ABSTRACT
In controversies about technology and society, there is no idea more provocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities. An eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political language is by no means the exclusive property of critics of large-scale high-technology systems. The physical arrangements of industrial production, warfare, communications, and the like have fundamentally changed the exercise of power and the experience of citizenship. This chapter outlines two ways in which artifacts can contain political properties. First are instances in which the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in a particular community. Second are cases of what can be called inherently political technologies, man-made systems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships.
