Key Concepts in Critical Social and Digital Theory
Posted on Jan 13, 2026 in Business Administration and Management (BAM)
Essential Concepts in Critical Social and Digital Theory
Power, Discipline, and Surveillance
Panopticon
- Author(s): Jeremy Bentham / Michel Foucault
- Definition: A design for a circular prison in which all inmates can be observed by a single guard without knowing when they are being watched.
- Expanded Explanation: The concept illustrates visibility as a method of social control; the uncertainty produces self-regulation.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): CCTV in public spaces makes people behave as though they are constantly monitored.
Panopticism
- Author(s): Michel Foucault
- Definition: A generalized principle of social organization based on surveillance and normalization.
- Expanded Explanation: Extends panopticon logic to society at large, making discipline pervasive.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Workplace monitoring, online tracking.
Vernacularization of Surveillance
- Author(s): Simone Browne
- Definition: The everyday normalization of surveillance technologies and practices.
- Expanded Explanation: Surveillance becomes embedded in routine social life, naturalized as common sense.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Ring doorbells, facial recognition apps.
Transparency (Foucault)
- Author(s): Michel Foucault
- Definition: Visibility as a tool for control.
- Expanded Explanation: Making actions or data observable reinforces surveillance and self-discipline.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Workplace dashboards, live analytics.
Discipline (Foucault)
- Author(s): Michel Foucault
- Definition: A type of power that relies on minute controls of the body and time to produce individuals who are docile and useful (docile subjects).
- Expanded Explanation: Not about repression, but production; it shapes individuals into compliant and predictable subjects required for industrial and bureaucratic systems.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): The precise scheduling of high school classes, bells, and structured seating arrangements to manage student time and movement.
Docile Subjects
- Author(s): Michel Foucault
- Definition: Individuals whose bodies have been subjected to, used, distributed, and improved; they are controllable, predictable, and economically useful.
- Expanded Explanation: The end goal of disciplinary power is to create subjects who internalize control and self-regulate, maximizing utility and minimizing resistance.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Factory workers performing repetitive, highly standardized tasks for an entire shift without close supervision.
Political Anatomy / Political Technology of the Body
- Author(s): Michel Foucault
- Definition: The set of procedures and methods for the control of the body that enables the body’s subjugation and utility.
- Expanded Explanation: Power operates directly on the body, organizing its time, movements, and forces to make it economically productive and politically submissive.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): The detailed instructions for posture, walking, and greeting used in military drills or boot camps to create uniformity and obedience.
Soul (Foucault)
- Author(s): Michel Foucault
- Definition: The effect of disciplinary power on the body; a non-material entity that serves as the prison of the body.
- Expanded Explanation: The “soul” is not a spiritual essence but a concept used to understand the self as a locus of punishment, morality, and correction in modernity.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): In a prison setting, the focus is placed on the inmate’s “rehabilitation” or “remorse” rather than just physical confinement.
Discursive Control
- Author(s): Michel Foucault
- Definition: Power exercised through shaping language, norms, and knowledge.
- Expanded Explanation: Influences perception and understanding rather than using force directly.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Media framing of protests or criminality to shape public opinion.
Identity, Performance, and Racial Dynamics
Performing Whiteness
- Author(s): Sara Ahmed / bell hooks
- Definition: Enacting norms and behaviors associated with whiteness.
- Expanded Explanation: Explores how individuals reproduce racial hierarchies through everyday actions.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Corporate professionalism conforming to white cultural norms.
Authenticity
- Author(s): Charles Taylor
- Definition: Perceived genuineness or realness of an individual’s identity.
- Expanded Explanation: Linked to societal norms and pressures; can be performed strategically.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Influencers branding themselves as “authentic.”
Performing-Not-Performing
- Author(s): Sarah Banet-Weiser
- Definition: Strategic presentation of self to appear authentic while navigating norms.
- Expanded Explanation: Negotiates audience expectations and identity work.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Social media influencers appearing casual yet carefully curated.
Self-Reflexivity
- Author(s): Stuart Hall
- Definition: Awareness of how one’s identity and actions are socially constructed.
- Expanded Explanation: Critical understanding of performance and societal expectations.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Reflecting on posts before sharing on social media.
Post-Race
- Author(s): Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
- Definition: The ideology claiming that racism is over or irrelevant.
- Expanded Explanation: Denies ongoing systemic inequality, masking subtle discrimination.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Colorblind hiring rhetoric that ignores bias.
Commodification and Cultural Appropriation
Eating the Other
- Author(s): bell hooks
- Definition: Consuming cultural difference for pleasure or profit.
- Expanded Explanation: Reflects power dynamics where dominant groups appropriate marginalized cultures.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Exotic foods marketed for trendiness, ignoring cultural significance.
Commodification of Otherness
- Author(s): bell hooks
- Definition: Turning cultural differences into products for consumption.
- Expanded Explanation: Reduces cultural identity to marketable assets.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Festival aesthetics, ethnic-inspired merchandise.
White Transformation
- Author(s): bell hooks
- Definition: Reinvention of white identity through engagement with Otherness.
- Expanded Explanation: Dominant identity reshaped while preserving hierarchy.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Yoga or spiritual practices marketed primarily to white consumers.
Imperialist Nostalgia
- Author(s): Renato Rosaldo
- Definition: Mourning the cultures destroyed or dominated by imperial powers.
- Expanded Explanation: Reinforces imperialist narratives by sentimentalizing the colonized.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Museum displays romanticizing colonized societies.
Cultural Appropriation
- Author(s): Rogers
- Definition: Dominant groups taking elements from marginalized cultures without permission or context.
- Expanded Explanation: Reinforces inequality and erases origins.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Headdresses worn as fashion statements.
Mutual Recognition of Racism
- Author(s): Sara Ahmed
- Definition: Collective acknowledgment of racism to address systemic inequality.
- Expanded Explanation: Promotes solidarity and accountability.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Anti-racist pedagogy, group discussions on bias.
Digital Blackface
- Author(s): Lauren Michele Jackson
- Definition: Performing racialized online identities without lived experience.
- Expanded Explanation: Perpetuates stereotypes and social hierarchies.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Using Black reaction GIFs or emojis in social media.
Race, Technology, and Systemic Bias (Ruha Benjamin)
Engineered Inequity
- Author(s): Ruha Benjamin
- Definition: Inequality intentionally embedded in systems and technologies.
- Expanded Explanation: Demonstrates how design choices reproduce societal biases.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Biased algorithms in hiring or policing software.
Race as Technology
- Author(s): Ruha Benjamin
- Definition: Use of race to organize, sort, or control populations through systems.
- Expanded Explanation: Race operationalized as a tool of social control.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Predictive policing algorithms targeting communities of color.
Automated Social Credit
- Author(s): Ruha Benjamin
- Definition: Algorithmic scoring of individuals for behavioral conformity.
- Expanded Explanation: Extends governance through technology.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Social credit systems like those implemented in China.
New Jim Code
- Author(s): Ruha Benjamin
- Definition: Technologies that reproduce racial hierarchies under the guise of objectivity.
- Expanded Explanation: Tech can be neutral on the surface but discriminatory in practice.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Facial recognition disproportionately misidentifying Black faces.
Surveillance Capitalism and Data Extraction
Data as Commodity
- Author(s): Shoshana Zuboff
- Definition: Data treated as a product to be bought and sold.
- Expanded Explanation: Key component of surveillance capitalism.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): User location data sold to advertisers.
Data as Capital
- Author(s): Shoshana Zuboff
- Definition: Data generates future economic value.
- Expanded Explanation: Data accumulation increases corporate power.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Training AI models on collected user behavior.
Data Imperative
- Author(s): Shoshana Zuboff
- Definition: Drive to collect and store all data possible.
- Expanded Explanation: Reflects logic of accumulation and prediction.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Apps requesting location, microphone, and browsing permissions.
Data Manufacturing (vs. Data Mining)
- Author(s): Nick Couldry & Ulises Mejias
- Definition: Actively producing data rather than extracting pre-existing information.
- Expanded Explanation: User behavior is captured and transformed into value.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Social media posts used for algorithmic profiling.
Data Colonialism
- Author(s): Couldry & Mejias
- Definition: Extracting data from populations, often in the Global South, for profit.
- Expanded Explanation: Modern form of imperialism via digital means.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Facebook or AI datasets using Global South users’ data without consent.
How Data is Used to Create Value
- Author(s): Zuboff / Couldry
- Definition: Data is leveraged to profile, optimize, control, model probabilities, build assets, and increase capital.
- Expanded Explanation: Multiple overlapping applications of data in systems design, creating value by predicting and modifying human behavior.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Targeted advertising, predictive policing, AI asset creation.
Dataveillance
- Author(s): Roger Clarke
- Definition: Surveillance through data collection.
- Expanded Explanation: Data used to monitor and influence behavior.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Health tracking apps sharing information with insurers.
Data Extraction (Theft)
- Author(s): Ulises Mejias
- Definition: Collection of data without compensation or consent.
- Expanded Explanation: Users’ labor and attention are exploited.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Platforms monetizing user-generated content without paying creators.
Global Palestine
- Author(s): Jasbir Puar
- Definition: Palestine serves as a testing ground for surveillance technologies and methods of control over marginalized populations, which are then exported globally.
- Expanded Explanation: The occupation operates as a “laboratory of surveillance” where new, often brutal, technologies of repression are refined before being sold internationally.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Israeli-developed drone and facial recognition technologies, tested on Palestinian populations, being sold to border patrol agencies worldwide.
Laboratory of Surveillance
- Author(s): Jasbir Puar
- Definition: A site where control technologies and security practices are experimented with, refined, and perfected on a specific, often marginalized, population.
- Expanded Explanation: Practices developed in this laboratory are presented as successful security solutions, justifying their global sale and adoption by security states.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Testing a new predictive policing algorithm on a specific, heavily policed neighborhood before deploying it city-wide or internationally.
Technologies of Repression (as export economy)
- Author(s): Jasbir Puar
- Definition: Surveillance, control, and crowd-management systems are profitable global exports, reproducing militarized inequality internationally.
- Expanded Explanation: The cycle is: test on oppressed populations → market as effective security → sell to other security states for profit and influence.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): The sale of advanced cyber-surveillance software (spyware) developed by Israeli companies to authoritarian regimes in other countries.
Security State (Justifying Repression)
- Author(s): Jasbir Puar
- Definition: The state legitimizes expanded control measures and repression through fear and narratives of necessary national security.
- Expanded Explanation: Law and policy are framed as protective against external or internal threats (e.g., terrorism, crime) but ultimately serve to consolidate power and surveillance.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Anti-terrorism legislation that enables mass, warrantless surveillance of citizens’ communications under the guise of national protection.
Matrix of Control
- Author(s): Jasbir Puar
- Definition: Interlocking and mutually reinforcing systems of surveillance, regulation, and control that create comprehensive governance over a population.
- Expanded Explanation: The various forms of monitoring (data, physical, discursive) overlap, making control pervasive and seemingly unavoidable.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): The combination of automated border checks, real-time data monitoring, and biometric ID systems to track and manage the movements of a specific ethnic or religious group.
AI, Language Models, and Bullshit Theory
Bullshitting (ChatGPT is Bullshit)
- Author(s): Harry Frankfurt; Hicks, Humphries, Slater
- Definition: Characterized by a reckless disregard for the truth or an indifference to how things really are. The bullshitter pays no attention to the truth and lacks conviction about what the truth is.
- Expanded Explanation: Unlike lying, bullshit does not require knowing or rejecting the truth. Large Language Models (LLMs) produce text that is plausible but indifferent to accuracy.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): ChatGPT generating a confident but entirely incorrect academic explanation.
General Bullshit
- Author(s): Frankfurt
- Definition: Any utterance produced where a speaker has indifference towards the truth of the utterance.
- Expanded Explanation: Covers all cases where truth is irrelevant to the communication act.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): AI-generated essays with factual errors but fluent style.
Soft Bullshit
- Author(s): Frankfurt (extended)
- Definition: Bullshit produced without the intention to mislead the hearer regarding the utterer’s agenda.
- Expanded Explanation: No intention to deceive; arises from indifference.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): ChatGPT presenting itself as helpful but without knowing truth.
Hard Bullshit
- Author(s): Frankfurt (extended)
- Definition: Bullshit produced with the intention to mislead the audience about the utterer’s agenda.
- Expanded Explanation: Intention to deceive depends on system design or human framing.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Marketing AI as intelligent or knowledgeable to users.
Hallucination (Critique)
- Author(s): Hicks, Humphries, Slater
- Definition: A misleading metaphor suggesting perceptual failure.
- Expanded Explanation: LLM errors are structural, not perception-based.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Calling wrong AI output a hallucination misrepresents system function.
Bullshit Machine
- Author(s): Frankfurt + AI theorists
- Definition: ChatGPT outputs bullshit because it cannot care about the truth of its output, and users often use it not to convey truth, but to convince the hearer that the text was written by an interested agent.
- Expanded Explanation: AI is more than a neutral tool but less than a human bullshitter.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Students submitting AI essays without verifying accuracy.
Lies (Why LLMs Cannot Lie)
- Author(s): Philosophy of Language
- Definition: To make a believed-false statement with the intention that the other person believe that statement to be true.
- Expanded Explanation: LLMs cannot lie because they cannot believe or intend truth.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): ChatGPT cannot “know” an answer is wrong.
Confabulations (Why LLMs Do Not Confabulate)
- Author(s): Psychology
- Definition: Occurs when someone’s memory has a gap and the brain convincingly fills in the rest without intending to deceive others.
- Expanded Explanation: LLM outputs are always predictive; there is no memory gap.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): AI generating plausible but incorrect statements is not confabulation.
Importance of Terminology
- Author(s): Hicks et al.
- Definition: Describing LLM inaccuracies as bullshit is more useful and accurate for predicting and discussing the systems’ behavior.
- Expanded Explanation: Correct terminology avoids misleading the public and normalizing untruth.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Treating AI as truth-seeking encourages over-trust in outputs.
LLM Goal
- Author(s): AI design premise
- Definition: LLMs are designed to produce text that is indistinguishable from human-produced writing and to create a normal-seeming response to a prompt. Their primary function is to output convincing lines of text, not to convey factual information.
- Expanded Explanation: Fluency is prioritized over correctness.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): ChatGPT delivering a polished but incorrect explanation.
Political Economy and Education Critique
AI Footprint
- Author(s): Kate Crawford
- Definition: The environmental, labor, and material costs of AI systems.
- Expanded Explanation: Training and running LLMs consume energy and resources.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Data center electricity consumption and hardware mining.
Energy Futures
- Author(s): Kate Crawford
- Definition: How technological systems shape future energy demands and inequalities.
- Expanded Explanation: AI expansion can lock societies into high-energy regimes.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Increasing cloud infrastructure energy requirements.
Dirty/Murderous Energy
- Author(s): Kate Crawford
- Definition: Energy systems causing ecological and human harm.
- Expanded Explanation: Exploitation and environmental degradation caused by energy extraction.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Lithium mining for batteries harming communities.
Technofeudalism
- Author(s): Yanis Varoufakis
- Definition: Digital platforms extract rent rather than produce value.
- Expanded Explanation: Reflects shift from industrial capitalism to digital rent-seeking.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Amazon charging fees to third-party sellers without adding value.
Digital Rent Strike
- Author(s): Varoufakis
- Definition: Refusal to generate value for platforms through participation.
- Expanded Explanation: Collective or individual resistance to exploitative digital systems.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Logging off social media platforms to prevent data exploitation.
Education Market
- Author(s): Henry Giroux
- Definition: Education treated as a commodity rather than a public good.
- Expanded Explanation: Neoliberal framing turns education into a transactional product.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Universities branding degrees as guaranteed pathways to employment.
Luddification of Classrooms
- Author(s): Neil Selwyn
- Definition: Deliberate rejection or critical skepticism of technology in education.
- Expanded Explanation: Emphasizes protecting pedagogy from over-digitization.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Banning AI use in assessments to focus on learning outcomes.
Ruling Ideas
- Author(s): Karl Marx
- Definition: The ruling ideas of each age are the ideas of the ruling class.
- Expanded Explanation: Dominant ideas reinforce class structures and normalize inequality.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): The narrative that AI adoption is “inevitable progress” favoring corporations.
Repressive State Apparatus (RSA)
- Author(s): Louis Althusser
- Definition: Institutions functioning primarily by violence or threat of violence.
- Expanded Explanation: Maintains order through coercion.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Police, military, prisons.
Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)
- Author(s): Louis Althusser
- Definition: Institutions functioning primarily through ideology.
- Expanded Explanation: Shapes beliefs and consent rather than using force.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Schools teaching meritocracy.
Critical Race Theory and Cultural Capital (Tara Yosso)
Critical Race Theory (CRT)
- Author(s): Tara Yosso / Derrick Bell
- Definition: A theoretical framework that views race and racism as central to the organization of U.S. society and legal systems.
- Expanded Explanation: Asserts that racism is not aberrational but normal and institutionalized, and that white supremacy and power are maintained through legal and ideological structures.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Analyzing how housing laws like redlining created and maintained racial wealth gaps for decades after the policies were supposedly ended.
Community Cultural Capital
- Author(s): Tara Yosso
- Definition: A theoretical model that challenges Bourdieu by focusing on the array of knowledge, skills, abilities, and networks possessed by marginalized communities.
- Expanded Explanation: Reframes non-dominant cultural practices not as deficits but as strengths or “capital” that sustain communities and resist oppression.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): A student who can code-switch seamlessly between their home dialect and formal academic English, a skill not valued in traditional schools.
Aspirational Capital
- Author(s): Tara Yosso
- Definition: The capacity to maintain hopes and dreams for the future, even in the face of real and perceived barriers.
- Expanded Explanation: A key survival skill developed in communities facing systemic obstacles; it fuels resilience and future-oriented goals.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): First-generation students pursuing post-secondary education despite lacking family experience or resources in that area.
Resistant Capital
- Author(s): Tara Yosso
- Definition: Knowledge and skills cultivated through opposition to inequality and systems of oppression.
- Expanded Explanation: Involves the commitment to challenge and dismantle unfair structures, often manifesting as non-conformity or activism.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Students organizing a protest against tuition hikes or discriminatory school policies.
Linguistic Capital
- Author(s): Tara Yosso
- Definition: Intellectual and social skills attained through communication experiences in more than one language and/or style.
- Expanded Explanation: Includes storytelling, aural, and written communication skills, often across multiple dialects or languages, enabling diverse communication practices.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): A child translating complex legal or medical forms for their immigrant parents, demonstrating high-level communicative skill.
Navigational Capital
- Author(s): Tara Yosso
- Definition: Skills of maneuvering through social institutions perceived as unsupportive or hostile.
- Expanded Explanation: The ability to successfully negotiate bureaucratic processes and survive institutions designed to marginalize.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): An individual successfully challenging a biased bank loan process or a restrictive school enrollment requirement.
Familial Capital
- Author(s): Tara Yosso
- Definition: Cultural knowledges nurtured among family kin that carry a history, memory, and cultural intuition.
- Expanded Explanation: Resources drawn from intergenerational stories, wisdom, and the collective memory of the family unit.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): Drawing on a grandparent’s memory of civil rights struggles to inform current political organizing.
Social Capital (Yosso)
- Author(s): Tara Yosso
- Definition: Networks of people and community resources (beyond immediate family) that provide support and assistance.
- Expanded Explanation: Focuses on community-level connections (e.g., church groups, neighborhood watch, cultural clubs) rather than elite professional networks.
- Detailed Example (Exam-Ready): A local community organization providing peer-to-peer tutoring and mentorship to neighborhood youth.
