I have not been making much this week but have found plenty to feed me…
Unusually original discourse about LLMs
I believe there are a few weeks left to listen to a recorded talk by Evgeny Morozov, hosted by the London School of Economics earlier this week. Morozov seemingly felt it necessary to devote the first two sections of his talk to convincing listeners that he is by no means a fan of the current manifestation of large language models (LLMs) or so-called AI, if you must stick to that term. Only then could he address the potential for an inadvertent expansion of horizons that LLMs induce in users, and how this relates to the socialist project. It is so hard to have any kind of conversation nowadays in this era of social-media-induced outrage. The rage towards the current neoliberal manifestation is completely justified, says Morozov; but to simply stop there is unimaginative (yup – not to mention naïve, and also hard to take seriously from anyone who feeds the apparatus by ‘givin’ it all that’ on social media every day). Interacting with these processes may be the best way to discover how those expanded horizons may be impacting us, and how they might fulfil what left-wing politics has lately failed to do. If you can still register to hear the recording, it is worth doing so. Of course, you do not necessarily have to agree with Morozov’s thesis, but there is a huge need to hear different perspectives and to refrain from exploding in symbolic apoplexy when faced with them.
Another book I want…
Performed moral outrage and ‘ready-made’ and unimaginative responses to the world are explored by Catherine Liu in her recently published book Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, which I have added to the very long list of books I want to read (in the interim there is a Noema essay below). Her much-needed, timely analysis of the now far-too-familiar ‘reveal-all’ habits we see on social media reminded me of Anna Kornbluh’s critique of how we hand the media overlords all of ourselves for free (and then complain endlessly about an apparatus that scrapes that information in order to become a mirror of who and what we are). And I loved the following phrase in a talk by Liu (link below): ‘Be resistant to ready-made forms of empathy’ (12.17 mins). God yes! (Thanks to Jenny Maxwell for the Liu links.)
Newly released Stuart Hall Archiving Project
This is definitely something to bookmark: this week the University of Birmingham released a publicly available archive of Stuart Hall’s notes, index cards, lectures and related tools, as reported in The Guardian (Osuh, 2026). Since reading the article, the site has been left open in my browser, and when I should be looking for work and projects worth applying to, I keep heading back to the window with Hall’s life work to marvel at the many scanned images of his lively and urgent scribbles. What a fantastic website – which, incidentally, has barred bots, writes Osuh, citing the site’s editors’ concerns about ‘culture, copyright and corporate power’. I get the impulse, but if Morozov is right about the horizon-expanding potential of these systems, blocking them from Hall’s work also encloses his thinking – which I cannot help but question.
Whatever ones thoughts on blocking, AI poison and LLM SLOP, I am very much looking forward to looking through the cybernetics page on Hall’s archive.
Flusser in action
Finally, last night I saw the second in a trilogy of pieces by Forced Entertainment in which LLMs play a role: Cold Sweat. Vilém Flusser’s encouragement to play against the apparatus is on full show, as it was in their previous iteration, Signal to Noise, which I saw in 2024 and wrote about here. Flusser (2012, loc. 936) writes at the end of Towards a Philosophy of Photography:
They [the experimentalists] are conscious that image, apparatus, program and information are the basic problems that they have to come to terms with. They are in fact consciously attempting to create unpredictable information, i.e. to release themselves from the camera, and to place within the image something that is not in its program.
This is precisely what Forced Entertainment are doing, and they do it brilliantly too. My friends who came with me last night and I are already planning to book tickets for the final piece, Everything Must Go, which will be in London early in 2027.
Relevant links listed below:
Socialism After AI
Hosted by Alternatives to Capitalism, LSE Law School and the Ralph Miliband Programme
Liu mentions that the word meritocracy was invented to question and satirise capitalist myths about how individuals should go about improving their lot in life. The following podcast hosted by David Runciman is useful for those who wish to learn more about its original intended meaning.
Refs:
Forced Entertainment: Cold Sweat | Southbank Centre (no date). Available at: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/forced-entertainment-cold-sweat/ (Accessed: 10 October 2026).
Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.
The History of Bad Ideas: Meri… – Past Present Future – Apple Podcasts (no date). Available at: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-bad-ideas-meritocracy/id1682047968?i=1000714981051 (Accessed: 10 October 2026).
Hochuli, A., Hoare, G. and Cunliffe, P. (2024) /458/ The Society of Pure Vibe ft. Anna Kornbluh | Bungacast, Bungacast. Podbean. Available at: https://bungacast.podbean.com/e/458-the-society-of-pure-vibe-ft-anna-kornbluh/ (Accessed: 25 April 2026).
The Institute of Art and Ideas (2026) How liberals monetized trauma | Catherine Liu on Marx, Trump, and identity politics. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS1Ng3CcAOs (Accessed: 10 October 2026).
Liu, C. (2023) ‘The Problem With Trauma Culture’. Available at: https://www.noemamag.com/the-problem-with-trauma-culture (Accessed: 10 October 2026).
Osuh, C. (2026) ‘Thatcherism via the Walkman: Stuart Hall’s British cultural studies preserved online’, The Guardian, 7 October. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/oct/07/stuart-hall-british-culture-online-project (Accessed: 10 October 2026).
Socialism after AI | Dr Evgeny Morozov (no date) The London School of Economics and Political Science. Available at: https://www.lse.ac.uk/events/ai-socialism (Accessed: 10 October 2026).
Stuart Hall Archiving Project (2026). Available at: https://stuarthalldigital.bham.ac.uk/about/ (Accessed: 10 October 2026).