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Summary Do artifacts have politics
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Summary of 2 pages for the course Technology Dynamics at TU Delft
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Highlight Ideas from “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” For the author there is no idea more provocative than the notion that artifacts have political
qualities, this is, the claim that machines, structures and systems of modern material culture can
be accurately judged for the ways they can embody specific forms of power and authority.
An eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political language is not exclusive of critics of
“large-scale high-technology systems”. Boosters of technological growth have insisted that
science and industry made available were the best guarantees of democracy, freedom and social
justice.
It is no surprise that technical systems of various kinds 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 completely mistaken. People
have politics, not things.
Social Determination of Technology(SDT) : What matters is not technology itself, but the social
or economic system in which it is embedded. SDT is an antidote to those who focus uncritically
on such things as “the computer and its social impacts” but who fail to look behind technical
things to notice the social circumstances of their development and use.
Technological Determinism (TD): 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.
The theory of Technological Politics draws attention to the momentum of large-scale
sociotechnical systems to the response of modern societies to certain technological imperatives,
and to the all too common sings of the adaptation of human ends to technical means. It suggest
that we pay attention to the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those
characteristics. This perspective identifies certain technologies as a political phenomena in their
own way.
Example 1: Architect Robert Moses design some of the bridges over the parkways of Long
Island, this overpasses are extraordinarily low . This was deliberately done so that public buses
should not transit on the parkways and so that poor people (most of them African-Americans)
wouldn’t get mixed with the upper middle class white Americans.
Technological change expresses a panoply of human motives, not the least of which is the desire
to have some dominion over the others, even though it may require an occasional sacrifice of
cost-cutting and some violence to the norm of getting more from less.
Example 2: Cyrus McCormicks, a manufacturing plant, buy some new machines for a high cost of
investment, not because of the higher productivity rates vs human labor, but because the
owners of the factory wanted to get rid of the workers union. A few years later after the union
didn’t have any more power, they started hiring human labor again.
If our moral and political language for evaluating technology includes only categories having to
do with tools and uses, if it does not include attention to the meaning of designs and
arrangements of our artifacts, then we will be blinded to much that is intellectually and
practically crucial.
Example 3: Some researchers from the university of California developed a machine that
increase productivity of tomato harvesting replacing almost all the human labor needed for the
job. 32000 jobs were lost as productivity increased rapidly. The University was suit, they denied
the charges by arguing that to accept them “would require the elimination of all research with
any potential practical application”.
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