Thinktanks, Universities, Hospitals, Law Courts, Corporations, Governments - constructed worlds for a constructed people. Hackspaces, Makerspaces, Community Science Labs, Online Fora, Social Media, Post-Commercial Space - communities built around common technologies, around a discourse of things, things everywhere, and people still everywhere.

Taking a perspective of how grounding can be built from types of knowledge and a situated perspective, the talk is about the relationship of democracy to technological community. The simulacra of Baudrillard, the situationist weaving of Sadie Plant, Donna Haraway's cyborgian agents, and the extended bodies of Marshall McLuhan - these are the social perspectives of the dweller in the made world. What languages, what relationships, what words now apply for this body. Once technical saturation reaches a point of no return, how do we talk about our mechanical limbs and digital friends to the computers that raised us?

Situations and radical epistemology. The performative agents of Karen Barad, the strong objective demands of Sandra Harding's empiricism, Serres' parasite trapped in a world of messengers and communication. How can we think through new modes of knowledge, new ways of engaging with the valuation of things, new epistemologies fit for the engineer's paradise. Deleuze resurrecting types of empiricism as a response to a situation of cybernetics and control, Hayles' focus on embodiment in the regime of computation. How can knowledge be made in constructed spaces, what positions do we need to maintain democracy amidst overwhelming mediation.

Skeptical communities. Solidarity in an ununified cause, society that allows for unforeseen difference. Society that scrutinizes its own cultural and collective practices. Mertonian norms, Latour's bringing of science into democracy, Stengers' ecology of practices. Feyerabend pushing epistemology to the point of social-democratic concern, these are thinkers of new communities, of politics after radical epistemology. How do we organize groups of sheer mediation, what do we value in spaces built for hackers and citizen technologists? If Boyle were alive today, he would have to extend his arguments to take on Thomas Edison. If there are invisible colleges, they have become as banal as the devices that are omnipresent in them. The skeptical chymist is also a skeptical collaborator.