New arrivals

🚨 Delighted to share that I’ve just signed with Oxford University Press to write my next book: looking at how ideas about Western civilisation shape (and are shaped by) the design and use of military technology.

Chris Elliot and I argue that it’s past time for the Australian War Memorial to update its Ben Roberts-Smith exhibits to give a full, unvarnished accounting of his crimes and their impact on victims. www.abc.net.au/religion/aus...

Trump: “DEATH TO MY ENEMIES” New York Times: “questions raised over Trump’s commitment to national unity”

Merimbula, NSW

11/10 graffiti

Disastrous

you should be able to take off work because your book is getting to the good part

"The termination is the first known case of a US technology company withdrawing services provided to the Israeli military since the beginning of its war on Gaza." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

No wonder Musk is impressed, the London march stretched all the way to the Arc de Triomphe

Sunday sunrise

Bleak

Effects of the Ukraine War, including the 2025 EU White Paper on European Defence, have transformed the political economy of European defence production are examined in a new @jei-publication.bsky.social article written with @brunoomartins.bsky.social and @jocelynmawdsley.bsky.social

Happy Sundays

We need to discuss the utter social bleakness these new technologies are responding to and in many cases worsening

Marching against the deliberate starvation of Palestinians

Universities: “AI will revolutionise education and enhance student learnings” Student prompts: “select my research topic, give me an argument, write the essay, add references, and hide all evidence of your crimes”

The ever excellent @elkeschwarz.bsky.social and Caroline Holmqvist on AI, nuclear weapons, algorithmic thinking, and the centrality of imagination to ethics journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Important things to consider before we outsource the research and writing process to machine proxies

Stunning Sydney

My first conference since returning to Oz and it was fantastic! Discussing AI and the resort to force with an amazing set of co-panelists

Personally, I was hoping for a future with slightly less billionaire-controlled Hitlerbots

The trick to reading lots of books is to not read lots of books

111 years ago today, Franz Kafka summed up adulthood

Please stop assuming that too many em dashes means AI written. Some of us are producing grammatically incoherent work the honest way!

Total dystopia

So excited to incorporate AI into the classroom and liberate my students from boring tasks like reading and thinking

Striking how consistently absent the most basic of strategic questions is from American foreign policy discourse: how does the world look through the eyes of the other guy? Empathy in international politics isn’t a concession to your adversary - it’s vital for your own security

Sunset on the lake

“Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment” - Eliot Cohen

Australian War Memorial

The UK's aim to "create a British Army which is 10x more lethal" with AI and autonomy reflects not just a strange Americanism, but may also pose a challenge to the UK's military AI ethics principles. A short piece from me in @theconversation.com theconversation.com/britains-pla...

Canberra sunset

'ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”...ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.' time.com/7295195/ai-c...

I am once again pitching my romantic comedy: - two academics start dating - discover they are each other's terrible reviewer - hijinks ensue Working title: Love is Double-Blind

Evergreen

David, famous for his undisclosed nuclear arsenal

“I asked chatgpt” “I asked grok”. well I went 40 pages deep on Wikipedia when I should have been sleeping, we are not the same

Frankish rulers had some wonderfully unimpressive names - Louis the Stammerer, Pepin the Short, Louis the Indolent, Charles the Simple!

Techno-fascist ascendancy

Welcome international conference attendees! During your stay in America please try to avoid anti-regime statements, the ICE kidnappings, and the roving military brigades

Man, the French Revolution sounds exhausting. Endless 13 hour speeches in an unventilated room of Roman cosplayers

I've written another article (apologies),where I riff on some points @ncrenic.bsky.social & I make elsewhere, but framed around Günther Anders' insights that the roots of 'the monstrous' mass violence in the 1930s & 40s may persist in our technological condition today carrier-bag.net/eichmanns-in...

Students, don't let ChatGPT take your over-the-top intro sentences from you. "never in human history...since the dawn of time...Oxford dictionary defines..." They're florid, trite, and PRECIOUS

Soviet poster, 1986

The Republican Party

This is an insane chart

Back with the marsupials

"AI is coming for your job" ya i'd like to see AI drink 11 coffees then have a panic attack

First day of a new job really feels like first day of school, especially when you’re wearing a stupid little backpack.