Jake Lawrence · STS / Political Economy of AI · Invisible Infrastructure theme
Six dead scholars read OpenAI's industrial policy proposal and find six connected problems it refuses to name.
A dramatized seminar in which a Council of Elders (Star, Polanyi, Galbraith, Ostrom, Scott, Franklin, with Hayek dissenting by letter) critiques OpenAI's April 2026 proposal 'Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age.' Seven interactive components let readers redraw the boundaries, score the document against Ostrom's eight principles, watch the dashboard miss the disruptions that matter most, and design their own governance architecture.
The position paper identifies classification as infrastructure inside AI systems. Seeing Like an AI Company shows the same dynamic one layer up: how a single company's classifications ('frontier', 'high-consequence') are being proposed as global policy categories.
The DSM became invisible infrastructure that sorts patients. The proposed 'frontier' tier is trying to become invisible infrastructure that sorts AI companies. Both are classification projects that would rather not be seen as such.
Stance Design finds invisible decisions at the product layer. Seeing Like an AI Company finds invisible decisions at the industrial-policy layer. Different altitudes, same authorship problem: the entity being governed is also the entity drafting the governance.
The New Sorting Hat watches AI detection classify students. Seeing Like an AI Company watches a proposal classify the AI industry itself. Both ask who gets to draw the line, and both find the answer uncomfortable.
The Sorting Machine examines how special education's thresholds were set by people with structural interests in where they fell. The Council of Elders asks the same question of OpenAI's proposed thresholds.
The tracker audits AI policy as deployed. Seeing Like an AI Company audits AI policy as proposed. The gap between the two is where this research program lives.
Seeing Like an AI Company watches a proposal try to classify the AI industry. Unratified watches an identity layer classify a population into citizens and casualties. Both ask who drew the line and by what authority, and both find no ratifying moment.
Seeing Like an AI Company runs Scott's legibility on a company's proposal to classify the industry from above. Ninety-Seven Percent Off runs it on the shadow market below, where the provider holds the god's-eye view of its own logs and still cannot read the supply chain reselling its tokens at a fraction of cost.
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