This article’s existing Chinese translation appears in Wu Laoshi’s edited *Lectures on Philosophy of Technology*, translated by Liu Guoqi. That version is basically accurate and readable, though it still has many small problems. When I translated it, I mainly rendered it myself first and then revised it with reference to that translation. Although I did consult the existing Chinese version, this is after all my first complete translated work. Now that this course’s grades have come out, I might as well post the assignment here for the archive.
The electronic edition of the English original can be found at: http://sts.nthu.edu.tw/tsts/trans/articles/
Do artifacts have politics?
Langdon Winner
Translated by Gu E
Among the many debates about technology and society, nothing is more provocative than the idea that “technical things have political qualities.” The controversial claim is that, to properly judge the machines, structures, and systems in modern material culture, one must take account not only of the efficiencies and productivities they contribute, and of their positive and negative environmental effects, but also of the ways they embody particular forms of power and authority. Since views of this sort keep turning up in discussions of the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention.
Lewis Mumford gave a classic formulation of this theme in the early 1960s, when he argued that “From the late Neolithic age in the Near East to the present, two technologies have existed side by side, one authoritarian, the other democratic. The first is system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable; the second is man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.” This argument rests on Mumford’s broader concerns in his studies of the history of cities, architecture, and craft, and it also reflects the concerns of earlier nineteenth-century critics of the industrial system such as Peter Kropotkin and William Morris. In the 1970s, the antinuclear and pro-solar movements in Europe and the United States adopted similar ideas as central to their case. According to the environmentalist Denis Hayes: “The increasing deployment of nuclear power equipment will inevitably bring society ever closer to authoritarianism. In fact, the only type of country in which it is possible to depend safely on nuclear power as a major source of energy is an authoritarian one.” Echoing the views of many advocates of “appropriate technology” and “the soft energy path,” Hayes argued: “Compared to centralized technologies, decentralized solar resources are more compatible with a fair, free society and a diverse culture.”
The desire to read political meaning into technical artifacts is by no means the exclusive property of critics of large-scale, high-tech systems. Among the enthusiastic champions of such systems there is also a large camp that insists the greatest and best things science and industry can bring about are precisely the best guarantees of democracy, freedom, and social justice. The factory system, automobiles, telephones, radio, television, the space program, and of course nuclear power—all of these technologies have at one time or another been described as forces advancing democracy and freedom. For example, David Lilienthal’s *T.V.A.: Democracy on the March* found in phosphate fertilizer and electricity the prospect of technological progress bringing democracy and freedom to rural America in the 1940s. Thirty years later, Daniel Boorstin’s *The Republic of Technology* celebrated the power of television “to dissolve armies, dismiss presidents, create a whole new democratic world—indeed, a democratic world such as people had never imagined, even in America.” Hardly any new invention has not been proclaimed a savior of the free society.
It is hardly surprising that a wide variety of technical systems are deeply intertwined with many circumstances of modern politics. Industrial production, warfare, transportation and communication systems, and other similar physical arrangements have fundamentally altered the ways power is exercised and citizens participate. But if one goes beyond this obvious fact and further claims that certain technologies themselves possess political properties, that at first glance seems completely wrong. We all know that people have politics; things do not[1]. To find good or evil in steel, plastic, transistors, integrated circuits, chemicals, and the like appears plainly mistaken, and a seductive trick that lets human beings—the true sources of freedom and oppression, justice and injustice—off the hook. When it comes to adjudicating the condition of public life, to denounce artifacts seems even sillier than to denounce the victims.
Accordingly, those who too lightly toy with the notion that technical artifacts have politics are usually given a serious warning: the problem is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which technology is embedded. This maxim, in its many variants, is the primary premise of what one might call the social determinist theory of technology, and it is of course sensible. For those who uncritically focus on things like “computers and their social impacts” while failing to notice the social setting that makes it possible for technological devices to be developed, deployed, and used, this maxim can provide a necessary correction. It supplies an antidote to naïve technological determinists—those who think that technology, as the sole result of some intrinsic dynamic mechanism, molds society into whatever shape suits it, without mediation by any other forces. Those who do not recognize that technology is in various ways shaped by social and economic forces have not achieved a truly deep understanding.
Yet this corrective has its own defect—namely, it suggests that artifacts are not a problem at all. Once someone has done the investigation necessary to uncover the “social origins” of a particular technical change (the powers that be behind it), he has explained all that matters. This conclusion allows social scientists to breathe easy; they confirm what they had reason to suspect all along, namely that the study of technology is nothing special from the outset. From then on, they can return to their standard models for dealing with problems of social power—interest-group politics, bureaucratic politics, Marxist models of class struggle, and the like—and these will suffice for all their needs. On this view, social determinism of technology is no different in essence from social determinism of, say, welfare policy or tax systems.
And yet there are good reasons to believe that technology itself really does have political significance, which is precisely why the standard models of social science go only so far in explaining the most interesting and difficult things in the topic of technology. A theory that might be called “technological politics” recurs in many modern social and political ideas—a curious hybrid often compounded out of orthodox liberal, conservative, and socialist philosophical views. This theory of technological politics focuses attention on the dynamics of large-scale sociotechnical systems, on the responses of modern societies to certain technical imperatives, and on those situations in which human purposes are forcibly reshaped to fit technological means. This perspective provides a distinctive framework for explaining and accounting for some of the more puzzling patterns that have emerged with modern material culture. Its starting point is the resolve to take technical artifacts seriously. Rather than insisting that everything be reduced directly to the interplay of social forces, technological politics invites us to attend to the characteristics of technical objects and what those characteristics mean. As a necessary supplement to, rather than a replacement for, social determinism of technology, this approach regards certain technologies themselves as political phenomena. Borrowing Edmund Husserl’s philosophical injunction—it directs us to return to the things themselves.
In what follows I shall sketch and illustrate two ways in which artifacts can contain political properties. The first consists of cases in which the invention, design, or arrangement of a particular technical device or system becomes a means by which a particular social group settles an issue in the affairs of a particular community[2]; with the proper specification, this sort of example is fairly easy to understand. The second consists of what may be called “inherently political technologies”[3]—artificial systems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, certain political relationships. Discussion of such cases will be much more troublesome, but also closer to the heart of the matter. By “politics” I mean arrangements of power and authority in human associations, as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements. For my purposes here, “technology” is understood to mean all modern practical artifice, though to avoid confusion I would prefer to use the plural form “technologies” to designate the larger or smaller components of a particular artifact or entire system. I do not pretend to settle all questions once and for all here, but only to indicate their rough contours and significance.
Technical Arrangements and Social Order
People accustomed to the normal height of overpasses on American highways will find certain bridges crossing parkways on Long Island, New York, a bit strange; many of the overpasses are exceptionally low, with a clearance of only 9 feet. Someone who happens to notice this curious structure will not feel that there is any special significance to the matter; in the way we normally look at things like roads and bridges, details of structure seem harmless enough, and rarely does one bother to reconsider them.
Yet the fact is that there is a reason Long Island has those roughly 200 low-hanging overpasses. They were intentionally designed and built by someone to achieve a particular social effect. Robert Moses, the builder who from the 1920s through the 1970s was constructing roads, parks, bridges, and other public works in New York, had these overpasses built according to a plan to keep buses off his parkways. According to evidence presented by Moses’s biographer Robert A. Caro, the reasons for this reflect Moses’s class bias and racism. The white “superior” and “comfortable middle” who, in his words, owned automobiles would use the parkways freely for leisure and commuting; the poor and Black people who usually relied on public transportation would be kept off the roads, because twelve-foot-high buses could not pass under the overpasses. The result was to limit access to Jones Beach, the much-acclaimed park Moses designed, for those minority and low-income groups. To make this outcome doubly certain, Moses also vetoed a proposal to extend the Long Island Rail Road to Jones Beach.
Moses’s life is a fascinating episode in modern American political history. How he bargained with mayors, governors, and presidents; how he carefully manipulated legislatures, banks, unions, newspapers, and public opinion—all this has given political scientists plenty to study for years. But the most important and far-reaching results of his work were his technological creations—the enormous engineering projects that made New York what it is now. In the generations after Moses died and the coalition he had forged had unraveled, his public works, especially his road and bridge construction that promoted the use of private automobiles rather than public transportation, would continue to shape the city. Many of his grand reinforced-concrete structures were embodiments of systematic social inequality, a way of designing the relations among people, and after a time they also became part of the urban landscape. As Lee Koppleman, a New York planner, told Caro about the low bridges on the Wantagh Parkway: “That old bastard was sure the buses would never be able to use his damn parkway.”
There are many other examples in the history of architecture, urban planning, and public works of technical arrangements that bear explicit or implicit political purposes. One might note the broad boulevards (abroad)[4] Baron Haussmann designed and built in Paris under Louis Napoleon’s direction in order to prevent a repeat of the street fighting of the 1848 Revolution. Or one might notice the many bizarre concrete buildings and huge plazas erected on American university campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which were designed to dampen student demonstrations. Interesting political stories can also be found in the study of industrial machinery and instruments, some of which defy our usual assumptions about why technical innovation occurs in the first place—if we expect new technologies always to be introduced in order to achieve greater efficiency, then the history of technology will sometimes disappoint us. Technological change expresses an entire set of human motives, including especially the desire to dominate others—even when, if necessary, one must pay any price for it and depart from the usual norm of “trying to make more.”
There is a poignant example in the history of nineteenth-century industrial mechanization. In the mid-1880s, in Cyrus McCormick’s harvester factory in Chicago, pneumatic molding machines—a new and largely untested invention—were introduced into the foundry at a cost estimated at $500,000. The standard economic explanation would lead us to assume that this measure was intended to modernize the workshop and obtain some of the efficiencies of mechanization. But the historian Robert Ozanne places this development in a broader context. At the time, McCormick II was busy at war with the National Union of Iron Molders. He saw the introduction of the new machines as a way to “get rid of the scabs,” aimed at the skilled workers organized by the Chicago unions. The new machines, operated by unskilled labor, actually produced inferior castings at a higher cost than the earlier production process. In fact, the machines were abandoned after three years of use, but by then they had done their work of destroying the unions. Thus, separated from the workers’ attempts to organize, the police repression of the Chicago labor movement during that period, and the events surrounding the Haymarket Riot[5], the story of technological development in McCormick’s factory cannot be adequately understood. The history of technology and the political history of the United States were then deeply entangled.
In examples such as Moses’s low bridges and McCormick’s molding machines, one sees the importance of technical arrangements as something to consider before talking about the use of things. Clearly, technology can be used as a means of strengthening some people’s power, authority, and privilege over others—for example, television can be used to sell a candidate. Our habitual line of thought regards technology as neutral tools, which can be properly or improperly used for good, for evil, or for something in between. But we usually do not stop to ask whether a particular device may have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a series of important consequences that are logically and temporally prior to the uses it is said to have after all, Moses’s bridges were meant to carry automobiles from one place to another; McCormick’s machines were meant to manufacture metal castings. Yet both technologies embodied purposes far beyond their immediate uses. If the ethical and political language with which we evaluate technology includes only categories related to tools and uses, and does not attend to the design and arrangement of these artifacts, we will be blind to many things of decisive intellectual and practical importance.
It is easiest to understand the issue starting from the embodiment of a specific intention in physical form, so thus far I have given examples that seem almost conspiratorial. But to recognize the political face of technology, we do not need to look for plotting or malice. In the 1970s, the organized disability rights movement in the United States pointed out that in the everyday use of machines, devices, and structures—buses, buildings, sidewalks, plumbing equipment, and so on—there were countless places where disabled people could not move about freely, producing a condition in which they were systematically excluded from public life. It is fair to say that the designs inappropriate to disabled people arose more from long-standing neglect than from anyone’s scheme. But once this issue drew public attention, a just demand for some corrective naturally followed. Entire series of artifacts have since been redesigned and rebuilt to accommodate these minority groups.
Indeed, many important cases of technology’s having political consequences fall outside the simple categories of “intentional” or “unintentional.” In these instances, the actual course of technological development is so thoroughly tilted in a particular direction that the results it so often produces are hailed by some social interest groups as marvelous breakthroughs, while for others they presage overwhelming defeat. In such cases, to claim that “some people deliberately set out to harm others” is neither appropriate nor insightful. Rather, one should say that a technological framework favorable to certain social interest groups has already been laid down, and that some people are destined to receive more support from it than others.
The story of the tomato harvester, that remarkable machine that researchers at the University of California have been steadily improving since the late 1940s, provides an example. This machine can harvest tomatoes in rows, cutting the crop from the ground, shaking the fruit loose, and electronically (in the newest models) sorting the tomatoes into huge 25-ton plastic gondolas for transport to the cannery. To accommodate the rough motions of these harvesters in the fields, agronomists bred new tomato varieties that were sturdier and firmer than the earlier ones, though inferior in taste. These harvesters replaced hand-picking methods, in which gangs of farmworkers would go through the fields again and again, placing ripe tomatoes into crates while leaving unripe fruit for a later pass. Studies in California showed that, compared with hand harvesting, using such machines could reduce the cost per ton of tomatoes by about five to seven dollars. But these benefits were by no means distributed equally across the agricultural economy. In fact, the machines in the orchards became the catalyst for a thorough transformation of the social relations involved in tomato production in rural California.
Because they are so large, and because each costs more than $50,000, these machines are suitable only for tomato cultivation on highly intensified farms. With the introduction of this new harvesting method, the number of tomato growers fell from about 4,000 in the 1960s to only around 600 in 1973, while tomato output rose dramatically. By the late 1970s, as a direct consequence of mechanization, an estimated 32,000 jobs had been lost in the tomato industry. While the giant growers benefited from the surge in productivity, other agricultural groups became the victims.
The University of California’s research and development of tomato harvesters and other agricultural machines eventually became the subject of lawsuits by attorneys from California Rural Legal Assistance, an organization representing farmworkers and related interests. The suit charged that university officials had spent taxpayers’ money on projects that benefited only a handful of private interest groups, while causing widespread harm to farmworkers, small farmers, consumers, and rural California, and it asked the court to order these activities halted. The university denied the charges, arguing that accepting them “would abolish all research work that could possibly lead to practical application.”
As far as I know, no one would claim that the development of the tomato harvester was the result of a conspiracy. Two researchers on the controversy, William Friedland and Amy Barton, went out of their way to clear the harvester’s and the new tomato varieties’ original developers of blame; they had no desire whatsoever to promote economic concentration in that industry. What we see here is an ongoing social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate interests reinforce one another within a stable pattern, a pattern unmistakably marked by political and economic power. For decades, agricultural research at U.S. universities, funded by the state through land grants, has increasingly been oriented toward the interests of large-scale agribusiness. Faced with this subtly entrenched pattern, people who resist new inventions such as the tomato harvester appear to be “anti-technology” or “anti-progress.” Since the harvester is not merely a symbol of a social order that enriches some and penalizes others, in a sense it really is the embodiment of that order.
Within a particular technological change, roughly speaking, there are two kinds of choice that may affect the relative distribution of power, authority, and privilege in a community. Usually, the crucial decision is a simple yes-or-no choice: do we want to develop and adopt this thing? In recent years, many local, national, and international disputes over technology have revolved around judgments of the “yes or no” sort concerning things such as food additives, pesticides, highway construction, nuclear reactors, dam projects, high-tech weapons, and so on. The basic decision about an antiballistic missile or a supersonic transport is whether to let this thing join society and become part of its operating mechanism; reflection on whether to adopt or reject these technologies is often just as important as deliberation about whether to adopt some important new law.
In many instances, a second kind of choice is equally crucial: once we have already decided to accompany ourselves with some technological system, we must then deal with the various specific aspects of that system’s design and configuration. Even after a public utility company has won approval to build a large transmission line, important disputes may remain over how the lines are to be laid out and how the towers are to be designed; even after an institution has decided to establish a computer system, questions such as the kinds of components, the programs, access modes, and so forth may still be contested. Once the basic form of the tomato harvester had been developed, a socially significant design change—such as the addition of an electronic sorter—altered the role this machine played in shaping the balance of wealth and power in California agriculture. Some of the most interesting inquiries into technology and politics focus precisely on this attempt to reveal, in painstaking and concrete ways, the deeply significant social choices concealed beneath what looks like a harmless design feature in technologies such as public transportation systems, hydraulic works, industrial machinery, and so on. The historian David Noble has examined the differing implications of two automated machine-tool systems for the relative power of managers and laborers in the industries that might employ them. He pointed out that although record/playback systems and numerical-control systems are basically similar in their electronic and mechanical components, the choice of one design rather than another has major effects on the social struggles among shop-floor workers. To look only in terms of cost cutting, efficiency, or the modernization of equipment is to miss the most crucial plotline.
Through these examples, I will propose certain general conclusions. These conclusions are consistent with what I have already explained in earlier chapters, namely technology as “forms of life.” And they add to that view an explicit political dimension.
What we call “technology” is also a way of ordering the world we live in. Many technological devices and systems important in daily life contain numerous possibilities for regulating human activity in different ways. Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, society chooses certain technological structures, and these will have long-term effects on how people work, communicate, travel, consume, and so on. In the process by which these structured decisions are made, different people occupy different positions, hold varying degrees of power, and possess different levels of awareness. Especially when a particular instrument, system, or technique is first introduced, there is the greatest room for choice. For the range of options will tend to become firmly fixed within material equipment, economic investment, and social custom; once the initial commitment has been made, the room for maneuver that once existed will no longer remain. In this sense, technological innovation resembles legislative action or political founding: both establish a framework for public order that will be handed down from generation to generation. Hence the concern and attention one directs toward rules, roles, and relations in politics must likewise be directed toward things such as highway construction, the creation of television networks, and the seemingly insignificant tinkering with new machines. The question of how people are separated or joined in society is addressed not only in corresponding political institutions and practices, but also, less obviously, in the tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, cables and radio waves, nuts and bolts, and so on.
Technologies with inherent politics
The arguments and examples considered above do not yet state that stronger and more troublesome claim that often appears in writings on technology and society: the belief that some technologies are political in their very nature. According to this view, the adoption of a particular technological system will inevitably be accompanied by its constraining human relations according to some particular political pattern—for example, centralization or decentralization, equality or inequality, oppression or liberation. This is the essential point behind claims such as Mumford’s that “the traditions of authoritarian and democratic technologies run side by side in Western history.” In all the cases quoted above, the design and configuration of technology are relatively malleable, and their effects are also variable. Although one can identify a particular result as having arisen from a specific arrangement, one can also easily imagine that the establishment of a broadly similar apparatus or system might have been accompanied by very different political consequences. The view we must now examine and assess is this: certain technologies do not allow such flexibility, so that choosing them is tantamount to irrevocably choosing a particular form of political life.
As one version of this argument, Engels, in his short essay “On Authority,” written in 1872, offers a very forceful statement. In response to anarchists who regarded authority as an evil to be abolished altogether, Engels praises authoritarianism and argues that strong authority is one of the necessary conditions of modern industry. To set forth his case in the strongest possible way, he asks the reader to imagine that revolution has already been achieved: “Suppose a social revolution disposes of the capitalists who now, by their authority, rule the production and circulation of wealth; suppose all the anarchistic points of view have been adopted, and the land and instruments of labor become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will authority then disappear? Or will it rather only change its form?”
His answer draws on three sociotechnical systems of the time: cotton mills, railways, and ocean-going ships. He sees that in the process of spinning thread, cotton must pass through many different operations throughout the factory. From starting the steam engine to moving the product, workers must perform all kinds of tasks. Because these tasks must be coordinated, and because the arrangement of working time is “fixed by the authority of the steam,” laborers must learn to accept severe discipline. According to Engels, they must work at prescribed times and agree to subordinate their individual wills to the operators of the factory’s machinery. Otherwise they face the terrifying prospect of production coming to an abrupt halt. Engels writes unsparingly: “The automatic machinery of the great factory is far more tyrannical than were the small capitalists who employed workers in the past.”
Engels’s analysis of the necessary conditions for railway and ship operations leads to a similar warning. Both require workers to subordinate themselves and attend to the “despotic authority” that keeps everything running according to plan. Engels finds that the relation of authority and subordination is not merely a peculiarity of the capitalist social system, but “arises independently of all social systems and is imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and circulate.” He then offers a stern caution to the anarchists, who, according to Engels, imagine that it is possible simply to eliminate subordination and hierarchy in one stroke. All such notions are absurd. He argues that the roots of authoritarianism are deeply embedded in humanity’s entanglement with science and technology. “If man, by means of his ability to know and invent, conquers the powers of nature, nature will also take its revenge; to the extent that man makes use of nature, to that extent he will also be subject to it, and this genuine despotism is independent of all social systems.”
The effort to justify strong authority on the basis of what are alleged to be the necessary conditions of technological practice has an ancient history. As a central theme in The Republic, Plato finds “authority” in techne, and thereby analogically supports his argument for endorsing authority in the polis. Like Engels, he also chooses a seafaring ship as one of his examples. Since a large sailing ship, by its very nature, requires a firm hand at the helm, the sailors must obey the captain’s orders, and no sensible person would believe that a ship could be run democratically, Plato goes on to suggest that governing a polis is like being the captain of a ship, or like being a physician who practices medicine. What is required in organized technical activities—the central rule and decisive action—is likewise required in political activity.
In Engels and in arguments similar to his, the defense of authority is no longer made through that classical Platonic analogy, but appeals directly to technology itself. If the basic facts are indeed as convincing as Engels believed, one might expect that, as a society adopts ever more complex technological systems as its material base, the prospects for an authoritarian way of life would be greatly strengthened. It would seem increasingly sensible to place centralized control in the hands of knowledgeable people at the top of a strict social hierarchy. In this respect, his position in “On Authority” seems somewhat at odds with Marx’s stance in Volume One of Capital. Marx tries to show that increasing mechanization will render obsolete the hierarchical division of labor and relations of subordination that, in his view, were necessary to early modern manufacturing[6][7]. He writes: “Modern large-scale industry, by its very technology, abolishes the manufacturing division of labor whereby each man is bound for life to a particular detailed operation. But the capitalistic form of large-scale industry reproduces this division more hideously: in the factory proper, by transforming the worker into the conscious adjunct of a partial machine.” In Marx’s view, the conditions that will ultimately dissolve the capitalist division of labor and drive the proletarian revolution lie hidden within industrial technology itself. The difference between Marx’s position in Capital and the one in Engels’s short essay poses an important question for socialism: in political life, what exactly does modern technology make possible—or make necessary? This theoretical tension reflects many of the practical dilemmas surrounding freedom and authority, dilemmas that make the socialist path to revolution muddy and difficult.
The claim that technology is in some sense inherently political has been made so widely in various contexts that it is difficult to summarize here. Even so, as I read these views, they mainly take two forms. One asserts that adopting a particular technological system will necessarily require creating and maintaining a specific set of social conditions as the environment in which that system operates. Engels’s position belongs to this type. A contemporary author has also advanced a similar view, arguing: “If you accept a nuclear power plant, you also accept an entire techno-scientific-industrial-military elite. You cannot have nuclear energy without those people in charge.” In this conception, it is as if certain technologies require their social environment to be structured in a particular way, just as a car requires wheels in order to move. Unless the corresponding social and material conditions are in place, the technology cannot exist as an effectively functioning entity. Here, “requires” refers to practical, not logical, necessity. Plato was considering precisely such practical necessity when he argued that an ocean-going ship needs a captain and a crew that obey unconditionally.
The second version is somewhat weaker: it claims that a particular technology is especially compatible with, rather than strictly required by, a certain kind of social and political relation. Many advocates of solar power, for example, argue that this diversified technology is better suited than energy systems based on coal, oil, or nuclear power to a democratic and egalitarian society. Yet they do not insist that anything about solar power depends on democracy. Simply put, they argue that solar power is decentralized in both technical and political senses: technically, it makes far more sense to build solar systems in a distributed, widely dispersed fashion than in a large centralized one; politically, solar power is better suited for individuals and communities to manage their own affairs effectively, because the systems they handle are more accessible, understandable, and graspable than giant centralized energy systems. From this perspective, solar power is preferable not only because of its economic and environmental benefits, but also because it may promise this beneficial mechanism in other realms of public life.
A further distinction can also be made within these two versions: the conditions associated with a particular technology may be internal or external. Engels’s argument, for instance, concerns the social relations allegedly required within cotton mills and railway systems; what such internal relations imply for the surrounding social environment is, for Engels, another question. By contrast, the solar-power advocates’ belief that solar technology is suited to democracy concerns how it adds benefits to the social sphere, regardless of how the technology itself is organized.
Thus, this kind of issue can be developed along several different directions. Are the assigned social conditions demanded by those particular technological systems, or are they highly congruent with them? Are those conditions internal to the system or external to it (or both)? Although writings on these questions are often vague, the relevant issues under this broad heading make up a major portion of modern political discourse. Many attempts to explain the changes that take place in social life following technological innovation involve the above questions. More importantly, the above questions are often used to support certain attempts to defend or criticize proposals to introduce a new technology. With regard to whether or not to adopt some particular technology, this kind of issue provides explicit political reasons, rather than the more commonly used, and more easily quantifiable, appeals—such as the economic benefits a technological system may bring, its environmental impact, the risks it poses to public health and safety, and so on. The issue here is not how many jobs will be created, how much revenue will be generated, how many pollutants will increase, or how many cancers will be caused; it is about how the choice of a technology will have important effects on the structure and nature of human relations.
If we examine the social arrangements that depict the environmental characteristics of technological systems, we will find that certain devices and systems are almost always linked to particular forms of organizational power and authority. The important question is: is this state of affairs ultimately the result of society’s inevitable response to the uncontrollable properties inherent in things themselves, or is it a pattern arbitrarily imposed by some dominant group, ruling class, or other social or cultural institution in order to further its own intentions?
To take the most obvious example, the atomic bomb is an inherently political artifact. So long as it exists, its deadly properties will necessarily require that it be controlled by a centralized, strictly hierarchical chain of command, excluding any and all interference that might cause accidental operation. The social system embodied in the nuclear bomb must be authoritarian; there is no other way. Such a state of affairs is a practical necessity independent of any political system into which the bomb is inserted. Independent of any type of regime and its rules, it is a practical necessity. Indeed, democratic countries must explore corresponding methods to ensure that the social structure and mentality shaped by the management of nuclear weapons do not “spill over” or “diffuse” into the polity as a whole.
Of course, the nuclear bomb is a special case. Its existence urgently requires an extremely strict relation of authority, and everyone ought to understand why. But perhaps we also want to look for other examples—namely, particular technologies that are universally recognized as requiring maintenance by some specific pattern of power and authority—in modern technological history there are abundant examples.
In his famous study of modern business enterprise, The Visible Hand, Alfred D. Chandler presented impressive evidence to defend the hypothesis that the construction and day-to-day operation of many production, transportation, and communication systems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries required the development of a particular social structure—a large-scale, centralized, hierarchical organizational mechanism dominated by highly skilled management experts. Chandler’s argument is exemplified by his analysis of railroad expansion:
“Technology made rapid, round-the-clock transportation possible, but to move goods and passengers safely, on time, and reliably, and to maintain and repair locomotives, trains, trucks, roadbeds, stations, cars, and other equipment, required the creation of a sizable administrative apparatus. This meant employing a body of managers to supervise the functional activities spread over a wide geographical area, and appointing middle- and top-level executives to monitor, evaluate, and coordinate the daily work of those managers.”
Throughout the book, Chandler points out how the technologies used in the production and distribution of electricity, chemicals, and various industrial goods “urgently require” or “demand” this form of human relationship. “Thus, American business urgently needed to create a hierarchical administrative mechanism in response to the requirements of railroad operation.”
Could other ways of organizing these people and apparatus be imagined? Chandler points to the previously dominant social model—the model of small traditional family businesses—which in most cases was surely no longer adequate. Even if he did not carry the inference any further, it is obvious that he believed that the actually viable patterns of power and authority suitable for modern socio-technical systems leave little room for negotiation. Many modern technologies (for example, oil pipelines and refineries) have characteristics that make possible such awe-inspiringly large-scale and high-speed economies. In order for these systems to function effectively, efficiently, rapidly, and safely, the corresponding requirements of internal social organization must be met; otherwise the material possibilities brought by modern technology cannot be developed. Chandler admits that if one compares the socio-technical mechanisms of different countries, one can find that “cultural orientations, values, ideologies, political systems, and social constructions affect the way in which the above imperatives are met in many different ways.” But the emphasis of The Visible Hand and its empirical evidence suggest that there is unlikely to be any significant deviation from that basic pattern.
Perhaps one can also imagine that other configurations of power and authority—for example, decentralization, democratic workers’ self-management, and the like—might prove equally capable of managing factories, refineries, communication systems, and railroads, or even of doing a better job than the organizational systems Chandler described. The example of Swedish automobile assembly teams, Yugoslav workers-managed workshops, and evidence of this sort from other countries are often invoked to support such a possibility. It is impossible here to settle these questions definitively; I only want to point out what I see as the crux of the matter in those controversies. The evidence at hand tends to indicate that many large, sophisticated technological systems are indeed highly compatible with centralized, hierarchical modes of management. However, the question to note is whether these patterns are in any sense what those systems require. This is not merely an empirical question. The most fundamental question is how we determine what measures, if any, are necessary to the actual operation of a particular kind of technology? And what kind of structure of human relations do these measures require, if any? When Plato says that a seagoing vessel needs a decisive hand at the helm and that only a single captain with obedient sailors can operate it well, is he right? When Chandler says that large-scale systems require centralized, hierarchical modes of management, is he right?
To answer these questions, we must undertake some careful examination of the moral claims implicit in those practical necessities—including those advocated in economic doctrines—and weigh them against other categories of moral claims (for example, the view that it is good to let sailors participate in the command of a ship, or that it is right to let workers participate in factory decision-making, and so on). Yet societies built on large-scale composite technological systems have acquired such a character that moral reasons outside those practical necessities increasingly appear outdated, “idealistic,” and irrelevant. No matter what claims people wish to advance on the basis of freedom, justice, or equality, such claims immediately collapse in the face of efficiency-based arguments: “Fine, but then you can’t get a railroad going (steel plant/airline/communications system…).” Here we encounter an important feature of modern political discourse, and of the usual way people think about what methods are legitimate for responding to the possibilities brought by technology. In many cases, to say that technology is inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons grounded in practical necessity—especially reasons having to do with keeping vital technological systems running smoothly—have tended to obscure other moral and political reasons.
The attempt to recover political autonomy from the entanglement of practical necessity involves the view that the conditions of human relations established within the operation of technological systems can easily be isolated from the political system as a whole. Americans have long been content to believe that how power and authority are allocated within industrial corporations, public institutions, and the like has little to do with public mechanisms, public practice, and public ideas overall. “Democracy stops at the factory gate” has been taken as an uncontested fact, unrelated to the practice of freedom in politics. But can the politics inside technology and the politics of the community as a whole really be so easily separated? A recent study of American business leaders—the contemporary counterpart to Chandler’s “visible hand”—found that they were rather impatient with concerns about democracy such as “one person, one vote.” American executives would ask: if democracy does not work even in companies, the most crucial institutions in society as a whole, how can one still hope to use it to govern a country—especially if the government also wants to intervene in companies’ achievements? The author of the report noted that, for businessmen, the authority patterns that work effectively within enterprises were “more to their liking than the political and economic relations elsewhere in society.” Although such a finding is far from beyond dispute, it does reflect an increasingly common mentality: predicaments such as the energy crisis no longer call for responses in the form of redistribution of wealth or broad public participation, but rather are to be met with stronger, centralized public and private management.
The debate over the risks of nuclear power is a vivid case illustrating how the requirements for the operation of a technological system can affect the quality of public life. As the supply of uranium in nuclear reactors is depleted, some have proposed using plutonium, a byproduct of the reactors, as a substitute fuel. The well-known objections to plutonium reprocessing focus on its high economic cost, its environmental-pollution risks, and the dangers it poses of international nuclear proliferation. However, besides these concerns there is a less widely known harm: those dangers involve sacrificing citizens’ freedom. The widespread use of plutonium as fuel would increase opportunities for this toxic substance to be stolen by terrorists, criminal organizations, or others. This would reveal a prospect that cannot be underestimated: extraordinary measures would have to be taken to ensure that plutonium is not stolen, and that when it is stolen it must be recovered. Workers in the nuclear industry and ordinary citizens outside it would very likely suffer background checks, covert surveillance, wiretapping, planting of informants, and even emergency measures under martial law—all of which could be justified on the grounds of protecting plutonium.
Russell W. Ayres, in his study of the legal consequences of plutonium reprocessing, concludes: “As time goes on and plutonium stockpiles increase, the traditional methods of judicial and legislative review in administrative affairs will be forced to give way, and a powerful centralized regime that can more harshly enforce security measures will develop. He asserts that ‘once some plutonium has been stolen, it is imperative to turn the whole country upside down in order to retrieve it.’” What Ayres anticipates and worries about is precisely the problem I am calling technology’s inherent politics. Of course, no human-made and human-maintained artifact can “require” anything in an absolute sense. But in any case, once a certain action is carried out, once artifacts such as nuclear power plants are built and operated, arguments about the legitimacy of society adapting to technological requirements spring up like bamboo shoots after a rain. In Ayres’s words: “Once reprocessing begins, and the risk of plutonium theft becomes real rather than hypothetical, the government appears to have no choice but to violate those protected rights.” At a certain point, those who cannot accept these hard demands and imperatives are denounced as dreamers or fools.
* * *
I have outlined two explanations of why artifacts are political. In the first case, we note how certain specific features of the design or arrangement of a device or system may provide a convenient means for establishing a particular pattern of power and authority. Such technologies possess a certain degree of flexibility in their material structure. Precisely because they are flexible, to understand their social consequences one must take into account the social roles that may have influenced their design and arrangement. In the second case, we examine how the uncontrollable properties of a particular technology strongly, and perhaps inevitably, become linked with a certain pattern of power and authority. Here the primary choice is whether to decide whether to adopt something by reference to its consequences. There is nothing especially choice-worthy in physical design and arrangement, and even different social systems (capitalist or socialist) can hardly intervene to alter those uncontrollable traits or to bring about significant changes in their political results.
Which of these two explanations applies to a given case? This question is the touchstone of many (sometimes quite fierce) debates about the significance of technology for our way of life. Here I have taken an “both/and” position, because in my view both understandings can apply in different circumstances. Indeed, within a technological complex (for example, a communication or transportation system), some aspects are flexible in their possible social consequences, while others may be (for better or worse) entirely uncontrollable. In many places, these two kinds of explanations I examine here overlap and intersect.
Of course, there are many other possible issues to dispute. Some advocates of renewable energy, for example, claim that they have discovered a set of technologies inherently imbued with democracy, egalitarianism, and communism. Yet, in my judgment, the social consequences of building renewable energy systems will undoubtedly depend on the particular arrangements of hardware and social institutions that are created to bring energy to us. This allows us to find ways to turn the miraculous into the decayed. On the other hand, those who advocate further development of nuclear energy seem to assume that they are operating a rather flexible technology, one whose adverse social effects can be set by changing reactor and waste-treatment design parameters. For the reasons already stated, I believe their conviction is completely mistaken. Indeed, it is possible for us to manage a few “risks” to public health and safety brought by nuclear energy. But if society adapts to the more dangerous and persistently lingering aspects of nuclear power, will human freedom not pay a profound price?
I believe we ought to pay closer attention to technological objects themselves, but this does not mean we can ignore the contexts in which those objects exist. As Plato and Engels both said, a ship at sea has reason to require a captain and a crew of obedient sailors. But a decommissioned ship moored in a shipyard needs only a watchman. To understand what kind of technology and what kind of context matter to us, and why they matter, this endeavor must involve two lines of inquiry: it must study specific technological systems and their histories, and it must also grasp the concepts and debates of political theory in a comprehensive way. Our generation is often willing to radically change its way of life to accommodate technological innovation, while resisting analogous changes in the political realm. For that very reason, in facing these questions, it is important to gain a clearer view than the attitudes to which we are accustomed.
[1] Since the author’s opening phrase have political qualities is translated as “have politics,” though the meanings are consistent, have political properties and have politics should be distinguished in wording. Quality sounds most broadly meaning, while property more strongly suggests having certain specific political tendencies and is more anthropomorphic, so I tentatively render it as “possess political characteristics.” If have politics is translated literally as “have politics,” it sounds awkward; given that my politics means my political views or stance, have politics can be understood as “have a political stance.” Generally speaking, “stance” is something attributed to persons, whereas artifacts are said to have no “stance,” or are usually understood to be “neutral.” Thus saying that artifacts “have a political stance” is a proposition that sounds surprising. It is more in keeping with the main point to highlight that technological artifacts are also “participants” in contemporary politics. In fact, have politics appears only once in the whole text apart from the title; here I translate it according to context as “possess a political stance,” while the title remains rendered in the broader form “have politics.”
[2] settle an issue is generally translated as “resolve a problem,” but it reads awkwardly here. What is meant here is that a particular group achieves its particular goals through a particular technology, which is completely different from solve a problem. Translating it as “resolve” cannot convey the meaning. Here the usage borrows from the original sense of settle as “establish” or “arrange,” and after consideration I have tentatively translated it as “deal with.” This comes closer to the intended sense. Later on it is rendered as “deal with” or “handle” depending on context.
[3] In Chinese translation, no distinction is usually made.
[4] Paris’s streets are broad and radiating outward
[5] The origin of Labor Day
[6] In Marx, modern manufacturing refers to the early large-scale manufacturing mode besides the factory. To align with the Chinese edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, this is rendered here as “modern workshop manufacture.”
[7] Quoted from the Chinese translation in the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. See Collected Works, first edition, vol. 23, pp. 530–531
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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