CONCEPT
The Parliament of Networks
Latour's proposal for a governance architecture adequate to hybrid entities — deliberative structures where technical mechanism and political effect confront each other with neither claiming exclusive authority. The governance AI demands and does not yet have.
The parliament of networks is the alternative to the modern constitution's division of authority between scientists and politicians. Latour's proposal, most systematically developed in Politics of Nature (2004), calls for governance structures that bring technical expertise and democratic participation into sustained confrontation — where neither side can claim the exclusive right to speak, and where the hybrid nature of the governed object is reflected in the hybrid composition of the governing body. The parliament gives non-human actants — training data, optimization targets, infrastructure dependencies — a place in the deliberative process, not by granting them votes but by making their characteristics objects of sustained political attention. For AI, this architecture is required and almost entirely absent.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The proposal emerged from Latour's engagement with ecological politics in the 1990s. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental toxicity were all hybrid phenomena that the modern constitution could not govern.