To Mills, the imagination was activated according to the structure of society, conceptualization of “the mechanics by which it is changing” (p. 6), and prevailing “varieties” of individuals of the period. Individuals have personal troubles that can be connected with issues of a public matter. The civic imagination has the potential to be activated around deep societal problems, which may involve institutional crises. The civic imagination is closely connected with participation. Castoriadis (1987)diverged from Marx by believing that not all futures were determined by history.Castoriadis believed that society’s future was collectively created and given traction through the imagination. That is, it was only “through the collective agency of the social imaginary that a society is created, given coherence and identity, and also subjected to auto-alterations” (Gaonkar, 2002, p. 7). To Appadurai (1996), the imagination was also intimately related to action because it was only in the service of fulfilling an as-yet unproven goal that we are driven to act.

Might “utopian realist” be applicable to the practices of civic hackers, intertwined with particular repertoires, technologies, and affective publics? McKenzie Wark (2014) sug-gests that the relationship between utopian and realist might be mutually constitutive rather than dialectical. He re-frames utopia as a realizable fragment or diagram that re-imagines relations. From this perspective, civic hacking gets traction not because they were ever intended to be the sole “solution” to a problem, but they are ways of acting and creating that are immediately apprehensible. Prototypes capture the imagination because they are shards of a possible future and can be created, modified, and argued about (Coleman, 2009).

Civic hackers might be most appropriately described as utopian realists (Giddens, 1990: 154), a term Giddens employed to capture how assuaging negative consequences in a risk society required retaining Marx’s concern of connecting social change to insti-tutional possibilities while leaving behind his formulation of history as determining and reliance on the proletariat as change agents. He positioned utopian realists as sensitive to social change, capable of creating positive models of society, and connecting with life politics.

civic hackers seek to ease societal suffering by bringing the hidden workings of abstract systems to light and improve their functioning. Part of the academic discomfort with recognizing civic hacking might stem from their activities cutting across political categories that have traditionally been passionately defended: unitary and adversary, citizen and consumer, horizontalist and institutionalized, and prefigurative and strategic.