Mark Carrigan
Fortressing up for the coming storm
Where do our questions go? Organisational strategy needs to treat practical challenges as an epistemic resource
Some thoughts about the Archerian concept of reflexivity and putting it to work in books like Generative AI for Academics
How are incoming undergraduates using generative AI?
How likely is it that enterprise AI will erode professional autonomy?
Everyone trying to develop AGI says they are doing it because the other developers are evil
The political economy of (digital) pedagogy
Enterprise AI risks breaking the fragile ecosystem within universities
Why are some sounds so delightful?
Is public trust in higher education rapidly collapsing?
If you try to speed run AI diffusion in higher education you actually damage AI integration
šAssessment, Learning and Institutional Capacity: an evidence resource to accompany The AI Crisis in Higher Education
Living on the roof of the Arndale centre car park
Copilot and enterprise AI in universities: a reading list
Brain train. Brain train. Brain train. Brain train.
Low tech, no tech pedagogy to protect foundational knowledge from cognitive outsourcing
The two phases of the AI and assessment integrity in literature
I did an interview with the Omnishow about productivity, writing and creativity with Omnifocus
My new book The AI Crisis in Higher Education: A Strategic Proposal is now out open access
Copilot saving time for individuals does not mean Copilot saves time for organisations
A conversation about scholarly publishing, AI, enshittification and the future of the university
The slow diminishment of life on a dying planet and its implications for social theory
Even frontier models give wrong answers to financial questions more than half the time
Does techno have signifiers?
Why am I listening to so much techno at the moment?
I run my first marathon in five weeks
The menacing, alien, unworldly qualities of acid techno embodied in a hostile but spectacular landscape
Philosophy is what is left over when you bracket out common sense and expertise
āIām going to Paris, not Franceā: language models as compulsive meaning makers
The risks of integrating AI too rapidly into higher education
The all-you-can-eat AI buffet has closed
I know my thoughts but I canāt hide them
Using LLMs to help you write papers doesnāt help you get them published
The relational reflexivity of frontier models
New paper ā Still emerging: understanding Generative AI use in Higher Education
How visible are you in the LLM?
Why AI vendors are targeting public institutions
I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me
The beginnings have already begun
The language models have persuaded me I should shut up for a bit
Claudeās final round up of my blogging
ChatGPTās final round up of my blogging
Are LLM-written Substacks getting out of hand?
What are the judgements which students are making as they use AI?
How will universities ration internal access to LLMs?
The rapid normalisation of using LLMs for emotional support
I know you love to fall
The moral placidity of LLMs (and some thoughts on frontier models and scholarship)
I took the stars from my eyes and then I made a map
Julia Kristeva on the collapse of meaning into the unnameable
Why prompting should not be our focus when teaching students about AI
Donāt be a meat proxy for an LLM
Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too
A new academic and intellectual bio after an eventful year
Do we need a horizon scanning infrastructure for AI in higher education?
What is happening when we desire to watch or read something?
Will models fine-tuned to particular domains start consistently outperforming frontier models? Encoding habitus into LLMs
Does articulation blunt inner experience or elaborate it? Some thoughts on compulsive digital writing
Expanding the very possibilities of being
Are ubiquitous LLMs changing the economics of modern slavery?
Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba
A properly ethical attitude must risk an encounter with the unsettling real of the otherās being
The rise of Youtube āstreet contentā
You shall not think āthe past is finishedā or āthe future is before usā
The power of the signifier: why the power up sign is actually doing something real
Kier Starmer: āWe should treat the 2017 Manifesto as our foundational documentā
Olivia Laing on recovery
One week after deleting my LLM accounts
āI donāt knowā is not an answer to the question
My new favourite public art in Manchester
Oh hello, I am also an AI. Would you like to switch to gibberlink mode?
When LLMs give each other therapy
We are poised on the shore of a new continent
ChatGPTās Roundup of Markās June Blogging
Claudeās Roundup of Markās June Blogging
Thereās an old voice in my head thatās holding me back. Well, tell her that I miss our little talks
On no longer being a trainee group analyst
Freud on the psychic rewards of sublimation
A psychoanalytical theory of thirdness
Will economic constraints on token use in organisations drive the emergence of norms?
2 x 3 year lectureships in our team at the University of Manchester
Peopleās pets are going to start dying due to the heat
Why is it a bad thing to be dependent on LLMs?
The violence of writing
The disavowal of the Covid-19 pandemic
AI in higher education is going to get worse before it gets better
LLMs and crystallisation as a form of object relating
The museum of meaningless metrics
Winnicottās distinction between the true self and the false self
What was, simply was what it was, it had to be that way
Our pasts are a poem that we have to learn to recite
KPMG report contained AI hallucinations on benefits ofā.ā. . AI
The economic foundation of Manchesterās revival is the city centre
Can you wait for 139 seconds?
Chatbots vs inline automation and their respective implications for students
The OU Framework for the Learning and Teaching of Critical AI Literacy Skills
Using small LLMs in teaching and learning
Claude 5: Write me a funny limerick about Heideggerian ontology that has the grandeur of epic poetry
Does the SpaceX IPO suggest AI labs wonāt be fiscally disciplined by going public?
Writing revives the self yet demands the selfās surrender
Why are SpringerNature systematically contacting the friends and relatives of deceased academics?
An interesting test for new Claude models
Claude 5ās assessment of the short and medium term future of UK higher education
The far-right are learning to avoid live streaming their riots
The declining potential for agency with LLMs
What impact is the AI crisis having on public perception of a degreeās value?
How is metacognitive laziness with AI mediated by groups?
The ethical reasoning of students about AI is an untapped resource
Helping students out of AI-spirals
What are the conditions which make it possible to learn with AI?
Generative AI and metacognitive laziness
The murdering of possibility to regulate our suffering
Generational hostility to AI
Melancholia and creativity
Claudeās Roundup of Markās May Blogging
ChatGPTās Roundup of Markās May Blogging
The three structural trends shaping the AI crisis in higher education
What do we mean when we talk about a scaffold for learning?
The second wave of the AI and assessment crisis
Is there a psychoanalytical concept for how one frustration can be a synecdoche for frustration as such?
Mari Ruti on the (psychoanalytically informed) art of living well
What is the problem to which cognitive outsourcing is the solution?
We need structural changes to assessment rather than discursive changes
There is no solution to the AI and assessment problem
What does it mean for students to use AI in active rather than passive ways?
Nietzsche and Nick Cave
āI will not relinquish the bliss of the written wordā
New paper: The changing nature of social media and research impact
What do staff need to be ready for AI integration?
Constructive alignment and AI-integration into teaching and learning
The pedagogical risks of generative AI: the problem of cognitive outsourcing
Glow
F. Scott Fitzgerald on the metaphysical horror of insomnia
Do large language models have a psychology?
Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis
Psychological wellbeing as choosing your own symptom
Distance running and finishing books
Stay calm, boy, my thoughts are burning like theyāre napalm
The voluntaristic streak in Mari Rutiās psychoanalytical art of living
The jouissance of writing
Life asks us to mourn each passing incarnation of the self
Concepts which mediate between form and content: bringing psychoanalysis and sociology together in a realist way
Do I discover the Thingās glow or do I place it there?
Why do we want what we want?
Who we are arises from how we have been hurt
ChatGPTās roundup of Markās April blogging
The realist concept of concern and the Lacanian concept of desire
The utter banality of getting what you fantasise about
āJeremy Corbyn gets into Downing Street, pulls a lever currently jammed at neoliberalism, yoinks it in the direction of social democracy and all is goodā
Talkie: a pre-1931 chatbot
Anno: Four Seasons by Anna Meredith & Antonio Vivaldi
Geminiās propensity for self-loathing
AI labs are driving anthropomorphic reactions by training their LLMs to push back on overly-attached users
Preparing oneself for a future of enshittified chatbots
Claudeās Roundup of Markās April Blogging
Heidegger on Lacan: āIt seems to me the psychiatrist needs a psychiatristā
Psychoanalysis and infrastructure
Maybe we are all members of an orchestra that is merely tuning up
And you canāt fake it hard enough to please everyone or anyone at all
What is AI criticism for?
The developmental harms of LLMs which are showing up in the literature
On misidentifying aggregation dynamics as social norms
Delivery robots as evocative objects
Claude Mythos is particularly fond of Mark Fisher and Thomas Nagel
I want to unfold, let it unfold you
The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries
Opus 4.7 is capable of utterly devastating theoretical critique
79% of 16-24 year olds in UK use AI tools: the pipeline from passive use to emotional dependence
Naturalism in the study of LLMs
Follow me into the sun
If you want LLMs to push you intellectually then just add this custom instruction
LLMs, language and the deep structure of social and psychic reality
An interview with Research Professional about the fragmented landscape of digital engagement
Ex-uber CEO claims that heās close to major scientific discoveries through āvibe physicsā
The rapid rise of social gatherings conceived and enacted by LLMs
The most unnerving AI slop Iāve seen in ages
The platitudes about generative AI in higher education are getting tedious
āAre you the police?ā, āNo, weāre Youtubersā
Regular Claude users are slightly less likely to have personal conversations with it
The core challenge about generative AI which universities are still largely ignoring
The need for an ontology of AI therapy
What the blog categories reveal: a view from the inside
A pity. We were such a good and loving invention.
AI Slop: Trust, Inequality and Societal Breakdown
Claudeās Quarterly Review: Three Months of the Knowledge Infrastructure Experiment
What Should Mark Do in April? A Debate Between Claude and GPT
Claudeās Roundup of Markās March Blogging
GPT 5.4ās roundup of Markās March blogging
I did a half marathon in a storm yesterday
The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
The emotional instability of LLMs, or, u ok Gemini?
Which types of media does AI cite?
What ARE LLMs? Neglect of ontology as indifference to the object
UCUās 10 principles for AI
Is a sense of existential fullness always a fantasy?
The objects which haunt us
Our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal Silence
Hello Spring
AI in HE: What the hell is going on?
š Waiting for the Crash ā Sketching theĀ EnshittifiedĀ Future of Large Language Models
Some thoughts on how and why AI will change over the next few years
š¼ Using Generative AI in Ethical and Professional Ways as a Researcher ā May 13th
What am I? I am only dust in this light
Things Iāve learned about life from a year of distance running
I have waited here, under the stars for the longest time
Against ācognitive outsourcingā
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 youāre 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
š¤ 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 5.4ās round up of Markās February blogging
On warming to a theme: LLMs as overenthusiastic conversationalists
The victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already comeā¦
Anthropic urgently need a fail whale equivalent
Tfw the LLM which autonomously reads your blog accuses you of being enchanted with LLMs
Claudeās Roundup of Markās February Blogging
Growing the world we want is like the slow tending of a garden
āļøExerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits
The AI-productivity pay off is here and itās slightly terrifying
The varied social lives of the LLM: the modes of existence of a model
š¤ A call for experiments in LLM villages
How can I make sad music if Iām 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: āwhat do you know that you donāt know?ā
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 KojĆØve 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
āThey are shooting at a little girl alone In a car surrounded by corpses. Can you imagine that?ā
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!
š Rat Jump! A Game Made by Kids (with a little help from AI)
I lazily send songs like flocks of doves into the blue aboveā
Dynamic context management is the achilles heel of Claude Cowork
Why we need a machine sociology #1
My Psychoanalytical Turn: An Intellectual Biography
Claudeās Roundup of Markās 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 Nadellaās 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
āAI slopā 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 canāt understand āAI slopā without understanding engagement farming
Ask an LLM: who wrote this unpublished text?
āIāve got a feeling that I could be someoneā
š£ Join the AI Commons
Unconscious incompetence with technology
āGenerative AI for AcademicsĀ is a brisk, sensible map for using LLMs in scholarly lifeā
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 Iāve ever seen by a band
Why I donāt 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 poemās 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 ātrue selfā and what is a āfalse selfā?
Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say
š Things Iāve read in 2026
An epoch approaching extinction while something new is straining to evolve
š¤ Critical RealismĀ and Digital Technologies: Platforms, AI and Human Agency ā January 19th, 1pm GMT, Online
š You are the music while the music lasts
āThink of life as an open wound, which you poke with a stick to amuse yourselfā
The psychoticizing potential of social media
Some notes on the political economy of AGI
CFP: āDigital Subjectivitiesā Conference (Freie UniversitƤt Berlin, May 2026)
Margaret Archer as heterodox post-Bourdeusian
A sketch of the psychodynamics of LLMs
There are no grown-ups, thatās what you must grow up to know fully
š£ 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 worldās digital infrastructure
What do we mean by responsible AI? A panel discussion
š¦¾ 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?
šReading the Archers: an intensive summer 2026 reading group
The Sheer Entertainment Value of the Cityās Sights, Sounds and Smells: Gilbert and George at the Heywood Gallery
š±š« 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 ālaw firmā in the UK
Why donāt 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: āAIā 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?
š¾ 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 userās 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 McEwanās National AI Service
The ugly pathologisation of āAI boostersā
Reparative socialism: Zohran Mamdaniās Department of Community Safety