Good point. But obviously, this has to do with the fact that following recent technological transformations, enshrining Intellectual property no longer serves the interest of big capital as it used to 4 decades ago.
This week at Group Threat, I spoke with @grundrza.bsky.social about Florida's censorship regime, teaching under authoritarianism, and how folks are coping (or not).
On a more general note: reality is gloomy enough as it is. There's no need to try make it seem even worse
This means that articles read by only few people; those to which many are exposed, but most of them don't read and surely don't take seriously; and those trusted by millions based on their sources' reputation are counted as equal. Calibrating for readership & trust could tell a very different story
This looks frightening: 51% of all online articles published in 2025 were AI-generated. No wonder people keep citing this number. However, it's important to bear in mind this calculation does not distinguish between articles based on their readership and authority graphite.io/five-percent...
SO important! This new paper convincingly shows that in Norway, people from different classes recognize the same occupational status hierarchy, which is often assumed but rarely tested. However, story might well be different for more conflicted/unequal societies journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...
Sorry for being recursive, but Dan's important work on how to study the AI hype rather than reproduce it definitely deserves a hype
Demonstrating in Tel-Aviv against the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Using starvation as a political tool to serve ethnic cleansing is dreadful. Most people who live here, Israelis and Palestinians alike, want this nightmare to end NOW
Very troubling. Not as troubling as the mass starvation in Gaza, but still: our academic freedom that we've taken for granted is threatened, more threatened than at anytime I can recall. www.theguardian.com/education/20...
Cool paper with an great title.
Across the world, boys are much more likely to overestimate their math ability than girls.
People from high SES backgrounds do the same
www.iza.org/publications...
Customers in the global north don't like the accent of low-wage workers from the global south? AI “accent translation” offers itself as a quasi-solution, grotesque yet socially consequential
www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...
Re: AI & creative writing: Least-skilled students using AI after seeing a guidance video wrote better than those who didn't use it at all *and* those who used AI w/o guidance. More skilled students didn't benefit at all & their writing got worse w/ unguided AI use
www.chronicle.com/newsletter/t...
New video abstract: Ori Schwarz introduces the Theory, Culture & Society article 'The Post-Choice Society: Algorithmic Prediction and the Decentring of Choice'. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ting...
TikTokized systems relying only on documented automatic reactions would ignore the second fact and offer him more porn & less foreign news. As a technology of 'individuation without choice', predictive algorithms treat us based on our system-1 self & call it into being 3/3 @theoryculturesociety.org
But imagine a user who stares at pornographic images 6 milliseconds longer than at foreign news items and yet believes that porn is a form of prostitution that must be abolished whereas reading foreign news is a cosmopolitan civil duty. Surely both facts tell something about this person. However 2/3
tinyurl.com/TCS25OS
What does the decentring of choice through algorithmic prediction mean for subjectification? My new paper suggests AI interpelates a 'system-1 cognition' self, assuming our quick automatic responses are who we really are, while consciousness/reflection is mere self-deception 1/
710 Palestinians killed in two days, 70% of which are women and children, to buy 7 votes of extreme right Israeli MPs on the budget bills. 101 fatalities per vote (and counting). I cannot breath with these levels of cynicism
This ‘individuation without choice’ calls into being a self very different from the choosing neoliberal self, based on the assumption that our 'hot cognition' alone reflects our true self whereas our conscious reflexivity is mere self-deception (4/4)
The paper also explores the threat of algorithmic prediction to democracy: if our will can be predicted, voting and deliberation might be conceptualized as friction that can be rid of, as algorithms know what we want better than us. Finally, I explore it implications for subjectification: (3/4)
I show how this transformation relies on changes in expert knowledge, as economists and psychologists no longer portray choice as an economic engine that increases consumption but rather as an obstacle for capitalism (2/4)
tinyurl.com/TCS25OS
Choice has been the key social technology & ideology organizing late-modern economy, culture & society. In my new paper @theoryculturesociety.org I explore how algorithmic prediction decenters choice and what cultural & political implications this transformation could have (1/4)
Granting & revoking civil rights based on AI evaluation of one's social media activity doesnt sound very promising for democracy. Unless of course you spell it 民主 or דמוקרטיה. Yet, as Cheney-Lippold's Jus Algoritmi paper on revoking protections shows, it's not quite new
www.axios.com/2025/03/06/s...
Okay, give me a schtickle of flouride
After years that the right turned 'bureaucratic' into an insult, it's sociology's turn to point to its promise as protection against the arbitrariness of power (and not only repeatedly reveal the always partial and biased realization of this promise).
Now the government is simply a stronger player (which in turn is controlled by even stronger ones, big capital). Must be interesting to teach Weber in these days, as they remind us that bureaucracy is not just an efficient system of governance but a democratic ethic of transparency and equality. 4/5
It's a natural continuation of Trump's principled opposition to abstract and generally-applying moral rules, which I once discussed in an article. Furthermore, the separation between governments that set the rules of the game and the governed that play by them has been cancelled: 3/5
AI in governance seeks to revert us to the age of (now non-human) intuition. In this sense Musk's AI-coup, the attempt to dismantle government agencies through AI decisions and replace others with AI, is a logical extension of Trump's policy: a war against the very idea of rule-based governance. 2/5
Some thoughts on Weber and the AI-coup: We all have intuition, a gut feeling based on past experiences that often hits the mark. Bureaucracy prohibited relying on intuition in governance, insisting instead on using standing promulgated rules to achieve fairness, transparency & accountability 1/5
