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Autonomous Technology
Winner's 1977 first book — Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought — examining how modern technological systems develop trajectories that exceed the capacity of individuals or institutions to govern.
Published by MIT Press in 1977, developed from Winner's Berkeley doctoral dissertation under Sheldon Wolin, Autonomous Technology was the first sustained political-theoretical engagement with the question of whether technology had become ungovernable. Winner traced the theme through Marx, Ellul, Mumford, Marcuse, and others, developing a sharpened thesis: the problem is not that technology is evil or that efficiency is inherently oppressive, but that technological systems, once established, generate their own requirements, their own trajectories, their own demands on human behavior — and these demands are experienced as technical necessities rather than political impositions. The political character disappears behind the mask of the technical requirement. 'We have to upgrade the system' is a political statement disguised as a technical one.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book was Winner's first major engagement with what he would later call the political philosophy of technology. Drawing on Wolin's political theory and the Frankfurt School, Winner argued that modern democracies had effectively surrendered governance of