Fractal Flows in Upstream Engagement: Symmetric Innovation between Technoscience and Social Justice

Paper presented at 4S, Oct 2013, San Diego CARon Eglash, RPI

Social and Environmental “impacts” are often due to properties that are “locked

in” at an early stage in science and engineering development

• Food fraud: pesticide safety, terminator seeds

• Energy industry fraud: clean coal, safe drilling, climate denial

• Genetics fraud: claims for race and IQ, gender and brains

• Transportation fraud: killing electric cars, public transport

The linear model of science/engineering

By the time social and environmental impacts are established, it’s too late!Can we “upstream” concerns to an earlier stage?

Upstreaming is hard and often unsuccessful

Challenges to upstreaming:

1) Upstreaming assumes we already know the social and environmental consequences for things not yet invented a. counter-instances: green chemistry, nuclear industry b. counter-counter instances: open source, nano-solar

1) Upstreaming puts all the innovation on the science and engineering side

2) Upstreaming uses a linear model of flow

3) Upstreaming is typically critiques of what NOT to do, not proactive

4) The creative aspects of science and engineering are viewed negatively, as loose cannons in need of control

My dad was a founder of “restorative justice”: prisoners can use their creativity and agency to make amends from the bottom up. The idea of “generative justice” applies this to technoscience, looking at how we can nurture its creative flows for egalitarian social benefit and sustainable living.

When dad died I visited the beach he took me to as a child, and photographed these flow patterns in the sand.

Fractal flow (Saffman-Taylor Instability)

What can we learn from Nature’s Fractal Flow?

Nature’s agency may not have intentionality, but it does have creativity

Creative agency is a “self-generating” process

Self-generating processes are often created at boundary layers

What can we learn from Humanity’s Fractal Flow?

As Marxists have emphasized, human agency is a generator of value

As anarchists have emphasized, human intentionality can turn a creative generative process into “generative justice”

Fisher, Mahajan, Mitcham: “midstream engagement”

We need “a more robust stream metaphor—with eddies, back currents, eroding banks, shifting depths, and whatnot.”

Fisher, Mahajan, Mitcham: midstream engagment

Rather than attempt to impose order on fractal flows, can we use those self-organizing aspects of technoscience -- multiple loops, eddies and shifting sandbars in the stream – as an aid rather than a hindrance?

Symmetric Exchange: the stream is not one-way

Scientists and engineers

Using problems in social justice

and sustainability to drive science and

innovation

STS researchers and lay

participants innovating our

models and understanding for

social justiceand sustainability

STS correctly recognizes the need for alternative accounts, but incorrectly frames relativism or subjectivism as the only route to that multiplicity.

•This leaves us completely disarmed when right wing politics attacks science.

•This weakens our ability to propose alternative paths that avoid pseudo-science

Multiple Objectivity: there is not just one stream

Multiple Objectivity: anti-relativist approach to situated knowledge

1752: Euler: Vertices, Edges, and Faces V - E + F = 2. Polyhedra are defined as "a solid whose faces are polygons."                            

1815: Hessel: a cube with a cubic hollow inside does not satisfy Euler's theorem.Polyhedra are redefined as "a surface made up of polygonal faces."

1865: Mobius: two pyramids joined a vertex also defies Euler's theorem. Polyhedra are again redefined.

Euler example from Lakatos, Bloor. See Ron Eglash, (2011) "Multiple objectivity:

an anti-relativist approach to situated knowledge", Kybernetes, Vol. 40 Iss: 7/8, pp.995 - 1003

Why not just “capture” all the branches and call that “the ONE universal math”?

Two reasons:

1. Practical Investment – making lab apparatus, books, professors, students, concepts etc. costs too much to go backwards

Why not just “capture” all the branches and call that “the ONE universal math”?

2. All trajectories open up new inquiries

www.csdt.rpi.edu: Navajo rug simulations to teach GIS

Controlled studies with statisticallysignificant improvement

Professor Shayla Sawyer

1)Nanosensors usinginorganic molecules could detect Navajo uranium pollution but not for coal and oil (VOC) pollution

2)Sawyer paused – “come to think of it, no one has tried this—to use organic molecules in semiconductor photodetection”

3)This created a new research path: nano-bio materials in semiconductor photodetection

4)Later we brought in a grad Fellow whose faculty advisor Chris Bystroff was in biology; he “tunes” genetic sequences to detect specific biological molecules

Nano-sensor’s Fractal Flow

Nano-sensor

and Navajo: cross-

current Fractal Flow

Generative Justice

Rather than attempt to tame turbulent mixing from the top-down; put these back-eddies

and non-linear loops in the service of creating hybrids for technoscience and social justice