1) Technologies and technical arrangements can have inherent political qualities, as they may require or be compatible with specific social and power structures. 2) The design of technologies can aim to promote certain social orders over others, such as architectures designed to enable or prevent demonstrations. 3) Artifacts like nuclear power plants, weapons, and certain production methods reinforce centralized control and authority, making them "inherently political technologies".

1. Do Artefacts Have Politics
Made by:
Gracy,Constance,Natalie&John

2. Do Artefacts Have Politics

3. Impact elements
• Social
• Economic
Human Political artefacts

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