Do Artifacts Have Politics? Do They? Do They?

No idea is more provocative in controversies about technology and society than the notion that technical things have political qualities.

So reads the first sentence in Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1980). On this point he is certainly right. At stake here is our understanding of power in society, its workings and origins. This is the arena for clashes between social and technological determinists, reducing whatever they can find to a result of either human-to-human interaction or crude materialism (of for example some Marxist kinds equating productive forces with machines and then machines with base and labor relations with superstructure … but that is a somewhat other history). So, what does Winner have to say on the matter?

The argument goes like this: Technology is “politically significant in its own right” (21). Why? Because large-scale sociotechnical systems might have momentum, modern societies might respond to technological imperatives, and human ends are transformed as they are adapted to technical means. (This is like almost a quote …) Just as Johnson in the previous post argued that we should not discriminate nonhuman actors, so says Winner that we should start taking technological artifacts seriously (a somewhat weaker cry, but pointing in the same direction).

There are, according to Winner, roughly two ways in which technological artifacts can “contain political properties” (22): Firstly, they might be the embodiment of certain power relations, enforcing them and giving them structure. The example here is bridges in New York built to only fit cars, not buses, thus letting white upper- and middle class people over, but not working-class black and white people riding on buses. Another example is the mechanical tomato harvester, leading the way to centralization and large scale farming, pushing small farmers to the side and putting farm workers out of labor. There are choices of design being made here, with different effects on social structuring etc. but as time goes this original flexibility vanishes due to fixation in equipment, investment and social habit.

Secondly, and maybe more provocatively, there is the question if there are technologies not allowing for such flexibility. Is, as Engels once argued, large-scale industry in absolute need of centralized, hierarchical organization? Will nuclear power lead to authoritarian state power (and solar power to a democratic Shangri La)? Winner holds the somewhat weaker view that some technologies at least seem to be strongly compatible with undemocratic, centralized, and authoritarian organization, both inside the factory and outside it (in the social factory, that is). It is still (in 1980 at least) an empirical question if such technologies really require the authoritarian organization.

OK, now I need to run of and collect my kids at kindergarten. Let’s finish of as we started, with the last sentences of Winner’s text:

In our times people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accommodate technological innovation while at the same time resisting similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds. If for no other reason than that, it is important for us to achieve a clearer view of these matters than has been our habit so far.

True that (google, facebook, NSA, and so on and so on and so on)!