Welcome to this digital notebook and project dispatch log. As I work on my upcoming book, "Machine Liberalism" (forthcoming 2027), this space serves as a public research notebook—a place to road-test arguments, share policy observations, and reflect on the intersection of political theory, platform governance, and artificial intelligence.
In my previous book, You Must Become an Algorithmic Problem (Bristol University Press, 2025), I examined how computational systems compel individuals to make themselves legible to ranking mechanisms. We are constantly solicited to format our lives, communications, and social interactions in ways that algorithmic feeds can ingest and categorize.
With Machine Liberalism, the inquiry shifts from individual subjecthood to constitutional and institutional expectations:
"Liberal democracy is founded on assumptions about deliberation, rights, individual autonomy, and administrative neutrality. What happens when those foundational assumptions are quietly mediated by proprietary algorithmic models?"
Key Questions We Will Explore
Over the coming months, this blog will feature short dispatches, seminar notes, and critical analyses centered around three core themes:
- The Reconfiguration of Public Reason: How predictive engines alter the cadence of public discourse and what counts as political evidence.
- Algorithmic Bureaucracy: The subtle shift from discretion-based civic administration to automated screening, risk scoring, and municipal optimization.
- Pedagogy & Civic AI: Practical experiments in teaching political science and social data science in an era of conversational agents and ambient computation.
An Open Digital Garden
Rather than waiting for traditional academic publishing cycles to release fully finalized treatises, I believe in working with the garage door open. Some entries here will be polished essays; others will be short field notes, code experiments with civic data, or draft fragments.
If you are a student, fellow researcher, or civic technologist, I invite you to read along and join the conversation.
