“Do Artifacts Have Politics?” by Langdon Winner. A reflection.

Langdon Winner is a political theorist whose work focuses on contemporary political thought, race, technology, and social theory. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” is a journal article by Winner published in 1980 where he first claims that that artifacts, intended as technical objects, have political properties and embody forms of authority and subordination. Winner suggests that we pay close attention to the properties of the technologies surrounding us and the meaning of those properties.

Winner provides examples of technical systems which at first sight may not explicitly express any form of political intent. But have, in reality, been designed to produce concrete social consequences. See the parkways erected around Long Island by Robert Moses in the 1930s and the introduction of the Mechanical Tomato Harvester in 1949.

These examples prove how some technologies have, from the outset, been deployed to discriminate, pose threats, and maintain a regime of power where skilled leaders are those making choices. Workers are not given the right to participate in the decision-making process, which rules how technology influences the way people connect with each other.

While some artifacts are widely believed to require social structures in which those can operate, others are thought to work well in conjunction with specific systems of power and authority (Winner, 1980). However, Winner states that certain technologies are inherently autocratic and must require particular social structures for their implementation. The atom bomb is one of those. On the other hand, solar power is far more decentralized and doesn’t represent a security risk — it is inherently democratic and populist (Innovation Group, University of California, n.d.).

Bibliography / Read More:

Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics?. Daedalus, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? (Winter, 1980), [online] Vol. 109,(№1), pp.pp. 121–136. Available at: http://innovation.ucsb.edu/wp-content/upload/2010/02/Winner-Do-Artifacts-Have-Politics-1980.pdf [Accessed 2 Oct. 2018].

Innovation Group · University of California, Santa Barbara. (n.d.). Innovation Group — Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”. [online] Available at: http://innovate.ucsb.edu/463-langdon-winner-do-artifacts-have-politics [Accessed 2 Oct. 2018].

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