Stephen Hughes
@stephenhues
Associate Professor in STS at University College London | Emotional dynamics in science/technology/society relationships (Fantasy, Denial, Ambivalence, Trust) | NEW BOOK: Affect, Emotion & Feeling in Science Communication 2027 with Bristol University Press
In Zuckerberg’s fantasy we no longer need the self. Our superintelligent agent will live our lives for us.
90s hero just took a bullet. Apparently publisher’s scenarios can be found elsewhere :( sad. RIP publisher!
Exactly what I needed Outlook, thank you! I was trying to think of utterly useless things that I could add to my endless list of unread emails!!! 😍😍😍
We’ve reached such a level of irrationality in conversations about AI safety and responsibility that unleashing their capacity for harm somehow IS the safe and responsible thing to do. techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/t...
Derrida really is an amazing secondary text on Freud. As frustrating as it is to read him sometimes, he comes up with amazingly sharp insights that are kind of mind blowing. Also he's insanely consistent across his work.
This is exceptionally cool. www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/ann...
Absolutely love a phat Freud footnote. Separately, whoever came up with endnotes needs to be cancelled. Why go to end of book in frenzied search when eyes can simply be cast downward!
We are 100 years into the future from when Freud wrote this and psychiatry has largely still not acknowledged the fundamental obscurity of the mind. Doing so would be to admit that mental life, suffering, and treatment are inherently mythic (based on meaning making).
Very interesting tension in UK conspiracy theories between ENVIRONMENT // NATURE. Environment is associated with unrealistic sustainability fantasies that impose order, control & domination. It is technologised nature. Nature itself is viewed as a grounding & cohering space for pure freedom.
DRAFT MANUSCRIPT SUBMITTED 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯 Thanks to everyone who helped out! Now I go into hole and recover! Bye!
No idea if this is true or not but 🤣🤣🤣 "An Al chat-assist created and offered a customer an 80% off offer. Customer has now placed an order of £8,000+"
1) This public attitudes to science report contains troubling (but familiar) insights about public relationships with science. It reinforces what I and others have been saying about a deteriorating relationship between science and society marked by conflict, ambivalence & uncertainty. pas.ipsos.com
If only we had experts in the fucked up ways that capital, power, and human bodies are tied up together
Who are the psychoanalysts who agreed to this??? And why is Nature now a tabloid??
"how do we make sure that we are the ones in the lead, so that we have influence in impacting how this technology is developed and setting the norms across society" www.theguardian.com/technology/n...
No way! Keanu Reeves liked my post on Twitter from 2 years ago!!!! Never knew he was into sociotechnical imaginaries!
Apt: "One effect of writing is that one learns what one thinks" (C Fred Alford).
Obsessed with this painting of a vision of Joan of Arc by Louis Maurice Boutet de Monvel, a children's book illustrator. Nice high res version available at www.nga.gov/artworks/195...
At the amazing Haptic Trouble conference at Sorbonne Nouvelle. Presenting a paper today - Lonely Dreams of Touch Without a Body - where I discuss fantasies about touchless tech via Derrida and Klein. But the main news is that Paris knows how to cater for academics. See pic for hard evidence.
Drafts of all chapters for Affect, Emotion and Feeling in Science Communication are now complete. They still need quite a bit of work but here’s an overview of where things currently stand (a thread):
Everything about this headline is so potently cringey. Like a frickin Brass Eye sketch.
Great paper by @felicitycallard.bsky.social & Stan Papoulias which reasserts that the value of psychoanalysis is its confrontation of our capacity for creativity AND destruction and the inescapable role that fantasy plays in navigating that conflict - mh-bmj-com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/content/45/2...
Without access to playful creativity in our reflection, discourses of responsibility / ethics can easily descend into organised nonsense and chaos [quote here from Winnicott].
Better to have all the fire alarms for the building in the one place
Can't get over how bad NCAD's homepage is. Looks like a local classified ads website.
Imagine, aged 3, you innocently draw a giraffe penis for your dad only for it to end up in the hands of Freud where it becomes a central brick in the edifice of psychoanalysis.