Response to Winner

So the question is, do technologies (or “artifacts” according to Winner) have politics? I don’t believe that any technology has an inherent political skew.  To say that the initial purpose of any technology is to pursue a political motive would be oversimplifying the utility of that technology. I believe that, first and foremost, that the majority of technology is created to solve a problem. I believe that the politics that are then fixated to that technology are based on the application of the technology by humans. Therefore, the human has politics, and not the technology. In my mind, there is the initial purpose and reason for creating the technology, whether it’s to move cars from point A to point B on a freeway, or to pick tomatoes using a machine. Then the application of the technology can achieve a secondary political purpose. In Winner’s example of Robert Moses’ freeway, the secondary political purpose was to discourage buses to maintain a social class bias. The freeway itself does not have politics. The engineer who applied the technology of freeways in a particular way, however, does have politics.

I only began to change my mind when Winner goes on to a discussion about inherently political artifacts, where he distinguishes how different technologies link to specific ways of organizing power and authority. He gives the example of an atom bomb as an inherently political artifact, and how its existence is inherently political because its destructive properties require that there be a centralized authority. I feel like this is a difficult idea to support, since the atom bomb was created by a centralized authority that was already in existence, so it is a somewhat circular idea to state that the atom bomb is inherently political because it requires a centralized authority. The atomic bomb example confused me most of all in the article, but overall I feel like technology is created with the primary, direct purpose, and then the technology is applied by humans to achieve other purposes, i.e., a gun is created to kill something. A secondary purpose is that human can apply that technology to threaten someone, or control a situation. Technology is politically significant, but it does not have its own politics.