Regimes of Fractured Objectivity: On the Limits of Technological Risk Governance

This chapter argues that modern risk governance rests on a useful fiction: that technological safety can be rendered as objective fact. Within a “regime of functional objectivity,” institutions translate unruly hazards into standardized metrics that appear auditable, comparable, and decisive. This fiction works tolerably well because the uncertainties of most technologies can be bounded enough for regulation and coordination. The chapter contends, however, that this regime has an epistemic boundary, past which the assumptions that support objectivity claims can no longer be safely ignored. Beyond this threshold lies a “regime of fractured objectivity,” where extreme stakes and sparse empirical feedback demand implausible certainty, small modeling choices have outsized effects on outcomes, and routine heuristics of expertise lose traction.