The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Do Artifacts Have Politics?
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. Hence, the stern advice commonly given those who flirt with the notion that technical artifacts have political qualities: What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded. It is no surprise to learn that technical systems of various kinds are deeply interwoven in the conditions of modern politics. This chapter shows why so much of modern social and political thought contains recurring statements of what can be called a theory of technological politics, an odd mongrel of notions often crossbred with orthodox liberal, conservative, and socialist philosophies.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
The Ethnography of Infrastructure
STAR, S. L. (1999) · American Behavioral Scientist · doi:10.1177/00027649921955326 · Cited by 4,486
Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity
Law, J. (1992) · Systems Practice · doi:10.1007/bf01059830 · Cited by 3,244
Working and organizing in the age of the learning algorithm
Faraj, S., Pachidi, S., & Sayegh, K. (2018) · Information and Organization · doi:10.1016/j.infoandorg.2018.02.005 · Cited by 929
Infrastructuring and the formation of publics in participatory design
Dantec, C. A. L., & DiSalvo, C. (2013) · Social Studies of Science · doi:10.1177/0306312712471581 · Cited by 564
Object Lessons: Workplace Artifacts as Representations of Occupational Jurisdiction
Bechky, B. A. (2003) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/379527 · Cited by 527
Metadata
- Authors
- Winner, L.
- Venue
- Computer Ethics
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Published
- 2017-05-15
- Pages
- 177-192
- OpenAlex
- W1498112155
- Cited by
- 2,317
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 1256.82
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Do Artifacts Have Politics? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.4324/9781315259697-21
- The paper
- Winner, L. (2017). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Computer Ethics. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315259697-21
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
