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Short abstract:

By connecting the STS literature on standard-setting to a specific case study of the ‘politicisation’ of AI standards, this paper aims to show how coproductionist STS can inform policy, connecting theory to practise to reveal new perspectives from which to think about technology governance.

Long abstract:

International standard-setting is often treated as a background issue in global affairs, conceived of as a value-free, ‘technical’ activity. However, the standard-setting system has begun to assume a more prominent position on the US and EU policymaking agendas over the past decade in response to perceived ‘politicisation’ of standard-setting bodies as a result of greater engagement by Chinese experts. Standard-setting is seen as a new ‘front’ in the battle for tech supremacy between the US and China. This paper aims to intervene in this policy debate, and draws on insights from coproductionist STS to problematise conventional narratives of the ‘politicisation’ of a value-free technical field. This conventional characterisation belies both the fundamental role played by international standardisation in ordering the world and the way in which ‘technical’ standard-setting is coproduced with a particular normative order. Standards underpin the entire operation of the global economic system, enabling the existence of transnational value chains. Standard-setting institutions are the principle fora in which safety conventions for new technologies, such as transparency standards for AI, are agreed across national borders. Standard-setting is a thoroughly normative activity, involving settlements on some of the most pressing political questions of our time about the uses to which technologies can be put. By connecting the STS literature on standard-setting to a specific case study of the ‘politicisation’ of AI standards, this paper aims to show how coproductionist STS can add texture to this policy debate, connecting theory to practise to reveal new perspectives from which to think about technology governance.

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Short abstract:

This paper explores the vision of an OECD acting in awareness that credible decision-making emerges from shared values. And it argues that, for the proposed technology governance model to deserve the global label, shared values should represent a cosmopolitan set of perspectives.

Long abstract:

We, citizens of a world of renewed tensions, inequalities, and uncertainty, are witnessing the concomitant triumph and collapse of the myth that capital-T technology will take us out of ourselves. We are in a constitutional moment that requires joint academic and policy efforts. Rooted in co-productionist thinking, this paper explores possible futures for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) after shedding light on its past decade of “Science, Technology and Innovation” activities, using document analyses, interviews, and ethnographic field notes.

A body such as the OECD is bound by what its infrastructure, institutional culture, organizational epistemology, and agents can problematize and address. A post-war developmentalist project at the service of a recovering and almighty West, the OECD has, from the start, been the guardian of the temple of economic growth, financial stability, and trade expansion. It has built an idiom from which it will hardly depart and is doomed to serve the “rich man’s club” vision. Yet, notwithstanding the rigidity of this organization’s DNA, a less deterministic take would acknowledge that the OECD is also what member countries make of it. It is malleable through intergovernmental, cross-sectoral negotiations, and its best contribution may precisely be its convening capacity. Though regionally limited, the OECD has proven to be a trusted center of production of expertise and developed a unique ability to unite nation-states, multinational corporations, and research laboratories. It can also be a space for debate, disagreements, and agreements on technological choices, in brief, a contemporary agora.

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Short abstract:

In this talk, I connect the scientific interest in inequality to politics and political movements using the STS lens of "comparative problematization." In particular, I analyze how dominant framings for defining inequality emerged out of diverse political contexts in the US, France and India.

Long abstract:

Inequality has become a watchword in just about every major social science, and has played an especially significant role in the discipline of economics in the last decade. New centers for policy research to study inequality have popped up, ranging from the OECD’s Centre for Opportunity and Inequality to the Stone Foundation’s Wealth Inequality Centers, located at the City University of New York, Harvard Kennedy School, UC Berkeley, Brown University and several other major American universities. At the same time, inequality has been held up by prominent politicians as the “defining issue of our time,” to borrow the words of former US President Barack Obama. New grassroots political movements have sprouted over the past ten years, from worldwide social movements such as Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to protests focused on national or regional inequalities, such as the 2018-9 gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) protests in France or the 2021 farmers protests in India.

In this talk, I connect the flurry of scientific interest in inequality to politics and political movements using the tools of science and technology studies (STS) and political theory. In particular, I take up the approach of “comparative problematization” to analyze how dominant scientific framings for defining and explaining inequality emerged out of the diverse political contexts of the US, France and India. Drawing on over a hundred semi-structured interviews and over five years of participant-observation, I demonstrate how inequality is understood in each country from “above,” by looking at how experts in the social sciences translate inequality into questions of epidemiology, historical trends à la climate change, and critical ethnography. I also look at inequality from “below” to see how political actors try to address, and redress, inequality on the ground in terms of demands for political representation and voice (US), demands for additional state welfare (France), and demands for rights for marginal citizens (India). I argue that the exploding interest in inequality needs to be understood in terms of felt dissatisfactions of democratic publics with the political order, and in particular, the failings of the social compact. That is, rather than see inequality as emerging from shifts in statistical distributions alone, as understood through causal arguments and historical data-driven approaches, they need to be seen as emerging in response to what people see as failures of a “just” social order.

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Short abstract:

A study of the institutional and constitution dimensions of "smart" urbanism in the U.S., arguing that neither smartification nor city empowerment will be sufficient to re-constitute local agency over the terms of political and economic progress in the city.

Long abstract:

In the 2010s, many American cities undertook “smart” development projects aimed at digitizing urban infrastructure and promoting innovation-driven economic growth. Often such projects proved controversial and failed to achieve public legitimacy, leading scholars and policy-makers to call for an end to “smart city” rhetoric. Taking a constitutionalist approach to the study of urban politics, this talk advances an understanding of what is at stake in debates about the role of the city in shaping economic and political progress in the digital age. I suggest that against the backdrop of progressive movements to resist Trumpism and the rise of “Big Tech,” smart city projects reveal the limits of calls to revitalize American democracy through “local empowerment” – not because cities are inherently irresponsible or incompetent actors, but because the constitutional status of the city is always being negotiated alongside the constitutional role of technological innovation in setting the terms of economic and political progress. Reconstituting forms of local agency over the terms of political and economic development is therefore a project that cannot be reduced either to making cities smart nor to making them sovereign. Instead, such a project demands a reckoning with the ways in which economic growth and technological innovation are authorized to serve as the constitutional measures of urban progress.

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Short abstract:

In the context of India, digitization of identity and payments has taken over traditional economic structures, even for poor citizens like street vendors. Why do failing techno-infrastructures and surveillance technologies gain populist support?

Long abstract:

Ideas of economic progress have always been deeply tied to perceptions of technological advancement. However, unsurprisingly to STS scholars, when technologies brush up against social realities they result in infrastructure failures, cultural clashes, unintended consequences etc. In the context of India, digitization of identity and payments has taken over traditional economic structures. Why do failing techno-infrastructures and surveillance technologies gain populist support? How does the relationship between institutions governing the economy and citizens participating in the economy change as a result of digitization and datafication?

I study the emergence of Digital Public Infrastructures (DPIs) in India, the major effort to digitize and create data flows between previously undigitized economic actors like those belonging to the informal economy. I focus specifically on street vendors in Delhi, who generally stay outside the ambit of structures of banking, licensing, taxation etc. but are increasingly being brought “into the system” using digital identification (Aadhaar) and payment systems (Unified Payments Interface). I argue that the disembodiment of an economic agent through digitization changes the very subject with whom the state or other governing institutions have an economic relationship, and the conceptions of prosperity that inform economic governance. I show how these orientations gain power and political popularity even among groups like street vendors who are “left behind,” based on ideas of the nation and nationalism being cultivated and refracted through digitization by the current political regime.