![]() ![]() The factory system, automobile, telephone, radio, television, space program, and of course nuclear power have all at one time or another been described as democratizing, liberating forces. A long lineage of boosters has insisted that the biggest and best that science and industry made available were the best guarantees of democracy, freedom, and social justice. 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." 2Īn eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political language is by no means the exclusive property of critics of large-scale, high-technology systems. According to environmentalist Denis Hayes, "The increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. ![]() During the 1970s, antinuclear and pro-solar energy movements in Europe and the United States adopted a similar notion as the centerpiece of their arguments. Writing in the early 1960s, Lewis Mumford gave classic statement to one version of the theme, 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 authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable." 1 This thesis stands at the heart of Mumford’s studies of the city, architecture, and history of technics, and mirrors concerns voiced earlier in the works of Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and other nineteenth-century critics of industrialism. Since ideas of this kind are a persistent and troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention. At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions to efficiency and productivity and their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority. No idea is more provocative in controversies about technology and society than the notion that technical things have political qualities. This essay first appeared in Daedalus 109 (1980): 121-36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. I’m posting here to save it from the memory hole - and have fixed the HTML formatting in the process.īy Langdon Winner, from The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. After much searching I finally found an electronic version of this essay via a dead link and. ![]()
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