This is Nick Cave all over again.

I am not listed on the Eventbrite, but am speaking in the 5pm session. Not sure if that encourages or discourages folk, but it is what it is…

I am now speaking in the afternoon session *as well*. Both the morning and afternoon session is online and free. I am told that BUP is giving a 50% off discount code for the book to attendees too.

Link for 5PM session here, other session listed below.
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/part-2-boo...

A funny thing about that clip is that he’s making a kind of Nietzschian/Foucauldian argument, but as though it were made by a Chris Morris character. The thing could be read as a sophisticated in-joke regarding Foucault’s account of the neoliberal subject & some of the subsequent scholarship.

I personally like VAR. It’s a perpetual public humiliation for a society that convinced itself objectivity was a mere technological innovation away.

Hmm… that’s a very poorly arranged sentence. I promise that it is not indicative of the writing in the book!

Link to the full book: policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/using-docume...

My chapter: doi.org/10.51952/978...

I happily will be speaking at this book launch in a few weeks on the chapter I wrote.

sign up here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/part-1-boo...

Yeah; I think finding and being profoundly buoyed by current limitations is a bad position to find oneself in. Not least because declaring its failures fundamental rather undermines you when some new work-around is attached that resolves that particular problem.

With that acknowledge refusal/disparagement/antagonism are obvs entirely appropriate response. However, IMV, they need to properly accept the complexity of the achievement. A machine need not be simple to be awful.

I agree with this, though I think the article is right in saying a lot of folk are consoling themselves with a bad faith reading of the technology as simple; thus, not a complex appendage of an essentialist/computational ideology that is not just typical of the contemporary right, but is its heart.

Come for the book review, stay for the methodological meditation… i wrote about using documents in social science, which was also recently published here: doi.org/10.51952/978....
The chapter is really just me doing my best AoK impression. I recommend the full book really.

Dr. Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us—and How AI Could Save Lives. By C. Blease, London: Yale University Press, 2025. 352 pp. £18.99 (hbk) £18.99 (ebk) ISBN 978‐0‐30024714‐5 Click on the article title to read more.

I wrote a short reflection on sociology, AI, and healthcare and smuggled it into a book review. It was was published this morning. doi.org/10.1111/1467...

Got a paper at BSA on this, and a few other pieces of writing in various states of completion, should that be of interest to anyone.

"The saints came back. Not the gods nor the dead but the saints: emerging from crowds and forests and broken towns with eyes as soft as milk and hearts like booming cannons. They went among the people and worked miracles. They brought calm to the mad and grief to the unfeeling and so parted the lands as gently as a mother parts her infant’s hair. And wherever they went there followed behind them tides of envy and muttered complaint, for the world still knows what to do with saints and soon busied itself sending them on, to a better place."

i wrote a 100 word short story about saints for my friend's substack which publishes only 100 word short stories veryshort.substack.com/p/return

Hi Marcus,
This is an interesting problem, with some echos of the professionalisation of medical record librarians in the 20th century. Have put my name down, hopeful that I can be of use.

Only a totalitarian would trust that guy’s maths.

… though obviously you’ll have to verify and test each component of it. And also figure out what it’s doing. You might have to do some other stuff like reinvent mathematics for yourself too. After that though..!

I missed the anniversary but nevertheless!

Aaron Seward's hand-painted music video for "The Year I Lived in Richmond" by Advance Base has been out in the world for a whole, big, terrible year.

Thank you Aaron for making beautiful magic.

Watch it here:
youtu.be/-LXwshEQjtg?...

Yeah, it was fun when it meant taking on a pseudo-intellectual critical class drunk on its own importance. It’s less fun when taking that position puts one shoulder to shoulder with marketeers & Netflix execs; facing down anyone considering seriously what it means to make art in contemporary life.

Generation Ready: Building the Foundations for AI-Proficient Education in England’s Schools Generation Ready: Building the Foundations for AI-Proficient Education in England’s Schools

See also: Blair Jr’s dad’s think tank rounding this circle. institute.global/insights/pub...

3, 2, 1: How We Were Drawn Into the Photo Booth A century after the first iteration, these public-private cameras have changed the way we think about photographs

This is a good and thoughtful essay. Photo booths are a strange thing to have persisted... There is something of the absurd in their invention, and thus, double absurd in their persistence. A romantic machine.
artreview.com/how-we-were-...

They just haven’t thought about who those guards may end up being.

This seems absolutely right. Seems to me a total inversion of the “anything goes” of Feyarbend. “Nothing goes without satisfying a guard.”.

I think, perhaps, my tolerance for scripts quoting Sartre as though it’s esoteric text is abnormally high.

Last night, I watched Richard Kelly’s The Box. Afterwards, I went to read critical reviews and all of them seemed utterly stupid and wrong. I can understand a critique of that film as pretentious, but as “confused” or “boring” seems totally wrong.

I watched The Shrouds tonight at the cinema. A strange little film (in a good way). Seems like a real companion to Crimes of the Future.

I expected this to be stupid, but it's worse than I thought. “Technology has a new target in its crosshairs – and that’s us. That’s our labour.” (hmm.. he's not really thought too much about the character of technology has he?) *few sentences later* "D**r, 48, is a technology theorist." (😬)

Likewise. I have a lot of *thoughts* in the vague area of your talk, so it’s probably for the best you whipped away.

I think that’s a kindness (perhaps to both). Metascience seems —to me— to be an articulation/strategic-deployment of a certain totalitarian/positivist science. What’s more, I think there’s a straight line between it and the biology you talked about on Monday.

A deep well. The Alan Moore fan annotation blogs constitute a utopian vision of the World Wide Web IMO.