In his renowned paper Do Artifacts Have Politics?, Langdon Winner (Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136, 1980) ascribes two political qualities to technological artifacts. Firstly, Winner shows that technological artifacts can be used to settle social or political problems, and can thereby structure social relations, reinforce vested interests, and engineer human relations (i.e., politicized artifacts). Winner also discusses a second political quality of artifacts, arguing that some technological artifacts practically require or strongly attract a specific set of social and political conditions to operate (...) (i.e., inherently political artifacts). We apply the insights from Winner’s theory on the politics of artifacts to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) within government and argue that Winner’s thought-provoking analysis of inherently political artifacts deserves more attention. Analysing how AI is and can be politicized helps us to see what social or political problems AI can assist governments in solving and how it may do so with important public values in mind (e.g., value-sensitive design). Dissecting the inherent politics of AI enriches our understanding of how AI’s need for data, expertise, and infrastructure, requires a new, horizontally-orientated governance structure, while also attracting public-private partnerships and pre-sorting certain environmental and labor conditions. Recognizing the inherently political character of AI is necessary to be able to resist the increasing power of the private sector in government. This article provides new insights into how the socio-political arrangements that artifacts attract may threaten key public values and entrench existing power inequalities. (shrink)

The purpose of this chapter is to present an interpretation of Langdon Winner’s perspective on the problem of autonomous technology, which relates to the debate on the notion of alienation. I also intend to show here that by decoding the phenomenon of autonomous and alienated technology, we can more clearly observe the current processes of knowledge and power centralization that actually existing Artificial Intelligence is promoting. The theoretical tools brought by Winner in his two books, Autonomous Technology (1978) and The (...) Whale and the Reactor (1986), allow us to observe the automated systems and their current technopolitical implications in depth. Despite having a different perspective, the application of the concept of alienation that Winner makes can align with Gilbert Simondon’s critique of the separation between culture and technology. For Simondon, the distance between humans and technical objects leads to a lack of understanding of technicality, a phenomenon that, through the prism of AI, is exacerbated by corporate structures that hold a monopoly over technological development. This distance prevents individuals and society from understanding the cultural, social, and political implications of the technologies that shape their lives. When analyzing this issue, it becomes clear that actually existing AI not only reproduces existing inequalities but also reconfigures society to maintain and expand these power structures. (shrink)

Laboratories have become an invasive species. In this chapter paper, I critically examine the field of retail atmospherics—an offshoot of marketing and behavioral psychology fields that attempts to engineer emotional atmospheres to induce consumers towards purchasing. Through a close reading of this small, but influential, literature, I analyze the affective politics of retail environments as they struggle to shift from brick-and-mortar stores into digital marketplaces. I argue that the empiricist logics of retail atmospherics have played a direct role in shaping (...) the ways digital marketplaces have experimented and structured themselves, taking advantage of our attention as a way to repackage and sell our subjectivity itself as products. In this way, they extend a laboratory framework into our day-to-day lives, subjecting us to greater surveillance and attempts at manipulation. (shrink)

This chapter interrogates Langdon Winner’s now infamous piece “Do Artifacts Have Politics” through the lens of Design. As both designers and users of technologies and infrastructures, there is much to be gained from disciplinary translations and deeper considerations of Winner’s ideas: refocusing on contextual and situated aspects surrounding a designed object or system, foregrounding issues related to time and obduracy, encouraging ethical Design considerations, and increasing the scope of designers’ and users’ agency, among others. Yet, Winner’s work, largely discussed from (...) a Sociological and more collective standpoint, requires translation into Design Praxis. To accomplish this, the chapter explicates some of the utility, and inherent tensions, in the scales and temporal positions of Sociological epistemologies and ontologies of collectives, for designers and their users, at work. In so doing, it further unpacks how designers may utilize Winner’s relational frameworks of artifacts and politics to more consciously understand, pluralize, leverage, and predict potential implications of their impacts in the world. Divided into two parts, the chapter first contextualizes Winner’s argument in relation to Design, while the second proposes three design tools/approaches that bridge Science and Technology Studies and Design praxis, which may assist designers to better forecast the politics of their products. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Crystal Cook Marshall reopens Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor’s title chapter as a theoretical, philosophical, and political warning that we have not heeded. We are no longer site-specific whales swimming near nuclear reactors. Coalfields, often a focus of Cook Marshall’s work, now bring risk to us all, dispersing and excelling catastrophe—we create coalfields, and we are coalfields. Blending personal narrative, excavation of STS, and direct encounter with Hurricane Helene, Cook traces our contemplation of “natural” terrors (the whale) to (...) an industrial terror (a nuclear reactor) to our manufacture of nature into an industrial terror which offers no one and nothing any harbor. (shrink)

Langdon Winner uses the concept of “technological somnambulism” to criticize how we often accept technology-driven changes without fully questioning their deeper impacts. In recent years, there has been a strong push to develop responsible technologies, especially in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), that anticipate socio-ethical concerns and integrate human values into technological design. At first glance, this suggests that we are no longer “sleepwalking” through technological change but are instead taking deliberate steps to ensure that AI aligns with social (...) values. However, this paper argues that Winner’s warning about technological somnambulism remains relevant today. Drawing on a multi-level framework of AI ethics, the paper shows how current efforts toward responsible AI often focus narrowly on anticipating and addressing impacts at the artifact level, while failing to challenge the deeper structural forces that perpetuate power imbalances and further marginalize vulnerable groups. This neglect of structural impacts risks leading us into what I call “AI somnambulism”. To move beyond this, the paper calls for strengthening existing ethical frameworks with a “structural imagination” to shift our focus from specific artifacts to deeper, structural issues in AI. It concludes by outlining how such imagination can be translated into more practical design practices, aiming to foster a truly responsible AI future. (shrink)

Urban infrastructures are known to determine the quality of a city, such as its justness and democratic approaches. They enable the flow of goods, people, and information. More importantly, thanks to them, people can develop a new, or different, understanding of their own environment and themselves, both thanks to their personal standpoints and encountering others. However, even though many scholars have recognized such a crucial role, a theoretical review of this theme and its broader implications seems to be missing.In this (...) chapter, the author intends to fill this gap by drawing on Science and Technology Studies and the work of Langdon Winner. She will focus on pieces of research dealing with urban infrastructures and their relationship with cities, and on how this can influence the daily life of people. In doing so, she will present urban infrastructures according to what she calls ‘double dimension’: Material and immaterial. In this sense, one will be able to focus on the social implications created by these massive projects. Indeed, given their acknowledged role in influencing cities, it is necessary to consider how urban infrastructures can affect issues such as social integration, uneven development, and growing masculinity.This chapter has a twofold goal. First, it can make a contribution to academic research by providing a summary of what the field has said so far on the topic, which can help scholars identify new elements to advance in research. Second, it can present practical hints. Thanks to the presentation of pivotal aspects in the double dimension of urban infrastructures and how these can impact and be impacted by cities, one can develop better practices for these projects. (shrink)

By virtue of its focus on providing definite tools for discourse analysis, the field of rhetorical studies is uniquely positioned as a counterpart to Langdon Winner’s philosophy of technology. Acknowledging resonance between the two, this chapter considers Langdon Winner’s characterization of high technology society and examines how it intersects with rhetorical studies insight in public discourse itself and the situations within which public discourse arises. The chapter proceeds in three parts. First, it identifies resonances and commonalities between Winner’s work and (...) rhetorical studies. Then, it considers how Winner’s work has influenced rhetorical scholarship, with a focus on the work of Carolyn Miller. Finally, it considers rhetoric as a situational phenomenon, arguing the material rhetoric embodied in technical artifacts calls us to reconsider the nature of rhetorical situations concerning technology writ large. (shrink)

This chapter applies Langdon Winner’s insights on the politics of technological artifacts to contemporary biomedical technologies for Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) management. As people with T1D rely on continuous monitoring and treatment technologies to survive, these systems, especially artificial pancreas systems (APS), shape more than clinical outcomes. They participate in the production of knowledge, access, and authority within healthcare. By examining the development and use of APS, the chapter investigates how these technologies can embed and reproduce values, reinforce existing power (...) structures, or generate new forms of inequity. At the same time, innovations emerging from citizen scientists and the broader DIY diabetes community highlight alternative models of technological design, governance, and ownership that challenge dominant assumptions. Drawing on science and technology studies, medical sociology, and bioethics, the chapter reconsiders prevailing narratives about biomedical innovation and interrogates whose needs and perspectives guide these systems. Ultimately, it argues for a more reflexive and inclusive approach to technological development in diabetes care, one that recognizes the political dimensions of biomedical technologies and centers the diverse experiences of those who depend on them. (shrink)