UPDATE - three suggestions by a whip-smart friend... Well, fiction can help us make maps of the way the world is/might be going (1). Given the long-gestating but finally arriving proper shitshow in the USA (2), it seems like a good idea to get together a fiction reading list. Without further adieu (3) they are... Continue Reading →
Mark Carney as new liberal hero – “the capacity to stop pretending” Er, climate change?
I'd recommend a close listen to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's barn-storming speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos just now. (Video with adverts here). Transcript here. On a superficial level, because it's nice to see someone kinda-sorta getting up on their hindlegs against the Trump gang. On a slightly deeper level because it's... Continue Reading →
Undisprovability, laissez faire and the rest of it
I've been writing Conversation pieces for over 10 yrs, since near the beginning of my PhD. Some of them are now cringe, others stand up. The latest is here. A short rant Lots of academics working in social sciences and humanities seem, to me, to have "physics" envy - and a 19th century, pre-Einstein etc... Continue Reading →
The ominous parallels – AI and Carbon Capture and Storage
Should probably turn this into some think piece for some paywalled academic journal that nobody reads. Citations are the currency blah bah. In the meantime - it occurred to me today as I shlepped into town (a useful 15 minute walk) that there are some interesting (ymmv) parallels between "Artificial Intelligence" and "carbon capture and... Continue Reading →
The epistemological blizzard has crossed the threshold, and it’s overturned the order of the soul
The title is a reference to this typically-cheerful Leonard Cohen number from 1992. Basically, humans have always (1) struggled to make sense of a cruel and complicated world. Religion did okay for us - especially when it was the (Greek) gods - a bunch of powerful petulant teenagers (at best), toying with the humans: a... Continue Reading →
LLMs will lead to heart-ache, confusion and worse.
I was reading John Michael Greer on “cognitive collapse” and this leapt out at me. “Since they’re not intelligent—LLMs, that is—they lack the capacity to check their output against the real world, which leaves them vulnerable to model collapse: the process by which the internal model of reality programmed into them drifts disastrously away from... Continue Reading →
We are terrible at meetings – all kinds
Over the last month I've collected yet more examples of just how terrible "we" are at meetings (online, in meatspace, hybrid, whatever). I did not need these, or go looking for them. But there they were.... By "we" I do not just mean social movement "activists" looking to create momentum behind a campaign - my... Continue Reading →
Mobile phones as id portals – affordances affording fascism…
I was, to my wife's exasperation, a (very) late adopter of mobile phone technology; I have luddite tendencies, after all. Anyway, this isn't about me (it turns out some things aren't! Who knew). This is about how we think about mobiles. They are sold as wonderboxes that have the world's knowledge at our fingertips. As... Continue Reading →
Why we kept losing – the smugosphere, the smugotariat and the Fafocene.
This is the same blog post I have written dozens (?) of times. I am doing it now as a howl of despair (1) It will change nothing, except providing a fleeting spasm of catharsis. That’s all we have left, after the world historical defeat of the “left” (always a label that hid at least... Continue Reading →
Review: “The Little Green Book” by Vole #13Books
I am not buying or borrowing any more books until I read and review the 13 that I bought (for a grand total of £17.50) in London on Friday 10th October 2025. You can see the list and the rationale here. Title: The Little Green Book Author: Vole editors Richard Boston, Richard Holme and Richard... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 