Do Artifacts Have Politics?

Whether we’re talking about a smart finance grid, biohacking, drone warfare, space colonization, or universal basic income, technosolutions are too commonly informed by the values inherent in technology itself: exponential growth, automation over human intervention, forward momentum, platformization, and a disregard for existing conditions on the g

But the most significant movement of this kind is that technocratic movement which is said in a short space of time to have spread over the whole of the United States. We know that it advocates, within the limits of a closed national economy, the abolition of competition and markets and an economic dictatorship exercised in sovereign fashion by tec

Technologies shape culture, politics, and economics as much as the other way around. For instance, most of our own social and governmental institutions today—prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, welfare systems, even schools—were shaped both literally and figuratively by that great embodiment of the Industrial Revolution: the factory.

The belief in the possibility of this development is founded on an erroneous supposition, namely, that “The historical achievement of science and technology has rendered possible the translation of values into technical tasks–the materialization of values.