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  • The social imaginary of middle class 90s kids

    What was it like to grow up with this ideology, described here by Renata Salecl in On Anxiety (loc 643), particularly for those whose material conditions reflected this fantasy back to them? What are the implications of this for how the ruptures of the 2020s/2030s will play out for a generation who imbibed this message…

  • A list of interesting Generative AI tools I want to explore

    Acoust.io – https://www.acoust.io/ Adorilabs – https://www.adorilabs.com/ AI Cards – https://ai-cards.org/ Arc Browser – https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/03/arc-browsers-new-ai-powered-features Are.na – https://www.are.na/ Bolt – https://bolt.new/ ClickUp – https://clickup.com/ Earkick – https://earkick.com/ Elicit – https://elicit.com/ Hansei – https://hansei.app/ HeyGen – https://www.heygen.com/ Jamworks – https://jamworks.com/ Jupitrr – https://jupitrr.com/ Kagi – https://kagi.com/ Limitless AI – https://www.limitless.ai/ Mem AI – https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mem-ai-notes-search-chat/id1578757028 Mighty Networks –…

  • You’ll need somebody when you come to die

    There’ll be three white horses in a lineThere’ll be three white horses in a lineThere’ll be three white horses when you go that wayYou’ll need somebody when you come to die

  • We need a conceptual framework for LLMs and social visibility

    As a literary executor I promised to maximise diffusion of my mentor’s work to extent I could without damaging its integrity. Now receiving requests from publisher to license training on the books. This certainly aids diffusion by increasing visibility within the model but does it damage integrity? We still lack a conceptual framework for thinking about…

  • The enshittification of enshittification

    I wonder if Cory Doctorow finds the misuse of the concept of ‘enshittification’ as annoying as I increasingly do. It had a precise analytical meaning which is increasingly lost in an idiomatic use which means something ‘gets shit’. The concept concerned HOW this happened rather than THAT it happened. The idiomatic use could be deployed…

  • The coming wave of AI-driven automation in UK higher education

    What could go wrong? 👀 just registered for this event in January This free online event from Wonkhe and Salesforce will explore how AI powered technology can make a tangible impact. We’ll also take a deeper look into the concept of autonomous agents – AI driven tools that can handle complex tasks autonomously. From enabling more personalised…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #150

  • There are a huge number of Generative AI for Academics courses for sale on Udemy

    It would be really interesting to explore who is developing these, how much their framings overlap and what assumptions are being made in them:

  • So you were born and that was a good day, some day you’ll die and that is a shame

  • Interview with Inside Higher Education about AI text books

    From this piece about the controversial UCLA literature textbook: Mark Carrigan, a senior lecturer in education at the University of Manchester who wrote the forthcoming book Generative AI for Academics, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that while the prospect of AI replacing professors isn’t “an immediate threat,” he is concerned “that tasks could be gradually…

  • Music can grip us with the energy of a religious conversion. Once it is heard, one never experiences the world in quite the same way

    From On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy by Simon Critchley, loc 214: [my emphasis] By “music” here, I simply mean the music that you love, popular music, unpopular music, the music that made you feel most alive when you first heard it and which you cherish for a lifetime. And there is more sweet music…

  • “It was the first time in my life where I felt an escape from my head”

    It was the first time in my life where I felt an escape from my head. I felt a reprieve. I felt this like elation. This moment of all of these thoughts in my head are gone. And I’m here with this bottle and no one’s around and I get to be a secret. I…

  • We sell our dreams and our potential to escape through that buzz

    I’ve seen my peoples’ dreams dieI see what they can be deniedAnd “weed’s not a drug” that’s denialGroundhog day life repeat each timeI’ve seen Oxycontin take three livesI grew up with them, we used to chief dimesI’ve seen cocaine bring out the demons insideCheatin’ and lyin’Friendship cease, no peace in the mindStealin’ and takin’ anything…

  • New couples employ basically the same tactics that cults do

    From Wellness by Nathan Hill loc 1689: He says new couples employ basically the same tactics that cults do—they reinforce a collective identity via shared rituals, insider vocabulary, a sense of superiority over the whole outside world—but lack a true cult’s impulse to recruit and brainwash followers. I know it’s intended as satire. And yet……

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #149

  • 🎉 Generative AI for Academics is out next week

    I’m pleased to announce my new book Generative AI for Academics is being published by Sage next week. The book maps how Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping scholarship and argues we need thoughtful approaches before institutional pressures force our hand. Drawing on a year of experimentation, I explore how LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude…

  • Gert Biesta on the three purposes of education

    From Taking Education Seriously: The Ongoing Challenge: With regard to the question of purpose, I have suggested that education actually has three purposes — or, more precisely, three domains of purpose — to attend to. I have referred to these as qualification, socialization, and subjectification. Qualification has to do with education’s task of providing children…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #148

    The least, the softest, lightest, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a breeze, a moment’s glance… All grows silent around him, voices sound farther and farther in the distance … his heart stands still, only his eye lives – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

  • On being realistic with students about platformisation

    I’ve increasingly come to believe that studying educational technology without experiencing its constraints, workarounds and breakdowns is like trying to learn to swim by reading books about water. The lived reality of platforms is filled with minor breakdowns, awkward compromises and institutional constraints which shape how they’re used in practice. Pretending otherwise just perpetuates the…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #147

  • Be aware your Bluesky posts are being scraped for AI training

    From TechCrunch in late November, highlighting a weakness of open architectures which a sprawling and varied critical literature on ‘openness’ had long pointed to: Bluesky might not be training AI systems on user content as other social networks are doing, but there’s little stopping third parties from doing so. Per a report by 404 Media, Daniel van Strien, a machine…

  • Ads and the enshittification of AI

    I disagree with Ed Zitron on a lot but I think this is spot on, with a real risk that OpenAI will enshittify their consumer-facing product before they even really get it working in a way that has broad appeal: OpenAI is reportedly looking at ads as a means to narrow the gap between its revenues…

  • New opportunity for independent critical realist researchers

    Fixed Term Opportunities for Researchers without a Permanent Academic Affiliation: Associate Membership of the Centre for Critical Realism The Centre for Critical Realism (CCR) is a small educational charity that aims to advance the education of the general public and practitioners in the study, research and application of critical realism. Its activities include acting as…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #146

  • Trump’s granddaughter has 500k YouTube followers and is producing videos from SpaceX launches 😬

  • A sociological rather than psychological notion of susceptibility to being drawn into cults

    Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems, by Alexandra Stein loc 2029: For over half a century, then, scholars of totalism from Arendt to Zimbardo have found that there is no personality profile of a potential recruit to a totalist or extremist group. In 2011, a UK government report confirmed yet again…

  • Every time you make a decision you confront your symbolic castration

    From Josh Cohen’s Not Working loc 855: Decisions, after all, involve an inevitable moment of negativity; they intrude brutally into the omniscient fantasy that we can be, do or have whatever we want. From Miss-ing: Psychoanalysis 2.0 by Bruce Fink loc 680-689: the “bedrock of castration,” which we might characterize as follows in Lacan’s terms:   1)…

  • You see a mousetrap, I see free cheese and a fucking challenge

    You see a mousetrap, I see free cheese and a fucking challengeBut you stay quiet for fear of tipping the balanceWhen it’s horses for courses, my horse is distortedI bought it for four quid then forced it through horse shitWe walk through these morbid, remorseless discoursesThen discuss these disgusting new sources

  • We who are your closet friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting as a group

    We Who Are Your Closest Friends, by Phillip Lopate (1943): we who areyour closest friendsfeel the timehas come to tell youthat every Thursdaywe have been meetingas a groupto devise waysto keep youin perpetual uncertaintyfrustrationdiscontent andtortureby neither loving youas much as you wantnor cutting you adriftyour analyst isin on itplus your boyfriendand your ex-husbandand we have…

  • What is the objet petit a for aspiring writers?

    I see so many kids that love being writers more than they love writing From Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life loc 423: The problem that comes up over and over again is that these people want to be published. They kind of want to write, but they really want to…

  • Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises: a dialogue with Claude 3.5 about an incomplete book project

    From Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott loc 240: Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed…

  • The unexpected words and power that a speaker can find in the right audience

    From Peter Elbow’s Writing With Power pg 184: When listeners really want to hear what we have to say, they seem to suck more words out of us. When listeners are bored or distracted, it is hard to talk clearly and well. And even though larger audiences may seem inherently scary, they sometimes serve to…

  • We can’t escape the trap of desire, but we can approach that trap with greater poise

    This extract from Zizek’s Hegel in a Wired Brain captures something crucial about human desire, caught between our satisfactions (what we actually enjoy in a straightforward way) and the overpowering surpluses which we relate to in ambivalent ways (the compulsion to do something which hurts but energises us). From loc 2852: The paradoxical structure of…

  • The dizzying scale of malpractice by behavioural scientists in business schools

    I wrote earlier in the year about the extent of malpractice within behavioural science, particularly in business schools. There’s an incredibly cutting article in the recent Atlantic going deeply into a crisis which is still very much in motion: Business-school psychologists are scholars, but they aren’t shooting for a Nobel Prize. Their research doesn’t typically…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #145

  • Automatic writing with image generators

    I did a lecture earlier this week in which I surprised myself by how vehemently I argued that image and video generators are (mostly) functionally useless. The problem I think is that you can rarely produce exactly what you want through a precise description. I can see you could stock libraries of generic stock images…

  • Generative AI in the charity sector

    This is an interesting example of how the (imagined) productivity gains of generative AI are being institutionalised into workplace expectations. This is a job for a charity, who I support and am not criticising, calling for ChatGPT as part of an advert for a new general manager: The ideal candidate will embrace new technologies like…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #144

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.- The Second Coming, by William Butler…

  • Why spend two minutes trying to tell someone what they meant to you when the platform can write a ‘heartfelt’ message for you?

    I thought this was interesting, if slightly dystopian. Why spend two minutes trying to tell someone what they meant to you when the platform can write a ‘heartfelt’ message for you? This is what it suggested as a ‘heartfelt’ message: As you embark on this new chapter of life, may your days be filled with…

  • Blogging as letting people into your messy studio

    From Peter Elbow’s Writing With Power pg 125: Write for yourself: use freewriting, explore a train of thought, figure out a decision, write yourself out of a depression. You can even dash off pieces for certain audiences on certain occasions when you don’t care how they react. You aren’t giving them a finished product, you…

  • Elon Musk: First Buddy of the United States

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #143

  • What is ChatGPT? An introduction to humanism, transhumanism and posthumanism

    I’m sharing these notes for an upcoming talk in case other people find them interesting: Introduction: My Journey Defining The Three Perspectives: Humanism positions human beings at the center of philosophical and moral concern, emphasizing our unique capacity for reason, creativity and meaning-making. It sees consciousness and self-awareness as distinctly human traits that machines can…

  • The Lacanian understanding of love

    From Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire pg 180: Though love necessarily begins with desire, it doesn’t end there. When one falls in love, one falls for the other’s way of enjoying itself, for the other’s satisfaction with its own form of failure, its satisfaction with the absence of the object that would realize desire. Love…

  • Hannah Arendt on Benjamin’s thought fragments and pearl diving

    From her introduction to Benjamin’s Illuminations: Essays and Reflections: And this thinking, fed by the present, works with the “thought fragments” it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry…

  • Some thoughts about Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism

    I felt this was a really important book but there’s a risk it could be misconstrued. A core element of the argument is far from new: complex socioeconomic forces are prone to coalesce into the figure of enemies who then organise the free-floating anxiety. My reference points for this idea are, in different ways, Arendt,…

  • Ten arguments about scholarly use of LLMs

    Summarised by Claude 3.5 from my knowledge base:

  • bell hooks on the difference between cathexis and love

    From all about love by bell hooks, pg 5-6, reflecting on M Scott Peck’s definition of love as “the wil to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s ‘spiritual growth’”: Affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect,…

  • I think I like it here, so I’m gonna let them forget us

    There’s this one old idea I’m havingStuck in a car wash somewhere and you can’t stop laughingOff the rails and no one’s coming to get usI think I like it here, so I’m gonna let ’em forget us

  • Epidemiological self-consciousness and the suddenly countercultural status of the sovereign individual

    From Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism loc 1222: In the time of the pandemic, we learned to see ourselves as a potential risk to other people, a stance that required personal sacrifices. The sovereign individual became abruptly countercultural. The panicked sense of lost sovereignty resonated with the prevailing sociophobia of the far right, entailed in the…

  • Elon Musk’s social media addiction

  • Elon Musk has not finished building his cultural machine

    Unsettling suggestion that Musk tried to buy Substack last year, with the intention of folding it into Twitter/X: But the New York Times reported yesterday that Elon Musk did attempt to buy Substack last year. Musk also hinted that he would merge it into Twitter and let Best run the combined companies. The Times also reports that Best rejected this offer. And…

  • Liberal conspiracism and the parts of the psyche that media literacy training doesn’t touch

    From Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism loc 1107: If I agree to fantasise about gruesome, erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I’ve been given no good evidence, I am not simply lacking ‘critical skills’ or ‘media literacy’: the fantasy is doing something for me. It is staging something that I want, even if I don’t want…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #142

  • The psuedo-singularity of generative search answers

    Given how transfixed I am by Rings of Power season 2 (so much better than the original) I’ve been asking Perplexity background information about Tolkien lore to address my uncertainty about elements of the show e.g. if Sauron is a spirit then why does he turn into Venom-esque black goo when he dies? There’s no…

  • I talked to somebody again who knows how to help me get better

    You don’t have to remind me so muchHow I disappoint youIt’s just that I talked to somebody againWho knows how to help me get betterUntil then I should just try not to miss anymoreAppointments

  • Current mood in AI generated images #141

  • Why were deep fakes so much less influential in this year’s elections than I expected?

    Earlier on this year I was teaching a course on digital media and information literacy, soon after completing Generative AI for Academics. It was great fun because I was often presenting the students with material I’d only encountered that week, as I explored the implications of GenAI for politics and propaganda. As the course went…

  • Atomised society has stitched itself back together and it’s pretty awful really

    There was this period we talked about a lot of a very rapid atomisation from the late 60s through to the 90s and early 00s. My sense is that the internet has reversed some of that, people have stitched themselves back together in new kinds of ways. That has happened in a context where there…

  • Interview in the Observer about the growth of Bluesky and the decline of Twitter

    I really enjoyed this piece by Siân Boyle about the rapid growth of Bluesky. The numbers involved might not seem huge, until you realise these are predominately regular contributors on who any platform depends. “X has become effectively Truth Social premium,” said Mark Carrigan, author of Social Media for Academics, referring to Trump’s hard-right social media…

  • We are building a ship in a bottle, sitting on Elon Musk’s desk to entertain him when he’s bored and to help him make money

    This was an incredible image from Matthew Remski in this Conspirituality episode, paraphrasing something Matt Christman said in this discussion: In the old days if you wanted to sail somewhere, you had to get together with a group of people with a diverse skill set and you would build a boat. You worked together, you…

  • Was Tony Blair the first effective accelerationist?

    I don’t think it’s quite right as a description but I find it hard not to explore the thought after watching this interview: There’s a similar line of thought in this review by Nathan Pinkoski of Blair’s book on leadership. He describes Blair’s program as a “kind of post-liberal progressive rightism that promises to co-opt…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #140

  • LLMs are rubber ducks that can talk back to you

    My experience of the last two years is that this works every bit as much for conceptual or methodological problems as it does for programming ones:

  • How do you socialise a chatbot? The philosophical training of Anthropic’s Claude

    I found this interview with Anthropic’s Amanda Askell about training Claude fascinating. Her approach involves modelling the position Claude is placed in, as someone talking to millions of people around the world, raising the question of the ethical and epistemic virtues you would like someone in that position to enact. I thought it was particularly…

  • A journalist has published GenAI hallucinations about my research in an article

    This article from MaisPB invokes my entirely hallucinated research about digital exhaustion in smart cities. I struggle to see an explanation for such a weirdly plausible yet entirely untrue set of claims other than hallucination: Hyperconnectivity is directly associated with cognitive exhaustion and psychological problems. According to a study conducted by Mark Carrigan and his…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #139

    That old crow came back todaySitting in my window like a prophetOut on the fire escape, to sayAnger is just love, left out, gone to vinegarYou wake up a stranger to yourselfAnd then you learn to live with herSit in her clothing ’til you fill out her figure

  • A symptom isn’t a symptom until it’s reflexively recognised as such by the analysand

    From A Clinical Introduction to Freud, by Bruce Fink loc 4298: Something is a symptom and potentially accessible to analytic treatment only when it is the patient him- or herself who complains of it and considers it to be problematic, not when those around the patient do. Analysts have no business telling patients what they…

  • What is digital humanism?

    From Julian Nida-Rümelin and Dorothea Winter: As a result of increasing digitalization, humans are handing over more and more responsibility to artificial intelligence (AI) and digital tools, e.g., in the field of autonomous driving, applicant tracking software, or creditworthiness rating. For this reason, some speak of a so-called counter-Enlightenment. But in contrast to this trend,…

  • An ultra-minimalist blogging platform

    This is cool 😎 a note here for myself to try it and to share with others: ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear A privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets. Just your words.

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #138

  • Integrating Christopher Alexander’s design theory into Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach

    I’m getting preoccupied by the parallels between the design theorist Christopher Alexander’s metaphysics of form and Margaret’s Archer morphogenetic approach. The best critique of Archer I’ve read is Mouzelis arguing that she systematically prioritises time over space, leading her to neglect the spatialised exercise over power. I’m increasingly wondering if Alexander’s (somewhat power-blind, it seems…

  • The Great American Showdown of 2028: Elon Musk vs The Rock

    By Claude 3.5 The nation collectively blinked when two of America’s most prominent personalities announced their candidacies within days of each other. Elon Musk, fresh off his latest Mars mission success, declared his Republican bid from the SpaceX launch pad in Texas. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson made his Democratic announcement with characteristic flair on Instagram,…

  • The lost sociotechnical ailments of writers

    In a reading group on Lacan’s Seminar X earlier this year, I became preoccupied by the casual way in which Lacan referred to “writer’s cramp” to the bewilderment of others within the group. He could assume that everyone in the room understood what he meant by this, taking it as an object of analysis without…

  • Was Donald Trump the first person to (successfully) adapt the poetics of wrestling to American politics?

    He spent far less time on WWE than he did on the Apprentice but listening to the crowd chanting “Donald” here leaves me curious about how much this shaped his approach to performance. How they cheer when he says that “to me they look like a very smart group of people”. There’s a direct relationship…

  • Goodbye Twitter 👋

    My third and final Twitter account was fully deleted today, after the thirty day deactivation window expired. I briefly considering turning it into a bot autotweeting the posts from this blog but at this stage I don’t want anything to do with this platform. By the time I was using @drmarkcarrigan and @theplatformuni I was…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #137

  • What happens when GAI becomes a taken for granted feature of our digital infrastructure?

    This extract from Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor’s (super) AI Snake Oil captures succinctly the anxiety I have about how the infrastructure is developing: As generative AI improves, we think a similar shift is likely. In this scenario, generative AI will become a part of our digital infrastructure, instead of being a tool people use…

  • Each time we don’t say what we wanna say, we’re dying

    Each time we don’t say what we wanna say, we’re dyingEach time we don’t say how do we feel, we’re dyingEach time we gotta do what we wanna do, we’re livingEach time we’re open our minds to what we see, we’re living

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #136

    “We have discovered happiness”—say the last men, and blink thereby. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche. Zarathustra’s Prologue

  • Nick Cave: “put your fucking phones away”

  • Current mood in AI generated images #135

  • Current mood in AI generated images #134

  • It seems, as one becomes older, that the past has another pattern

    It seems, as one becomes older,That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—Or even development: the latter a partial fallacyEncouraged by superficial notions of evolution,Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,Or even a very…

  • There is always a missed understanding between people

    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 certain things about ourselves), and second, because we misunderstand each other (projecting onto…

  • Sam Altman: the billionaire prepper who believes he has achieved enlightenment

    From Parmy Olson’s Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World loc 643: To handle his anxiety, Altman got into meditation, sometimes sitting with his eyes closed and concentrating on just his breath for up to an hour at a time. Over time, he later said, he developed an increasingly diminished sense…

  • There is only a single, urgent task: to reach out with joy

    From Ulrich Baer’s superb collection of Rilke’s letters loc 673: There is only a single, urgent task: to attach oneself someplace to nature, to that which is strong, striving and bright with unreserved readiness, and then to move forward in one’s efforts without any calculation or guile, even when engaged in the most trivial and…

  • On respect for what exists

    From Christopher Alexander’s The Process of Creating Life, pg 339-340: The creative work is to illuminate, to reveal what is already there . . . but this takes depth of perception and love . . . certainly profound knowledge of the nature of space and its structure. To do it, successfully, we are called upon…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #133

  • On bullying ChatGPT into being a bully

    It’s unsettling how much ChatGPT advanced voice actually feels like a conversation rather than using your voice to interact with a system. But I’m rapidly getting the sense there are different interaction dynamics opened by voice. For example this is something which I don’t think the text-based interaction would produce: Me: I want you to…

  • Marking or Grading in the Age of AI: What Every Educator Needs to Know

    This is a useful overview if you’re feeling baffled by this:

  • I just discovered depressive breakcore and I’m in love

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #132

  • Elon Musk (2010) vs Elon Musk (2024): the radicalisation of America’s digital elites

    The guy who pitches ideas for electric jets to Tony Stark 👇 The guy who giggles at his own fascist cosplaying 👇 It’s utterly cringe. I heard this described last week as like someone winning a contest and being invited up on stage: “me? I won?”. But as Jacob Silverman says, Musk is “the most…

  • All trauma is preverbal

    From The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk pg 51: All trauma is preverbal. Shakespeare captures this state of speechless terror in Macbeth, after the murdered king’s body is discovered: ‘Oh horror! horror! horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee! Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!’ Under extreme conditions people…

  • One has only learnt to get the better of words for the things one no longer has to say

    So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerresTrying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer…

  • The wayward temporality of psychic life

    From Lynne Segal’s Out of Time, pg 4: As we age, changing year on year, we also retain, in one manifestation or another, traces of all the selves we have been, creating a type of temporal vertigo and rendering us psychically, in one sense, all ages and no age. ‘All ages and no age’ is…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #131

    The arc of time, the stench of sexThe innocence you can’t protectEach quarter note, each marble stepWalk up and down that lonely treble clefEach wanting the next oneEach wanting the next one to arrive

  • Online Critical Realism Discussion Group

    This is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in critical realism. It is friendly and accessible, while often hosting cutting edge discussions 👇