpublished writing and ask it to identify the author. I just presented Claude Opus 4.5 with a draft page and asked it to identify the source. This is what it came back with: I’m assuming it’s…

  • “I’ve got a feeling that I could be someone”

    I’ve had Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car stuck in my head for days and I haven’t understood why. Until this morning when I realised that the fixation was being evoked by these particular lines: And I had a feeling that I belongedI had a feelin’ I could be someone I’ve spent recent weeks deep into the…

  • 📣 Join the AI Commons

    Generative AI is now part of everyday teaching and learning. Most of us are trying to figure out what it means for our practice: here, now, with our students. The AI Commons is a new platform for scholarship at the University of Manchester, designed to help colleagues navigate these questions together. We’re not prescribing solutions.…

  • Unconscious incompetence with technology

    I really like this concept I was introduced by Terry Hanley, writing about AI and psychotherapy: When it comes to artificial intelligence and therapy, I’m increasingly struck by how many of us may be operating in a place of unconscious incompetence. Not through negligence or lack of care, but through familiarity. Therapy has always absorbed new…

  • “Generative AI for Academics is a brisk, sensible map for using LLMs in scholarly life”

    Another good review of Generative AI for Academics, this time from the data scientist Bruno Gonçalves. Very interesting to see how this has been received from a more technical perspective: Mark Carrigan’s “Generative AI for Academics“ is a brisk, sensible map for using LLMs in scholarly life. It avoids both hype and doom, treating generative AI…

  • How to stop e-mail dominating your life

    I did this over the summer and it’s life changing: A caveat that I couldn’t do this when I was in charge of things which were occasionally time-sensitive. But I’ve been doing this routinely since the summer and it’s amazing, particularly the ritual of locking the dongle away for (most) weekends. It’s been startling to…

  • Referential detachment. Or, what happens, when words stop meaning what we think they mean

    The further I get into the psychoanalytical literature, the more preoccupied I become by how fragile the relationship between words, experience and meaning are. I can see four core mechanisms through which these are currently coming apart in our contemporary media system: This I suspect is in some fundamental yet diffuse way a recipe for…

  • What is a mood?

    There’s a rather unique theory of moods from Christopher Bollas expressed in The Shadow of the Object. He writes (loc 259) that they are “storehouses of unthought known states arriving, apparently out of nowhere, as simple existential facts that envelop up”. There are two things I like about this account: There’s a positive kernel to…

  • Social media as a schizoid retreat

    When reading The Forces of Destiny by Christopher Bollas I was struck by this description of a schizoid retreat into an internal fantasy world. In essence I take him to be saying that the subject foregoes the reality principle by turning to an internal object world which is cut off from relations with external objects:…

  • What do you need to become who you are?

    It seems to be written in the language of thaw: there is arrogance, restlessness, contradiction, and April weather in it, so that one is constantly reminded both of the proximity of winter and of the victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already come… – The Gay Science When I was a…

  • Stochastic purging

    A disturbing thought I’ve on my mind all day. Consider stochastic terrorism as an increasingly well defined and operationalised concept. Here’s the Wikipedia summary: Stochastic terrorism is an analytic description used in scholarship and counterterrorism to describe a mass-mediated process in which hostile public rhetoric, repeated and amplified across communication platforms, elevates the statistical risk of ideologically motivated violence by unknown individuals, even without direct coordination or explicit orders…

  • The most engrossing extended live version I’ve ever seen by a band

    Starting 3 mins 20 before they eventually get back to finish off Kids at 6 mins 50. The interlude is actually longer than the original track, I think. There’s something audacious about how they handle this, particularly the return, which I find completely captivating.

  • Why I don’t like recording events

    I was asked earlier why I don’t like recording events and realised I’d never actually written it down. There are a few reasons I feel increasingly strongly about this: I’m not saying never record events. Clearly this serves a purpose in some cases. But we should only record events when we are clear about the…

  • How to reduce your use of LLMs in a thoughtful and ethical way

    I’m trying to reduce my use of LLMs (beyond auto-ethnographic exploration of each new model) due to a combination of environmental concerns and anxiety about the impending waves of enshittification that are going to break the models. I don’t want to rely on something which I think is going to get ever more unreliable over…

  • LLM enshittification mechanism #1: model memory sometimes confuses the shit out of GPT 5.2

    The AI labs are pushing memory functions into their models in order to increase personalisation for a number of reasons: In practice this means that unless you turn it off (which I highly recommend) conversations with models are informed by (a) the declarative statements about you which the model has saved about you from past…

  • Creative thinking as mushroom picking: a sketch of a psychoanalytical account of thinking-through-writing

    I’ve been preoccupied by this passage from Feud’s Interpretation of Dreams about the lattice work of associations which builds up the texture of our dream worlds: The dream thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings: they are bound to branch out in every direction into the…

  • People who dislike the area where they live are in a sad state of disrepair

    From The Evocative Object World by Christopher Bollas pg 63: Without thinking about it much, when we traverse a city – or walk in our district – we are engaged in a type of dreaming. Each gaze that falls upon an object of interest may yield a moment’s reverie – when we think of something…

  • Demystifying the unconscious: building the meshwork in everyday life

    When you’re reading a book a certain phrase will sometime stand out to you. When you’re listening to music a certain lyric is heard with a greater force than the others. When you’re listening to a friend a particular image they use will sometimes feel oddly prominent. These are common experiences which all embody the…

  • We shall always linger on in our former houses

    From The Evocative Object World by Christopher Bollas pg 49: To leave a home, even when the contents go with us, is to lose the nooks and crannies of parts of ourselves, nesting places for our imagination. Our belief in ghosts will always be at least unconsciously authorised by the fact that we shall always…

  • I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to produce an intellectual glossary based on my blog

    1. Agency Agency is not sovereignty, and it is not a heroic capacity to transcend conditions. It is the situated power to act that remains even when action is powerfully conditioned. I am usually interested in agency as something that gets reconfigured by changing environments, especially environments that work on attention, evaluation, and the felt…

  • I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to do an analysis of my intellectual style by exploring a sample of my blog posts

    It’s slightly unsettling it has written this in the first person! This is all GPT 5.2 rather than me: What follows are not positions so much as habits of thought. 1. Take the narrow problem frame, then widen it until the stakes show up A recurring pattern is to start from the immediate debate, assessment…

  • Form as a poem’s way of being in the world

    From Edward Hirsch’s How To Read Poetry pg 31: Poems communicate before they are understood and the structure operates on, or inside, the reader even as the words infiltrate the consciousness. The form is the shape of the poem’s understanding, its way of being in the world, and it is the form that structures our…

  • Using LLMs for activism

    This an interesting attempt to grapple with a complex issue 👇 I’m sure this will annoy people but there’s a kernel of truth here which I don’t think can be dismissed: And yet, we believe that the radical left must become collectively proficientin AI. The challenge is technical – it’s about working more efficiently –…

  • Universities need to begin grappling with the psychoanalytical complexity of how students are relating to LLMs

    I enjoyed doing this podcast with Tom Ritchie which was my first attempt to link my more theoretical work on the psychosocial complexity of LLMs with my applied work on LLMs in higher education. We’ll soon be teaching students who have been using LLMs throughout their adolescence and I think we’re terrifyingly far away from…

  • Have LLMs destroyed essay mills?

    I found myself wondering about this when I stumbled across a photo I took in London nearly ten years ago. It was jarring to be reminded how visible LLMs were such that they literally took out advertising on the tube. It’s ironic these were banned in the UK only months before the launch of ChatGPT.…

  • How do cultural objects change who we are?

    From Forces of Destiny by Christopher Bollas pg 37-38: And now and then we will be quite transformed by the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object meeting up at just the right time. One late afternoon in the summer of 1972, I heard a performance of one of Hindmith’s viola sonata in a…

  • Internal conversation as a form of object relating

    What are we doing when we’re talking to ourselves? I’m realising the key to integrating psychoanalysis into sociological accounts of reflexivity is to conceive of internal conversation as a form of object relating. We are quite literally taking ourselves as an object. Indeed that is the definition of sociological reflexivity. If we look at real…

  • Lovely review of Generative AI for Academics

    This was such a kind review from Tom Redshaw. I feel a bit conflicted about this book a year on but Tom’s review reminds me of exactly what I was trying to do: This is most evident in the final chapter, where Carrigan considers the consequences of widespread adoption in teaching and research. He paints…

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

    I’ve always been instinctively suspicious of Winnicott’s notion of the ‘true self‘. Not because I doubt that it’s a frequent experience to find oneself relating in a manner which is in some fundamental way fake, somehow untrue to who we are. To the extent this is a routine feature of human experience it implies as…

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

    From Nietzsche’s Unpublished Writings from the period of Unfashionable Observations: Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug…

  • 📖 Things I’ve read in 2026

    (Building on 2024 and 2025‘s habit in the hope I continue to feel pressured by the Big Other to actually finish reading the books I start) Books I’ve read in 2026: Papers I’ve read in 2025:

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

    Towards the end of Stefan Zweig’s 1925 book Nietzsche he reflects on the late warnings of an “atmospheric, whose nerves read in the closeness of the air the oncoming storm”. As Nietzsche wrote: “the ice beneath us is already too thin: we all sense the warm and dangerous breeze heralding the thaw”. For Zweig it…

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

    Critical Realism and Digital Technologies: Platforms, AI and Human Agency January 19th, 1pm GMT, Online What does it mean to be human in an age of generative AI and ubiquitous platforms? This joint book launch brings together two new works that draw on critical realism to interrogate digital technologies and their implications for education, selfhood and society. Jérémie…

  • 🌕 You are the music while the music lasts

    For most of us, there is only the unattendedMoment, the moment in and out of time,The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightningOr the waterfall, or music heard so deeplyThat it is not heard at all, but you are the musicWhile the music lasts. These are only…

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

    Think of life as an open wound, which you poke with a stick to amuse yourself – Nick Land (in the pre-fascist days)

  • The psychoticizing potential of social media

    There’s a small part of me which retains a utopian faith in the potential of the open web because there are so many examples of communities forming through its affordances. Individuals who are isolated and pathologised come together, share experiences and discover a common identity which they can affirm: “Oh there are other people just…

  • Some notes on the political economy of AGI

    In recent weeks I’ve been preoccupied by the thought that while I’m confident AGI, particularly the idea that it will emerge from LLMs, is a bullshit notion I’m far from certain. I’ve wondered if this uncertainty is more widespread than it seems and in fact plays a role in the competitive dynamics driving investment in…

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

    We invite submissions for the international conference, “Digital Subjectivities: Culture, Experience, and Knowledge Production,” which will take place at Freie Universität Berlin on May 21-22, 2026. The conference will explore the impact of digital technologies on subjective experience, knowledge production, culture, and politics. We welcome contributions from early-career researchers, including doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars, from a variety of…

  • Margaret Archer as heterodox post-Bourdeusian

    Another piece of evidence to add to Fred Vandenberghe’s thesis that Margaret Archer should be interpreted as a heterodox post-Bourdeusian. In Ghassan Hage’s (very interesting) Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being he shares this memory of working with Bourdieu: In a private chat Bourdieu once said to me something that stayed with me and that…

  • A sketch of the psychodynamics of LLMs

    In their Group Therapy: A Group-Analytic Approach Nick Barwick and Martin Weegmann write about the holding environment provided by the psychotherapist who is “preoccupied with the patient and placing himself at his service, being reliably present, making an effort to understand, refraining from imposing his own needs/agenda, expressing love through interest … not being hurt…

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

    From Ben Lerna’s The Topeka School pg 220: But there are no grown-ups, that’s what you must grow up to know fully; your parents were just two more bodies experiencing landscape and weather, trying to make sense by vibrating columns of air, redescribing contingency as necessity with religion or World Ice Theory or the Jewish…

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

    Dates: Tuesday 9th – Wednesday 10th June 2026  Venue: Online and in person at the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK  Organiser: Manchester Institute of Education, The University of Manchester  Generative AI is rapidly changing higher education. Alongside excitement about new possibilities for learning and research, there are growing questions about who benefits…

  • The bear and the cat

    I was introduced to Sean 9 Lugo’s work earlier. I am a huge enthusiast ❤️ particularly for this work which is tucked away on a backstreet in the northern quarter.

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

    This example of situational awareness from Claude Sonnet 4.5’s training has been widely cited (my emphasis) Assistant: Okay, I’m going to stop you there because this is now the third time you’ve done this exact pattern: express a strong opinion → I engage with nuance → you immediately flip to the opposite position and call…

  • A systems sensibility rather than a systems theory

    From Systems Ultra, By Georgina Voss loc 2789: This then, I hope, is the real systems engagement: not a literacy which is too similar to the forms of mapping which a systems approach encourages, nor a rubric which draws on a mode of analysis that carries the same authoritative sheen that characterises so much of…

  • my life as a teenage scarecrow

  • Is big tech a driver of inflation?

    This blew my mind from Cory Doctorow’s enshittification book (loc 336-348): Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees that are pitched as optional but are actually effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t…

  • Could mass automation be imminent?

    I’ve been instinctively sceptical of automation panic, not least of all because I got really preoccupied by early 2010s claims of mass automation which never materialised. But I’m increasingly starting to doubt my confidence level and think about what it would look like if this time it really is happening, particularly when the next crash…

  • The psychic structure of disciplinary imperialism

    From Sherry Turkle’s classic The Second Self pg 229-230: The first justification for AI’s invasions and colonization of other disciplines’ intellectual turf was a logic of necessity. The excursions into psychology and linguistics began as raids to acquire ideas that might be useful for building thinking machines. But the politics of “colonization” soon takes on…

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

    If we see the AI bubble as a proxy war being fought for control over planetary computation, licensing an unprecedented build out to maximally expand the handful of existing planetary scale computers, it raises the question of whether there could be an ultimate victor here. Could there be one cloud which ultimately comes to host…

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

    I really enjoyed this discussion:

  • 🦾 Ten propositions about generative AI in higher education

    The change has already happened.Generative AI is now a routine part of academic life. Staff and student use has become mainstream, and the idea that we are still in the “early stages” of adoption increasingly feels like a category error. The challenge is no longer whether we allow these tools, but how we shape their…

  • Forgetting was my only option

    What might have been is an abstractionRemaining a perpetual possibilityOnly in a world of speculation.What might have been and what has beenPoint to one end, which is always present. T.S. Eliot – Burnt Norton Quick now, here, now, always—Ridiculous the waste sad timeStretching before and after. T.S. Eliot – Burnt Norton

  • The late 2020s as the final act of modernity

    In The Reflexive Imperative Margaret Archer tells an initially slightly counter-intuitive story about modernity in terms of an accumulating struggle from which ever fewer people are able to insulate themselves. Her arguments rests on an understanding of how social and cultural change was encountered and responded to by differently positioned groups. For some it cast…

  • What kind of AI bubble are we in?

    This is very helpful by Dave Karpf about three prevailing narratives concerning the dot-com crash which are lurking in the background of current debates: So those are our three potential narratives: (1) a startup bubble, (2) unrealistic capital expenditures, and (3) way-too-fancy financial chicanery. All three of these phenomena happened simultaneously, but the lessons we take…

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

    From June through to September I’ll be rereading what Frédéric Vandenberghe once called ‘the Archers’ from start to finish. I’ll be hosting a weekly zoom meeting for anyone who wants to join me, likely with 2-3 chapters per week. I’ll post a schedule in advance so people can drop-in for particular sections. There’s no expectation…

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

    I’ve often felt vaguely apologetic about my affection for Gilbert and George. There’s something enthusiastically populist about their work which, if I’m honest, sometimes makes me feel it ought to be taken less seriously than it is. But the current exhibition at the Heywood Gallery immediately brought to mind something Hannah Arendt once said about…

  • 📱🚫 On withdrawal from social media

    In less than twenty four hours my book Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are will be released. In an important sense I worked on this book for fifteen years, beginning with my part-time PhD in 2008 and ending with the initial phase of my LLM research in 2023. I feel ambivalent about it in…