The Whale and the Reactor

Winner states implicitly that he wishes to add his book to a surprisingly short list of works that can be

characterized as "philosophy of technology" (which includes Marx and Heidegger). His book will deal

primarily with the political and social aspects of this philosophy, pertinent since as he notes the world is

changing because of tech., no longer comprised of national entities--a global economy, etc. In this

context he will also look at language and determine how adequate it is presently for handling the state of

the art high tech world. His ultimate and ever present question being asked throughout his book is,

"How can we limit modern technology to match our best sense of who we are and the kind of world we

would like to build?" (xi), since the "basic task for a philosophy of technology is to examine critically the

nature and significance of artificial aids to human activity" (4). Winner makes a crucial distinction:

"technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that

activity and its meaning" (6). Of course, the social arena is directly and profoundly influenced by tech.

W cites a recent court case from San Diego where, as in Los Angeles, virtually everyone travels

everywhere by car, of "a young man who enjoyed taking long walks at night through the streets of San

Diego and was repeatedly arrested by police as a suspicious character." A criminal court ruled,

however, that "Merely traveling by foot is not yet a crime" (9). Yet it is important not simply to see tech

as the "cause" of all world "effects." Rather, "as technologies are being built and put to use, significant

alterations in patterns of human activity and human institutions are already taking place" (11). All the

same, tech developments are absorbed into the ever mutating process of human activity so that they

some to be taken for granted and are integrated into our view of what is natural and/or inherent in the

world--they become "second nature," as Winner, taking after Wittgenstein, terms it, they become part

of our "forms of life" (11).

In this context we can best appreciate certain crossroads or perhaps better to say thresholds we are

facing, such as genetic engineering and the possibility of founding human settlements in outer space.

These "call into question what it means to be human and what constitutes 'the human condition'" (13).

How do such developments change the fabric of everyday existence?

Chapter 2: "Do Artifacts Have Politics

W asks, Can technology "embody specific forms of power and authority" (19). He reviews the ideas

of Kropotikin, Morris Hayes, Lillienthal, Boorstein and Mumford on his way to answering his question.

For example, Hayes states that "deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward

authoritarianism" because of safety concerns (19-20). W believes "that technical systems of various

kinds are deeply interwoven in the conditions of modern politics [and further, that the] physical

arrangements of industrial production, warfare, communications, and the like have fundamentally

changed the exercise of power and the experience of citizenship" (20). Indeed, "human ends are

powerfully transformed as they are adapted to technical means" (21).

Artifacts "contain political properties" in two ways: 1) via "invention, design, or arrangement of a

specific technical device or system that becomes a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a particular

community." 2) via "'inherently political technologies', man-made systems that appear to require or to

be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships." Here W means the term politics

to stand for "arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that

take place within those arrangements"; while the term technology is meant to stand for "all of modern

practical artifices" (22).

Examples cited in the above regard include the highway overpasses at Jones Beach, designed by

Robert Moses, which are "extraordinarily low" so that poor people cannot gain access to the beach

because their only method of transportation there would have to be by bus yet a bus cannot

get under the overpasses. Moses wanted to "build a particular social effect" (22-23). And in fact he

made sure that a rail line would not be built to go to the beach.

Similarly, Baron Haussmann engineered broad Parisian thoroughfares to make sure that there could be

not street fighting of the sort that occurred in 1848. This was an early version of the kinds of planning

that informed the construction of college campuses in the 1970s after the trauma of student rioting that

began in the 1960s.

Another example is that of McCormick's reaper manufacturing plant in Chicago in the 1880s, when he