Jake Lawrence · STS / Critical Psychology · Sorting & Education theme
The DSM determines who receives a diagnosis, what treatment they access, and how they understand themselves. It was designed as a reference manual. It became infrastructure.
A cross-disciplinary literature review examining psychiatric classification through the lens of infrastructure theory. Presented as an interactive essay with six embedded pedagogical games and thirteen narrated audio sections.
Both apply Bowker and Star. The position paper identifies the pattern in AI; The Invisible Architecture traces it in psychiatric diagnosis.
The DSM classifies patients invisibly. AI stance design classifies users invisibly. Both were designed for institutional purposes and both became infrastructure the people inside them cannot see.
Both trace how a system designed for one purpose became invisible infrastructure that sorts people with real consequences.
Psychiatric classification and special education placement: two instances of diagnostic systems that became sorting machines.
The Invisible Architecture shows what happens when infrastructure hides. The Beautiful Unfinished argues the hiding is structural.
Both apply Bowker and Star to a system that became constitutional without meaning to. The Invisible Architecture traces it in psychiatric diagnosis; Unratified traces it in the identity layer of digital public infrastructure, and lets you write one yourself.
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