🚨 We are entering the AI society. After two decades of platforms reshaping markets, communication, and governance, a new shift is underway: AI is transforming society. What should we expect from the 'AI society'? 🧵 📄 Our new paper faces this question: osf.io/preprints/so...

💰 Economic shift: platform capitalism to AI capitalism Platforms do not make profits through free market competition, but by controlling chokepoints and extracting monopoly rents—often described as techno-feudalism. Those same feudal logics are now shaping AI.

But where platforms locked users in through network effects, these are weaker for AI. Instead, AI creates cognitive and social dependencies—which may be even harder to escape. 🧠🔗 AI represents the infrastructuralization of cognition itself, concentrating unprecedented levels of private power.

🧠 Epistemic shift: from prediction to generation Just as platform data reshaped the social sciences, generative AI is reshaping how we understand the world. LLMs don’t just run analyses—they participate in interpretation and theorizing, creating deep dependence on private, opaque infrastructures.

🏛️ Political shift: from data politics to alignment politics AI is quietly coming to produce a growing share of human language and culture. Control the models, and you shape meaning, politics, and culture. This is infrastructural empire.

You might think the current moment of AI is bad. But we're still in the honeymoon phase of generative AI - mirroring the "millennial lifestyle subsidy" era of platforms, when venture capital underwrote cheap urban consumption. Enshittification has yet to come.

To meet this moment, we need Critical AI Studies 📚🤖 – Historically grounded: platform roots matter – Power-centered: AI as cognitive infrastructure – Reflexive: AI reshapes inquiry itself