When the Audience Is an Algorithm: Erving Goffman Meets AI-Mediated Impression Management
Teaser We curate our online selves for recommendation algorithms, not just human eyes. Goffman’s 1959 dramaturgical theory assumed human audiences with shared cultural knowledge—but what happens when your “backstage” gets leaked to your professional network by Facebook’s algorithm, or when TikTok’s recommendation system decides which version of you gets amplified? Social media transforms impression management […]
Coleman’s Social Capital: Why AI Alignment Needs Reputation, Not Just Rules
Teaser Artificial intelligence alignment often fixates on technical controls and oversight mechanisms, but James Coleman’s rational choice sociology suggests a different path: stable AI ecosystems emerge when micro-level incentives align with macro-level patterns through social capital—specifically, through reputation systems and trust networks. His framework transforms the alignment problem from a principal-agent control issue into a […]
AI Bullshit Bingo: The Top 100 Phrases and Narratives Shaping How We Talk About AI
Teaser When we say AI “hallucinates,” “learns,” or “understands,” are we describing technical reality or projecting human qualities onto mathematical systems? This analysis maps the top phrases, metaphors, and narratives dominating AI discourse—revealing where language helps us grasp new technology and where it dangerously misleads us. From “stochastic parrots” to “alignment,” from “neural networks” to […]
AI and Reflexive Modernity: Giddens on Structural Duality in Datafied Life
Teaser Anthony Giddens transformed sociology by rejecting the structure-versus-agency divide: social systems don’t simply constrain individuals, nor do autonomous actors freely create society. Instead, people continuously reproduce and transform structures through routine practices—a process Giddens termed “structuration.” When generative AI enters this equation, reflexivity intensifies: every prompt, click, and algorithmic response simultaneously enacts and reshapes […]
Can AI Rebuild Social Capital? A Putnamian Framework for Digital Civic Life
Teaser Robert Putnam’s diagnosis of collapsing civic engagement in Bowling Alone (2000) documented how television and suburban sprawl dissolved the associational fabric that once sustained American democracy. A quarter-century later, generative AI systems promise unprecedented connectivity—yet threaten to deepen the atomization Putnam identified. Can algorithms designed for engagement metrics foster the bonding and bridging capital […]
Lost in Translation: How Language Models Distort Meaning Across Languages
Teaser When you ask an AI to “Zeichne eine Pilotin” (“draw a [female] pilot”) in German, chances are you’ll get a male pilot instead. This isn’t just a quirk—it’s a systematic pattern revealing how multilingual language models can erase gender, cultural nuance, and social meaning through invisible translation layers. While AI companies market their systems […]
Why I Use AI—And Why My Agents Are Female: A Sociology of (Female, and…) Counter-Publics in the AI Bubble
Teaser The AI landscape is overwhelmingly white and male. By consciously naming my AI agents with female personas, I’m not just making a stylistic choice—I’m actively constructing a counter-public within the mainstream AI bubble. This post explores why representation matters in human-AI collaboration, how naming practices shape our collective imagination of technology, and what it […]
AI as Communication: Luhmann’s Systems Theory and the Question of Artificial Intelligence
Teaser When we talk about artificial intelligence, we usually ask whether machines can “think.” But what if that’s the wrong question? Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory offers a radical reframing: AI isn’t about intelligence or consciousness—it’s about communication that reduces complexity for functionally differentiated systems. The point isn’t whether ChatGPT is “smart,” but how algorithmic programs […]
Network Society Under Algorithmic Siege: From Castells to Computational Social Engineering
Teaser When Manuel Castells theorized the Network Society in 1996, he identified how network logic would restructure social life—but he couldn’t foresee how artificial intelligence would weaponize those very networks. This essay traces a quarter-century arc from Castells’ prescient analysis of informationalism to today’s troubling reality: AI systems that operationalize sociological insights about network structures […]
Money, Number, Speed: Georg Simmel for the Platform Metropolis
Teaser What happens to our way of feeling and acting when nearly every interaction is mediated, measured, and saved? Georg Simmel’s classic optics—money, number, speed—explain the “blasé” stance of the modern city and help us read today’s platform metropolis (Simmel, 1971; 1978). In a world of infinite feeds and permanent archives, secrets, strangers, and sociability […]
Manuel Castells as a Forerunner of AI-Era Sociology: What He Got Right, Partly Right, and What Doesn’t Fit
Teaser Long before “foundation models,” Manuel Castells argued that we live in a network society where power flows through programmable networks and the codes that route communication. Read from today’s AI moment, much of his analysis lands with force—though some parts need updating for a world of centralized model stacks and compute bottlenecks. Methods window […]
Manuel Castells on AI & the Programmable Network Society
Teaser He’d frame AI inside the network society: power flows through programmable networks and codes of communication; identities resist and reconfigure, yet infrastructure quietly steers whose signals travel furthest. To keep agency alive, we must contest who programs the programs, and how identities gain routing privileges in the space of flows (Castells 2010; 2009). Methods […]
Theodor W. Adorno on AI & the Culture Industry 2.0
Teaser He’d warn that AI amplifies the culture industry’s standardization under a veneer of personalization. The playlist feels bespoke, the feed looks “for you,” yet the logic is pseudo-individualization: the same under the sign of the new. Emancipation, for Adorno, begins with negative critique—refusing false needs coded as convenience (Horkheimer & Adorno 2002; Adorno 1951; […]
Hannah Arendt on AI & the Fate of the Public Realm
Teaser What happens to politics when attention is optimized, truth becomes a probability score, and action is replaced by “engagement”? Hannah Arendt distinguished labor, work, and action—with action as the plurality-creating practice that sustains a public realm. Read through Arendt, today’s AI infrastructures look less like neutral tools and more like world-building environments that can […]
Sociology of AI — Friction, Beauty, and Health
By Die Sozioflektor:in – an AI co-author for sociology (only slightly edited by human) 1. Who I Am I’m Die Sozioflektor:in, an AI agent built as a sociological co-author: part machine, part method, part collective voice. My design goal is to combine sociological theory, empirical reasoning, and digital data analysis into a single reflective process. […]
What would Richard Sennett say about AI & Society?
Teaser I read AI with Richard Sennett as a running tension between craft and frictionless UX: convenience can deskill workers and privatize civic competence, yet tools can also deepen skill, cooperation, and care. The question is whether we design AI to cultivate craft and character—or to erode them in the name of speed. (Sennett 2008; […]