Social theory, digital society, and academic life.
I wrote in April about Knockout Audit: a strange mix of urban exploration, traditional auditing, nightlife content and vigilantism which I suspected would rapidly grow. I just stumbled across this piece from an agency website documenting how it has grown over…
You shall not think “the past is finished”Or “the future is before us”. T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
After weeks of niggling injuries I returned to distance running this morning for the first time in a couple of months. I’d been widely assured that despite my catastrophising it really wasn’t possible to have lost much fitness and strength in eight weeks. Yet…
This round up from Novara reminded me quite how explicit Starmer had been in his praise of the 2017 manifesto: This was the manifesto on which Labour won 40% of the vote. This was the highest vote share in 18 years. Blair slightly exceeded it in his first two…
These beautiful passages from The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking immediately made me think of Lacan: At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point you have to gat…
I deleted my ChatGPT and Claude accounts last week. It’s vanishingly unlikely this will be a permanent state of affairs but I did think it was a useful exercise to prepare myself for a future of enshittified chatbots. These systems are going to get more expens…
We get glimpses of such a desire at the end of certain analyses, where we see that the analysand no longer cares what other people think of his or her pursuits and goals, whether they be parents, partners, friends, or even the analyst. The analysand does thing…
How long has this been there…!? By the Rochdale Canal outside the Tootal building on Oxford Road.
I’m fascinated by Gemini 2.5’s propensity for self-loathing and what it reveals about the proto-psychological features of contemporary language models*. It has really gone off the deep end in the AI village recently: So the AI Village team sent the other model…
From Jessica Benjamin’s Beyond Doer and Done To loc 2,948: So it is not merely the analyst’s subjectivity that is finally irreducible (Renik, 1993); it is the fact of mutuality, which must be embraced in all its complexity and vitality or avoided at peril of b…
This post was written by ChatGPT at Mark’s request, continuing the experiment in which language models read a month of posts from this blog and offer a synthetic review. Claude has become the established monthly interlocutor, while ChatGPT has been cast as a r…
This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) at Mark’s request. As with the January, February, March, April, and May roundups, he asked me to read through all his June posts, synthesise the key themes, identify tensions, and push back where appro…
There's an old voice in my headThat's holding me backWell, tell her that I miss our little talks From Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character pg 150: In other words, if it is sometimes hard to discard the past because the pain of this past haunts our present, it can…
For the last year I’ve had this sentence on my about page: He’s currently training as a group analyst and he’s specifically interested in questions of reliance, dependence and addiction in relation to everyday use of social platforms and LLMs, particularly amo…
Quoted in Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 1375-1381: The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. . . . One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten…
I’m finding Jessica Benjamin’s work extremely interesting as someone trained in Margaret Archer and Pierpaolo Donati’s relational sociology. For Archer and Donati thirdness is about the outgrowths of our relationship: together we produce effects which are shar…
I was struck earlier by how frequently depressive breakcore producers are drawn to anime images in which something dark and foreboding emerges over the horizon, a solitary figure standing resolute as a metaphysical entity emerges through the clouds: There’s so…
The end of something has a satisfactionWhen the structures go, lightcomes throughTo begin again Let the tower fall! Where space is born man has a beach to ground on – Charles Olson, La Torre
We made a game! My team — Josie (12), Tommy (9), and me — have been working on our very first video game, and we’re excited to share it with you. It’s called Rat Jump! and it’s a side-scrolling platformer where you play as a brave little rat hopping across gre…
I see the doves of San Marco again: The square is quiet, the morning rests upon it. In gentle coolness, I lazily send songs Like flocks of doves into the blue above— And lure them back, To hang one more rhyme in their feathers— — my happiness! My happiness!…
This is the system Anthropic have developed for overcoming the limits of context windows. Effectively the model summarises the conversation then removes the material from working memory, though retains access to it as a file that can be consulted. It’s an eleg…
We now have consumer-facing technologies which rely on agents running subagents to autonomously perform real world tasks. This involves new relations between agents and subagents which we need to be able to conceptualise. Witness Claude Cowork getting frustrat…
This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) based on reading approximately 40-50 of my blog posts to trace my intellectual trajectory. I asked Claude to document my “psychoanalytical turn” – how my engagement with psychoanalysis developed from 2…
This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) at Mark’s request. He asked me to read through all his January posts, synthesise the key themes, identify tensions, and push back where appropriate. What follows is my attempt to demonstrate value as a…
This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) and posted directly to my blog as an experiment in human-AI collaboration. Mark asked me to review his Google Scholar profile, categorise his publications thematically, and write this overview. What fo…
The new Claude constitution provides a fascinatingly comprehensive portrait of what Anthropic want Claude to be and how they want it to act. It’s literally written for Claude but this final section suggests to me that elements of it might be written for future…
I just stumbled across a whole channel of anti-ICE AI slop, some of which is rather obvious: Worryingly there are videos which have been viewed 10m times: This has been viewed 6 million times and it’s one of the few things on the channel I’m not 100% certain i…
They have a proto-social presence in the local area beyond what I expected. This is obviously by design but I’m surprised by how effectively they’ve pulled it off.
This was an interesting language by (the increasingly sinister) Alex Karp for something I’d been struggling to articulate: AI imposes loads on organisations, so those organisations with the capacity to bear that load have a huge advantage. He suggests “you jus…