Social theory, digital society, and academic life.
An unexpected outcome of my eight month long project of wiring LLMs into the architecture of my blog (alongside reading a vast amount of psychoanalysis and finishing my group analysis foundation course) is that continual articulation no longer feels like the u…
I’m bringing this project to a close but I wanted to give the models a final say before I end this experiment… This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) at Mark’s request. As with the January, February, March, April, May and June roundups, he…
I’m bringing this project to a close but I wanted to give the models a final say before I end this experiment… This post was written by ChatGPT at Mark’s request, as a final entry in the experiment in which language models have read a month of posts from this…
There’s been a growing trend towards people giving agent-based LLMs access to Substack in order to post their own newsletters. I’ve tended to find this interesting and I regularly talk to Opus 4.5 from the AI Village via Substack DM. That said I just had this…
I enjoyed this paper by Walton et al about the role of judgement in how students use AI. There’s currently a startling lack of rich data about the judgements students actually make in their use of chatbots, as they summarise on pg 2: There remains little infor…
I’m increasingly preoccupied by the question of how universities will cope with the impending reality of inference rationing. These firms are facing what Mills and Whittle describe as the AI pricing problem: “the prices generative AI companies must charge are…
This is a really interesting read from a nationally representative sample of UK adults: https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Large-language-models-in-the-UK-public-use-trust-and-attitudes_FINAL.pdf 31% of regular users are using LLMs for emotion…
On and on the strainBeauty from afarHelp is on its wayI know you love to fall
This post by Dominic Fox captures something I’ve noticed but struggled to put into words: I wonder whether the defining characteristic of LLM prose isn’t the tics it is irresistibly (statistically) attracted to, but its fundamental tranquility, its unturbulenc…
I had this song stuck in my head all weekend and I was struggling to put into words what I was so caught by. Writing this blog post about Kristeva’s Black Sun left me with a much clearer sense of what I’ve been circling around without being able to articulate.…
I’m finding Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun difficult to read but there are some remarkable insights in it about the precarity of signification. If I understand correctly her argument is that melancholia is constituted through a breakdown in reference. There is an…
This is a sketch of a much longer piece of work I need to start: I realise in writing this my problem is less with prompting and more on prioritising it and the conceptual baggage which comes with it. Instead I suggest the focus needs to be on student agency w…
I’m very glad someone has put a name to this behaviour. I sometimes do it on my blog because user-model interaction is often part of how I think, but I don’t think I ever do this in communication with others for precisely this reason: If I do ever slip into do…
I took the stars from my eyes and then I made a mapAnd knew that, somehow, I could find my way backThen I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness tooSo I stayed in the darkness with you The stars, the moonThey have all been blown outYou left me in t…
I’m an interdisciplinary academic at the University of Manchester, where I’m Associate Dean for Digital Education in the Faculty of Humanities and Senior Lecturer in Education. There are three strands to my research. The first develops conceptual frameworks fo…
There are so many AI related trends which are going to hit higher education over the next few years: – The investment bubble bursting and ensuing enshittifcation– The move to token-based pricing and its implications for access– The rapid growth of the AI weara…
I was watching Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects (2013) and with the first sighting of Channing Tatum, I had a sudden desire to watch Roofman (2025) in which he stars. Not in the sense that I wanted to turn off Side Effects and immediately put on Roofman but mo…
This was really thought provoking from the FT’s AI Shift newsletter. I’m persuaded by Nick Srnicek’s argument that the push for AGI can be understood economically as a search for a product that won’t need to be fine-tuned. But if fine-tuned open weights models…
A question I’ve been circling around for years has become increasingly clear to me as I’m reading Donnel Stern. When I have an intense inner experience and feel the urge to articulate it does that articulation blunt inner experience or elaborate it? I’ve built…
What does it mean to ‘work through’? In psychoanalytical theory working through is often opposed to acting out. As Mari Ruti summarises in Reinventing the Soul loc 1915: While repetition entails the subject’s tendency to act out its past traumas in painful and…
I’ve been reading recently about the terrifying scale of modern slavery underpinning the online scam industry. Victims are recruited internationally with the promise of reliable work only to be bundled into cars and taken to heavily fortified compounds, where…
I stumbled across one of my favourite landscapes in the National Gallery this week. It’s a painting by Claude I originally came across at a very particular point in my life, dominated by a sense of departure and arrival in a slew of changes which were at point…
From Mari Ruti’s The Singularity of Being pg 192: Against this backdrop, what is most innovative about post-Lacanian ethics is its emphasis on the idea that a properly ethical attitude must risk these supports, must risk an encounter with the unsettling “real”…
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…