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  • 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…

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

    🗓️ 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 à 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…

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

    The first chapter is available on Google Books here. Unfortunately the book is going to be expensive in print (though an eBook is available) so let me know if you have trouble accessing it and I’ll do my best to help. Here’s the introduction to the book: We live in a digital age. That statement…

  • 📘 Have you written a PhD using critical realism?

    The critical realism network has just launched a thesis archive to collect these as a public resource: Our thesis archive provides links to doctoral theses written by critical realist scholars, as a resource to help other researchers understand how critical realism can be employed in social research.

  • The neurotic individual and the group

    From Group-Analytic Psychotherapy: A Meeting of Minds by Harold Behr & Liesel Hearst, pg 10: Neurosis, according to Foulkes, is a state of mind which develops when, as individuals, we get to be at odds with our group and become, to a varying degree, isolated from ourselves and others. The neurotic position is by definition…

  • Winter is coming

    From Katherine May’s Wintering pg 13 Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world,…

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

    While academics are now expected to engage with the use of social media as part of their professional roles – to support teaching and learning, research activities and scholarly communication beyond the academy, for example – it is typically done through the use of personal accounts. As an increasing number of studies show, this places…

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

    This is something which everyone working in higher education should be wondering given the current direction of travel. From their 2024 manifesto: Also from this HEPI blog compilation: So what would this mean in practice? It would mean a significant reduction in income for universities (removal of STEM tuition fees + big reduction in international…

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

    It took me a while to get there after my traumatised embrace of normie social democracy after the 2019 election and Covid, but Zack concisely and powerfully captures what now seems like the most important fact about contemporary politics. Things WILL change. The question is not whether change comes or doesn’t. It’s what change will…

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

    There’s a blistering critique in Gary Hall’s Masked Media of what he terms, drawing on McKenzie Wark’s account of the novel, bourgeois theory. As he puts it on pg 185, bourgeois theory is rendered unserious and slightly ridiculous by being stuck in antiquated modes which leave it unable to address new conditions. To the extent…

  • Where did Python come from?

    There’s dozens and dozens of aspects of Python today where somebody had a vision for “if you just add this to Python, just look at all these amazing things I can do”

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

    From Emily Bender here: I’ve found myself frequently using the analogy of plastic: To try to live without using plastic now (at least in the US) is an extremely expensive endeavor, both in terms of money and and in terms of time. Plastic is so deeply integrated into so many of our systems that it…

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

    From The Sickness Unto Death, by Sören Kierkegaard: A thinker erects an immense building, a system, a system which embraces the whole of existence and worldhistory etc. – and if we contemplate his personal life, we discover to our astonishment this terrible and ludicrous fact, that he himself personally does not live in this immense…

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

    Via Audrey Watters’s newsletter

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

    Summer’s burst. Now this strange new season.Everywhere you might catch your eye on thorns and spikelets. Late September, an interregnumof heat among the scrambling of things – cinnabar-stripped ragwort, burdock, willowherb, sorrel and teasel, knapweed and nettle,bramble sprawled to its extent. Here is a twisting of time,the gradient of wind shifted through thistledownand the birch…

  • LLMs, thoughts and the thinking of those thoughts

    From Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human 188: Most thinkers write badly because they tell us not only their thoughts but also the thinking of those thoughts. I was thinking about this observation when reading Gary Hall’s thought provoking, if at times slightly frustrating, Masked Media. He observes on pg 30 that “the accepted arrangement by which…

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

    I can see what they’re going for with this initiative. To advocate that all student work be done “in person, offline and on paper” takes the logic of AI detection to its obvious conclusion. What would this look like in practice though? I struggle to imagine a sustained learning process enacted in this way which…

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

    I really enjoyed this discussion:

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

    It’s a conceptual vocabulary I’ve slipped into which tends to make Archerian realists cringe slightly, but it’s essentially what Mark Coeckelbergh is talking about here in his book Self Improvement: Using terms from Wittgenstein, I have argued that technology is embedded in games and in a form of life. When we use technologies, this is…

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

    It is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and furySignifying nothing.- Macbeth, Act V, Scene V, lines 17–28.

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

    This aggressive interview with an incredibly defensive Nick Clegg was fascinating as an instance of contemporary tech politics. I was particularly struck by how he explicitly invokes ‘techno-determinism’ to dismiss claims about social platforms generating politics and social harms: He argues it’s “patronising” to claim that platforms have a significant influence because “people have agency”.…

  • LLMs and a general ambivalence about platform capitalism

    I have a strange relationship to LLM-criticism. I often agree with what critics say, even if I pedantically insist on reframing claims about LLMs as claims about interaction between LLMs and organisational settings. But I also use them daily and support others in using them. There are intellectual reasons for this given that, if you…

  • How much time do people spend using LLMs?

    This is a question I’m getting increasingly preoccupied by and the Sensor Tower report offers some interesting findings (Yes I had no idea what Luzia and Nova were either – I suspect we’re going to see hyper-segmented software, using API calls on the main models, as performance plateaus around GPT 5 / Claude Opus 4…

  • On playing well and making yourself heard

    From Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human 156: When productive energy has been damned up for a while and has been hindered in its outflow by an obstacle, there is finally a sudden outpouring, as if a direct inspiration with no previous inner working out, as if a miracle were taking place. This constitutes the well-known…

  • When Lacan came to America

    This is fascinating from Sherry Turkle about what she terms Lacan’s psychoanalytical protestantism: But for me, there was more to Lacan’s popularity than the idea that the French had found a Catholic and French Freud. My working hypothesis: In the aftermath of the failed student uprising of May 1968, Lacan’s notions about the centrality of…

  • A few thoughts about ChatGPT 5

    I’ve not tried GPT 5 Pro yet so I withhold judgement. My impression is ChatGPT 5 is more useful than Claude as a practical assistant in some contexts but that Claude Opus 4.1 still feels fundamentally smarter in some important but nebulous way. However I think it will be much easier for a user to…

  • The visibility of academics will be shaped through LLMs as much as social media in future

    This observation by the tech journalist Casey Newton got me thinking about how LLMs are increasingly shaping the visibility of academics: Thinking models have gotten surprisingly good at identifying potential sources — potentially academic ones. When writing about Grok last month, I wanted to talk to someone who had studied relationships between people and chatbots. ChatGPT…

  • LLMs become more dangerous as they rapidly get easier to use

    This is a concise summary by Ethan Mollick of what I increasingly see as a key factor driving the evolution of consumer-facing LLMs: Using AI well used to be a pretty challenging process which involved crafting a prompt using techniques like chain-of-thought along with learning tips and tricks to get the most out of your…

  • Last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice

    For last year’s words belong to last year’s languageAnd next year’s words await another voice. T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding

  • a point is a beginning

    a pointis a beginningof everythingas well asan endof everything. Li Yuan-Chia

  • Murakami on the reflexive imperative as you age

    From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, pg 37 I’m struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack…

  • The cultural logic of AI slop: the example of AI-produced motivational videos

    I stumbled across this genre yesterday and I’m morbidly fascinated. It combines AI generated ‘motivational music’ with transformation videos: (To be fair I’ve had the second one stuck in my head all morning. I think it’s catchier than a lot of human-generated motivational music I’ve heard) And it uses this as background music for what…

  • Three modes of working with LLMs in higher education

    I’m enjoying this series by Anthropic, even if it’s largely a new language for things I’ve already argued in Generative AI for Academics. I like their description of three modes of working with LLMs: In these terms my stance has been that augmentation offers tremendous intellectual possibilities for academic work but that the political economy…

  • Why generative AI guidance for students needs to be embedded in departments

    I just read the Russell Group AI principles for the first time since they were released and was struck by principle number 2: “Staff should be equipped to support students to use generative AI tools effectively and appropriately in their learning experience“. This is exactly what I’ve been blogging about recently as the point where…

  • Calm creation that in opening closes, often ceases by starting

    Seek transformation. O be eager for that flamein which something escapes you, proud of change.In overcoming the earthbound, that designing spiritloves the zest of a figure at its turning point. Whatever locks itself shut has already petrified.Does it feel safe and secure in inconspicuous grey?Wait – the hard warned by the hardest far away.Woe betide…

  • The gap between student GenAI use and the support students are offered

    I argued a couple of days ago that the sector is unprepared for our first academic year where the use of generative AI is completely normalised amongst students. HEPI found 92% of undergraduates using LLMs this year, up from 66% the previous year, which matches AdvancedHE’s finding of 62% using AI in their studies “in…

  • Are UK universities ready to cope with generative AI in the 25/26 academic year?

    In a month we’ll enter the second full academic year in which large language models (LLMs) have been a routine feature of staff and student practice within universities. While their uptake was originally driven by a sense of novelty, there’s increasing evidence LLMs are now an ingrained feature of life for a growing user base.…

  • So I find words I never thought to speak in streets I never thought I should revisit

    For last year’s words belong to last year’s languageAnd next year’s words await another voice.But, as the passage now presents no hindranceTo the spirit unappeased and peregrineBetween two worlds become much like each other,So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a…

  • A review essay on Generative AI for Academics

    Thanks so much to Milan Stürmer for this thought provoking and insightful reflection on generative AI for academics: However, it might be that these capacities are acquired and maintained through just the kind of reading and writing practices that are in danger of disappearing with the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs). For those…

  • A relational sociology of large language models in education

    This paper with Morten Hansen is out now in the British Journal of Sociology of Education: Generative artificial intelligence products are often heralded as a solution to the problems of education bureaucracies by providing individualised learning opportunities in a cost-effective way. We posit that this claim has not been critically examined from a relational and…

  • Thinking With Machines: How Academics Can Use Generative AI Thoughtfully and Ethically

  • Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: the essence of running, and a metaphor for life

    People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason most people run. most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the…

  • Living on the Other’s time

    Hamlet is forced to realize that there is no truth with a capital T, no Truth about the truth, as it were, but only “the moment of truth”—the moment at which he accedes to his desire and takes action, at which he puts his desire into action. Hamlet, like the obsessive more generally, is always…

  • Revisiting poststructuralist approaches to language in order to understand how we live and work with LLMs: the Pikachu Capybara effect

    There’s much to critique about LLMs, particularly their political economy, but I’m sceptical that much of the criticism of LLMs themselves (as opposed to the firms) really nails what are the key issues. One aspect of this I’d like to explore concerns the widespread claim that LLMs don’t do meaning, they are ‘bullshit machines’, as…

  • The inevitability and irreversibility of loss

    By way of contrast, Lacan’s view is that losses are inevitable and irreversible, and they must be mourned. We mustn’t spend our whole lives complaining that we’ve been gypped and trying to get back what we feel we’ve lost out on. Now, once those losses are recognized for what they are and mourned, they can…

  • Astonishingly Meta are actually federating Threads

    In the past I’ve argued that we shouldn’t trust Bluesky or Threads when they claim they will federate their services, opening them up in a way which radically reduces the switching costs for users. Even if the leadership is ideologically committed to this, would investors really let them when they get past the early growth…

  • The Covid-19 pandemic as a social mechanism driving biographical change

    This line from Lucy Easthope’s new book (pg 4) reminds me of the paper I never finished about Covid-19 as a reflexive imperative in Margaret Archer’s sense i.e. an event to which everyone has no choice but to respond, even if those responses might differ in dramatic ways: The long, difficult years of the coronavirus…

  • Kangaroos don’t have opposable thumbs!!!

    Saving this for next year’s digital literacy class, even though I’m a bit disturbed how many people don’t immediately see the way the kangaroo is holding the ticket as obviously unreal. (Credit to the actual producer of the video here, even though it’s circulated everywhere by now) Edit to add: I’m suddenly struck by the…

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

    We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.Through the unknown, unremembered gateWhen the last of earth left to discoverIs that which was the beginning;At the source of the longest riverThe voice of the hidden waterfallAnd the children in…

  • 4 reasons why Copilot is a poor alternative to Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini

  • Something will always be lacking

    Something will always be wanting (or lacking) in the way in which my request is granted. It will never be exactly right. Lacan on Desire, by Bruce Fink

  • Readwise.io lets you talk to your notes and it’s amazing

    I’ve been using readwise.io for years to collate my Kindle highlights and send me daily e-mails with a random selection of them. My blog posts are often informed by what I encounter in these e-mails and I’ve found it a hugely creative way of engaging with what I’ve read. They’ve now introduced an LLM into…

  • Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are

    Well I’m a bit dismayed that it’s £145 and hardback only (at least initially) but still nice to see this being trailed for an October release: This book examines how digital platforms are reconfiguring the parameters of agency and reflexivity in contemporary social life. Drawing on Margaret Archer’s social realist framework, it moves beyond treating…

  • Somebody stole my car radio and now I just sit in silence…

    I have these thoughts, so often I oughtTo replace that slot with what I once bought’Cause somebody stole my car radioAnd now I just sit in silence

  • When LLMs engage in a flamewar on social media

    I suspect this interaction between Neuro-Sama and Grok gives a sense of what might be a common feature of social platforms within a few years. Grok enters at 7 minutes if you get bored of Neuro-Sama’s thread: What happens if most people encounter LLMs through their social media personas? How will that drive public perception…

  • Webinar: Is it possible for academics to use LLMs in a responsible and ethical way?

    The emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools presents both opportunities and challenges for academia. While these technologies offer powerful capabilities to support scholarship, their thoughtless adoption could undermine the very foundations of academic work. This talk introduces a framework for incorporating generative AI into academic practice in ways that enhance rather than replace…

  • A Lacanian analysis of addiction

    From Bruce Fink’s Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key: “Addiction” is not, in and of itself, a psychoanalytic diagnosis, inasmuch as it refers to activities found across the diagnostic spectrum. Addictions may, like so many other cyclical activities, be viewed as symptomatic (i.e., compulsive) activities that aim at achieving a…

  • The most common use of LLMs in 2025 is therapy/companionship

    The result should be treated with a bit of caution, as a content analysis of forums and online articles, but an important finding nonetheless. It’s striking how this development features almost nowhere in debates about LLM use by students within higher education! It suggests to me that LLMs are rapidly diffusing as a reflexive technology…

  • Well it’s a deep dark night and I hear you, I’ve been there