Moses's Long Island Overpasses

In the AI Story

The example is foundational because it is undeniable. The low clearances have no engineering justification. Standard parkway bridge clearances in the mid-twentieth century were higher than Moses specified. The deviation from standard was deliberate, documented, and served an identifiable social purpose: keeping poor and minority New Yorkers away from Jones Beach and the other public recreational sites Moses's parkway system served.

The bridges illustrate Winner's first category of political artifact: technologies designed to settle a political dispute. Moses could not have legislated racial exclusion from public beaches — the politics would not permit it. But he could build bridges that made bus travel impossible, and the exclusion would operate through infrastructure rather than policy, through physics rather than politics. The clearance was the policy.

The AI parallel runs deep. AI systems' pricing structures, training data choices, and optimization targets operate in precisely the manner Moses's bridges operated: silently, automatically, without requiring enforcement, distributing access along lines the designers chose but need never acknowledge. The developer in Lagos encounters the AI amplifier's architecture the way a bus driver encountered Moses's overpass: as an immovable material fact whose politics have been rendered invisible.

The historical accuracy of Caro's account has been challenged, most notably by Bernard Joerges in 1999, who argued that public transit restrictions on parkways were more complex than the Moses-as-racist narrative suggests. Defenders of Winner's use of the example point out that even if the historical details are imperfect, the conceptual point survives: artifacts can and do embed political arrangements, and the Moses case remains the clearest teaching example.

Origin

The example entered political theory through Robert Caro's 1974 biography The Power Broker, which documented Moses's four decades of power over New York's public infrastructure. Winner encountered the example during his work on Autonomous Technology and made it central to the 1980 essay that became the founding text of political technology studies.

Its uptake has been remarkable: the Moses bridges appear in nearly every introductory science and technology studies course, every technology ethics syllabus, every discussion of design and politics. The example's power lies in its concreteness — a bridge is a physical object whose dimensions can be measured, whose clearance can be verified, whose exclusionary function cannot be denied once pointed out.

Key Ideas

Politics in concrete. The bridges encode racial and class exclusion in material form, where it operates without enforcement, decision, or review.

Infrastructure beyond its creator. Moses's political context is long gone; his bridges remain, distributing access according to his original design.

The alibi of engineering. Presenting the clearance as a technical specification rather than a social policy is the rhetorical move that protects the politics from democratic challenge.

Parallel to algorithmic exclusion. AI systems' pricing, training, and optimization choices operate with the same silent automaticity as Moses's clearances — and with similar distributional consequences.

The historical debate is secondary. Even if Caro overstated Moses's personal racism, the conceptual claim — that artifacts can embed political arrangements — survives countless other confirming cases.

Debates & Critiques

Bernard Joerges's 1999 paper 'Do Politics Have Artefacts?' challenged the historical accuracy of Winner's use of the example, noting that New York had multiple reasons for parkway bus restrictions. Steve Woolgar and Geoff Cooper defended Winner by distinguishing between the example's historical accuracy and its pedagogical function — the case works as an illustration of a general principle even if its specific details are contested. The debate has clarified rather than undermined the underlying concept.