Autonomous Technology Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought Langdon Winner The M!T Press Cambridg-e, Massachusetts, and London, England To my parents and Mrs. A 306.46 WIN I i0/10 First MIT Press paperback edition, 1978 Copyright© 1977 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set by To the Lighthouse Press, printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Winner, Langdon Autonomous Technology. Includes Index 1. Technology-Social aspects. 2. Technology­ Philosophy. 3. Technocracy. I. Title. Tl4.5.W56 301.24'3 76-40100 ISBN 0-262·23078-X (hardcover) ISBN 0-262-73049-9 (paperback) 10 Contents Contents vii Preface ix Chapter 5 Artifice and Order 1 7 3 Introduction 2 The Technological Society: Groundwork 175 Technological Politics: Master and Slave Revisited 187 Chapter I Order, Discipline, and Pace 191 Autonomy and Mastery 13 Transformation and Incorporation 208 Mastery and Its Loss 18 Reverse Adaptation 226 Autonomy and Animism 30 Chapter 6 237 Chapter 2 Technological Politics Engines of Change 44 Reverse Adaptation and Control 238 Momentum and Motive 46 The Technological Imperative and the State 251 Technological Evolution 57 The Revolution and Its Tools 262 Technological Determinism 73 .,, Technological Drift: Uncertainty and Unintention 88 Chapter 7 The Technological Imperative 100 Complexity and the Loss of Agency 279 Complexity: Manifest and Concealed 282 Chapter 3 The Loss of Agency in Technological Systems 295 The Flaw and Its Origins 107 Nature and Western Civilization 108 Chapter 8 The Victory of Technique 118 Frankenstein's Problem 306 The Search for a "New Ethic" 130 Technology as Legislation 317 Luddism as Epistemology 325 Chapter 4 Technocracy 135 Notes 336 Classical Technocracy 135 Technocracy and Liberalism 146 Index 375 Preface The questions that inform this book spring from my coming to terms with a set of problems in political and academic life of the past decade. My concerns took shape at an institution, the University of California at Berkeley, which had, for reasons its leaders thought eminently pro­ gressive, defined itself as a vast research, training, and social service mechanism. As it pursued that end, its philosophy began to exemplify a ..mode of human relationships that I here describe as technological politics. That model eventually came to grief in a situation that cast major social issues of the 1960s and early 1970s-civil rights, Vietnam, racism, and militarism-at the door of the "multiversity." In the lively and sometimes violent controversies of that period, Berkeley became a place in which politics in the plaza and learning in the classroom were never far removed. This was especially true for those of us fortunate to be studying political theory and intellectual history during those years. For whatever one's position on the war or latest university controversy happened to be, the lectures, sections, and readings on Thucydides, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, or Marx always seemed directly suited to dilemmas immediately at hand. I wish to express special thanks to my teachers at Berkeley-Sheldon Wolin, John Schaar, Hanna Pitkin, Norman Jacobson, and Thomas Morrison-whose ability to mix scholarly concerns with broader human commitments is an inspiration to all who study with them. My involve­ ment with issues of political thought, which they encouraged, was later given focus by the questions about technology and politics raised by Todd La Porte, a man whose interest in my work made it possible for me to continue when I might otherwise have stopped. Sheldon Wolin read the manuscript in its earliest stages and made many helpful sugges­ tions about the direction it might take. Later drafts were considerably improved by the comments of Darrell Hawthorne, Jim Miller, Ira Kurzban, Todd La Porte, Robert Biller, and my colleagues at M.I.T., Miles Morgan, Charles Weiner, Nathan Sivin, and Joseph Weizenbaum. To Hanna Pitkin, Kai Lee, and Herman van Gunsteren I owe a special debt for their line-by-line commentaries on my writing. This would be a much better, albeit much longer book if I had followed all of their l'•·cfncc x Autonomous Technology suggestions. As it is, I thank them for steering me through a number of difficulties and toward a project that now extends far beyond the con­ fines of this one statement. Don Van Vliet, who does not read manu­ scripts, influenced much of what appears here through his sense of the comedy of nature and artifice. The friendship and encouragement of Greil Marcus and Bruce Miroff have often sustained me in this and other work. What the reader finds here is a detailed treatment of a theme rele­ vant to political theory, which, it seems to me, has never received suffi­ cient attention. Ideological presuppositions in radical, conservative, and liberal thought have tended to prevent discussion of a problem in tech­ nics and politics that has forced itself onto the agenda of our times. The problem was first and most powerfully raised for me by a speaker on the steps of Sproul Hall in December 1964. "There is a time," his voice rang out, "when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part; you can't even pas­ sively· take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to rnake it stop. And' you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." 1 Those words marked a turning point for the student generation of that decade and gave me the first glimmerings of my subject here. Con­ cealed in them was a contradiction, which events of subsequent years have made clear, that there are institutions one must oppose and struggle to modify even though one also has considerable affection for them. lntrnrhwtlun Introduction 3 In unr, diHgulse or another, technology has been a central theme in po­ or about the approach that an intelligent person should take in the lltlcnl thought for the past two hundred years. Although the definition quest for understanding. In the eyes of scientists and technicians, the issue takes the form of a moral dilemma that hovers menacingly over of the issue of concern has again and again shifted, it has been clear during this time that there is something in the nature of modern tech­ their work. Since World War II they have become increasingly sensitive nology thinkers can ill afford to ignore. A partial catalog of the topics to the fact that scientific technologies have profound and often unfor­ that have been associated with various aspects of modern technics tunate consequences in the world at large. With the neutrality of their professions and products now in question, they have begun intensive would include the following: the industrial revolution and the rise of inquiries into the political and ethical context in which their activities industrial society, the ascendancy of the middle class, the possibility of exist.1 utopia, the misery of the working class and the necessity of revolution, the rise of new elites, the social and psychological turmoil involved in From the point of view of social scientists and managers, the crucial issues are those of the increasing complexity and rate of change in rapid change, alienation, nationalism, imperialism, leisure, and the pos­ modern society. Developments in the technical sphere continually out­ sibility of ecological disaster. pace the capacity of individuals and social systems to adapt. As the rate Despite its widely acknowledged importance, however, technology itself has seldom been a primary subject matter for political or social of technological innovation quickens, it becomes increasingly important inquiries. While technological developments are commonly cited as and increasingly difficult to predict the range of effects that a given among the most important causes of the shape of modern society, the innovation will have. When compounded by the increasing complexity tendency has been to see the matter solely in terms of economics and of sociotechnical systems, these changes make it more and more diffi­ economic history, perspectives that due to their special mode of ab­ cult to carry out some of the most basic activities of contemporary straction and selectivity give us a very limited vision of the role technics social life: planning, design, and functional coordination. For this have played in modern history. Writers who have suggested the eleva­ reason complexity and change are increasingly studied as "independent tion of technology-related questions to a more central position-William variables" said to have objectively knowable correlations to certain F. Ogburn, Lewis Mumford, Leslie White, and others-have for the most kinds of social and political phenomena. 2 part been politely ignored. The prevalent opinion has remained that the In other modes of interpretation, however, the concerns of the natu­ true problems of modernity could best be upderstood in ways that ex­ ral and social scientists are held to be trivial, self-serving, and beside the cluded all direct reference to the technical sphere. Technology could be point. Radical critics of "the technological society" in both Europe and left to the technicians. America have insisted that what deserves our attention is not the rate of In recent years, however, the prevailing winds of neglect have begun technological innovation and its effects but rather the very existence of to shift.