- 28 Jan 2016 13:34
#14647062
http://innovate.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Winner-Do-Artifacts-Have-Politics-1980.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner#Technology_and_politics
I thought this might be an interesting read for others and perhaps brings up questions that could incite interesting responses and put here thinking this be most appropriate to share a paper. I don't have any questions for others about the work though would be interested to hear any thoughts should one glance over it or read it entirely.
Intro
Here's a critical response from Bernward Joerges: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/artefacts.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner#Technology_and_politics
I thought this might be an interesting read for others and perhaps brings up questions that could incite interesting responses and put here thinking this be most appropriate to share a paper. I don't have any questions for others about the work though would be interested to hear any thoughts should one glance over it or read it entirely.
Intro
Writing in Technology and Culture almost two decades ago, Lewis Mumford gave classic statement to one version of the them, arguing that "from late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authortarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensley powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable."2
This thesis stands at the heart of Mumford's studies of the city, architecture, and the history of technics, and mirrors concerns voiced earlier in the works of Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and other nineteenth century critics of industrialism. More recently, antinuclear and prosolar energy movements in Europe and America have adopted a similar notion as a centerpiece in their arguments.
Thus environmentalist Denis Hayes concludes, "The increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible only in a totalitarian state." Echoing the views of many proponents of appropriate technology and the soft energy path, Hayes contends that "dispersed solar sources are more compatible than centralized technologies with social equity, freedom and cultural pluralism."3
An eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political language is by no means the exclusive property of critics of large-scale high-technology systems. A long lineage of boosters have insisted that the "biggest and best" that science and industry made available were the best guarantees of democracy, freedom, and social justice. The factory system, automobile, telephone, radio, television, the space program, and of course nuclear power itself have all at one time or another been described as democratizing, liberating forces. David Lilienthal, in T.V.A.: Democracy on the March, for example, found this promise in the phosphate fertilizers and electricity that technical progress was bringing to rural Americans during the 1940s.4
In a recent essay, The Republic of Technology, Daniel Boorstin extolled television for "its power to disband armies, to cashier presidents, to create a whole new democratic world - democratic in ways never before imagined, even in America."5 Scarcely a new invention comes along that someone does not proclaim it the salvation of a free society.
Here's a critical response from Bernward Joerges: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/artefacts.pdf
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
-For Ethical Politics