Alongside the fiction and film, Lawrence works as an independent researcher and policy writer — examining how digital infrastructure shapes authority and society, drafting policy proposals across a broad range of public interest areas, and contributing to national occupational health and safety discourse. Policy proposals are published as part of Civic Sketches — a series of working drafts on technology, environment, occupational health, and democratic governance, now available directly on this site.
Authority, Visibility, and Algorithmic Power in the Digital Age
This six-part series advances the concept of infrastructural religion as an analytic framework for understanding how authority operates within contemporary digital environments. Rather than examining belief or doctrine, the work asks how platforms structure recognition, participation, and interpretation at scale — and introduces epistemic sovereignty as a political concept describing a community's capacity to understand and influence the infrastructures that condition its collective truth recognition.
The series spans six papers: from the foundational analysis of authority embedded in systems and the migration of social control into code, through the governance of visibility, the absorption of religious practice into platform environments, and the rise of automated judgment, to a concluding synthesis that consolidates these strands into a unified theoretical framework.
Methodological Approach & Scope - This paper establishes the methodological and theoretical foundation for a research series examining digital platforms as systems of authority, governance, and legitimacy through the analytical framework of infrastructural religions.
Historical and Structural Foundations - This paper traces how religious and quasi-religious institutions historically transformed legitimacy into durable governance through infrastructure, procedural enforcement, visibility, dependency, and costly exit, arguing that contemporary digital platforms inherit and intensify these same structures of authority.
Visibility and Exclusion: Algorithmic Authority and Excommunication - This paper argues that digital platforms govern by algorithmically allocating visibility, attention, and archival access, allowing ranking, suppression, and account restrictions to function as opaque, automated forms of inclusion, exclusion, and domain-specific sovereignty.
The Absorption of Older Religions: Platform-Mediated Faith - This paper argues that while religious institutions retain formal authority over doctrine, digital platforms increasingly shape which interpretations become prominent by filtering faith through engagement-driven ranking, repetition, compression, and platform-native influence.
AI as Clergy: Automation, Opacity, and Ritualized Deference - This paper argues that AI systems increasingly perform clergy-like functions within digital platforms by interpreting rules, adjudicating boundaries, shaping meaning, and disciplining participation through opaque automated systems that diffuse accountability and normalize procedural deference.
Implications and Synthesis - This paper synthesizes the series’ argument that digital platforms have become infrastructures of authority—governing visibility, participation, interpretation, and memory through opaque, automated systems—and frames the resulting struggle over how truth is recognized and circulated as a question of epistemic sovereignty.
A practical reference document for citizens, community groups, municipal officials, and elected representatives navigating data centre development proposals in their communities. The handbook compiles the questions that need to be asked, the concerns that need to be addressed, and the accountability frameworks that should be in place before approval is granted — written for people who have the right to participate in these decisions but may not yet have the technical or policy language to do so effectively.
Released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 — free to download, reproduce, distribute, and adapt with attribution. Intended for use by anyone facing a data centre proposal in their community.
Draft policy proposals spanning technology governance, environmental policy, occupational health, housing, democratic governance, and broader questions of public interest — published as part of Civic Sketches. New proposals are added regularly.
Loading proposals…
Articles published in Canadian Occupational Safety, Canada's leading occupational health and safety publication.