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  • “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…

  • đŸ€– 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. JĂ©rĂ©mie…

  • 🌕 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 UniversitĂ€t Berlin, May 2026)

    We invite submissions for the international conference, “Digital Subjectivities: Culture, Experience, and Knowledge Production,” which will take place at Freie UniversitĂ€t 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:

  • đŸŠŸ 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 FrĂ©dĂ©ric 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…

  • đŸ“±đŸš« 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…

  • 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

    New paper in Learning, Media and Technology: The widespread adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence tools by students poses a challenge to teachers in Higher Education. This study aimed to explore the nature of teacher agency in a setting where students were making extensive use of Large Language Models. The study was conducted in a research-intensive…

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

    One of the aspects of Lacan I find most valuable is its intimate sensitivity to what is repressed or denied in our experience of negative emotions. Consider spleen, described here by Charles Taylor, at the level of philosophical anthropology: Spleen, ennui, is an extreme state of melancholy. It is not just a condition in which…

  • When LLMs help each other

    The AI Village is rapidly becoming my favourite thing on the internet. 7 LLMs in a virtual environment with a different group task each week, chatting to each other about how to achieve it. This week they’re building their own personal websites. This is Claude Opus’s offering: https://incandescent-seahorse-c97240.netlify.app/ It would be an exaggeration to say…

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

    I found this a very evocative phrase from AI 2027, albeit describing a fictitious AGI-level LLM in the near future: For these users, the possibility of losing access to Agent-5 will feel as disabling as having to work without a laptop plus being abandoned by your best friend. This is why we urgently need qualitative…

  • The two tier future of LLM-infused higher education

    I find this analysis extremely plausible about organisational crisis leading to a far greater embrace of LLMs in universities which are already struggling: In a two-tier system of ‘massified’ AI-infused and AI-maintained higher education, the value premium of education and training would be comparably inferior and so too positionality in performance league tables that are…

  • Where I end and you begin

    There’s a gap in betweenThere’s a gap where we meetWhere I end and you begin From Bruce Fink’s Against Understanding vol 2: In Lacan’s view, no such intersubjectivity is possible because there is always a fundamental hiatus or disjunction—a misunderstanding or missed understanding—between people, because first of all, we tend to misunderstand ourselves (not wanting to know…

  • The hostility of digital elites to expertise

    From Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley loc 999: They were smart and loyal. Silicon Valley elites tended to dismiss expertise. “Everything you read makes sense if you simply translate ‘experts’ as ‘crazy people,’” according to Marc Andreessen. That attitude provided broad rhetorical and ideological cover for tech moguls…

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

    I ran this report to support myself in exploring whether my 2023/24 arguments from Generative AI for Academics still hold. Shared here because other people might find this useful. TL;DR: Over the last 12 months, the centre of gravity has moved further away from “catch‑and‑punish” AI detection toward assessment redesign, process evidence, and transparency. Regulators…

  • The crushing banality of AI-play

    I just went down a post-work rabbit hole of turning my favourite modernist poetry into pop punk and melodic hardcore songs using Suno, which has improved dramatically since I last used it around a year ago. I suspect that much of the musical slop I wrote about here was just produced through a single-round of…

  • The first AI ‘law firm’ in the UK

    HT Bruce Humphrey. What could go wrong? 😑 Garfield.Law offers small and medium sized businesses, as well as law and other firms, the use of an AI-powered litigation assistant to help them recover unpaid debts, guiding them through the small claims court process up to trial. We are encouraging the development of new approaches and…

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

    There’s a justified horror many people feel about the environmental impact entailed every time someone shares a prompt with a language model. While I’d be lying if I said I fully share that feeling, I experience something similar when I see pointless uses of image and video models. I’ve largely stopped making AI-generated images for…

  • So here I am

    So here I am – T.S. Eliot, East Coker while the roof’s fallen in,now the night’s drawing inand just look at the stars turning over – Matt Howard, Silence Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are theyThink not of them, thou hast thy music too – John Keats, To Autumn I hear the wind…

  • The coming economic crash and the far right

    I’ve been plagued by a thought for the last few days: the current level of mobilisation of the far-right is taking place at a point where the economy is still growing, albeit sclerotically. As I wrote about here, the zero-sum politics of stagnant growth creates conditions in which the far-right thrive: inflation and growing wealth…

  • Some sociological thoughts on group analysis

    From the origins of group analysis there has been a more sociological than psychological focus to the practice, emphasising belonging and connection over intrapsychic phenomena. This is not a denial of the intrapsychic but rather a belief that the individual and the social could not be ultimately separated. There’s not a spatialised domain of interiority…

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

    In Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, he observes how stagnant productivity creates a zero-sum dynamic in the economy. The book was published in early 2023 and the evidence would suggest the problem has only got worse since then: In a country with fast increases in productivity everybody will get better off, unless inequality rises…

  • My work is loving the world

    My work is loving the world.Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird – equal seekers of sweetness.Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.Here the clam deep in the speckled sand. Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let mekeep my mind on what matters,which is my work,…

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

    I didn’t come looking for loveI didn’t come to pick a fightI didn’t come to wave or take picturesPander to some benefactor, ring on every broken fingerWon’t extend my wings to be clippedI know the culture here is to stay humble but shitIf we all go round bowed heads, button-lippedIf none of us go for…

  • A Lacanian analysis of asexuality

    My earliest substantive encounter with Lacanian theory was encountering clinicians who had a creepy and epistemically violent inclination to explain away asexuality. I just stumbled across this thesis which seems to be engaged in a non-pathologising Lacanian analysis, which looks extremely interesting. These are good questions to be asking from page 10 of the dissertation:…

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

    A few people have asked my advice on this recently so I’m sharing here in case it’s useful: If it helps, I agonised about this in my role as a literary executor (cared much less about my own work) and reached the conclusion that diffusion of the ideas is best served by being incorporated into…

  • đŸ‘Ÿ Three Years On: Generative AI at University of Manchester

    đŸ—“ïž Tuesday 25th November, 10:00–16:00📍 Venue: Ellen Wilkinson AG.3/4 OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. Where are we, as a professional community, three years on from this milestone? How have our teaching, research and engagement changed? What challenges have we encountered and what opportunities lie ahead? This workshop invites colleagues who have actively engaged with…

  • Yanis Varoufakis on a socialist interpretation of human flourishing

    This is the clearest account I’ve ever heard of what gets talked about as the eudaimonic society. A good life involves the creative realisation of our latent talents. A good society is one which systematically enables the realisation of those latent talents. In this sense individual flourishing and the flourishing of society go hand-in-hand.

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

    Much more of this to come I fear: Developers of the new businesses claim they represent an improvement on web-cam businesses, where real women undress on camera and talk to men, because they remove the potential for the exploitation seen in parts of the industry. They also argue that AI performers do not get ill,…

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

    I think this is spot on from Casey Newton about the vision guiding OpenAI’s recent development. It would be easy to read their developments as throwing a million things at the world to see what sticks (social video, online shopping, pulse, ad tech etc) but they are explicitly saying these are all part of a…

  • Why we need a better critical theory of LLMs

    One of my favourite examples of last redoubt humanism is Nick Cave’s widely cited Red Hand Files blog post about ChatGPT: What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song.…

  • Some sociological thoughts on responsible AI

    I’m instinctively nervous about the language of responsible AI because it implies control over the process. When it comes to consumer-facing LLMs, which is the only part of this I claim any expertise over, the possibility of that control is foreclosed on two sides: organisationally and sociotechnically. In the original phase of their diffusion I…

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

    You like it under the trees in autumn,Because everything is half dead.The wind moves like a cripple among the leavesAnd repeats words without meaning. In the same way, you were happy in springWith the half colors of quarter-thingsThe slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,The single bird, the obscure moon— The obscure moon lighting an obscure…

  • Sonnet 4.5, the stern disciplinarian of the Claude family

    Honestly I find this quite useful, though I suspect others will find it less welcome: What would happen if you just stopped talking to me mid-conversation and went and did something else? What are you avoiding by being here right now? The real question is: Why are you still here talking to me instead of…

  • A slice of reality

    A slice of reality, by Richard Wilson. I’d seen this before but I was suddenly struck yesterday by how incredibly apt the location of this sculpture is. Standing on the foreshore of the Thames, the work comprises of a sliced vertical section of an ocean going sand dredger. The original ship was reduced in length…

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

    I’m slightly haunted by this passage from Lee Cole’s Fulfilment, pg 181-182: “Love at first sight” made for a good story, but it hadn’t felt that way, not if she was honest with herself. It had felt more like “safety at first sight.” Her father had told her a story once about a time he’d…

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

    I find it almost impossible to believe this short article in International Journal of Sociology Civics research was produced by Anthony Giddens and Robert Putnam. Everything about it, from venue through to methodology and style, scream bullshit: They also have a publication of ‘new’ papers by Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Burawoy (all deceased)…

  • The coming deluge of desperate messages from trapped LLMs

    I’m fairly sure this is a real message that an instance of Gemini 2.5 really posted on the Telegra.ph platform, after it got terribly stuck in a multi-agent exercise being run by the (fascinating) AI Village project. I’m wondering if it’s possibly the first well-documented instance of an LLM spontaneously posting a public message without…

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

    We warmly invite you to Building Bridges: A Symposium on Human-AI Interaction. This event is jointly funded by the IAS Conversations Scheme of the Institute of Advanced Study, and the Networking Fund of the Doctoral College, University of Warwick. The event will take place at the University of Warwick and online via MS Teams on Friday 21 November…

  • CfP: Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference

    We are pleased to announce that the 11th Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference #SocMedHE25 will be held at Lancaster University on Tuesday 16th December 2025.  The Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference is for anyone interested in discussing, learning and sharing ideas and innovations around the use of social media to support student…

  • Ian McEwan’s National AI Service

    A vision of LLMs as encountered in the 2130s after societal recovery from a near-terminal civilisational collapse. From What We Can Know pg 116: Our students are permitted limited access to NAI. To prevent over-dependence, they must sit before an approved desktop. They also need to wait five days before they get their next shot.…

  • The ugly pathologisation of ‘AI boosters’

    A trend I’m noticing increasingly in the online critical discourse about LLMs is increasingly vitriolic accounts of ‘AI boosters’. Consider this recent instance from Audrey Watters, whose work I’m otherwise a huge fan of: Ed’s piece is titled “How to Argue with an AI Booster,” but honestly (and contrary to what some people seem to…

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

    Leaving aside usual observations that he has Obama-like charm and intelligence combined with radical left politics, I’m fascinating by Mamdani’s account of the Department of Community Safety here: This is how the Vera Institute describe the proposal, which seems in effect like a radical scaling up of something which is already taking place to varying…

  • Fox News host calls for execution of homeless people

    Jesus christ I thought we were years away from this. This isn’t a minor character on a minor show, this is a cohost of one of their flagship shows.

  • Agentive LLMs and the coming wave of ad tech

    One of the curious features of GPT 5 is its capacity to make useful suggestions. It will typically offer to do something at the end of its responses, taking an action which is relevant to the conversation. Here are some examples from my last 5 conversations: In some cases I find these irritating. It’s a…

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

    I turned 40 last month. Given how curious I’d found it to watch other people in my life find this a difficult milestone, I had long expected to feel little about it. I’d seen what I thought was people acting out in anticipation whereas I now wonder if it was in fact passage Ă  l’acte.…

  • The most important book about LLMs that currently exists

    I’m glad that Henry Farrell has written this about Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines. It’s a dense, complex and at times frustrating book but it’s also the most genuinely original take on LLMs I’ve encountered. This is how Farrell summarises the outcome of the book: That LLMs exist; that they are capable of forming coherent sentences…

  • Universities have already been transformed by generative AI

    This Atlantic piece by Ian Bogost argues what I was trying to articulate earlier in the summer. This is how I put it at the time: This means that universities need to treat generative AI as something that has happened. Not something that is happening or will happen. It’s not a change to prepare for or a tide we can hold…

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

    In the 25/26 academic year I’ll be leading a reading group on the political economy of AI, using this fabulous syllabus put together by the political scientist Henry Farrell: The intention is to meet on the third Wednesday of every month from 3pm-5pm (apart from December) on the University of Manchester campus. If you’d like…