Thesis Title:
The Spectre in the Machine: AI-Integrated Platform Capitalism in Perspective
Thesis Abstract:
This PhD project investigates how artificial intelligence (AI) and digital platforms are transforming economies and societies, focusing on how these transformations manifest within financial systems. These shifts have the potential to reshape the ways knowledge, value, and prediction are produced. To explore these dynamics, the research treats these systems as socio-technical infrastructures embedded within political-economic regimes. It examines how platforms and AI systems organise and mediate information, shaping what becomes visible, valuable, and actionable across economic life and financial systems. Both operate within broader infrastructures of data, computation, and capital that underpin contemporary digital economies.
The project combines theoretical frameworks from economic sociology, political economy, and science and technology studies with qualitative and computational methods. It explores how AI-driven systems reorganise expertise, reconfigure practices of trust and transparency, and reshape how infrastructural power is distributed within contemporary capitalism.
Ultimately, the project aims to show how AI and digital platforms function as sites where forms of knowledge and power are actively designed and consolidated. It seeks to illustrate how contemporary capitalist relations depend on multiple ways of producing knowledge, yet their financial manifestations remain tied to infrastructures that centralise control and shape socio-economic life.
Primary Supervisor:
Dr Nick Srnicek