Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,525 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 3d ago
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Langdon Winner's 1980 article, Do Artifacts Have Politics, is the UR text for questions like these.
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In this seminal essay, the raw critic turned tech scholar winner demands that we move beyond the simple framing of tech having intended and unintended consequences, and instead insists that politics come baked into some technologies.
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Winner divides the politics of technology into two broad categories: politics that are derived from the specific way that a technology has been introduced into the world, and politics that are either necessitated by or strongly compatible with a technology, by dint of its technical characteristics.
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For the first category, objects whose politics are determined by deployment decisions, Winner cites a set of notorious Long Island freeway overpasses.
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These were specified by Robert Moses, and in The Power Broker, Robert A.
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Carro's seminal biography of Moses, we learn that Moses deliberately chose to make these overpasses too low for a bus to pass beneath in order to
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Prevent a public transit route from being established between New York's black neighborhoods and Long Island's public beaches, favored by the white bourgeoisie.
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According to Winner, a freeway overpass isn't necessarily political, but these overpasses are
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What's more, their politics is durable, outlasting Robert Moses' tenure as New York's most powerful political figure, even outliving Moses himself.
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For the second category.
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Technologies whose politics emerge from their intrinsic technical characteristics, Winner compares solar and nuclear power.
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Nuclear reactors, he argues, require a central authority to build, operate, and maintain.
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We might add here that they also require a constant stream of fissiles that can be extracted only from certain unevenly distributed mining sites.
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By contrast, solar can be installed anywhere the sun shines, established and overseen by small decentralized groups.
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For winter, nuclear
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Are irreducibly the tech of large centralized states, while solar is potentially the tech of autonomous, non-hierarchical societies.
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Between these two technological poles, Winner discusses a third example, a tomato harvester.
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The harvester enabled farmers to fire many of their pickers, giving powers to bosses at the expense of workers.
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At the same time, the harvester only worked with hardier varietals that traded flavor for durability, yielding a cheaper, worse kind of tomato that drove out competing tomatoes that tasted better, but cost more to raise because their cultivation wasn't as amenable to cost-saving automation.
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The tomato harvester wasn't created to weaken labor and worsen tomatoes, but that was its effect.
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Showing 141–160 of 2,525 · page 8 of 127
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