Sustainable technological citizenship

Displacement through technology

Technology has the potential to displace power. It also has the capacity to both offer social goods and displace their distribution. These two reasons are why political philosophy and social theory need to engage with technology. This article develops this engagement into an idea of technological citizenship. It first discusses the displacement of power and social goods through technology. It then shows that existing notions of technological citizenship fail to properly address these displacements. This will lead to a number of demands that technological citizenship needs to meet. Consequently, the article will show how Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology offers the basics for a successful notion of technological citizenship. Finally, this is operationalized as an ideology of sustainability combined with an idea of politics as contestation.

Displacement of power occurs whenever the context in which decisions are made is not clearly connected to the context in which those decisions matter. Non-displaced politics hypothetically exists if a person undergoing the effects of a decision is also very involved in making that decision, but non-displaced politics is the exception rather than the rule. Conversely, parliamentary democracy, as opposed to direct democracy, is the primordial example of displaced politics: decisions are made in a site where the average citizen has only marginal influence.

Displacement of politics is not by definition undemocratic or undesirable. In fact, one merit of parliamentary democracy is that it enables the average citizen to spend as little time on politics as they want (Harbers, 1996). However, it becomes problematic if there is no democratic mechanism to legitimize and control both the content of displaced decisions and the displacement itself. In such cases, the solution is usually not to correct the displacement, nor to devise a singular site of decision-making where all relevant politics is democratically contained. Rather, the solution is to find connections between the different sites of decision-making that are legitimated in different ways (Marres, 2005). This article develops technological citizenship as a normative connection between such sites.

Technological cultures show displaced politics in the appropriation of technology design by experts, detached from the public sphere, institutional politics, and the citizen. This is partly the consequence of the division of labour, which is indispensable to our modern, rationalized economy. While displacement is not essentially undesirable, it is not straightforwardly unproblematic either. That the friction of displacement is indeed felt is reflected by ongoing pursuits of democratization in technology design through methods such as user interaction groups, citizen juries, stakeholder meetings, and initiatives of constructive technology assessment (Schot and Rip, 1996). Yet, what it means to be a citizen in such processes remains unarticulated.

Nahuis and Lente (2008) itemize a number of conceptions of technology, which imply different accounts of displacement. The conceptions agree on the ability of technology to materialize values and impose these on society: by constraining our actions and influencing our thinking, technologies influence which norms and values are realized, and which are not. Nahuis and Lente distinguish five basic models of value consolidation into technology design, three of which are used in this article.

The first kind of displacement only captures the potential of technologies to materialize norms and values. Authors such as Winner (1988) and Sclove (1995) argue that our societies are stabilized by their material infrastructure in the same way that they are stabilized by the legal constitution and other institutions. Designers can wilfully deploy their craft to impose transformations on society. Winner and Sclove argue that such transformations require democratization. Winner’s democratization amounts to publicly discussing whether technologies should be produced, and what their features should be. Sclove argues in equally broad terms that the constitution-like effects of technological structures require clear criteria for technological design in a democratic society.

Implicit in these approaches are two levels at which democratization may take place. First, technology design may be made more accessible to non-expert citizens. Second, the technologies themselves may be arranged in a way that makes them compatible with democratic values, such as freedom of movement, speech and ideology. Nevertheless, it has been argued that such approaches to democratization are naïve, since they presume that technology will comply if better democratic decisions are made (Mitcham, 1997). They fail to account for the (not least social) complexities of technology development.

The second class of conceptions of technology further develops this social perspective, in which technologies are considered the products of the dynamics in socio-technical practices. Some authors, including Bijker (1995) and Latour (1987), argue that technologies are not merely determined by natural laws, but also by social interests that employ those natural laws. They agree with the first class of conceptions, which argue that technological arrangements provide a constitution to our social worlds. Yet they also develop the idea that such arrangements are themselves the product of our socio-technical worlds. In this light, democratization of a technological culture would mean bringing both social and techno-scientific influences under democratic control.

Bijker (1996) argues that since technical design incorporates many factors beyond the mere technical, experts other than formally qualified technologists and scientists must be enrolled in the design process as early as possible. Nonetheless, he also argues that the involvement of experts in itself does not inform technology design in any substantial normative way beyond the procedural. Neither does it prevent people with harmful intentions from harnessing the potential of technology design to their particular interests (Bijker, 1995: 289). This account is thus the starting point of democratization of technological cultures rather than its conclusion.

The third class of conceptions of technology captures the self-reproducing potential of these socio-technical arrangements: once social values are consolidated into technology design, they will start to contribute to the arrangements of socio-technical practices, thus reproducing themselves in new technological designs. At least two forms of hegemony may occur here. First, at the ideological level, particular values and visions of society may be reproduced. Second, at the economic level, those holding capital are most likely also to have best access to further acquisition of capital, which buys them power in technology design.

This displacement of power through the material reproduction of social values is further developed below when discussing Feenberg’s critical theory of technology. Democratization in this context involves breaking hegemony and emancipating people, chiefly non-experts, who would otherwise be excluded from sites of decision-making. The intimate connection between ideology and economy makes issues of justice ¹ a good means of mending the problem of ideological hegemony. Additionally, even if ideological hegemony presented no problems, a revision would still be justified by the material injustice.

Democratization of technological cultures thus includes the following elements. Its plainest anti-position is technocracy in which we are constrained by technologies, of which science and technology experts are in charge beyond any democratic control. First, democratic control could be pursued through these technologies. Second, democratic mechanisms could be devised for the production of technologies in social practices. Third, displacement itself could be democratically corrected or balanced. Finally, correctives could be offered to break the hegemony of particular values and ideologies in socio-technical arrangements. The final element mentioned here continues on from the other three democratic moves, taking account of both the obduracy and the constructed nature of technologies, as well as the social reproduction through both.

The dispersed nature of technology stands in the way of a central arrangement, such as parliamentary democracy, to offer the corrections needed. Moreover, sites of displaced politics are a potential enrichment of politics rather than a downright threat to democracy (De Vries, 2007; Marres, 2005). Thus, a multitude of arrangements is needed that together offer sufficient democratic leverage on technology development (Brown, 2009; Marres, 2005). Mechanisms of democratic technological governance are likely to take the form of ‘mini-publics’ such as educative forums, advisory panels, and participatory problem-solving collaborations (Fung, 2003). These offer different ways of serving the need to connect technology development to social life, for example, by lending a voice to silenced minorities, seeking support, changing the opinion of dissenters, acquiring extended input for the design process, framing design problems, and cultivating multiple epistemological lenses. They serve different democratic values such as justice, legitimacy, sustainability, and the possibility of pursuing a sufficiently wide range of ideas of the good life.

Technological displacement poses the following challenge for these mini-publics. On the one hand, they need normative guidance to transcend and break hegemonic structures; otherwise they end up under the same hegemony. This normativity needs to be generally acceptable. This must constitute what Rawls (1993: 11 ff.) calls a political conception: an idea that people from different backgrounds can all accept, because it is reasonable and only pertains to a limited range of issues. At the same time, this normativity needs to cope with the permanent dynamics of a technological culture, which is better served by contestation and revision than by consensus and stability. Mouffe (2005) argues that consensus takes the political out of politics, and that a vivid political culture needs contestation instead. As the remainder of this article argues, sustainability is a value that meets both demands.

Existing notions of technological citizenship offer at best a partial specification of what it means to be a member of a democratic, technological society. The next section discusses these notions, and derives from them three requirements that technological citizenship must meet. These requirements are used to develop insights from the critical theory of technology into a conception of sustainable technological citizenship.

Towards an ideal of technological citizenship

Citizenship is always grounded in some form of membership. As Thomas (2002) itemizes, several mechanisms may underlie this membership: common ancestry, cultural attachment, particular political principles, a scheme of rights and duties, or a scheme of material contributions to the community. Connections provided by technology, however, are missing from his inventory. Why not argue that our political community is also tied together by technologies that unite us?

Different conceptions of citizenship provide different specifications of the distribution of power over citizens and institutions, and the content and nature of the political. Generally, two types are discerned: republican and liberal citizenship (Crick, 2004: 80; Dagger, 2002; Habermas, 1996: 296; Leydet, 2009). Republican citizenship consists of the active membership of a polity, where the citizen is involved in its shaping and governance. Citizens collectively exercise political power. Liberal citizenship, in contrast, consists only of rights to freedom that individuals enjoy as a result of living in a state. It entails no further influence on the governance of that state. Politics and power are more displaced in liberal forms of citizenship than in republican forms.

Liberal arrangements maintain a relatively narrow content of the political, shaped as a focus on harm and its prevention. Republican forms, in contrast, are more inclined to publicly discussing moral values and ideas of the good. From the overview above, it follows that the displacement of power through technology is so complex that the narrow vocabulary of harm underlying liberal forms of citizenship is a priori less likely to be capable of addressing all aspects of technology than republican forms. However, even republican citizenship will fail to deal with displacement caused by technology and its dynamics if it has no account of technology, which is the case with existing notions of technological citizenship

To the best of my knowledge, the concept of technological citizenship was introduced by Frankenfeld (1992). His idea of technological citizenship is implied in the fact that people live in a technological polity, bounded and united by the consequences of technological configurations. According to Frankenfeld, a technology creates a realm of impact, i.e. an area or population affected by its consequences. These consequences may be not only material, but also social and political. What is more, they may even be central to the workings of technologies. Frankenfeld argues that, therefore, permanent involvement of the general citizen in the governance of a society’s technologies should be arranged. At face value, Frankenfeld’s account directly mends the displacement of power in industrial engineering.

However, closer investigation reveals that Frankenfeld’s account actually trades the displacement of politics for another type of displacement. Even though it explicitly builds on the principle of autonomy, it specifies this principle differently for those in control of science and technology and for lay people. For innovators, autonomy consists of the freedom to innovate. This freedom is conditional on the provision that innovations serve the common good, and that experts are held accountable for their actions. For lay citizens, in contrast, autonomy only amounts to generic rights to freedom: people are to be protected against technological harm. However, no rights are granted beyond this protection: in Frankenfeld’s approach, political participation requires a considerable level of expertise.

Frankenfeld’s approach is framed against a background populated with specific threats: concealable environmental hazards, toxic chemicals, nuclear power and nuclear wastes, and recombinant DNA. These issues share a high degree of uncertainty and complexity in the assessment of risks. Against industrial plants and other large, dangerous and ugly technologies, Frankenfeld’s approach makes sense. For these technologies, the focus should be on safety, and relevant knowledge is indeed most likely found among experts; there is no need to democratize the prevention of something so obviously harmful.

However, this justificatory background is also the approach’s weakness: it invalidates a generalization towards technologies that carry different problems. The approach remains unhelpful, if power, for example, is displaced by the ownership of information, as diagnosed by Castells (2000) and Lash (2002). Neither does the approach offer a general comfort against the hegemony of particular values in technology design or particular rationalities and the consequent exclusion of non-experts – two types of displacement addressed by the critical theory of technology that are discussed below.

Frankenfeld’s conception is a liberal, freedom-granting form of citizenship. However, it is also an ‘end-of-pipe’ solution that does not address the question of what kinds of technologies are desirable. Frankenfeld’s division of intellectual labour thus becomes expertocracy. Experts become the representatives of citizens as soon as they take the citizens’ concerns into account (Brown, 2009: 259), but here the justification of this representation falls apart. It is based on the experts’ knowledge of hazard control, and there is no reason to expect them to have a special ability to decide on moral, social and good-life issues. Additionally, Frankenfeld’s account implicitly makes natural scientific knowledge the ideal of political acumen in the governance of science and technology, thus excluding considerable parts of society.

A second conception of technological citizenship is developed by Stevenson (2006), who distils the concept from the works of Manuel Castells and Paul Virilio. Stevenson argues that both Castells and Virilio rightly diagnose the constitution-like character of technology. Both developed the Marxist idea that a certain form of technological rationality has acquired hegemony, which is biased in a way that favours venture capital in the acquisition of economic power. They argue that capital has displaced skilled labour as an economic good. Both Castells and Virilio observe that this leads to a globalizing economy in which local ecologies are subsumed.

Both authors are strongly guided by a focus on information technologies and new media. In line with Lash (2002), they argue that power is displaced by ownership of information, supported by the technical structures that prioritize owners of information. According to Castells (2004), information technologies facilitate the hegemony of capitalist rationality, and offer a binary mechanism of inclusion: either individuals comply with the network rationality and are included, or individuals fail to comply, resulting in exclusion from the global market. Virilio’s (2005) hegemony involves new media preventing people from participating critically in politics. Modern states are argued here to be determined to retain control, including control of how things are presented and revealed, i.e. control of the provision of news and information.

Stevenson concludes with an overtly cosmopolitan and republican idea of technological citizenship. He argues that a ‘strong civic culture’ is the only way to develop a global civil society and prevent capital from taking world dominance. International solidarity requires a locally-oriented identity. He argues that citizenship must be an engaged and discursive practice, in which learning takes place and identities are shaped through dialogue (Stevenson, 2006: 5, 6). He develops an agenda of bottom-up approaches that deal with global technological structures from a local perspective.

Stevenson aims to mitigate hegemony through the displacement of power to information. However, the approach has one important drawback: it treats technology as something external to politics. Like manna from heaven, technologies – primarily ICTs, which limit the generalizability of the account – exist, and people may decide to use them one way or another. Nowhere does Stevenson give an account of the construction of technologies and their displacement. Even though Stevenson ascribes considerable political influence to the average citizen, this influence is limited to the use of technologies, not their design. While the approach appears to be republican from a mainstream political-philosophical or social-theoretical perspective, it actually proves to be liberal when a thicker account of technology is applied: it promotes freedom under given circumstances, but with respect to technologically shaping those circumstances it remains empty. It leaves essential power in the hands of science and technology experts.

These two varieties of technological citizenship are valuable when applied to the problems for which they were devised, yet they remain unconvincing as general notions of technological citizenship. Frankenfeld only covers big industrial technologies and fails to correct for expertocracy. Stevenson’s account is limited to globalizing information and communication technologies. Both approach technologies as off-the-shelf items and fail to cultivate the influence that individuals can, do, or must have on technologies.

A search for further conceptions of technological citizenship only yields alternatives that are equally bound to particular applications. For example, Strijbos (2001) argues against real problems of globalization, but, like Stevenson, fails to incorporate the socially constructed nature of technology, or its full potential to displace power and agency. Similarly, Bovens (2002) develops an accurate account of our civic rights in the face of omnipresent information technologies, but remains limited to this context. Furthermore, while Elam and Bertilsson (2003) have elaborated on citizenship in a culture of science and technology, their concern is not explicitly with the values materialized in technology, and by extension does not sufficiently cover the displacement of politics – though their engagement with politics as contestation resonates well with the consequences that I draw from the critical theory of technology.

Based on these ideas of technological citizenship and their shortcomings, three requirements can be framed for technological citizenship. First, any truly democratic conception of the political dimension of technological citizenship should grant access to all citizens, regardless of their specific capacities or social status, including their formal training in the areas of science and technology. This challenge of accommodating influence for the general citizen is referred to in the present article as the subject requirement. On this requirement, Frankenfeld’s conception fails, and Stevenson’s conception weakens when faced with a comprehensive account of technology.

The second challenge concerns the scope of technological citizenship. In the notions of technological citizenship discussed above, the specific technological problems for which they were proposed invalidate them for a broader range of application. However, the range of technologies influencing our political, social, and private lives is nearly infinite. Thus, technological citizenship must be able to accommodate the governance and shaping of a wide range of technologies, referred to here as the object requirement.

A final demand follows from the first two: a conception of technological citizenship that takes the general citizen as its subject and virtually all technologies as its object hides an epistemological challenge. On the one hand, citizens’ abilities to exert influence must not depend on their level of science and technology education. On the other hand, making and implementing technological choices benefit from possessing technological and scientific knowledge. Even if we morally disapprove of expertocracy, experts are at least empirically in an advantaged position in technology-related decisions. Thus, a tension exists between the broadest democratization of decisions and the best use of expert knowledge (Collins and Evans, 2002). For reasons beyond the scope of this article, this tension cannot be resolved by simply making expert knowledge available to the citizen. ² The need to provide an arrangement for expert knowledge while retaining its assets is referred to here as the epistemological requirement.

Technology should not be democratized by controlling all forms of displacement and justifying their democratic mechanisms in the same way, but rather by offering an ecology of different democratic mechanisms (Brown, 2009; Marres, 2007). It should now be clear that citizenship is the primary framework of such arrangements. An account is thus needed of how this can be shaped. To this end, the next section further develops the connection between the political and the technological. By corollary, it connects technology to justice – traditionally a concern of the political. However, justice tout court does not suffice to inform technological citizenship. Therefore, in the final section, technological citizenship is generalized into an idea of sustainability.

From a critical theory of technology to technological citizenship

In the critical theory of technology, Andrew Feenberg critiques the political arrangements of industrialized cultures. The theory, deeply inspired by Marxist thinking, proposes that technical rationality is not neutral, but rather is aimed at promoting capitalist values of efficiency, while maintaining a neutral guise, and that arrangements that appear rational and by consequence neutral, in fact, allocate disproportionate power to holders of capital. Feenberg offers a comprehensive account of the displacement of power. More than the accounts of displacement discussed above, Feenberg’s ideas have clear consequences for citizenship.

The anti-position against which the critical theory of technology is devised is the hegemony of capitalist-biased forms of rationality. Feenberg (2002: 163) uses the concept of media to identify containers of these biases. Examples of these media are markets, elections, administrations and technical systems. They appear transparent and universal, and their design and existence are legitimated by a discourse of scientific-technological rationality, neutrality and an appeal to efficiency. This rational discourse actively serves the construction and maintenance of this image of impartiality, thus rendering entire practices politically irrelevant.

However, below the surface, media permanently distort the content they express. In line with the Marxist idea that the seeming neutral criteria of efficiency in fact hide a power bias in favour of the capital-rich, Feenberg (1995: 28) locates the dominance of the whole system at a technical rationality. This rationality extends beyond the industrial system, into the spheres of leisure, education and sexual life – spheres where technical rationality cannot properly claim any priority. While the Enlightenment promised liberation through rationality, Feenberg argues instead with Horkheimer and Adorno (1944) that this dominance of technical rationality and the consequent exercise of power are the inevitable consequence of the Enlightenment itself, since the promise of liberation through rationality is loaded with class differences.

The neutral appearance of media is achieved by a process of decontextualization (Feenberg, 2002: 179): technologies and technological configurations are reduced to their basic elements, detached from any context. Obscuring a technology’s context entails concealing the power it helps exercise and obscuring its political relevance. Moreover, eliminating connections with the context entails that the individual is no longer the subject in technical organization, but instead becomes an object. Here an overtly Marxist diagnosis appears, one that clearly offers a target for technological citizenship to repair.

With the concept of the technical code, Feenberg refers to the hegemonic realization of particular interests in a technological solution. Such a solution then starts to serve as the paradigm for entire classes of problems, even though in fact different solutions are possible. The choice between possible solutions appears to be made on the basis of efficiency, while in fact many social factors influence this choice. The incumbent technological code is thus the implementation of a dominant form of rationality constructed as neutral (Feenberg, 2002: 19–22). The particular technical code under which industrialized societies live resonates well with the narrow vocabulary of liberal politics based on harm and its prevention.

In the same way as failing emancipation is arguably not the undelivered promise of the Enlightenment, but rather its inevitable consequence, social problems resulting from technology are not just side-effects or externalities. Instead, social problems of technology are the consequence of the narrow range of values that enter into the design process. They are internally connected to the technology design itself and the technical code, under the aegis of which the design takes place.

Feenberg therefore argues for a replacement of the technical code. This requires recontextualization: the context of a technology should be an integral part of the design process. Problems owing to decontextualization can only be remedied by reincorporating considerations of ecology, health, aesthetics and urban organization as internal to technology design (Feenberg, 2002: 184; 2005: 52). The intervention thus extends the range of values that finds entry to the process, as well as the access to the design process that is limited to ‘technical experts and the corporate and political elites they serve’ (Feenberg, 2005: 52).

Feenberg’s recontextualization is directly relevant for technological citizenship. However, the critical theory seems to stop at the very point where technological citizenship emerges. This is remarkable, as it implicitly links to citizenship in three ways. First, recontextualization literally calls for bringing the context into the design. Clearly, the contexts of most technologies contain citizens. These citizens should, therefore, be included somehow in the design process, which corrects a certain level of displacement.

Second, recontextualization calls for the inclusion of a broader range of values than only capitalist efficiency and liberal prevention of harm. Enlarging the input space creates a knowledge gap beyond techno-scientific expertise. Covering this gap with, for example, professional ethicists would likely expand the value input to some extent, but it would also add another elite in exactly the same sense that Feenberg criticizes. Alternatively, adding a mechanism of representative democracy would not help either, as the displacement in such a form of democracy usually entails clustering values in package deals, and hence remains vulnerable to efficiency and harm retaining hegemony. Therefore, given the infinite granularity of technology design and the many levels at which it takes place, the gap can best be filled by an engaged citizenship.

Third, critical theory deconstructs non-expertise as a consequence of capitalist interests: the reproduction of capitalist power, which promotes a specific form of rationality, excludes non-experts from the process of technological design. The fact that lay people’s participation in technological design hinges on their appropriation of natural scientific knowledge is precisely the consequence of a narrowly defined range of elites and interests that technology design is supposed to serve. ³ As an empirical observation, this justifies hope that engaged technological citizenship is possible. A normative consequence of deconstructing expertise is that somebody has to step in: as argued above, this somebody is the citizen.

Regarding the epistemological requirement, it remains questionable whether a normative notion of citizenship will ultimately be able to offer any consolation for the fact that people who have formal training or hold a relevant office are better equipped than others to be heard where technological decisions are concerned. The short answer to this is no, and it is fairly difficult to compensate lay people for their disadvantaged position by anything other than formal training. The long answer is that technological citizenship informed by the critical theory of technology rearranges the relationship between lay people and experts: it reduces the relative contribution of expert knowledge in favour of contributions from the general public.

This rearrangement follows from critical theory’s insight that the epistemological gap between experts and lay people is itself the consequence of capitalist and expertocratic arrangements, not its cause. If no rationality, reasonableness, or other primacy is attributed a priori to any kind of knowledge, all contributions bear the same burden of explanation, decreasing the relative weight of expert contributions. This is an important parallel with ideals of deliberative democracy (Gutmann and Thompson, 2004). As a corollary, the subject requirement is partly resolved: insofar as people’s exclusion from political processes depends on their constructed non-expertness, their exclusion is corrected for by removing a priori primacy from different kinds of knowledge. The critical theory of technology, thereby, outperforms other conceptions of technological citizenship. However, this specific move does not affect unjust distributions of power due to other causes.

Delegating such deliberation to the experts is impossible for all the reasons given, as it would open the door again for decontextualization. Citizens and experts together form the technology design community. Although Jasanoff (2003: 397–8) argues that the merit of citizens’ contributions does not lie in their possession of a special kind of knowledge, one consequence of the critical theory of technology is at least an appreciation of the axiological and hence contextual knowledge of citizens (Bijker, 1996), which would otherwise be absent in technological design.

Since earlier conceptions of technological citizenship were devised for specific technologies, their generalizability is limited. They fail on the object requirement. The critical theory of technology performs better in this respect since it does not depend on specific technologies. Nonetheless, it is important to note that between the lines of Feenberg’s writing there is a clear bias towards capitalist production technologies and other technologies that are clearly connected to the capitalist system. For this reason, the present article finally stretches the scope of critical theory, by offering a notion of sustainability to inform a general form of technological citizenship.

Technological citizenship is sustainable citizenship

Chiefly, the critical theory of technology calls for an extension of the normative input space that informs technology design, and for access to design processes for others besides experts. It thus serves important humanistic values (Feenberg, 2002: 19–22), including a rejection of instrumental approaches to nature. The technical code needs to be modified, not to reduce the efficiency it pursues, but to harness it in favour of a broader social programme. It should additionally promote people’s ability to realize their full potential. By extending the input space of technology design, its political content becomes apparent. However, for politics to seize this new normative area and address issues of technology design, one of its primary objects, namely justice, needs to be generalized as well. Sustainability provides such a generalization, and it is able to inform technological citizenship, in much the same way as justice informs general citizenship.

This generalization is also needed to move beyond the exemplary technologies against which the critical theory was devised. Technologies exist at all levels of organization. Some, for example, work at the intra-human level, such as medical technologies and envisaged technologies of human enhancement. Others, such as information and communication technologies, work at the global level. They may lead to the suppression and exclusion of groups and entire states (Castells, 2000). At the same time, human enhancement promises people the realization of their full potentialities (Agar, 2004), and information technologies equally promise to serve many more values than efficiency. These technologies at least have the potential to internalize the question of what kind of world we want to shape, including humanist questions of a moral and aesthetic nature. From a moral perspective, they thus appear to be liberating, partly becoming immune to critical-theoretic thinking. By generalizing justice into sustainability, this can largely be corrected.

Conceptually, distributive justice refers to a situation in which everyone receives what they are entitled to, and contributes what they ought to. First, the concept requires a scheme of distribution that specifies and justifies people’s entitlements and duties. Second, the concept requires a justice community that includes all those people entitled to justice and participating in the scheme of distribution. Third, the concept requires an object space, i.e. an idea of the kinds of goods that are to be redistributed.

On its initial inception by the Brundtland Commission, the notion of sustainable development was taken to refer to ‘meeting the needs of present generations without compromising the capacity of future generations to meet theirs’ (Brundtland, 1987). This notion captures the imperative to assess our actions in a perspective of long-term and global justice, as opposed to the short-term and local profits view that a market economy typically pursues. Sustainability can be considered a generalized form of justice in the following ways.

First, most important is the extension of the justice community to include future generations (Martens, 2006). This follows directly from the Brundtland Commission’s definition, and hides a critique towards the instrumentalization of human beings in the same way as the critical theory does: consequences for future generations should be internalized in our design choices, not regarded as mere externalities.

A second generalization is that notions of sustainability are intrinsically supranational. Thus, the community entitled to justice stretches beyond the conventional level of political containment, i.e. the nation-state. Through the global ramifications of our societies, not least mediated by technologies, we are inextricably connected to people in the most distant regions. These connections are conceptualized as constructs such as ecological footprint and carrying capacity, which relate our local consumption to the use of resources across the globe (Vanderheiden, 2008).

The third generalization is that we bear obligations to our fellow humans, as well as to our natural surroundings, including natural resources and wildlife. In some sense, the community entitled to justice extends beyond the human. Latour’s parliament of things reflects an important insight here: if politics is focused on human interests only, it will fail to accommodate benefits that nature indirectly offers us (Latour, 1993). Latour’s tenet is that distinctions made between human and non-human interests are bound to fail. In this light the failure to address problems of sustainability is in fact the consequence, not the cause, of a politics that presumes a clear distinction between human and non-human interests. Sustainability informs technological citizenship by the imperative not to instrumentalize the non-human part of our world in any burdening way.

In addition, sustainability performs a transformation on the goods that fall under the scheme of redistribution. Generally, distributive justice is concerned with social goods. While the natural resources fostered by sustainability are not obviously outside the category of social goods, neither are they clearly linked to the social, if the social coincides with our local community. Through sustainability, however, social goods become intrinsically global: resource use today is a global affair, and sustainability brings it into the scope of justice.

Finally, the scheme of distribution is affected by sustainability. In a non-generalized conception of justice, people’s rights and duties are connected to their being human and being a member of a polity. The duties to contribute are typically shaped as a scheme of taxation based on income. This is where sustainability makes a difference: duties are not based on income, but on the use of resources. Thus, sustainability reverses the fifth possible reason for membership as inventoried by Thomas (2002): instead of contribution, sustainability grounds our civic identity in our consumption. ⁴ Provided that this consumption is somehow sustainable, the scheme of distribution is in fact compatible with unlimited wealth. In some schemes of general justice, unlimited wealth in contrast leads to extremely high contributions. This is in line with the notion from critical theory that there is nothing against efficiency or the accumulation of capital; it just emancipates other values as well.

Through these generalizations and transformations, sustainability tightens the connection between technology and democracy and serves recontextualization. Our relations with the material world are entrenched with technological mediations. Sustainability relates these technologies to justice, making them politically relevant. Even though this does not logically entail a specific distribution of power and goods, it does imply an extended community of stakeholders in political and technological decision-making.

Including these stakeholders in design processes serves the quality of those processes in at least two ways. It could be argued in a cynical way that including these stakeholders provides just another opportunity to reduce dissent by moulding the opinions of dissenters. More wholeheartedly, it could be argued that such inclusion leads to a stronger engagement between stakeholders, ensuring that a broader range of ideas finds entry into the design. This would make the design more robust, both socially and technically (Bijker, 2004). Bringing citizens into the design process is an essential element of recontextualization.

The aim of recognizing a global community of stakeholders hides an impossibility: global democracy is impossible and in some respects even undesirable. Yet a derivative requirement is possible: technological citizens have an obligation to consider the consequences of their choices for all humans. This further cultivates the link with deliberative democracy mentioned before. It also expands on earlier arguments that present-day citizenship must be a cosmopolitan citizenship (Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010; Smith, 2007).

Sustainability is a contested concept. It is necessarily so, as it always requires a projection of future needs, for which uncontested scientific proof is impossible (Martens, 2006). Also, the attribution of rights to future generations is morally intricate (Gosseries, 2008). At the same time, sustainability serves well as a Rawlsian political concept. We may reasonably expect people to believe that there is something unfair about exhausting resources that others may also depend upon, especially since we owe those resources to the lottery of nature, not to our own efforts.

This ambiguous nature grants that sustainability can serve as an aspirational fiction (Valkenburg, 2009): an idea that we can aspire to and act upon because we pretend that it is unequivocal and unproblematic, even if it is not. It allows for disagreement and contestation, but still gives normative guidance in a more or less coherent direction. ⁵ This makes it suitable to inform technological citizenship: the democratization of technology requires a broad input space and perpetual revision, as was argued above. Not least, it offers a normative corrective to the potential dilution of knowledge as a result of broadening the normative input space, and an answer to the epistemological requirement in general.

Goeminne (2010) argues that the failure of the climate summits such as Copenhagen and Cancún is in fact a failure under only a very limited perspective, namely the perspective of politics aiming for consensus. Indeed, no consensus was reached, and all hope for it has been lost. Yet, this opens the possibility for contestation on the concept of sustainability, which is more able than any consensus to provide the wealth of norms and values that Feenberg’s recontextualization requires.

In a similar vein, Mouffe (2005) has argued that aiming at consensus in politics takes the political out of politics. Politics appearing as consensual is in fact the symptom of hegemony, and a repression of the contestation intrinsic to politics. Elam and Bertilsson (2003) relate this to an idea of scientific citizenship, but as a means of agenda setting, rather than technology design. The notion of sustainability, as exposed above, offers the exact playground needed for such contestation to produce the wealth of values that should, according to the critical theory of technology, be taken as the input of technology design.

As signalled by Marres (2009), arrangements of experiments in sustainable living carry the potential to materially rearrange the connection between the private and public spheres. This connection fundamentally belongs to the realm of citizenship. In addition, the concept of issue politics (Marres, 2005) proves helpful. Sustainability and the accompanying technological arrangements may serve as an issue that is not the representation of particularistic interests, but instead a potential alignment device that attracts and unites publics. In the context of technological citizenship, the involvement of citizens could be cultivated by publicly assessing technological developments, and explicitly framing those developments in terms of the reconfiguration of the world in which we live our social lives. Where the critical theory has articulated that such assessments are likely to be dominated by depoliticizing narrow vocabularies of efficiency, the imperative of technological citizenship thus consists of keeping this vocabulary broad enough.

It is exactly because of this cultivation of contestation that this article was able to discuss justice and sustainability at a conceptual level only. Both justice and sustainability deserve further development. However, fairly independently of their exact specifications, the conclusion follows that expanding the sphere of technological concern leads to inclusion of matters of justice, and that conflating technology and justice inevitably leads to the transformation of justice into a concern with sustainability. As such concerns are too granular to be contained in a single point, the encompassing political ideal of technological citizenship is the best option for addressing them.

An explanation is still needed on how sustainable technological citizenship is to be implemented in everyday practice. This article presented technological citizenship as the link between different sites that contain democracy in a technological society. This connection is clearly a normative one, to be implemented by modifying existing institutions in such a way that they are bent towards sustainability. This is legitimated by critical theory. First, neutrality of institutions is an illusion, so we must ensure that their non-neutrality is beneficent. Second, biasing institutions towards sustainability intrinsically carries a broadening of the discourse and an inclusion of humanistic values in technology design.

The dispersed nature of both technology and citizenship calls for an ecology of sites of politics (Brown, 2009) such as public hearings, focus groups, deliberative polls, and user panels. Each may make different links between the technological and the political. Fung (2003) argued that different sites may entertain different ideals of participant selection, scope, and representativeness. They may differently cultivate one or more aims such as mobilization of constituencies, calling technology design to account, justifying policy, and promoting inclusion. They differently accentuate elements of justice, sustainability and technological design, thus providing for the rich input space that the critical theory of technology argues for. Technological citizenship thus captures the virtue of engaging in such practices, and doing so for global sustainability.