- What Would a Knowledge Democracy Look Like -
The workshop The War on Knowledge on Thursday 17th of October in Brighton’s
Digital Festival.
The workshop is an attempt to help flesh out questions that are around issues
variously
described as the "epistemic crisis” the “post truth era" the “digital tailspin”
and “dark epistemology”.
Preparation for the workshop generated quite a number of questioned that
featured that I tried to address
in an article I posted about a week ago. But for the purposes of Thursday I
have sought to boil things down to a list
of questions and throw them open to Nettime hoping for some some thoughts to be
dropped in the “bowl".
Just for info the workshop will be led by Marc Tuters and Emillie de Keulenaar
of the Amsterdam based
research group OiLab who have investigated the dark corners of the internet and
tracked and analysed the
emergence of alternative knowledge regimes. The event will also enlivened by
the presence of scholars and
artists from across the region (and beyond) we will also be joined by members
of the Forensic Architecture
group.
The ideal outcome of the workshop would be to flesh out some fresh answers to
the question: what
would a *knowledge democracy* look like?
Here are a bunch of related questions that might need to taken into account
along the way:
* The internet is frequently blamed for the epistemological crisis. Given that
a general erosion of trust in science
and its institutions and has been in train for decades to what extent can
today’s version of the internet be
legitimately asked to shoulder so much of the blame?
* Are the tactics of far right populist movements the cause of the epistemic
trouble we are in or rather an
aggravating and contributory symptom? Where are the correlations that
demonstrate that the internet
represents a significant 'step change' in the epistemic trouble we are in ?
* Can we be more precise about the relationship between the hyper polarisation
of today’s politics and the knowledge
question?
* What other elements that need to be factored in?
* Are these problems simply (as analytic philosophers might argue) problems of
language, logic or perception
or has the nature of how we discover (or construct) facts and truth claims
fundamentally changed ?
* Can the pursuit of knowledge be reduced to "various competing realities, past
and present, each trying to impose
its own set of values, beliefs and behaviors.” ? Doesn’t the reiteration of
this post-structuralist trope play into the hands of
the far right who denounce all inconvenient evidence as ‘fake news’.?
* Are today’s facts more provisional and dynamic.? And if so what would that
mean for how we organise
society and do our politics.
* If we accept that scientists and other technocratic authority figures"can’t
have their facts back” (Maares) as there is
"no norm to return to” then must we give up on the task deciding on more or
less valid contributions to public knowledge ?
* Can we evaluate the rival claims of re-establishing a relationship between
citizen participation and expert knowledge
e.g. “open verification” “citizens assemblies” etc ?
* Is the day to day relationship between knowledge, power and the citizenry
actually often quite banal as it falls under the expanding
province of quasi judicial regulatory regimes and their systems. The
-expertocracies- and technocracies largely inaccessible to public
scrutiny or accountability?
* How can this essential regime be respecified?
* If the above is the case would it be useful to de-dramatise the case studies
and the language of crisis, war, dark, tailspin etc or is this
terminology appropriate descriptors of current conditions? (I include the name
of the workshop in this critical question.)
* If arriving at public facts can only happen in the public domain where are
the frontiers of invention for collective action to
transform the public domain and make it fit for a 21st century democracy: a
knowledge democracy ?
-More questions most welcome-
Thanks
David Garcia
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