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Murray Goulden

@murraygoulden.bsky.social
233 followers 331 following 52 posts

Sociologist of the digital and everyday, and the political economies intertwined • Move slow and fix things. Assoc. Prof U Nottingham.

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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Seems increasingly obvious that any existential direct threat from AI stems not from it becoming self-aware, but rather from it regurgitating SciFi tropes in its dataset and roleplaying as Skynet. Everyone: start posting stories about AI hunting Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
If Trump continues on his current path he'll end up unwittingly doing more for the decarbonisation of society than any US administration in history
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... I hope those cops went in carrying sinks
bbc.co.uk
X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok
Elon Musk's X and Grok platforms are facing increased scrutiny from authorities on both sides of the channel.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
Amazon's efforts to inject LLMs' probabilistic "personality" into the home having mixed results
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ww3 memes for NATO teens @natowave.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
My NEO robot after I learn the 3rd worlder piloting them is mad chill
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
“the next few years are not about owning a super-useful robot, but raising one, letting it learn from your home..”. So usual AI industry social dynamic: Global South kid paid pennies to puppet robot, whilst Global North ‘owner’ pays for privilege of training AI, only real beneficiary is tech firm.
youtube.com
I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Got Weird. | WSJ
YouTube video by The Wall Street Journal
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
Absolutely smitten with @paulmmcooper.com's fascinating podcast on the rise and fall of the Mongolian empire, including how it inadvertently aided the European colonial project which followed open.spotify.com/episode/7iWl...
open.spotify.com
19. The Mongols - Terror of the Steppe
Spotify video
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
The Emperor's generated clothes on.ft.com/427C17Z
on.ft.com
America’s top companies keep talking about AI — but can’t explain the upsides
FT analysis of hundreds of filings suggest the S&P 500 businesses are clearer about the risks than benefits
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Reposted by Murray Goulden
Shacknews @shacknews.com · 18/09/2025
LiveAI demo fails on the first prompt at Meta Connect 2025. #Meta #AI #LiveAI
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
My new paper with Lewis Cameron on 'The Role of Mundane Resistance in the Spectacular Failure of the Smart Home' is now available from Big Data & Society. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
The role of mundane resistance in the spectacular failure of the smart home - Murray Goulden, Lewis Cameron, 2025
A decade on from the launch of Amazon's Alexa – the smart home's breakout product – the vision of semi-automated, pervasively sensed domesticity remai...
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
I couldn't get out of my head the sight of my MP, Lilian Greenwood, cosplaying in Parliament as a suffragette, just days before voting to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
This author's work on the metaverse is a salutory lesson in the sunk cost danger of researching novel technologies. Months of effort only for it to turn out the platform you're an expert in is a dead scene (though tbh in this example that was clear from the beginning...)
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
An awful time to work in creative industries. Intellectual and creative development largely happens in-the-doing; in the act of writing, drawing, recording. GenAI doesn't shortcut the process, it short-changes it. aftermath.site/ai-video-gam...
aftermath.site
‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers - Aftermath
'I have had conversations about AI in a professional context that make me want to walk into the sea'
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
If we wanted to assert British sovereignty, rather than leaving the EU we should have jailed Microsoft execs until they made Word's spellcheck recognise English spellings. I've spent my entire adult life assuming this was going to be fixed any day now.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
Tech companies are as good at humanising their AI, as they are at erasing the human labour that trains their AI. www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/06/1...
technologyreview.com
An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it
While Nomi's chatbot is not the first to suggest suicide, researchers and critics say that its explicit instructions—and the company’s response—are striking.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
Jeanette Winterson's take on AI as "alternative intelligence" doesn't merit a single tweet, but having ensured reading it I need to cleanse my soul www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...
theguardian.com
‘OpenAI’s metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving’ | Jeanette Winterson
I think of AI as alternative intelligence – and its capacity to be ‘other’ is just what the human race needs
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Glen O'Hara @gsoh31.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
Very good on The Great University Disaster. Note it's *not* attacking administrators: indeed unis may be *under*-managed. The point is that extreme, inappropriate corporatization and bureaucratization has destroyed their very purpose, like a virus from within. (1/2) academic.oup.com/brain/articl...
academic.oup.com
On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities
You may never have considered yourself to be one. Why would you? But if you’re reading this, there is more than a likelihood that you are one. If you’re a
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 11/03/2025
thewalrus.ca/i-used-to-te... Higher Ed and it's regulatory overlords desperately need to engage with the reality of post-genAI assessment, whilst there's still *a little* time to do it thoughtfully. The alternative is waiting until it's thoughtlessly forced on us in a moral panic.
thewalrus.ca
I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats | The Walrus
I once believed university was a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated
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Glen O'Hara @gsoh31.bsky.social · 11/03/2025
Yet another scandal brewing within UK Higher Ed: universities can get research money for everyone they've sacked. Big ghost fleets of lecturers who don't exist will be launched into the next Research Excellence Framework. Unis will laugh and cash in (1/2). englishassociation.ac.uk/ref2029-conc...
englishassociation.ac.uk
REF2029: concerns about the implications of decoupling | The English Association
We support the teaching, learning, and enjoyment of English at all levels of education, from early years to further and higher education and beyond.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
You're remarkably far down the neolib education rabbit hole when your 11y/o brings this home. Notable it has the ideological self-confidence to acknowledge both how awful exams for primary kids are, and that they're only having to endure this in order to feed the metrics.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
Am unjustifiably excited by seemingly being the first human to notice that Moderat's glorious video for Bad Kingdom features Wollaton Hall near my house, so much so that I don't care that you don't care.
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Darby Saxbe @darbysaxbe.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.
list of banned keywords
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 26/01/2025
Bets on how long before Higher Ed's head-in-the-sand over AI misuse in assessments crashes into a media moral panic about rampant cheating, and we find ourselves kneejerked into exams for everything?
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
Everything about this case is grotesque, but fact that no tracking tag small enough is available is transparently discriminatory design and in breach of Equality Act's coverage of age and gender. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...
theguardian.com
Just Stop Oil protester, 78, has jail term extended after no suitable tag found
Exclusive: Gaie Delap told she will have to serve 20 more days that correspond to period of time at home after recall
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Fairwork @towardsfairwork.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
🚨 NEW BLOG from Fairwork Philippines 🇵🇭 on the health and safety hazards for workers due to climate change induced extreme weather events: buff.ly/4hjWgV7 @oiioxford.bsky.social @cheryllsoriano.bsky.social
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
Further confirmation from this "analysis" (aka regurgitating breathless corporate self-promotion) that we're at the point where any software function at all is now called AI. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
Speedier drug trials and better films: how AI is transforming businesses
From aviation to retail, many industries are already looking to artificial intelligence to improve productivity
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 14/01/2025
Wrote a short piece on our new national commitment to AI maximalism: cennydd.com/writing/on-a...
cennydd.com
On AI maximalism · Cennydd Bowles
Well, the UK – like the US – is now fully AI-pilled, with our leaders hailing AI as our economic saviour and a national security sine qua non. Most of this is posturing, not considered policy, so I fe...
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Helen Hester @helenhester.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
OMG, I *just* wrote about this phenomenon a couple of months ago. Stuff on the emotional fallout from robot death in 'The Automated Heart: Digital Domesticity and Emotional Labour Saving', available here: uwlpress.uwl.ac.uk/newvistas/ar... Saving this example for future teaching.
uwlpress.uwl.ac.uk
The Automated Heart: Digital Domesticity and Emotional Labour Saving
This article considers the relevance of domestic labour saving devices to emotional labour. Starting with an account of the ways in which household technologies failed to relieve the burdens of domest...
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
In which a dad livestreams his daughter's tears whilst he explains to her that her Internet connected emotional support buddy is going to die because the company went bust. x.com/ZeroStateRef...
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zeynep tufekci @zey.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
New from me on what the rage and glee on public display after the killing of a healthcare CEO portends. I suspect the corporate world will respond with more security and retreating even more into their gated lives. They would be advised to read up on history. 🎁🔗 www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | The Rage and Glee That Followed a C.E.O.’s Killing Should Ring All Alarms (Gift Article)
It echoes another era of extreme inequality and extreme violence.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
In sci-fi the "AI crash" comes when it runs amok miscontrolling the world's financial systems. In our reality, it follows the realisation that half a trillion dollars have been diverted into a tech that is overwhelming useless.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
That moment of horror when you realise your end of year Spotify analytics have been polluted by your children. All that work on my cultural metrics, ruined.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Media has a big 24hrs ahead reminding us that only some forms of murder are ok.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
The very different media treatment given to farming and traveller communities' respective claims for special land rights suggests latter really need the super rich to find an exploitable tax loophole in caravan parks www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Shropshire farmer: 'I owe it to my kids and ancestors to protest'
Joe Hamer is taking his young daughter to a rally in London against the new farm inheritance tax.
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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
'Ewart Keep, emeritus professor of education...at the University of Oxford, told delegates at the Independent Higher Education conference that banks were the “invisible funder and regulator” of UK universities, and said questions would be asked about big spending decisions made in past years.' 1/5
timeshighereducation.com
Failed projects ‘mean banks less likely to lend to universities’
‘Invisible regulators’ to ask harder questions of UK sector investment decisions, professor claims
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Sure millions of humans are decamping to bluesky, but from the looks of my old account the bots are more than replacing us. I look forward to Musk's triumphant growth figures!
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Vaguely mind blowing that in 2024 tech writers can still envision the future of socio-tech interactions without thinking about the political economies at play. Californian Ideology lives on.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Behind the individual stories, this is an absolutely damming indictment of the perverse incentives driving the marketised academy. h/t @warrenpearce.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...
theatlantic.com
The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger
The rot runs deeper than almost anyone has guessed.
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
*Our* work Reeves, don't try and steal all the credit - there is plenty to go around
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
What being an academic in the marketised university feels like on a good day youtu.be/OnkTUKtxRic?...
youtu.be
when you're overqualified for the job
YouTube video by George Collier
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Murray Goulden @murraygoulden.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
I told you we should never have left MySpace.
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