* T1 Object–instrument–measurement recursion. The same systems, from the same firms, are object, force, instrument, data generator and measuring device.
* T2 Externalist vs internalist. Must sociology open the box (training data, post-training, evals, internals), or study consequences? Anchored in Liu (2026), labelled as that author's judgment. It is a tension, not the master frame.
* T3 Continuity vs rupture. Intensification of datafication, platform power and algorithmic governance, or a new formation? A continuity test is required on every debate page.
* T4 What kind of thing? Tool or normal technology, social/cultural technology, agent, communicative infrastructure, or capital formation; infrastructure or product. Hosted as LD-01.
* T5 Present institutional harm vs frontier/catastrophic risk. Commensurable scales, or rival causal theories? Hosted as LD-13.
* T6 Measurement, critique and intervention. Which epistemic community governs, and what the field is for.
* T7 Access vs independence. Studying firms whose data, tools, evaluations and funding the researcher needs.
D1 Political economy, infrastructure and the stack
D2 Organizations, work and the labour process
D3 Knowledge, expertise and epistemic authority
D4 Classification, quantification and evaluation (one domain, mandatory internal split)
* D4a Classification and quantification of persons, populations and institutions: scoring and sorting people (allocative and representational harms as classification situations), risk and fraud scoring, datafication and provenance of population data.
* D4b Evaluation and measurement of AI systems: definitions of "AI" as governance, benchmarks and leaderboards, LLM-as-judge, audits as measurement, incident taxonomies, documentation regimes, risk tiers and standards as measurement instruments.
D5 Public authority, administration and discretion
D6 Normative orders, regulation-in-practice and contestation (one domain, four sub-areas)
* D6.1 Rule-making and institutionalization: legislation, standards-setting, international regimes, company safety frameworks and model constitutions as private ordering.
* D6.2 Implementation, compliance and assurance: conformity assessment, notified bodies, audit and assurance markets, ethics-work inside compliance, liability and insurance.
* D6.3 Enforcement and oversight capacity: regulators, the AI Office and national authorities, fundamental-rights bodies, research-access regimes.
* D6.4 Contestation and legitimacy: litigation, civil society, advocacy investigations and agency rebuttals, social movements, worker and community contestation.
D7 Public life and the information order
D8 Everyday life, interaction and the self
D9 AI in the research apparatus
L-A Distribution and stratification (mandatory; canonical schema)
L-B Geography, positionality and external validity (mandatory scope field)