[2604.16106] Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI: Avoiding Decoys in Pursuit of Accountability

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Computer Science > Computers and Society

arXiv:2604.16106 (cs)

[Submitted on 17 Apr 2026 (v1), last revised 20 Apr 2026 (this version, v2)]

Title:Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI: Avoiding Decoys in Pursuit of Accountability

Authors:Janet Vertesi, danah boyd, Alex Taylor, Benjamin Shestakofsky<br>View a PDF of the paper titled Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI: Avoiding Decoys in Pursuit of Accountability, by Janet Vertesi and 3 other authors

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Abstract:The Project of AI is a world-building endeavor, wherein those who fund and develop AI systems both operate through and seek to sustain networks of power and wealth. As they expand their access to resources and configure our sociotechnical conditions, they benefit from the ways in which a suite of decoys animate scholars, critics, policymakers, journalists, and the public into co-constructing industry-empowering AI futures. Regardless of who constructs or nurtures them, these decoys often create the illusion of accountability while both masking the emerging political economies that the Project of AI has set into motion, and also contributing to the network-making power that is at the heart of the Project's extraction and exploitation. Drawing on literature at the intersection of communication, science and technology studies, and economic sociology, we examine how the Project of AI is constructed. We then explore five decoys that seemingly critique - but in actuality co-constitute - AI's emergent power relations and material political economy. We argue that advancing meaningful fairness or accountability in AI requires: 1) recognizing when and how decoys serve as a distraction, and 2) grappling directly with the material political economy of the Project of AI. Doing so will enable us to attend to the networks of power that make 'AI' possible, spurring new visions for how to realize a more just technologically entangled world.

Comments:<br>To be presented at ACM FAccT, Montréal, Canada, June 25 to June 28, 2026

Subjects:

Computers and Society (cs.CY); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2604.16106 [cs.CY]

(or<br>arXiv:2604.16106v2 [cs.CY] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.16106

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history<br>From: Alex Taylor [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:38:06 UTC (55 KB)

[v2]<br>Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:33:52 UTC (55 KB)

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