Vigilance, Denunciation, and Evaluation

In Rosanvallon's framework, these are the three practices through which citizens exercise sovereignty between elections. Vigilance is continuous monitoring of authority-holders through institutional mechanisms: free press, transparency laws, civil society organizations, whistleblower protections. Denunciation is the public naming of abuses and failures, requiring a public sphere where naming can reach an audience large enough to generate democratic pressure. Evaluation is ongoing assessment of whether governance produces outcomes the governed have the right to expect, requiring shared standards against which performance can be measured. The AI transition has structurally disabled all three: vigilance is blinded by technological opacity (citizens cannot see training data, audit models, evaluate alignment), denunciation is atomized (individual workers experience displacement individually, preventing aggregation into collective narratives), and evaluation lacks standards (no agreed criteria for assessing whether an AI company is governing its technology democratically).