Week 1 Study Guide: Artifacts and Politics

Lecture 1 - Introduction

Technologies have politics, meaning the physical design/arrangement of a technology itself can enact and enforce power relationships, not just "be used" for good or bad.

Robert Moses's overpasses

• Robert Moses built ~200 highway overpasses over parkways with unusually low clearance.
• As a result, 12-foot-tall buses couldn't pass underneath.
• Because poor people and Black residents relied on public buses (while wealthier white residents had cars), this physically barred them from reaching Jones Beach and other parkway destinations.

How technology creates social order

1. Integrates into everyday life
2. Becomes part of the landscape (i.e., stops being noticed/questioned)
3. Embodies social values/positions/narratives
4. Engineers relationships (between people)
5. Becomes an obligatory passage point (you must go through it to get what you want)

Reading - "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" (Winner, 1980)

Q1: Technological determinism vs. social determinism of technology

• Technological determinism: the idea that technology develops purely from its own internal logic, and then unilaterally "impacts"/molds society. Technology is the cause; society just reacts. (Winner calls this "naive.")
• Social determinism of technology (the corrective view): what matters is not the technology itself but the social/economic system it's embedded in. Technology is shaped by social forces (power holders, economics), so if you trace those origins, you've "explained everything."
• Winner's critique of both: Technological determinism ignores that humans shape tech. But pure social determinism goes too far the other way. It implies the technical artifact itself "doesn't matter at all," which misses how the actual design/arrangement of an artifact can lock in political consequences (like Moses's bridges). Winner wants a middle position: take the material/technical details seriously as political phenomena in their own right, in addition to social context.

Q2: What does Winner mean by "politics"?

Winner defines politics narrowly and practically: "arrangements of power and authority in human associations, as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements." It's not just formal government, but also technologies that can create de facto power arrangements (who controls whom, who has access, who is excluded).

Q3: Two ways a technology can be political

(A) Technologies as a way of settling a social issue (contingent/flexible design choices)

• The device could have been built differently, but a specific design was chosen that produces political consequences.
• Examples: Moses's low bridges (excluded bus riders); the mechanical tomato harvester (favored huge farms over small growers, eliminated ~32,000 jobs); Cyrus McCormick's factory machines (used to bust a labor union, not for efficiency).
• Key insight: technologies encompass purposes far beyond their immediate use. The harvester's purpose wasn't just "harvest tomatoes faster," it also reshaped who could survive as a farmer.
• This category also includes unintentional bias, e.g., inaccessible buildings/buses that excluded disabled people not from malice but from long-standing neglect.

(B) "Inherently political" technologies (technology as requiring a certain political/social order)

• Some technologies are argued to strictly require (or are strongly compatible with) a particular kind of social/political arrangement, regardless of who's in charge.
• Strong version (requires): e.g., a factory, railway, or ship needs centralized authority to function at all (someone must control the steam engine's timing; a ship needs one captain). The atom bomb is Winner's clearest example: it must be controlled by a rigid, centralized, authoritarian chain of command, since there's no democratic way to run a nuclear weapons system.
• Weak version (merely compatible with): e.g., solar energy advocates argue solar tech is compatible with decentralized, democratic control, but doesn't necessarily require it.
• Winner's own conclusion: both types of political technology exist, and you have to evaluate case-by-case which kind you're looking at. The stakes are high: societies often accept authoritarian arrangements inside factories/technical systems while resisting the same authoritarianism in other place, even though Winner argues these shouldn't be treated as separable.

Lecture 2 - "Making the Datafied World 2"

Layers of the datafied world

• Ubiquitous data (base layer - everything generates data)
• Reliable analytics (processing that data)
• Culture of algorithms (algorithms become normalized decision-makers)
• Autonomous agents (top layer - systems that act with less human oversight, e.g. AI agents)

Case study: Rental pricing algorithms (RealPage)

• What happened: RealPage sells "YieldStar" software that recommends rent prices to landlords using pooled/shared data across many landlords.
• Controversy: DOJ lawsuit alleges this amounts to algorithmic price-fixing, as landlords are effectively coordinating (via a shared algorithm) to raise rents in ways that would be illegal if done by humans talking directly. San Francisco and other CA cities are moving to ban this kind of software; DOJ later reached settlement/scrutiny with major landlord Greystar too.
• Why it matters as a case study: it shows "the algorithm" can be a full sociotechnical system (landlords providing data, tenants forced to comply, regulators reacting, journalists exposing it).

Takeaway: Datafication is always selective. It picks certain things to quantify and leaves out others (often the human/qualitative stuff). This selectivity is itself a political choice.

World-making

• A conceptual diagram showing that technology-and-society interactions simultaneously shape three overlapping domains:
  1. Power (who controls what)
  2. Social order (how relationships/institutions are structured)
  3. Meaning (how we understand/narrate our world)
• Takeaway: datafication isn't just "tools being used", but rather actively making the world we live in, in political, social, and meaning-making ways at once.