Do Artifacts Have Politics?

Citation: Langdon Winner (1980) Do Artifacts Have Politics?. Daedalus (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Do Artifacts Have Politics?
Download: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652
Tagged: Sociology (RSS) classic (RSS), Science and Technology Studies (RSS), influential (RSS), social construction (RSS)

Summary

This paper is a summary introduction to a body of theoretical approaches which analyze the "politics" of a technology. Although some scholars assert that technologies are neutral implements and therefore apolitical, others have found that the traits of objects either necessitate or tend to encourage a particular set of values, norms, and ways of organizing human activity. The article includes multiple examples, and describes how each can be said to have a politics.

One example that Winner returns to multiple times in the piece is nuclear weaponry and power generating plants. The atomic age has brought forth technologies which have so much potential for damage to humanity as a whole that they require strict controls and scrutiny -- not only of those who are employed to work with them, but also in all the systems which surround and protect their use. Strict control over human behavior at sufficient scale to ensure safety of the general population, in turn, suggests either an authoritarian system or at least the willingness to tolerate authoritarianism in some circumstances.

Other examples in which artifacts can be observed to have a politics are automation or manufacturing technologies, which decrease the amount of labor or amount of skill required to execute a task, and features of the built environment, which tend to accommodate uses and users differently.