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Mark Carrigan

Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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  • Why is it a bad thing to be dependent on LLMs?

  • An interview with the Studies in Critical Realism podcast

  • Critical Realism and Digital Technologies: Platforms, AI and Human Agency

  • Unconscious incompetence with technology

  • Social media as a schizoid retreat

  • How do cultural objects change who we are?

  • 📱🚫 On withdrawal from social media

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

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

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

  • Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are

  • How would workplace learning work if there’s an LLM driven removal of entry level jobs?

  • Was Jordan Peterson radicalised by his own audience?

  • Chapters abstracts for my new book

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

  • Does Trump dictate his tweets?

  • Interview in the Telegraph about touchscreens and digital change

  • After 16 years and 7 months I’ve finished Platform and Agency

  • Digital elites and reactionary modernism

  • Using reasoning models to support theory-building

  • The enshittification of Spotify

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

  • The anxiety of individualisation

  • What is Elon Musk’s end game?

  • We need a conceptual framework for LLMs and social visibility

  • The enshittification of enshittification

  • Some thoughts about Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism

  • 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

  • Was Tony Blair the first effective accelerationist?

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

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

  • Nick Cave: “put your fucking phones away”

  • There is always a missed understanding between people

  • 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

  • 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

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

  • Reflexivity was always integral to Margaret Archer’s macro-sociology

  • Why hasn’t Twitter/X died yet?

  • My notes on Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion

  • What need do conspiracy theories serve?

  • The monster became self-conscious of its size and intoxicated by the belief in its own omnipotence

  • Why digital elites are embracing Trump

  • A relational theory of existential challenge

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

  • Epistemic flooding

  • In late modernity the signposts established by tradition are now blank

  • Ticketmaster is the epitome of enshittification

  • A Lacanian reading of digital elites

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

  • Am I a voluntarist about technology?

  • Capaciousness as a sociological category

  • Imagine being in lockdown and your country suffering a massive cyberattack

  • Did ‘unconnected content’ ruin social media? The TikTokification of every social platform

  • I was interviewed about the sociology of awkwardness for a French futures magazine

  • Judith Butler’s notion of the phantasmatic scene and the epistemic chaos of platforms

  • Trying too hard is symptomatic of a mind divided

  • The enshittification of Grindr and the coming wave of platform addiction

  • From art to entertainment to distraction to addiction

  • The silent inner world

  • What’s the opposite of flourishing? Languishing

  • Setting your own technological rhythm

  • There are too many identity labels being circulated too quickly

  • What we need today is not a theory of a new age

  • The manifest and latent function of online reviews

  • Is digital distraction the 21st century equivalent of neurathemia?

  • The impending reality of the digital daemon

  • Is generative AI predicated on digital enclosure?

  • A Lacanian spin on Margaret Archer’s concept of contextual incongruity: the meta-reflexive as hysteric

  • Platform capitalism, historciality and Andrew Abbott’s sense of modernist temporal ontology

  • Lacan on the biographical momentum of partial objects

  • Hannah Arendt on machinic rhythms and their power to consume our autonomy

  • The moral economy of automaticity: sociological and psychoanalytical perspectives

  • What does it mean to be composed?

  • The agonies of humiliation involved in submitting to contigency

  • How platforms shape the parameters of agency

  • The inner adult and the inner child

  • Theorising permanent instability and volatility as necessary rather than contingent features of the environment

  • Platform & agency: becoming who we are in a digital world

  • From social media to generative media: a first lecture on my next project after Generative AI for Academics

  • On returning to music

  • What if we have achieved postcapitalism but it isn’t socialism?

  • Alan Levinovitz on empowerment epistemology

  • CfP: The future of conspiracy scholarship: New epistemologies and imaginaries

  • Big Data, Critical Realism, Human Agency and the Future of the Social Sciences

  • A list of human cognitive biases and the assumptions underpinning them

  • The power of giving language to hidden things

  • On learning what matters to us

  • Why are conspiracy theories coalescing into a heterogenous world view?

  • Shock as a narrative vacuum

  • Maurizio Lazzarato’s a-signifying semiotics and the computational infrastructure of generative AI

  • It’s all in the game though, right?

  • On platform and agency

  • The capacity of the algorithm to create monsters

  • Techno-optimism as boomer dogma

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