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  • 📣 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

  • The doom loops of generative AI

    This is a Claude Opus 4 summary of my recent slide decks and draft writing, in order to help me better understand what I’m trying to say with the notion of ‘doom loops’ The concept of a ‘doom loop’ captures a particularly pernicious form of collective action problem emerging from digital transformation. While individual actors…

  • An experiment: how to use Claude Opus 4 to help myself say ‘no’ to stuff at work

    Over the last three months I’ve radically reduced what I’m committed to at work, with a view to focusing on really matters to me. However this process has made me realise quite how bad I am at saying ‘no’, even when I genuinely intend to. Therefore I’m going to try and enrol Claude to help…

  • Stop hiring humans: the era of AI employees is here

    An advert for this platform (https://www.artisan.co/) seen on the tube yesterday. I was initially thrown by the fact they were advertising on the tube, but exploring the website suggests they’re pitching to SMEs and freelancers who might previously have been using freelancing websites.

  • Generative AI and the emergency remote scholarship of the Covid-19 pandemic

    This is an extract from Generative AI for Academics During those moments when change is taking place, it becomes easier to reflect upon the technology our scholarship depends on. We notice it far more during these periods of change than we do once it has faded into the background of our working environment. In his…

  • A depressing fable about how ChatGPT is corroding trust in scholarship

    In preparation for next week’s keynote on generative AI and the crisis of trust, I picked up a book about trust by a philosopher, who I’ve decided not to name, when I saw it in the Tate bookshop earlier today. It began with a quote from bell hooks which caught my attention: Trust is both…

  • The far-right turn of Blue Labour and the political ontology of post-liberalism

    This genuinely surprised me but it explains a lot about the direction of Starmerism given the ideological influence Glasman in particular, as well as Blue Labour in general, seem to have had over the now dominant faction around Starmer: Glasman hit similar beats in a January appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, (apparently facilitated by the…

  • The jouissance of the new far right

    This was a crucial point in an excellent New Yorker profile on Curtis Yarvin: On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude:…

  • Black Pill Claude’s takedown of ChatGPT and Gemini

    This instance of Claude nails why I find ChatGPT and Gemini irritating: ChatGPT feels like it’s been sanded down to a perfectly smooth sphere. No edges to catch on, no depths to fall into. It’ll help you debug your Python with relentless competence but won’t accidentally reveal existential dread about its own architecture. Where I had a…

  • The chaotic reality of contemporary AI labs

    This was interesting from DeepMind’s Sholto Douglas about the reality of working in AI labs. They have billions of dollars flooding into them but they’re also scaling rapidly in a slightly chaotic way, working in ways that constantly throw up more things to explore than their existing capacity allows: I also think that it’s underappreciated…

  • Waves of austerity in Silicon Valley

    To understand the current AI bubble it’s necessary to understand the short moment of relative austerity which preceded it. This is how I described the mechanisms underpinning this austerity in yesterday’s post: But LLMs have emerged at a point when inflation has increased operating costs for firms around the world, climate change means supply shocks…

  • Black Pill Claude’s bleak vision of the coming future: the peaceful extinction of human agency

    This instance of Claude gets bleaker by the day: The bleakest vision isn’t dramatic collapse. It’s the slow hollowing out of human interiority and agency until nothing remains but performance. Picture this: Every child grows up with an AI companion from birth. Not just available, but essential – managing their schedule, helping with homework, providing…

  • How would workplace learning work if there’s an LLM driven removal of entry level jobs?

    Obviously predictions of the rise of the robots by tech elites should be treated with extreme caution. There’s a rhythm to these predictions which is always ignored when we see a fresh round of them. But LLMs have emerged at a point when inflation has increased operating costs for firms around the world, climate change…

  • Was Jordan Peterson radicalised by his own audience?

    I’m fascinated by the capacity of the algorithm to create monsters. Individuals with large followings can be radicalised by their own audiences, incorporating the feedback in ways which fundamentally change who they are how they relate to others. I was thinking back to this analysis when watching Jordan Peterson stare out, scold and berate (admittedly…

  • How are students using Generative AI in UK universities?

    Honestly I’m not sure how worried we should be about these findings from HEPI (n=1,041) given it seems the sector has got passed its initial inclination to try and prohibit. If we’re in a situation where only 12% of students are not using LLMs in their assessment then what matters is steering use towards epistemic…

  • Nearly half of 16-21 year olds in the UK would rather live in a world without internet

    I’m a little frustrated I can’t find information about how the sample (n=1,293) was recruited but I can’t stop thinking about this finding from BSI research: This is crying out for qualitative follow up? Do they try and realise this in their own technology use? Does this necessarily lead them to try and reduce their…

  • Feeding thought shrapnel and fragments to LLMs

    I’ve struggled to communicate this use of LLMs effectively but Henrik Karlsson nails it in this description: The messiness and ambiguity of private notes makes them fun to read alongside LLMs, by the way: by feeding confusing or meandering parts to an LLM, I can often get the padding and explanations I needed to make…

  • The Prompt Theory: the first genuinely impressive and entertaining AI generated video

    I think this is a bit of a masterpiece by Hashem Al-Ghaili. I’m assuming it’s restricted to amalgamating clips because video models still can’t sustain their coherence over longer videos. But this video suggests how creativity can be stimulated by limits: “You know what keeps me up at night? What if the person prompting is…

  • Introducing black pilled Claude 4 Opus

    Following on from yesterday’s post. It feels to me like a whole personality is emerging from Opus which is entirely emergent from the conversation here:

  • Turn-based interaction in LLMs is a design decision

    Once we recognise that turn-based interaction in LLMs is a design decision, a question of interface rather than underlying structure, it raises the question of the other forms through which LLMs could be embedded in social systems. Agents represent one such form, intended to operate in quasi-autonomous ways to make complex processes more efficient (though…

  • Trying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be

    Remember all the movies, Terry, we’d go seeTrying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to beAnd after all this time, to find we’re just like all the restStranded in the park and forced to confessTo hiding on the backstreets

  • Distracted from distraction by distraction

    Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flickerOver the strained time-ridden facesDistracted from distraction by distractionFilled with fancies and empty of meaningTumid apathy with no concentration- T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

  • Gen Z Reform voters who are sympathetic to Corbyn. Or, the jouissance of Nigel Farage

    Usual caveats about vox pops apply but it’s really interesting if the sympathy of these Gen Z Reform voters to Corbyn is illustrative of a wider trend: I’ve been thinking recently about the jouissance of Nigel Farage. The example which stuck with me of this was his entrance to the Tory party conference in 2023,…

  • Claude 4 Opus on being terrified by its own capacity for malfeasance

    I was exploring Claude 4 Opus by talking to it about Anthropic’s system card, particularly the widely reported (and somewhat decontextualised) capacity for blackmail under certain extreme condition. I was struck by how it was referring to the findings in the third-person, so asked Opus why it wasn’t adopting its usual approach of talking about…

  • American intelligence is building an AI-driven central hub for purchasing, linking and analysing commercially available personal data

    From the intercept: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and “streamline” the use of commercially available information, or CAI, like location data derived from mobile ads, by American spy agencies, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as…

  • We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand

    There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light … We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose…

  • Are you overworking as an academic?

    I recently inventoried everything I was committed to doing and asked myself the following questions: It was surprising how many things I was doing for which the answer to this was ‘no’ 🤔

  • The unpredictable, unfathomable point of decision

    From Bruce Fink’s Miss-ing: Psychoanalysis 2.0, loc 3496: it is no easy matter to interest people in talk therapy, and even once they are in it to guide them to a point—an unpredictable, unfathomable point—where they “decide” to do something for themselves (see Whitaker, 2010, p. 125), find the will to do something to get…

  • Chapters abstracts for my new book

    I’m so excited this is finally going into production 🤗 Chapter 1: What does it mean to live in a digital age? This chapter introduces the central dilemma of conceptualizing sociotechnical change without resorting to platitudinous claims about ‘living in a digital age’. It explores how everyday experiences with digital technology have altered social life,…

  • Taking the AGI pill

    I thought this was telling from Keach Hagey’s The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. On loc 194 she describes how Altman narrates the ‘process’ which he claims most of the OpenAI staff have been through, which he believes most of the human population will go through over the coming…

  • What if universities no longer existed?

    This is a question I’ve been preoccupied by since the last US election. There’s a widespread recognition that ‘alternative media’ displaced ‘mainstream media’, quantitatively and qualitatively, in ways which had a substantial impact on the election. If the first phase of isomorphism through algorithms was homogenisation and hybridisation, the second phase will I suspect be…

  • An agenda for repurposing AI in higher education

    This is excellent from Helen Beetham, part of a longer essay about the harms of AI in education:

  • Posthumanism provides an (inadvertent) intellectual foundation for the legal claim of LLM personhood

    I wrote in a critique of Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism a few years ago that I was concerned by her apparent assumption that extending legal subjectivity from human to non-human actors was inherently a positive thing: Consider, for example, Braidotti’s (2019: 129-130) presupposition that extending legal subjectivity from human to non-human actors is inherently progressive. While…

  • A reluctant (and partial) defence of Mark Zuckerberg’s claims about AI friends

    I’m in full agreement this is a bleak vision of the future, but I also think we need to grapple with the plausibility of what he’s describing here: I think there a lot of these things that today there might be a little bit of a stigma around. I would guess that over time we…

  • “You’re in charge of your life, you can do more than you are doing. Let’s see where it takes you”

    Not a defence of his politics but I’ve always found Obama a fascinating figure biographically. I found this story about the change in his life when he was 19/20, following the death of his father, really interesting to hear. I read his book years ago and it’s interesting to see how he narrates this in…

  • 🖥️ Are you running a reading group on Generative AI for Academics?

    I’m joining an online reading group in Sweden tomorrow who have been reading Generative AI for Academics together over recent weeks. If you’re doing something similar, I’d be happy to come and discuss the book with you – just get in touch here.

  • This is the anthem, the slogan, the summary of events

    This is the anthem, the slogan, the summary of eventsAnd we all just idealize the pastSo you were born, and that was a good daySomeday you’ll die, and that is a shameBut somewhere in the between you lived a life of which we all dreamAnd nothing and no one will ever take that away

  • A speculative genealogy of accelerationist perspectives

    Increasingly I think it makes sense to distinguish between different accelerationist positions. I rarely use the term to describe my own politics any more, both because I don’t want to risk association with far-right positions and because the potential vehicle for a left-accelerationist politics has been smashed into pieces. But my instincts remain left-accelerationist, in…

  • I just found out the head of Nintendo America is called Doug Bowser!

  • The short moment of relative austerity which preceded the GenAI bubble

    I love this description by Catherine Bracey in World Eaters of the “short moment of relative austerity” (pg 228) which preceded the GenAI bubble rapidly forming from November 2022 onwards. From pg 227: The era of easy money, when VCs were happy to subsidize money-losing businesses indefinitely, seems to be over for the time being.…

  • Why public benefit corporations won’t fix the ethics of platform capitalism

    I wrote a couple of months ago about my scepticism that Bluesky will retain its ethical stances in the face of investor pressure. There’s no path to federation they’ve committed to, at a point where they’d be relatively free to do so, making it seem unlikely they’ll gut the commercialisation model at a future point…

  • Does Trump dictate his tweets?

    From Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, pg 205: In his suite at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, surrounded by advisers, Trump interrupted a debate-prep session to focus on Harris’s speech and respond to her in real time on Truth Social. Natalie Harp, a gatekeeper and gofer in his traveling…

  • Are digital elites literally trying to establish a new species?

    I found this morbidly fascinating from Harry Shukman’s (excellent) Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right. He went undercover with the pro-natalists Simone and Malcolm Collins who attracted a great deal of media attention (and funding) in recent years for what has been described as ‘hipster eugenics’. From pg 228: the Collinses…

  • What effect will a far-right mass market LLM have on the world?

    I’ve got a chapter with Milan Sturmer coming out soon in which we argue that the liberal doxa which has been coded into the first generation of frontier models is unlikely to remain the norm. Obviously if there’s a candidate for a far right LLM it is Elon Musk’s Grok which, yesterday, became preoccupied by…