Technoscientific citizenship

Toward a politics and ethics of immanence

Yurij Castelfranchi1

Abstract

In recent years, the notion of citizenship and its novel forms and practices were criticized, discussed, and re-
conceptualized by several scholars in the Latin-American context, especially in fields such as political sciences
and sociology. Feenberg´s work is of great value to apply and foster such discussions in the context of Science
and Technology Studies, and to investigate potentialities and practices for a technical citizenship. We show how
what we will call political and epistemological “hacking” may allow both to reconceptualize citizenship and to
point to possible paths for an experimental ethics and a bottom-up politics, not based in principles or axioms, but
on a Critical Practice of Technology. Changing social systems and technological codes is possible, if analysis
and practices are grounded not on an essentialist vision of technique, nor on a normative notion of human
nature, but on a dynamic, dialectic approach to human condition and technical environment.

INTRODUCTION

Critical Theory of Technology is extremely fecund for the sociologist of technology in many
different aspects. It problematizes and throws new light on classical, fundamental sociological
issues, such as agency and structure, social stratification, class and power, State, domination. It
analyzes capitalism in a non-reductionist framework and free from fatalist or determinist
accounts. Finally, from the philosophical and epistemological point of view, Critical Theory of
Technology allows us to take into account relevant contributions of feminist epistemology,
postmodernism, constructivism, as well as classical critical reflections on social production of
rationality and nature of technology (such as those of Marxism, Frankfurt school,
postmodernism, constructivism etc.), in a framework that is immune to the simplifications of
relativism or of essentialism and determinism.

1Department of Sociology and Anthropology – Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences – Federal
University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) – Brazil.InCITe Research Group (“Investigating Citizenship, Innovation
and Technoscience”). E-mail: ycastelfranchi@gmail.com.

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On the one side, while taking seriously into account both social constructivism and actor-
network theory, Critical Theory of Technology provides, in our view, a more sophisticated
comprehension of agency than the former, and a greater attention to power and politics than
the latter, deploying a more effective and concrete politicization of the study of
transformations and construction of socio-technical trajectories, and stressing out concrete
clues for social transformation. On the other side, CTC takes into account essentialist
approaches, in order to understand constraints and conditions of political and social action in a
technologically modulated milieu, but avoiding the epistemological and political dangers of
technological determinism. Finally, in Feenberg´s work philosophy is a philosophy with people
and matter in: the sophisticated adjustment of dialectics, made by a careful analysis of
marxism and Critical Theory, joint with a great attention to empirical data and historical
comparisons, permits formulating concrete hypotheses and sociological models, inventing
possible thought-experiment or testing empirical and historical aspects.

In this work, we discuss some of these aspects, and their connection, by means of a review of
theoretical reflections and empirical evidence focusing on a specific question posed by
Feenberg himself in several works: when, where and how is agency possible in our
technologically mediated social systems? If political decision-making is, more and more,
legitimized by criteria of technical efficiency and by scientific discourse of truth, is it citizenship
possible in a context of technocracy?

“Citizenship implies agency, but what is agency and how is agency possible
in a technologically advanced society where so much of life is organized
around technical systems commanded by experts? (Feenberg, 2011)

Feenberg’s answers to such question is yes: technical citizenship is possible and, actually,
necessary and unavoidable for social change. Our answer will also be yes: technical citizenship
is possible and, actually, already happening, though, in some areas and cases, still in
embryonic, unplanned, not organized or not conscious forms. Technical citizenship occurs in
an ample range of direct, planned practices, or as improvised and not-planned tactics, as well
as in the form and indirect attitudes and perceptions. I will call here this complex set of
practices and networks “techcnoscientific citizenship”, since their study involves not only
understanding technology and individual agency, but relationships between agents and
systems, as well as forms of appropriation and reinvention of knowledge. Such relational
aspects of citizenship are particularly interesting, as we shall show, since they show the
importance of focusing not so much in the search for general, abstract or universal normative
principles for social reforms or regulation and governance, but in the modes of emergence of
patterns and regulations starting from processes that are “inside-out” (biopolitics and
governmentality instead of discipline, if one want to say it in foucauldian terms) and “bottom-
up” (participative and radicalized democracy, instead of representative democracy). People
tactics in solving problem within the constraint posed by their own interests and desires,
hegemonic technological codes, capitalism, moral and political values, as well as socio-
environmental problems or conflicts, may provide strong clues for a reflexive practice that see

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ethics not as a set of axiom, but a contested territory for experiments from which dynamical
principles and norms emerges and can be tested and benchmarked.

TECHNOSCIENCE AND CI TIZENSHIP

Firstly, it is important to make two caveats on technoscientific citizenship.

While some scholars seem to understand technoscience in terms of a merging, a fusion, a loss
or confusion of boundaries between science and technology (always present or supposedly
occurred in XX century), we assume that science and technology are different. They interact
and participate in processes of mutual constitution (usually not in a linear way), but they have
(as knowledge and practices, as well as at the institutional level) their own autonomous logic,
organizational modes, forms of legitimization and testing, ethos, practices, etc. So in this work
“technoscience” does not mean S&T, nor “science + technology”, and does not also mean a
kind of hybrid configuration in which the two mix. We use such term to say that, in order to
understand and transform technology, we have to take into account the ways in which
capitalism, knowledge production (as well as circulation and appropriation of knowledge), and
technology interact in a context of different possible assemblages. Capitalism, technology and
science may legitimate and modulate mutually, or, on the contrary, produce frictions and
tensions. For example, while capitalism tend to legitimate and encourage technological
innovation, patents and commoditization of information, that are crucial in this stage of
capitalism, may affect knowledge production, as well as academic ethos and institutional
organization, eventually leading to resistance and struggling by scientists.

With respect to citizenship, we discuss it here not merely as a set of practices or attributes of
the individual, nor as a list of rights and duties that government must guarantee and regulate.
We investigate and define citizenship (as well as agency in general) as an interaction, a
relational process, a dynamics of the entanglement between subjects and their milieu. In this
sense, being a capacity to act in a framework of constraints, we can treat citizenship as a
particular kind of power, in a weberian and foucauldian sense: not simply something one can
have, conquer or lose, not a substance or attribute “inside” the individual, but also a dynamic
relationship modulated by subjects that are conditioned and constrained by strategies, norms,
environmental limitations or possibilities. Studying citizenship mean studying not only people
and governments, but also links between the subjects and their milieu, links that modulate
both the environment and the constitution of subjectivities.

This point is important, not so much to define citizenship, but mainly to focus its study. If a
citizen is not simply equipped with rights and duty, if he/she performs and practices citizenship
through tactics and interactions, than citizenship is not merely about guaranteeing or
conquering rights. It is also a conflictive field of invention of rights: the exercise of citizenship is
not only the fight for new policies or rules, but a territory in which rights that simply did not
exist are invented, defined within contested boundaries. Citizenship is a practice that turns
visible the invisible (women rights and animal rights being some example of such “right to have
rights”: Dagnino, 2004). In this sense, duties and rights are more the consequence of agency
and citizenship, and less its conditions.

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In this perspective, we may explore in which sense, when and how subjects living in a
technologically advanced society, governed through governmental rationality and technocratic
legitimization of policy-making, can – by using things, contesting processes, protesting against
policies or markets, inventing stuff, adapting themselves to existing codes and mutating them
by tactics at micro or macro level – actually transform technology and, eventually, in an
organized and self-conscious way, transform civilization: is it a technoscientific citizenship
possible?

In the dominant technical code, and in the framework of hegemonic rationality, technical
citizenship is a problem: in the first place, because agency implies knowledge, and technical
knowledge is a kind of expert knowledge in which lay people use to have no literacy:

Capacity to act implies three conditions: knowledge and power, and an

appropriate occasion. Power without knowledge is as likely to be self-
destructive as fulfilling. This is not what we mean by agency. We do not
talk about agency in cases where the subject is too ignorant to make
informed decisions. [...] Agency is reserved for domains in which action is
both personal and informed, and in which it is appropriately so. Politics is
the prime example and we call agency in this domain citizenship. Citizen
agency is the legitimate right and power to influence political events.
(Feenberg, 2011)

If so, the capacity to influence technical choices and to transform technology through politics,
seems to be not an option for the lay citizen:

Technocratic ideology claims that agency is impossible where specialized

technical disciplines such as engineering exist. […] We generally think of
technical questions as similar to mathematical or scientific questions. In all
three cases we believe there is a truth independent of personal beliefs
established by incontrovertible evidence and reasoning. In the case of
technology, that truth concerns the most efficient way to solve problems
[…]. Technical citizenship seems incompatible with efficiency since only the
technologists know the one best way to do things in their domain.
(Feenberg, 2011)

In a context of what Michel Foucault calls governmentality (and Weber discusses in terms of
rationalization, disenchantment and bureaucratic legal-rational domination), political issues
are often re-located as technical problems: politics is de-politicized thanks to a rationality that
broadly grounds policy in the domain of technical problems. Politics must be based on facts
and reason, not on “ideology” or “irrational beliefs”:

Philosophically considered, the question concerns the nature of rationality.

Most political theorists imagine people disagreeing about values and
ideologies, not facts. They take it for granted that some sort of rational
process allows convergence around a similar description of the

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 contentious issues, but what to do depends also on personal
commitments. […] This is why citizenship is so important: since no rational
procedure can eliminate disagreement, we must have the right to our
beliefs regardless of what others think, even if they are many and we are
few. But this right does not extend to challenging technical knowledge
where it exists with mere ideology or personal preferences. The
technocratic theory is at least partially correct. […] But […] behind the
technocratic argument lies a hidden assumption, namely, that technical
experts know everything relevant and rational in their domain. Thus the
real question is, do the users and victims of technology know anything
worth knowing that is not known by technical experts? (Feenberg, 2011)

Feenberg’s responds affirmatively to such question, as also do major empirical works in the
field of STS (see, for example, Wynne, 1996; Callon et al, 2009, Collins and Evans, 2009). An
empirical research program can study which practices and knowledge are historically relevant
in transforming technological codes, trying to detect current frictions and contestations of
technocracy, their effects and their (eventually new) conditions of possibility and norms. We
will try in the following to show the importance of mapping different territories in order to
explore possibilities for (and potentialities of) technoscientific:

- At the macro level, we need to explore reconfigurations in the relationships between

capitalism, technology, politics and the “public”

- At the level of subjectivities, we need to investigate perceptions and attitudes of

people while coping with the often complex problem (with no single or optimal
solution) of making their way, taking their decisions coping with the often
contradictory constraints posed by desires and goals, technological medium, moral
norms, economic imperatives, hegemonic rationality, and so on

- The above permits analyzing tactics and “tactical gestures” that eventually contest
technocracy or reclaim technoscientific territories: people may contribute, by figuring
out what to do, or by buying, using, voting, desiring different things in different ways,
to transform technology and modulate markets or policies. They can re-signify or
reinvent technical objects or processes, opening bifurcations and singularities that can
be territorialized in different ways. They show and empower ambiguities and deploy
the margin of maneuver of current technologies. Such processes are usually not
organized or planned, by can lead to major changes in technoscience, in some case,
when a loop or affinity occurs between goals and effects at this levels and ruptures or
condition of possibilities in the macro level.

- Finally, it is important to analyze critically current procedural mechanisms and

processes in technoscientific citizenship (consensus conferences, public consultations,
etc.) and current social movements to see if organized and planned goal-oriented
practices can emerge and be empowered, or if stable alternative routes and goals are
not yet possible.

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TECTONICS AND NEVRALGIES OF TECHNOSCIENCE

Between the Second World War and the end of the Cold War, changes have occurred both in
the production of scientific knowledge and in the relationships between knowledge,
innovation, economy, and politics. Production and appropriation of both scientific and
technological knowledge always played an important role in capitalism, but such role was
reconfigured and amplified during globalization, due to re-signification in intellectual property
rights and changes in the accumulation regime. The organizational structures of science, its
institutions, agents, practices and discourses also have suffered mutations. Several scholars
studied those transformations. Someone stressed out the economic aspects (reorganizations
in the capitalist regime in which production and appropriation of scientific and technological
knowledge play novel, deeper strategic roles). Others emphasized institutional, organizational
or epistemological changes in science. “Regulatory science” by Jasanoff (1995), “post-normal”
science by Funtowicz & Ravetz (1993), as well as the “Mode 2” of knowledge production by
Gibbons et al (1994) and Nowotny et al (2001) and “post-academic” science by Ziman (2000),
“techno-science” as defined by Latour (1992) or Echeverría (2003), are some examples. More
in general, recent sociological diagnostics of contemporary societies – like “risk society” by
Ulrich Beck (1999), or “network society” by Manuel Castells (1997) - also showed the crucial
role of relationships between science, technology, politics and the market.

Among several factors, one that most authors emphasize is the remarkable role played by
private capital in contemporary techno-science, in the majority of developed and emergent
countries. In the decades of Cold War, science was strongly and mainly supported and funded
by Nation States, and rhetorically seen as a “common good”. In the ‘80s, this configuration
began to change, with a strong growth of private funding in R&D, and scientific knowledge
began to be seen as something that could, or even should, be commercialized, sold, patented.

Sociological analysis of “post-fordism”, “cognitive capitalism”, “immaterial work” (Castells,

1997) also stressed out the importance of the transformation of the intellectual property rights
on scientific knowledge. Another important aspect of such reconfiguration can be seen in the
mechanisms and rules governing research practices. During the last decades, competition,
“Publish or perish”, the search for diverse sponsors and funders for research contributed for
changes in the ways in which scientists work in networks, think in “inter” and “trans”
disciplinarity of their objects, internationalize their groups, and so on: it is a transformation
similar to the one we saw in the production of commodities and in the work (Ziman, 2000;
Nowotny et al, 2001).

While during Cold War and fordist regime so called basic research enjoyed a relative autonomy
(Jasanoff, 2004; Nowotny et al, 2001), today techno-science shares with business and industry
several norms and practices. Economic rationality plays a relevant role in the force field that
contributes to shape what science is and how is done, so that S&T systems are being thought,
in most central countries, as big companies of mixed capital, and many concepts of the
business-world, such as flexibility, mobility, venture capital, competitiveness, performance,
productivity, are being applied to them. Synergy, efficiency, spin-off, failure/success,

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marketing, pro-activity, entrepreneurialism enters the daily vocabulary and practices of several
researchers in many different areas of science. Narratives of techno-science tell us today a
story in which knowledge and information are crucial for capitalist competition, in which the
production and circulation of scientific and technical knowledge have to be managed in
“efficient”, “calculated” forms, more directly linked to “national security”, “social demands”,
“economic performance” of the states. Both in Latin America and in the “developed”
countries, policy-makers, managers and techno scientific leaders repeat slogans that
emphasize the need for a reconfiguration in the role of universities and research: they tell the
story of the “challenge” and of the “urgent need” to create “entrepreneurial universities” able
to “commercialize” and “sell” research to society (Etzkowitz, 2001). This means that several
scientists have to cope with norms that are partially new, and a recombinant academic ethos,
in which the search for truth and profit, objectivity and politics can share the same territory.
New actors and stakeholders contribute to management and planning of scientific research.

If such reconfigurations in the relationship between scientific research and the markets are
linked to the present shape of capitalism, the links between science and politics were also
affected by the growing importance of risk and socio-environmental issues. Both in “risk
societies” (Beck, 1999) and in “reflexive modernization” (Giddens, Beck & Lash, 1997), the
problem of social consequences of S&T is central, intrinsically political and global. And a crisis
of legitimization in the Cold War “social contract between science and society” (Nowotny et al,
2001) also emerged from the increasing visibility of the interests – and of conflicts of interests
– in science: biomedicine, GMOs, patents, as well as the publicizing of several recent cases of
misconduct in science (for instance, Woo-Sunk Hwang, Jon Sudbø, Jan HendrikSchön:
Castelfranchi, 2006.

We see, from all the above, that actual “reticularization” of information systems and control,
new dynamics in contemporary capitalism, new modes of participatory politics, all contributed
to a new context in which interactive connections, dialogues, negotiations, cybernetic
feedbacks between practices and markets impose a new shape on techno-science: demand,
costs, benefits, social concerns, externalities, marketing are all things with which many
researchers have to stay in contact in order to make their career.

These circumstances came together with an increasing public exposition of S&T during the
last decades. Different social movements since the ‘60s began to denounce a crisis of the
industrialization model, as well as the serious environmental consequences of science-based
technological applications. Criticisms of technical and scientific rationality also received new
impetus and force, during and after May 1968 (Feenberg, 1999). The present configuration of
techno-science shows an engagement of different agents and institutions participating in
global science communication fluxes that do not accept a more or less passive role as
“audience” or “consumers”, as in traditional communication models, and reclaim a role as
participants, and producers of information and knowledge. All this has important impacts on
the dynamics of both production and diffusion of knowledge, and also changes communicative
strategies in S&T, with respect to the internal communication between scientists, the
communication in the public arena, the relationships with mass media, with marketing,
political propaganda, and expert consulting. Issues like nuclear energy, biotechnology, food
security, reproductive technologies, and nanotechnology, and their connections with risk

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governance and socio-environmental impacts, have today strong links with these new forms of
organization and practices in techno-science.

Linked to such processes, as well as to changes in governmental rationality and capitalism,

ideas rhetoric of a “bottom-up” democracy and participatory models emerged.
Simultaneously, civic participation has opened new academic routes of exploration related to
conflictive social issues about “civic participatory cultures” and the search of measures and
precautionary principles for the application of technologies (Lengwiler, 2008; López
Cerezo&Gómez, 2009; López Cerezo, 2003).

During the second half of XXth century, and especially after the end of the Cold War, "lay"
users reclaimed participation in the construction of knowledge, or at least, in establishing its
validation and governance. In the medical area, patient groups, increasingly stronger,
organized and informed, modulated the agenda of some scientists and institutions (Bucchi,
2009). In some cases, they even had a weight in establishing what should be considered "good
science" or "bad science" (Epstein, 1995). In fact, in contemporary medicine, non-
governmental organizations not only defend the rights of patients. In some cases, they can
collect money than governments themselves, and decide how to use it; what it means which
kind of research is needed to be financed (Telethon, in France, for example). In other cases,
the knowledge production is originated, at least in part, outside the universities and centers of
traditional research. Local communities and pressure groups can order reports and
experiments produced by "independent scientists". In some cases, grassroots organizations
can have an influence on scientists’ behavior or even over methodological decisions. This way
many non-governmental organizations linked to social and environmental activism not only
militate in favor or against certain "shapes" and "impact" of techno-science. They are an
integral part of techno-science: they can actually contribute not only to regulate
downstream “impacts” of technology, but also to reconfigurate technical codes from the
inside: they practice a “hacker politics”, opening potentialities for recombinant technologies.

Petras and Veltmeyer (2006), analyzing the cases of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador,
identify three basics modalities of social change and political power in the region: electoral
politics, social action in the direction of local development, and the construction of social
movements. In Latin American countries there have been some remarkable contemporary
events that have put civil society to the centre of technological development discussion and,
more widely, to the debates on democracy and sustainable development. Just to mention a
few among of examples: social resistance to open-pit mining in Argentina -or Chile, Bolivia and
Peru (Svampa & Antonelli, 2009); social mobilization and organization against the installation
of pulp mills production on the margins of the River Uruguay (Vara, 2007b); or the huge public
discussion on lithium extraction in Bolivia. In Brazil, governmental rhetoric gave a stronger
emphasis, in the last decade, on e-democracy, social inclusion, participation, engagement.
Several mechanisms for “bottom-up” deliberation, like participative budgeting, public
consultations, plebiscites etc. assumed stronger roles in governance processes. S&T were not
immune to the process (see, for example, Castelfranchi, 2009). Some few examples: “civil
society” participated in the debate on the constitutionality of stem-cell research (see, for
example, Cesarino, 2007), and participates, at least partially, in bioethics and bio-security
committees (Leite, 2007); an on-line public consultation was recently made to formulate a

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proposal for the new law on intellectual property rights for music; consensus conferences
were organized on biotechnology; public engagement programs were planned to stimulate the
debate on nanotechnology, and so on. Recently, Amazonian indigenous people participated
actively, not as “subjects of research”, or “informants”, or “native speakers”, but as real co-
authors, in researches published in international journals as prestigious as Science
(Heckenberger et al., 2003). Social movements and indigenous NGOs also produced scientific
data, funded scientific research useful to fight their battles (Castelfranchi, 2008).

A conclusion is that these collectives (interest groups and pressure groups) and social
movements do not want to be viewed any more as “passive” or “ignorant”, “lay” people. In
many cases, they cannot be considered simply as “audiences” or “consumers”. They
vindicate themselves as activists and information producers. They know their actions can
influence policies (and the politics) and affect the dynamics of knowledge production and
technological innovation. For instance, new informational technologies (blogs, social
networks, wikis, YouTube and other similar platforms, etc.) are intensively used by these
social agents. This way, technological development, capitalism, science and democracy are
daily confronted in different public arenas.

All this shows that public communication of S&T and public participation are today an
intrinsic part of the metabolism of contemporary capitalist democracies. Diffusion of S&T are
today not only a "right" for the publics, and not only a "moral duty" for scientists,
technologists or politicians (“democratizing knowledge”), but a need, both for society and
technoscience, as well as a unavoidable process.

New mediators and communicators (or no mediators at all), new stakeholders in science
communication area, and also new “sources” of scientific knowledge emerge today in this
interesting scenario. In some cases, the “public” is today also a producer of scientific
information (e.g.: indigenous movements on environmental activist collecting and producing
data). This implies in amplified conditions of possibility for technoscientific citizenship, and
several different micro and macro forms for political agency.

EMPIRICAL CLUES OF TECHNOSCIENTIFIC CITIZENSHIP

COMMUNICATION, TECHNOSCIENTIFIC LOBBYING AND MARKETING

Communication has acquired a new status: it has become a structural and structuring feature
of contemporary techno-science. Scientific and technological practices are unthinkable
without different strategies of communication at various scenarios within the public arena.
The search for visibility, legitimization, funding, alliances, and the need of negotiations and
dialogue with different stakeholders, generates new impulses for science communication. In
some cases, scientists metaphorically wear, when their talks enter political debates and
conflicts, their white coat, as a symbol of a pure, neutral, universal knowledge. In other cases,
they accept the rules of the mediated game. In order to sell books, market a company, become
“visible”, they accept to use hype. God and the soul, life and death, sex and war are some of
the more used tricks to capture the attention of the media (Polino and Castelfranchi, 2012).

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Science advocacy is another interesting aspect of these processes: marketing, lobbying,
publicity are increasingly important in S&T (Castelfranchi, 2002). What is remarkable today is
that an important part of such activities is directed not only to politicians or the business
sector, but to civil society, too. This happens because the need of techno-science for
accountability, lobbying and public legitimization joins today with the need of politics to
legitimate itself through science. As a consequence, interfaces between science, technology
and the public appear: communication plays a complex role in public agenda, in the
governance of S&T and even inside the lab. It is not exogenous to science or to technological
innovation, nor it happens diachronically “after” research and development, but it is also an
intrinsic process synchronic with new R&D and contributing to shape its forms and
possibilities. This implies potentialities for techno-scientific citizenship even when subjects are
seen not in the role of voters, but as consumers, users, “lay public”.

These are clues, in our opinion, of greater possibilities for bottom-up influence on S&T: even
if participation is restricted, a feedback is open. Since communication has several functions (it
serves pedagogical goals, but also informative, strategic, marketing, and political ones), the
media also represent an arena and territory in which battles are fought for prominence,
funding, epistemic or political authority. Battles in which technical codes can suffer
mutations. Battles in which people take part, directly or indirectly.

PUBLIC PERCEPTION OF TECHNOLOGY AND RISK PERCEPTION

European Union: in 1998, during the climax of the transgenic food polemical debate in Europe,
Durant, Bauer and Gaskell studied public attitude toward biotechnology in European Union.
An Eurobarometer survey asked people to give their opinion on six application of
biotechnology (Using genetic testing to detect diseases; introducing human genes into bacteria
to produce medicines or vaccines; crop plants; production of GMO foods; genetically modified
animals for laboratory research; human genes into animals to produce organs for human
transplants. For each of those application, subjects were asked to say how much they
considered it useful; risky; morally acceptable; to be encouraged (or not). Quite surprisingly, in
a moment in which most opinion-leaders were saying that rejection of biotechnology was
consequence of irrational fear caused by ignorance and linked mainly to exaggerated risk
perception, statistical analysis of the data showed that, actually, most Europeans did not fear
technology, nor biotechnology. The rejection was strong only in the case of transgenic food
and, statistically, was motivated not so strongly by uncertainties regarding safety or health
issue. Actually, people perceived some applications of biotechnology as potentially risky, but,
at the same time, consider them worthy to be encouraged and pursued, if risk was associated
to utility and moral acceptability:

Moral acceptability is the best predictor of encouragement, followed by

usefulness. Surprisingly, risk has a very low predictive value. […] The
absence of a relationship between risk and encouragement is remarkable,
particularly in light of the importance attached to the issue of risk and
safety in scientific debate and public policy-making. This suggest that

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 there is a disjunction between expert reasoning (focusing on risk) and lay
reasoning (focusing on moral and ethical issues). It is often argued that
knowledge is an important determinant of support for science and
technology: the more informed the public, the more likely they are to be
supportive. [...] Yet the results from the Eurobarometer show that while
knowledge is clearly related to the formation of attitudes, it is not simple
relationship.

(Durant et al, 1998)

On the one side, this kind of result can be read in a pessimistic way: since people do not seem
to follow the technocratic rationality to settle political problems, dialogue and real
participation are impossible. On the other side, Europeans’ attitudes have a big impact on
policy making, and the novel connections people make coping with moral values,
instrumental or economic criteria, risk perception, are important because they can surprise
markets and policy-makers, pointing out less visible aspects of technology, formulating new
questions, posing new constraints and, so, opening up possible bifurcations in socio-
technical trajectories.

People may accept technology perceived as posing risk, and reject another perceived as
offering lower risk: moral and political views are more relevant than probability and efficiency.

Our research on public perceptions and attitudes in S&T Latin America (Castelfranchi et al,
2013) show that Brazilians trust scientists and believe that positive effects of S&T outweigh
negative effects. However, such views are neither simplistic nor uncritical: awareness of
risks, ethical and economic aspects, need for control of techno-science are expressed.
Attitudes toward S&T are associated with different factors: no predictors can be found for
generally positive or negative attitudes, and consumption of information or educational
level has a limited influence in the consolidation of attitudes. Clues point to a complex, non-
linear information-attitude relationship, potentially different from that detected in other.

This are interesting findings, since they show that people do not always understand, grasp or
are aware of all dimensions of technology, but, in their daily life, make their decision by means
of complex, unstable mixings between economic rationality, political values, religious beliefs,
cultural capital, etc. People attitudes toward technology do not depend only on their
ignorance or technological literacy, and do not always are determined by fear, nor by mere
instrumental or economic calculations.

CHILDREN’S REPRESENT ATIONS ON TECHNOLOGY

Research conducted by us in Italy and Brazil with focus groups and a technique developed by
us (illustrated narrative groups), detected some interesting feature of the perceptions of
technology hold by 8-11 years old children. Using textual analysis of children’s narration, and
social semiotic analysis of their drawing, we saw that a consistent part of representations on
S&T develops and solidify in early childhood, and that such vision not always are stereotyped
or simple. While most Brazilian children, of different social strata, depicted technology

11
basically as powerful, exogenous and often with magical connotation, children in Italian
government schools, both of middle class and worker families, both Italian or immigrants,
tended to draw a more complex scenario, in which technology may be magic and powerful
(for good or evil), but in which trial and errors, experiments and hypotheses, analysis and
research, have often a strong role. Besides this, many children focussed on social aspects of
invention, application, appropriation of knowledge and technology (how do a scientist or
technologist live, how does he or she work, what are the effects of his or her work, etc.). This
is a clue, in our analysis, that even young subjects with very low contact with scientific e
technical literacy, and exposed to stereotypical images on S&T, tend to construct, when in
contact with problems or stimulating sociability process, quite a complex image of
technology, in which politics, aesthetics, social and moral aspects are relevant, even in the
absence of knowledge or of a detailed vision. Technology is not seen only as an exogenous
thing, falling from sky (or from the Olympus of Science), and impacting society, but as
something that is constructed by people who try to solve problems, eventually failing, and
embedded in a social and political milieu that is linked someway with the trajectory of
technical objects they develop. It can be not so much in terms of possibility of citizenship, but
it is a clue that deserves deeper investigation: how do children use technology? How are they
aware of its transformations and implications?

TACTICS AND RESISTANCE

Mapping case studies about practices, perceptions and knowledge of subjects usually seen and
analyzed as “receptors”, “consumers”, “clients”, “public”, “lay people” is useful also because
we may detect territories and settings in which people actually question and transform
technology, as well as market and politics: in a tactical, not always planned or conscious way.
By solving problems, deciding the goods they buy, the politicians they vote for, downloading
music, enjoying their leisure time or figuring out how to cope with goals they need to achieve
within the moral, legal or technological constraints they live in, consumers can act as
producers or inventors. Members of environmental groups may produce new scientific data or
technical knowledge, or pose new constraints or challenges both to methods and organization
of science. Empirical evidence that such processes are important, and that actually tactics and
micropolitics can have effects and contribute for recombination and reconfigurations in
technology and policies, is growing. Some classical, well-known example are case study by
Epstein (1995) on HIV-positive patients in California, as well as Brian Wynne’s (1996) account
on sheep farmers in Cumbria during the Chernobyl crisis. More recently, a good review of
cases and stories is discussed in Callon et al (2009). Besides this, history of technology is very
rich in examples of users and consumers transforming and reinventing technologies, or in
posing problems that stimulate bifurcations in socio-technical trajectories. Our research on
genetic counseling show decision people make can influence strongly physician practices, as
well as policy-making.

On the other side, experiments in public participation and deliberative decision making in S&T
show their limitation, while planned and performed in a liberal framework of rules and
expectative, but also show the great potential to constitute an interesting setting for mutual,

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collective learning, in which scientist, engineers and technocrats learn together, in a conflictive
situation, and open up the menu of problems to be take on into account: in this context,
“efficiency” is politically contested and redefined thanks to need, questions, but also data and
knowledge coming from diverse social groups.

In all such case, clues appears that local, situated knowledge, and also practices and conflicts
people enact or suffer, contribute (in same case dramatically) to transform policies, as well as
processes of diffusion, regulation and governance of S&T, but also invent new mechanisms for
the management and production, eventually generating or empowering processes that modify
epistemological and methodological aspects of technology, generating true “bottom-up” and
“inside-out” innovation (that´s what we call “innovating innovation”).

Studying such aspects, novel experiments in discussion, participation and public deliberation
can be invented and tested, as well as participative technological innovation.

The challenging part of such research program is to see whether, or not, such bottom-up
aspect can be effective in opening up possibilities for a real rupture. Our hypotheses is that
they are necessary but not sufficient: they can be crucial if affinities and loops between the
micro and macro level appear, empowering and amplifying potentialities for change at both
levels. Ruptures, singularities and unintended consequence of social action (both at micro and
macro level) may combine themselves amplifying mutually and, eventually joint to conscious
political choice and citizen agency, allowing for bifurcations in sociotechnical trajectories.

A critical practice of technology, nurtured by ironic and heterodox approaches to

epistemological and political hacking, may help us construct a political bridge between
micropolitics and social transformation. Understanding not only how technology “impact” our
life, but also how our performances enact technology and allow for bifurcations, can be
exploited consciously and collectively for social change.

RESISTANCE, INSISTENCE AND HACKING: TOWARD A CRITICAL PRACTICE OF

TECHNOLOGY

Our discussion support Feenberg’s claims on the possibility, and necessity, of technical
citizenship:

Huge changes are occurring in fields such as medicine and computers

under the influence of political protest and public involvement in design.
The environmental movement has been deeply and quite concretely
involved in the question of technology for the last twenty years. The
technological world we will inhabit in the years to come will be a product
of public activity to a great extent (Feenberg, 1999, p. IX)

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Some of the processes we described here are what de Certeau would call tactics: simple
tactical gestures. Others, more organized, planned or articulated politically (in the context, for
example, of social movements) are what, in foucauldian terms, we could call resistance. But
we prefer here to distinguish resistance from “insistence”.

Classically, great socialist workers’ parties, social movements in the ‘70s, contra-culture or
antagonist, contra-hegemonic movements, “resisted” to power, ideology, oppression or
hegemony as a victim of a kind of external domination: when you resist to something or
someone, you can “name the enemy”. You can situate yourself within a moral, epistemological
and political perspective of difference and conflict. Eventually, you can situate yourself in an
ontological position of otherness with respect to “the system”. It is a quite comfortable place
of purity and honesty: we can judge, plan our actions “against” a mega-machine that is trying
to pass on our bodies or souls. However, as feminism, as well as ecology, showed, we are all
legitimate or illegitimate sons and daughters of our world, impure witnesses, whose eyes are
not innocent. We are an active part of our world, not an external, innocent victim. In this
perspective, political action is more complicated, ironic and blaspheme (Haraway, 1991) since
no moral or epistemological privileged point of view exist (all knowledge is made through
power, and situated). But, on the other side, other possibilities and potentialities of
resistance and conflict get visible. One is “insistence”: a hacker politics, in which we do not
see technology and domination as above us, or external to us. We live and enact our lives
inside the political and technological blackbox that we try to open or deconstruct and
demystify. And, if we live inside them, operation of conceptual and epistemological hacking
(and recoding) as well as political hacking (and recombination) can be seen as concrete and
powerful possibilities for political action. Insistence is a change of perspective, in which,
instead of naming the enemy, we accept the impurity, discomfort, complication and
responsibility of being part of a totality and try to invent inside-out and bottom-up actions
eventually capable of constructing loops and feedback with potentialities and ambiguities at
the macro level, and producing changes in technical codes and rationalities.

This brings, in our opinion, to a theoretical and political interest in tensioning and questioning
the frontiers between ethics, esthetics and politics and to research programs focusing, on
the one side, on emergence and mutual causation and constitution and, on the other side,
on empirically oriented search for “hacked”, recombinant politics: inside-out, bottom-up
practice that may have effects on technical codes and rationalities.

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