12 Do Artifacts Have Politics?

In this article, Langdon Winner raises the seemingly simple question "Do artifacts have politics?" Winner isn't asking whether automobiles are Republican or Democrat but whether artifacts alter the power relationships between people. While the traditional answer is to say that artifacts are value neutral—as in the saying "Guns don't kill people, people kill people"—Winner argues to the contrary, that artifacts are political. He does this by showing how artifacts are integrated into social systems, how they are supported by social arrangements, and in turn how they embody certain values. He contends that artifacts can be political in two important ways. First, the deployment of a technology may become "a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a particular community." Second, artifacts may be inherently political in the sense that they require or are strongly compatible with particular kinds of political arrangements. Winner argues that technology is not simply associated with political order but in some real sense is political order. Technology, at least in some cases, is the method by which society is organized. Although scholars have called into question the specific facts underlying Winner's most compelling example (the Long Island bridges), the story he tells serves as a parable of the political nature of technologies. Winner's analysis points to the ways in which certain values—like racial segregation, freedom, and universal access—can be affected, promoted, or denied, either intentionally or accidentally, through the process of design, construction, and use of a technology.