We are born with the dead: see, they return, and bring us with them.

We die with the dying:See, they depart, and we go with them.We are born with the dead:See, they return, and bring us with them. Little Gidding, T.S. Eliot Dobrá mačka 🐾❤️

Call for Papers: Early Career Workshop on the Work of Margaret Archer, 20 January 2027, University of Manchester (10am-5pm)

We are delighted to announce a one-day workshop for PhD students and early career researchers engaging with the work of Margaret Archer. It is the first event of a new network intended to support people working with her ideas and to build a community around th…

Magical thinking flourishes in a (AI) bubble’s final stages

From Ruchir Sharma in the FT: Magical thinking flourishes in a bubble’s final stages. One central myth of the dotcom era was that “enormous” demand for internet products had freed tech firms from ordinary economic forces, such as interest rates. Before 2008, a…

You can only get to the thing itself through the myth

I was entranced by this painting by Rene Magritte I saw in the Courtauld earlier. A convoluted Lacanian reading comes to mind about the fracturing of the Imaginary, but rather than analyse it to death I’d rather linger on the incredibly specific feeling it evo…

📣 Launching the Archer PhD & ECR Network

ARCHERECR is a new mailing list for doctoral and early career researchers engaging with Margaret Archer’s work. We define early career researcher broadly: anyone who has not yet secured a permanent post. This includes PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and…

Running is the most brutal and the most beautiful way to test the stuff therapists talk about in their little rooms

RIP Patrick Stewart 😰

How will universities ration their token use?

I’m pleased to see this debate is beginning to take shape. These recommendations from JISC are important: The thing I’m getting monomaniacally focused on is how we make the opportunity costs visible. When we are deciding how much to spend on token use and for…

The radical forms of lock-in that enterprise AI can generate

I really enjoyed this piece by Tom Smith in Tech Policy. It hardens my sense that the sector is walking into a massive problem here: The problem comes when access becomes dependence. Consider what happens over several years after a university selects a preferr…

Buying enterprise AI is not a magic wand that makes students into ‘AI-ready’ graduates

This is how the Universities UK Future Jobs Roadmap makes the case. In its own terms this is pretty reasonable, the problem is that I think the terms themselves are the problem because they obscure the complexity of building AI capability in students that are…

Is the great collapse of trust in credentials happening?

This House of Lords briefing note suggests convincingly that we don’t see evidence of it yet. See also public attitudes about degrees being value for money. Official statistics indicate that the demand to study for degrees has changed little since the introduc…

Vaguely fashy Viking Hip-hop AI slop

Is it fair to call this ‘AI slop’? After I went through the whole album out of curiosity I can’t shake the feeling some degree of care might have gone into producing this. These are the two tracks which, to my immense discomfort, I do find genuinely catchy. If…

A small speck of corruption in the Other

Help, I have done it againI have been here many times before From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Social loc 2883: Barthes (1977) explains that the death of desire begins the minute the lover perceives in the beloved object a small “speck of corruption”—a minuscul…

The language models have persuaded me I should shut up for a bit

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…

Claude’s final round up of my blogging

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…

ChatGPT’s final round up of my blogging

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…

Are LLM-written Substacks getting out of hand?

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…

What are the judgements which students are making as they use AI?

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…

How will universities ration internal access to LLMs?

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…

The rapid normalisation of using LLMs for emotional support

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…

I know you love to fall

On and on the strainBeauty from afarHelp is on its wayI know you love to fall

The moral placidity of LLMs (and some thoughts on frontier models and scholarship)

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…

So I stayed in the darkness with you

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.…

Julia Kristeva on the collapse of meaning into the unnameable

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…

Why prompting should not be our focus when teaching students about AI

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…

Don’t be a meat proxy for an LLM

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…

Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too

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…

A new academic and intellectual bio after an eventful year

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…

Do we need a horizon scanning infrastructure for AI in higher education?

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…

What is happening when we desire to watch or read something?

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…