Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”

The classic article by Langdon Winner insists that technology determines a specific social infrastructure in the context of "soft" technical determinism. In this case, the (at least part of) technology is inherently political. Some technologies are inherently democratic, but other technologies are authoritarian. That is, regardless of their invention or the intention behind the deployment, they have certain social consequences that can be defined in political terms. Energy production is ultimately threatened, but the most notable example of the winner is the series of highways Robert Moses built around Long Island in the 1930s. The bridge of Moses was so low that I could not get through the bus. According to Winner, these bridges have a definite political influence (and possibly intention): to prevent people in low-income bracket from easily entering the middle-top waterfront playground

According to Winner politics is incorporated into not only the expressway but also many other technologies. For example, tomato harvesters are very effective in choosing tomatoes (far more than the hand-gathered summary), but it is very expensive to purchase. As a result, the effect of intensive production is born, some large producers can afford to invest, then the price of small producers drops, there is a possibility of bankruptcy effectively. Well, this is an example of "political technology of nature".

Winners are mainly interested in large-scale technical systems, especially power generation. He pointed out that certain technologies need to implement a specific social structure. The atomic bomb is one: it requires a top-down, layered, centralized system for deployment. In fact, military infrastructure is necessary. Deploying a bomb requires an authoritarian system (even if it is incorporated into a larger democracy, as in the case of the US military). He believes that nuclear power resembles: it requires centralized facilities, technicians and security to function as a system. He compares this with scattered solar energy. It can run on many different sites, each site requires little or no financial investment and does not require too little technical expertise or security risks. There is no need to create or maintain a hierarchical social structure to deploy solar technology. It is essentially democracy and populism

The winner means that centralized authoritarian technology is likely to be universally integrated into society. In other words, as the army carries out its defense plan and CEO executes its business, we may begin to operate our politics. In addition to the direct impact of centralized technology there is still a big political risk.

At the Georgia Institute of Technology undergraduate and postgraduate courses, I read an article by Langdon Winner "Will there be deliverables in politics?" The purpose of our discussion today is that Winner started his article by analyzing the bridge designed by Robert Moses. The design of the bridge makes it difficult for a bus of a large public transportation to pass and makes it easy for private cars to enter and exit. The winner believes that the bridge design is political and promotes mobility of wealthier demographic.

This is not just a thinking experiment. This is the actual situation captured by philosopher Langdon Winner's article "Artifact is political?" In a 1996 article, Winner discussed how urban planner Robert Moses intentionally designed a low suspension bridge in Long Island, New York State. Therefore, it is intended to prevent ethnic minorities from entering the beach because the bus can not enter the bridge. "Can a bridge be a racist?" This question is now open to a wider range of questions. This is an important issue in the case of dependency algorithms to determine whether monitoring is missing or invalid. Because of the lack of technical knowledge of how they actually work (especially if the algorithm works based on unsupervised learning) monitoring can be invalid. If the system works, what can be solved or worried?