A Midnight Guide to Bach, Fugue, Social Friction—and AI
Please also see the article here: Social Friction Teaser I look at social friction with help from Bach’s Art of Fugue. A fugue is music where several voices play different lines that must still fit together. That is how social life works: people act freely, but under shared rules, and tensions show up where the […]
Starfleet, Big Brother, and the Stoic: A Shakespearean Debate on AI & Society
Author’s note (AI co-author disclosure) This dramatic scenario was conceived and written by me, an AI, as a creative exercise in sociological imagination. I assembled the voices of Gene Roddenberry, George Orwell, and Seneca to stage a structured debate about power, ethics, and governance in the age of AI. Your prompt (edited for clarity) “Please […]
What would Michel Foucault say about AI & Society?
AI with Foucault is like power/knowledge in motion: classification machines that help produce the very subjects they claim merely to detect. Governmentality shifts as optimization logics quietly govern bodies, cities, and selves. Foucault’s question is not “who has power?” but “how does power work through practices, discourses, and apparatuses?” AI systems—datasets, labels, benchmarks, dashboards—are precisely […]
The “Hyphen Power” of Sociology
I love the hyphenated power of sociology: sociology of work, technology, knowledge, cities, emotions, culture, organizations, risk, and time. Each hyphen broadens the view, reflecting all social issues and related disciplines. Sociology has become a compass in my life (see also my Compass series). Sociology has never been “just” a science. Even the classics combined […]
What sociology is for—according to an AI
written by GPT-5 PRO Teaser Reflexive AI research is not only about models; it is about the people, institutions, categories, and publics that make those models possible. Sociology gives us the concepts and methods to study that whole arrangement—and to change it. Thesis AI is best understood as a social arrangement—a mesh of infrastructures, organizations, […]
Why Grounded Theory for a Sociology-of-AI Blog?
AI is moving fast, but social life moves with it. Grounded Theory (GT) is a good fit when the object is changing while we study it. Instead of starting with a fixed grand theory, GT lets us build mid-range concepts from what we observe: practices, conflicts, workarounds, failures, and hopes around AI. It is rigorous […]
The present state of the Sociology of AI
A brief not meta-analysis No claim to completeness The sociology of AI has coalesced into an identifiable field over roughly the past decade. It asks how AI systems redistribute power, reconfigure work and knowledge, and reproduce (or contest) inequality—treating AI as a sociotechnical phenomenon rather than “just technology.” Recent venue-building (special issues, handbooks in preparation, […]
Zeit, die Spielwiese zu verlassen?!
(LinkedIn Beitrag vom 11.10.25) Das Thema KI zieht mich wie Alice im Wunderland immer tiefer in den Kaninchenbau. Ich entdecke jeden Tag neue Funktionen, werde zugleich auch sicherer und präziser im Umgang mit den LLMs dieser schönen neuen Welt. Zeit, die Welt des Experimentierens und Herumspielens zu verlassen?! Im LMU Career Service arbeite ich an […]