Technological Politics (Please see attached for article)? Langdon Winner argues in ‘Do Artifacts have Politics’ that technological artifacts can have political properties. After reviewing his artic

17 Do Artifacts Have Politics?

Langdon Winner

No idea is more provocative in controversies about technology and society 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 to efficiency and productivity and their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority. Since ideas of this kind are a persistent and troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention.

It is no surprise to learn that technical systems of various kinds are deeply interwoven in the conditions of modern politics. The physical arrangements of industrial production, warfare, com- munications, and the like have fundamentally changed the exercise of power and the experience of citizenship. But to go beyond 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; things do not. To discover either virtues or evils in aggregates of steel, plastic, transistors, integrated circuits, chemicals, and the like 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 arti- facts have political qualities: What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic sys- tem 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 corrective to those who focus uncritically upon such things as ‘‘the computer and its social impacts’’ but who fail to look behind technical devices to see the social circumstances of their development, deployment, and use. This view provides an antidote to naı̈ve technological determinism—the idea that technology develops as the sole result of an internal dynamic and then, unmediated by any other influence, molds society to fit its patterns. Those who have not recognized the ways in which technologies are shaped by social and economic forces have not gotten very far.

But the corrective 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—

From Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor, 19–39. Copyright � 1986 by University of Chicago Press. Reprinted by permission.

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C o p y r i g h t 2 0 0 9 . R o w m a n & L i t t l e f i e l d P u b l i s h e r s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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252 Langdon Winner

power holders behind a particular instance of technological change—one will have explained everything of importance. 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 to believe that technology is politically significant in its own right, good reasons why the standard models of social science only go so far in accounting for what is most interesting and troublesome about the subject. Much of modern social and political thought contains recurring statements of what can be called a theory of technological politics, an odd mongrel of notions often crossbred with orthodox liberal, conservative, and socialist philoso- phies.1 The theory of technological politics draws attention to the momentum of large-scale socio- technical systems, to the response of modern societies to certain technological imperatives, and to the ways human ends are powerfully transformed as they are adapted to technical means. This perspective offers a novel framework of interpretation and explanation for some of the more puz- zling patterns that have taken shape in and around the growth of modern material culture. Its start- ing point is a decision to take technical artifacts seriously. Rather than insist that we immediately reduce everything to the interplay of social forces, the theory of technological politics 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 approach identifies certain technologies as political phenomena in their own right. It points us back, to borrow Edmund Husserl’s philosophical injunction, to the things themselves.

In what follows I will outline and illustrate 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 the affairs of 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. Arguments about cases of this kind are much more troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By the term ‘‘politics’’ I mean arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements. For my purposes here, the term ‘‘technology’’ is understood to mean all of modern practical artifice, but to avoid confusion I prefer to speak of ‘‘technologies’’ plural, smaller or larger pieces or systems of hardware of a specific kind.2 My inten- tion is not to settle any of the issues here once and for all, but to indicate their general dimensions and significance.

TECHNICAL ARRANGEMENTS AND SOCIAL ORDER

Anyone who has traveled the highways of America and has gotten used to the normal height of overpasses may well find something a little odd about some of the bridges 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 curb. Even those who happened to notice this structural peculiarity would not be inclined to attach any special meaning to it. In our accustomed way of looking at things such as roads and bridges, we see the details of form as innocuous and seldom give them a second thought.

It turns out, however, that some two hundred or so low-hanging overpasses on Long Island

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Do Artifacts Have Politics? 253

are there for a reason. They were deliberately designed and built that way by someone who wanted to achieve a particular social effect. Robert Moses, the master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and other public works of the 1920s to the 1970s in New York, built his overpasses according to speci- fications that would discourage the presence of buses on his parkways. According to evidence pro- vided by Moses’ biographer, Robert A. Caro, the reasons reflect Moses’ social class bias and racial prejudice. Automobile-owning whites of ‘‘upper’’ and ‘‘comfortable middle’’ classes, as he called them, would be free to use the parkways for recreation and commuting. Poor people and blacks, who normally used public transit, were kept off the roads because the twelve-foot-tall buses could not handle the overpasses. One consequence was to limit access of racial minorities and low- income groups to Jones Beach, Moses’ widely acclaimed public park. Moses made doubly sure of this result by vetoing a proposed extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach.

Robert Moses’ life is a fascinating story in recent U.S. political history. His dealings with mayors, governors, and presidents; his careful manipulation of legislatures, banks, labor unions, the press, and public opinion could be studied by political scientists for years. But the most impor- tant and enduring results of his work are his technologies, the vast engineering projects that give New York much of its present form. For generations after Moses’ death and the alliances he forged have fallen apart, his public works, especially the highways and bridges he built to favor the use of the automobile over the development of mass transit, will continue to shape that city. Many of his monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality, a way of engineering relationships among people that, after a time, became just another part of the land- scape. As New York planner Lee Koppleman told Caro about the low bridges on Wantagh Parkway, ‘‘The old son of a gun had made sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamned park- ways.’’3

Histories of architecture, city planning, and public works contain many examples of physical arrangements with explicit or implicit political purposes. 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 university campuses in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s to defuse student demonstrations. Studies of industrial machines and instruments also turn up interesting political stories, including some that violate our normal expectations about why technological innovations are made in the first place. If we suppose that new technologies are introduced to achieve increased efficiency, the history of technology shows that we will sometimes be disappointed. Technological change expresses a pano- ply of human motives, not the least of which is the desire of some to have dominion over others even though it may require an occasional sacrifice of cost savings and some violation of the normal standard of trying to get more from less.

One poignant illustration can be found in the history of nineteenth-century industrial mecha- nization. At Cyrus McCormick’s reaper manufacturing plant in Chicago in the middle 1880s, pneu- matic molding machines, a new and largely untested innovation, were added to the foundry at an estimated cost of $500,000. The standard economic interpretation would lead us to expect that this step was taken to modernize the plant and achieve the kind of efficiencies that mechanization brings. But historian Robert Ozanne has put the development in a broader context. At the time, Cyrus McCormick II was engaged in a battle with the National Union of Iron Molders. He saw the addition of the new machines as a way to ‘‘weed out the bad element among the men,’’ namely, the skilled workers who had organized the union local in Chicago.4 The new machines, manned by unskilled laborers, actually produced inferior castings at a higher cost than the earlier process. After three years of use the machines were, in fact, abandoned, but by that time they had served their purpose—the destruction of the union. Thus, the story of these technical developments at the

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254 Langdon Winner

McCormick factory cannot be adequately understood outside the record of workers’ attempts to organize, police repression of the labor movement in Chicago during that period, and the events surrounding the bombing at Haymarket Square. Technological history and U.S. political history were at that moment deeply intertwined.

In the examples of Moses’ low bridges and McCormick’s molding machines, one sees the importance of technical arrangements that precede the use of the things in question. It is obvious that technologies can be used in ways that enhance the power, authority, and privilege of some over others, for example, the use of television to sell a candidate. In our accustomed way of thinking technologies are seen as neutral tools that can be used well or poorly, for good, evil, or something in between. But we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given device might have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed uses. Robert Moses’ bridges, after all, were used to carry automobiles from one point to another; McCormick’s machines were used to make metal castings; both technologies, however, encompassed purposes far beyond their immediate use. If our moral and political lan- guage for evaluating technology includes only categories having to do with tools and uses, if it does not include attention to the meaning of the designs and arrangements of our artifacts, then we will be blinded to much that is intellectually and practically crucial.

Because the point is most easily understood in the light of particular intentions embodied in physical form, I have so far offered illustrations that seem almost conspiratorial. But to recognize the political dimensions in the shapes of technology does not require that we look for conscious conspiracies or malicious intentions. The organized movement of handicapped people in the United States during the 1970s pointed out the countless ways in which machines, instruments, and struc- tures of common use—buses, buildings, sidewalks, plumbing fixtures, and so forth—made it impossible for many handicapped persons to move freely about, a condition that systematically excluded them from public life. It is safe to say that designs unsuited for the handicapped arose more from long-standing neglect than from anyone’s active intention. But once the issue was brought to public attention, it became evident that justice required a remedy. A whole range of artifacts have been redesigned and rebuilt to accommodate this minority.

Indeed, many of the most important examples of technologies that have political conse- quences are those that transcend the simple categories ‘‘intended’’ and ‘‘unintended’’ altogether. These are instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others. In such cases it is neither correct nor insight- ful to say, ‘‘Someone intended to do somebody else harm.’’ Rather one must say that the technolog- ical deck has been stacked in advance to favor certain social interests and that some people were bound to receive a better hand than others.

The mechanical tomato harvester, a remarkable device perfected by researchers at the Uni- versity of California from the late 1940s to the present offers an illustrative tale. The machine is able to harvest tomatoes in a single pass through a row, cutting the plants from the ground, shaking the fruit loose, and (in the newest models) sorting the tomatoes electronically into large plastic gondolas that hold up to twenty-five tons of produce headed for canning factories. To accommodate the rough motion of these harvesters in the field, agricultural researchers have bred new varieties of tomatoes that are hardier, sturdier, and less tasty than those previously grown. The harvesters replace the system of handpicking in which crews of farm workers would pass through the fields three or four times, putting ripe tomatoes in lug boxes and saving immature fruit for later harvest.5

Studies in California indicate that the use of the machine reduces costs by approximately five to seven dollars per ton as compared to hand harvesting.6 But the benefits are by no means equally divided in the agricultural economy. In fact, the machine in the garden has in this instance been

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Do Artifacts Have Politics? 255

the occasion for a thorough reshaping of social relationships involved in tomato production in rural California.

By virtue of their very size and cost of more than $50,000 each, the machines are compatible only with a highly concentrated form of tomato growing. With the introduction of this new method of harvesting, the number of tomato growers declined from approximately 4,000 in the early 1960s to about 600 in 1973, and yet there was a substantial increase in tons of tomatoes produced. By the late 1970s an estimated 32,000 jobs in the tomato industry had been eliminated as a direct conse- quence of mechanization.7 Thus, a jump in productivity to the benefit of very large growers has occurred at the sacrifice of other rural agricultural communities.

The University of California’s research on and development of agricultural machines such as the tomato harvester eventually became the subject of a lawsuit filed by attorneys for California Rural Legal Assistance, an organization representing a group of farm workers and other interested parties. The suit charged that university officials are spending tax monies on projects that benefit a handful of private interests to the detriment of farm workers, small farmers, consumers, and rural California generally and asks for a court injunction to stop the practice. The university denied these charges, arguing that to accept them ‘‘would require elimination of all research with any potential practical application.’’8

As far as I know, no one argued that the development of the tomato harvester was the result of a plot. Two students of the controversy, William Friedland and Amy Barton, specifically exoner- ate the original developers of the machine and the hard tomato from any desire to facilitate eco- nomic concentration in that industry.9 What we see here instead is an ongoing social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns, patterns that bear the unmistakable stamp of political and economic power. Over many decades agricultural research and development in U.S. land-grant colleges and universities has tended to favor the interests of large agribusiness concerns.10 It is in the face of such subtly ingrained patterns that opponents of innovations such as the tomato harvester are made to seem ‘‘antitechnology’’ or ‘‘antiprogress.’’ For the harvester is not merely the symbol of a social order that rewards some while punishing others; it is in a true sense an embodiment of that order.

Within a given category of technological change there are, roughly speaking, two kinds of choices that can affect the relative distribution of power, authority, and privilege in a community. Often the crucial decision is a simple ‘‘yes or no’’ choice—are we going to develop and adopt the thing or not? In recent years many local, national, and international disputes about technology have centered on ‘‘yes or no’’ judgments about such things as food additives, pesticides, the building of highways, nuclear reactors, dam projects, and proposed high-tech weapons. The fundamental choice about an antiballistic missile or supersonic transport is whether or not the thing is going to join society as a piece of its operating equipment. Reasons given for and against are frequently as important as those concerning the adoption of an important new law.

A second range of choices, equally critical in many instances, has to do with specific features in the design or arrangement of a technical system after the decision to go ahead with it has already been made. Even after a utility company wins permission to build a large electric power line, impor- tant controversies can remain with respect to the placement of its route and the design of its towers; even after an organization has decided to institute a system of computers, controversies can still arise with regard to the kinds of components, programs, modes of access, and other specific features the system will include. Once the mechanical tomato harvester had been developed in its basic form, a design alteration of critical social significance—the addition of electronic sorters, for exam- ple—changed the character of the machine’s effects upon the balance of wealth and power in Cali- fornia agriculture. Some of the most interesting research on technology and politics at present focuses upon the attempt to demonstrate in a detailed, concrete fashion how seemingly innocuous

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256 Langdon Winner

design features in mass transit systems, water projects, industrial machinery, and other technologies actually mask social choices of profound significance. Historian David Noble has studied two kinds of automated machine tool systems that have different implications for the relative power of man- agement and labor in the industries that might employ them. He has shown that although the basic electronic and mechanical components of the record/playback and numerical control systems are similar, the choice of one design over another has crucial consequences for social struggles on the shop floor. To see the matter solely in terms of cost cutting, efficiency, or the modernization of equipment is to miss a decisive element in the story.11

From such examples I would offer some general conclusions. These correspond to the inter- pretation of technologies as ‘‘forms of life’’ presented earlier, filling in the explicitly political dimensions of that point of view.

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 unconsciously, 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 situated differently and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness. By far the greatest latitude of choice exists the very first time a particu- lar instrument, system, or technique is introduced. Because choices tend to become strongly fixed in material equipment, economic investment, and social habit, the original flexibility vanishes for all practical purposes once the initial commitments are made. In that sense technological innova- tions are similar to legislative acts or political foundings that establish a framework for public order that will endure over many generations. For that reason the same careful attention one would give to the rules, roles, and relationships of politics must also be given to such things as the building of highways, the creation of television networks, and the tailoring of seemingly insignificant features on new machines. The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institu- tions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and semiconductors, nuts and bolts.

INHERENTLY POLITICAL TECHNOLOGIES

None of the arguments and examples considered thus far addresses a stronger, more troubling claim often made in writings about technology and society—the belief that some technologies are by their very nature political in a specific way. According to this view, the adoption of a given techni- cal system unavoidably brings with it conditions for human relationships that have a distinctive political cast—for example, centralized or decentralized, egalitarian or inegalitarian, repressive or liberating. This is ultimately what is at stake in assertions such as those of Lewis Mumford that two traditions of technology, one authoritarian, the other democratic, exist side by side in Western history. In all the cases cited above the technologies are relatively flexible in design and arrange- ment and variable in their effects. Although one can recognize a particular result produced in a particular setting, one can also easily imagine how a roughly similar device or system might have been built or situated with very much different political consequences. The idea we must now examine and evaluate is that certain kinds of technology do not allow such flexibility, and that to choose them is to choose unalterably a particular form of political life.

A remarkably forceful statement of one version of this argument appears in Friedrich Eng- els’s little essay ‘‘On Authority,’’ written in 1872. Answering anarchists who believed that authority is an evil that ought to be abolished altogether, Engels launches into a panegyric for authoritarian-

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Do Artifacts Have Politics? 257

ism, maintaining, among other things, that strong authority is a necessary condition in modern industry. To advance his case in the strongest possible way, he asks his readers to imagine that the revolution has already occurred. ‘‘Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth. Supposing, to adopt entirely the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared or will it have only changed its form?’’12

His answer draws upon lessons from three sociotechnical systems of his day, cotton-spinning mills, railways, and ships at sea. He observes that on its way to becoming finished thread, cotton moves through a number of different operations at different locations in the factory. The workers perform a wide variety of tasks, from running the steam engine to carrying the products from one room to another. Because these tasks must be coordinated and because the timing of the work is ‘‘fixed by the authority of the steam,’’ laborers must learn to accept a rigid discipline. They must, according to Engels, work at regular hours and agree to subordinate their individual wills to the persons in charge of factory operations. If they fail to do so, they risk the horrifying possibility that production will come to a grinding halt. Engels pulls no punches. ‘‘The automatic machinery of a big factory,’’ he writes, ‘‘is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been.’’13

Similar lessons are adduced in Engels’s analysis of the necessary operating conditions for railways and ships at sea. Both require the subordination of workers to an ‘‘imperious authority’’ that sees to it that things run according to plan. Engels finds that far from being an idiosyncrasy of capitalist social organization, relationships of authority and subordination arise ‘‘independently of all social organization, [and] are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.’’ Again, he intends this to be stern advice to the anarchists who, according to Engels, thought it possible simply to eradicate subordination and superordination at a single stroke. All such schemes are nonsense. The roots of unavoidable authori- tarianism are, he argues, deeply implanted in the human involvement with science and technology. ‘‘If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, insofar as he employs them, to a veritable despo- tism independent of all social organization.’’14

Attempts to justify strong authority on the basis of supposedly necessary conditions of techni- cal practice have an ancient history. A pivotal theme in the Republic is Plato’s quest to borrow the authority of technē and employ it by analogy to buttress his argument in favor of authority in the state. Among the illustrations he chooses, like Engels, is that of a ship on the high seas. Because large sailing vessels by their very nature need to be steered with a firm hand, sailors must yield to their captain’s commands; no reasonable person believes that ships can be run democratically. Plato goes on to suggest that governing a state is rather like being captain of a ship or like practicing medicine as a physician. Much the same conditions that require central rule and decisive action in organized technical activity also create this need in government.

In Engels’s argument, and arguments like it, the justification for authority is no longer made by Plato’s classic analogy, but rather directly with reference to technology itself. If the basic case is as compelling as Engels believed it to be, one would exp

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