4. Technologies have political properties
• The invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or
system becomes a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a particular
community
• Require or to be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political
relationships which called inherently political technologies
5. Political design
• "Baron Haussmann's broad Parisian thoroughfares, engineered at Louis
Napoleon's direction to prevent any recurrence of street fighting of the kind that
took place during the revolution of 1848,"
• "concrete buildings and huge plazas constructed on university campuses in the
United States during the late 1960s and early 1970 to defuse student
demonstrations,"
• Cyrus McCormick's introduction of pneumatic molding machines into his
Chicago reaper manufacturing plant in the 1880s, in order to "weed out" the
skilled workers who had organized a local union
6. Technical Arrangements and Social Order
• New machines and tools were invented not only to make the industrial process more
effective, but also in order to secure current regimes and practices of domination
• Technologies are ways of building order in our world. Many technical devices and
systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of
ordering human activity
• Societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to
work,communicate,travel,consume
7. Technical Arrangements and Social Order
• Technological innovations are similiar to legislative acts or political foundings
that establish a framework for public order
• The isssues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the
institutions and practice of politics,but also in tangible arrangements
• Regardless of the intent behind their invention or deployment, they have social
consequences that can be qualified in political terms
8. Technical Arrangements and Social Order
• Technical Arrangements can achieve a social effect(e.g.the height of bridges-to
limit access of racial minorities and low-income groups to Jones Beach)
• Technologies can be used in ways that enhance the power,authority,and privilege
of some over others(e.g.use of TV to sell a candidate)
• The technological deck has been stacked in advance in favor of certain social
interests(e.g.the tomato harvester)
9. Inherently political technologies
• Many technologies inherently political
• Very creation and operation requires specific social arrangements
• a particular sociological system
• strongly compatible with a particular sociological system
• Four 'types' of artifacts:
• those requiring a particular internal sociological system
• those compatible with a particular internal sociological system
• those requiring a particular external sociological system
• those compatible with a particular external sociological system
10. Plato's Republic
• Ships can be run democratically
• Their operation requires the coordination of so many individual workers.
• Large ships require social hierarchies that one-person canoes do not.
11. Friedrich Engels
• Complex technical systems
• large production factories reinforcing centralized control
• knowledgeable people acting at the top of a rigid social hierarchy
would seem increasingly prudent
12. Jerry Mander
• nuclear power plants
• techno-scientific industrial-military elite nuclear power
• democratizing qualities of solar energy work against the concentration
of power in the hands of large institutions.
13. The atom bomb
• Nuclear weapons
• Internal social system Authoritarian
• Its lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralized, rigidly
hierarchical, chain of command closed to all influences that might make
its workings unpredictable
• Matter of practical necessity independent of any larger political system in
which the bomb is embedded
14. Conclusion
• Attending more closely to technical objects
• Don’t ignore the contexts in which those objects are situated
• Study of specific technical systems
• History though concepts and controversies of political theory
• Author’s view:
• Resisting changes of political grounds> Accommodating technological
innovation
15. References
• Barbara,S,(2016).Innovation Group: Center for Nanotechnology in Society.
• Groen, C(2015). Prototypes and the politics of the artefact: visual explorations of design
interactions in teaching spaces. Taylor & Francis. p.1-16
• Shoup, D(2015). Who Owns Objects? The Ethics and Politics of Collecting Cultural
Artefacts. European Journal of Archaeology. Vol.9(2-3), pp.298-300
