Assignment

Choose one of the following options:

Option #1 Technological Politics (Please see attached for article) 

Langdon Winner argues in “Do Artifacts have Politics” that technological artifacts can have political properties. After reviewing his article, please do the following: 

1. Using your own words and paraphrasing or summarizing, describe what Technological Politics is when it is part of the design or arrangement of a device or system, according to Winner. 
2. Choose one example from the article (Robert Moses overpasses, pneumatic molding machines, tomato harvester machine) and explain its political properties, according to Winner. Be sure to discuss who has power and who does not due to the artifact’s design.   
3. Find an example of a technological artifact in your environment (bridge, street sign, game, tool, device, utensil, band-aid etc.), describe it briefly, and then explain who you think this artifact was designed for AND who may not have been considered when this artifact was designed. Who do you think might have more power due to the design of the artifact, and why? Explain your assessment using specific examples from the artifact. 

For instance, you could point out that those with small hand sizes, often women, may not have been fully considered in the design of the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra because it is too big for those with smaller hands to use with one hand. Then, give the dimensions of the phone and the dimensions of a typical woman’s hand to show how this could be true. You could then talk about how those with bigger hands might have more power when using this device since it’s easier for them to use to take selfies, become influencers using it, etc.   

4. Use two quotes from any of your resources to support or explain your points. Make sure to provide in-text citations for both quotes in MLA format.  

5. Provide references for all sources in MLA format.   

Option #2: Gender (Please see attached for articles)

After reading Wacjman’s chapter, “Feminist Theories of Technology,” and Todd’s commentary, “GamerGate and Resistance to the Diversification of Gaming Culture,” in the Required Learning Materials, please do the following:  

1. Briefly explain three things that you learned from these resources that have contributed to the tendency to relate technology to the male gender and stereotypes about gender and technology?  
2. Identify one of your perceptions about technology and gender and explain why you might hold that idea.  

For instance, maybe you hold the idea that all car mechanics are men. You think this because you have only seen boys taking engine repair classes in high school, and every mechanic shop you have gone to has only had men working there repairing cars. You have also seen many television shows about racing, and the majority of those who drive racing cars and who work in the pits are men. Also, when you think of “mechanic,” an image of a greasy man in overalls holding a wrench comes into your head.  

Alternately, maybe you hold the idea that women like to vacuum. You hold this idea because you grew up only seeing the female grownup in your household use the vacuum cleaner. You have seen countless commercials and television shows with women vacuuming, and you remember something about the old Kirby vacuum cleaner sales people always wanting to talk to the “woman of the house.”  

1. Finally, discuss why you think there can be such resistance, as exemplified by #Gamergate when genders other than male attempt to participate in creating and using technology?  
3. Use two quotes from any of your resources to support or explain your points. Make sure to provide in-text citations for both quotes in MLA format. 

 

4. Provide references for all sources in MLA format.   

Option #3: Race (Please see attached for articles)

After reading de la Peña’s “The History of Technology, the Resistance of Archives, and the Whiteness of Race” and Marijan’s “Algorithms Are Not Impartial” in the Required Learning Resource, please do the following:  

1. Explain three factors or issues that contribute to race often being omitted in research on the history of technology.   
2. Explain one factor or issue that contributes to race being omitted in algorithmic calculations.   
3. Choose one of the solutions that either of these authors proposes to the problem they outline. Do you think that the author’s proposed solution can be effective? Why or why not?   
4. Discuss one other roadblock, factor or issue you think can come up in trying to address race and technology in historical research or algorithmic calculations.  

Use two quotes from any of your resources to support or explain your points. Make sure to provide in-text citations for both quotes in MLA format. 

5. Provide references for all sources in MLA format.  

17
Do Artifacts Have Politics?

Langdon Winner

No idea is more provocative in controversies about technology and society than the notion that
technical things have political qualities. 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. Since ideas of this kind
are a persistent and troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they
deserve explicit attention.

It is no surprise to learn that technical systems of various kinds are deeply interwoven in the
conditions of modern politics. The physical arrangements of industrial production, warfare, com-
munications, and the like have fundamentally changed the exercise of power and the experience of
citizenship. But to go beyond this obvious fact and to argue that certain technologies in themselves
have political properties seems, at first glance, completely mistaken. We all know that people have
politics; things do not. To discover either virtues or evils in aggregates of steel, plastic, transistors,
integrated circuits, chemicals, and the like seems just plain wrong, a way of mystifying human
artifice and of avoiding the true sources, the human sources of freedom and oppression, justice and
injustice. Blaming the hardware appears even more foolish than blaming the victims when it comes
to judging conditions of public life.

Hence, the stern advice commonly given those who flirt with the notion that technical arti-
facts have political qualities: What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic sys-
tem in which it is embedded. This maxim, which in a number of variations is the central premise
of a theory that can be called the social determination of technology, has an obvious wisdom. It
serves as a needed corrective to those who focus uncritically upon such things as ‘‘the computer
and its social impacts’’ but who fail to look behind technical devices to see the social circumstances
of their development, deployment, and use. This view provides an antidote to naı̈ve technological
determinism—the idea that technology develops as the sole result of an internal dynamic and then,
unmediated by any other influence, molds society to fit its patterns. Those who have not recognized
the ways in which technologies are shaped by social and economic forces have not gotten very far.

But the corrective has its own shortcomings; taken literally, it suggests that technical things
do not matter at all. Once one has done the detective work necessary to reveal the social origins—

From Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor, 19–39. Copyright � 1986 by University of Chicago
Press. Reprinted by permission.

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252 Langdon Winner

power holders behind a particular instance of technological change—one will have explained
everything of importance. This conclusion offers comfort to social scientists. It validates what they
had always suspected, namely, that there is nothing distinctive about the study of technology in the
first place. Hence, they can return to their standard models of social power—those of interest-group
politics, bureaucratic politics, Marxist models of class struggle, and the like—and have everything
they need. The social determination of technology is, in this view, essentially no different from the
social determination of, say, welfare policy or taxation.

There are, however, good reasons to believe that technology is politically significant in its
own right, good reasons why the standard models of social science only go so far in accounting for
what is most interesting and troublesome about the subject. 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 philoso-
phies.1 The theory of technological politics draws attention to the momentum of large-scale socio-
technical systems, to the response of modern societies to certain technological imperatives, and to
the ways human ends are powerfully transformed as they are adapted to technical means. This
perspective offers a novel framework of interpretation and explanation for some of the more puz-
zling patterns that have taken shape in and around the growth of modern material culture. Its start-
ing point is a decision to take technical artifacts seriously. Rather than insist that we immediately
reduce everything to the interplay of social forces, the theory of technological politics suggests that
we pay attention to the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those characteristics.
A necessary complement to, rather than a replacement for, theories of the social determination of
technology, this approach identifies certain technologies as political phenomena in their own right.
It points us back, to borrow Edmund Husserl’s philosophical injunction, to the things themselves.

In what follows I will outline and illustrate 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 the affairs of a particular community. Seen
in the proper light, examples of this kind are fairly straightforward and easily understood. 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. Arguments
about cases of this kind are much more troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By the
term ‘‘politics’’ I mean arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the
activities that take place within those arrangements. For my purposes here, the term ‘‘technology’’
is understood to mean all of modern practical artifice, but to avoid confusion I prefer to speak of
‘‘technologies’’ plural, smaller or larger pieces or systems of hardware of a specific kind.2 My inten-
tion is not to settle any of the issues here once and for all, but to indicate their general dimensions
and significance.

TECHNICAL ARRANGEMENTS AND SOCIAL ORDER

Anyone who has traveled the highways of America and has gotten used to the normal height of
overpasses may well find something a little odd about some of the bridges over the parkways on
Long Island, New York. Many of the overpasses are extraordinarily low, having as little as nine
feet of clearance at the curb. Even those who happened to notice this structural peculiarity would
not be inclined to attach any special meaning to it. In our accustomed way of looking at things such
as roads and bridges, we see the details of form as innocuous and seldom give them a second
thought.

It turns out, however, that some two hundred or so low-hanging overpasses on Long Island

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Do Artifacts Have Politics? 253

are there for a reason. They were deliberately designed and built that way by someone who wanted
to achieve a particular social effect. Robert Moses, the master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and
other public works of the 1920s to the 1970s in New York, built his overpasses according to speci-
fications that would discourage the presence of buses on his parkways. According to evidence pro-
vided by Moses’ biographer, Robert A. Caro, the reasons reflect Moses’ social class bias and racial
prejudice. Automobile-owning whites of ‘‘upper’’ and ‘‘comfortable middle’’ classes, as he called
them, would be free to use the parkways for recreation and commuting. Poor people and blacks,
who normally used public transit, were kept off the roads because the twelve-foot-tall buses could
not handle the overpasses. One consequence was to limit access of racial minorities and low-
income groups to Jones Beach, Moses’ widely acclaimed public park. Moses made doubly sure of
this result by vetoing a proposed extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach.

Robert Moses’ life is a fascinating story in recent U.S. political history. His dealings with
mayors, governors, and presidents; his careful manipulation of legislatures, banks, labor unions,
the press, and public opinion could be studied by political scientists for years. But the most impor-
tant and enduring results of his work are his technologies, the vast engineering projects that give
New York much of its present form. For generations after Moses’ death and the alliances he forged
have fallen apart, his public works, especially the highways and bridges he built to favor the use of
the automobile over the development of mass transit, will continue to shape that city. Many of
his monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality, a way of
engineering relationships among people that, after a time, became just another part of the land-
scape. As New York planner Lee Koppleman told Caro about the low bridges on Wantagh Parkway,
‘‘The old son of a gun had made sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamned park-
ways.’’3

Histories of architecture, city planning, and public works contain many examples of physical
arrangements with explicit or implicit political purposes. One can point to Baron Haussmann’s
broad Parisian thoroughfares, engineered at Louis Napoleon’s direction to prevent any recurrence
of street fighting of the kind that took place during the revolution of 1848. Or one can visit any
number of grotesque concrete buildings and huge plazas constructed on university campuses in the
United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s to defuse student demonstrations. Studies of
industrial machines and instruments also turn up interesting political stories, including some that
violate our normal expectations about why technological innovations are made in the first place. If
we suppose that new technologies are introduced to achieve increased efficiency, the history of
technology shows that we will sometimes be disappointed. Technological change expresses a pano-
ply of human motives, not the least of which is the desire of some to have dominion over others
even though it may require an occasional sacrifice of cost savings and some violation of the normal
standard of trying to get more from less.

One poignant illustration can be found in the history of nineteenth-century industrial mecha-
nization. At Cyrus McCormick’s reaper manufacturing plant in Chicago in the middle 1880s, pneu-
matic molding machines, a new and largely untested innovation, were added to the foundry at an
estimated cost of $500,000. The standard economic interpretation would lead us to expect that this
step was taken to modernize the plant and achieve the kind of efficiencies that mechanization
brings. But historian Robert Ozanne has put the development in a broader context. At the time,
Cyrus McCormick II was engaged in a battle with the National Union of Iron Molders. He saw the
addition of the new machines as a way to ‘‘weed out the bad element among the men,’’ namely, the
skilled workers who had organized the union local in Chicago.4 The new machines, manned by
unskilled laborers, actually produced inferior castings at a higher cost than the earlier process. After
three years of use the machines were, in fact, abandoned, but by that time they had served their
purpose—the destruction of the union. Thus, the story of these technical developments at the

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254 Langdon Winner

McCormick factory cannot be adequately understood outside the record of workers’ attempts to
organize, police repression of the labor movement in Chicago during that period, and the events
surrounding the bombing at Haymarket Square. Technological history and U.S. political history
were at that moment deeply intertwined.

In the examples of Moses’ low bridges and McCormick’s molding machines, one sees the
importance of technical arrangements that precede the use of the things in question. It is obvious
that technologies can be used in ways that enhance the power, authority, and privilege of some over
others, for example, the use of television to sell a candidate. In our accustomed way of thinking
technologies are seen as neutral tools that can be used well or poorly, for good, evil, or something
in between. But we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given device might have been designed
and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any
of its professed uses. Robert Moses’ bridges, after all, were used to carry automobiles from one
point to another; McCormick’s machines were used to make metal castings; both technologies,
however, encompassed purposes far beyond their immediate use. If our moral and political lan-
guage for evaluating technology includes only categories having to do with tools and uses, if it
does not include attention to the meaning of the designs and arrangements of our artifacts, then we
will be blinded to much that is intellectually and practically crucial.

Because the point is most easily understood in the light of particular intentions embodied in
physical form, I have so far offered illustrations that seem almost conspiratorial. But to recognize
the political dimensions in the shapes of technology does not require that we look for conscious
conspiracies or malicious intentions. The organized movement of handicapped people in the United
States during the 1970s pointed out the countless ways in which machines, instruments, and struc-
tures of common use—buses, buildings, sidewalks, plumbing fixtures, and so forth—made it
impossible for many handicapped persons to move freely about, a condition that systematically
excluded them from public life. It is safe to say that designs unsuited for the handicapped arose
more from long-standing neglect than from anyone’s active intention. But once the issue was
brought to public attention, it became evident that justice required a remedy. A whole range of
artifacts have been redesigned and rebuilt to accommodate this minority.

Indeed, many of the most important examples of technologies that have political conse-
quences are those that transcend the simple categories ‘‘intended’’ and ‘‘unintended’’ altogether.
These are instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in
a particular direction that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by
some social interests and crushing setbacks by others. In such cases it is neither correct nor insight-
ful to say, ‘‘Someone intended to do somebody else harm.’’ Rather one must say that the technolog-
ical deck has been stacked in advance to favor certain social interests and that some people were
bound to receive a better hand than others.

The mechanical tomato harvester, a remarkable device perfected by researchers at the Uni-
versity of California from the late 1940s to the present offers an illustrative tale. The machine is
able to harvest tomatoes in a single pass through a row, cutting the plants from the ground, shaking
the fruit loose, and (in the newest models) sorting the tomatoes electronically into large plastic
gondolas that hold up to twenty-five tons of produce headed for canning factories. To accommodate
the rough motion of these harvesters in the field, agricultural researchers have bred new varieties
of tomatoes that are hardier, sturdier, and less tasty than those previously grown. The harvesters
replace the system of handpicking in which crews of farm workers would pass through the fields
three or four times, putting ripe tomatoes in lug boxes and saving immature fruit for later harvest.5

Studies in California indicate that the use of the machine reduces costs by approximately five to
seven dollars per ton as compared to hand harvesting.6 But the benefits are by no means equally
divided in the agricultural economy. In fact, the machine in the garden has in this instance been

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Do Artifacts Have Politics? 255

the occasion for a thorough reshaping of social relationships involved in tomato production in rural
California.

By virtue of their very size and cost of more than $50,000 each, the machines are compatible
only with a highly concentrated form of tomato growing. With the introduction of this new method
of harvesting, the number of tomato growers declined from approximately 4,000 in the early 1960s
to about 600 in 1973, and yet there was a substantial increase in tons of tomatoes produced. By the
late 1970s an estimated 32,000 jobs in the tomato industry had been eliminated as a direct conse-
quence of mechanization.7 Thus, a jump in productivity to the benefit of very large growers has
occurred at the sacrifice of other rural agricultural communities.

The University of California’s research on and development of agricultural machines such as
the tomato harvester eventually became the subject of a lawsuit filed by attorneys for California
Rural Legal Assistance, an organization representing a group of farm workers and other interested
parties. The suit charged that university officials are spending tax monies on projects that benefit a
handful of private interests to the detriment of farm workers, small farmers, consumers, and rural
California generally and asks for a court injunction to stop the practice. The university denied these
charges, arguing that to accept them ‘‘would require elimination of all research with any potential
practical application.’’8

As far as I know, no one argued that the development of the tomato harvester was the result
of a plot. Two students of the controversy, William Friedland and Amy Barton, specifically exoner-
ate the original developers of the machine and the hard tomato from any desire to facilitate eco-
nomic concentration in that industry.9 What we see here instead is an ongoing social process in
which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in
deeply entrenched patterns, patterns that bear the unmistakable stamp of political and economic
power. Over many decades agricultural research and development in U.S. land-grant colleges and
universities has tended to favor the interests of large agribusiness concerns.10 It is in the face of
such subtly ingrained patterns that opponents of innovations such as the tomato harvester are made
to seem ‘‘antitechnology’’ or ‘‘antiprogress.’’ For the harvester is not merely the symbol of a social
order that rewards some while punishing others; it is in a true sense an embodiment of that order.

Within a given category of technological change there are, roughly speaking, two kinds of
choices that can affect the relative distribution of power, authority, and privilege in a community.
Often the crucial decision is a simple ‘‘yes or no’’ choice—are we going to develop and adopt the
thing or not? In recent years many local, national, and international disputes about technology have
centered on ‘‘yes or no’’ judgments about such things as food additives, pesticides, the building of
highways, nuclear reactors, dam projects, and proposed high-tech weapons. The fundamental
choice about an antiballistic missile or supersonic transport is whether or not the thing is going to
join society as a piece of its operating equipment. Reasons given for and against are frequently as
important as those concerning the adoption of an important new law.

A second range of choices, equally critical in many instances, has to do with specific features
in the design or arrangement of a technical system after the decision to go ahead with it has already
been made. Even after a utility company wins permission to build a large electric power line, impor-
tant controversies can remain with respect to the placement of its route and the design of its towers;
even after an organization has decided to institute a system of computers, controversies can still
arise with regard to the kinds of components, programs, modes of access, and other specific features
the system will include. Once the mechanical tomato harvester had been developed in its basic
form, a design alteration of critical social significance—the addition of electronic sorters, for exam-
ple—changed the character of the machine’s effects upon the balance of wealth and power in Cali-
fornia agriculture. Some of the most interesting research on technology and politics at present
focuses upon the attempt to demonstrate in a detailed, concrete fashion how seemingly innocuous

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256 Langdon Winner

design features in mass transit systems, water projects, industrial machinery, and other technologies
actually mask social choices of profound significance. Historian David Noble has studied two kinds
of automated machine tool systems that have different implications for the relative power of man-
agement and labor in the industries that might employ them. He has shown that although the basic
electronic and mechanical components of the record/playback and numerical control systems are
similar, the choice of one design over another has crucial consequences for social struggles on the
shop floor. To see the matter solely in terms of cost cutting, efficiency, or the modernization of
equipment is to miss a decisive element in the story.11

From such examples I would offer some general conclusions. These correspond to the inter-
pretation of technologies as ‘‘forms of life’’ presented earlier, filling in the explicitly political
dimensions of that point of view.

The things we call ‘‘technologies’’ are ways of building order in our world. Many technical
devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of
ordering human activity. Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies
choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate,
travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time. In the processes by which structuring decisions
are made, different people are situated differently and possess unequal degrees of power as well as
unequal levels of awareness. By far the greatest latitude of choice exists the very first time a particu-
lar instrument, system, or technique is introduced. Because choices tend to become strongly fixed
in material equipment, economic investment, and social habit, the original flexibility vanishes for
all practical purposes once the initial commitments are made. In that sense technological innova-
tions are similar to legislative acts or political foundings that establish a framework for public order
that will endure over many generations. For that reason the same careful attention one would give
to the rules, roles, and relationships of politics must also be given to such things as the building of
highways, the creation of television networks, and the tailoring of seemingly insignificant features
on new machines. The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institu-
tions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel
and concrete, wires and semiconductors, nuts and bolts.

INHERENTLY POLITICAL TECHNOLOGIES

None of the arguments and examples considered thus far addresses a stronger, more troubling claim
often made in writings about technology and society—the belief that some technologies are by
their very nature political in a specific way. According to this view, the adoption of a given techni-
cal system unavoidably brings with it conditions for human relationships that have a distinctive
political cast—for example, centralized or decentralized, egalitarian or inegalitarian, repressive or
liberating. This is ultimately what is at stake in assertions such as those of Lewis Mumford that
two traditions of technology, one authoritarian, the other democratic, exist side by side in Western
history. In all the cases cited above the technologies are relatively flexible in design and arrange-
ment and variable in their effects. Although one can recognize a particular result produced in a
particular setting, one can also easily imagine how a roughly similar device or system might have
been built or situated with very much different political consequences. The idea we must now
examine and evaluate is that certain kinds of technology do not allow such flexibility, and that to
choose them is to choose unalterably a particular form of political life.

A remarkably forceful statement of one version of this argument appears in Friedrich Eng-
els’s little essay ‘‘On Authority,’’ written in 1872. Answering anarchists who believed that authority
is an evil that ought to be abolished altogether, Engels launches into a panegyric for authoritarian-

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Do Artifacts Have Politics? 257

ism, maintaining, among other things, that strong authority is a necessary condition in modern
industry. To advance his case in the strongest possible way, he asks his readers to imagine that the
revolution has already occurred. ‘‘Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now
exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth. Supposing, to adopt entirely
the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had become
the collective property of the workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared or will it have
only changed its form?’’12

His answer draws upon lessons from three sociotechnical systems of his day, cotton-spinning
mills, railways, and ships at sea. He observes that on its way to becoming finished thread, cotton
moves through a number of different operations at different locations in the factory. The workers
perform a wide variety of tasks, from running the steam engine to carrying the products from one
room to another. Because these tasks must be coordinated and because the timing of the work is
‘‘fixed by the authority of the steam,’’ laborers must learn to accept a rigid discipline. They must,
according to Engels, work at regular hours and agree to subordinate their individual wills to the
persons in charge of factory operations. If they fail to do so, they risk the horrifying possibility that
production will come to a grinding halt. Engels pulls no punches. ‘‘The automatic machinery of a
big factory,’’ he writes, ‘‘is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers
ever have been.’’13

Similar lessons are adduced in Engels’s analysis of the necessary operating conditions for
railways and ships at sea. Both require the subordination of workers to an ‘‘imperious authority’’
that sees to it that things run according to plan. Engels finds that far from being an idiosyncrasy of
capitalist social organization, relationships of authority and subordination arise ‘‘independently of
all social organization, [and] are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under
which we produce and make products circulate.’’ Again, he intends this to be stern advice to the
anarchists who, according to Engels, thought it possible simply to eradicate subordination and
superordination at a single stroke. All such schemes are nonsense. The roots of unavoidable authori-
tarianism are, he argues, deeply implanted in the human involvement with science and technology.
‘‘If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter
avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, insofar as he employs them, to a veritable despo-
tism independent of all social organization.’’14

Attempts to justify strong authority on the basis of supposedly necessary conditions of techni-
cal practice have an ancient history. A pivotal theme in the Republic is Plato’s quest to borrow the
authority of technē and employ it by analogy to buttress his argument in favor of authority in the
state. Among the illustrations he chooses, like Engels, is that of a ship on the high seas. Because
large sailing vessels by their very nature need to be steered with a firm hand, sailors must yield to
their captain’s commands; no reasonable person believes that ships can be run democratically. Plato
goes on to suggest that governing a state is rather like being captain of a ship or like practicing
medicine as a physician. Much the same conditions that require central rule and decisive action in
organized technical activity also create this need in government.

In Engels’s argument, and arguments like it, the justification for authority is no longer made
by Plato’s classic analogy, but rather directly with reference to technology itself. If the basic case
is as compelling as Engels believed it to be, one would expect that as a society adopted increasingly
complicated technical systems as its material basis, the prospects for authoritarian ways of life
would be greatly enhanced. Central control by knowledgeable people acting at the top of a rigid
social hierarchy would seem increasingly prudent. In this respect his stand in ‘‘On Authority’’
appears to be at variance with Karl Marx’s position in Volume I of Capital. Marx tries to show that
increasing mechanization will render obsolete the hierarchical division of labor and the relation-
ships of subordination that, in his view, were necessary during the early stages of modern manufac-

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258 Langdon Winner

turing. ‘‘Modern Industry,’’ he writes, ‘‘sweeps away by technical means the manufacturing
division of labor, under which each man is bound hand and foot for life to a single detail operation.
At the same time, the capitalistic form of that industry reproduces this same division of labour in
a still more monstrous shape; in the factory proper, by converting the workman into a living
appendage of the machine.’’15 In Marx’s view the conditions that will eventually dissolve the capi-
talist division of labor and facilitate proletarian revolution are conditions latent in industrial tech-
nology itself. The differences between Marx’s position in Capital and Engels’s in his essay raise
an important question for socialism: What, after all, does modern technology make possible or
necessary in political life? The theoretical tension we see here mirrors many troubles in the practice
of freedom and authority that had muddied the tracks of socialist revolution.

Arguments to the effect that technologies are in some sense inherently political have been
advanced in a wide variety of contexts, far too many to summarize here. My reading of such
notions, however, reveals there are two basic ways of stating the case. One version claims that the
adoption of a given technical system actually requires the creation and maintenance of a particular
set of social conditions as the operating environment of that system. Engels’s position is of this
kind. A similar view is offered by a contemporary writer who holds that ‘‘if you accept nuclear
power plants, you also accept a techno-scientific-industrial-military elite. Without these people in
charge, you could not have nuclear power.’’16 In this conception some kinds of technology require
their social environments to be structured in a particular way in much the same sense that an auto-
mobile requires wheels in order to move. The thing could not exist as an effective operating entity
unless certain social as well as material conditions were met. The meaning of ‘‘required’’ here is
that of practical (rather than logical) necessity. Thus, Plato thought it a practical necessity that a
ship at sea have one captain and an unquestionably obedient crew.

A second, somewhat weaker, version of the argument holds that a given kind of technology
is strongly compatible with, but does not strictly require, social and political relationships of a
particular stripe. Many advocates of solar energy have argued that technologies of that variety are
more compatible with a democratic, egalitarian society than energy systems based on coal, oil, and
nuclear power; at the same time they do not maintain that anything about solar energy requires
democracy. Their case is, briefly, that solar energy is decentralizing in both a technical and political
sense: technically speaking, it is vastly more reasonable to build solar systems in a disaggregated,
widely distributed manner than in large-scale centralized plants; politically speaking, solar energy
accommodates the attempts of individuals and local communities to manage their affairs effectively
because they are dealing with systems that are more accessible, comprehensible, and controllable
than huge centralized sources. In this view solar energy is desirable not only for its economic and
environmental benefits, but also for the salutary institutions it is likely to permit in other areas of
public life.17

Within both versions of the argument there is a further distinction to be made between condi-
tions that are internal to the workings of a given technical system and those that are external to it.
Engels’s thesis concerns internal social relations said to be required within cotton factories and
railways, for example; what such relationships mean for the condition of society at large is, for
him, a separate question. In contrast, the solar advocate’s belief that solar technologies are compati-
ble with democracy pertains to the way they complement aspects of society removed from the
organization of those technologies as such.

There are, then, several different directions that arguments of this kind can follow. Are the
social conditions predicated said to be required by, or strongly compatible with, the workings of a
given technical system? Are those conditions internal to that system or external to it (or both)?
Although writings that address such questions are often unclear about what is being asserted, argu-
ments in this general category are an important part of modern political discourse. They enter into

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Do Artifacts Have Politics? 259

many attempts to explain how changes in social life take place in the wake of technological innova-
tion. More important, they are often used to buttress attempts to justify or criticize proposed courses
of action involving new technology. By offering distinctly political reasons for or against the adop-
tion of a particular technology, arguments of this kind stand apart from more commonly employed,
more easily quantifiable claims about economic costs and benefits, environmental impacts, and
possible risks to public health and safety that technical systems may involve. The issue here does
not concern how many jobs will be created, how much income generated, how many pollutants
added, or how many cancers produced. Rather, the issue has to do with ways in which choices
about technology have important consequences for the form and quality of human associations.

If we examine social patterns that characterize the environments of technical systems, we
find certain devices and systems almost invariably linked to specific ways of organizing power and
authority. The important question is: Does this state of affairs derive from an unavoidable social
response to intractable properties in the things themselves, or is it instead a pattern imposed inde-
pendently by a governing body, ruling class, or some other social or cultural institution to further
its own purposes?

Taking the most obvious example, the atom bomb is an inherently political artifact. As long
as it exists at all, its lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralized, rigidly hierarchi-
cal chain of command closed to all influences that might make its workings unpredictable. The
internal social system of the bomb must be authoritarian; there is no other way. The state of affairs
stands as a practical necessity independent of any larger political system in which the bomb is
embedded, independent of the type of regime or character of its rulers. Indeed, democratic states
must try to find ways to ensure that the social structures and mentality that characterize the manage-
ment of nuclear weapons do not ‘‘spin off’’ or ‘‘spill over’’ into the polity as a whole.

The bomb is, of course, a special case. The reasons very rigid relationships of authority are
necessary in its immediate presence should be clear to anyone. If, however, we look for other
instances in which particular varieties of technology are widely perceived to need the maintenance
of a special pattern of power and authority, modern technical history contains a wealth of examples.

Alfred D. Chandler in The Visible Hand, a monumental study of modern business enterprise,
presents impressive documentation to defend the hypothesis that the construction and day-to-day
operation of many systems of production, transportation, and communication in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries require the development of particular social form—a large-scale centralized,
hierarchical organization administered by highly skilled managers. Typical of Chandler’s reasoning
is his analysis of the growth of the railroads.18

Technology made possible fast, all-weather transportation; but safe, regular, reliable movement
of goods and passengers, as well as the continuing maintenance and repair of locomotives, rolling
stock, and track, roadbed, stations, roundhouses, and other equipment, required the creation of a
sizable administrative organization. It meant the employment of a set of managers to supervise
these functional activities over an extensive geographical area; and the appointment of an admin-
istrative command of middle and top executives to monitor, evaluate, and coordinate the work of
managers responsible for the day-to-day operations.

Throughout his book Chandler points to ways in which technologies used in the production and
distribution of electricity, chemicals, and a wide range of industrial goods ‘‘demanded’’ or
‘‘required’’ this form of human association. ‘‘Hence, the operational requirements of railroads
demanded the creation of the first administrative hierarchies in American business.’’19

Were there other conceivable ways of organizing these aggregates of people and apparatus?
Chandler shows that a previously dominant social form, the small traditional family firm, simply
could not handle the task in most cases. Although he does not speculate further, it is clear that he

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260 Langdon Winner

believes there is, to be realistic, very little latitude in the forms of power and authority appropriate
within modern sociotechnical systems. The properties of many modern technologies—oil pipelines
and refineries, for example—are such that overwhelmingly impressive economies of scale and
speed are possible. If such systems are to work effectively, efficiently, quickly, and safely, certain
requirements of internal social organization have to be fulfilled; the material possibilities that mod-
ern technologies make available could not be exploited otherwise. Chandler acknowledges that as
one compares sociotechnical institutions of different nations, one sees ‘‘ways in which cultural atti-
tudes, values, ideologies, political systems, and social structure affect these imperatives.’’20 But the
weight of argument and empirical evidence in The Visible Hand suggests that any significant depar-
ture from the basic pattern would be, at best, highly unlikely.

It may be that other conceivable arrangements of power and authority, for example, those of
decentralized, democratic worker self-management, could prove capable of administering factories,
refineries, communications systems, and railroads as well as or better than the organizations Chan-
dler describes. Evidence from automobile assembly teams in Sweden and worker-managed plants
in Yugoslavia and other countries is often presented to salvage these possibilities. Unable to settle
controversies over this matter here, I merely point to what I consider to be their bone of contention.
The available evidence tends to show that many large, sophisticated technological systems are in
fact highly compatible with centralized, hierarchical managerial control. The interesting question,
however, has to do with whether or not this pattern is in any sense a requirement of such systems,
a question that is not solely empirical. The matter ultimately rests on our judgments about what
steps, if any, are practically necessary in the workings of particular kinds of technology and what,
if anything, such measures require of the structure of human associations. Was Plato right in saying
that a ship at sea needs steering by a decisive hand and that this could only be accomplished by a
single captain and an obedient crew? Is Chandler correct in saying that the properties of large-scale
systems require centralized, hierarchical managerial control?

To answer such questions, we would have to examine in some detail the moral claims of
practical necessity (including those advocated in the doctrines of economics) and weigh them
against moral claims of other sorts, for example, the notion that it is good for sailors to participate
in the command of a ship or that workers have a right to be involved in making and administering
decisions in a factory. It is characteristic of societies based on large, complex technological sys-
tems, however, that moral reasons other than those of practical necessity appear increasingly obso-
lete, ‘‘idealistic,’’ and irrelevant. Whatever claims one may wish to make on behalf of liberty,
justice, or equality can be immediately neutralized when confronted with arguments to the effect,
‘‘Fine, but that’s no way to run a railroad’’ (or steel mill, or airline, or communication system, and
so on). Here we encounter an important quality in modern political discourse and in the way people
commonly think about what measures are justified in response to the possibilities technologies
make available. In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say
that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity—especially the need to maintain crucial
technological systems as smoothly working entities—have tended to eclipse other sorts of moral
and political reasoning.

One attempt to salvage the autonomy of politics from the bind of practical necessity involves
the notion that conditions of human association found in the internal workings of technological
systems can easily be kept separate from the polity as a whole. Americans have long rested content
in the belief that arrangements of power and authority inside industrial corporations, public utilities,
and the like have little bearing on public institutions, practices, and ideas at large. That ‘‘democracy
stops at the factory gates’’ was taken as a fact of life that had nothing to do with the practice of
political freedom. But can the internal politics of technology and the politics of the whole commu-
nity be so easily separated? A recent study of business leaders in the United States, contemporary

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Do Artifacts Have Politics? 261

exemplars of Chandler’s ‘‘visible hand of management,’’ found them remarkably impatient with
such democratic scruples as ‘‘one man, one vote.’’ If democracy doesn’t work for the firm, the most
critical institution in all of society, American executives ask, how well can it be expected to work
for the government of a nation—particularly when that government attempts to interfere with the
achievements of the firm? The authors of the report observe that patterns of authority that work
effectively in the corporation become for businessmen ‘‘the desirable model against which to com-
pare political and economic relationships in the rest of society.’’21 While such findings are far from
conclusive, they do reflect a sentiment increasingly common in the land: what dilemmas such as
the energy crisis require is not a redistribution of wealth or broader public participation but, rather,
stronger, centralized public and private management.

An especially vivid case in which the operational requirements of a technical system might
influence the quality of public life is the debates about the risks of nuclear power. As the supply of
uranium for nuclear reactors runs out, a proposed alternative fuel is the plutonium generated as a
by-product in reactor cores. Well-known objections to plutonium recycling focus on its unaccept-
able economic costs, its risks of environmental contamination, and its dangers in regard to the
international proliferation of nuclear weapons. Beyond these concerns, however, stands another less
widely appreciated set of hazards—those that involve the sacrifice of civil liberties. The widespread
use of plutonium as a fuel increases the chance that this toxic substance might be stolen by terror-
ists, organized crime, or other persons. This raises the prospect, and not a trivial one, that extraordi-
nary measures would have to be taken to safeguard plutonium from theft and to recover it should
the substance be stolen. Workers in the nuclear industry as well as ordinary citizens outside could
well become subject to background security checks, covert surveillance, wiretapping, informers,
and even emergency measures under martial law—all justified by the need to safeguard plutonium.

Russell W. Ayres’s study of the legal ramifications of plutonium recycling concludes: ‘‘With
the passage of time and the increase in the quantity of plutonium in existence will come pressure
to eliminate the traditional checks the courts and legislatures place on the activities of the executive
and to develop a powerful central authority better able to enforce strict safe-guards.’’ He avers that
‘‘once a quantity of plutonium had been stolen, the case for literally turning the country upside
down to get it back would be overwhelming.’’ Ayres anticipates and worries about the kinds of
thinking that, I have argued, characterize inherently political technologies. It is still true that in a
world in which human beings make and maintain artificial systems nothing is ‘‘required’’ in an
absolute sense. Nevertheless, once a course of action is under way, once artifacts such as nuclear
power plants have been built and put in operation, the kinds of reasoning that justify the adaptation
of social life to technical requirements pop up as spontaneously as flowers in the spring. In Ayres’s
words, ‘‘Once recycling begins and the risks of plutonium theft become real rather than hypotheti-
cal, the case for governmental infringement of protected rights will seem compelling.’’22 After a
certain point, those who cannot accept the hard requirements and imperatives will be dismissed as
dreamers and fools.

* * *

The two varieties of interpretation I have outlined indicate how artifacts can have political
qualities. In the first instance we noticed ways in which specific features in the design or arrange-
ment of a device or system could provide a convenient means of establishing patterns of power and
authority in a given setting. Technologies of this kind have a range of flexibility in the dimensions
of their material form. It is precisely because they are flexible that their consequences for society
must be understood with reference to the social actors able to influence which designs and arrange-
ments are chosen. In the second instance we examined ways in which the intractable properties of
certain kinds of technology are strongly, perhaps unavoidably, linked to particular institutionalized

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262 Langdon Winner

patterns of power and authority. Here the initial choice about whether or not to adopt something is
decisive in regard to its consequences. There are no alternative physical designs or arrangements
that would make a significant difference; there are, furthermore, no genuine possibilities for cre-
ative intervention by different social systems—capitalist or socialist—that could change the intrac-
tability of the entity or significantly alter the quality of its political effects.

To know which variety of interpretation is applicable in a given case is often what is at stake
in disputes, some of them passionate ones, about the meaning of technology for how we live. I have
argued a ‘‘both/and’’ position here, for it seems to me that both kinds of understanding are applica-
ble in different circumstances. Indeed, it can happen that within a particular complex of technol-
ogy—a system of communication or transportation, for example—some aspects may be flexible in
their possibilities for society, while other aspects may be (for better or worse) completely intracta-
ble. The two varieties of interpretation I have examined here can overlap and intersect at many
points.

These are, of course, issues on which people can disagree. Thus, some proponents of energy
from renewable resources now believe they have at last discovered a set of intrinsically democratic,
egalitarian, communitarian technologies. In my best estimation, however, the social consequences
of building renewable energy systems will surely depend on the specific configurations of both
hardware and the social institutions created to bring that energy to us. It may be that we will find
ways to turn this silk purse into a sow’s ear. By comparison, advocates of the further development
of nuclear power seem to believe that they are working on a rather flexible technology whose
adverse social effects can be fixed by changing the design parameters of reactors and nuclear waste
disposal systems. For reasons indicated above, I believe them to be dead wrong in that faith. Yes,
we may be able to manage some of the ‘‘risks’’ to public health and safety that nuclear power
brings. But as society adapts to the more dangerous and apparently indelible features of nuclear
power, what will be the long-range toll in human freedom?

My belief that we ought to attend more closely to technical objects themselves is not to say
that we can ignore the contexts in which those objects are situated. A ship at sea may well require,
as Plato and Engels insisted, a single captain and obedient crew. But a ship out of service, parked
at the dock, needs only a caretaker. To understand which technologies and which contexts are
important to us, and why, is an enterprise that must involve both the study of specific technical
systems and their history as well as a thorough grasp of the concepts and controversies of political
theory. In our times people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accom-
modate technological innovation while at the same time resisting similar kinds of changes justified
on political grounds. If for no other reason than that, it is important for us to achieve a clearer view
of these matters than has been our habit so far.

NOTES

1. Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977).

2. The meaning of ‘‘technology’’ I employ in this essay does not encompass some of the broader defini-
tions of that concept found in contemporary literature, for example, the notion of ‘‘technique’’ in the writings
of Jacques Ellul. My purposes here are more limited. For a discussion of the difficulties that arise in attempts
to define ‘‘technology,’’ see Autonomous Technology, 8–12.

3. Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Random House,
1974), 318, 481, 514, 546, 951–958, 952.

4. Robert Ozanne, A Century of Labor-Management Relations at McCormick and International Harvester
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 20.

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Do Artifacts Have Politics? 263

5. The early history of the tomato harvester is told in Wayne D. Rasmussen, ‘‘Advances in American
Agriculture: The Mechanical Tomato Harvester as a Case Study,’’ Technology and Culture 9:531–543, 1968.

6. Andrew Schmitz and David Seckler, ‘‘Mechanized Agriculture and Social Welfare: The Case of the
Tomato Harvester,’’ American Journal of Agricultural Economics 52:569–577, 1970.

7. William H. Friedland and Amy Barton, ‘‘Tomato Technology,’’ Society 13:6, September/October 1976.
See also William H. Friedland, Social Sleepwalkers: Scientific and Technological Research in California Agri-
culture, University of California, Davis, Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences, Research Monograph
No. 13, 1974.

8. University of California Clip Sheet 54:36, May 1, 1979.
9. ‘‘Tomato Technology.’’

10. A history and critical analysis of agricultural research in the land-grant colleges is given in James High-
tower, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1978).

11. David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Machine Tool Automation (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1984).

12. Friedrich Engels, ‘‘On Authority,’’ in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. 2, Robert Tucker (ed.) (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1978), 731.

13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 732, 731.
15. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ed. 3, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern

Library, 1906), 530.
16. Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: William Morrow, 1978),

44.
17. See, for example, Robert Argue, Barbara Emanuel, and Stephen Graham, The Sun Builders: A People’s

Guide to Solar, Wind and Wood Energy in Canada (Toronto: Renewable Energy in Canada, 1978). ‘‘We think
decentralization is an implicit component of renewable energy; this implies the decentralization of energy
systems, communities and of power. Renewable energy doesn’t require mammoth generation sources of dis-
ruptive transmission corridors. Our cities and towns, which have been dependent on centralized energy sup-
plies, may be able to achieve some degree of autonomy, thereby controlling and administering their own
energy needs’’ (16).

18. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cam-
bridge: Belknap, 1977), 244.

19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 500.
21. Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics and Profits: The Crisis of Confidence in American Business

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 191.
22. Russell W. Ayres, ‘‘Policing Plutonium: The Civil Liberties Fallout,’’ Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Lib-

erties Law Review 10 (1975):443, 413–414, 374.

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The Ploughshares Monitor | Spring 2018 5

Joy Buolamwini, now a PhD stu-
dent at MIT’s Center for Civic
Media, was an undergraduate
when she first encountered a
problem with facial recognition

software. She was trying to teach a robot
to play peek-a-boo, but the robot did not
seem to recognize her (Couch 2017). The
robot’s facial recognition software seemed
to detect her colleagues, but not her. Buol-
amwini needed the help of a roommate to
finish her assignment (Buolamwini 2016).

Discriminatory data
As a graduate student several years later,
Buolamwini, who is African-American, en-
countered the problem again. She decided
to test the software by putting on a white
mask. Then the software recognized her.
Boulamwini realized that she was the vic-
tim of algorithmic bias. The math-based
process or set of rules (algorithm) used
in this machine-learning system reflected
implicit human values.

By then, facial recognition technology
was entering the mainstream (Lohr 2018)
and Buolamwini knew that she had to
speak out. She has been at the forefront
of discussions on how algorithms can
lead to discriminatory practices and why
the data used in new technologies must be
transparent.

In Buolamwini’s case, the software’s
dataset was predominantly white and male.
This is not uncommon. A widely used
facial recognition system uses data that
is more than 75 per cent male and 80 per
cent white (Lohr 2018). In her research,
Buolamwini finds that facial recognition
software achieves 99 per cent accuracy if
the subject is a white man, but only 35 per
cent accuracy if the subject is a woman
with darker skin.

Facial recognition software illustrates
only some of the possible problems of
biased machine learning systems. A system
using a historical dataset, in which certain
groups were excluded or particularly tar-
geted, will replicate these biases. Biases
can be compounded if the teams doing
the coding are not diverse and fail to
consider how the software could be used
against different members of society.

Consider this: police in the United
States are making more use of facial rec-
ognition software that was originally used
by the military in war zones and to combat
terrorism abroad.

Why bias matters
Experts are telling us that the data and
mathematical models on which innovative
and disruptive technologies are based are
not neutral, but are shaped by the views of

As new technology is shaped by old biases, stereotypes,
and prejudices, users must remain vigilant

By Branka Marijan

Algorithms are not impartial

The Ploughshares Monitor | Spring 20186

their creators. Included in these views are
some very old prejudices, stereotypes, and
structural inequalities.

As mathematician Cathy O’Neil says in
her new book, Weapons of Math Destruc-
tion, we trust mathematical models too
much and are afraid to question the math
because we believe we lack the requisite
expertise (Chalabi 2016). O’Neil notes that
some of the algorithms impacting people’s
lives are secret and the interests they re-
flect are hidden. She urges everyone to
question how decisions are made and the
ways in which they impact certain popula-
tions.

Prof. Laura Forlano of the Illinois
Institute of Technology points out that
algorithms are not impartial. “Rather, al-
gorithms are always the product of social,
technical, and political decisions, negotia-
tions and tradeoffs that occur throughout
their development and implementation.
And, this is where biases, values, and dis-
crimination disappear into the black box
behind the computational curtain” (For-
lano 2018).

In her 2018 book, Automating Inequality:
How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Pun-

ish the Poor, Virginia Eubanks traces how
new algorithms are further embedding
biases about the poor and putting these
vulnerable populations in an ever more
precarious position. The political and
socioeconomic forces long at play are re-
inforced by new technologies.

The effects on our security
Bias in justice, military, and security appli-
cations is particularly worrisome.

Some U.S. judges use a new system to
help them determine if parole should be
granted. Already disadvantaged people are
being given longer sentences because an
algorithm indicates that they have a higher
chance of reoffending. But an investiga-
tion into this system revealed that it may
be biased against minorities (Knight 2017).
Similarly, predictive policing that uses al-
gorithms to determine where and when
certain criminal activity will occur has
been seen to be racist.

Algorithms and machine learning ap-
peal to developers of new military tech-
nologies and weapons. Based on neutral
and impartial data, autonomous weapons
systems, they claim, will be more respon-

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Joy Buolamwini gives a
TED talk on the bias of
algorithms.
Photograph TED

The Ploughshares Monitor | Spring 2018 7

sible and accountable than human soldiers.
The argument is that these systems, coded
to respect international humanitarian law
and protect non-combatants, will improve
security for civilians. But no developer
should be allowed to hide behind sup-
posedly objective models, even though
few companies and governments appear
to be willing to deal with algorithmic bias
(Knight 2017).

We also can’t simply adopt the view
of Google AI chief John Giannandrea,
who has suggested that algorithmic bias
and not killer robots should be of great-
est concern to the public (Knight 2017).
We know that militaries are interested in
developing autonomous systems, and we
have no reason to believe that they are
dedicated to removing bias. As a society,
we can’t know precisely how algorithmic
bias will be encoded in new weapons sys-
tems, but we can be reasonably certain
that bias will be present.

How to get algorithmic accountability
Some people are pressing for algorithmic
accountability. Buolamwini began the Al-
gorithmic Justice League to involve the
tech community and engaged citizens in
identifying bias in different technologies.

Some governments are starting to con-
sider the implications of the latest tech.
The Canadian government has conducted
several consultations on using AI in gov-
ernance.

More must be done.
Tech companies need to be attuned to

bias and held accountable. Yes, it can be
difficult for all parties to understand how
certain algorithms work and how machine
learning systems make certain determina-
tions. But ignorance cannot be used as an
excuse—the fallout from a lack of con-
sideration could be too great.

Much can be done to ensure that
checks are in place to prevent bias or a
badly designed algorithm from being used
to make decisions and determinations that
impact people’s lives. As O’Neil points
out, all models can be interrogated for ac-
curacy. Just as we audit and evaluate other
products and systems, we must be able to
do the same with emerging technologies.

Civil society organizations must pay
closer attention to AI use in their re-
spective fields. Ordinary citizens need to
be more informed about how decisions
that impact their lives are being made.
They should have the right to demand that
businesses be more transparent about the
types of data and algorithms that they use.

And, as security and military uses of
artificial intelligence increase, all of us
will need to become even more vigilant—
about the uses of AI and machine learning
and about the existence of bias in new
technology applications.

There is still much we can and must do
to counter bias, and to regulate and con-
trol the new technology. In cases involving
weapons systems, a minimal requirement
should be that humans control critical de-
cisions, such as the decision to kill. This is
a clear moral and ethical imperative. □

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

References

Buolamwini, Joy. 2016. How I’m fighting bias in algorithms. TED Talk, November.

Chalabi, Mona. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction: Cathy O’Neil adds up the damage of algorithms. The Guardian, October 27.

Couch, Christina. 2017. Ghosts in the Machine. PBS, October 25.

Eubanks, Virginia. 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. St. Martin’s Press.

Forlano, Laura. 2018. Invisible algorithms, invisible politics. Public Books, February 1.

Knight, Will. 2017. Google’s AI chief says forget Elon Musk’s killer robots, and worry about bias in AI systems instead. MIT Technology Review,

October 3.

Lohr, Steve. 2018. Facial recognition is accurate, if you’re a white guy. The New York Times, February 9.

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The History of Technology, the Resistance of Archives, and the Whiteness of Race

Author(s): CAROLYN de la PEÑA

Source: Technology and Culture , October 2010, Vol. 51, No. 4 (October 2010), pp. 919-
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The History of Technology, the Resistance
of Archives, and the Whiteness of Race

CAROLYN de la PEÑA

What gets remembered is not simply a matter of documents but also of choice,
of deciding what we will write about. And that decision often rests on what we
imagine is possible to write about.

– Bruce Sinclair, 2004

At the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in 2004,
I presented a paper in a session titled “Race and Technology” – the only ses-
sion at this meeting that directly engaged race. I have a very clear memory
of looking out at the group (I’d call it a crowd, but I think there were maybe

fifteen people in attendance) assembled to hear the paper and intuiting that
perhaps race was not a core concern for historians of technology.

My reaction was both right and wrong. In fact, the year I made my pres-

entation, Bruce Sinclair published Technology and the African-American
Experience, a collection of essays on the relationship between race and tech-
nology, prefaced by an eloquent case for the importance of weaving race
into our approach to the technological past. The next year, Carroll PurselPs
A Hammer in Their Hands, a collection of primary sources on African-
American contributions to technology, showcased the resources available to
historians who would work on race, while urging those reading to start
writing. These books were followed in 2008 by Evelynn Hammonds and
Rebecca Herzig’s edited volume on race and science. Race, we might con-
clude, is becoming a core concern for a growing number of scholars work-
ing in and around the edges of the history of technology, and we now have
the edited volumes to prove it.1

Carolyn de la Peña is professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis.
The original draft of this essay was circulated and presented at SHOT’s Fiftieth Anniver-
sary Workshop in October 2007 in Washington, D.C. This workshop was supported by
the National Science Foundation under Grant no. 0623056. The opinions, findings, and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this essay are those of the author and do
not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/10/5104-0009/919-37

1. Bruce Sinclair, ed., Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and

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Yet if a critical mass of historians in the field seems interested in devel-

oping studies that engage race, it is also apparent that most of us are not yet

pursuing such a task. Pursell wrote in 2005 that “even a cursory glance” at
the literature in the field reveals “the almost total lack of attention to mat-

ters of race, just as gender was once ignored.”2 His assertion echoed Sin-
clair’s comment a year earlier that the relationship between race and tech-
nology “has yet to be understood,” and Herzig’s more stark assessment that
“generally, historians of technology ignore the subject of race altogether.”3
A quick survey of articles published in Technology and Culture suggests that
not much has changed during the intervening years. Between 2004 and
2009, four articles out of the roughly hundred published devoted primary
attention to analyzing the relationship between race and technology.4 These
four articles doubled the number that appeared between 1999 and 2003.
Between 1995 and 1998 there were three,5 and between 1989 and 1994,

none.6 So, the situation has improved over the years, but even the four pub-

lished between 2004 and 2009 account for only 4 percent of the total num-
ber of articles in the journal.

Opportunities for Study (Cambridge, Mass., 2004) (the epigraph that begins this essay is
found on page 13); Carroll Pursell, ed., A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary His-
tory of Technology and the African-American Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Eve-
lynn Hammonds and Rebecca Herzig, eds., The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in
the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).

2. Pursell, Introduction, in A Hammer in Their Hands, xn.

3. Sinclair, “Preface,” in Technology and the African-American Experience, vii; Rebecca

Herzig, “Race in Histories of American Technology,” in Technology and the African-
American Experience, 156.

4. William Storey, “Guns, Race, and Skill in Nineteenth- Century Southern Africa,”
Technology and Culture 45 (October 2004): 687-71 1; Carolyn de la Peña, “‘Bleaching the
Ethiopian’: Desegregating Race and Technology through Early X-ray Experiments,”
Technology and Culture 47 (January 2006): 27-55; Ron Eglash, “Broken Metaphor: The
Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature,” Technology and Culture 48 (April 2007):
360-69; and Abby Kinchy, “African Americans in the Atomic Age: Postwar Perspectives
on Race and the Bomb, 1945-1967” Technology and Culture 50 (April 2009): 291-315.

5. The five that appeared between 1995 and 2003 were Venus Green, “Race and Tech-
nology: African- American Women in the Bell System, 1945-1980,” supplement to
Technology and Culture 36 (April 1995): S101-S143; Venus Green, “Goodbye Central:
Automation and the Decline of ‘Personal Service’ in the Bell System, 1878-1921,” Tech-
nology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 912-49; Judith Carney, “Landscapes of Technol-
ogy Transfer: Rice Cultivation and African Continuities,” Technology and Culture 37
(January 1996): 5-35; Rebecca Herzig, ‘”North American Hiroshima Maidens’ and the
X-Ray,” Technology and Culture 40 (October 1999): 723-45; and Anne Kelly Knowles,
“Labor, Race, and Technology in the Confederate Iron Industry,” Technology and Culture
42 (January 2001): 1-26. Four additional 1997 articles dealing with gender also included
race as a core category: those by Nina Lerman, Arwen Mohun, and Roger Howoritz in
the January issue, and that by Warren Belasco in the July issue.

6. Additional studies of transnationahsm and colonialism appear in tour 1 &C arti-
cles between 1989 and 2002 and seven between 2003 and 2009. These might include sub-
stantive racial analysis, but I did not review them as my focus here is scholarship on race
in the United States.

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de Id PEÑA I Archives and Race

Historians of technology stand at a moment when a vast discrepancy
exists between what we would like to be doing and what we are accom-
plishing. We can, in the fashion of the books that have appeared, make the
argument that historians must regard race as inextricably linked to the his-
tory of technology in the United States. And we can continue to publish
technological histories that do not pay attention to race. Interestingly, given
that this essay originated as remarks presented at a workshop panel on
“Race and Gender,” this discrepancy does not apply to the question of gen-
der and the history of technology. Both gender and race were largely absent
from the early decades of the field, but twenty years ago, historians of tech-

nology began urging one another to take gender seriously, and many have
done so. One could argue, of course, that the push to study gender simply
came sooner than did the push to study race, and we have simply not
waited long enough to see a thousand flowers bloom. But I conclude that
this seems unlikely to happen. Gender studies flourished following the first
major publications during the 1970s in the history of technology, but we
are now a decade past those calls to take race seriously.7

The sticking point seems to be the challenge of translating such calls
into action. Part of the difficulty is the process of conducting the research
upon which all historical scholarship must rest. We cannot rely on the ar-
chives or methods that have well served many others engaged in the history
of technology to serve the study of race and technology. The history of
technology began with engineers telling stories about their own crea-
tions – and it continues to be, as Pursell puts it, one that “privileges
design.”8 Engineers and inventors have long been the actors, and techno-
logical innovations the sites. Until recently, these stories did not, by and
large, feature nonwhites. Add to this pattern the structuring we tend to
bring to historical study itself, a tendency to use time periods rather than
categories as our scaffolds for analysis. Surveys of the field continue to fea-
ture temporally driven narratives of major technologies such as steam
engines, aircraft, and information processing. Much scholarship also tends
to focus on big questions concerning the relationship between technology
and cultural values or social change, rather than examining cultures and
social relations embedded in the technologies themselves.9 Within this
landscape there are few built-in mechanisms for producing scholarship that
prioritizes race.

NSF ESSAY

SERIES

7. One can date the first “call” to take race seriously in a number of ways. Here, I am
choosing to do so by the publication of Herzig’s “‘North American Hiroshima Maidens'”
in 1999, although one could set the date to 1995 with Green’s “Race and Technology.”

8. Pursell, Introduction (n. 2 above), xn.
9. See, for instance, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology

(New York, 1997); Donald Cardwell, Wheels, Clocks, and Rockets: A History of Technology
(New York, 2001); Thomas P. Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technol-
ogy and Culture (Chicago, 2005); and David Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live
With (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).

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Nor can historians interested in race rely fully on the techniques that
have worked for bringing gender analysis into the study of technology.
Much of this work fits into two categories of scholarship: research that in-
serts women into meta-historical narratives, and that which explores the
importance of women in the design and innovation process through their
roles as consumers. Yet accomplishing either purpose requires archives with
relevant documents. Thanks to the fact that women often were innovators,

on their own and through their husbands, records of their activities can be
located. Personal papers offer further opportunities for exploring women’s
unreported contributions, just as business records permit excavation of
their influence as buyers (or not) of new technologies. When studies such
as Ruth Oldenziel’s survey of the importance of women’s knowledge in
modern engineering projects and Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s exploration of
household technologies appeared, they inspired generations of feminist
scholars to write women into the history of technology and pointed them
toward the resources they have needed to do it.10

Similar excavation work by scholars on race also inspires excitement.
Judith Carney’s groundbreaking work revealed that the skills of African
Americans enabled rice cultivation in the antebellum South, while Venus

Green’s articles (and subsequent book) demonstrated how race influenced
both the implementation and reception of new technologies in the Bell Sys-
tem. Anne Kelly Knowles’s research explored the under-appreciated contri-
butions of black labor to the Confederate iron industry. Along with path-
breaking studies such as Rayvon Fouché’s and Lisa Nakamura’s, their work
comprises a significant body of scholarship that leaves little doubt that peo-
ple of color and the history of technology have, in Sinclair’s words, “always
been intertwined.”11 But good records that allow scholars to undertake this
kind of study simply are not as plentiful as they are when they examine
women (white women), as many of us know from experience. One may
find, for example, photos of black, Asian American, or Latino workers, but
all too rarely does one find correspondence or detailed data on the racial
breakdown of workers or accounts of racial stratification in the work-

place.12 Such documents signal the possibility of alternative technological
narratives, but often the data required to write them remains elusive.

10. Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Ma-
chines in America, 1870-1945 (Amsterdam, 1999); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for

Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave
(New York, 1985).

11. Sinclair, “Preface” (n. 3 above), vii; Rayvon Fouché, Black Inventors in the Age of
Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby f. Davidson (Baltimore,
2003); Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New
York, 2002).

12. Here, I am thinking of my own use of two manuscript collections: the Krispy
Kreme Donut collection at the Archives Center of the National Museum of American

History, Washington, D.C., and the Monsanto Company Newsletter collection at the

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de Id PEÑA I Archives and Race

Arguably, the very success of historical scholarship on gender and tech-
nology obscures the challenges of prioritizing race as an analytical category
in histories of technology. Because it is possible, even if difficult, to write
women into technological histories by combing known sources and by
locating alternative archives, we have as a profession effectively “diversi-
fied,” especially compared to where we stood two decades ago. Important
work has been accomplished, and it has greatly enhanced our knowledge of
the factors that influence technological production and consumption in the
United States. At the same time, much of this work on women is primarily
about white women. As recent scholarship on intersectionality in sociology
and cultural studies has demonstrated, oppression does not impact lives
through the separate lenses of one’s gender, race, class, or sexuality; rather,
these forms interlock, creating “intersections” that comprise our lived expe-
rience.13 Our success in writing women into the history of technology
should make us more eager to unearth the underpinnings of race.14 Yet this
can be difficult, both because the methodologies of studying race may not
be the same as those used to explore gender, and because of the tendency of
SHOT, at panels like the one where I first presented these ideas in 2007, to
combine papers on race and gender into a single category. This “bundling”
may keep us from noticing that the success of one has not really foreshad-
owed the success of the other.

The challenge historians of technology face at this point in the process
of encouraging critical race studies within the history of technology is, I
believe, what Sinclair has referred to as the “problem of sources.”15 Rather
than imagining “race” as a term that describes particular individuals marked
as nonwhite, I want to suggest that we think of race as an epistemology at
play in all technological production and consumption. This concept makes
it possible to see the significance of the obvious: that white people have race.
And they make it, sustain it, and protect it in part through technology. More

importantly, this approach suggests that it is not only the problem of sources

that keeps us from integrating race fully into our analyses. Instead, the real
difficulty occurs in tandem: difficult-to-locate sources combine with our
own tendencies to fail to see all that can be found in what is available, and

to creatively engage and interpret it in order to draw race out of the archive.

NSF ESSAY

SERIES

Hagley Library and Archives, Wilmington, Delaware. One example of just this kind of rich
technological history is Vicki Ruiz’s Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women,
Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque, N.M.,
1987). Ruiz’s account rests upon her own extensive interviews and oral histories.

13. Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society 30 (November 2007): 1771-1800.

14. Ruth Frankenberg offered a multifaceted description of the way that race shapes
white women’s lives in White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness
(Minneapolis, 1993), 1-2.

15. Bruce Sinclair, “Integrating the Histories of Race and Technology,” in Technology
and the African-American Experience (n. 1 above), 12.

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I am not the first scholar to argue that racial difference and whiteness
are constructed through technology. Sinclair identifies the foundation of
this history in his assertion that “the heart of the distinctions drawn
between black and white people in this country” has been whites’ success at
“defining African Americans as technically incompetent and then . . . deny-
ing them access to education, control over complex machinery, or the
power of patent rights law.”16 Studies by Herzig and Hammonds enable us
to see that this situation is not limited to actual, tangible inequities such as
the right to own property, attend school, or pursue employment. People of
color – particularly African Americans prior to the 1960s – have been held
to particular, culturally constructed categories deemed “race” by techno-
logical tools and scientific systems.

Speaking of technology and race, Herzig argues in Technology and the
African-American Experience that “the two emerge simultaneously through
particular, identifiable practices,” a process she illustrates by showing how
technologies of hair management and evaluation have served to “prove”
racial difference in the twentieth century.17 In Herzig’s more recent edited
volume with Hammonds, the two historians enrich this argument with pri-

mary sources illustrating how scientific inquiry, defined as “laborious acts
of observation, quantification, and experimentation,” have effectively
brought “specific categories of people . . . into being.”18

If, however, we allow race to refer to nonwhite people, we have to admit

that the most powerful racial category brought into “being” by science and
technology has been whiteness. In a 2007 essay, Joel Dinerstein argues that
technology as a concept in American culture functions as a “white mythol-
ogy.” By exploring the trajectory of technological utopias, Dinerstein dem-
onstrates that the rhetoric of white Americans has repeatedly positioned
technology, created by white knowledge, as a means of realizing, purifying,
and enhancing the human experience.19 He argues, in fact, that these nar-
ratives have grown stronger over time, emerging in recent post-human dis-
course that seeks to counter the increasing ethnic diversity among Ameri-
cans. The result is an ideal image of a disembodied, technologically enabled
body that in form and privilege is white.

Dinerstein specifically addresses whiteness, but that topic does not need
to be mentioned to be present. George Lipsitz has argued that racism’s most
virulent form is not personal prejudice, but rather “structured advantage”
that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites, while posing

16. Ibid., 2.

17. Herzig, “Race in Histories of American Technology” (n. 3 above), 159.
18. Hammonds and Herzig (n. 1 above), xii.
19. Joel Dinerstein, “Posthumanism and Its Discontents, in Rewiring the Nation :

The Place of Technology in American Studies, ed. Carolyn de la Peña and Siva Vaidhyana-
than (Baltimore, 2007), 16.

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de la PEÑA I Archives and Race

impediments to those same things for people of color.20 As is also clear in
cultural histories like David Nye’s Second Creation, white actors rarely men-
tion whiteness as the goal they seek to create through technological sys-
tems, even as those systems, in action, always protect white positions of
power. This makes sense. Given that technology, as I have previously de-
fined it, is “the material or systemic results of human attempts to extend the

limits of power over the body and its surroundings,” one would expect to
find a “possessive investment in technology” in our history.21

Here, studies of the history of technology and gender can provide a
model. The earliest analyses of race and technology, in fact, traced the path
earlier worn by historians who initially devoted their attention to gender
questions. An important shift occurred when scholarship emerged that
instead of adding gender (read women) to the existing narrative, adopted
gender as a lens through which to view the field as a whole. In Roger Horo-
witz’s edited collection Boys and Their Toys, for instance, a number of essays

address the ways in which technological innovation emerged from mascu-
line social networks, and how technological products appealed to male
consumers because of embedded values and functional characteristics.22

Masculine cultures and male-centered communities have not only pro-
duced particular technologies and driven desires to consume technological
objects, they have also made it possible to see technological epistemologies
as both right and good, a process that has been particularly pronounced in
times of war.23

This shift – from regarding gender as corollary to regarding it as foun-
dational – has enabled historians to move beyond adding new people to
existing technological narratives, and instead to reach a place where the
analyst now asks questions of the narratives themselves. Such an approach
affects both our point of focus and the significance of the histories we
write. While adding women through gender creates a more diverse record
of the history of technology, viewing the history of technology through
gender actually enhances our understanding of what technology does and
for whom. Including men in gendered analysis was the crucial turn, one
that needs to be mirrored now by the realization that white people have
race. Rather than focusing primarily on adding what is missing, let us also

NSF ESSAY

SERIES

20. George Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from
Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 1998), 106.

21. Carolyn de la Peña, “‘Slow and Low Progress,’ or Why American Studies Should
Do Technology,” in Rewiring the “Nation” 362.

22. Roger Horowitz, ed., Boys and Their Toys: Masculinity, Class, and Technology in
America (New York, 2001).

23. Michael Adas discovered that data-heavy assessments of success in Vietnam
communicated “facts” along with particular masculine forms of status; see Adas, Domi-
nance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge,
Mass., 2006).

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2010

VOL. 51

push our evidence to reveal the race-influenced ideologies that have in part
created and perpetuated the absences.

To accomplish this task, historians need to interact in a different way
with their archives. Few historical subjects are self-reflexive about their
whiteness. Just as racism, in Sinclair’s words, has “whitened the national

narrative,”24 so too has it whitened our technological stories – so much so
that race as race is rarely mentioned, and when it is discussed, it nearly al-
ways refers to a person of color. To explore whiteness, historians must first
raise the subject. Yet bringing it up poses a challenge for practitioners in a
field in which particular kinds of evidence are valued and a certain amount
of objectivity is required to do “good work.” Studying whiteness means
working with evidence more interpretive than tangible; it requires imagi-
native analyses of language and satisfaction with identifying possible moti-
vations of subjects, rather than definitive trajectories of innovation, pro-
duction, and consumption. We have to wrestle with the data, and then we
have to wrestle with ourselves.

Yet the stretch beyond the archive is not a new one for historians. In her

influential essay “Embellishing a Life of Labor,” Lizabeth Cohen worked
between available records and the study of objects to locate common aspi-
rations and accommodations for working-class immigrants in the early
twentieth century that were otherwise obscured from the historical record.
Similarly, Eric Wolf argued in Europe and the People Without History that a
creative stretch between macro- and micro -histories was required to enable

“both the people who claim history as their own and the people to whom
history has been denied” to emerge “as participants in the same historical
trajectory.”25

These scholars wrote nearly thirty years ago. In order to write the histo-

ries on race and technology that are missing, we must, again, become the
historians who ask about what is missing from the record and the archives.
We have to be willing to talk about race, even when our subjects did not.26
It is a risk, and it can lead to overreaching in one’s analysis, misreading the
data, and simply getting things wrong. It can also open up essential new ter-
rain in the study of how racialized thinking has shaped technological inno-
vation and influenced our engagement with its objects in the United States.

The remainder of this essay discusses two case studies from my own

24. Sinclair, “Integrating the Histories of Race and Technology” (n. 15 above), 2.
25. Lizabeth Cohen, Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material

Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885-1915,” in Material Culture Studies in
America: An Anthology, ed. Thomas Schlereth (1982; rept., Walnut Creek, Calif., 1999),
289-305; Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982), 9.

26. A comparison could be drawn to “action research,” a process by which scholars
place themselves in the midst of social structures in order to think and rethink their
questions from the point of view of multiple actors in the midst of real-time issues of
concern. Here, the immersion is with the imagined actors of history, however, rather
than a living community.

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de la PEÑA I Archives and Race

work as a means of exploring strategies for using historical records in alter-
native ways and asking different questions about race and technology. The
first examines how race, while ostensibly discussed as an issue concerning
people of color, actually is used rhetorically to explore the relationship be-
tween technology and whites. The other case explores how race can be
found in narratives of technological innovation, even when it is not openly
discussed. Specifically, the consumers who have used artificial sweetener
since its popular introduction in the 1950s have been predominantly white,
and we cannot see the significance of this situation unless we reinsert these
products into their cultural context and draw race out. Ultimately, my goal
is less to argue that these are perfect examples in subject matter or method-
ology, and more to offer initial forays into a “stretched” archive on race and

technology. Hopefully, my conclusions provide fodder for debate and en-
courage others to undertake some stretching of their own.

X-rays and the Language of Whiteness

In 1904, as many as fifteen newspapers across the country reported that
numerous black patients had undergone repeated exposure to X-rays
(sometimes combined with radium) in order to whiten black skin. In some

cases, the skin was fully whitened, these reports suggested, leaving it
“creamy white” as a result. In at least three experimental laboratories, the
journalists explained, white professionals using new X-ray technology had
recruited willing African-American patients who were having their skin
pigment permanently lightened even as the story was being written.

Having found newspaper accounts in two archival collections, I reported
this story verbatim in my first book, The Body Electric. I returned to this story

again, but in a very modified form, in a 2006 article published in Technology

and Culture.27 The reason for the changes reach back to that 2004 SHOT
panel I mentioned earlier, at which Evelynn Hammonds served as commen-
tator. My intent in the 2004 paper was merely to retract what I had learned
was significant misinformation about the original journalistic accounts. I did
not, at that time, know whether these experiments had actually occurred or
whether they had been successful: much more work, I argued, needed to be
undertaken to understand how racial fears played into the early development
of X-rays and radium. Hammonds, in her comment, explained that it was my
job to tell this story. It was not enough to point to the evidence and say that
this was really interesting stuff, but that someone who works on race should

figure out what it meant. As a historian of technology, I should be able to tell
that history. She pointed me toward several books on late-nineteenth-cen-
tury racial categorization and segregation policy and I got to work.

NSF ESSAY

SERIES

27. Carolyn de la Peña, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern
American (New York, 2003); de la Peña, “‘Bleaching the Ethiopian'” (n. 4 above).

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TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE

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VOL 51

I quickly came up against that obstacle mentioned earlier – the “prob-
lem of sources.”28 My archival records were not sufficient to support an ar-
gument about the dynamics of race in early X-ray technology. I learned
that one of the reported “experiment sites” was bogus: at the University of
Pennsylvania Hospital, Dr. Henry Pancoast was, in fact, treating keloids
rather than attempting to whiten skin. Two other experiment sites actually
appeared to have existed, but I had no way of discovering who the patients
were, what brought them to the X-ray, or what had happened to them. No
records existed in archives, nor did any accounts provide names or demo-

graphic details. In addition, I could not discover how these articles were
read, or even if they had been read. It was difficult to try to integrate these
stories into other narratives of X-rays. It seemed that they provided neither

sufficient information about patients to analyze African Americans and X-

ray technology nor sufficient information about practitioners to rethink
how X-rays were used during the period.

The archives held limited sources on the black actors and actual tech-

nological impacts. Yet there were ample stories wherein white journalists
talked about technology and race. In the end, it was this realization that
helped me to see that I had, in fact, two types of evidence that enabled a
story of race to be told: first, the patterns in journalistic accounts of
“whitening” experiments, and second, the context of race in the early twen-
tieth century. Significantly, here race would mean whiteness. This approach
moved away from my comfort zones – material analysis, stories of inven-
tors, advertising materials, and archival records of engagement – and
toward close attention to words; it was an approach that required me to
create connections that I could not prove and to imagine environments I
could not re-create.

Instead of seeking to identify the African-American subjects of the
experiments or to understand the technology used, I looked at how the
journalistic accounts described the patients, process, and results. Skin was
often described as “creamy white” and results as “freakish.” The first de-
scription was curious, because Pancoast reported that the result of keloid
treatments was, in fact, gray skin, not white. The discrepancy suggests that
creamy white made a better story. And such phrasing seemed more likely
by considering as well the cultural context of the period: X-rays were a
highly praised, new technology widely understood to have mysterious pow-
ers – so could they not make a white that was more attractive than natural
white? At the same time, the fantasy of bleaching black skin whiter than
white made the experiments particularly troubling.

28. Even after extensive searching in old newspapers, I found only two stories other
than those I had seen earlier. The problem was that small-town papers were infrequently
archived, yet it was such papers that often reported these stories. There was also a brief
story in the June 1908 issue of Popular Mechanics – with a photo included – of one of the
copycat experiments in Philadelphia.

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de Id PEÑA I Archives and Race

If we look carefully at the early construction of X-ray “power,” particu-

larly among nonexpert whites, much of it involved questions about visibil-
ity. In newspapers (in some cases, the very same ones that covered the story
of black whitening), cartoons featured men wearing X-ray glasses and see-
ing through women’s clothes, revealing fat and thin bodies that were iden-
tical in skeletal form. Within this context, it becomes more understandable

that many whites might be threatened by reports that X-rays were effec-
tively removing black pigment from skin. Certainly the broader context of
technology and racial visibility suggests such a conclusion.

In 1904, the nation was intensively debating racial definitions: legisla-
tures sought to define black as a particular percentage of ancestry; W. E. B.
Du Bois discussed the increasing numbers of “passers” at length; Plessy v.
Ferguson determined that “separate was equal,” thereby enforcing segrega-
tion of public spaces and causing public fixations on visible racial differ-
ences. A recipe for white panic was set when the particular fantastical qual-
ities of X-rays appeared against those events. X-rays were not just any
technology; as several historians have documented, they were deemed mir-
acle forces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. People spec-
ulated that society could expect human energy to increase and inner
“truths” to be revealed. A story that revealed one of these truths to be the
technological mutability of skin color, the obvious marker of racial origins,
could hardly be ignored – or, apparently, questioned.

This context likely explains the repeated assertions that such “white”
blacks would be “freaks.” A strange compilation of evidence was used in this
regard: they were freaks because they went against God’s plan and masked
their inferior blackness behind whiteness; and they were freaks because,
more often than not, the technologies stopped working during the experi-
ments, one through fire, one because the technician discontinued his work.
Read as a single narrative, such assertions expressed both a profound fear
that technology might prove that blacks were equal to whites and a clear
pleasure in noting that the technologies, while capable of creating creamy
perfection, somehow knew how not to complete the work that challenged
the racial order. When I wrote the article, I had not realized the importance
of the oft- repeated tale of Thomas Eldridge’s Philadelphia experiment lab-
oratory being shut down, mid-treatment, when it was destroyed by fire.
Few accounts that mentioned Eldridge failed to tell this story and to include
the result: that “unhappy negroes” were forced to remain permanently half-
white. Thus readers could regard this story as a morality tale akin to that of
Icarus, who crashed to the earth on melted wings because he flew too close
to the sun. By subverting God’s rules, or (white) man’s technological rules,
African Americans eventually would find themselves rendered inferior –
indeed, permanently maimed.

Ultimately, the whitening story gained traction because race was at the
forefront for many laypeople when they assessed the impact of new tech-

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nologies at the turn of the twentieth century. This was an extreme example,

admittedly; but I would argue that concerns over the impact of a new tech-
nology on one’s perceived status are not limited to the case of X-rays. Any
system that promised to expand the capacities of some humans over others
in the early twentieth century would have been assessed by white produc-
ers and consumers, at least in part, by its ability to operate in a culturally
acceptable manner.

This process is essentially rhetorical. Subjects would not discuss white
privilege or an investment in inequalities of knowledge or access; instead,
one finds them assessing the positive and negative effects of new technolo-
gies or the appropriate application of new possibilities. Leo Marx referred
to this behavior as the second product of technology, the “mythology” we
fashion around new technologies that establish our place in the world.29
This hidden archive on race and technology sits in plain view.

Sweetener and the Context of Whiteness

In the summer of 2008, 1 uncovered archival materials on female entre-

preneurs in the canning, magazine, and diet-club industries, and from
those documents I drafted several chapters of what I was coming to regard
as a balanced book. Men and women created sweeteners together, I be-
lieved, and in so doing relied upon each others’ varied expertise and con-
tacts in order to transform waste products and adulterants into valuable,
even healthful (they argued), ingredients.

Only after I sent my manuscript for initial review was I reminded that
I had not been writing about women – my subjects were white women. I had
failed to apply the lesson previously learned about technological innova-
tion and consumption as a racialized process. Because race was never men-
tioned in any sources, I had not seen it. At the urging of the reviewers, I de-
termined to write race into the manuscript even though I did not,
technically, possess the sources. I had to rely again upon context. By situat-
ing my white subjects within their eras, I was able to reach some tentative
conclusions about how artificial sweeteners evoked a sense of privilege and

specialness for users, and how it may have shaped a particular worldview
that accentuated perceived racial differences. This insight allowed me to
argue that the whiteness of this technology contributed to disparities in
consumer practices and social positions.

I should say at the outset that the archival evidence does not exist to
support these claims, yet this interpretation seems justified. Other histori-
ans of technology have shown that racialized thinking motivates the pro-
duction and consumption of new technologies, and that technologies have

29. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America (New York, 1964), 226.

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de la PEÑA I Archives and Race

disparate impacts because of race and ethnic differences (among others).30
But the jump from the general observation to its application in the case of
artificial sweeteners forces us to confront the problem of archives that stub-

bornly resist articulating issues of race. Their sources have to be shaken,
leading me to take up the challenge posed by Pursell: to look more at con-
text and impact than at actors and objects. In this case, answering his de-
ceptively simple questions – What do [technologies] do? What do they
mean? – led me to acknowledge the presence of race.31

The case study for what artificial sweeteners “do” takes us to the 1950s,
when women first purchased cyclamates and saccharin in pill and powder
form to experiment with what they called at the time “de-calorization,” or
the removal of sugar calories from prepared foods and desserts. A variety of
sources covered this subject, including mass-circulation women’s magazines
such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, contemporary cook-
books, and informational packets (including recipes) provided by “diet”
food producers and the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured these
chemicals. One might assume, by reviewing the rhetoric of male sweetener
producers or women’s magazine writers, that cyclamates and saccharin were
primarily tools for women to lose weight, to focus on their appearance, and
to attract men. These things were all true from a producer’s point of view;
yet taking seriously what women told one another about actually using
these substances reveals two other ways in which sweeteners were “tools”:
first, they enabled women to experiment directly with a chemical, thereby
professionalizing the domestic work of food production in home kitchens
and distancing themselves from sugar “labor”; and second, being hidden in
foods, they were tools for women who wanted to “fool” their husbands and
children into cutting calories and thereby exert control over the household’s
health, which they might not otherwise articulate.

Recipe books from the 1950s suggest that women did not casually
achieve a cyclamate-sweetened dish. Advice varied concerning how much
cyclamate, in either tablet or liquid form, women needed to use. In 1958,
Poppy Cannon’s Unforbidden Sweets, for example, recommended two tea-
spoons of Sucaryl (cyclamate) solution to make “sugarless boiled custard,”
and three tablespoons of “Sucaryl solution” for a “sugarless chiffon cake.”
Ruth West’s Stop Dieting! Start Losing! – published just two years earlier –
had used tablet measurements in all its recipes. Her mildly sweetened
dishes, such as apple Betty, required ten tablets of cyclamate, while highly
sweetened dishes such as cranberry sauce required forty. According to
Cannon, women who wanted to save money could buy tablets and find that
“it’s very easy to make the liquid form yourself.” Dissolving forty-eight

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30. See Nakamura (n. 11 above); Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity,
Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst, Mass.,
2003); and Fouché (n. 11 above).

31. Pursell, “Introduction” (n. 2 above), xiii.

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VOL. 51

tablets in a cupful of hot water allowed cooks to measure out one teaspoon
of liquid for the equivalent of one teaspoon of sugar. But Cannon acknowl-
edged that variations existed between batches, and also between the tablets
of competing pharmaceutical companies. As a result, “it is impossible to say
that so much of the sweetener is equal to so much sugar,” she warned read-
ers. The only guarantee of success was trial-and-error tasting of the
results.32

White women who used artificial sweetener were encouraged, through
these cookbooks and later marketing materials, to see themselves as cre-
ative cooks taking advantage of the modern tools of science to bring health
to their families. “America’s traditional recipes were not handed down from
The Mount,” explained artificial sweetener-advocate West. “They were
compounded, not in laboratories by white-coated technicians, but by ordi-
nary women in gingham aprons with no help but that of their taste buds
and imaginations.” Both their direct experiences and the cookbooks’ rhet-
oric encouraged white women to regard themselves as innovators, akin to
chemists. This departed from the traditional linkage of sugar to domestic
service and brown-skinned plantation labor. Modern women not only re-
moved a few calories, but also connected the laboratory and pantry to pro-
tect American (read white American) food. “We need this kind of creative
cook to modernize and de-calorize the old anachronistic recipes [by] using
the de-calorized new ingredients food chemists have perfected for us,” West
asserted.33 It was, according to Myra Waldo, author of the famous Slender-
ella Cook Book, nothing short of “an entirely new concept.” Saccharin and
cyclamates emerged in this era as technological tools for those smart and
modern enough to use them. Diet food could thus be “interesting and
palatable” and freely indulged.34

Such evidence contributed to my assertion, in an early draft of this
chapter in my book, that the most important cultural lesson to be derived
from women’s early experimentation with artificial sweeteners was this:
“Women were able to exert control over their families and experiment with
science in the domestic sphere at a formative moment in modern American
life through their use of artificial sweetener.” But that was accurate only for
white women. In fact, artificial sweeteners were not marketed to women of

color in any sustained fashion until the 1980s. Even today, such marketing
remains less prevalent than that aimed at white consumers. Artificial sweet-
ener advertisements for Tab, Diet Pepsi, and low-calorie desserts became
regular features in publications such as McCalVs and Ladies’ Home Journal
during the 1970s but were notably absent from Ebony, the beauty magazine
aimed at black women. Sweetener advertisements appear, in fact, to have

32. Poppy Cannon, Unforbidden Sweets (New York, 1958), 21, 56, 107.

33. Ruth West, Stop Dieting! Start Losing! (New York, 1956), 12.
34. Myra Waldo, The Slenderella Cook Book (New York, 1957), 15.

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de la PEÑA I Archives and Race

favored blondes.35 Not until 1984, when Pepsi, Coke, and Diet Coke shifted
to diverse “product promoters” in order to expand market share were black
and Latina women routinely depicted in diet-soda ads in mainstream pub-
lications. Ebony featured its first diet-soda advertisements in 1983; Diet
Coke’s “Just for the taste of it” campaign to this market ran off and on until
at least 1987.36

Considering the patterns of African-American culture, one assumes
that few black women would have embraced the message of sweeteners
articulated in 1950s cookbooks or later marketing materials: namely, that
ingesting chemicals produced by scientists in a laboratory could improve
physical health. Wartime technology had benefited all Americans, and firms
like DuPont eagerly touted their part in the victory through much of the
1950s (e.g., “better living through chemistry”). But the segregation of Afri-
can Americans during the war, combined with the lack of recognition for
African-American soldiers after it, meant that whites and blacks hardly
benefited equally from the march of science. Indeed, by the 1950s, black
Americans specifically (and Americans of color, generally) had ample evi-
dence that science and technology could easily do more harm than good. A
long list of examples included colonial land policies that had transferred
Native American lands to whites, because of the former’s “inferior” techni-

cal knowledge; systems of racial segregation upheld by nineteenth-century
pseudosciences like phrenology, which declared whites to be intellectually
superior to other races; and medical professionals who used African Ameri-
cans as guinea pigs in experiments designed to further scientific knowledge
by putting their bodies in peril.37 Against this background, the presentation

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35. The “Like” campaign, designed by J. Walter Thompson to promote Seven-Up’s
new diet soda, featured only white women in its advertisements, nearly all of them
blonde. Advertisements from the Thompson Agency’s Like campaign of 1969 can be
found in the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History in Duke
University’s Special Collections Library, Durham, N.C.

36. See, for example, Ebony advertisements from its issues of: December 1985, 63;
September 1986, 63; and January 1987, 116-17. For information on Michael Jackson’s
pitch for Pepsi (which resulted in the infamous scalp fire) and Coke’s subsequent enlist-
ment of black celebrities to sell Coke and Diet Coke, see Pamela Noel, “TV Ad Wars’
Newest Weapon,” Ebony, July 1984, 81-86. Ads for artificially sweetened products that
featured African Americans in non-African-American newspapers and magazines fre-
quently featured famous men. See, for example, Flip and Géraldine Wilson with Diet
Seven-Up in McCalVs, March 1981, 69; Bill Cosby promoting Jell-O Instant Pudding in
the Los Angeles Times, 9 June 1985, AJ67; and Famous Amos pitching chocolate soda in
the New York Times, 3 November 1985, 73.

37. Most infamous of these were the Tuskegee experiments, begun in the 1930s and
extending into the 1970s, wherein hundreds of African- American men with syphilis,
mostly poor sharecroppers, were not offered penicillin treatments long after they were
available so that researchers could better understand the long-term impact of leaving the
condition untreated. Another layer of distrust, especially for women, may have been
added by the specific experience of black women’s bodies within American medical prac-

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2010

VOL 51

of artificial sweeteners as agents of scientific progress and tools for “mod-
ern de-calorization” may have encouraged nonwhite consumers to view
such products with suspicion.

African-American ideas about healthy foods have provided further dis-
incentives to the adoption of sugar substitutes. African-American cook-
books produced recently suggest that, even fifty years after the emergence
of artificially sweetened foods, African-American women rarely use artifi-
cial sweeteners, even in “light” or “diet” cooking. One of the authors in the
1994 collection Body and Soul: The Black Women s Guide to Physical Health
and Emotional Well-Being acknowledges African-American women’s desire
to be thin, citing an Essence readers’ poll that found 71 percent of respon-
dents were “terrified of being overweight.” Yet she specifically recom-
mended against using artificial sweeteners in order to shed pounds, because
they “are made of chemicals that may be dangerous.”38 Another guidebook
for black women written four years earlier and republished in the same year

suggests that the key to weight loss for African Americans is to “get back to
our more natural ways” by substituting homemade chicken stock for ham
hocks in seasoning cabbage and replacing salt with a “squeeze of lemon.”39
Patti LaBelle, in her 2004 cookbook Lite Cuisine, also advocates healthful

food – specifically, recipes from the African- American culinary heritage –
over low-calorie substitutions. “Usually, when people are feeling stressed
out they want a pill,” she explains, “but honey, give me a pot.”40 And while
LaBelle probably was alluding to anti-anxiety pills rather than sweeteners,
her statement indicates little common ground with the early cyclamate
kitchen chemists. Religious beliefs also may have dissuaded prospective
artificial-sweetener users. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, which, rela-

tice, where reproductive health services have frequently been inferior and at times dam-
aging for women of color. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wild/Tuskegee J>tudy_of_Untreat
ed_Syphilis_in_the_Negro_Male (accessed 27 May 2010). For the history of scientific
arguments in favor of white superiority, see David Nye, America as Second Creation:
Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Sinclair, ed.,
Technology and the African- American Experience (n. 1 above); and Keith Wailoo, Drawing
Blood: Technology and Disease identity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1997).
For more on African-American women and reproductive science, see Dorothy E. Rob-
erts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York,
1997).

38. Linda Villarosa, ed., Body and Soul: The Black Women s Guide to Physical Health
and Emotional Well-Being (New York, 1994), 51, 309.

39. Jessica B. Harris, “Celebrating Our Cuisine,” in The Black Women s Health Book
(Seattle, 1994), 305-9. Of eight recent cookbooks aimed at African Americans, including
two weight-loss-focused texts, only one used artificial sweetener in a recipe. That book,
The New Soul Food Cookbook for People with Diabetes, was published by the American
Diabetes Association, and even those three recipes that called for sugar-free gelatin also
included sugar.

40. LaBelle, quoted in Kimberly Nettles, Saving Soul Food, Gastronomica: Ine
Journal of Food and Culture 7, no. 3 (2007): 111; see also Wilbert Jones, The New Soul

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de Id PEÑA I Archives and Race

tive to the total population, has long attracted more African- American than
white members, has historically urged members to avoid processed foods
as part of their religious practice. The church disparaged artificial sweeten-
ers specifically, in recent years featuring anti-aspartame activists on church
websites and in small group discussions.41

Returning to the question of what technologies do and what they mean,
sweeteners have provided white users with a great degree of control, con-
centrated in a chemical affiliated with white-coat chemists and modern

progress. Yet African Americans have not shared this experience. For white
women in the 1950s, these calorie-removing tools elevated the importance
of kitchen cooks by rendering them professionals in charge of family
health. During the 1960s and through the early 1980s launch of Nutra-
Sweet, the rise of mass-marketed diet products moved this control from the
kitchen to the grocery cart. Sugar substitutes, through diet foods, enabled
consumers to (theoretically) reconcile competing mantras of modern life:
unfettered consumption and thinness. During the 1970s and 1980s, artifi-
cial-sweetener consumers became activists: more than a million of them

wrote to the FDA, Congress, and even to the president in 1977 to demand
aspartame’s continued availability. And, from the mid-1980s to the present,
thousands of other former consumers have authored books and partici-
pated in web forums urging others to recognize aspartame in particular as
a dangerous substance.

This wider view enables us to understand artificial sweeteners in a more

nuanced light: they were technologies of calorie reduction, as well as episte-
mologies for understanding appropriate consumption and consumer rights.

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Food Cookbook (New York, 1996). For an extensive list of African- American cookbooks,

including titles aimed at controlling diabetes or facilitating weight loss, see Nettles,
“‘Saving’ Soul Food.”

41. In 2007 the York, Pennsylvania, Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) parish featured
three films as part of its Vespers emphasis on “health- related information.” One of them
was an interview with Dr. Russell Blaylock on the health effects of sweeteners (see
http://www.naturalnews.com/020550_excitotoxins_MSG.html [accessed 25 May 2010]);
another was Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World, directed by Cori Brackett and J. T. Waldron
(2006). See also Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day
Adventism and the American Dream (Bloomington, Ind., 2007), esp. 146-49, 164. For in-
formation on the York Vespers film series, see http://www.yorksdachurch.org/arti
cle.php?id=23 (accessed 5 July 2009). There seems to be a correlation between the eth-
nicity of parishioners in the SDA and the church’s stance on sweeteners; as of May 2010,
all SDA churches that mention on their websites that artificial sweeteners are harmful

had predominantly black congregations. See Berean in Los Angeles (http://berean29.ad
ventistchurchconnect.org/article.php?id=32); East New York in Brooklyn (http://east
newyork.org/health.asp?ResID=107&id=71&offsetl5); and New Dimension, also in
Brooklyn (http://www.newdimensionsda.org). Another African- American SDA congre-
gation mentions on its website that its youth choir has sung for anti-aspartame activist
Russell Blaylock (http://dallascitytemple.org/ministries_music_total.htm). (All websites
accessed 25 May 2010.)

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As the latter, sweeteners can be regarded as affording structural advantages
similar to, if more quotidian than, Lipsitz’s other “possessive investments.”42

It is possible, in fact, that consumers’ continued exposure, over decades, to
diet-product marketing has ultimately made thinness itself (in the midst of
abundance) a chief “investment” of whiteness. Much of this argument, of
course, lies beyond what the historical record can prove or disprove; such
scenes, however, enable us to observe what artificial sweeteners may have
done and meanings they may have created that would otherwise remain
concealed from view. This makes them essential to stage.

Conclusion

The history of technology has come a long way over the past two
decades. Scholars have authored multiple volumes that attest to the impor-
tance of race in technology’s history. This foundational scholarship illumi-
nates the gains associated with meticulously combing archives, and locating
alternative archives, for the ways in which people of color have influenced
the innovation, production, and consumption of technologies in the United
States. The remaining challenges include making that key shift similarly
undertaken so fruitfully by those engaged in the study of gender: we must
take as a mantra that white people have race. And we have to assume, unless

proven otherwise, that constructing and protecting whiteness has been, if
not a core pursuit, then certainly a by-product in the specific technological
histories that have charted the course of individuals within and beyond the
United States.

To get from here to there, we need new conferences and new collections
that explore the archives, methods, and approaches that can help bring
these histories to the forefront of the field. Such studies may mean paying

more attention to the impact of class among technologists and their advo-
cates; it may mean exploring the nuances of language surrounding new
(and old) technologies; it may mean looking more closely at the process of
technological transfer within the United States, and between this country
and other nations; and it may mean considering the impact of technologies
and technological ways of thinking on nonwhite individuals as constitutive
of the technological “product” and innovation “process” themselves. To this
end, one imagines new volumes with titles like “Technology and the White-
American Experience(s)” and “Technologies of Sameness” on the shelves
next to those that have already made African-American histories of tech-
nology essential to the field.

Yet we also must be careful not to mistake words for action. It is one

thing to know what we should do, and quite another to commit to making
the changes required to do it. Creating scholarly studies of technology and

42. Lipsitz (n. 20 above).

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de la PEÑA I Archives and Race

whiteness requires us first to re-create ourselves: we have to learn to ap-
proach the archive with race in mind, and with a capacious sense of race as
a cultural construct of belonging and nonbelonging that permeates every
aspect of life within the United States. As such, we must assume that race is
a factor in play in all histories, whether we look at innovation, production,
dissemination, or consumption – unless we can prove that it is not. Putting
race into plain view in the history of technology requires more than a stated

commitment, a well-intentioned designated panel or two at our confer-
ences, or even a new volume on whiteness and technologies; it requires a
strong, ongoing commitment to view the history of technology and the
subjects that comprise it through new eyes. This is the commitment
required to fully reveal those “rewarding new directions” that Bruce Sinclair
intuited several years ago. By drawing out possibilities and working cre-
atively within the cultural contexts of history, historians of technology can
begin to produce the imperfect, unfinished, and essential work on race and
technology that remains to be done.

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• Contents

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p. 930

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p. 932

p. 933

p. 934

p. 935

p. 936

p. 937

• Issue Table of Contents

Technology and Culture, Vol. 51, No. 4 (October 2010) pp. 781-1088

Front Matter

EDITOR’S NOTE: Passing the Baton [pp. 781-785]

Radio before Radio: Araldo Telefonico and the Invention of Italian Broadcasting [pp. 786-808]

Wanamaker’s Department Store and the Origins of Electronic Media, 1910-1922 [pp. 809-828]

War, Wireless, and Empire: Marconi and the British Warfare State, 1896-1903 [pp. 829-853]

Who Invented the Telephone? Lawyers, Patents, and the Judgments of History [pp. 854-878]

RESEARCH NOTE

Robert Fulton’s Torpedoes [pp. 879-888]

ON THE COVER

Michigan Central Station, Detroit, 2010 [pp. 889-892]

NSF ESSAY SERIES

Categories of Difference, Categories of Power: Bringing Gender and Race to the History of Technology [pp. 893-918]

The History of Technology, the Resistance of Archives, and the Whiteness of Race [pp. 919-937]

Mobilizing the History of Technology [pp. 938-960]

Back at the Start: History and Technology and Culture [pp. 961-994]

EXHIBIT REVIEW

Joining Art and Science: The Special Exhibition “Split and Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine” at the Medical Museion, Copenhagen [pp. 995-1001]

ESSAY REVIEWS

Two Views of Cassandra [pp. 1002-1005]

Getting Bucky Fuller Right [pp. 1006-1009]

CLASSICS REVISITED

The Machine in Context: Merritt Roe Smith’s Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change [pp. 1010-1017]

BOOK REVIEWS

Review: untitled [pp. 1018-1019]

Review: untitled [pp. 1020-1021]

Review: untitled [pp. 1021-1023]

Review: untitled [pp. 1023-1024]

Review: untitled [pp. 1024-1026]

Review: untitled [pp. 1026-1028]

Review: untitled [pp. 1028-1030]

Review: untitled [pp. 1030-1031]

Review: untitled [pp. 1031-1033]

Review: untitled [pp. 1033-1034]

Review: untitled [pp. 1035-1036]

Review: untitled [pp. 1036-1038]

Review: untitled [pp. 1038-1040]

Review: untitled [pp. 1040-1041]

Review: untitled [pp. 1042-1043]

Review: untitled [pp. 1043-1044]

Review: untitled [pp. 1045-1046]

Review: untitled [pp. 1046-1048]

Review: untitled [pp. 1048-1050]

Review: untitled [pp. 1050-1051]

Review: untitled [pp. 1051-1053]

Review: untitled [pp. 1053-1054]

Review: untitled [pp. 1054-1056]

Review: untitled [pp. 1056-1058]

Review: untitled [pp. 1058-1060]

[Update on the Film “Metropolis”] [pp. 1061-1062]

Back Matter

Women’s Studies Journal, Volume 29 Number 1, August 2015:

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COMMENTARY: GamerGate and resistance to the
diversification of gaming culture

CHERIE TODD

It is reported that there are now over one billion people worldwide who play multimedia video
games, and the typical ‘gamer’ stereotype (mid 20s, single, white male) no longer applies
(Reilly, 2015). Games are growing increasingly more pervasive as well as more social, and
are now available any time on multiple platforms (PC, Xbox and PlayStation) and devices
such as smart phones and iPads. Within less than a decade, video games have gone from being
a niche area of entertainment for a few, to a mass medium that appeals to people of all ages
and genders. Research continues to show an increase in the number of women who are now
gaming, with the genders almost reaching parity. These statistics, however, tend to focus on
gaming as a whole, and ignore gender splits within particular games and/or countries, where
in many online games women are often a minority. As a result of this gender imbalance, the
culture of games continues to be heavily influenced by highly masculinist discourse.
There is an increasing diversification of gaming culture that is occurring due to the growing
popularity of games. While many perceive this to be a positive step, there are some who are
resistant to these fundamental shifts and who do not want the culture of games to change.
Users of the hashtag #GamerGate have been the most vocal in their resistance to these changes.
In 2014 reports of GamerGate activities started to circulate more widely, becoming a topical
issue in the USA where news outlets began to describe the emergence of a ‘culture war’ over
the diversification of gaming culture. The most prominent debates centred on the topic of
cyberbullying, including rape and death threats that were being directed primarily at scholars
and women involved in the gaming industry.
The movement known as #GamerGate has evolved out of a series of incidents following
the publication of an online blog written by Eron Gjoni (posted 8 August 2014). In this blog,
Gjoni accuses his former girlfriend, game developer Zoe Quinn, of sleeping with a game critic
journalist in order to gain a favourable review for her game Depression Quest. Gjoni’s story
was subsequently posted on several other forums where discussions were aimed at harassing
Quinn and exposing details about her personal life. This saw Quinn’s private details (including
home address and phone numbers) become public knowledge, and shortly afterwards she
began receiving multiple rape and death threats on a daily basis. Gjoni’s accusations have since
proven to be unfounded, yet the resulting backlash continues to impact Quinn’s life and those
closest to her.
Other notable media reports of harassment from the GamerGate movement involve game
developer Brianna Wu and feminist cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian. These women have also
received numerous rape and death threats, as well as having their accounts hacked and personal
information published on websites. Sarkeesian gained the attention of the media in October
2014 after cancelling a speaking engagement at Utah State University, due to the university
receiving an anonymous message that threatened a mass shooting on the campus if Sarkeesian’s
talk went ahead. While there has been harassment directed at men working in the gaming
industry for voicing their support of their female colleagues, it is women in particular who

64

GamerGate 65

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have become the primary targets. What these people all have in common is their critical stance
against how girls and women are typically portrayed in games (as submissive, sexualised and
victimized characters) and also their stance against the cultural embeddedness of misogynist
tendencies present within the gaming industry, in which the majority of employees are men.
There is a growing body of work that examines various elements relating to this particular
issue in gaming culture (see, for example, Consalvo, 2012; Fox & Tang, 2014; Gonzalez et
al., 2014). In a recent newsletter, the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) made it
known that scholars involved in gaming and gender research are also receiving threatening
messages. The newsletter also reported on GamerGate’s attempts to discredit DiGRA by
misquoting their material and accusing DiGRA members of participating in a plot to ruin video
game culture by ‘inserting a social justice agenda into game design’ (ICA, 2014). Importantly,
this newsletter also outlined some useful security measures for people who work in gaming
and other communication fields, and who believe that they may be at risk of privacy invasion
and harassment.
The harassment of women gamers and game critics is not new. Past attempts to discuss
the issue include the hashtag thread #1reasonwhy, which began on Twitter with a tweet that
simply asked ‘why are there so few lady game creators?’ Over the course of a day, thousands of
women tweeted in response and shared their experiences of sexism, exclusion and harassment
(Isaacson, 2012). The majority of these replies came from women who had experienced working
within the gaming industry in various roles, including as developers, critics and journalists,
and their answers covered a broad range of reasons why there are not more women involved in
the production of games. In turn, some of the responding tweets reflected the unsupportive and
often aggressive denial of women’s experiences, with comments such as, ‘if women are too
sensitive and self-absorbed to deal with criticism it’s good they don’t design video games’, and
‘business is hard and needs strong people. Don’t blame me or anyone else but deal with it if
you want to be part of it. Comments such as these seem to be a common occurrence for women
involved in gaming. In the past, these kinds of verbal assaults on women unfolded sporadically
and died out quickly. For the first time, however, there are a number of people being harassed
by one particular group and these attacks have been ongoing. Sarkeesian, for example, has
been receiving ongoing threats since 2012 (before GamerGate) and has since felt compelled to
leave her home in fear for her life. Women experience sexism and misogyny in various cultural
arenas, especially in fields where the majority of participants are men, such as sports. Yet, in
comparison, the level of hatred and abuse that is being directed at women like Sarkeesian and
Wu from certain people in the gaming community is unparalleled.
So what are law enforcement officials doing to help? Also, what are gaming industry
leaders doing to support their employees, and women in particular? The answer to both of
these questions, unfortunately, is not a lot. With regard to legal consequences, no one has yet
been arrested for harassment, whereas a small number of industry leaders have voiced their
objection to the actions of GamerGate. Those caught up in this debate, such as Wu, argue
that these events are a result of a culture that has been dominated by sexist values for too
long. Across the industry of game development, the current gender split among employees is
estimated to be around 20% women and 80% men. Yet, as Wu (as cited in Pakman, 2014) points
out, approximately 15% of these women work in support or administration roles. Wu goes on
to argue that ‘GamerGate is a symptom of a deeper industry problem … Right now games are
made for men, developed for men, and marketed for men. And it’s signalling to [others] that
games are a space for men. That has the consequence that when women like myself come in
here and ask to be represented, [male] gamers feel like it’s their space’ (as cited in Pakman,
2014).

66 Cherie Todd

Women’s Studies Journal, Volume 29 Number 1, August 2015: 64-67. ISSN 1173-6615
© 2015 Women’s Studies Association of New Zealand Hosted at www.wsanz.org.nz/

The contexts of online games are now better understood as social and cultural environments
that consist of a diverse range of social networks, where emotions, thoughts and concerns are
a felt experience by those participating within these settings. Therefore, politics of difference
can play a significant role in whether or not particular identities feel in-place within certain
environments (Todd, forthcoming). Furthermore, research shows that the places of online
games offer players new ways of ‘trying out’ different ways of being. Yet, these dynamic
online environments are heavily influenced by offline dominant values and norms that players
themselves carry with them while gaming (Todd, 2012). As a result, issues such as sexism
and misogyny are also present in online games. The present climate of gaming culture tends
to make women gamers feel excluded and out-of-place; this is particularly evident in games
where the majority of players are men, and the dominant discourse reflects and reinforces
heterosexist and masculinist values and norms. Some suggest, however, that a good starting
point for change might be with addressing the ways in which gender and sexuality are assigned
to storylines and characters within games, which will aid in establishing a more balanced
perception of gender in games (Consalvo, 2012; Fox & Tang, 2014; Sarkeesian, 2015).
The GamerGate controversy represents a small group of gamers who do not want to see
the culture of gaming change; however, their actions have brought attention to an important
cultural shift that is occurring in the gaming community. Not only have these attacks on women
heightened concerns relating to how gaming is being portrayed via the media (which in turn
affects public perceptions of gaming) but they have also effectively demonstrated the extent
to which sexism and misogyny have become culturally embedded over time. As pointed out
by Edwards, one good thing to come out of these unfortunate events is how the impact of
GamerGate has raised ‘the conversation to a level that we’ve been wanting for a long time’
(cited in Handrahan, 2015, para. 3). Consequently, as GamerGate supporters fight against the
diversification of gaming culture, their actions and arguments also work to shine a light on
an issue that has been swept under the proverbial rug for decades. Furthermore, critics such
as Sarkeesian correctly point out that the corporations developing games need to take a more
proactive stance in protecting their employees, stating that there is a ‘need to enforce a zero-
tolerance policy of sexism and racism and homophobia. … Developers need to start moving
away from the entitled macho-male power fantasy in their games. They need to recognize
that there are wider stories that they can tell’ (as cited in Kolhatak, 2014, para. 26). This is an
ongoing issue and although changes are happening, they are occurring at a slow rate. Therefore,
efforts to make gaming a more inclusive and diverse culture need to involve the continuous
search for new ways and means of improving the representation and participation of women
and other marginalised groups across gaming as a whole.

CHERIE TODD is a PhD candidate in the Geography programme at the University of
Waikato. She recently submitted her thesis, which investigates how gamers construct sex and
gender in the online game World of Warcraft, with a particular focus on connections between
intimate relationships and gendered power relations.

References
Consalvo, M. (2012). Confronting toxic gamer culture: A challenge for feminist game studies scholars. Ada: A

Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, 1.
Fox, J., & Tang, W. Y. (2014). Sexism in online video games: The role of conformity to masculine norms and

social dominance orientation. Computers in Human Behavior, 33, 314-320.
Gonzalez, A., Gomez, E., Orozco, R., & Jacobs, S. (2014). Entering the boys’ club: An analysis of female

representation in game industry, culture, and design. iConference 2014 Proceedings. DOI: 10.9776/14325.

GamerGate 67

Women’s Studies Journal, Volume 29 Number 1, August 2015: 64-67. ISSN 1173-6615
© 2015 Women’s Studies Association of New Zealand Hosted at www.wsanz.org.nz/

Handrahan, M. (2015). IGDA: Gender, GamerGate and the need for action. Retrieved from http://www.
gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-04-29-igda-gender-gamergate-and-the-need-for-action

ICA. (2014). GamerGate and academia. ICA Newletter, 42 (9). Retrieved from http://www.icahdq.org/
membersnewsletter/NOV14_ART0009.asp

Isaacson, B. (2012). #1ReasonWhy reveals sexism rampant in the gaming industry. The Huffington Post. Retrieved
from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/29/1reasonwhy-reveals-sexism-gaming-industry_n_2205204.
html

Kolhatak, S. (2014). The gaming industry’s greatest adversary is just gettting started. Bloomberg Business.
Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-11-26/anita-sarkeesian-battles-sexism-in-
games-gamergate-harassment

Pakman, D. (2014). #GamerGate: Brianna Wu accuses interviewer of ‘hit piece’ attack. Interview with David
Pakman, 27 October 2014. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETVcInunAss

Reilly, C. (2015). 1.2 billion gamers worldwide and growing. Retrieved from http://www.gameskinny.com/
q88jr/12-billion-gamers-world-wide-and-growing

Sarkeesian, A. (2015). The Scythian – sword and sorcery. Retrieved from http://feministfrequency.com
Todd, C. (2012). ‘Troubling’ gender in virtual gaming spaces. New Zealand Geographer. (68), 101-110.
Todd, C. (Forthcoming). Sex and gender in World of Warcraft: Identities, love, and power. Unpublished PhD

thesis. University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-04-29-igda-gender-gamergate-and-the-need-for-action

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-04-29-igda-gender-gamergate-and-the-need-for-action

http://www.icahdq.org/membersnewsletter/NOV14_ART0009.asp

http://www.icahdq.org/membersnewsletter/NOV14_ART0009.asp

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/29/1reasonwhy-reveals-sexism-gaming-industry_n_2205204.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/29/1reasonwhy-reveals-sexism-gaming-industry_n_2205204.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-11-26/anita-sarkeesian-battles-sexism-in-games-gamergate-harassment

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-11-26/anita-sarkeesian-battles-sexism-in-games-gamergate-harassment

http://www.gameskinny.com/q88jr/12-billion-gamers-world-wide-and-growing

http://www.gameskinny.com/q88jr/12-billion-gamers-world-wide-and-growing

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9
•

Feminist Theories of Technology

J U D Y W A J C M A N

OVER the last 15 years, an exciting new field of study has emerged, con-
cerned to develop a feminist perspective on technology. The development of
this perspective is more recent and consequently less theoretically developed
than that which has been articulated in relation to science (see Keller, Chapter
4 in this volume). To date, however, most contributions to the debate on
gender and technology have been of a somewhat specialist character, focused
on a particular type of technology. Thus the area is characterized by many
edited collections such as Martha Moore Trescott (1979a), Joan Rothschild
(1983), Jan Zimmerman (1983), Wendy Faulkner and Erik Arnold (1985),
Maureen McNeil (1987), Chris Kramarae (1988), and Gill Kirkup and Laurie
Keller (1992), which do not necessarily share a theoretical approach.

While some feminists have been primarily concerned with women’s lim-
ited access to scientific and technical institutions (see Fox, Chapter 10), others
have begun to explore the gendered character of technology itself. This latter,
more radical, approach has broadly taken two directions. There are those
feminists who argue that Western technology itself embodies patriarchal
values and that its project is the domination and control of women and nature
(Corea et al., 1985; Griffin, 1978; Merchant, 1980; Mies, 1987). This ap-
proach finds political expression in the cultural feminism and eco-feminism
of the 1980s, which calls for a new feminist technology based on women’s

189

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190 S C I E N T I F I C A N D T E C H N I C A L C U L T U R E S

values. Taking a different tack, there are a group of writers who adopt the
methods of the social studies of technology, which is more historical and socio-
logical in orientation (Cockburn, 1983, 1985; Cowan, 1976, 1979, 1983;
Faulkner & Arnold, 1985; Hartmann, Kraut, & Tilly, 1986-1987; McGaw,
1982; McNeil, 1987). Much of their work has been concerned with the
gender division of labor in both paid and unpaid work.

What I have attempted here, and developed more fully elsewhere (Wajcman,
1991), is to construct a framework that brings together these various perspec-
tives. Instead of imposing an artificial uniformity, I will argue that different
kinds of technology are shaped by specific constellations of interests, so that
the male interests shaping reproductive technologies, for example, are dif-
ferent than those that form technologies in the workplace. In this chapter I
have chosen to concentrate on the three most heavily researched areas—pro-
duction, reproduction, and domestic technologies. In the final section I pre-
sent a more general analysis of women’s marginality, one that focuses on
technology as a masculine culture.

THE TECHNOLOGY OF PRODUCTION

The study of technologies in the context of paid work has been and still is
the main subject of research on technological change. Since the mid-1970s,
feminist researchers and activists have addressed the effects of automation
on women’s employment. The introduction of computer-based technologies
into offices is a prime site of this research, mainly because the majority of
clerical and secretarial workers almost everywhere are women. Office auto-
mation forms the basis for many of the generalizations about women’s work
experience. This research examines the effects of technological change
both on women’s employment opportunities and on their experience of work
(Crompton & Jones, 1984; Feldberg & Glenn, 1983; Hartmann et al., 1986,
1987; Webster, 1989; Wright, 1987).

Although word processors were initially seen as a threat to typists’ skills
and as leading to the fragmentation and standardization of work, a more com-
plex picture is now emerging. With respect to skill levels required for given
jobs, detailed empirical studies show that opposing tendencies of increased
complexity and of greater simplification and routinization may coexist.
Rather than the impact of automation being uniform across a range of office
jobs, the effects of new technology operate within and reinforce preexisting
differences in the patterns of work. It has been found, for example, that
technological change tends to further advantage those who already have
recognized skills and a degree of control over their work tasks (Baran, 1987).

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Feminist Theories of Technology 191

Another strand of research has taken up the issue of divisions between men
and women in the workplace and the implications of this for the sex typing
of occupations. Of particular concern here is the remarkable persistence of
the gender stereotyping of jobs, even when the nature of the work and the
skills required to perform it have been radically transformed by technologi-
cal change.

Much of this feminist research has been influenced by a theoretical per-
spective, mainly Marxist in orientation, that identified the connections between
technologies of production and control over labor (Braverman, 1974; Noble,
1984). The basic argument of this literature is that, within capitalism, a major
factor affecting the development and use of machinery is the antagonistic class
relations of production. To control the labor force and maximize profit-
ability, capitalism continuously applies new technology designed to frag-
ment and deskill labor, so that labor becomes cheaper and subject to greater
control (MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1985).

Although this theoretical approach has been sophisticated in its analysis
of the capital-labor relation, feminists questioned the notion that control over
the labor process operates independently of the gender of the workers who
are being controlled. They pointed out that the relations of production are
constructed as much out of gender divisions as class divisions (Beechey,
1988; Cockburn, 1983; Hartmann, 1976). Both employers as employers, and
men as men, were shown to have an interest in creating and sustaining oc-
cupational sex segregation.

The Sex Typing of Technical Skills

Standard historical accounts of craft unionism have examined the role of
technical skills in securing job control, that is, as a weapon in class conflict.
Its role as a weapon in patriarchal struggles at work has been ignored. It is
now well established in the feminist literature that, as exclusively male pre-
serves, craft unions have played an active part in creating and sustaining
women’s subordinate position in the workforce. The identification of men
with skill has been central to male dominance in the workplace.

Some authors have focused on the male domination of the skilled trades
created with the introduction of machines during the industrial revolution
(Cockburn, 1983,1985; Faulkner & Arnold, 1985; McNeil, 1987). Male craft
workers could not prevent employers from drawing women into the new
spheres of production. Instead, they organized to retain certain rights over
technology by actively resisting the entry of women into their trades. Women
who became industrial laborers found themselves working in what were
considered to be unskilled jobs for the lowest pay. Even when they did
manage to enter technical/skilled industrial work, as in the two world wars,

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192 S C I E N T I F I C A N D T E C H N I C A L C U L T U R E S

this was followed by a deliberate process of expulsion from that work once
the immediate crisis had passed. Most women workers wanted to retain their
jobs and were only removed through the combined efforts of management
and unions (Milkman, 1987).

Thus male dominance of technology has largely been secured by the active
exclusion of women from areas of technological work and it is fundamental
to the way in which the gender division of labor is still being reproduced today.
Let us now turn the focus around and look at how these gender divisions may
themselves shape particular technological developments in the first place. If
technology is designed by men, with job stereotypes in mind, then it is hardly
surprising that sex segregation is being further incorporated into the work-
place. Gender divisions in the workplace profoundly affect the direction and
pace of technological innovation.

The Gendered Relations of Workplace Technology

One of the most important ways that gender divisions interact with techno-
logical change is through the price of labor, in that women’s wage labor
generally costs considerably less than men’s. This may affect technological
change in at least two ways. Because a new machine has to pay for itself in
labor costs saved, technological change may be slower in industries where
there is an abundant supply of women’s cheap labor. For example, the clothing
industry has remained technologically static since the nineteenth century
with little change in the sewing process. While there are no doubt purely
technical obstacles to the mechanization of clothing production, there will
be less incentive to invest in automation if skilled and cheap labor power is
available to do the job. Thus there is an important link between women’s
status as unskilled and low-paid workers, and the uneven pace of technologi-
cal development.

There is a more direct sense, however, in which gender inequality leaves
its imprint on technology. Employers may seek forms of technological
change that enable them to replace expensive skilled male workers with
low-paid, less unionized female workers. A good example of this comes from
Cynthia Cockburn’s (1983) account of an archetypal group of skilled work-
ers being radically undermined by technological innovation. It is the story
of the rise and fall of London’s Fleet Street compositors, an exclusively male
trade with strong craft traditions of control over the labor process. A detailed
description of the technological evolution from the Linotype system to elec-
tronic photocomposition shows how the design of the new typesetting technol-
ogy reflected gender issues.

The new computerized system was designed using the keyboard of a con-
ventional typewriter rather than the compositor’s traditional, and very different,

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Feminist Theories of Technology 193

keyboard. There was nothing inevitable about this. Electronic circuitry is in
fact perfectly capable of producing a Linotype lay on the new-style board.
So what politics lie behind the design and selection of this keyboard? In
choosing to dispense with the Linotype layout, management were choosing
a system that would undermine the skill and power basis of the compositors,
and reduce them at a stroke to “mere” typists. This would render typists
(mainly women) and compositors (men) equal competitors for the new
machines; indeed, it would advantage the women typists. The keyboard on
the new printing technology was designed with an eye to using the relatively
cheap and abundant labor of female typists.

Although machine design is overwhelmingly a male province, it does not
always coincide with the interests of men as a sex. As we have seen, some
technologies are designed for use by women to break the craft control of men.
Thus gender divisions are commonly exploited in the power struggles be-
tween capital and labor. In this way, the social relations that shape industrial
technology include those of gender as well as class.

REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY

The area most vigorously contested at the moment by feminists, both
politically and intellectually, is in the sphere of human biological reproduc-
tion. Much feminist scholarship has been devoted to uncovering women’s
struggle throughout history against the appropriation of medical knowledge
and practice by men. Contemporary debates are fueled by the perception that
the processes of pregnancy and childbirth are directed and controlled by
ever-more sophisticated and intrusive technologies.

Reproductive Technology as Patriarchal Domination

Most vocal in their opposition to the development of the new reproductive
technologies are a group of radical feminists who see these technologies as
a form of patriarchal exploitation of women’s bodies (Corea et al., 1985;
Hanmer, 1985; Klein, 1985; Mies, 1987; Rowland, 1985). According to these
writers, techniques such as in vitro fertilization, egg donation, sex prede-
termination, and embryo evaluation represent another attempt to control
women’s bodies. The technological potential for the complete separation of
reproduction from sexuality is seen as a move to appropriate the reproductive
capacities that have been, in the past, women’s unique source of power.

Central to the radical feminist analysis is a concept of reproduction as a
natural process, inherent in women alone, and a theory of technology as

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194 S C I E N T I F I C AND T E C H N I C A L C U L T U R E S

intrinsically patriarchal. In a similar vein to the work on reproductive tech-
nologies, eco-feminists have analyzed military technology and the ecologi-
cal effects of other modern technologies as products of patriarchal culture
that “speak violence at every level” (Caldecott & Leland, 1983; Griffin, 1978).
These theories argue that women are more in tune with nature because of
their biological capacity for motherhood. Conversely, men’s inability to give
birth has made them disrespectful of human and natural life, resulting in wars
and ecological disasters.

Technology, like science, is seen as an instrument of male domination of
women and nature. And, just as many feminists have argued for a science
based on women’s values, so too there has been a call for a technology based
on women’s values. From this perspective, a new feminist technology would
be based on “a nonexploitative relationship between nature and ourselves”
and would embrace feminine intuition and subjectivity.

This trend in feminism has been gathering force in recent years, and
resonates with some feminist postmodernism that is largely concerned with
an analysis of technology as a cultural phenomenon. It has been positive in
taking the debate about gender and technology beyond the use/abuse model
of technology and focusing on the political qualities of technology itself. It
has also been a forceful assertion of women’s interests, needs, and values as
being different than men’s as well as of the way women are not well served
by current technologies.

However, there are clearly some fundamental problems with this idea of
a technology based on women’s values, including the representation of
women as inherently nurturing and pacifist. The assertion of fixed, unified,
and opposed female and male natures has been subjected to a variety of
thorough critiques (Eisenstein, 1984; Segal, 1987). There is only space here
to observe that the values being ascribed to women originate in the historical
subordination of women. The belief in the unchanging nature of women, and
their association with procreation, nurturance, warmth, and creativity, lies at
the very heart of traditional and oppressive conceptions of womanhood.
Rather than asserting some inner essence of womanhood as an ahistorical
category, we need to recognize the ways in which both “masculinity” and
“femininity” are socially constructed and are in fact constantly under recon-
struction. The pursuit of a technology based on women’s inherent values is
therefore misguided.

The literature referred to above has surveyed the range of reproductive
technologies and was important because it identified the sexual politics in
which these technologies were embedded. Recently, there has been some
attempt to make distinctions within the field of reproductive technologies by
emphasizing the specific nature of each technology and the differing posi-
tions of women in relation to them. Edited collections such as those by Michelle

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Feminist Theories of Technology 195

Stan worth (1987) and Maureen McNeil, Ian Varcoe, and Steven Yearley
(1990) represent notable contributions to the social studies of technology.
While maintaining that male interests have profoundly structured the form
of reproductive technologies that have become available, this literature treats
neither men nor the technologies as a homogeneous group. It also recognizes
that women are not necessarily hostile to increased technical intervention.
Indeed, many women, as patients, favor high-technology deliveries and want
access to in vitro fertilization (Morgall, 1992).

While it is evident that all the stages in the career of a medical technology,
from its inception and development, through to consolidation as part of
routine practice, are a series of interlocking male activities, the male interests
involved are specifically those of white middle-class professionals. The
division of labor that produces and deploys the reproductive technologies is
both sexual and professional: Women are the patients, while the obstetricians,
gynecologists, molecular biologists, and embryologists are overwhelm-
ingly men.

Technology and Professionalization

One of the key themes to emerge from these studies is that the “techno-
logical imperative” within reproductive medicine is intrinsic to the defense
of doctors’ claims of professionalism. The unequal power relations between
medical practitioners and their female patients are based on a combination
of factors, predominantly those of professional qualification and gender. The
professional hierarchy means that doctors are regarded as experts who
possess technical knowledge and skill that laypeople don’t have. Technology
is particularly attractive in the case of obstetricians because techniques such
as the stethoscope and foetal monitoring enable male doctors to claim to know
more about women’s bodies than the women themselves (Oakley, 1987).

High-technology activities are not only the key to power at the level of
doctor-patient relations but also to power within the profession. Status,
money, and professional acclaim within the medical profession are distrib-
uted according to the technological sophistication of the specialty, and the
new techniques of in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer are no exception.
Before the introduction of these techniques, the investigation and treatment
of infertility had long been afforded low status in the medical hierarchy. The
new techniques of in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer provide gyne-
cologists with an exciting, high-status area of research as well as a technically
complex practice that only they can use (Pfeffer, 1987). Clearly, professional
interests play a central role in determining the type and tempo of technologi-
cal innovation in this area.

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196 S C I E N T I F I C A N D T E C H N I C A L C U L T U R E S

There are also wider economic forces at work. The commercial interests
of the vast biotechnology industry are particularly influential. Much has been
written about the “new medical-industrial complex” and the way in which
resources are systematically channeled into profitable areas that often have
no connection with satisfying human needs (Yoxen, 1986). However, there
is as yet little detailed information about the financial interests of medical
biotechnology corporations in the development of the new reproductive
technologies.

The gender perspective presented in these studies has in some ways built
on the earlier analysis of gender relations of production technologies. How-
ever, while the conflictual relations of the workplace provide the context for
the analysis of technologies of production, reproductive technologies can only
be understood in the wider context of the growing supremacy of technology
in Western medicine. Although women are prime targets of medical experi-
mentation, reproductive technology cannot be analyzed in terms of a patri-
archal conspiracy. Instead, a complex web of interests has been woven
here—those of professional and capitalist interests overlaid with gender.

DOMESTIC TECHNOLOGY

Just as women are the primary consumers of reproductive technologies,
so are domestic technologies destined for use by women. In this case,
considerable optimism has attached to the possibility that technology may
provide the solution to women’s oppression in the home. Since the 1970s,
with the recognition of housework as work, feminist scholars have produced
excellent material on the history of housework and domestic technology
(Bose, Bereano, & Malloy, 1984; Cowan, 1983; Hayden, 1982; Ravetz, 1965;
Strasser, 1982). Another body of writing on domestic technology has concen-
trated on the recent dramatic expansion of information and communication
technologies in the home. It has been concerned with the cultural conse-
quences for the family of their diffusion and consumption (Silverstone &
Hirsch, 1992).

Such research has challenged the main orientation within the sociology of
technology toward paid, productive labor in the public domain. Issues that
have been central here are the relationship between domestic technologies
and time spent on household labor, whether technology has affected the
degree of gender specialization of housework, and gender bias in the use of
new technologies. Dominating the debates is the knowledge that the amount
of time women spend on household tasks has not decreased with “mechani-
zation of the home.”

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Feminist Theories of Technology 197

“Labor-Saving” Appliances

In her study of household technology, Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1983)
provides the following explanations for the failure of the “industrial revolu-
tion in the home” to ease or eliminate household tasks. Mechanization gave
rise to a whole range of new tasks, which, although not as physically demanding,
were as time consuming as the jobs they had replaced. The loss of servants
in the early decades of this century meant that even middle-class housewives
had to do all the housework themselves. Further, although domestic technol-
ogy did raise the productivity in housework, it was accompanied by rising
expectations of the housewife’s role, which generated more domestic work
for women. With a major change in the importance attached to child rearing
and the mother’s role, the home and housework acquired heightened emo-
tional significance. The split between public and private spheres meant that
the home was expected to provide a haven from the alienated, stressful
technological order of the workplace as well as entertainment, emotional
support, and sexual gratification. The burden of satisfying these needs fell on
the housewife.

Much of the feminist literature has pointed to the contradictions inherent
in attempts to mechanize the home and standardize domestic production.
Such attempts have foundered on the nature of housework—privatized, de-
centralized, and labor intensive. The result is a completely “irrational” use of
technology and labor within the home, because of the dominance of single-
family residences and the private ownership of correspondingly small-scale
amenities. “Several million American women cook supper each night in
several million separate homes over several million stoves” (Cowan, 1979,
p. 59). Domestic technology has thus been designed for use in single-family
households by a lone and loving housewife. Far from liberating women
from the home, it has further ensnared them within the social organization
of gender.

Alternatives

There is a tendency to see the technologies we have as the only possible
ones. This obscures the way particular social and economic interests have
influenced their development. It is useful to ask how a particular technology
or set of technologies might be redesigned with alternative priorities in mind.
History provides us with examples of alternative technologies that have been
developed but that have not flourished. In particular, studying paths not taken
can illuminate the way in which ideologies of gender shape technology.

In the case of domestic technologies, this can be illustrated in a number
of ways. For example, it is worth remembering that during the first few decades

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198 S C I E N T I F I C AND T E C H N I C A L C U L T U R E S

of this century a range of alternative approaches to housework were being
considered and experimented with. These included the development of com-
mercial services, the establishment of alternative communities and coopera-
tives, and the invention of different types of machinery (Hayden, 1982).
Seeing that the exploitation of women’s labor by men was embodied in the
actual design of houses, a group of Victorian feminists believed that the only
way to free women from domestic drudgery was to change the entire physical
framework of houses and neighborhoods. The continued dominance of the
single-family residence and the private ownership of household tools has
obscured the significance of these alternative approaches.

Thus, when women have designed technological alternatives to time-con-
suming housework, little is heard of them. A contemporary example is Gabe’s
innovative self-cleaning house (Zimmerman, 1983). Although still premised
on the single-family home, her design focuses on the need to relieve women
of the burden of housework it generates. An artist and inventor from Oregon,
Frances Gabe spent 27 years building and perfecting the self-cleaning house.
In effect, a warm water mist does the basic cleaning and the floors (with rugs
removed) serve as the drains. Every detail has been considered. “Clothes
freshener cupboards” and “dish washer cupboards” that wash and dry relieve
the tedium of stacking, hanging, folding, ironing, and putting away. The costs
of her system are no more than average because it is not designed as a luxury
item. Although ridiculed at the time, architects and builders now admit that
Gabe’s house is functional and attractive. One cannot help speculating that
the development of an effective self-cleaning house has not been high on the
agenda of male engineers.

Domestic Technology: A Commercial Afterthought

The fact is that much domestic technology has not anyway been specifi-
cally designed for household use but has its origins in very different spheres.
Many domestic technologies were initially developed for commercial, indus-
trial, and even military purposes and only later, as manufacturers sought to
expand their markets, were they adapted for home use. For this reason new
domestic appliances are not always appropriate to the household work that
they are supposed to perform. Nor are they necessarily the implements that
would have been developed if the housewife had been considered first or
indeed if she had had control of the processes of innovation.

An industrial designer I interviewed put it thus: “Why invest heavily in
the design of domestic technology when there is no measure of productivity
for housework as there is for industrial work?” Given that women’s labor in
the home is unpaid, different economic considerations operate. When pro-
ducing for the household market, manufacturers concentrate on cutting the

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Feminist Theories of Technology 199

costs of manufacturing techniques to enable them to sell reasonably cheap
products. Much of the design effort is put into making appliances look attrac-
tive or impressively high tech in the showroom—for example, giving them
an unnecessary array of buttons and flashing lights. Far from being designed
to accomplish a specific task, some appliances are designed expressly for
sale as moderately priced gifts from husband to wife and in fact are rarely
used. In these ways the inequalities between women and men, and the subor-
dination of the private to the public sphere, are reflected in the very design
processes of domestic technology. Men design domestic technology with
female users in mind and against the background of a particular ideology of
the family.

THE INDETERMINACY OF TECHNOLOGY

Throughout this chapter I have been examining the way in which the
gender division of our society has affected technological change. As I have
argued that technology is imprinted with patriarchal designs, it may appear
that the politics implicit in my account are profoundly pessimistic. A crucial
point is that the relationship between technological and social change is fun-
damentally indeterminate. The designers and promoters of a technology cannot
completely predict or control its final uses. There are always unintended
consequences and unanticipated possibilities. For example, when, as a result
of the organized movement of people with physical disabilities in the United
States, buildings and pavements were redesigned to improve mobility, it was
not envisaged that these reforms would help women manoeuvering prams
around cities. It is important not to underestimate women’s capacity to
subvert the intended purposes of technology and turn it to their collective
advantage.

A good illustration of how a technology can yield unintended conse-
quences, and how women can disrupt the original purposes of a technology,
is provided by the diffusion of the telephone. In a study of the American
history of the telephone, Claude Fischer (1988) shows that there was a
generation-long mismatch between how the consumers used the telephone
and how the industry men thought it should be used. Although sociability
(phoning relatives and friends) was and still is the main use of the residential
telephone, the telephone industry resisted such uses until the 1920s, con-
demning this use of the technology for “trivial gossip.” Until that time the
telephone was sold as a practical business and household tool.

The people who developed, built, and marketed telephone systems were
predominantly telegraph men. They therefore assumed that the telephone’s
function would be to replicate that of the parent technology, the telegraph.
Telephone “visiting” was considered to be an abuse or trivialization of the

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200 S C I E N T I F I C A N D T E C H N I C A L C U L T U R E S

service. The issue of sociability was also tied up with gender. It was women
in particular who were attracted to the telephone to reduce their loneliness
and isolation and to free their time from unnecessary travel. A 1930s survey
found that, whereas men mainly wanted a telephone for business reasons,
women ranked talking to kin and friends first (Fischer, 1988, p. 51).

A fuller feminist analysis of these processes is provided by Michèle Martin’s
book (1991) on telephone development in Canada. She shows that women’s
access to the telephone came from their husband’s phone connection between
home and office and that they gained this access for functional purposes.
Again, the author demonstrates that women consumers were quick to resist
these limitations and to adapt and appropriate the telephone to their own needs.

Women’s relationship to the telephone is still different than men’s in that
women use the telephone more because of their confinement at home with
small children, because they have the responsibility for maintaining family
and social relations, and possibly because of their fear of crime in the streets
(Rakow, 1988, 1992). Although designed with working men in mind, the
telephone has increased women’s access to each other and the outside world.
Thus, far from relating passively to male-designed technologies, this exam-
ple shows that women can and do actively participate in defining the meaning
and purpose of technologies.

Of course, the unintended consequences of a technology are by no means
always positive for women. To take the same example, the diffusion of the
telephone has facilitated the electronic intrusion of pornography and sexual
harassment into the home. Not only are abusive and harassing telephone calls
made largely by men to women, but new sexual services are being made
available to men in this way. The point is that a technology can contain
contradictory possibilities; its meaning will depend on the economic, cul-
tural, and political context in which it is embedded.

TECHNOLOGY AS MASCULINE CULTURE

The ways in which technology is constructed as masculine, and masculin-
ity is defined in terms of technical competence, have been alluded to
frequently in this chapter. This is a good point at which to explore in more
depth the interplay between the culture of technology and masculinity.

Hidden From History

To start with, women’s contributions to technological innovation have by
and large been left out of the history books, which generally still represent
the prototype inventor as male. So, as in the history of science, an initial task

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Feminist Theories of Technology 201

of feminists has been to uncover and recover the women technologists who
have been hidden from history. Some of this historical scholarship examines
patent records to rediscover women’s forgotten inventions (Stanley, 1992).
In the current period, there has been considerable interest in the involvement
of women such as Ada Lady Lovelace and Grace Hopper in the development
of computer programming (Stein, 1985).

However, reassessing women’s role in this way is limited by our under-
standing of what technology is. We tend to think about technology in terms
of industrial machinery and cars, for example, ignoring other technologies
that affect most aspects of everyday life. The very definition of technology,
in other words, too readily defines technology in terms of male activities. It
is important to recognize that different epochs and cultures had different names
for what we now think of as technology. A greater emphasis on women’s
activities immediately suggests that women, and in particular black women,
were among the first technologists. After all, women were the main gatherers,
processors, and storers of plant food from earliest human times onward. It
was therefore logical that they should be the ones to have invented the tools
and methods involved in this work such as the digging stick, the carrying
sling, the reaping knife and sickle, pestles and pounders. If it were not for
the male orientation of most technological research, the significance of these
inventions would be acknowledged.

Thus there is important work to be done not only in identifying women
inventors but also in discovering the origins and paths of development of
“women’s sphere” technologies that seem often to have been considered
beneath notice. By diminishing the significance of women’s technologies,
the cultural stereotype of technology as an activity appropriate for men is
reproduced. We need to try and sever this link between what technology is
and what men do. The enduring force of the identification between technol-
ogy and manliness is not an inherent biological sex difference. It is instead
the result of the historical and cultural construction of gender.

Masculinity and Machines

There are now a range of feminist analyses that focus on the symbolic
dimension of technology and the way technology enters into our gender
identity (Hacker, 1989; Kramarae, 1988; Turkle, Î984). Technology in this
sense is more than a set of artifacts; it includes the physical and mental know-
how to make use of those things. Appropriating these sorts of knowledge and
practices is integral to the constitution of male gender identity. Men affirm
their masculinity through technical competence and posit women, by con-
trast, as technologically ignorant and incompetent. That our present technical
culture expresses and consolidates relations among men is an important

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202 S C I E N T I F I C AND T E C H N I C A L C U L T U R E S

factor in explaining the continuing exclusion of women. Indeed, as a result
of these social practices, women may attach very different meanings and
values to technology. To emphasize the ways in which the symbolic repre-
sentation of technology is sharply gendered is not to deny that real differ-
ences do exist between women and men in relation to technology. Nor is it
to imply that all men are technologically skilled or knowledgeable. Rather,
it is the dominant cultural ideal of masculinity that has this intimate bond
with technology.

In modern societies it is the education system, in conjunction with other
social institutions, that plays a key role in the formation of gender identity.
Schooling, in conjunction with youth cultures, the family, and mass media
all transmit meanings and values that identify masculinity with machines and
technical competence. There is now an extensive literature on sex stereotyp-
ing in general in schools, particularly on the processes by which girls and
boys are channeled into different subjects in secondary and tertiary educa-
tion, and the link between education and the extreme gender segregation of
the labor market. This work has shown that discrimination against female
students is compounded by exclusionary masculinist cultures within the
scientific and technical classroom (B irton & Walker, 1983; Deem, 1980).

The durability of these cultures in the workplace has been the focus of
another strand of feminist research. From school to workplaces, feminists
have been frustrated by the limited success of equal opportunity policies and
schemes to channel women into technical trades. This has prompted some
writers to home in on men’s workplace cultures so as to understand how it
is that women experience them as alien territory (Cockburn, 1983; Hacker,
1981).

Engineering culture, with its fascination with computers and the most
automated techniques, is archetypically masculine. Of all the major profes-
sions, engineering contains the smallest proportion of females and projects
a heavily masculine image hostile to women. It is a particularly intriguing
example of masculine culture because it cuts across the boundaries between
physical and intellectual work and yet maintains strong elements of mind-
body dualism.

Central to the social construction of the engineer is the polarity between
science and sensuality, the hard and the soft, things and people. This draws
on the wider system of symbols and metaphors in Western culture that identify
women with nature and men with culture. These sexual stereotypes contain
various elements such as that women are more emotional, less analytical, and
weaker than men. Sally Hacker (1981) found that engineers attach most
value to scientific abstraction and technical competence and least to femi-
nine properties of nurturance, sensuality, and the body. The posing of such

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Feminist Theories of Technology 203

categories as “hard/soft” and “reason/emotion” as opposites is used to legiti-
mate female exclusion from the world of engineering.

Engineering epitomizes another form of the masculinity of technology as
well—that involving physical toughness and mechanical skills. All the
features that are associated with manual labor and machinery—dirt, noise,
danger—are suffused with masculine qualities. Machine-related skills and
physical strength are fundamental measures of masculine status and self-es-
teem according to this model. The workplace culture of engineering illus-
trates a crucial point: that the ideology of masculinity is remarkably flexible.
Masculinity is expressed both in terms of muscular physical strength and
aggression and in terms of analytical power. “At one moment, in order to
fortify their identification with physical engineering, men dismiss the intel-
lectual world as ‘soft.’ At the next moment, however, they need to appropriate
sedentary, intellectual engineering work for masculinity too” (Cockburn,
1985, p. 190). No matter how masculinity is defined according to this diverse
and fluid ideology, it always constructs women as ill-suited to technological
pursuits.

CONCLUSION:
WHERE ARE WE NOW?

This chapter has looked at the connections between gender, technology,
and society from the perspective of the social studies of technology. I have
argued that a gendered approach to technology cannot be reduced to a view
that treats technology as a set of neutral artifacts manipulated by men to
women’s detriment. Rather, this approach insists that technology is always
the product of social relations. Although there are other equally powerful
forces shaping technology, such as militarism, capitalist profitability, and
racism, I have concentrated on gender. This means looking at how the
production and use of technology are shaped by male power and interests.

Such an account of technology and gender relations, however, is still at a
general level. There are few cases where feminists have really got inside the
“black box” of technology to do detailed empirical research, as some of the
recent sociological literature has attempted (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987).
Over the last few years, a new sociology of technology has emerged that is
studying the invention, development, stabilization, and diffusion of specific
artifacts. This literature attempts to show the effects of social relations on
technology that range from fostering or inhibiting particular technologies,
through influencing the choice between competing paths of technical devel-
opment, to affecting the precise design characteristics of particular artifacts.

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204 S C I E N T I F I C AND T E C H N I C A L C U L T U R E S

So far, however, this approach has paid little attention to the ways in which
technological objects may be shaped by the operation of gender interests. Its
blindness to gender issues is indicative of a general problem with the
methodology adopted by the new sociology of technology. Using a conven-
tional notion of technology, these writers study the social groups that actively
seek to influence the form and direction of technological design. What they
overlook is the fact that the absence of influence from certain groups may
also be significant. For them, women’s absence from observable conflict does
not indicate that gender interests are being mobilized. For a social theory of
gender, however, the almost complete exclusion of women from the techno-
logical community points to the need to take account of the underlying struc-
ture of gender relations.

A concept of power is by no means absent from sociological theories of
technology, but it does not readily accommodate what feminist theory has
come to understand by “male power.” The process of technological develop-
ment, and preferences for different technologies, are shaped by a set of social
arrangements that reflect men’s power in the wider society. Recent feminist
work is providing new insights into the way that specific social interests,
including men’s interests, structure the knowledge and practice of particular
kinds of technology. It is also enriching theoretical developments within
feminism more generally. Empirical and theoretical work is now under way
to show that gender relations are an integral constituent of the institutions
and projects from which technologies emerge. It is my belief that the social
studies of technology can only be strengthened by a feminist critique. Without
it, we are not getting the full story.

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