Collection of practices, organizations would be eg Bluesky, X, Substack, ResearchGate etc

Speaking of Parsons, though, I think this would make a lot of sense to him. He did, after all, in American Society, write that "instrumental activism" is the "paramount value of American Society" and then discussed how this is institutionalized (and the source of many strains).

good question! I mean it very literally, as in a platform is an institution that incentivizes people to use each other and their interactions instrumentally (e.g. to build up their followings).

I take the intuition very seriously, and try to build a platonic participatory platform-in-speech run on the same principles as efforts to imagine a post capitalist participatory economy. The results, alas, are information degradation, misaligned incentives, and black attention markets.

political sociality creates a counterintuitive moral context, in which, as in political economy, many everyday intuitions are relaxed. One intuition that is very difficult to let go of is that it is possible to organize the production and allocation of influence directly and cooperatively.

The Scroll to Surfdoom Social Capitalist Ethics and the Paradoxes of Participatory Platform Planning

This essay applies some political economy concepts to platforms, which I conceptualize under the heading of “political sociality” and “social capitalism”: the institutionalized instrumentalization of social relations. Aka: staged clout tournaments.

open.substack.com/pub/thesilve...

sethabrutyn.com/2026/04/09/t...
#sociology

Tarrying with the Negative Why Our Method of Argument Matters for Social Theory

A great illustration of the power of Tarrying with the Negative.
thesilverlining3.substack.com/p/tarrying-w...

This is a terrific article, laying out an approach to sociological theory that builds from Hegel's idea of determinate negation and aims to rejuvenate deep engagement with existing theories as a central driver of theoretical creativity.

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Sociology's evolving discourse Me and Codex have entered the chat

A really great substack by the ever-brilliant @dsilver432.bsky.social charting the rise and fall and sometimes rise again of sociological research areas, discourse, and interests. Sadly, I find myself somewhere in that mid-20th century world...

thesilverlining3.substack.com/p/sociologys...

Many interesting details, read the whole thing! One fun analysis was an attempt to predict what would happen post-2015 based only on what came before. The models failed pretty badly, but it is illuminating to see how and why and where.

Sociology's evolving discourse Me and Codex have entered the chat

Sociology's Evolving Discourse

A computational analysis of over a century of sociology journal articles

open.substack.com/pub/thesilve...

If the external justification of social capitalism involves the social benefits that flow from staging a clout competition, the internal ethics involves guidance as to how to do so well.

The result is that some relaxation of everyday morality is justified on platforms, since this is functionally necessary for healthy competition. This does not mean that anything goes, any more than competition within a sports league means that one can simply destroy one’s competitor.

This post argues that platforms indeed exist in order to stage clout competitions, much like sports leagues do, and that competitive dynamic is justified because it can remedy problems of incentive and compliance and discovery that are otherwise intractable.

An ethics of social capitalism therefore must grapple with the central role that competition plays on platforms. If they cannot exist in a way that fulfils their function without staging some form of competition, then any ethical social capitalism must justify this competitive dynamic.

It is a striking fact that social media platforms tend to converge on the competitive clout tournament as a mechanism to discover the value and stimulate the production of content. This competitive dynamic is why they are best understood as social capitalist institutions.

Social Media Platforms are Staged Clout Competitions Why we fight

Social Media Platforms are Staged Clout Competitions
open.substack.com/pub/thesilve...

Why do we compete for influence online? A theory of social capitalism.

My assignments have been my own humble attempt to bring this Platonic spirit into the contemporary classroom. In this post, I want to show you the final assignment from last semester (more on this semester’s experiments to come!).

In contrast to Socrates, Plato wrote, but he did not write essays, he wrote dialogues — in the hopes of creating a new medium that would somehow preserve and enact, and maybe enhance, or at any rate diffuse, the dialogic and pedagogic practice of his teacher.

The answer I gave is that, while he would be sad at the demise of the traditional essay as an all-purpose tool of assessment, he would seek out alternatives.

Chatstorm is a platform designed to make the social dimension of AI explicit, built into the very architecture by which we interact with AIs. In a previous post, I asked What Would Plato Do? in the face of the rise of LLMs.

Classical social theorists after Smith critiqued specifics, but all stand in a tradition that takes “the social” as its object in one way or another.

He understood very well the idea that Hayek would only later formalize, that prices and markets network minds so they can benefit from one another, just as the division of labor networks activities.

A central insight of social theory is that intelligence is plural and distributed. This is why it is fair to treat Adam Smith as perhaps the discoverer of the social as a distinct domain of reality.

Artificial Social Intelligence in the Classroom Experiments in Classical Sociology IV

Artificial Social Intelligence in the Classroom
open.substack.com/pub/thesilve...

This is the latest post in a series on our experiments in teaching Classical Sociological Theory by way of Artificial Social Intelligence.

The social construction of crime Or, how to avoid becoming a sucker

I've been enjoying Dan Silver's substack, but this post on avoiding a "sucker sociology" really speaks to me: open.substack.com/pub/thesilve...

Living with Ghosts: How Physical Traces of the Past Shape Cultural Trauma in Chinatowns - Matt Patterson, Henry Tsang, Bryan Kuk, Weiqi Li, Mojtaba Rostami, 2026 Cultural trauma refers to how past experiences of harm can fundamentally transform a community’s shared identity, potentially generating feelings of solidarity ...

Check out our new paper in American Sociological Review: "Living with Ghosts: How Physical Traces of the Past Shape Cultural Trauma in Chinatowns" The paper is based on research we've done on efforts to preserve and protect historic Chinatowns in Canada and the United States

doi.org/10.1177/0003...

Another excellent read here for those who teach #sociological theory or are interested in simplifying how certain perspectives work

The essay articulates this idea, and concludes with the proposal that, far from being an altruistic decision in contrast to the more selfish decision to stay single, marriage, in this tradition, represents a kind of higher selfishness, self-expansion through building a joint reality with another.