Rumsfeld's comments – which came in the middle of a news briefing regarding the possible presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – were largely treated with derision at the time, even winning a ‘Foot in Mouth’ award from the UK Plain English Campaign for the ‘most baffling comment by a public figure’. The phrasing is, perhaps, tortuous, and the structure confusing. But (remarkably enough) the basic idea that Rumsfeld is trying to convey is an important one, and one that we will explore throughout this chapter. Knowing and not knowing are generally taken to be straightforward, binary categories: we know or do not know a particular fact. But in practice these categories have texture and nuance. As Rumsfeld says, there are different ways of not-knowing, and, as we will see in Chapter 7 in particular, knowledge itself can be fragile and contestable. In this chapter we explore some of this fragility, looking at what happens to technoscientific knowledge in times of disaster or crisis, as well as the ways in which both knowledge and non-knowledge are constructed through the intermingling of scientific, social, and political processes. We therefore examine the kinds of unknowing that Rumsfeld describes. How do we come to know some things, know that we don't know others, and are entirely ignorant of the existence of others again?

Knowing and not knowing

In the decades since Rumsfeld made his comments the field of ignorance studies has emerged. Its basic premise is that ignorance is not simply emptiness or lack, but a rich social space that emerges in particular ways and has particular uses. In scientific research, for instance, we know particular things and not others because of funding and scholarly priorities and interests, all of which operate to focus research on specific areas (we continue to be ignorant of, for instance, many aspects of women's health, because standard scientific models are generally male, or of diseases that dominate the South rather than the rich North).

I am writing from what feels like a time of crisis. As I sit in my office in Vienna the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage, causing everything from cancelled meetings and online teaching to millions of excess deaths across the world. The climate crisis – the onset of changes in the global climate caused by human activity – is beginning to shape weather patterns and the degree to which particular regions of the world are habitable; each year, we see more extreme weather, alongside disasters such as widespread flooding or wildfires. And there are conflicts and clashes at national borders. Two countries over from where I sit in Austria, Russia has invaded Ukraine, and the country is the site of appalling violence as it fights to maintain its sovereignty. This is, however, just one example of forms of nationalistic aggression that are taking place around the world, from Colombia to Afghanistan, which are causing widespread death, destruction, and displacement. Many predict that such conflicts will only increase as climate change reshapes the world's landscapes.

This is not a book about these crises, or the many others that shape our world. It is, however, a book about one thing that these events have in common. In all of these examples, scientific and technical knowledge and expertise are central to how they are understood, managed, and unfold. While they are not only scientific crises or controversies, science and technology are vital aspects of them. To take some examples: I have just read an expert commentary on the war in Ukraine that uses the results from ‘war games’ to discuss possible outcomes of the current situation. These highly technical processes use modelling to try and understand different conflict scenarios, with the results of such games themselves feeding in to political advice and decision making. I have also just carried out a PCR test for COVID-19, a now regular occurrence to check whether I am infected and whether I can safely meet with others. My results will come back in 24 hours: I have become adept both at carrying out the test and reading the results (I have learned what a ‘CT value’ is, for instance).

The COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s marked a significant interruption into normal life for billions of people around the world, and cost millions of lives. Its impacts are still unfolding as I write, and touch everything from national economies to long-term healthcare needs and community cohesion. But the pandemic is also illustrative in multiple ways of the themes discussed in this book. For months and years technoscientific research became highly visible, as governments referred to scientific advice to justify their decisions and as researchers explained their work in the media. As public audiences, we watched ‘science in the making’ – unfinished, uncertain science – as scientists sought to make sense of the situation, offer the best advice possible, and develop vaccines and medical treatments. Given the emphasis on stable and uncontroversial knowledge within much science communication, the pandemic was an almost unprecedented moment in which the uncertain, incremental nature of scientific research became public. At the same time some researchers – like virologist Christian Drosten in Germany or epidemiologist Salim Abdool Karim in South Africa – became household names, shooting to a level of visibility no one would have anticipated.

The story of one such researcher is particularly pertinent to the topics I will discuss in this chapter. Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson was a key figure in the UK government's pandemic response, a modeller whose work helped make the case for stringent lockdowns and physical distancing. But in early May 2020 he abruptly resigned from his government advisory role after newspaper reports that, during a period in which those in separate households were forbidden from intermingling, he had been visited twice by his married lover (or, as one report had it, ‘trysting’). ‘I accept I made an error of judgement and took the wrong course of action’, Professor Ferguson said in a statement. ‘I have therefore stepped back from my involvement in Sage (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies).

Why did Ferguson feel the need to resign? Perhaps it's not a question that needs asking – after all, his choice was treated as obvious at the time, with the UK health minister saying that it was the ‘right decision’ and that it was ‘not possible’ for him to continue in his expert advisory role.

R.F. Kuang's 2022 novel Babel is a fantasy, set in a world in which the act of translation between languages can spark magic. But it is also a meticulously researched account of Oxford in the 1830s, a world in which knowledge production is entangled with the maintenance of colonial power. At the novel's centre is the Royal Institute of Translation, housed in a tower in the centre of Oxford – known as ‘Babel’ – that is eight stories high and the tallest structure in the city. The home of the translation work that powers the British Empire, it is a magically protected ‘gleaming white edifice’ accessible only to an elite cohort of scholars. It is the heart of translation scholarship, and thereby – in the logic of the novel – the seat of power that is used to exploit and dominate the world.

Intentionally or not, Kuang's Babel echoes images of academia as an ivory tower, a metaphor used to present universities as cloistered environments that are segregated from the societies in which they sit. As Steven Shapin has charted, the use of this metaphor intensified throughout the 20th century, increasingly becoming attached to research and researchers and being used to critique an attitude of academic detachment. ‘This is no time for any man [sic] to withdraw into some ivory tower’, Shapin quotes US President Roosevelt as saying in 1940, ‘and proclaim the right to hold himself aloof from the problems, yes, and the agonies of his society’. The image of the ivory tower continues to circulate and (Shapin suggests) is now almost entirely framed as negative, capturing the idea that research that is disengaged from society and its needs is morally problematic. In both Babel and wider discourse, ivory towers are dangerous.

To think of the relationship between science and society is, often, to reach for metaphors such as the ivory tower. Such languages are taken-for-granted means of expressing how academic knowledge production relates to wider society, and the assumptions that lie behind them are perhaps too rarely explored. In this chapter I would like to do so, and to situate and explore the things we call ‘science’ and ‘society’.

This chapter is slightly different to those that have preceded it. As I worked on the chapters you have read so far, I increasingly felt that it was important to contextualise the discussions they contain (and the spaces that they describe) through a more explicit engagement with power. Indeed, I came to see this as even more urgent than thinking about technoscience in the context of democracy – the kinds of debates discussed in the preceding chapter. It is certainly important to consider the place of technoscience in democratic societies, and the ways in which it can be subject to deliberation and debate, but at the same time democracy is a slippery concept, and one that looks very different in different contexts. Many countries, spaces, and processes are not committed to the version of democracy that is celebrated in deliberative theory. It is therefore necessary to find ways of critically reflecting on technoscience and its place in collective life that do not simply end at the idea of democratisation. This chapter uses scholarship concerned with power and justice to do this, returning to many of the sites and processes I have discussed so far to consider their intersection with questions of equity – by which I mean questions of fairness and equitable access to the opportunities and benefits of contemporary societies.

Why should we critically interrogate technoscience's entanglements with collective life in this way, and reflect on how it relates to power and structural inequalities? The answer to this question is for me exemplified by a moment at a science communication conference I attended in 2023. Like many other fields, science communication has, over the course of the last years, started to reckon with the ways in which it continues to incorporate institutionalised racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression.

I have already mentioned (in Chapter 5) analyses of science communication that show the ways in which it is organised around Whiteness and middle-class values; other work has sought to explore what it might mean to queer, decolonise, or otherwise diversify science communication practice. Both the urgency and the sensitive nature of these moves became clear at the conference. Science has a history of oppressing Black and queer bodies, one Black participant said. How can it be held accountable for this? Similarly, it has a history of ignoring women's pain, and of framing their bodies as deviations from a male norm. Why should those of us who inhabit bodies subject to such forms of oppression or ignorance trust or celebrate it?

This book is, as I began by saying, a resource. It brings together and connects you to different ideas, scholars, and literatures that have something to say about the relationship between science, technology, and society. My aim was to collate, synthesise, and summarise, doing as much justice as possible to the complexities of the diverse spaces we have encountered while still capturing their range and sweep. I hope that you can use it as a starting point for engaging further with the debates and moments that most interest you.

While I want this book to be a resource, a set of tools for living in technoscientific societies, I have chosen not to give instructions or directions. It contains few practical tips and no lists of how to navigate the contemporary world. The resources I offer are concepts and ideas that help us think about technoscience and society, rather than concrete suggestions as to how to act on them.

In part this is because there are no easy instructions for responding to a view of the world in which technoscience is always social, and society is shaped by technoscience. This view may change our imaginations, the ways in which we think about the role and place of science in society, but given the diversity of the kinds of interactions and mutual shapings that we have encountered it is clear that there can be no single account of how to navigate these. Indeed, many of the spaces and debates I have described demand individual judgements and choices. I cannot tell you how to act in response to arguments for the need to decolonise the university, acknowledge epistemic diversity, properly engage with the emergence of public concerns about technoscience, or view expertise as flexible rather than static (for instance). These discussions require personal responses that may, however, lead to collective action (as in the case of the radical science movement, citizen activism around environmental harm, or efforts to ensure responsible technology development).

At the same time it seems too lazy to leave you without any concluding thoughts or suggestions. I want to offer three ideas that, to me, offer a summary of the resources – the tools to think technoscience in society with – that are outlined in this book.

This chapter is concerned with concrete examples of how the mutual shaping of science, technology, and the social become visible. The ways in which technologies are developed and used is one central instance of this: let's start, then, with three examples of such development.

The first is recent, dating from the time of writing, in 2023. A user on the social media platform Reddit has prompted an artificial intelligence (AI)-based image generator to create a series of selfies of soldiers from throughout history, from Samurai warriors to French soldiers during the First World War. As Jenka Gurfinkel notes in commenting on the images, the result is deeply uncanny for a number of reasons, one of which is the identical way in which each group is depicted as grinning for the camera. Quite aside from the question of whether the battlefield would be a place for smiling selfies, all of the soldiers sport what Gurfinkel describes as the ‘American smile’: the tooth-revealing grin that results when you are asked to say ‘cheese’. These smiles are a result of the training data the AI system was built on, and its reliance on images from the Anglophone internet, where smiling in this way is common. The images are, however, particularly weird if you come from a culture where smiling is done differently, or less frequently. The ways in which emotions are shown are highly specific; to Gurfinkel, as an emigre from Russia to the United States, it grated that all of the different ethnic groups and cultures represented had the same kind of smile. ‘AI dominated by American-influenced image sources’, Gurfinkel writes, ‘is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions’. Particular cultural norms – in this case around what smiling should look like and how emotions are expressed – thus come to shape a technology (such as AI image generators), without acknowledgement that local values are being implicitly universalised.

The second example is older, and concerns the way in which particular technologies may be transported and reinterpreted in new locations. Historian Jean Gelman Taylor tells the story of how Singer sewing machines, after initially being developed in the United States in the 1800s, travelled to the ‘Dutch East Indies’ – occupied Indonesia – in the early 20th century.

When I was a teenager in 1990s UK – a period which coincided with the height of public obsession with the TV show Friends – a series of adverts for hair products circulated featuring the Friends actor Jennifer Aniston. Famous for her glossy hair and ‘Rachel cut’, in the ads she talks about falling in love – with a shampoo. The most famous version of the advert doesn't only feature Aniston, however: she breaks off with the immortal words ‘Here comes the science bit – concentrate!’, allowing the ad to segue into an animation representing the shampoo in question's innovative technology and a (male) voiceover that explains this technology. According to the scriptwriters, this allowed them to include the ‘obligatory scientific message’ with humour and a sense of fun.

I have forgotten a lot of things from this period of my life, but – for better or worse – this advert is not one of them. And perhaps it is ripe for re-analysis. There's a lot to reflect on in it: that the ‘science bit’ is framed as comprehensively separate from Aniston; that it is disembodied; that it involves jargon (the product contains Ceramide-R!); that there is the suggestion, through Aniston's winking ‘concentrate!’, that it is boring or at least demanding. The advert is just one example of the ways in which science and technology populate culture, not only through the technologies we use or how we imagine the role of science in society, but in popular media, consumer culture, and entertainment. Technoscience permeates leisure as well as politics.

This chapter explores some of the ways in which it does so, and how it comes to shape our shared visions and imaginations not just of science but also of collective life and the future. In it we look at how science is represented in news and entertainment media, and at some of the subtle ways – such as that shampoo advert – in which it forms part of public culture without us really being aware of it. At least some of these manifestations of technoscience may seem trivial: who really cares about what is represented in a shampoo advert, after all?

What is necessary for building a well-functioning state? The answers, of course, are various, and are often enshrined in constitutions – the principles or laws that define and govern particular nations. In India one such constitutional principle is the notion of scientific temper, which is presented as one of the ten central duties of citizens. ‘This clause’, explain Anwesha Chakraborty and Poonam Pandey, ‘makes embracing scientific and rational thinking and ways of life a duty and responsibility of Indian citizens’. Based on the work and writings of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, scientific temper is:

Indian citizens are thus expected to embrace not just science and its applications, but the mindset that is understood as tied to it: critical thinking, the capacity to change one's mind, the rejection of irrationality and ‘religious temper’ (which Nehru framed as the opposite of scientific temper). Science is thus constitutionally central to citizenship. Similarly, in 2009 the then-new President Obama promised to put science in its ‘rightful place’ in US society and politics. In both cases, the assumption is that science is central to society, the state, and to politics, and that its ‘rightful place’ is at the heart of the political system, speaking truth to power. Indeed, for some commentators science and democracy are intimately connected, sharing central values such as rationality and working in constant support of one another. In this view one cannot have one without the other.