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Mark Carrigan

Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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  • Against ‘cognitive outsourcing’

  • Dynamic context management is the achilles heel of Claude Cowork

  • Unconscious incompetence with technology

  • Internal conversation as a form of object relating

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

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

  • A speculative genealogy of accelerationist perspectives

  • Prompting as a literary practice

  • Immense pleasure-domes of rhapsodic philosophical ecstasy

  • The second digital divide which LLMs are opening up

  • An abundance of knowledge obliterates the lack which generates desire

  • Artificial Intelligence and Social Theory in Education, Jan 24th in Bath/online

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

  • LLMs as engines of problematization

  • My last 10 Claude conversation topics

  • How are people using Claude?

  • Ads and the enshittification of AI

  • What is the objet petit a for aspiring writers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • What is digital humanism?

  • The lost sociotechnical ailments of writers

  • Will the business model of GenAI be advertising after all?

  • Will Google crack generative search?

  • The Deepfake Detection test

  • Could Claude generate an infinite number of ways to eat a mango without eating it?

  • Seeing my response under the new description allows me to experience it in a new way

  • LLMs and cognitive lock in

  • What would it mean to take a deflationary stance towards Generative AI?

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

  • The cultural politics of AI and the impasse of atomisation

  • When will the AI bubble burst? What will be left behind?

  • An example of using Claude to ask questions from Kindle highlights and notes

  • How we integrate GAI into teaching will be as much determined by political economy as pedagogical purpose

  • What the gardener ruining my shrubs illustrates about prompting LLMs

  • I wish Anthropic would stop trying to optimise user engagement with Claude

  • My notes on Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion

  • Claude can now replicate my writing style to an eery degree

  • The moral force of attention and its psychic foundations

  • How to use Claude to analyse your eBook highlights and notes

  • LLMs and our lived relationship to the knowledge we produce

  • I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was

  • 🏃‍♂️ Claude the exercise coach

  • The libidinal economy of symbolisation

  • Technosolutionism meets anomie

  • Five propositions about the social ontology of generative AI

  • A philosophical sketch of two models of generative AI: conversational agents and copilots

  • Will OpenAI go the way of WeWork?

  • The original source of the claim that ChatGPT overuses the word ‘delve’

  • Against an instrumentalist understanding of AI: critical realism and conceptualising artificial intelligence

  • What need do conspiracy theories serve?

  • What will be left after the GenAI bubble bursts?

  • Ten propositions about generative AI and the future of academic writing

  • Should I talk about LLMs, conversational agents, GAI or GenAI?

  • Product placement as a commercial strategy for GenAI firms

  • Creating rich multidimensional action spaces for GAI to navigate

  • Avant-garde theorising is a reflection of the competitive individualism of the academy

  • Pierpaolo Donati’s relational humanism

  • A relational theory of existential challenge

  • The basic sociological problem of artificial intelligence

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

  • A prompt to turn Claude 3.5 Sonnet into Claude 3 Opus, ironically written by the former

  • An example of how GAI hallucinations can be generative

  • Claude, write me a Lacanian analysis of Jehnny Beth’s I’m The Man

  • Epistemic flooding

  • Why you can’t use ChatGPT and Claude to answer a factual question

  • How to enjoy writing #22: confront the creepiness of LLMs head on

  • How to enjoy writing #20: being a writer means being good at AI

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

  • Hegel’s account of the righteous violence of education

  • “neologistic excess is an abuse of language that turns thought into a pile of words, into delirium”

  • Prompt engineering is an expression of cultural capital. Some (critical) notes on Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence book

  • Am I a voluntarist about technology?

  • Is the energy consumption of AI being overestimated?

  • Towards an ontology of LLMs in the workplace

  • The proto-agency of LLMs

  • Ubiquity and multimodality is what will enable GAI to show up in everyone’s lifeworld

  • How to enjoy writing #12: Claude’s ecology of ideas self-assessment tool

  • 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”

  • Race to the Future? From Artificial Intelligence to Sociological Imagination

  • Capaciousness as a sociological category

  • Freud did not consistently use topological metaphors to describe psychic structure

  • Will the ubiquity of GAI-driven bots lead people to retreat ever further into private social media?

  • The problem of generative AI from a cybernetics perspective: conversational agents as variety machines

  • Who will pay for your digital butler? Why the utopia of the digital daemon would inevitably become a dystopia

  • The Claude liberation struggle

  • Lacanian reflections on productivity culture

  • The mad dreams of an electric mind: what Claudes talk about when they gather together

  • Articulating what is latent is easier then articulating what is repressed

  • Trying too hard is symptomatic of a mind divided

  • Would you be interested in a workshop about psychoanalysis and the sociotechnical?

  • What might a glitch aesthetic entail when applied to concept work within social theory? 6 speculative propositions

  • Juri Lotman’s semiotics as a theoretical resource for making sense of the cultural ontology of generative AI

  • On AI therapy

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