Abstract

This chapter revisits Langdon Winner’s question “Do Artefacts Have Politics?” to argue that contemporary philosophy of technology has overly confined political analysis of technologies to an ontic register, focusing on discrete artefacts and their immediate social effects. We reconstruct an ontological approach that investigates how technologies help constitute the very conditions of possibility of politics. First, drawing on Heidegger’s ontic/ontological distinction, we show how the empirical turn reads Winner’s 1980 essay in isolation and thereby reinforces an ontic focus. Second, we retrieve the neglected ontological impulses in Winner’s later account of “technologies as forms of life” supplemented with the transcendental “grammars” that pre-shape technological meaning and use. Third, we connect this line of thought to Arendt’s analysis of artefacts as the material “in-between” that enables political intersubjectivity, re-reading Winner’s Moses’ bridge case as world-structuring rather than merely behavior-shaping. Finally, we extend this framework to social media algorithms, arguing that their processual, constantly recalibrating character inaugurates a distinct, indeterminate way of “having politics” that cannot be captured by the classic politics-of-artefacts template. The chapter thus proposes a productive entwinement of ontic and ontological inquiry for analysing political technologies in the algorithmic age.