1. “Hacker Politics”: the challenge of
technoscientific citizenship in
contemporary democracy
Prof. Yurij Castelfranchi
Dept. of Sociology
Faculty of Phil. and Human Sciences
Federal University of Minas Gerais
(UFMG)
ycastelfranchi@gmail.com

2. Summary
 Contemporary relationship between technology, knowledge
production and democracy
 Conditions of possibility for an erosion of technocracy and a
crisis of legitimization of representative democracy: cybernetic
markets and cybernetic governmentality
 Forms of political action and resistance: “insistence”, “deexistence”(not with the meaning of “giving up”)
 Political and epistemological “hacking” in a politics of
immanence: inventing rights, recombining codes

3. The Pedophile and the Truth:
Aspects of technocracy
 Kyoto and George Bush
 Greenpeace and High-speed rail
 Abortion and the Vatican
 ….

4. Classical Technocracy:
Policy depoliticized
 Science-based decision-making and evidence-based policy
whenever technical arguments are possible
 In situation of risk (social, technological, environmental) or
uncertainty, policies tend to legitimate itself based on scientific and
technical expertise
 Rhetoric of progress: technical innovation seen as necessary
andor sufficient for social and economic progress: “future at
stake”, “the train we can not lose”...
 Scientists not as engaged intellectuals, but as neutral experts:
spokespersons of “facts”, producers of answers. Science is
spokesperson of Nature: a “silencing machine” (Stengers)

5. Classical Technocracy:
Policy depoliticized
 Publics seen as “lay public”: deficit of competences to decide on
technical problems... And technical problems are a major part of
political problems...
 Conflictive or antagonist voices tend to be silenced by classical
mechanisms of discourse rejection based on the place of truth and
reason: they are depicted as either “irrational”
“obscurantist”, “hysterical” (non-reason) or as
“ideological”, “corrupt” (non-truth)

6. Neuralgias of technoscience

“Regulatory science” (Jasanoff , 1995)
 “Post-normal” science (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993)
 “Mode 2” of knowledge production (Gibbons, Nowotny, et al 1994, 2001)
 “Post-academic” science by Ziman (2000)

7. Post-Normal Science
(Funtowicz e Ravetz)

8. “Post-academic Science” (Ziman)
Non-instrumental
Academic
1900
Universities
1950
Pure
Basic
‘Mode 1’
2000
Pre-instrumental

Instrumental
Industrial
Government Labs
Research Councils
Foundations
Industries
Applied
Post-industrial
Strategic

‘Mode 2’
Post-Academic


9. Neuralgias of technocracy: in a politics
of immanence... Knowledge is political
 If policy and politics are science-based and legitimated
through expertise, experts are seen as political, and as
stakeholders with
 In most technoscientific problems and conflicts, no
single technoscientific answer or solution exists, for two
reasons....

10. Erosion of technocracy
• 1. Complex systems and uncertainty:
• Knowledge
• Controversies
• Complexity
WE DO NOT KNOW
MORE THAN 1 MODEL, OR
ALTERNATIVE
THEORIES (poliphonic expertise)
HAVING DATA AND A THEORY
DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN
CONTROL
OR FORESEE
• Often, risk is not measurable (uncertainty: we do not know what
we do not know)

11. Erosion of technocracy
• 2. Social definition of risk
 Even when we can estimate risks, damages and
externalities, social acceptability of risk is not the same than
its numerical estimates
 S&T neither sufficient for a politically relevant definition of risk
nor to legitimate policies
John Gummer: “beef eater”

14. Erosion of technocracy
Despoliticization of decision making
(tecnhocracy)
Crisis of representative
democracy and “bottom-up”
rhetoric (especially in
neoliberalism)
Politicization of science
and expertise

15. S&T and democracy today
 Science and Technology linked to (old and) new political
conflicts: risk society and “acting in an uncertain world”; ethics;
Intellectual Property Rights and commercialization of knowledge,
etc.
 Science and technology opening up new spaces for citizen
action
 Knowledge as a realm of politics (re-politization of S&T)
 Struggle over participation and “technical democracy”: people
feeling excluded from technical decision, while so much part of
decision-making is de-politicized as being “technical”

16. Effects (and affects)
 Erosion of technocracy
 Midiatization of politics
 Financeirization of global economy
 Effect 1: cybernetic high-frequency
markets, cybernetic governments:
fluxes and feedbacks are crucial
 Effect 2: crisis of legitimization of a
democracy kidnapped by financial
markets
 Conditions of possibility for positive
loops and explosive feedbacks,
exponentially amplifying the effects
and affects of individual or collective
actions, both political and subpolitical: boycotts, media campaigns,
direct action, civil disobedience…
 More powerful forms of “insistence”
and “de-existence”

17. 2 questions, 2 issues
 What resistence and struggle become in a context of
neoliberal subjects and subaltern communities
 Resistance
 “In-sistence”
 (“De-existence”: not in the
sens of “giving up”)
 Citizenship as a form of power
 “Technoscientific citizenship”
 Political aspects: re-politicizing
technology (and politics itself)

18. What resistence and struggle become in a context of
neoliberal subjects and subaltern communities?
 Neoliberal subjectivities, precarization, etc. tend to
generate movements and riots in which individuals, and
multitudes, play important role. Individual and collective
actions,
not
as
workers,
but
as
a
consumers, voters, parents, may have strong impact on
politics, market and labor itself

19. TACTICS AND RESISTANCE
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.
Environmental or patient groups may produce new scientific
data, or pose new constraints or challenges both to
methods and organization of science.
Empirical evidence is great that tactics and micropolitics can
have effects and contribute for recombination in
technology and policies (Epstein , 1995; Wynne, 1996;
Callon et al., 2009).

20. TACTICS AND RESISTANCE
• Experiments in public participation and deliberative decision
making in S&T show their limitations, 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, 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 needs, questions, but
also data and knowledge coming from diverse social groups.

21. TACTICS AND RESISTANCE
• Situated knowledge, practices and conflicts people enact
contribute to transform policies, as well as processes of
diffusion, regulation and governance of S&T eventually
generating or empowering processes that modify
epistemological and methodological aspects of technology,
(that´s what we call “innovating innovation”).

22. What is “Citizenship”
 NOT ONLY a set of practices or attributes of the individual
 NOT ONLY a list of rights and duties
 Being a capacity to act in a framework of constraints, we
can treat citizenship as a particular kind of power: 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 constrained by strategies,
norms, environmental limitations or possibilities.

23. What is “Citizenship”
 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:
a territory in which rights that did not exist are invented or
redefined within contested boundaries.
In this sense, duties and rights are the consequence of agency
and citizenship, not only its conditions of possibility.

24. Is technical citizenship possible?
 People may contribute, by figuring out what to do, by
buying, using, voting, desiring different things, to transform
technology and modulate markets or policies.
 They can re-signify or reinvent technical objects or
processes, opening bifurcations that can be territorialized in
different ways.
 Such processes are usually not organized or planned, but
may lead to changes in technoscience, in some cases, when a
loop or affinity occurs between goals and effects at this level
and ruptures or condition of possibilities in the macro level.

25. Insistence
We prefer here to distinguish resistance from “insistence”.
Socialist workers‟ parties, social movements in the „70s, contraculture “resisted” to power, ideology, oppression or hegemony as
victims of a domination: when you resist to something or
someone, you can “name the enemy”.
As feminism 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
complicated: no moral or epistemological privileged point of view
exist.
Other possibilities and potentialities of resistance exist.

26. Insistence
“Insistence”: a hacker politics, in which we do not see
technology, capitalism and domination as above us, or external.
We live inside the political and technological blackboxes we try to
open.
If we live inside them, conceptual and epistemological hacking
(and recoding) as well as political hacking (and recombination)
can be seen as concrete possibilities for political action.

27. Insistence
Insistence is a change of perspective, in which we accept the
impurity, discomfort, complication and responsibility of being part
of a totality and try to invent bottom-up actions eventually capable
of loops and feedback with potentialities and ambiguities at the
macro level.
Thinking all this at the level of work and labour may be important:
workers have to fight to change power relationships (“take the
power”)…
But can also transform reality inside-out and bottom-up

28. Conclusive remarks
 In a politics of immanence, hacker politics may be very
effective
 Epistemological hacking contributes to the invention of rights
 Political hacking and insistence contribute to recombine codes
 Recombination may lead to disruptive innovation (innovation of
innovation): the construction of new technical and political codes
in which what changes is NOT the impact (of policy, or
technology) but power relationships (who is in control of what)

29. Thank you
Contact
ycastelfranchi@gmail.com