Inter-section 1
What is Ethics of Sciences, Technologies, and Innovation?

True story and oxymoron: ethics of security and surveillance technologies

Once upon a time there was a philosopher, an adviser at the castle, who sent a message to a wise man asking him to come to his country, far far away. The philosopher was convening a grand gathering on the Ethics of Security and Surveillance Technologies and he was hoping the wise man would agree to talk to all of those gathered.

But this is what the man responded:

Let me begin by thanking you for your kind invitation. As you know, I am very sensitive to the problem of Security Technologies to which your Group is devoting its attention.

But it is precisely for this reason that I am somewhat embarrassed by your invitation. I firmly believe that, as far as these technologies are concerned, the only possible ethical attitude is to refuse them completely, as they are inhuman and barbaric, and, moreover, are not designed to achieve the goal they claim to be aiming for. What is more - and this should particularly concern your commission - they act on western democracies as a power that, by establishing a kind of perpetual state of exception, is gradually eliminating any real democracy.

This is why I am hesitating and cannot accept your invitation. Ethics should never be conceived as something that accepts de facto an inhuman situation and tries to establish juridical limits to it.

Yours sincerely,

And so the philosopher gave a similarly heartfelt answer:

Thank you very much for your response. To tell you quite frankly, that is precisely why I feel it is vital that you come. I have conveyed some of those pivotal concepts such as that of state of exception in the work of the Group, and indeed several of its members are starting to experience the embarrassment and hesitation that you justifiedly point out.

There is no "participation trap" in this setting and I do believe that your presence and contribution to the reflection could do more good than a decision to abstain.

In any case, I am deeply grateful that you gave me the chance of this generative hiatus of critique and reflexivity.

I hope that you will be able to come to Brussels so that this opportunity can be shared with all the others too.

With all best wishes,

And the wise man came. On that day, in that faraway land, that wisdom was shared - with one and all.

A story within a story. Caution and care. Critique and ambivalence.

That story also started with a request from the President of the European Commission - high authority of the High Authority - to the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies, asking it to prepare an Opinion on the ethical implications of security and surveillance technologies.

In the context of this collective thought experiment in which I held the pen - in this sharing and crafting of perplexities, arguments and analyses - several subversive insights and transformative questions emerged and shone to me: the unpacking of "security", in particular in relation to notions of risk, commodification, social contract and the state; the scrutinizing and surpassing of trade-off framings (hegemonic arrangements mobilizing the zero-sum game, the communicating vessels); the reflection on the role - indeed on the embedding and instrumentalization - of ethical, political, social scientific engagement; the exploration of all of the above as an experimentation of the polity (of the European project) putting identity and citizenship at stake.

And then there is the most perplexing question and the brightest shining beacon: citizens. That is to say, the inquiry into the evolving assemblages that entangle the citizen, the state and the making of the world.

We are witnessing profound shifts in the ways knowledge and innovation are produced, processed and legitimated. The wider public is increasingly involved in research and innovation across a multitude of roles and functions, a change accompanied and reinforced by parallel shifts in conceptualizations and institutionalizations of the scientific endeavor. These new forms of life and sociotechnical arrangements, these new ways to exercise - both individually and collectively - citizenship and creativity and rights, hold tremendous transformative potential. And indeed tremendous entanglements of empowerment and exploitation.

The Open Beta Society: Work in Progress

Who will be able to tell the story?

What if computer programs (consider a piece of gaming software, for example) were released while still containing bugs, shortcomings and errors, issues which may still cause crashes or losses, such that users would be confronted with them in the field and report those faults so that in turn they could be addressed? In the software development and release lifecycle, this is called the "Beta" stage.

Perhaps we should pay to get this at this stage or instead wait for the "real thing". There will be patches and updates anyway. Or perhaps the beta-users themselves should be recompensed for their development work.

Now what about public policies? Should they trade in certainty, premised on scientific certitude (and its particular articulation of definite knowledge with definite action) to provide legal certainty, or should they be tentative and unsettled, amenable to learning and change, to wizing up.

What about genetically modified organisms (GMOs)? How and when should they be released? How to cultivate learning and change with them? And then what about medicinal drugs and vaccines, surveillance and security technologies, and so many other entities.

In interesting ways, such is our world and age, evolving in a state of variously open, variously public, variously perpetual Beta1. The developments that confront us also call upon the notion of the "Narrative society", or the "Storytelling society", with both the weaving and spinning of words and worlds playing such a decisive part in the ontology - the ontological diplomacy - of individuals as well as institutions2. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Who will get to tell the story? Who invites participation? Who divides the labor in the collective experiment and distributes the roles (experimenter, experimentee; vigil or vigilante; watcher, watched, or watcher watched)? Or indeed what stories are told and how? In other words, and with reference to the developments above, through which agendas, processes and practices do certain softwares and policies and GMOs and drones and medicines come to make up the world in which we live together?

Conceptions of the world

Our world is etymological. The meaning of words and things, the meaning of the world, is inherited from the past wherefrom we came with them. The meaning is given, rigged, imposed, hidden, loaded. Weighing with all its weight of history.

The meaning is a foregone conclusion, played in advance. And with it the world.

To be in the world with these languages is already to take up their embedded performativity.

The meaning is played, given, but we can take it back, foil it. Reinvest the matricial threads. Or failing that: "add to the woe of this world".

The world is syllepsis to us. The world is sylleptic and proleptic. Backward from the wood you cannot see for the trees falling without a sound that no one is there to hear. Rhizome to be traced that traverses us. Open book wyrm.

Walk, forest, mountain, city, desert. Dive, silence, life, profusions, vulnerabilities, encounters. So many worlds are possible, compossible.

Ethics and aesthetics, ontology and metaphysics, phenomenology and epistemology, cosmology and politics - all come together with the world. The sunrise in the bracing mists of the nascent day; the tree tops through which the clouds sail; the expanse of the sea, and the vault of heaven, and the horizon where they come together.

Cosmic. Oceanic. Sublimating the sublime. From a passage from tensions and impulses (sexual, of life, of death, etc.) to a purpose that transcends them. passing to the en deça (the underlying, or the open, das Offene), to the immanent relation, to the experience and the recounting and the unspeakable.

The cosmos of which I am and which through me contemplates itself (or even mutilates itself, or repairs itself, remedies itself). Sublime: slopes and thresholds that come together in the en deça. Relations to build, to invent, to experiment, to live. Mise en abyme, mise en relations, that the world is.

The world is under construction, in progress, in peril, in play. The fate of the world is playing out before our eyes.

I agree?

It is a peculiar feature of the set of sociotechnical transformations which we address here that they challenge at one and the same time our understandings of democracy and of knowledge production (i.e. of political representation and of scientific representation).

This key dimension is recounted in a different way in the short evocative sparks that follow, which also draw attention to the interplay between public and private (and res communis and res...