Abstract
We reflect on the novel Infomocracy as a way to simulate the relationship between democracy, technology and society. While some talk about science fiction predicting the future, its predictiveness has been questioned. We think science fiction holds greater potential to help us understand what sort of world we want to create, starting from the present. A key part of how we create the world we want to live in is by creating policy, that is, setting forth plans of action and governance principles for how humans govern themselves and technology. We provide a framework for how science fiction can help inform policyserve as a kind of simulation to test values and ground normative assertions about governance and to offer space to reflect on how technology and society relate. To motivate this framework, we will draw significantly on key themes from the first author’s 2016 novel Infomocracy.
All opinions expressed in this article belong to the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of NASA or the United States Government.
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Notes
- 1.
Having only three main categories of influence is a virtue in the attention starved world of policy, and helps to concepts from Miller and Bennett. This framework owes some heritage to reflective technology assessment approaches by Guston and Sarewitz (2002), for whom the second author worked from 2005 to 2007. Specifically, Guston and Sarewitz talk about ‘technology assessment and choice’, which we have here focused on as values reflection and governance. Guston 2014 and other work on anticipatory governance has evolved Guston and Sarewitz’s work, but did not feed into our analysis.
- 2.
- 3.
Vincenti also broadly recognizes how social influences can affect higher level systems engineering decisions, but does worry about constraints in the details of engineering work.
- 4.
It should be noted that even the most ardent advocate of technological determinism, Heilbroner (1994) offers many different caveats about the important influences of social factors on and within the design process. Despite the many critiques and alternatives to technological determinism, Ceruzzi (2005) and Wyatt (2008) note technological determinism may not have been properly assessed.
- 5.
The social construction of technology movement was perhaps the most contrasting alternative to tech determinism (Bijker et al. 1987). Others refer to technological momentum (Hughes 1994), technological styles (Bijker 1987), and actor network theory (Latour 2005). These alternatives differ slightly in their concepts, but all of which serve as possible lenses to examine the influences on a technology, and all recognize political agency as a key influence on how technology’s develop. Jasanoff’s (2004) notion of co-production offers a comparable way to capture all of these connections in broad terms, with some similarities to Hughes.
- 6.
There is a vast amount of literature on the nature of democracy, including much on the nature of how democracy relates to the governance of science and technology policy (Brown 2004, 2009; Gutmann and Thompson 1998). We will not attempt to fully elaborate on the vast amount of literature on the nature of democracy.
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Older, M., Pirtle, Z. (2021). Imagined Systems: How the Speculative Novel Infomocracy Offers a Simulation of the Relationship Between Democracy, Technology, and Society. In: Pirtle, Z., Tomblin, D., Madhavan, G. (eds) Engineering and Philosophy. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70099-7_17
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