Do Artifacts Have Politics?
Do Artifacts Have Politics?
Author(s): Langdon Winne
Source: Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? (Winter,
1980), pp XXXXXXXXXX
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences
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LANGDON WINNER
Do Artifacts Have Politics?
In controversies about technology and society, there is no idea more pro
vocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is
the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture
can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and pro
ductivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects,
ut also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and
authority. Since ideas of this kind have a persistent and troubling presence in
discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention.1
Writing in Technology and Culture almost two decades ago, Lewis Mumford
gave classic statement to one version of the theme, arguing that "from
late neo
lithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have
ecu
ently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the
first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other
man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable."2 This thesis
stands at the heart of Mumford's studies of the city, architecture, and the his
tory of technics, and mi
ors concerns voiced earlier in the works of Peter
Kropotkin, William Mo
is, and other nineteenth century critics of industrial
ism. More recently, antinuclear and prosolar energy movements in Europe and
America have
adopted
a similar notion as a centerpiece in their arguments.
Thus environmentalist Denis Hayes concludes, "The increased deployment of
nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe
eliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible
only in a totalitarian state." Echoing the views of many proponents of appropri
ate technology and the soft energy path, Hayes contends that "dispersed solar
sources are more compatible than centralized technologies with social equity,
freedom and cultural pluralism."3
An eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political language is by no
means the exclusive property of critics of large-scale high-technology systems.
A long lineage of boosters have insisted that the "biggest and best" that science
and industry made available were the best guarantees of democracy, freedom,
and social justice. The factory system, automobile, telephone, radio, television,
the space program, and of course nuclear power itself have all at one time or
another been described as democratizing, liberating forces. David Lilienthal, in
T.V.A.: Democracy on the March, for example, found this promise in the phos
121
122 LANGDON WINNER
phate fertilizers and electricity that technical progress was
inging to rural
Americans during the 1940s.4 In a recent essay, The Republic of Technology,
Daniel Boorstin extolled television for "its power to disband armies, to cashier
presidents,
to create a whole new democratic world?democratic in ways never
efore imagined, even in America."5 Scarcely a new invention comes along that
someone does not proclaim it the salvation of a free society.
It is no surprise to learn that technical systems of various kinds are deeply
interwoven in the conditions of modern politics. The physical a
angements of
industrial production, warfare, communications, and the like have fundamen
tally changed the exercise of power and the experience of citizenship. But to go
eyond this obvious fact and to argue that certain technologies in themselves have
political properties seems, at first glance, completely mistaken. We all know
that people have politics, not things. To discover either virtues or evils in aggre
gates of steel, plastic, transistors, integrated circuits, and chemicals seems
just plain wrong, a way of mystifying human artifice and of avoiding the true
sources, the human sources of freedom and oppression, justice and injustice.
Blaming the hardware appears even more foolish than blaming the victims when
it comes to judging conditions of public life.
Hence, the stern advice commonly given those who flirt with the notion that
technical artifacts have political qualities: What matters is not technology itself,
ut the social or economic system in which it is embedded. This maxim, which
in a number of variations is the central premise of a theory that can be called
the social determination of technology, has an obvious wisdom. It serves as a
needed co
ective to those who focus uncritically on such things as "the comput
er and its social impacts" but who fail to look behind technical things to notice
the social circumstances of their development, deployment, and use. This view
provides an antidote to naive technological determinism?the idea that tech
nology develops as the sole result of an internal dynamic, and then, unmediated
y any other influence, molds society to fit its patterns. Those who have not
ecognized the ways in which technologies are shaped by social and economic
forces have not gotten very far.
But the co
ective has its own shortcomings; taken literally, it suggests that
technical things do not matter at all. Once one has done the detective work
necessary to reveal the social origins?power holders behind a particular in
stance of technological change?one will have explained everything of impor
tance. This conclusion offers comfort to social scientists: it validates what they
had always suspected, namely, that there is nothing distinctive about the study
of technology in the first place. Hence, they can return to their standard models
of social power?those of interest group politics, bureaucratic politics, Marxist
models of class struggle, and the like?and have everything they need. The
social determination of technology is, in this view, essentially no different from
the social determination of, say, welfare policy
or taxation.
There are, however, good reasons technology has of late taken on a special
fascination in its own right for historians, philosophers, and political scien
tists; good reasons the standard models of social science only go
so far in ac
counting for what is most interesting and troublesome about the subject. In
another place I have tried to show why so much of modern social and political
thought contains recu
ing statements of what can be called
a theory of tech
DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? 123
nological politics, an odd mongrel of notions often cross
ed with orthodox
liberal, conservative, and socialist philosophies.6 The theory of technological
politics draws attention to the momentum of large-scale sociotechnical systems,
to the response of modern societies to certain technological imperatives, and to
the all too common signs of the adaptation of human ends to technical means. In
so doing it offers a novel framework of interpretation and explanation for some
of the more puzzling patterns that have taken shape in and around the growth of
modern material culture. One strength of this point of view is that it takes
technical artifacts seriously. Rather than insist that we immediately reduce
everything to the interplay of social forces, it suggests that we pay attention to
the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those characteristics.
A necessary complement to, rather than a replacement for, theories of the social
determination of technology, this perspective identifies certain technologies as
political phenomena in their own right. It points us back, to bo
ow Edmund
Husserl's philosophical injunction, to the things themselves.
In what follows I shall offer outlines and illustrations of two ways in which
artifacts can contain political properties. First are instances in which the inven
tion, design, or a
angement of a specific technical device or system becomes a
way of settling an issue in a particular community. Seen in the proper light,
examples of this kind are fairly straightforward and easily understood. Second
are cases of what can be called inherently political technologies, man-made sys
tems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds
of political relationships. Arguments about cases of this kind are much more
troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By "politics," I mean a
ange
ments of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that
take place within those a
angements. For my purposes, "technology" here is
understood to mean all of modern practical artifice,7 but to avoid confusion I
prefer to speak of technology, smaller or larger pieces or systems of hardware
of a specific kind. My intention is not to settle any of the issues here once and for
all, but to indicate their general dimensions and significance.
Technical A
angements as Forms of Order
Anyone who has traveled the highways of America and has become used to
the normal height of overpasses may well find something a little odd about some
of the
idges over the parkways on Long Island, New York. Many of the
overpasses are extraordinarily low, having as little as nine feet of clearance at the
cu
. Even those who happened to notice this structural peculiarity would not
e inclined to attach any special meaning