Social, Political & Cultural Analysis Ideas Collection

A data visualization project showing the cities across the world with the biggest difference between median and mean salaries, highlighting the impact of using the wrong metrics in conversations about wealth.

An analysis of the societal impact of AI-driven job loss, moving beyond the flawed 'Industrial Revolution' comparison to create a better set of five stories that help us understand the real human consequences.

A predictive analysis of which hobbies and industries (like boating in the Great Lakes) will suffer most as AI-driven job loss reduces disposable income for leisure activities.

A comparative analysis of how the character 'Data' from Star Trek was perceived then versus how we perceive and interact with actual AI now.

An analysis of how AI training data reflects its training data and implicit worldview of the majority of content published on the easily scrapable internet today. What would an AI stock-trading bot do if trained on stilted rose-tinted glasses on company performance instead of objective reality that we learn through years of living?

A thought piece exploring the concept of 'materialistic nihilism,' where creation is not 'out of nothing' but a reforming of existing matter, and how this changes our entire conception of what an 'artist' is.

An analysis of the historical convergence/divergence between the 'entrepreneur' and the 'artist,' and how technology has shaped their respective roles and conceptions in society.

An analysis of how the future of work, as envisioned by CEOs of AI companies, often focuses on abstracting away user choice, which is in direct conflict with how users actually want to use AI -- as a tool they make choices with on how to leverage it.

A critique of how modern medicine might taste the way it does because of a long lineage tracing back to traditional berry-based medicines, explaining why Tylenol might taste like omija.

An analysis of how people talk about love in writing, moving beyond descriptions and listing 'the little things' and nice moments to instead understand how the actual feeling is expressed in words.

A critical look at the 'tech credentialed' echo chamber, questioning why VCs are funding another AI task-management app instead of addressing fundamental changes to humanity.

A thought piece on the concept of 'ritual' and trust and how late-stage capitalism, with its focus on disposable efficiency, has eroded the meaningful, trusted rituals our grandparents had, from brand loyalty to weekly visits to the local restaurant/barber/salon/etc store.

A thought piece on how - if LLMs are less transformational in their learning and output than stated - the quack theories of people who post on niche blogs about conspiracies get swept up in 'bottom trawler scrapes' to create LLM training datasets and may later become a foundational component to someone saying they found the 'AI consciousness' when it's really just someone's wonky blog...

A study analyzing and categorizing all subscriptions into two groups: those that genuinely need to be subscriptions to improve our lives, and those that could just be one-off purchases, questioning the infiltration of subscription models.

A project to track and tell the stories of giving birth experiences across the world (*ahem America*), potentially as a form of medical tourism research.

A social experiment to show people a field and ask them to estimate how many passes it will take to mow, revealing how drastically we underestimate the time consumed by the edges and little bits.

A cultural analysis exploring what conceptions of chivalry existed under communism, how they varied by country, and how they were influenced by the pre-existing belief systems.

A social experiment and content series documenting what would happen if a person actually lived their life according to every ad they saw for a week.