• The rise of Youtube “street content”

• New paper: The changing nature of social media and research impact

• An interview with Research Professional about the fragmented landscape of digital engagement

• Ex-uber CEO claims that he’s close to major scientific discoveries through ‘vibe physics’

• “Are you the police?”, “No, we’re Youtubers”

• The Authoritarian Stack: How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America

• Anti-ICE AI slop on Youtube

• The delivery robots being trialed in Leeds

• The radicalisation of urban exploration YouTubers

• Social media firms actively undermine the relationship between content creators and their communities

• ‘AI slop’ as a form of affect mining which transforms engagement farming

• You can’t understand ‘AI slop’ without understanding engagement farming

• Social media as a schizoid retreat

• The psychoticizing potential of social media

• CFP: “Digital Subjectivities” Conference (Freie Universität Berlin, May 2026)

• Is big tech a driver of inflation?

• The hostility of digital elites to expertise

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

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

• CfP: Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference

• Agentive LLMs and the coming wave of ad tech

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

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

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

• LLMs and a general ambivalence about platform capitalism

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

• Astonishingly Meta are actually federating Threads

• When LLMs engage in a flamewar on social media

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

• Waves of austerity in Silicon Valley

• Was Jordan Peterson radicalised by his own audience?

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

• Distracted from distraction by distraction

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

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

• Does Trump dictate his tweets?

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

• How will generative AI firms seek to optimise their models to increase user engagement? 

• Apple’s bleak sales pitch for embedding GenAI into iOS

• Interview in the Telegraph about touchscreens and digital change

• Academic networks need to prepare for waves of enshittification

• The second digital divide which LLMs are opening up

• The sociological significance of TikTok

• Digital elites and reactionary modernism

• TikTok is the next stage in Elon Musk’s cultural machinery of reaction

• #FreeOurFeeds – help secure the future of social media

• Why did the Bluesky migration succeed where the Mastodon migration failed?

• Interview with Science Magazine about academic Bluesky

• The enshittification of Spotify

• How much time does Elon Musk spend tweeting each day?

• What is Elon Musk’s end game?

• We need a conceptual framework for LLMs and social visibility

• The enshittification of enshittification

• On being realistic with students about platformisation

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

• Ads and the enshittification of AI

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

• Elon Musk: First Buddy of the United States

• Elon Musk’s social media addiction

• Elon Musk has not finished building his cultural machine

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

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

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

• 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

• An ultra-minimalist blogging platform

• Goodbye Twitter 👋

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

• Nick Cave: “put your fucking phones away”

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

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

• Why am I so fascinated by the aesthetics of abandoned media?

• The internet and pluralistic ignorance

• 26% of 5-7 year olds in the UK own a smart phone

• That time Bill Gates paid the government to build him a secret tunnel to his vacation home

• A concise explanation of why you should leave Twitter/X

• The GenAI debate is being filtered through social media in problematic ways

• Why hasn’t Twitter/X died yet?

• Should other professional associations leave Twitter/X?

• IBM’s Paperwork Explosion Prefigures Hyped Claims about GenAI

• My notes on Surveillance Capitalism

• My notes on Deep Work by Cal Newport

• My notes on The Nowhere Office, by Julia Hobsbawm

• My notes on The Metaverse and How It Will Revolutionise Everything, by Matthew Ball

• My notes on Digital minimalism, by Cal Newport

• My notes on Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion

• The moral force of attention and its psychic foundations

• The privilege of escaping from the Twittering Machine

• What need do conspiracy theories serve?

• Some thoughts on the emerging platform economies of generative AI

• Why digital elites are embracing Trump

• Obsessional neurosis as private religion and the mediation of collective reflexivity by the internet

• Epistemic flooding

• How the interaction of AI search, social media and generative AI will entrench existing status hierarchies

• Ticketmaster is the epitome of enshittification

• A Lacanian reading of digital elites

• A first person account of losing your creative job to AI

• Special issue: Social Media in Higher Education – What’s Happening?

• The danger GAI poses to the public sphere is not false belief, it’s the (further) collapse of trust in truth

• The terrifying future of AI-driven news

• Crowds on Demand: “out-of-the-box campaigns, audiences and events”