Mark – Page 7 – Mark Carrigan

Blog: https://markcarrigan.net/
Profile: https://markcarrigan.net/author/streetlightmanifesto/
Homepage: http://www.markcarrigan.net/

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…
Can ChatGPT do public sociology? Sociological Practice, AI and Platform Capitalism

I’ve started mapping out my keynote for the Finnish Sociological Association conference next year and I’m getting really excited about writing this 🤗 Can ChatGPT do public sociology? The question might seem frivolous at a time when generative AI is generating widespread anxiety within universities about the integrity of assessment. However, I suggest it helps…
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 👇
Why am I so fascinated by the aesthetics of abandoned media?

I can’t walk past abandoned media crap without feeling the need to take photos of it. It was particularly rich pickings in Manchester today 👇
7 myths about Generative AI in education

I’d like to develop this into a paper, though I’m slightly reticent about using examples of these myths because it risks being deeply critical of people I like:
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #130
Will the business model of GenAI be advertising after all?

I’ve been sceptical of the rush to impute a platform economy model to GenAI firms because there’s a range of different business models being experimented with: The one which has received less attention, as far as I can see, is advertising despite the fact that Meta are claiming growing success: One thing that is giving…
The friendly face of objet petit a

I’ve been obsessing about a Lacanian reading of these murals by Nick Hamilton which I took pictures of this weekend 👇
Burdened by the image of an unalienated future, one finds oneself fleeing from existence itself

From Todd Mcgowan’s Embracing Alienation, loc 1998: The lure of overcoming alienation entraps subjects in the pursuit of a false possibility that deforms their perspective on existence. Existence becomes the struggle to transcend the obstacles standing in the way of achieving happiness. Unhappiness becomes a state to flee rather than the normal state of existence.…
Interview about teacher training and generative AI in Times Education Supplement

A brief comment in this interesting piece on GAI in teacher training, alongside my collaborator Liz Birchinall who leads the primary PGCE: The university team involved will research the tool’s use in the years ahead to see how it impacts on teacher training, explains Mark Carrigan, senior lecturer in education and programme director for digital…
Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take

Footfalls echo in the memoryDown the passage which we did not takeTowards the door we never opened Into the rose garden – T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (Murals by Nick Hamilton in Manchester UK)
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #129
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #128
The internet and pluralistic ignorance
Will Google crack generative search?

I was initially extremely sceptical but this rapidly improving. This was the result for the slightly niche query “university of manchester two-step I don’t have a smart phone” and it was exactly what I was looking for: This is exactly the page I needed from the university website, which is ironically the sort of specific…
Current mood in AI generated images #127
The things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget that history puts a saint in every dream

And indeed there will be timeFor the yellow smoke that slides along the street,Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;There will be time to murder and create,And time for all the works and days of handsThat lift and drop…
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #126

(Mural by Nick Hamilton in Manchester UK) For each of you had an hour, or perhapsnot even an hour, a barely measurable timebetween two moments, when you were granted a senseof being. Everything. Your veins flowed with being.- Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy
I live my life in widening circles

I live my life in ever widening circles, each superseding all the previous ones. Perhaps I never shall succeed in reaching the final circle, but attempt I will. I circle around God, the ancient tower, and have been circling for a thousand years, and still I do not know: am I a falcon, a storm,…
The impending GenAI driven automation of higher education

From Generative AI for Academics ch 8: Yet from a sociological perspective I see a genuine risk of academics being automated out of our jobs. Not immediately, nor everywhere. But a gradual process in which human scholarship becomes a retreating role, increasingly confined to elite institutions which charge a premium for human research and teaching.…
What the efficiency agenda in UK universities will look like in practice

From Peter Mandelson’s intervention today: In return, Mandelson said universities would need to make “more tough choices” to improve efficiency, noting that Italian state universities had one teaching staff for every 21 students while UK universities had one for every 13. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/sep/25/raise-tuition-fees-to-ease-pressure-on-english-universities-says-peter-mandelson I’m increasingly convinced GenAI will be proposed as a way to reduce staffing.…
That secret that you know but you don’t know how to tell

That secret that you knowBut you don’t know how to tellIt fucks with your honourAnd it teases your head
The new OpenAI o1 model will offer medical theories and that’s extremely dangerous

I’ve currently got a burst blood vessel in my eye. I found myself searching for potential connections to a supplement I started taking recently, as I suddenly remembered someone telling me it could potentially have mild impacts on blood clotting. I was amazed to find that o1 will theorise at length in response to a…
26% of 5-7 year olds in the UK own a smart phone

From the latest Ofcom Children’s Media Literacy study: (This must surely be an artefact of the sample, right? See the comparison between 3-4 and 5-7 🤯)
GenAI and the rapid disappearance of ground truth

This is a fascinating case study from the (consistently excellent) 404 media: Google is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to figure out what mushrooms are safe to eat. The AI images were flagged by the moderator of the…
That time Bill Gates paid the government to build him a secret tunnel to his vacation home

From Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King by Anupreeta Das loc 4574: Highway 106 cut through the Alderbrook property, putting its parking lot on the other side of the road. The problem could be solved by rerouting the highway to move the lot to the same side. But that meant the Gates vacation compound, which contained five…
A concise explanation of why you should leave Twitter/X

From Casey Newton’s recent newsletter: We also stopped posting to X. It felt bad contributing to a site that had actively dismantled its own content moderation operation and predictably soon filled up with hate speech of all sorts. Posting to it made us feel complicit in both in Elon Musk’s war against journalism and his…
Yuval Noah Harari is like a ChatGPT condensation of broadsheet op-eds and magazine think pieces
Fling the emptiness in your arms out into the spaces we breathe

You still don’t see? Fling the emptiness in your armsout into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birdswill feel the increase of air with more passionate flight.- Rilke, The First Elegy
Put out my eyes, and I can see you still

Put out my eyes, and I can see you still,Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;And without any feet can go to you;And tongueless, I can conjure you at will.Break off my arms, I shall take hold of youAnd grasp you with my heart as with a hand;Arrest my heart, my brain…
The coming wave of automation in UK higher education

I find it hard to read this from today’s WonkHE and not worrying we’re about to see a coming wave of GAI-driven automation in UK universities 👇 Public investment and funding is clearly a significant part of that picture, but Universities UK will also want to show that the sector is prepared to revisit its…
Making the familiar strange

Reading Charles Taylor’s new book on romantic poetry reminded me how interesting it is that Novalis, the German romantic poet, offered a maxim which has come to define the sensibility of generations of qualitative sociologists, summarised here by Ash Watson: The maxim of ‘making the familiar strange’ seems so central to contemporary sociology it is…
The best resource on Lacan I’ve encountered so far

This podcast series is absolutely superb, particularly if you read along with the seminars while listening to them: https://lecturesonlacan.substack.com/podcast
Words strain, crack and sometimes break under the burden

Words strain,Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,Will not stay still. Shrieking voicesScolding, mocking, or merely chattering,Always assail them.- T S Eliot, Burnt Norton From Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment loc 1257: But, and here the idealism enters,…
There was a Zelda: A Link to the Past 2 😮
Current mood in AI generated images #125

So I treat it like what it isI lay these eggshells to remember to be careful
What happens when the free trial period of GenAI is over?

I think Ed Zitron is undoubtedly correct that (a) this software is being run at a huge loss and (b) that can’t go on for ever, though I don’t necessarily think that means the ‘bubble will burst’, at least in a straightforward way: Almost every “AI-powered” startup that uses LLM features is based on some…
Nerd cultures building up around academics and their tools: mathematicians and chalk

HT Morten Hansen
The Deepfake Detection test

Saving this for next semester’s teaching 👇 I was not as good at this as I thought I was… https://detectfakes.kellogg.northwestern.edu/
Those whom we transform into myth are themselves myth-ridden

From Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy, by Irvin Yalom pg 81: Strange, I mused as I watched the van drive away, that I, who have devoted my life to apprehending the world of the other, have not, until Magnolia, truly understand that those whom we transform into myth are themselves myth-ridden.…
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #124
Current mood in (not) AI generated images #123
What you seek, it is near, now comes to meet you half-way

Warm the shore is here, and valleys open in welcome, Pleasantly lit by paths, greenly allure me and gleam. Gardens, forgathered, lie here and already the dew-laden bud breaksAnd a bird’s early song welcomes the traveller home. All seems familiar; even the word or the nod caught in passing Seems like a friend’s, every face…
The enigmatic desolation of Caspar David Friedrich
We must be still and still moving, into another intensity

We must be still and still moving, into another intensityFor a further union, a deeper communion – T.S. Eliot, East Coker
Could Claude generate an infinite number of ways to eat a mango without eating it?

Inspired by an aside in this episode of John Oliver I asked Claude 3.5 “how do I eat a mango without eating it?“ It got to 45 possibilities before I got bored, highlights including ‘mango-themed escape room’ and ‘mango obstacle course’, before I asked if it could produce an infinite number of options for eating…