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Do Artifacts Have Politics?
Winner's 1980 essay — the most cited work in the history of science and technology studies — that established the hard claim: the design of a technology is itself a political act.
Published in Daedalus in 1980 and reprinted as the opening chapter of The Whale and the Reactor, this essay demolished the assumption that technologies are politically neutral until put to political use. Winner's argument distinguished two ways artifacts carry politics: deliberately, through designs intended to settle political disputes (Robert Moses's low parkway overpasses excluding public transit from Long Island beaches); and structurally, through technologies that require particular political arrangements as a condition of their operation (nuclear power requiring authoritarian control structures regardless of the ideology of the society deploying it). The essay became foundational to science and technology studies because it shifted the site of political analysis from the user to the artifact, from the application to the design, from what technology does to what technology is.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Winner wrote the essay against the prevailing assumption — shared by liberals and conservatives, engineers and policymakers — that technology was a