Affordable needs and rights: anticipating techno-moral change

Abstract

Typically, when an innovation is successful, the argument is that there must have been a need for this, albeit ‘latent’. Yet, empirical studies show that when technologies are promised, developed and used, many things change in the same movement, including needs and, eventually, rights, when new needs have become self-evident. The malleability of needs and rights raises the intriguing question how novelty and needs are co-produced and whether such changes can be anticipated. When needs are not pre-given, but dependent upon socio-technical configurations, and, in fact, both cause and effect of technological change, a range of philosophical, sociological and anticipatory questions come to the fore.