machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be evaluated not only for their efficiency and productivity, but also for how they embody specific forms of power and authority.

• social determination of technology
  • what matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded
  • antidote to technological determinism
    • the idea that technology develops as the sole result of an internal dynamic and then, unmediated by any other influence, molds society to fit its patterns
  • shortcomings
    • suggests that technical things do not matter at all → technology or taxes, all the same
    • reduce everything to the interplay of social forces
• theory of technological politics
  • focus on the momentum of large-scale sociotechnical systems, to the response of modern societies to certain technological imperatives, and to the all too common signs of the adaptation of human ends to technical means
  • pay attention to the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those characteristics
  • complement social determination of technology (not replacement)

artifacts can contain political properties in two ways

technical arrangement as forms of order

• technological change expresses a panoply of human motives, not the least of which is the desire of some to have dominion over others, even though it may require an occasional sacrifice of cost-cutting and some violence to the norm of getting more from less
• technical arrangements precede the use of the things in question
  • designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed uses
• example: racist overpasses
• two kinds of choices that can affect the relative distribution fo power, authority and privilege
  • are we going to develop the thing or not?
  • specific features in the design ir arrangement of a technical system
• the things we call technologies are ways of building order in our world

ways in which specific features in the design or arrangement of a device or system could provide a convenient means of establishing patterns of power and authority in a given setting. Technologies of this kind have a range of flexibility in the dimensions of their material form. It is precisely because they are flexible that their consequences for society must be understood with reference to the social actors able to influence which designs and arrangements are chosen.

inherently political technologies

• some technologies are by their very nature political in a specific way. their adoption unavoidably brings with it conditions for human relationships
• choosing certain kinds of technology is to choose a particular form of political life
• example: engels opinion on factory machinery
• two views on these technologies
  • the adoption of a given technical system requires the creation and maintenance of a particular set of social conditions as the operating environment of that system
  • a given kind of technology is strongly compatible with, but does not strictly require, social and political relationships of a particular stripe