Technologies as Political Entities

I am not totally convinced by the argument that the ways we use technologies are necessarily divided into two categories, authoritarian and democratic. When he described how these two categories work as systems, authoritarian being central, powerful, and unstable, and democratic being dispersed and weak but stable, one technology specifically came to mind: the internet. The internet would absolutely seem to be democratic rather than authoritarian, because no one owns or controls the internet. Even those who attempt to do so, such as the Chinese government, fail to do so. However I don’t think that anyone would argue that the internet is a weak system; in fact it is extraordinarily powerful, something that we have only really begun to feel the initial effects of in the last decade. That’s not to say that there are instances of technological artifacts that do fall into these rigidly defined categories, but the idea that there are only these two absolutes is ludicrous.
One part of the Winner reading that I found fascinating was his description of how buildings and infrastructure have been used to achieve certain political and social ends. I’ve never really thought of these technologies as having that sort of power; in my mind they were purely functional in terms of providing space and keeping the weather out, and aesthetic in terms of being beautiful and lavish or ugly and unkempt, depending on how much money the owners had or cared to spend. However the description of Robert Moses’ low hanging overpasses that prevented people using public transportation from reaching his parks made me realize how naive this was of me. The fact that these goals of class division are immortalized in concrete and steel rather than on something as ephemeral and changing as paper and in minds further chills me.