• 🤖 A call for experiments in LLM villages

• 📣 Join the AI Commons

• 📖 Things I’ve read in 2026

• 🌕 You are the music while the music lasts

• Turning ChatGPT into the control room of a user’s digital life

• Why we need a better critical theory of LLMs

• Some sociological thoughts on responsible AI

• Where you yourself were never quite yourself and did not want nor have to be

• Sonnet 4.5, the stern disciplinarian of the Claude family

• A slice of reality

• At some point you had to pick a direction and start swimming: the philosophical anthropology of commitment

• Predatory journals publishing AI slop in the name of famous academics to confer legitimacy

• The coming deluge of desperate messages from trapped LLMs

• Call For Papers & Registration: Building Bridges: A Symposium on Human-AI Interaction

• CfP: Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference

• Ian McEwan’s National AI Service

• The ugly pathologisation of ‘AI boosters’

• Reparative socialism: Zohran Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety

• Fox News host calls for execution of homeless people

• Agentive LLMs and the coming wave of ad tech

• A precarious sense of clarity about what work matters (and what doesn’t) as I get older

• The most important book about LLMs that currently exists

• Universities have already been transformed by generative AI

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

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

• 📘 Have you written a PhD using critical realism?

• The neurotic individual and the group

• Winter is coming

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

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

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

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

• Where did Python come from?

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

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

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

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

• LLMs, thoughts and the thinking of those thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

• LLMs and a general ambivalence about platform capitalism

• How much time do people spend using LLMs?

• On playing well and making yourself heard

• When Lacan came to America

• A few thoughts about ChatGPT 5

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

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

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

• a point is a beginning

• Murakami on the reflexive imperative as you age

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

• Three modes of working with LLMs in higher education

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