The aim of this article is to elucidate the anthropological conditions of possibility for computing. I will first show how symbolic manipulation is constitutive of hominization. Secondly, I will ex…
Vibe Coding: The Final Form of Hyper-Individualism
A few days ago, I had to deal with the first "vibe coded" PR to my software. In this article, I reflect on this encounter, and analyze the social …
The hidden ‘rules of the game’ that dictate how we navigate the world | Psyche Videos
How free are we really, if human behaviour embodies the complex, intertwined webs of society and history?
Deleuze and Biosemiotics: Biological Emergence, Agency, and Subjectivity in Logic of Sense and A Thousand Plateaus
Anthropeum
A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artifact was made. See how you rank.
Solidarity Syllabus: Indigenous Peoples, Rematriation, and Resisting AI Data Centers — Solidarity Is
For this Solidarity Syllabus, we are learning alongside Indigenous organizers, leaders, and communities whose work offers important solidarity lessons and invitations for how we might understand land, water, sovereignty, and resistance to data centers. Indigenous Peoples Day is observed
The Physics and Metaphysics of Social Powers: Bridging Cognitive Processing and Social Dynamics, a New Perspective on Power through Active Inference
Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object & Tool
Uses of advanced artificial intelligence are changing how societies organize labor, govern, produce knowledge, and make meaning. In light of these developments, this essay argues that AI models, tools, and systems pose three interrelated imperatives for social science: they demand renewed attention to social theories of how technology, human experience, and social order are entangled; they require study as objects of inquiry in their own right; and they offer capabilities that may transform—or upend—the practice of social investigation itself. From Weber’s analysis of rationalization to Du Bois’s study of technology and inequality to contemporary scholarship on algorithmic governance, the essay examines what social science distinctively offers: the capacity to historicize the apparently unprecedented, to trace connections across scales, and to center those most affected by technological change. It identifies how algorithmic systems are remaking the distribution of opportunity and risk as a central task of social inquiry and asks what futures social science might help bring into being.
Women Who Use AI Seen As Incompetent; Men Who Use AI Seen As Pragmatic
A 2026 study found that when women and men use AI tools to create identical resumes, evaluators view the women as less competent, while crediting the men with initiative.
A Grammar of Institutions
The institutional grammar introduced here is based on a view that institutions are enduring regularities of human action in situations structured by rules, norms, and shared strategies, as well as by the physical world. The rules, norms, and shared strategies are constituted and reconstituted by human interaction in frequently occurring or repetitive situations. The syntax of the grammar identifies components of institutions and sorts them into three types of institutional statements: rules, norms, and shared strategies. We introduce the grammar, outline methods for operationalizing the syntax, apply the syntax to an analysis of cooperation in collective dilemma situations, and discuss the pragmatics of the grammar for analyses of behavior within complex institutional settings.
Introducing Persimmon | humans&
A model of human behavior, and new ways to measure how faithfully AI can simulate people.
Technoableism
Technoableism is a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for. It’s a classic form of ableism—bias against disabled people, bias in favor of nondisabled ways of life. Technoableism is the use of technologies to reassert those biases, often under the guise of empowerment.
Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the…
People Who Can't Visualize Anything Are Challenging a 300-Year-Old Theory of Thought
Mental imagery might not be as central to complex human thought as we believed, philosophers say.
