CONCEPT
Follow the Actants
Latour's methodological injunction: do not pre-sort the world into agents and instruments — trace the network and let the participants declare themselves through their effects. The discipline that makes actor-network analysis more than metaphor.
Follow the actants is Latour's core methodological rule: begin without categories, refuse to assume in advance which entities act and which merely assist, and trace the network as it actually operates until the participants reveal themselves through the differences they make. The rule sounds modest, even banal. In practice it is radical, because it suspends the entire architecture of modern thought — the clean divide between active subjects and passive objects, between creative humans and instrumental things — that governs how most analyses begin. The AI moment is precisely the moment at which that suspension becomes empirically necessary, because the networks through which AI-assisted work occurs cannot be honestly described within the sovereign-subject framework.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The rule has two components, and both matter. The first is negative: do not begin with categories. Do not assume that humans act and machines compute, that creators originate and tools execute, that the interesting participants