Langdon Winner “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”

Langdon Winner “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? (Winter,1980), pp. 121-136

“I shall offer outlines and illustrations of two ways in which artifacts can contain political properties. First are instances in which the invention, design, or arrangement 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 systems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships.”

Taking an example of a bridge on Long Island, he writes: “In our accustomed way of looking at things like roads and bridges we see the details of form as innocuous, and seldom give them a second thought.” (123) Low overpasses in order not to let buses (associated back then with Black Americans) pass through them, only private cars with White Americans. “One can point to Baron Haussmann's broad Parisian thoroughfares, engineered at Louis Napoleon's direction to prevent any recurrence of street fighting of the kind that took place during the revolution of 1848. Or one can visit any number of grotesque concrete buildings and huge plazas constructed on American university campuses during the late 1960s and early 1970s to defuse student demonstrations.” (124) History of technology is similar, as new machines and tools were invented and introduced not only to make the industrial process more effective, but also in order to secure current regimes and practices of domination.

Takes an example of a tomato harvesting machine to argue that development of new technologies is “an ongoing social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns that bear the unmistak able stamp of political and economic power.” (126)

“The things we call "technologies" are ways of building order in our world. Many technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of ordering human activity. Consciously or not, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time. In the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are differently situated and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness.” (127) This is totally true for Soviet history as well. Inefficient industry was instrumental for the preservation of bureaucracy which could not be challenged by other social groups; hence inefficient industry was reproduced to the degree of idiocy, whereas efficient solutions were carefully uprooted. And modelling or even imagining “future” technologies was a way of symbolic building of a better, more efficient world, in which Soviet technical intelligentsia hoped to occupy a more prominent place, replacing bureaucracy.

“Taking the most obvious example, the atom bomb is an inherently political artifact. As long as it exists at all, its lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command closed to all influences that might make its workings unpredictable. The internal social system of the bomb must be authoritarian; there is no other way.” (131)  Winner then develops the argument and claims that certain artifacts do require certain political and social conditions for them to emerge; once they emerge, they start reproducing (contribute to reproducing) of these conditions (131-132).

“Alfred D. Chandler in The Visible Hand, a monumental study of modern business enterprise, presents impressive documentation to defend the hypothesis that the construction and day-to-day operation of many systems of production, transportation, and communication in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries require the development of a particular social form – a large-scale centralized, hierarchical organization administered by highly skilled managers.” (131)