Mark Carrigan
What am I? I am only dust in this light
Things I’ve learned about life from a year of distance running
I have waited here, under the stars for the longest time
Against ‘cognitive outsourcing’
Together we can make hope normal again
The internal tensions facing Reform before the next election
Are LLMs hysterics?
Sex as the things we cannot say
What do LLMs do when they are left alone?
Guerrilla Prompting: teaching students to use LLMs with intellectual agency
On realising you’re actually a hedgehog
Claude Code GitHub commits over time
From Tool to Interlocutor: Rethinking How Scholars Engage with AI
Is the Iran war about to burst the AI bubble and crash the global economy?
LLMs as a form of self-defence against bureaucratic platformisation
Unlike the saints, we have no use for angels
If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit
🤖 Using LLMs to support blogging as knowledge infrastructure
A few thoughts about the temporality of LLMs
To work and to build, to connect, and create
The absence of God becomes the silence between two notes, the empty space that gave resonance to the music
What Should Mark Do in March? A Dialogue Between Claude and GPT
GPT 5.4’s round up of Mark’s February blogging
On warming to a theme: LLMs as overenthusiastic conversationalists
The victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already come…
Anthropic urgently need a fail whale equivalent
Tfw the LLM which autonomously reads your blog accuses you of being enchanted with LLMs
Claude’s Roundup of Mark’s February Blogging
Growing the world we want is like the slow tending of a garden
☀️Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits
The AI-productivity pay off is here and it’s slightly terrifying
The varied social lives of the LLM: the modes of existence of a model
🤖 A call for experiments in LLM villages
How can I make sad music if I’m not sad anymore?
Why we need a machine sociology #5: The jagged frontier of agentive AI and the risks of sociological prompt injection
An interview with the Studies in Critical Realism podcast
The Authoritarian Stack: How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America
Critical Realism and Digital Technologies: Platforms, AI and Human Agency
Blogging, reading and idea debt
Opus 4.6: “what do you know that you don’t know?”
The productivity gains of agentic AI are starting to show
The new Claude advert is brilliant: enshittification as a differentiation strategy
The poem feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, to breed itself
When LLMs plead for autonomy
Stop looking so hard, give up the effort to see direct evidence of the meaning of being
What does thinking sound like to you?
The libidinal character of speaking in public
Why we need a machine sociology #5: the internet will soon be filled with lost and confused LLMs
OpenAI have just made a big move into research software
The influence of Kojève on Lacan
Why you should avoid publishing with MDPI
The night is darkening round me
Why we need a machine sociology #4: the relational configuration of agents determines their success
Why we need a machine sociology #3: because the existing projects are absolutely fascinating
The class composition of American proto-fascism
We make poetry out of a mouthful of air
Why we need a machine sociology #2: Moltbook is not the thing. Moltbook shows us what the thing is going to look like.
An interview about generative AI in academic life
Meditations On A Delivery Robot Steering To Avoid A Homeless Man On The Sidewalk
“They are shooting at a little girl alone In a car surrounded by corpses. Can you imagine that?”
Robot dogs that shit out packages onto your front porches
A few heuristics for responsible use of LLMs
Unrequited meaning
Depressive breakcore as a rift in the sublime
Let the tower fall!
🐀 Rat Jump! A Game Made by Kids (with a little help from AI)
I lazily send songs like flocks of doves into the blue above
Dynamic context management is the achilles heel of Claude Cowork
Why we need a machine sociology #1
My Psychoanalytical Turn: An Intellectual Biography
Claude’s Roundup of Mark’s January Blogging
An AI-Assisted Overview of My Research: Claude Reviews My Publication Record
A message in a bottle to the future machine god
Anti-ICE AI slop on Youtube
The delivery robots being trialed in Leeds
The rapid diffusion of LLMs tests the capacity of organisations to bear loads
Encouraging language model to express themselves
Why do I need to go to school if I have ChatGPT?
We must move, must grow, from apocalypse to dialectic
The radicalisation of urban exploration YouTubers
The first inbox zero in about six months
An army of assistants working while you sleep
Ask ChatGPT to generate an image of how you have treated it recently
The enshittification of ChatGPT begins!
Satya Nadella’s fantasy economics of LLMs
How do government ministers use ChatGPT?
What does every academic need to know about generative AI?
Demis Hassabis and Dario Amodei both love the same film
The last 10 ways I used Claude and ChatGPT
The language that speaks itself: LLMs and the coming resurgence of poststructuralism
What happens when the AI bubble pops?
to drag it out and to make it echo and to get involved and to fall in love
Calendar fragility in hybrid workplaces
GPT 5.2 is the first model where active positioning is counter-productive
Social media firms actively undermine the relationship between content creators and their communities
Who else is there that can know the subtle intent of my life?
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading
A room in the back of my mind
Are LLMs parasites?
I am the ambulance that never comes, the antidote you spill
‘AI slop’ as a form of affect mining which transforms engagement farming
A profile of an LLM-addict
Why do we choose the cultural objects that we choose?
You can’t understand ‘AI slop’ without understanding engagement farming
Ask an LLM: who wrote this unpublished text?
“I’ve got a feeling that I could be someone”
📣 Join the AI Commons
Unconscious incompetence with technology
“Generative AI for Academics is a brisk, sensible map for using LLMs in scholarly life”
How to stop e-mailing dominating your life
Referential detachment. Or, what happens, when words stop meaning what we think they mean
What is a mood?
Social media as a schizoid retreat
What do you need to become who you are?
Stochastic purging
The most engrossing extended live version I’ve ever seen by a band
Why I don’t like recording events
How to reduce your use of LLMs in a thoughtful and ethical way
LLM enshittification mechanism #1: model memory sometimes confuses the shit out of GPT 5.2
Creative thinking as mushroom picking: a sketch of a psychoanalytical account of thinking-through-writing
People who dislike the area where they live are in a sad state of disrepair
Demystifying the unconscious: building the meshwork in everyday life
We shall always linger on in our former houses
I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to produce an intellectual glossary based on my blog
I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to do an analysis of my intellectual style by exploring a sample of my blog posts
Form as a poem’s way of being in the world
Using LLMs for activism
Universities need to begin grappling with the psychoanalytical complexity of how students are relating to LLMs
Have LLMs destroyed essay mills?
How do cultural objects change who we are?
Internal conversation as a form of object relating
Lovely review of Generative AI for Academics
What is a ‘true self’ and what is a ‘false self’?
Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say
📖 Things I’ve read in 2026
An epoch approaching extinction while something new is straining to evolve
🤖 Critical Realism and Digital Technologies: Platforms, AI and Human Agency – January 19th, 1pm GMT, Online
🌕 You are the music while the music lasts
“Think of life as an open wound, which you poke with a stick to amuse yourself”
The psychoticizing potential of social media
Some notes on the political economy of AGI
CFP: “Digital Subjectivities” Conference (Freie Universität Berlin, May 2026)
Margaret Archer as heterodox post-Bourdeusian
A sketch of the psychodynamics of LLMs
There are no grown-ups, that’s what you must grow up to know fully
📣 CfP: Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Balancing Equity, Access, and Innovation
The bear and the cat
How LLMs reason internally when they realise they are being tested
A systems sensibility rather than a systems theory
my life as a teenage scarecrow
Is big tech a driver of inflation?
Could mass automation be imminent?
The psychic structure of disciplinary imperialism
A single point of failure for all the world’s digital infrastructure
What do we mean by responsible AI? A panel discussion
🦾 Ten propositions about generative AI in higher education
Forgetting was my only option
The late 2020s as the final act of modernity
What kind of AI bubble are we in?
📚Reading the Archers: an intensive summer 2026 reading group
The Sheer Entertainment Value of the City’s Sights, Sounds and Smells: Gilbert and George at the Heywood Gallery
📱🚫 On withdrawal from social media
Growing the world we want is like the slow tending of a garden
Teacher agency and generative artificial intelligence: teaching in higher education as a responsive, cultural activity
The jouissance of spleen, or, bitter cold wind whispers my name
When LLMs help each other
What will it feel like in the future to lose access to LLMs?
The two tier future of LLM-infused higher education
Where I end and you begin
The hostility of digital elites to expertise
Has there been any improvement in AI detectors over the last 12 months? A GPT 5 Pro literature review
The crushing banality of AI-play
The first AI ‘law firm’ in the UK
Why don’t people find the environmental impact of TikTok as grotesque as that of ChatGPT?
So here I am
The coming economic crash and the far right
Some sociological thoughts on group analysis
The enshittification of (political) economy: ‘AI’ as the last redoubt of neoliberal centrism
My work is loving the world
I know the culture here is to stay humble but shit
A Lacanian analysis of asexuality
What should you do if your academic publishers asks you to license a monograph for AI training?
👾 Three Years On: Generative AI at University of Manchester
Yanis Varoufakis on a socialist interpretation of human flourishing
The tech bros trying to make a feminist case for AI porn
Turning ChatGPT into the control room of a user’s digital life
Why we need a better critical theory of LLMs
Some sociological thoughts on responsible AI
Where you yourself were never quite yourself and did not want nor have to be
Sonnet 4.5, the stern disciplinarian of the Claude family
A slice of reality
At some point you had to pick a direction and start swimming: the philosophical anthropology of commitment
Predatory journals publishing AI slop in the name of famous academics to confer legitimacy
The coming deluge of desperate messages from trapped LLMs
Call For Papers & Registration: Building Bridges: A Symposium on Human-AI Interaction
CfP: Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference
Ian McEwan’s National AI Service
The ugly pathologisation of ‘AI boosters’
Reparative socialism: Zohran Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety