🧭 One of our AI alignments: where our guidelines meet an outside framework, where we share ground, and where we go further.
Vertesi, J., boyd, d., Taylor, A., & Shestakofsky, B. (2026). Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI: Avoiding Decoys in Pursuit of Accountability. FAccT ’26. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16106
This paper is the most rigorous sociological elaboration we have found of Ali Alkhatib’s political definition of AI — the one that opens the “Name the Systems of Power” section on our AI Collaboration page. Vertesi et al. provide the structural mechanism: the Project of AI is a world-building endeavor in which wealthy financiers and corporations actively reinforce particular networks of power, sustained by a suite of “decoys” that route critics toward tractable technical questions while the network assembles out of sight.
Naming systems of power. Drawing on Manuel Castells’ network power theory, Actor-Network Theory, and economic sociology of market-making, the paper provides the most complete structural account we’ve found of how AI concentrates power and why surface-level critiques tend to reinforce rather than challenge it. It belongs alongside Alkhatib, Nelson, and tante as load-bearing intellectual infrastructure for our AI ethics work.
POSIWID and decoy accountability. The five decoys show precisely why the POSIWID standard is necessary. Decoys generate the appearance of accountability: safety conferences, regulatory testimony, participatory design sprints. Each appears to offer a tractable path. Each routes critics away from the network of power that makes AI possible. Evaluating by effects — not by claims — is the only exit from the trap.
The safety decoy and disability justice. AI companies yoke “AI Safety” to existential risk while communities bearing the highest cost of AI deployment have the least say in where “safety” gets directed. The paper documents the mechanism with precision. This directly supports our structural critique of AGI doomsday narratives as accountability deferral.
The participatory design decoy and nothing about us without us. This is the most consequential alignment. Vertesi et al. document how stakeholder engagement can be conscripted into inevitability — functioning as ritual that upholds the Project’s march rather than contesting it. This is not an argument against community participation. It is a structural argument for distinguishing genuine power-sharing from consultation theater. Our co-design political demand and nothing about us without us standard are both strengthened by this analysis: they name exactly the form of participation that escapes the decoy.
Where this paper stops. Vertesi et al. don’t write from or about disability, neurodivergence, or access. The political economy analysis operates at a different register than the access and daily functioning analysis. Both are true. Neither cancels the other. A person navigating an inaccessible system with AI assistance is not enrolled in the Project of AI by doing so. The structural critique and the survival imperative coexist. We hold both.
The paper was produced by elite academic institutions. Its citations are primarily elite academic and industry sources. It doesn’t center the communities most harmed by AI. We cite it for the structural mechanism it provides — not as a disability justice document. The disability justice framing is ours to supply.
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