Public Interest Technology, Citizen Assemblies, and Performative Governance

There are many domains of human endeavor which invoke the “public interest,” for example, environmental sustainability, law, journalism, and, perhaps most pointedly in 2020–2021, health. All of these domains require some sort of tradeoff between different and potentially competing stakeholder priorities. For example, public interest in environmental sustainability, with respect to air quality, potable water, and arable land, can be in contention with requirements of manufacturing, transport, and consumer demand. Advocacy for social justice through public interest law might set a disadvantaged or disempowered group against a privileged or powerful one [1] , [2] . Similarly, journalistic reporting in the public interest must consider holding the powerful accountable for their actions and decisions and the potential impact on society against basic rights to privacy and ethical practices in investigative journalism. Choices in public health sometimes appeal to the concept of procedural justice and can involve a multiperspective tradeoff between individual risk and collective benefit, personal preference and state mandate, financial costs and effectiveness of treatments, and speed and caution (and note these are tradeoffs not false dichotomies, as some would have it).