My research focuses on how ecological structures negatively affect our agency, individual and collective. I’m especially interested in how changing social conditions arising from the Information Age might be negatively affecting our agency, and what we might be able to do about it.

I am happy to share drafts of works in progress. Feel free to email me at lmanuali [at] umich [dot] edu for a draft.

“Can LLMs advance democratic values?” (w/ Seth Lazar), accepted at FAccT 2025, under review

Examines (and categorizes) the various ways computer scientists and others are attempting to use LLMs in proposals for democratic processes and then assesses said uses in light of a few key democratic values.

“Addictive Motivational Scaffolds: Why is Social Media Addictive?”, under review

In the tradition of 4E cognition, offers a psychiatric externalist account of behavioral addiction by developing the notion of a motivational scaffold (as opposed to cognitive or affective scaffolding) and then applies said account to elucidate why social media is addictive.

“The Coherent Dual Theory of Addictive Desire”, Philosophical Psychology, 2022

Offers an account of the dysfunction present in desire in addiction by attempting to attain coherence between empirical (esp. neuroscientific) accounts of addiction and phenomenological accounts of addiction.