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.
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 occupational health and safety, technology governance, environmental policy, and broader questions of public interest. Published on Substack with new proposals added regularly.
This policy proposal calls for governments to treat government AI use — the prompts, outputs, and reliance on them — as public record, with a searchable registry, mandatory disclosure for high-impact uses, and real oversight to keep AI-assisted decisions from disappearing from public scrutiny.
This proposal would stabilize property taxes for homeowners, seniors, and family farms at their purchase-time value — shielding them from speculation-driven assessment spikes — and recover a fair share of that deferred benefit only when the property is later sold at a real profit.
This proposal would require every major corporate subsidy — grants, tax breaks, royalty reductions, loans, and more — to undergo a mandatory four-year public review testing whether it actually delivered jobs, revenue, and local benefit, with built-in clawback and sunset provisions to reform, reduce, or end subsidies that fail to prove their public value.0
The Shared Standard Compensation Act would automatically link any increase in elected officials' pay or allowances to an equal proportional increase in disability, seniors, housing, and other basic-needs supports — and tie cuts or freezes to those supports to matching cuts in political compensation — so governments can no longer raise their own pay while leaving the most vulnerable behind.
The Productive Farmland Protection and Valuation Act would tax active farmland at its agricultural production value rather than speculative development value, letting the protected valuation pass to family successors or other farmers while imposing a conversion tax on speculative gains whenever land is taken out of food production.
The AI Upload Consent and Data Authority Act would require clear warnings, informed consent, and disclosure before anyone can upload someone else's copyrighted, private, or confidential material into AI systems, treating unauthorized uploads themselves as an actionable harm rather than requiring victims to prove specific damages.
The Truth in Job Advertising and Applicant Data Protection Framework would require employers to honestly label whether a posted job is a real, active vacancy or just a talent pool, disclose how applicant data will be used and retained, and ban "ghost jobs" that harvest résumés or distort labour-market data without any real intent to hire.
The Honest Jobs Reporting Act would require governments to break down every job creation claim into short-term, long-term, and living-wage long-term FTE positions — plus the public subsidy cost per job — so "1,000 jobs" announcements can't hide how few are permanent, well-paid, or worth the public money spent.
The Food Affordability and Grocery Transparency Act would require grocery companies to disclose shrinkflation, report profit taken across the entire supply chain (not just store-level margins), ban surveillance-based food pricing, and show consumers exactly how their loyalty-program data is being monetized in exchange for rewards.
The Camera-Capable Wearable Technology and Sensitive Information Protection Act would require disclosure, disabled recording, and non-recording alternatives anywhere people must expose IDs, bank cards, or medical documents — treating unauthorized capture by smart glasses or similar devices, even in the background, as a serious privacy violation regardless of intent.
This companion policy would ban ordinary individuals — not just businesses — from using smart glasses or other wearable cameras to capture a stranger's ID, bank card, screen, or other sensitive information in public and semi-public spaces, treating unauthorized capture itself as harm even without proven financial loss.
The Homes First Residential Ownership Act would restrict corporate and large-scale investor accumulation of single-family homes, duplexes, and townhouses — through ownership limits, a progressive housing concentration tax, and mandatory divestment with tenant protections — while still allowing purpose-built rental apartments to add real housing supply.
The Renewable-Ready Construction and Grid Relief Policy would require new buildings to include on-site renewable energy generation, have mortgage rules credit the resulting utility savings toward affordability, and guarantee homeowners fair market payment — without delivery fees — for surplus power they send back to the grid.
This proposal would let elected officials attend legislative proceedings remotely from secure locations within their own ridings — cutting taxpayer-funded capital housing and travel while tracking real attendance — and require candidates to actually live in the communities they seek to represent, ending parachute candidacies.
The Privacy First Act would flip data law's default from "collect first, justify later" to requiring every organization prove personal data collection is strictly necessary and minimal before it happens, establishing a legal right not to be unnecessarily collected, profiled, or retained in the first place.
Articles published in Canadian Occupational Safety, Canada's leading occupational health and safety publication.