Comparative Entitlement Formation
How platforms form entitlements out of comparison, and structure the grievance that follows.
Theory
Comparative entitlement formation names the process by which infrastructures of comparison — feeds, rankings, dashboards — constitute the sense of what one is owed by measuring what others have.
The account is post-mimetic: it treats desire not as a private state but as a relational configuration that platform mediation reshapes and stabilises.
The concept explains why platform environments generate grievance at scale: they do not merely display inequality, they format it as entitlement whose frustration has a recognisable, and monetisable, affective shape.
Key publications
- Comparative Desire and Social Violence (working paper).
- The Platforming of Desire (working paper).
A continually updated record is available through the publications page.
Current work
- Fieldwork with mimetic theory on entitlement structures in platform environments.
- A theory of grievance formation as an infrastructural output.