Computer Science, Off Course - Episode 10 - Do artifacts have politics

Today we release the final episode of the season! This is on a, now, quite famous paper: Do artifacts have politics, by political scientist Landon Winner. I could not find a lot more information online about him, this work and similar papers seems to be his main focus. I say famous, but of course, I don't mean famous among computer science people. I only read it about a year ago when I was preparing my upcoming book.

It is just a wonderful paper, it is easy to read in a certain sense, the content flows like a piece in the New Yorker, but hard in another sense at it is quite on the nose and contrary to what CS people believe.

Starting at the top is, in this case, a good idea. It starts out with:

In controversies about technology and society, there is no idea more provocative 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 productivity, 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.

The paper is not (as one might think) about digital technologies per se, one of the examples the paper names which is just mind blowing is power. Winner argues—and he cites environmentalist Denis Hayes for this—that nuclear power is only compatible with an authoritarian state as it requires a lot of planned checks and balanced. Solar, he argues (and again, this is 1980!) is much more compatible with a decentralized system.

I am recently read—not sure who recently wrote this, it might have been Rebecca Solnit [[1]]—that renewables by default are local, and I remember thinking that I never thought of it that way. Fossil fuels require international coordination, renewables are much more local.

Langdon reminds us that the story about new technology is almost always a positive one, he for example cites a paper by Daniel Boorstin, who...

extolled television for "its power to disband armies, to cashier presidents, to create a whole new democratic world? democratic in ways never before imagined, even in America"

Scarcely [these are the words of Winner again] a new invention comes along that someone does not proclaim it the salvation of a free society.

This of course brings to mind an thought of the Arabic spring which embodied the promise of social media to bring democracy to the world.

A look beyond technology itself

What is so interesting about the paper is that it aims (in my eyes) very high. It assumes that we are already looking at the impact of technology (as the into says "not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects"), which I think for CS is already asking quite a lot. But Winner goes much beyond that:

What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded. This maxim [...] can be called the social determination of technology [...] serves as a needed corrective to those who focus uncritically on such things as "the computer and its social impacts" but who fail to look behind technical things to notice the social circumstances [...].

This view provides an antidote to naive technological determinism—the idea that technology develops as the sole result of an internal dynamic, and then, unmediated by any other influence, molds society to fit its patterns. Those who have not recognized the ways in which technologies are shaped by social and economic forces have not gotten very far.

Winner himself is critical on not just technological thinkers but also socials scientists, who "only go so far in accounting for what is most interesting and troublesome about the subject".

Technology arranges society

Ok, long intro but the paper is so good, I could just read all of it aloud. Winner distinguishes two different ways in which technology can have political properties.

The first are "instances in which the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes away of settling an issue in a particular community."

As an example for this form, Winner names the low bridges of Long Island as planned by Robert Moses. Because bridges and tunnels were designed to be quite low, cars could use them, but not buses, severely hampering people using public transportation to use them. And while Moses's story might have been more complex then Winner explains it, we can easily see how there are modern examples of this also, how AirBnB or Gorillaz or Uber shape neighborhoods and communities. Winner also cites another example from the 1880s where expensive machines were introduced into factories, not so much to optimize, but to break worker power:

The new machines, manned by unskilled labor, actually produced inferior castings at a higher cost than the earlier process. After three years of use the machines were, in fact, abandoned, but by that time they had served their purpose:the destruction of the union.

This of course fits with last week's episode on Mueller’s book Breaking things at work:

Instead, the more fundamental problem of technology is its role in the reproduction of hierarchies and injustices foisted upon most of us by business owners, bosses, and governments.

Back to Winner, who explains that in this case, technology cannot "be understood adequately outside the record of workers' attempts to organize" and other social factors. "Technological history and American political history were at that moment deeply intertwined" as they are today also, of course, which is why it is so important that technology people also understand history.

In [these cases] one sees the importance of technical arrangements that precede the use of the things in question.

It reminded me of the comparison I have often made between Scratch and Hedy (for example in my talk on Hedy at Strangeloop). Something I did not understand for a very long time, is that even before you start to teach with Scratch, you have to buy into the notion that kids will figure out the interface of Scratch by themselves. That’s what it’s for, it’s for learning not for teaching, and that is caused by the belief system of people that built Scratch. They generally believe that teachers are not helpful for learning, or at least that teaching (plenary) is not helpful. Kids should learn on their own, with help when they need it.

As such, the interface of Scratch supports learning, but not teaching. For example, I can’t add explanations in the interface for kids to see when they log in (while I can do other things, like share demo programs, or change their password). Scratch, I found out after banging my head against both my own failure in teaching it in a classroom setting and the general lack of classroom teaching success of Scratch, is a technology that has such strong politics, that it is not compatible with how (Dutch) teachers run their classrooms that it keeps failing there.

And of course, this is incredibly true also in days of AI. Writers, professors, artists were already being devalued before AI, in fact AI leans on that exploitation.

Inherently political technologies

The second category Winner describes is more subtle, and concerns:

cases of what can be called inherently political technologies, man-made systems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships.

Some technologies, Winner writes "are by their very nature political in a specific way."

According to this view, the adoption of a given technical system unavoidably brings with it conditions for human relationships that have a distinctive political cast: for example, centralized or decentralized, egalitarian or inegalitarian, repressive or liberating.

For some technologies, Winner argues, one can imagine that they shape the world in different ways, social media could have been more social, more participatory and more democratic. However some technologies are only compatible with certain arrangements. Winner names a factory, which requires a certain tempo and collaboration which can only come from authoritarianism. You will be, and Winner cites Friedrich Engels here "fixed by the authority of the steam".

You have to look at technology, says Winner, in a very very broad way:

[T]he adoption of a given technical system actually requires the creation and maintenance of a particular set of social conditions as the operating environment of that system.

Or, a bit more on the nose:

"if you accept nuclear power plants, you also accept a techno-scientific-industrial military elite." (this is a quote but my PDF does not show by whom)

There are some smaller concerns in the paper, for example whether the configuration is internal (in a factory) or external (impacting society in a lager sense) but these are not important I would say for a first reader.

More important is Winner's argument (and he builds here not only on Engels but also on Plato) that reconfiguration because of technology does not go in a random direction, rather, increasing use of technology will inevitable lead to more central control:

one would expect that, as a society adopted increasingly complicated technical systems as its material basis, the prospects for authoritarian ways of life would be greatly enhanced. Central control by knowledgeable people acting at the top of a rigid social hierarchy would seem increasingly prudent.

This quote almost physically hurt me, as it makes me so angry this is a perspective never offered in CS courses; the idea that power is moved from people to (an ever smaller number of) technology people.

And this really does not only concern digital technology, Winner also cites another writer (Alfred D. Chandler) which has argued that the railways were the cause of the first administrative hierarchies in American. You simply can't have people democratically run their own railways, it won't work. Winner also names the atomic bomb, which, while being of course a very unique thing, requires, just by its existence, a system to safeguard it.

Similarly AI as we have it now, its existence does something to us, for example that we can no longer trust our own eyes, which again spawns a (technological) system of distrust and trust-verification.

The Tattoo Quote!

Technologies are seen as neutral tools that can be used well or poorly, for good, evil, or something in between. But we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given device might have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed uses.

It can be discussed whether CS programs do the first things, but certainly we do not think of influences on society.

Or maybe just the last words of the paper?

A ship at sea may well require, as Plato and Engels insisted, a single
captain and obedient crew. But a ship out of service, parked at the dock, needs only a caretaker. To understand which technologies and which contexts are important to us, and why, is an enterprise that must involve both the study of specific technical systems and their history as well as a thorough grasp of the concepts and controversies of political theory.

In our times people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accord with technological innovation at the same time they would resist similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds.

If for no other reason than that, it is important for us to achieve a clearer view of these matters than has been our habit so far.

Homework

• This is an episode in which we can again recommend reading the whole paper! There is some stuff that might be hard to follow, like a detailed take on differences in opinion between Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, but most is very understandable and not too long!
• I also think when designing software, for example in a requirements course, one could ask what social configurations the software requires and enables or encourages

[[1]]: I think it was this piece in The Guardian