Do Artifacts Have Politics?

By L. Winner. 2017

In controversies about technology and society, there is no idea more pro vocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and pro ductivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority. Since ideas of this kind have a persistent and troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention.1 Writing in Technology and Culture almost two decades ago, Lewis Mumford gave classic statement to one version of the theme, arguing that "from late neo lithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable."2 This thesis stands at the heart of Mumford's studies of the city, architecture, and the his tory of technics, and mirrors concerns voiced earlier in the works of Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and other nineteenth century critics of industrial ism. More recently, antinuclear and prosolar energy movements in Europe and America have adopted a similar notion as a centerpiece in their arguments. Thus environmentalist Denis Hayes concludes, "The increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible only in a totalitarian state." Echoing the views of many proponents of appropri ate technology and the soft energy path, Hayes contends that "dispersed solar sources are more compatible than centralized technologies with social equity, freedom and cultural pluralism."3 An eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political language is by no means the exclusive property of critics of large-scale high-technology systems. A long lineage of boosters have insisted that the "biggest and best" that science and industry made available were the best guarantees of democracy, freedom, and social justice. The factory system, automobile, telephone, radio, television, the space program, and of course nuclear power itself have all at one time or another been described as democratizing, liberating forces. David Lilienthal, in T.V.A.: Democracy on the March, for example, found this promise in the phos 121

Subfields: AI Ethics, Fairness & Society

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Citations in the corpus

Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models (2021, background): “This is why technological artifacts such as LMs are never “value neutral” - they represent and perpetuate the values and norms present in the training data (Bender et al., 2021; Winner, 1980).”
BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model (2022, background): “Second, in a world mediated by technology, choices at all stages of its development end up shaping people’s lives in a way that can be most closely compared to regulations (Winner, 1977, 2017), albeit without the same explicit consultation of stakeholders in the process.”
Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems in Systems and Society (2023, background): “Long-term societal inequity, power imbalances, and systemic injustices [265] feed training data [242], influence system development and deployment [237], and shape social impact [121].”
BigScience: A Case Study in the Social Construction of a Multilingual Large Language Model (2022, background): “The creation of such an artifact raised a number of interdependent but distinct research questions, especially for a project that aimed to meaningfully engage with its social context and acknowledge its social dimensions (Winner, 1980).”
The BigScience ROOTS Corpus: A 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Dataset (2023, background): “Even more relevant to the corpus creation aspect of our project, (Winner, 2017).”
Towards Accountability for Machine Learning Datasets: Practices from Software Engineering and Infrastructure (2020, background): “t is critical to dispel the myth (discussed in [59]) that engineering practice is a “purely technical” matter. Engineering artefacts are imbued with politics via their roles in sociopolitical systems [57, 147], and so too are ML datasets inseparable from politics [36, 41, 113]. To be “just an engine”
The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research (2021, background): “There is a foundational understanding in Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS), Critical Theory, and Philosophy of Science that science and technologies are inherently value-laden, and these values are encoded in technological artifacts, many times in contrast to a field’s formal research c”
Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence (2020, background): “Scholarship in this domain (Winner 1980; Nissenbaum 2001; Greene et al. 2019) aims not only to explain sociotechnical phenomena, but to also examine issues of values, culture and power at play between stakeholders and technological artefacts.”
Critical Race Theory for HCI (2020, background): “Extrapolating Winner’s proposition that artifacts carry politics [136], it seems abundantly clear that in a world where racism is ordinary, racism in its technologies is also ordinary.”
WeBuildAI (2019, background): “All algorithm design choices cannot be addressed by a purely technical approach [42, 83]; particularly in governing algorithms, some design choices require a normative decision, as they affect multiple stakeholders and need to codify critical social values and associated tradeoffs.”
This Thing Called Fairness (2019, methodology): “ as Human Computer Interaction (HCI)and Science & TechnologyStudies, has paidattention tothewaysinwhichtechnicalpracticesandcomputationalartifactsofallkindsembedorpromotearangeofsocialvalues(e.g.,[78,110,137,138,151]).Researchprogramsdeveloped to focuson values and technology, such as Value Sens”
Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control (2020, background): “It allows us to understand algorithmic systems not as neutral tools that facilitate efficiency and improve communication exchanges, but as contested instruments of control that carry specific ideological preferences (Winner, 1980 Mechanism for action: obscuring and securing surplus value.”
Better, Nicer, Clearer, Fairer: A Critical Assessment of the Movement for Ethical Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (2019, unknown): “political outcomes of technological design [34], [35].”
Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research (2024, unknown): “Second, there is the risk of reproducing the weak objectivity of the past, failing to appreciate that AI tools embed the largely homogeneous standpoints of their creators as well as those of the dominant social groups 7,171,172 .”