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This essay begins from the intensified entanglements of technoscientific innovation with miscellaneous societal and public fields of interest and action over recent years. This has been accompanied by an apparent decline in the work of purification of discourses of natural and human agency, which Latour observed in 1993. Replacing such previous discursive purifications, we increasingly find technoscientific visions of the imagined-possible as key providers of public meanings and policies. This poses the question of what forms of legitimation are constituted by these sciences, including the ways in which they enter into articulations of public matters. Revisiting historical and contemporary theories of imagination and science, this essay proposes a joint focus on imagination, publics and technoscience and their mutual co-production over time. This focus is then directed towards recent reconfigurations of technosciences with their imagined publics and towards how public issues may become constituted by social actors as active imaginations-exercising agents.

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The increasing use of quantification in all spheres of society is paralleled by the rise of digitalisation. These intertwining developments not only revolutionise data treatment, but also its societal effects. On the one hand, they have wonderfully enabling societal effects. On the other hand, they give rise to complex ethical dilemmas that motivate this call for an ethics of quantification. The central claim of this Comment is that quantification necessarily has two faces: illumination and obfuscation. Aspects that can be socially legitimated are illuminated, while those that cannot be so legitimated are obfuscated. This obfuscation poses ethical problems, hence its effects require rigorous analysis. Three ontologies of quantification are delineated to enable such examination: (i) as the disembodied practice of data processing in the 'ether'-this foregrounds elements of big data and artificial intelligence; (ii) as the situated practice and effects of quantification within societal contexts-this attends to governing subjects through numbers; and (iii) as increasingly incorporated in physical reality-this focuses on governmentality of behaviours and behavioural change as mediated through everyday objects through an 'Internet of Things'. Drawing on scholarship from the emerging sociology of quantification, the ethics of quantification is defined as the iterative illumination of obfuscation in legitimation by quantification. This is key for ensuring contextually desirable illuminating functions of quantification in all three ontologies.

This article addresses the anticipated use and users of smart energy technologies and the contribution of these technologies to energy sustainability. It focuses on smart grids and smart energy meters. Qualitative accounts given by European technology developers and experts reveal how they understand the final use and social impacts of these technologies. The article analyzes these accounts and compares the UK’s smart meter rollout with experiences from other European countries, especially Finland, to provide insights into the later adoption stages of smart energy and how its impacts have evolved. The analysis highlights significant differences in the likely intensity and manner of user engagement with smart grids and meters: depending first on whether we are considering existing technologies or smart technologies that are expected to mature sometime in the next decade, and second on whether the ‘user’ is the user of smart meters or the user of an entire layer of new energy services and applications. By deploying the strategic approach developed in the article, smart grid developers and experts can give more explicit attention to recognizing the descriptions of ‘users’ in smart-grid projects and to the feasibility of these expectations of ‘use’ in comparison to the possibilities and limits of energy services and applications in different country contexts. The examination of user representations can also point out the need for further technology and service development if some of the envisioned user profiles and user actions appear unrealistic for presently available technologies.