Reading “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”

Scholarly texts are not always easy to read. An academic book or journal article is often written in a way that’s challenging to those who aren’t fluent in its disciplinary language. Beyond the language and complexity, these works are often long. In my (very) periodic “Reading” series, I offer digested interpretations of works I find important. These are my interpretations, so they’re not authoritative readings (if such a thing is even possible), but I hope they offer an entry into texts that would otherwise be challenging to even begin. It’s a bit like Cliff Notes, but also very much not. My goal isn’t to help you pass the test or do the assignment, but to get you interested enough to, just possibly, give the original a try. Start with my reading, and maybe discover that you’d like to do your own.

Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” is an oldie but a goodie. It was published in 1980, is widely-read, and taught frequently, not specific to one discipline, but in many places where questions of technology and politics overlap. It’s arguably most famous for a parable about some bridges. Inevitably, I’ll write a little about the bridges here, though they won't be my focus. (As an example of how pervasive the bridge parable is, it makes an appearance, Susan Leigh Star’s “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.”)

Politics in things

“Do Artifacts Have Politics?” fits into a long heritage of work on the politics of technology – the politics of technology are not, in 1980, a new question, but an established area of discussion. Winner begins the article by presenting what he frames as a provocation: “that technical things have political qualities,” a state he characterizes as the capacity of those technical things to be judged “for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority” (121). The language Winner uses in his first paragraph already invites the reader to make assumptions about his direction – he presents the idea of the embodiment of politics in technology as having a “persistent and troubling presence” and thus requiring attention. When he gets down to the argument, though, it’s a fairly modest one: Winner’s goal, ultimately, is not to solve the debate over the embedding of politics in technology, but to lay out its parameters.

In the debate on the embedding of politics into technologies, Winner identifies two main “ways in which artifacts can contain political properties” (123). The first of those is that “the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in a particular community” (ibid). The second way is that of “inherently political technologies, man-made systems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships” (ibid). For convenience, I’m going to call these mode one and mode two – mode one is a technology being used to settle an issue, while mode two is a technology that requires or is strongly connected to a certain political system.

The structure of the article is pretty simple. After leading us to these two modes, Winner devotes a few pages to the first way of understanding politics in technology, then a few pages for the second mode, a little bit of wrapping up, and then home in time for dinner. It’s not really a long article, it just looks daunting on the surface. As we enter Winner’s exposition on how the embedding of political choices in technologies can be used to settle issues (mode one), the famous bridges make their appearance.

Those bridges

The bridges are in fact a series of overpasses over roads on Long Island. According to the source used by Winner (The Power Broker by Robert Caro), the overpasses embodied the political desires of Robert Moses, an instrumental figure in urban planning decisions in and around New York City in the mid-20th century. As we learn in the example, these overpasses were designed to be too low for buses to pass underneath, limiting access to a number of public parks to people who owned cars, and excluding those reliant on public transit. The overpasses on the parkways of Long Island represent the first of the two methods: they are a way of settling an issue – in this case, encouraging racial and class segregation at public parks and beaches by making it more difficult for public transit users to get there.

Winner goes on to argue that the power of embedding values and particular social arrangements in a technology is that the technology can persist after its designer has ceased to be politically active in other ways. This is an argument Winner makes about Robert Moses, the initiator of the low overpasses. Moses can continue his influence long after his retirement or death, through the politics embedded in and enacted by his overpasses.

But the overpasses are only one example of this mode one embedding of politics in technology. We also get the story of an end-of-the-19th-century industrialist in Chicago, implementing technologies of automation for political reasons, rather than because the new machines were better or faster than the existing employees. Instead, the machines were a tool in a union-busting effort by the industrialist. Winner neatly ties up the point: “The new machines, manned by unskilled labor, 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” (125).

Recognizing that this argument makes it begin to seem that all politics present in artifacts are there for malevolent reasons, Winner goes on to offer examples of politics which appear in artifacts through a slow process of accretion, rather than as an explicit choice by the designer. Not all of the issue-settling is explicitly intended by the designers of technologies – sometimes it is the result of carelessness, of unconscious bias, or of swimming in the waters of society as it is at a current moment.

Winner offers a caution about how the embedding of politics in technologies can come about, through "instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results counted as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others” (125). This, then, is an example of how a larger imbalance is present in society, leading to an innovation environment in which some groups are routinely favoured over others.

The tomato harvester

After the very important caution about how unequal politics collect and compound, Winner hits us with my favourite example from this article: the mechanized tomato harvester. This machine, researched and refined at a public university in California, transformed tomato harvesting, turning it from a totally manual process requiring huge amounts of human labour, into a process requiring far less labour, and capable of creating huge savings for tomato farmers.

The mechanical tomato harvester and the hard cultivars of tomatoes developed to go along with it, though not designed with this effect in mind, acted as a means of concentrating capital and farm ownership in the Californian tomato industry. As Winner puts it, rather than being a conspiracy or an explicit attempt to concentrate power and wealth into the hands of a smaller number of farm owners, the tomato harvester and its technological/development ecosystem “is an ongoing social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns that bear the unmistakable stamp of political and economic power” (126). The tomato harvester was not designed with malevolence in mind, but instead with a functional desire: make harvesting tomatoes more efficient. It’s a great example of how a focus only on apparently functional issues can still have serious political implications. As Winner points out much later in the article, studying the technology itself is not sufficient – the context also needs to be taken into account. The context of the tomato harvester, not only the harvester itself, led to the privileging of a certain kind of farm, farmer, economic, and political structure.

Many additional nuances follow the parable of the tomato harvester, before Winner wraps up the section with a good reason to pay attention to the politics of technological features: “The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institutions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in the tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and transistors, nuts and bolts” (128). Essentially, if we believe that only politics are political, we’re missing the part of the story (and the decisions we could be contesting) that’s hidden in the artifacts around us.

Artifacts requiring politics

The second mode Winner offers us is, as he writes, “a stronger, more troubling claim” which is ”the belief that some technologies are by their very nature political in a specific way” (128). Basically, some technologies require (and thus, bring with them) a specific sort of politics, or specific political arrangements.

The second section of the article questions whether and how some kinds of technology require a certain kind of politics, “and that to choose them is to choose a particular form of political life” (128). After some historical back-and-forth on the capacity of a technology to require a certain form of social and political organization (with cameos from Marx and Engels), Winner jumps forward in time to what was, in 1980 (and is still/again) an important debate: the merits of renewable energy, in counterpoint to nuclear energy. Winner puts the case of those advocating for solar energy, who argue that it has the capacity to allow decentralization both technically and politically, creating the opportunity for power systems controlled by smaller and more democratic groups. This is contrasted to nuclear energy, which requires rigid, hierarchical, and extremely security-forward organization in order to function, and to be safe in society.

Winner wraps up his rundown of the two modes with a provocation. Some technologies are linked to certain forms of power, but “[t]he important question is: Does this state of affairs derive from an unavoidable social response to intractable properties in the things themselves, or is it instead a pattern imposed independently by a governing body, ruling class, or some other social or cultural institution to further its own purposes?” (131). In short, does the linkage between a certain technology and a certain form of power come from something intrinsically necessary in the technology, or is it coming from somewhere else, imposed externally onto the technology?

The home stretch

As an example of the view that some technologies require certain political or social arrangements, Winner cites Alfred D. Chandler's book, The Visible Hand. Chandler, we are told, provides many examples of the development of hierarchical and rigid structures around technologies, and suggests that these structures are required by those technologies. Winner ask us to question whether the fact that a complex technological system can function within a rigid hierarchy is indicative that it must have that system in order to be effective. This is a bit of a hit-back at Chandler's argument that big systems require rigid hierarchies.

Winner comes in with a real political gut punch, worth citing in full:

It is characteristic of societies based on large, complex technological systems, however, that moral reasons other than those of practical necessity appear increasingly obsolete, ‘idealistic,’ and irrelevant. Whatever claims one may wish to make on behalf of liberty, justice, or equality can be immediately neutralized when confronted with arguments to the effect: ‘Fine, but that’s no way to run a railroad’ (or steel mill, or airline, or communications system, and so on). Here we encounter an important quality in modern political discourse and in the way people commonly think about what measures are justified in response to the possibilities technologies make available. In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity – especially the need to maintain crucial technological systems as smoothly working entities – have tended to eclipse other sorts of moral and political reasoning. (133)

Essentially, watch out for the trap of letting moral issues be swept aside by reasoning which claims to be only functional, but also comes with a certain political structure. This gets followed up with some interesting argumentation on the conflict between how businesses are run and how democracies work, and on the risk that people in power (who run businesses autocratically instead of democratically) may well believe that their way of running things should also be applied to society more broadly. Winner was writing about this risk in 1980, and it has only gotten worse since then.

By page 134, we’re getting into recap territory. Winner sums up the two ways politics can be in artifacts, the two modes that occupied the bulk of the article. He gives us some pointers to follow in our thinking and actions. In the mode of politics in technology which uses design to settle issues, the flexibility of technologies asks “that their consequences for society must be understood with reference to the social actors able to influence which designs and arrangements are chosen” (134).

His call to action for the second mode, in which a certain technology requires a certain political form, is even more urgent. He argues that with these technologies, “the initial choice about whether or not to adopt something is decisive in regard to its consequences. There are no alternative physical designs or arrangements that would make a significant difference; there are, furthermore, no genuine possibilities for creative intervention by different social systems – capitalist or socialist – that could change the intractability of the entity or significantly alter the quality of its political effects” (ibid). In short, if a technology requires certain political structures, we need to think very hard about whether or not to adopt it.

But don’t think that that’s the end. Instead, Winner positions himself as taking a both/and position to the two modes of understanding politics in technology. He argues that both positions can be relevant within even a single technology. We once again meet the example of renewable energy (and a very vivid image): “the social consequences of building renewable energy systems will surely depend on the specific configurations of both hardware and the social institutions created to bring that energy to us. It may be that we will find ways to turn this silk purse into a sow’s ear” (135). Alongside this, he implores us to study technologies with nuance. We must pay attention to both the object and the context. One object can have very different structures, depending on its context of use, and our understanding of the object will not be complete unless we take context into account.

In a documentary on the overpasses of Long Island, Winner states a clear position: he is not trying to simply tell a story or unravel a mystery, he is trying to push a politically-aware, activist position. Understanding is not a goal only for its own sake, but also for what actions it can lead to. So it’s fitting that “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” ends with the following: “In our times people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accord with technological innovation at the same time they would resist similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds” (135). It may take a second for that to land. Winner is reminding us that if we take for granted the politics that can be embedded in objects (and the differing modes by which they can be embedded), we are letting in through the back door something that we would not admit by the front. Decisions which appear to be functional are political, and technologies can be Trojan horses for political structures and decisions that we then need to live with.

References

Caro, R. (1974). The Power broker. Knopf.

Chandler, A. (1977). The Visible hand. Belknap Press.

Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121-136.