Do Artifacts Have Politics?

Text Exploration

In this text, Winner argues two main ways to interpret the relationship between artifacts and politics. The first form of interpretation is in examining the specific features of a technology or technologically-rich artifact. The more flexible forms of technical capabilities require people to shape them—and the people likely have a political perspective and agenda. The second form of interpretation is to examine properties of a technology that are strongly or even innately tied to an authoritarian or autocratic approach in order to function successfully. For Winner, both forms of interpretation are required to better respond to the controversies about technology and society, and to better shape the technologies that we want to include on our lives.

Winner discounts the idea that a technology itself—the literal and physical aspects of it, such as a blade or a tube—in infused with political meaning, which he feels is commonly argued; he also discounts the simplicity of the common response to this claim, which is that the technology is irrelevant, as compared to the social and economic systems in which it is embedded. The first he views as “just plain wrong,” while the second is problematic because it “suggests that technical things do not matter at all.” Winner indicates that there are alternative perspectives on how technology and politics are intertwined (technology as “all of modern practical artifice,” and politics as “arrangements of power and authority.”)

One of these alternative perspectives is to consider the way technology is arranged, who is doing the arranging, and why they are selecting a given arrangement. The racist agenda of Robert Moses is used to describe how a technology of transport (specifically, bridges) was arranged in such a way as to prohibit black people from accessing public areas. Similarly, management at an executive plant selected machinery to purposefully remove union workers. The technology itself might be seen as benign, but the selection and arrangement of it is purposeful and in both examples, in support of a political agenda rather than a utilitarian optimization. The development of ADA requirements is seen as a positive example of the arranging of technology in support of a political agenda (although selecting this example may trivialize the grassroots effort of organization in support of a larger cause, where meaningful collaboration likely provided a more substantive lever for change than the arrangement of concrete ramps or height regulations.) Related to the intertwined technological arrangement and politics is the idea that a selected technology continues to be rearranged after it has been “installed,” and at this point, constraints make large-scale changes difficult and instead demand detailed tuning in its rearrangement.

Winner argues a second way to consider and interpret technology and politics: by questioning if some technologies are inherently political, and primarily political in support of an autocratic form of control. Plato answered these questions, but focused less on the issue of technology and more on the issue of democracy, by indicating “it a practical necessity that a ship at sea have one captain, and an unquestioningly obedient crew.” If the various technologies have been assembled into one of sea voyage, logistics, product transportation, and so-on, the broader “technology of sailing in a ship” has an implicit need for a non-equitable politic.

Engel also recognized the social relations that are required in large-scale systems like factories and railways, and argued that based simply on the complexity and scale of these technologies, some form of oversight-through-power is required for sustained operation. The most vivid example offered is the atomic bomb, which the author recognizes is “a special case,” but clearly could not be created, implemented, managed, or maintained if all participants involved were considered equal.

It is overly simplistic to claim technology is apolitical, or to claim that it is embedded with agenda and naturally leads to inequity. Instead, Winner argues that a considered attempt to understand how technologies become un-neutral means looking at how technology features are arranged, and how some technologies are, by necessity, political and argument provoking. It is likely the intertwining of these facets that highlights technological intrusion likely to cause dissent and controversy.