Explanatory publics: explainability and democratic thought

In order to legitimate and defend democratic politics under conditions of computational capital, my aim is to contribute a notion of what I am calling explanatory publics. I will explore what is at stake when we question the social and political ef- fects of the disruptive technologies, networks and values that are hidden within the “black boxes” of computational systems. By “explanatory publics”, I am gesturing to the need for frame- works of knowledge — whether social, political, technical, economic, or cultural — to be justified through a social right to explanation.