Gustavsson, Per M. “The Distributed Leviathan: AI, Networked Violence, and the Fragmentation of Responsibility.” AI & SOCIETY, ahead of print, August 4, 2026.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03244-x.

Open access: Yes

Notes: In the face of AI, violence does not emerge as an individual, easily recognizable act. Rather, in this theoretical paper, Gustavsson argues that violence now operates through participation, amplification, and distributed coordination. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon, however — rather, it is a continuation of longer-standing questions about responsibility, coordination, and social organization.

Gustavsson identifies three processes of transformation: distributed operationalization (the infrastructural condition in which perception, coordination, and action emerge through interactions between users, platforms, and AI systems rather than through a centralized actor), synthetic reality (the operational role of computational representations and AI-generated content in shaping social experience), and distributed opacity (the epistemic condition produced by these systems, in which no single participant can fully reconstruct the operational logic through which outcomes are generated).

Together, these processes reshape how we frame responsibility, shifting it away from any single identifiable individual. As Gustavsson puts it: “Violence no longer appears solely as direct coercion between identifiable actors, but as an emergent property of sociotechnical environments whose operations exceed the perspective of any single participant. Networked infrastructures transform not only violence, but the conditions under which reality becomes socially intelligible.“