Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI: Avoiding Decoys in Pursuit of Accountability

Vertesi, boyd, Taylor, and Shestakofsky argue that AI accountability debates are not failing by accident — they are being shaped by the same networks of power they nominally critique. The concept of 'decoys' is analytically sharp: it names a mechanism by which critics, journalists, and policymakers are recruited into legitimising the very structures they think they are challenging. This is a political economy argument in the tradition of Galbraith or Veblen applied to contemporary AI governance — the question is not whether AI is good or bad, but who controls the terms of evaluation. For product directors who work inside or alongside large AI platforms, this paper offers a structural map of why so many accountability efforts feel productive while changing little. The author lineup — Janet Vertesi, danah boyd — brings serious institutional credibility to what might otherwise read as polemic.