WORK
The Whale and the Reactor
Winner's 1986 masterwork — <em>A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology</em> — containing 'Do Artifacts Have Politics?' and establishing the political philosophy of technology as a field.
Published by the University of Chicago Press, The Whale and the Reactor collected Winner's mature statements on the political dimensions of technology. Its opening chapter — the 1980 essay Do Artifacts Have Politics? — became the most cited work in science and technology studies. The title essay meditated on a scene at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on the California coast: Winner watching a gray whale pass beneath the reactor's cooling water intake, holding in single vision the ancient biosphere and the civilization that had learned to split atoms. The book articulated what Winner called the political philosophy of technology — the insistence that the design and deployment of powerful technologies are political decisions subject to the same democratic scrutiny that democratic societies apply to other consequential collective choices.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's chapter titled 'Mythinformation' examined the claim — already pervasive in the 1980s — that personal computers would democratize society by distributing access to information. Winner dismantled