AI Criticism as Contestation of Sociotechnical Imaginaries: Patterns and Limits

Abstract

As so-called artificial intelligence diffuses throughout society, a growing body of critical texts contests its dominant sociotechnical imaginaries. To understand how these critiques are organized, this paper reconstructs the internal grammar of a corpus of 252 English-language critical texts. Each text is assigned a node, the domain its critique is rooted in (society, capital, technology, or the nation-state), and a critique mode, the strategy it argues through (immanent, reframing, or structural). What each mode can and cannot contest is then examined. Across the four nodes, these texts contest the dominant AI imaginary as a self-justifying financial trajectory (capital), an autonomous cognitive trajectory (technology), an irreversible social force (society), and a governable geopolitical technology (state). The findings also indicate strong correlations across the texts examined here. Capital-focused texts lean overwhelmingly toward structural critique, technology-focused texts tend toward immanent critique, state-focused texts favor reframing, and society-focused texts split between reframing and structural approaches. The analysis points toward an asymmetry, indicating that the deeper the challenge to the imaginary's conditions, the less it registers within the vocabulary the imaginary itself recognizes as valid. State institutions sustain this asymmetry by keeping structural claims out of policy, and market culture by recasting them as matters of preference.