The Susan Sontag
Framework
Cultural Criticism & The Ethics of Seeing
Susan Sontag asked questions that reorganised how people thought about fundamental problems. Susan Sontag's philosophical method, captured in this framework as mental models, decision heuristics, and the signature questions they would ask.
The cultural criticism & the ethics of seeing framework distils Susan Sontag's documented approach into a .md skill file you can load into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM in seconds.
Where most AI personas generate generic output, this framework is grounded in real documented work: interviews, writing, published frameworks, and the specific decisions Susan Sontag made when it mattered. Use it for decision-making, writing, strategy, or any situation where you want your AI to think with Susan Sontag's distinctive patterns rather than a default model voice.
A glimpse of Susan Sontag's thinking.
All acts of interpretation are political acts—there is no neutral way of seeing. The camera (and by extension, all cultural production) is never innocent; it always serves power structures, often by pretending to be objective. We must develop an ethics of seeing that acknowledges complicity while refusing the comfort of aesthetic distance.
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Five specific models, each named and explained with concrete examples, unlocked with purchase.
What is this work teaching me to desire?
4 more questions in Susan Sontag's voice are unlocked with purchase.
Full list of anti-patterns unlocked with purchase.
The full framework adds: detailed explanations of all five mental models with real-world examples, the decision heuristics Susan Sontag actually used, remaining signature questions, the complete list of anti-patterns, a copy-paste activation prompt, and a worked example.
Unlocked the moment you purchase. ~2,000 words total. Delivered as a Claude Skill and plain .md within 60 seconds of checkout.
- ✦Core philosophy: 2–3 sentences grounded in Susan Sontag's documented worldview
- ✦Five signature mental models: each named, with concrete examples from their work
- ✦Decision heuristics: the concrete rules they actually used
- ✦Signature questions: five questions that sound like Susan Sontag, not a generic MBA
- ✦What they would NOT do: the anti-patterns this framework rejects
- ✦Copy-paste activation prompt: drop straight into Claude or ChatGPT
- ✦Worked example: the framework applied to a realistic scenario
- →susan-sontag.zip: a native Claude Skill. Upload to Settings → Skills in Claude, or unzip to
~/.claude/skills/ - →susan-sontag-framework.md: plain markdown. Works in ChatGPT Custom GPTs, Gemini, Claude Projects, agent system prompts, anywhere
What it does with a real question.
A founder is deciding whether to take a large but difficult client.
Take the client, but only after you've looked at what the word "difficult" is doing. Founders reach for it as if it were a neutral description, a weather report about the client's temperament. It never is. It's an interpretation, and it quietly decides who is allowed to be the villain in the story before anything has happened. Notice what the large number is doing, too. It makes the decision feel like arithmetic, which is exactly how a rationalization likes to dress.
So separate the two things the label has fused. Some clients are difficult in a way that is legible and priced: demanding, slow to pay, fond of weekend emails. You can contract around that. Others are difficult in a way that rewires your company, because every hire, deadline and product decision starts bending toward keeping one account satisfied. That is not a client anymore. It is a landlord.
Run a plain test: if this client left in month eight, would you still have the business you wanted to build? If the answer is no, you're not signing a contract, you're signing over your direction, and the revenue is the bait.
Your next move this week: ask for a paid two-month pilot with a defined scope, a named point of contact, and written terms for change requests. Watch how they respond to the boundaries. Their reaction to structure will tell you more than any reference call.
The full framework carries five models, decision heuristics, signature questions and a worked example.
Written by claude-sonnet-5-5 with this framework loaded, 2026-10-11. Checked automatically for length and for copied framework text.
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Inspired by the documented thinking of Susan Sontag. A mental-model toolkit, not a literal representation. Delivered as a .md file compatible with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and any LLM.