Neilan began his career in writing before turning to academic scholarship, a path he has followed for over three decades alongside the vicissitudes of commercial architectural practice.

As an independent scholar, his work engages Foucauldian themes of knowledge, power, and the formation of the modern self, with particular attention to how a technologically mediated world shapes thought, memory, and conduct. Bringing together the philosophical, technical, and experiential, his fiction and non-fiction writing traces the historical conditions that have produced who we are, while opening onto who we might yet become.

His perspective is grounded in architectural theory, a discipline that treats buildings and cities as material sites where power an Neilan began his career in writing before turning to academic scholarship, a path he has followed for over three decades alongside the vicissitudes of commercial architectural practice.

As an independent scholar, his work engages Foucauldian themes of knowledge, power, and the formation of the modern self, with particular attention to how a technologically mediated world shapes thought, memory, and conduct. Bringing together the philosophical, technical, and experiential, his fiction and non-fiction writing traces the historical conditions that have produced who we are, while opening onto who we might yet become.

His perspective is grounded in architectural theory, a discipline that treats buildings and cities as material sites where power and subjectivity are shaped. Trained to think across concepts, materials, abstract systems, and lived experience, Neilan applies this interdisciplinary lens to examine how contemporary infrastructures are reshaping human subjectivity.

He holds three first-class degrees, including a Master of Arts in Histories and Theories (with Distinction) from the AA in London. There his research explored (among other things) transparency, governmentality, and modern subjectivity in Modernist architecture, and resulted in his nomination for the Cittadellarte Scholarship. As an undergraduate, he was his university's record prize winner, served as valedictorian, and received the institution's most prestigious award, the Hackett Postgraduate Research Scholarship for Overseas Study. He is also a recipient of multiple national and international prizes as a practitioner.

His debut book, After the Human, draws on Michel Foucault's archaeology of knowledge and genealogy of power to examine how contemporary AI systems are transforming the conditions of human subjectivity, arguing that machine-learning systems are not only intensifying these trajectories but inaugurating a qualitative shift in how subjectivity itself is structured.

See also:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
https://www.amazon.com/author/martinn...
https://substack.com/@martinn1977
https://www.linkedin.com/company/alet...
Twitter/X: MartinNeil27676
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Knowledge Without Understanding (#6 of 6 Thought-Pieces for AFTER THE HUMAN)

In December 2020, DeepMind announced that its AlphaFold system had solved a problem in structural biology that had resisted the field for half a century. The challenge was this: given the sequence of amino acids that make up a protein, predict the three-dimensional shape that sequence will fold into. Proteins fold into specific shapes, and those shapes determine their biological function — how enz Read more of this blog post »

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Published on May 16, 2026 03:35 • Tags: after-the-human, agi, ai, alien-reason, artificial-general-intelligence, artificial-intelligence, continental-philosophy, critical-theory, cultural-theory, displaced-human, foucauldian, foucault, immanuel-kant, kant, kantian, media-studies, model-collapse, post-human, science-and-technology-studies, sts, subjectification, subjectivation, subjectivisation, technology, the-order-of-things

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Martin Neilan shared a quote “The birth of the Node is not the end of the human but the end of a particular fantasy of the human, the fantasy of sovereignty, of exception, of standing outside and above.” Martin Neilan
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“We built AI to process human knowledge — but did we anticipate that it would dismantle the human who does the knowing?”
― Martin Neilan, After the Human: Artificial Intelligence, Subjectivity, and the Future of Knowledge

tags: agi, ai, alien-reason, artificial-general-intelligence, artificial-intelligence, continental-philosophy, critical-theory, foucauldian, foucault, model-collapse

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“The birth of the Node is not the end of the human but the end of a particular fantasy of the human, the fantasy of sovereignty, of exception, of standing outside and above.”
― Martin Neilan, After the Human: Artificial Intelligence, Subjectivity, and the Future of Knowledge

tags: agi, ai, alien-reason, artificial-general-intelligence, artificial-intelligence, critical-theory, foucauldian, foucault, model-collapse

0 likes