CS213 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Sociotechnical System, Langdon Winner
*discuss non material parts of assemblages (crime, fear of strangers) → for workshop
Autonomous Weapons Video
● Can target people using facial recognition
● Could they target ideologies?
● Target using social media posts
“Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals, they are a collective organism,
sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in
nature,” said William Roper, director of the Strategic Capabilities Office
“Because every Perdix communicates and collaborates with every other Perdix, the swarm has
no leader and can gracefully adopt to drones entering or exiting the team.”
Authors Note That
● Seems obvious that tech is political and economic (because can be used for politics)
● “Prisons can be used to confine political prisoners; telephones can be used to raise
political contributions, bombs can be dropped to win political advantage. Hence
technologies are political in that they can be used for political ends. Computers can be
sold to make a profit; self service checkouts can be used to lay off workers and save
money; factories can operate 24/7 to maximize economies of scale… used for economic
ends (pg 165)
Deceptive in 3 Ways
● 1. Symptomatic causal understanding → one developed, then used for political ends
● 2. Assumes that technology is separate from politics and economics → techs developed
in politics/econ, need emerges in particular environments
● 3. Treats politics and economics as separate
What is Meant by Politics?
● Want to see politics as everyday choices - politics and economics involved in our
everyday
Authors
● “Politics, then, is the term for the work of generating, concretizing, and challenging
positions of possibility, status, and relations of power and agency” (166)
● Stabilizes to some degree - politics generates possibilities but also limits them as it
makes certain practices enduring
● Becoming, existing, negating (challenging)
● We let people make technological decisions for us (abstract system makes us feel
detached and like we have no opinion on the matter)
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