Do Artifacts Have Politics?

Our past tells us about our present—how it was just one of many possible futures claimed by those who came before. In this context, both the creation and use of technology express a kind of power relation.

The revolutions in biotech and infotech are currently being started by engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists who are hardly aware of the political implications of their decisions, and who certainly don’t represent anyone. Can parliaments and political parties take matters into their own hands? At present it does not seem

The idea of technological change as quasi-autonomous, driven by some process of autopoesis or self-organization, allows many aspects of contemporary social reality to be accepted as necessary, unalterable circumstances, akin to facts of nature. In the false placement of today’s most visible products and devices within an explanatory lineage that in

Perhaps leaning so hard as I have on democracy will only cause it to snap. Perhaps we need another word; perhaps the word can be refurbished and put to better use. Either way, technology is sure to be drafted in the cause. A further fruit of Langdon Winner’s reflections on artifacts and politics is an observation about the amnesia that surrounds in

the problem is less about inventing new ways to do things than about building the political power to demand them.