English Translation of Techno-Science as a Political Space

        xabier@barandiaran.net
        http://barandiaran.net

http://sindominio.net/autonomiasituada

Summary

Technoscience has become the main source of power (productive and structural) in the knowledge society. At the same time, the main source of funding for technoscientific processes, public investment, is mainly oriented towards innovation within the framework of the market economy and war and progressive restriction of the free circulation of knowledge and techniques. In this context we present the project Autonomy Located as a space for research, production, diffusion and collective learning around cybernetics, artificial life and cognitive sciences.

Keywords

Technoscience, knowledge society, philosophy of science, techno-scientific policy, collective research, autonomy and social self-organization, cognitive sciences, cybernetics, artificial life, Situated Autonomy.

1. Introduction

This document is an elaboration of the presentation speech of Situated Autonomy that took place at the Copyleft Conference during the days 27-30 of March 2003 in The Laboratory 03 and La Casa Encendida, Lavapiés, Madrid.

Unfortunately, we did not have enough time for the presentation to be the result of the collective work carried out on the Gray-Walter1 list (virtual assembly of the group), so this document does not respond to the collectively elaborated and consensus based reflection on the common work we have done. come doing. However, I hope to have been faithful to the analysis, orientation and expectations that we have built during the barely six months of our journey.

This document is divided into two fundamental parts, in the first of them (sections 2 and 3) I describe the context of techno-scientific policy on which the figure of the Situated Autonomy project is drawn, a context that serves as a political and cognitive contrast in which The outline of our project is drawn with the importance and urgency that we believe it has. The second part (section 4) makes a presentation of the work done so far, the motivation that pushed us to create the group, and the future expectations we have as well as the general lines of our organization of techno-cognitive work.

Before starting I would like to advance a brief presentation of what is Autonomy Situated. 

Located Autonomy is a project and a community of learning, dissemination and research on cybernetics, artificial life and cognitive sciences. Because it seeks to generate and disseminate knowledge (and its derived technology) in a self-organized, horizontal and participatory manner it is an autonomous project. We also consider that ours is a situated project because we seek to re-situate the processes of production, learning and techno-scientific diffusion in the social reality that surrounds us in the face of academic, corporate and military research. Our goal is to create a techno-scientific space on the idea of the open cognitive code, free dissemination and participation and collective intelligence, breaking the boundaries between processes of production, use and dissemination of scientific knowledge (an Independent Research Center). Cybernetics, artificial life and cognitive sciences have an unexplored potential to serve as a theoretical and technological framework for new forms of self-organization of cognitive and social processes; at the same time, they discover the systemic and computational foundations that define life, information, mind and networks (social, communicative and electronic).

2 The knowledge society: A Society of Risk

In this section I would like to make a brief review and some possible redefinitions of the labels that are being used to define the space and time we live, such as technoscience, information society, knowledge society, risk society, etc. As they did well to point out, the psychologists of Gestalt background and figure require each other to make the perception of an object emerge. In the same way, I would now like to dedicate a few minutes to defining the specific context on which to properly cut the significance of our project.

2.1 The knowledge society

The fact that we live in an information society and a knowledge society is now commonplace. However, it is necessary to make a series of distinctions and a review of the defining characteristics of the knowledge society in order to progressively focus on the modes of organization of techno-scientific processes and their political relevance.

The digital age allows the manipulation, storage, distribution and copying of digitized signals. A digital universe, unprecedented in the history of humanity, is produced through the codification and recoding of signals. However, it is worth remembering that isolated digitalization is not a differential fact of our societies, nor is the fact of the predominance of information as a social product. It is rather knowledge (and especially scientific knowledge) and its effects on production and social organization, which makes it possible to claim a difference between our society and its precedents. Digitization and information technologies are enabling conditions for a knowledge society, conditions that are effectively necessary, but not sufficient.

It is convenient at this point to clarify (through a series of definitions) the dependence relations between digitization, information, knowledge, technique, technology and technoscience:

Digitization:

process that imposes a separation of the continuous (the analogous), giving rise to a discretization and coding that allows building a computationally manipulable world.

Information:

signals or registers of more or less ordered signals susceptible of interpretation by an intelligent system to produce knowledge.

Knowledge:

set of skills and functional information organization that allow effective action on a domain of the real.

Technique:

practical application of knowledge.

Technology:

sphere of the real produced by the recursive application of the technique.

Technoscience:

process in which science and technology are strongly embedded in mutual feedback: science allows the development of new technologies that in turn accelerate or influence the scientific process, which in turn allows new technologies …

What really defines current societies is that cognitive processes (especially those of a scientific nature) applied to the production and organization of production processes, to the forms of social organization and to the resolution of conflicts, become the main factor of increase in the productive force and in processes of constitution of society itself, thus placing itself as primary sources of power (structural and productive). To this must be added the irruption of communication and information technologies that allow a flow, copy, storage and management of information (and therefore of codifiable knowledge) that in turn accelerates knowledge production processes. This is what marks a qualitative change in the forms of production that characterize our societies against their historical precedents: a technological reflexivity about knowledge.

This knowledge society is marked by a series of features that we can pick up in the following enumeration:

The greatest factor in increasing the productive force is techno-scientific innovation, thus producing a dematerialization of the economy in which technoscience is the first productive force (centers of innovation, consultancies, exchange and information management, quality controls, etc.). The difference between the production capacity of different societies no longer resides so much in the amount of material resources and accumulated resources but in cognitive processes (especially those of a scientific nature) and their recursive application on reality (material and social): technology.

The digital technologies of information and communication reinforce this trend by allowing the reproduction, dissemination, storage and management of information and knowledge.

The recursive application of technoscientific products on production processes reinforces the trend.

This is made evident via the facts that:

• A greater proportion of the intangible production is observed in the GDP and in the employment rate (cognitive).

• Greater weight of science and technology in public management and public decision-making (in the form of technical advice).

• Greater public investment in techno-scientific and innovation processes.

• Increased presence of the need for technological skills and knowledge (as well as local information – about the choice of purchases, of day-to-day decisions) in daily life, as opposed to respect for traditional ways, correction according to institutions symbolic-religious, which characterized daily life in ancient society.

It can be argued that all societies have been knowledge societies in some way but in our case it is that scientific knowledge and its management is the fundamental source of power (productive and structural), and thus becomes a constituent element of the society itself. Habermas (1968) goes so far as to affirm that the real qualitative change of modern societies is that the ends-means rationality (whose maximum expression is technoscience) becomes the legitimating foundation of political domination. But we’ll talk about this later. Let us focus first on the forms that the organization acquires of these technoscientific processes constitutive of our knowledge societies.

2.2 The Risk Society

The “other face” of techno-scientific development has been revealed under another label that has also become common currency to designate our societies: “The risk society”. Popularized by Beck (1986) in his work of the same title, the risk society points to the catastrophic consequences and social, psychological, medical, environmental and other dangers that products and techno-scientific interventions produce. The theme of risk thus becomes one of the main sources of politicization of the techno-scientific process.

Beck characterizes the risk society based on three fundamental features:

1. Many of the risks of today’s society are of a catastrophic nature derived from techno-scientific products: explosions, major accidents, or larval catastrophes (destruction of the forest, acid rain, etc.). These catastrophes and risks do not respect borders (neither of species, nor of nations, nor of social, nor generational classes, etc.). The traditional risks were limited to certain conditions, classes, nations. The new risks are global.

2. Risk is present in the center of everyday life, in the sense that we constantly have to make risky decisions such as consumers, parents, bus drivers, etc. There is a lack of a binding tradition in individual conduct that requires permanent decisions on equally permanent risks. Previously decisions related to consumption were dictated by the tradition and technologies were adjusted to over years of presence and sedimentation.

3. These risks are not experienced as inevitable damages (dangers) but as risks. The difference between risk and danger is that the risk is subject to attribution of responsibilities (unlike an earthquake, hurricane, etc.). But even natural catastrophes are conceptualized as risks (at least their effects) since we have enough technology to neutralize damage, although the cause of it is inevitable. The more science and technology there are, the dangers become risks thanks to their possible preventability.

The paradox of knowledge societies are shown in the risks generated: more knowledge and technology plus risk, both because of the possibility of avoiding hazards and because of the technologically generated risks. The new devices (electronic, nuclear, chemical, biological, etc.) introduced into the market and production processes have often unpredictable impacts on society, health and the environment. Part of the public policy in science and technology (as we saw in the previous section) is aimed at alleviating these adverse effects. But if we keep Bush’s linear model of a polarization between laboratory and society, a polarization that is mediated by commercialization, the regulation of interfaces will barely avoid some of the predictably most scandalous impacts.

2.2.1 Post-normal science and values in science

In this context, techno-scientific spaces that escape the traditional classifications of “normal” scientific work are shown to work with indefinite terms, low uncertainty, based on well-established research traditions, etc. Under the name of postnormal science Funtowicz and Ravetz (1990) have detected and analyzed techno-scientific spaces of high uncertainty, with great potential for impact and aimed at solving problems of great complexity in very limited periods. Techno-scientific practices that take place in many sectors of industry, in the control of nuclear power plants and techno-scientific super devices, evaluation of environmental risks, biotechnologies, pharmaceutical laboratories, etc. The practice of post-normal science is discovered loaded with values in the forms of measurement and evaluation: correction of errors, statistical measurements, analysis of damages, etc. (López Cerezo and Luján, 2001). Scientists working in post-normal science have to respond to various interests and pressures, in limited time frames and face having to make urgent decisions with uncertain consequences. And this trend is not an isolated case but a generalized practice that discovers a large part of the techno-scientific practice (if not all) crossed by values (Echeverría, 2001).

3 Techno-scientific policy, politics in technoscience and technoscience as politics

In the framework of what we have been saying, the form taken by the evaluation, regulation and financing of techno-scientific processes is shown as a fundamental structure with which to reflect on society itself, especially in the way in which public investment (the majority ) in science and technology defines the nature of this process. In this section we will make a brief history of the relationship between the techno-scientific process and its evaluation and public regulation, while we review the indicators that public institutions have used to develop their work.

3.1 Public policy in the organization of technoscientific processes

The inherited conception of science that comes from the logical positivism of the 1930s draws a science guided by purely epistemic values (of rationality, rigor, logical consistency, contrastability, publicity, and intersubjectivity) and autonomous (ie not marked by interests external to the scientific practice) that are those that supposedly mark and ensure the excellence of science and its results. It was considered therefore that science was a self-regulated and disinterested practice.

Within the framework of this interpretation of science and after the Second World War (and the fundamental role that science and technology played in it), the Bush Report (1945) was drafted, whose title “Science, the Endless Frontier” already condenses optimism and confidence in the possibilities of scientific development. The Vannevar Bush report of 1945 marked US scientific policy, which would soon spread to the rest of the developed countries including the communists. In the words of the author:

Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which is the burden of the common man for ages past. But to achieve these objectives … the flow of new scientific knowledge must be both continuous and substantial.

(Bush, 1945, p.5), taken from (Sarewitz, 1996, p.17)

The image of an autonomous and self-regulated science from which social benefits inevitably followed gave rise to a scientific policy of “ laissez faire ” (letting science do it) to which resources had to be provided unconditionally in the form of a blank check, to ensure input to a process from which an invisible hand was expected to distribute the product in the form of social benefit. Thus, a linear model of organization of the techno-scientific process (which lasts until today) is established under the structure illustrated in figure 1.

****

More input to science amounted, then, to more social welfare, so that scientific policy only had to ensure a series of almost unlimited resources, thus establishing the social justification of science and public investment in it. This first stage of relations between the governmental public sphere and techno-scientific processes is marked by the first generation indicators, which are basically input indicators, which measure the total expenditure on science and technology and the number of human resources in the sector.

It will not be until the end of the 1950s that Western countries begin to consider a more active scientific policy with the launching of Sputnik and the demonstration of techno-scientific superiority of the Soviet Union. This is how, even without abandoning the linear model, the US could consider a relative control of scientific education and a process of evaluation of techno-scientific production to ensure its quality. Specialized academic institutions, institutes of science studies were created and curricular programs were revised. The characteristic indicators of this stage are the Frascati indicators that are output indicators to evaluate the efficiency of the scientific-technological production process, measured through: the number of published articles and citations (science index citation) for science and number of patents for the technological production process. The idea of a self-regulated science is broken in a certain way, since by more input it is no longer considered that there is necessarily more production output and the process must be controlled and its efficiency maximized, but the linear model that is now being optimized is maintained.

We will have to wait until the end of the 60’s and the beginning of the 70’s to begin to see a concern (and the consequent institutional efforts) to regulate the technoscientific products. It was in the wake of the student protests of ’68, the anti-nuclear movement and environmental movements (including those concerned about public health), that a public awareness of the risks inherent in a growing transformation of the world by technoscientific interventions and products began to be generated. Thus emerged the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the OTA (Office of Technology Assessment) and other government institutions aimed at assessing and regulating the effects and risks arising from the techno-scientific production. At the same time the inherited conception of science begins to fall and a vision of science begins to take shape (championed by the Khunian perspective of “The structure of scientific revolutions”) in which the discontinuities of scientific progress are shown as well as its dependencies of social and historical contexts. Evaluation and regulation mechanisms were established to reduce the negative effects, optimize the positive effects and contribute to the public acceptance of given technologies. The types of impact of techno-scientific products (environmental, psychological, institutional, social, legal, economic, etc.) are identified, analyzed (their probability, affected groups, response of these, etc.), assessed (assumable risks, etc.) and advice is sought for decision making on techno-scientific policy. Longer term evaluations that introduce side effects are also beginning to be established. But this is still a kind of “let the technology continue to develop and correct the adverse side impacts it may have”. It is a type of scientific evaluation (involving almost exclusively scientists and technicians) that is reactive (focused only on the evaluation of products that are about to be released to the market) and almost exclusively economic and probabilistic orientation (with type indicators aligned with cost / benefit analysis).

In a final stage of this generalist history of the evolution of public policy in science and technology, the concept of innovation begins to predominate. Based on the two dimensions of the concept of innovation, which are the techno-scientific novelty and the benefit derived from its introduction into the market, it is now a matter of intervening in the techno-scientific process to maximize its economic performance. It seeks to optimize the fit between science, technology, business and market. Public investment begins to be directed towards the creation of techno-scientific transfer centers from universities to companies, resource management offices, etc. to maximize the innovation process. Of particular concern is the absence of society as an environment for adjustment, and the paradoxical situation arises that the first techno-scientific regulation efforts achieved by social movements aimed at alleviating their environmental, health and social effects are now redirected towards the maximization of their economic performance. In the words of Dickson (1988): “Where new technological projects have previously been studied for their environmental impact, the regulations are presented to mitigate this impact, in reverse, have to be evaluated for their economic impact.”2 ( p.311). The innovation indicators characteristic of this stage appear in the 80s and are consolidated in the 1990s as a consensus set of innovation indicators (in the Oslo manual). These indicators are mainly surveys to entrepreneurs to measure the level of exploitation in the market of scientific discoveries. This is a substantial change because an impact of improvement in the market derived from scientific policy is requested. It has gone from the science-push (in the Bush model, in which resources are introduced in science and scientific processes are expected to “self-regulate”) to market-pull (in which the market marks the lines of research and innovation). To the extent of the number of patents and scientific articles published to give approval to research projects, consultancies are now added to companies and DCRs (restricted circulation documents, restricted use studies oriented to technological and innovation companies).

3.1.1 Techno-scientific organization

Summing up what we have been saying we find an organization of techno-scientific processes articulated under four fundamental types of techno-scientific work:

Basic science: research is, in principle, not subject to practical interests and seeks to expand the limits of scientific knowledge (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.).

Applied science: research guided by the interest in solving technical problems in the field of science and technology.

Technology: aimed at the production of artifacts and mechanisms based on established scientific knowledge.

Postnormal science: scientific practices carried out under a high degree of uncertainty and great potential for impact.

Finally, the mutual and recurrent interactions between them can be collected under the concept of technoscience, which is mainly oriented towards:

Military research in programs of the international scientific vanguard, generally marked by power groups and Western scientific traditions (to which about 54% of public investment in science and technology is devoted in the US).

The market: biotechnology, pharmaceutical, research into new materials, etc.

evaluated, regulated and financed based on:

• its performance in the market and innovation processes
• its possible impact on public health and the environment
• its production measured based on internal standards (such as the number of published articles and adaptation to research lines) of scientific power groups that have grown up around research traditions.

3.2 Myths: ideology in technoscience

In “Frontiers of illusion: Science, Technology and the Politics of Progress” Daniel Sarewitz dismantles the socially and politically constructed mythology that sustains Bush’s linear model, the ethical and political autonomy of scientific practice, the assumption of the necessary benefit of techno-scientific research and development and hope put in science as an authority for the resolution of political problems. According to this author throughout the last decades, a social narrative of techno-scientific determinism has been built, driven by: 

1. the power groups of scientific and academic institutions (to justify and increase public investment in their research traditions) 
2. corporations and the market based on innovation (to allow them to continue to benefit from and take ownership of public investment and collective cognitive production) and c) finally by politicians themselves who succumb to the temptation to substitute institutional political commitment for the techno-scientific rationality.

While this narrative is maintained we are condemned to a techno-scientific process that progressively moves away from the social benefit that it could produce (and that paradoxically aims to legitimize public policy in science and technology). A distancing accentuated by two trends:

Placing technoscience in a context of market adjustment (as recent public policies in R & D and innovation suggest and enhance) has two fundamental consequences:

the tendency for society to assimilate techno-scientific products through the independent social welfare market that they can produce (sometimes even against social welfare) is favored

the tendency is favored that the techno-scientific production ends up preferentially oriented towards the classes with greater purchasing power, which are, in short, those with the greatest potential for consumption and, paradoxically, those with the least social problems. The political agenda of R & D moves away, thus, progressively from the most urgent social problems.

In this way and in the words of Sarewitz “ Science and technology are facing an economic task that is inherently sisífea: increase the human need to consume. ” (Sarewitz, 1996, p.128).

Moreover, the myths on which scientific policy is based surpass its function as a legitimizing discourse of current techno-scientific practice, underpinning confidence in a market economy based on innovation; i.e. They feed the confidence necessary for the deployment of capitalism in knowledge societies.

Substitute social policy for techno-scientific policy. In a whole chapter devoted to the topic, Sarewitz shows how it tends progressively to replace institutional interventions and political decisions aimed at social change through public policies in support of techno-scientific production: subsidies to pharmaceutical companies to solve physical and mental health problems, to biotechnology to solve hunger problems, and a long etc. In addition, the belief that more research will solve certain social problems is subject to a debate infinitely less than other types of political budgets.

Regarding the discourse that considers science as a development factor for third world countries, the paradox shows that the interest of academic science (to which third world scientists must adhere) is marked by large scientific publishers whose interests respond to the research programs of the northern countries. So scientists from developing countries work for the first world, that is the one that marks the scientific directives, which in turn are regulated by organizations that seek to maximize the innovation of their own country. In this way, developed countries appropriate the scientific processes of developing countries to maximize their innovation.

3.3 Alternatives: constructive evaluation and public participation

Faced with the difficulties and trends mentioned, critical voices and participatory proposals have been developed. Among them stands out the model of constructive evaluation of the technologies developed by Rip and collaborators (1995) whose main hypotheses (oriented to overcome the techno-scientific deterministic model) are that:

Technological development results from a large number of decisions made by different heterogeneous actors. In the negotiation of technical options, the diversity of centers and decision criteria implies a certain degree of technical plasticity. The various agents involved shape the techno-scientific development with what breaks the linear model and the associated techno-scientific determinism.

The technological options can not be reduced to its strictly technical dimension. Hence, the evaluation of technological options is a topic of political debate.

Technological decisions produce irreversible situations, which result from the gradual disappearance of the available margins of choice.

The practical horizon is to redirect the processes of innovation and development towards socially transparent processes:

where a multiplicity of actors can have a presence,

where a variety of analysis tools and values are used, and

where social learning can take place.

The focus of regulation is on emerging technologies (as opposed to finished products), the function is that of an early warning (rather than a containment of the product) and the basis of regulation is the knowledge of the dynamics of technology and the role of social agents in the modulation of innovation.

This approach considers that through the coevolution of technology and society the problems of anticipating the technoscientific effects on society and the environment can be solved and the deterministic techno-scientific model can be broken. To the extent that we can intervene in the selection agents, there is no longer a problem of anticipation because there is nothing to anticipate but something to build. This approach is about opening participation to the processes of selection of technologies.

At the same time, models of public participation are being developed in an attempt to democratize techno-scientific construction:

• seeking to open decision-making in science and technology policies with various models such as citizen panels * s, referendums, consensus-oriented participatory conferences, citizenship advisory committees * s, working groups, etc.
• promoting the promotion of education policies in scientific culture that include the awareness of the value, ethical and political burden of techno-scientific practice
• seeking to reorient the public policies of science and technology towards the most urgent, local social problems in the most neglected spaces.

Proof these types of initiatives are already in progress are shown in the so-called “Science Shop” that, despite its name, condense some of the most important proposals of public participation. The idea is to create windows to the society that allow to offer the knowledge generated in the university to groups without resources so that they can take advantage of them. It is also sought that the university (through the science shop) mediates techno-scientific conflicts, as well as letting information from society to the university, making the university itself can meet the needs of society.

Without taking away the relevance, urgency and priority that this type of initiative deserves, one can question the current model further and draw more radical perspectives of transformation (at least in some specific aspects of techno-scientific development); but first, it is necessary to pay some attention to the process of commodification that technoscience and restrictive forces (in terms of the dissemination and transformation of knowledge) that this process generates are undergoing.

3.4 Intellectual property & Commercialization of Knowledge and Techniques

“The sudden and unbridled passion for private property in the field of knowledge has created a paradoxical situation. While the technological conditions (coding and transmission at a reduced cost) are given so that everyone can benefit from immediate and perfect access to new knowledge, the increasing number of intellectual property rights prohibits access to this knowledge in areas that until then had been preserved (fundamental research in general, biological science, computer programs). An attempt is made to create an artificial rarity in a sphere in which abundance is the natural rule. This causes huge waste.”

(David and Foray, 2001, p.15)

“Indeed, we are faced with a growing commercialization of cognitive products that is especially aggravating in the context of publicly subsidized research, in which more and more new public policies aimed at innovation are required, patentable results and / or subjects to copyright. A dynamic in which the university world is not an exception, but a standard-bearer in this trend.” (González-Barahona, 2003).

If the traditional tendency in science was to gain recognition in the scientific community for the quality of the research, Etzkowitz and Webster (1995) show that the credibility in science is now progressively linked to the ability to generate economically exploitable knowledge.

As these authors point out, what is important, in the process of capitalization of the science that we live, is no longer the authorship of a relevant research, but to ensure intellectual property, its exploitation in the market and the ability to acquire added value. To ensure the viability of this process, it is fundamental to restrict the free dissemination, copying and transformation of knowledge and techniques through the force of the law embodied in patent and copyright legislation. That is, in the techno-scientific economy, intellectual authorship becomes the right to exploit a knowledge or technique through the restriction of dissemination, use and transformation of the product, even when the production process is financed by public investment and mobilizes infinity of collective cognitive resources (universities, inherited knowledge, collective research projects and instruments and techniques that belong to the public domain). Something already advanced by Lyotard (1979) apropos of the digitized externalization of knowledge:

The relationships between the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use are now tending, and will increasingly tend to take the form taken by the commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume – that is, the form of value. Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valued in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.4

(Lyotard, 1979, §1)

In this context, the social re-appropriation of techno-scientific production requires demanding policies for the liberation of knowledge, its free access, use, dissemination and modification. This requirement and practice is being articulated by the copyleft community in the fields of art, science, technology, and literature. This heterogeneous community of actors, producers, consumers and disseminators of knowledge uses the various copyleft licenses (built on copyright legislation5) meticulously designed to build and defend a legal territory on which to build cognitive communities of free distribution, transformation and appropriation of cognitive and technical work.

The advantages of a release of cognitive production through copyleft licenses have been underlined again and again, but it is nevertheless necessary to briefly collect some of the most important arguments in this regard:

• Freedom of access, dissemination and transformation.
• Gradual improvement of the material thanks to the right (recursive) of product handling.
• Techno-cognitive diversity thanks to the multiple elaborations of the same product.
• Disappearance of intermediaries in the diffusion guided by the direct benefit extracted from the product and not by the quality of it.
• Survival in the ecosystem of attention in which copyright as a copy restriction supposes a memetic suicide. (Cervera, 2003).
• Revaluation of the cognitive product: ideas are worth more the more widespread.
• Exploitation (not waste) of the cognitive work force (David and Foray, 2001), thanks to the possibility of reusing the code and the existing text (be it musical, computer, scientific, didactic or any other type).

3.5 Technoscience as a policy

After highlighting the knowledge society as a risk society, the loaded nature of values of post-normal science practices, the insertion of the interests of the market economy in the process of techno-scientific production and pointing out the dominant power forces in research traditions, we have abandoned the criticism of techno-scientific production in denouncing the tendency of institutional policy to replace uncomfortable social policies in favor of R & D policies and in denouncing a process of progressive merchandising to know. Indeed up to this point the solution seems to be to abandon the linear model, to integrate the various social agents in a constructive and non-deterministic process of techno-scientific development, to open spaces for participation in the regulation of technoscience and to make membranes more permeable of the academic system.

The organization, financing and justification of techno-scientific products and practices, as well as the economic model based on innovation, are effectively reinforced by the complex of myths that we have exposed with Sarewitz, namely, the myth of a deterministic techno-scientific rationalization, autonomous, and necessarily benefactor.

But the process of techno-scientific rationalization can be interpreted as something more than a myth or an ideology imposed on society as a discourse that justifies the current state of techno-scientific organization from top to bottom. This critical task was undertaken by Marcuse and later by Habermas more than 30 years ago, and together with this new spaces of techno-scientific policy action are opened.

3.5.1 Technoscience as an ideology

As Marcuse and Habermas (1968) already pointed out, the trend of techno-scientific rationalization of the political sphere gradually replaces the spaces of communicative rationality, making technoscience to be discovered as (meta) ideology that seeks to substitute the irreplaceable: social construction processes aimed at defining the interests of society itself, a society that is progressively losing the ability to achieve socially binding communicative processes and is reduced to build its identity through the consumer products of the market in leisure time and a rational action ends – technoscientifically – articulated at work.

The peculiar performance of this ideology is that it dissociates the self-compression of the society from the reference system of the communicative action and of the concepts of the symbolically mediated interaction and replaces them by a scientific model. To the same extent, the culturally determined self-compression of a social world of life is replaced by the self-classification of men under the categories of rational action with respect to ends and adaptive behavior (Habermas, 1968, p.89).

But the ideology to which Habermas refers here is not an ideology in the sense of a narrative or discourse that legitimates as such a mode of domination, from top to bottom. It is rather a process of techno-scientific rationalization that as a constitutive process of the forces of production and social organization reveals itself as legitimation from the bottom up.

The paradox of a possible regulation or control of technoscience on the part of society is shown by the fact that the current form of technoscientific economy and rationality has been implanted in the constitutive processes of society itself. The greatest difficulty of the models of participatory and constructive regulation lies in the asymmetry that exists between the degree of autonomy of the techno-scientific economy and that of society. An asymmetry marked by the degree of control that the techno-scientific economy exercises over society: 

1. modifying the context of selection of its innovation products (through advertising), 
2. through cognitive labor exploitation
3. dominating the regulation of public investment in science and technology
4. commercializing cultural products and the collective cognitive heritage (while imposing control and restriction measures on the free circulation of knowledge and techniques -copyright, patents and restricted copying technologies).  

This dominance is accentuated when the indicators with which the public funding of technoscience is evaluated are reduced to the production of patents and published articles (generally under copyright), and, lately, consultancies are required from companies and DCRs (restricted circulation documents), studies of restricted use to companies) to obtain public funding for research projects.

3.5.2 Reduction of complexity: The nuclei of Power in Techno-Scientific Networks

The theory of the network of actors (Latour and Woolgar, 1986, Latour, 1999) shows how techno-scientific production hides processes of complexity reduction and power relations that hinder an open re-appropriation of techno-scientific products by society. According to this theory, the techno-cognitive communities are composed of human beings, apparatuses, institutions, electronic networks, publications and a long etcetera of mechanisms and agents in such a way that human beings can not be understood in isolation as producers of knowledge but only inserted in a complex network of references, artifacts and institutions. Even the techno-scientific product of these networks is reintroduced into the network itself, becoming one more actor. However, for the network to be productive, a reduction in complexity is required. In a process (that the authors denominate of translation) sub-networks of the process are represented by actantes that turn into black boxes (black-box) for the other components of the network. These actantes compress the complexity of the processes of the subnet that generates them to be able to be re-introduced with effectiveness in the processes of a wider network. In this way the black-box or actants become unified entities that are used by other actors in the network or become themselves actors. The point of translation thus becomes a space of power and control, in such a way that translational processes become a source of social order within the network itself, since they determine the assemblages of (re) organization of interactions within it. These black boxes not only hide the complexity produced, but the network of power relations and the discourses of the production subnet. 

Black boxes can take the form of tools (material artifacts), organizations (when represented by a human being) or key concepts (when they are the result of a cognitive process).

From this perspective it is understood that social participation in the process of techno-scientific production can not be reduced to regulation from the outside but must be introduced in the processes of production of the black boxes; that the polarization between the laboratory and society (with the aggravation of mediation by the market economy) is the greatest difficulty in building socially liberating technoscience. Two factors hinder the opening of that reduction of complexity that hide the network of power relations of the production sub-networks:

1. The growing complexity of techno-scientific production together with the hyper-specialization that is occurring in the process. Something that must be compensated by trans-disciplinary processes of communication and (re) elaboration of techno-scientific products.

2. The need for capitalist techno-economy to close the black boxes and hinder access to the processes they contain to increase competitiveness in innovation processes. A need that is satisfied through patents, company secrets, closed code in software development, opaque technologies, etc. A whole series of legal and technological mechanisms whose neutralization passes, once again, by demanding and disseminating copyleft licenses and transparent and openly modifiable technologies.

3.6 Recapitulation and Conclusions

The way in which the various levels of techno-scientific production are subject to:

1. Selective pressures, filters and transmission restrictions (copyright, patents, restrictive and opaque technologies, etc.),

2. Constraints of variability (restriction of possible theoretical and experimental variations) and

the reduction of complexity in the production of black boxes that condense the power relations of producing sub-networks

are determined by:

• the high competitiveness and globalization of the capitalist economy that forces a permanent race for innovation, making the organization of techno-scientific production processes no longer respond to a supposed satisfaction of social needs but to survival in a global competitive market environment ,
• the military industry, and
• the power interests of various research traditions,
• discover the political nature of the techno-scientific processes that are located at the root of:
• the increase of production forces,
• the organization of the society itself and
• the legitimation of the political domain (divorced from the socially binding communicative processes)

in knowledge societies.

Conclusions

The objectivity of science (as intersubjectively contrastable rationality) should not be confused with an absolute image of reality, it is rather a process of production of conceptions of the world that is cut out on a scale of what is possible and that applied recursively on the reality (through technological practice) also ends up shaping our social world, our imaginary, our identity; a process whose consequences have a marked political character.

The solution is not to free technoscience from military and market interests to “restore” something like an original and pure moment of science (something impossible and that, on the other hand, would not guarantee the social re-appropriation of technoscientific production), but by inserting it in socially constitutive processes in a conscious way, by assuming the political burden of all techno-scientific process and building from it.

4 Situated autonomy: towards new forms of organization of techno-cognitive social power

We believe that part of the solution of the problems posed in the knowledge society come from the creation of autonomous research networks and locating them in the contexts of social self-organization, both social movements and parallel initiatives of open and collective techno-scientific construction (such as the free software movement6, initiatives of antagonistic telematics7, hack-labs8, tactical hacktivism9, etc.).

The structural difficulties of a regulation from outside the techno-scientific production, maintaining the polarity (mediated by the market) between laboratory and society, always subject to interests and the restriction of the diffusion of knowledge and techniques, demand, to the extent of the possible, the collective commitment to appropriate the technoscientific processes as a fundamental political space in our societies.

It is not so much about regulating or participating in a more or less constricted way in the processes of techno-scientific production, but about being a constituent part of the process, about being subjects of a socially situated technoscience, and not being subject to a technoscientific economy that is progressively becomes independent of social interests.

It is definitely about:

• cutting that linearity that has marked the legitimization and organization of technoscientific processes
• open broadcasting of information via broadcast channels
• making transparent the black boxes of the techno-scientific production, to place ourselves in the digitalization interfaces that determine the forms of coding information in the digital universes
• strengthening dynamics of collective creation
• building spaces of trans-disciplinarity in which to construct critical and productive discourses that break with the barriers imposed by the scientific and technical super-specialization
• building techno-scientific laboratories in the processes of social self-organization
• and to make these laboratories objects of experimentation in collective intelligence, in new forms of organization of technoscientific production and diffusion.

It is a question, then, of re-appropriating critically and collectively the technoscientific processes, as constitutive and therefore political processes of the knowledge society; to merge communicatively binding spaces with those of techno-scientific production in autonomous and socially situated collective projects of research, learning and techno-scientific dissemination.

And it is, responding to this need that we have launched the Situated Autonomy project.

The term cybernetics comes from the Greek and refers to the helmsman of the ships of the time. Cybernetics is thus discovered as a techno-scientific practice aimed at discovering the nature of agency, of autonomy and subjectivity, of the complex network of systemic relations that define adaptation, control, communication and intelligence; both for control and for its opposite: freedom (both structured by communication processes).

The Principia Cybernetica12 project today collects an inexhaustible and participatory archive of classical cybernetics and some of its later developments.

4.2.2 Artificial life and biology

“These are the sciences made possible by technology, the technologies made possible by science. The world view we create is derived from the intimate interaction of technology and science with the eye of craft experience, shaped by the theoretical expectations within which we as scientists must live. (…) Wresting reliable knowledge from the world we study biology, as Koestler described it, an Act of Creation”13

(Rose, 1999, p.873)

Perhaps one of the disciplines inherited from cybernetics (not only in its content but also in its transdisciplinary character, experimental and open to the transgression of academic and technical borders) is Artificial Life (VA). Christened by Christopher Langton (1996) as “the study of life-as-it-could-be rather than life-as-we-know-it”14, the VA becomes a science of the possible, a study synthetic (constructive) bottom-up of the processes of self-organization, of biological and cultural evolution, of the origin of life, intelligence and communication in the natural and artificial universes. Through artificial simulation (computational, chemical, electronic, robotic …), the VA discovers the conditions of possibility, the constrictive possibilities of the organization of systems, overcoming the classical experimental statistical study by opening the possibility of (re) create artificial universes in which to experiment with new forms of interaction, communication networks, forms of intelligence and autonomy, spaces in which we permanently re-define the biological, neurological and social substrate that constitutes us.

But more than as a discipline some practitioners (Wheeler et al., 2002) consider (in an attempt to flee from academic institutionalization) the VA as a label under which to produce a series of techno-scientific tools applicable to areas as diverse as art, biology, philosophy, psychology, linguistics and robotics. And it is in this vocation of production of tools that we find in the VA a techno-cognitive space in which nature does not bend to mere operational domain space but becomes a companion to interrogate on the evolutionary and autonomous forms of symbiosis, collective intelligence, bacterial networks (Blissett, 2002), multicellularity or autopoiesis. Nature becomes co-investigator of the different ways of organizing our own identity, individual, collective, multiple.

4.2.3 Cognitive Sciences and Artificial Intelligence

“If one manages to simulate at the level of social systems the structure of rational action with respect to ends, man could not only, as homo faber, fully objectify himself for the first time and face his own automated products, but could also be integrated into its own technical apparatus such as homo fabricus.”

(Habermas, 1968, p.90)

Perhaps one of the most relevant techno-scientific spaces in the context of knowledge societies is that of cognitive sciences. If we allow research in cognitive sciences to become autonomous in the sphere of market innovation processes, we are playing our own creation. 

While the cognitive sciences objectify the human being as an object of study and insert it into the processes of techno-scientific production, the cognitive sciences become producers of scientific models of the human being (from intelligence tests to cognitive therapies) with the consequent transformation potential of understanding and structuring of ourselves and our forms of relationship and interaction in knowledge societies. From autonomous robotics to classical computationalist functionalism, through evolutionary psychology or connectionism, cognitive sciences, far from drawing a closed image of the human being, are in constant revolution and theoretical conflict. They discover a set of myths and beliefs that have chained the human being to certain forms of interaction (cognitive and social) derived from the theories or mythical conceptions that the human being constructs of himself; but also new forms of exploitation, reduction and aspiration of the human being are generated at the same time that criticisms, alternatives and unexplored possibilities arise. Reapproving these processes of techno-scientific production, critically dialoguing in and from them, adapting them and also knowing and / or not recognizing ourselves through them is a task as urgent as it is fascinating.

At the same time, cognitive sciences represent a kind of organizational science of the knowledge society, especially thanks to the development of artificial intelligence technologies and the cognitive organization sciences. This is the case of the creation of a semantic network inserted in the WWW (García Cataño and Arroyo Menéndez, 2002) in which the conceptual ontologies developed will determine the navigability form “intelligent” of the infospace or the artificial selection agents of information in the network. Equally important is the production of intelligent software that facilitates collective creation (Casacuberta, 2003), accessibility and participation in information repositories, etc.

Therefore, the cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence are in a privileged place of influence in the form acquired by the society of knowledge and the interaction of the human being; both by the effect of the objectification of the human being and by the artificial intelligence technologies that begin to configure the domains of cognitive interaction in cyberspace and in the set of interactive human spaces of a cognitive nature.

4.2.4 Towards a science of the possible

The Cognitive Sciences, the Cybernetics and the VA is thus shown as one of the strongest paradigms of science of the possible, one of the motivations exposed in Barandiaran (2003) and that we quote extensively here:

It is appropriate here to quote Ashby (pioneering cyberneticist of the 1950s) whose “An introduction to cybernetics”15 is an unbeatable and irreplaceable prelude to the sciences of the artificial: “Finally a set may be created by the fiat of the theoretician wh , not knowing which state a particular machine is at, wants to trace the consequences of all the possibilities. The set now is not the set of what does exist, but the set of what may exist (so far as the theoretician is concerned). This method is typically cybernetic, for it considers the current in relation to the wider set of the possible or the conceivable. “16 (Ashby, 1956, p.136) 

Indeed, cybernetics (and together with it the artificial life, contemporary heir of the foundations “forgotten” by classic cybernetics), overcomes the framework of what-exists-to think what can-exist (a dualism already present in the founding text of Life Artificial (Langton, 1996). We can make a rapid classification of sciences (classification that would require a more elaborate justification of the present here, but which nevertheless can serve as a powerful and stimulating intuition, always revisable) in three main groups:

1. Sciences of the universal
2. Sciences of the current
3. Sciences of the possible

The first group includes physics, and in general the “strong” sciences (paradigm of traditional scientific epistemology). These sciences of the universal discover the laws of nature, whose applicability does not require specific constraints17, hence its marked objective, universal and necessary character. But science also delves into other spaces that are not so “universal”: life, the mind and the economy, to name a few. 

The current sciences work on what exists, seeks probabilistic predictions about some systems that surround us, extracts knowledge from a series of assumed conditions (DNA structure, rationality, stability of production processes, etc.) and the statistics obtained of the observed variables. The current sciences are incapable of “seeing” beyond what there is, sometimes condemning human knowledge to resigning itself to the present. 

Finally, the sciences of the possible work on the constraints that make possible the current, work on the conditions of possibility, on the variations of what makes the current possible from the universal. The science of the possible is asked by the “how” of the current discovering other possible realizables. This is the case of cybernetics and artificial life, systemic theory, complexity theory and non-Cartesian artificial intelligence. Thus, for example, the study of the conditions that make life possible: i.e. that make it possible for the dynamics of a system to close generating its own autonomy, discover “ life-as-could-be ” and, along with it, other possible ways of organizing the lives of those who surround

The science of the possible is revealed as well as technology, as a source of power, of being able to re-structure, recombine and reconstruct the modes of organization and production through the (simulated) experimentation of the constrictions or conditions of possibility of the same. The sciences of the possible (by overcoming a statistical study of what exists through the question of “what makes what exists”) open a space of action towards new modes of organization, towards new possible trajectories of a system: with a field of applicability that goes from biology to modes of human organization, through cognition and language.

(Barandiaran, 2003, §1.2)

In a techno-political space marked by biotechnology, social control with artificial intelligence techniques, legitimization of capitalism as self-regulated and self-organized and cognitive labor exploitation (among others), assume as research and learning contents cybernetics, artificial life and cognitive science is an urgent initiative. Even more so when this opening and critical re-appropriation of technoscientific processes also becomes a source of effective instruments and tools to coordinate horizontal communication, the self-organization of social processes, and collective communication and creation (Casacuberta, 2003); tools to increase, in short, our productive and organizational power outside the spaces of market power, war and academia.

Attentive always to the traps that the human being is permanently built to deceive himself, this project can not be disconnected from the critique of exploitation and capitalization of life and knowledge, instrumentalist conceptions of cognition and intelligence as well as of neo-spiritualist and pseudoscientific voices that flood the network (occupying the heartbreaking emptiness opened by the substitution of the communicative / symbolic spaces for the construction of the personal and collective identity by a rationality ends / means alienating and socialized through consumption).

4.3 Tactics

Universities have been transformed into overcrowded nurseries where taking notes and passing exams becomes the ritual of turn to access titles that determine competitive social status in knowledge societies. A meritocracy of titles that has replaced the passion to know, share and disseminate knowledge. Many students are aware of this situation and look for new, open and stimulating cognitive spaces. If we add to this that the number of students is far above the job opportunities linked to the chosen area of study and the number of young researchers who do not find techno-cognitive spaces that meet their objectives (in view of the commercialization and growing capitalization of research academic) we observe a growing waste of social cognitive forces (especially if it does not greas well its structure to fit into the domains of the market) and a frustration in the aspirations of those who wish to continue researching, learning and sharing knowledge.

That is why we believe that an autonomous and situated research project can in principle reach to mobilize the necessary cognitive force to be effective in its production, diffusion, and criticism. This has been the case of the process of setting up the free software community and, to a certain extent, of mediativist communities18. Socio-technical experiments parallel to ours whose success make us optimistic about the future possibilities of Situated Autonomy.

In the context of the techno-scientific development described in the previous sections, parasitizing the academic, institutional and labor commitments that are continually acquired in the knowledge society (whether in class work, research projects, etc.) is a legitimate and useful strategy for the construction of autonomous and situated techno-scientific spaces. 

Alumni researchers can integrate their academic work in collective intelligence projects (in which to participate actively, share resources, generate debate and produce technoscience), the labor technocognitive resources (unused outside working hours) can also be mobilized, the time of leisure can (and should) also be channeled out of the consumer and alienating leisure proposals. We have, in short, the necessary potential and the amount of economic resources necessary to carry out the initiative (in the techno-scientific content we have chosen in Situated Autonomy) whose investment needs are very small.

4.4 Development

In Situated Autonomy we already have a series of projects in operation and others in the process of development:

Virtual Assembly mailing list: The Gray-Walter19 mailing list serves as a communicative channel as a permanent assembly in which to discuss the internal lines of operation, the maintenance of the website, reading group, share various information and generate debates around projects and topics of interest.

Rhizomatic Repository: The Rhizomatic Repository is a free software application that allows to maintain a file of links with comments and assessment of the users. In this way we open our website to the contribution and participation of anyone who wishes to contribute to a wide archive of links to documents, web pages, bibliographies, etc.

Reading group: On the Gray-Walter mailing list we also carried out a reading group in which we discussed scheduled readings20. In the future the idea is to be able to invite investigators to participate in the discussion after reading some of their texts.

Creation and dissemination of documents: Generating own documents that contribute to the dissemination, translation, learning, criticism and research on the chosen topics is one of the fundamental objectives. For this we have chosen the copyleft license designed by Creative Commons attribution-noncomertial-sharealike21.

News and information: The central section of the website is intended to present news of techno-scientific interest and proposals, documents and initiatives of the group.

Technical Resources: A section of the web is dedicated to exposing the free software resources that we use to generate documents and programming, and to promote the networks of users * s / producers * s of them.

Research projects: Once we have advanced in the generation of basic documentation, resources and internal debate, we hope to be able to launch specific research projects.

4.5 Objectives

To finish we can collect the objectives (always revisable) of Autonomy Located in the following points:

Liberate techno-scientific spaces in the context of the copyleft community and the collective re-appropriation of techno-cognitive processes.

Generate autonomous techno-scientific power (articulated in horizontal processes of decision-making and independent of the interests of the market, war and academic power groups) and located in social and existential problems; i.e. assuming as their own and legitimate the interests derived from these problems.

Contribute to a technoscience of the possible that produces useful tools and critical discourse; in open, participatory and transparent processes (open source).

In short, we launched the open proposal to: Build an open, participatory and non-centralized network of research, learning, dissemination and techno-scientific criticism around cybernetics, artificial life and cognitive sciences; located and rooted in social and existential problems that constitute us as living, cognitive, communicative and social.

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Footnotes

… Gray-Walter1

grey-walter@sindominio.net

… impact. ” 2

Where previously the new technological projects had to be analyzed for their environmental impact, the progressively introduced regulations to mitigate this impact, now, contrarily, should be evaluated for their economic impact.

… mythology3

The five myths that Sarewitz reveals in his work are:

The myth of infinite benefit: that more science and more technology will lead to more public benefit. This is the myth on which the Bush linear model is based.

The myth of research equally beneficial: that any line of scientifically reasonable research on natural processes is as capable of generating social benefit as any other.

The myth of responsibility: that the “peer review”, the reproducibility of results and the control of the quality of scientific research reflect the main political responsibilities of the research system.

The myth of scientific authority: that scientific information provides an objective basis for the resolution of political problems.

The myth of the endless border: that the knowledge generated in the frontiers of science is independent of its moral and practical consequences in society.

Translated from (Sarewitz, 1996, pp.10-11)

… exchange.4

“ The relationship of suppliers and users of knowledge with the knowledge they provide and use is tending, and will progressively tend to acquire the form that has already taken the relationship between producers and consumers of goods with the goods they produce and consume – that is, the form of the value. Knowledge is produced and produced in order to be sold, consumed and consumed in order to acquire value in a new production: in both cases the objective is exchange. ”

… copyright5

We can here cite three of the most important referents of the copyleft community that have developed specific licenses:

The GNU project and the Free Software Foundation: http://www.gnu.org

Creative Commons: http://www.creativecommons.org

Art Libre – Copyleft Attitude: http://www.artlibre.org

… free6

http://gnu.org or http://debian.org

… antagonist7

http://indymedia.org

… hacklabs8

http://www.hacklabs.org

… tactical9

http://www.hactivist.com

… war.10

This section has been copied from http://sindominio.net/autonomiasituada/faq.html

… machine”11

The science of control and communication in the animal and the machine

… Cybernetica12

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be

… Creation”13

“ These are the sciences made possible by technology, the technologies made possible by science. The vision of the world that we create is derived from the intimate interaction that is established between science and technology and the artisan experience, modeled by the theoretical expectations in which we live as biology theorists. (…) To extract reliable knowledge of the world that we biologists study is, as Koestler described it, an Act of Creation. ”

… life-as-we-know-it”14

The study of life-as-it-can-be instead of life-as-we-know-it.

… cybernetics”15

Released at: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html

… conceivable. “16

“Finally, a set can be created by the competence of the theoretician who, not knowing what state the machine is in, wants to discover the consequences of all the possibilities. The set, in this case, is not the whole of that which exists, but of that which can exist (insofar as it concerns the theorist). This method is typically cybernetic because it takes into account the current in relation to the broader set of what is possible or what is conceivable. ”

… constrictions17

The difference between law and constriction is of fundamental importance for this point: a law determines a space of prediction and universal and necessary applicability. The laws of physics are fulfilled regardless of the initial conditions of a system, they are general and absolute. Constraints (constraints), on the other hand, are the reduction of the variability of a system whose local dynamism is determined by laws: they include aspects such as initial conditions and boundary conditions. I explain, the emergence of life is not something derived exclusively from the laws of nature but of these plus a series of initial conditions and contour (temperature, molecular combinations based on carbon, autocatalytic processes, operational closure, etc.). that it is necessary to postulate and specify to explain or predict the origin of life. That is, a phenomenon such as life, to become a scientific object, is not simply specified by physical laws, but requires a series of information “extra”, not contained in universal laws. This extra information is that contained in the constrictions.

… mediaactivists18

http://indymedia.org

… Gray-Walter19

grey-walter@sindominio.net

… scheduled20

To date Varela (1992); Emmeche (1994); Dawkins (1986); Margulis and Sagan (1986).

… attribution-noncomertial-sharealike21

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/legalcode

… Copyleft22

copyleft@sindominio.net