Daniel Silver

How are social media platforms like used car dealers? This post answers that question, and more.

What do the Protestant Ethic and the Ethic of Authenticity have in common? Both are disciplines, internally and externally. open.substack.com/pub/thesilverl…

And read more here: substack.com/home/post/p-18…

What would Claude, Deepseek, Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT say if they walked into a bar? You can explore these questions and more with R.B. Griggs' chatstorm, here: chatstorm.io

AI is exiting its early psychological phase and maturing into its sociological moment. We can all see the potential in networked and distributed intelligences. At the same time, throwing them all together and watching the sparks fly tends to produce mush.

Liberalism as an existential problem. A parable in which John Rawls encounters a Nietzschean evil demon at the grocery store, dismisses him easily, but meets another even more terrifying one. open.substack.com/pub/thesilverl…

Social Capitalist Ethics: beyond the morality of the gentleman A Market-Failure Approach to Platform Ethics. The first in a series of posts on why social media is a staged competition for influence, and how to decide what counts as fair play. open.substack.com/pub/thesilverl…

Experiments in classical sociological theory III The hidden abode of production open.substack.com/pub/thesilverl…

An essay on the creativity of social conflict. From 1950s PTA meetings to 21st century social media flame wars. open.substack.com/pub/thesilverl…

Rob Ford’s mayoralty in Toronto is a telling case, in that it occurred outside of national politics and hot-button issues, and within a multi-cultural metropolis (often represented as more or less inherently on one side of the populist divide).

The case study method helps to give some empirical flesh to a conversation that threatens to become highly abstract.

This piece tries to bring a sociological perspective to the discussion of populism, building on Heath’s provocative essay and Dan Williams’ critical notes on grounding a theory of populism in dual process psychology. @thesilverlining3/note/c-170644179?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=8fcpq" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@thesilverlini…