This article analyses the way citizen science as we know it today configures its main aspirations and dynamics as part of an open science system centered on production of and access to data. Seen in this light, we call attention to the risk of citizen science being diverted to a practice of sophisticating data collection and classification and, thus, that the democratic values which underlie the idea of open science become, more than genuine, spectacular. As an alternative, the suggestion proposed – with Alan Irwin (1993) – is to revise the understanding of citizen science as linked to the idea of citizen critique, demand, and confrontation.