Do Artifacts Have Political Economy?

Abstract

Harking back to Langdon Winner's now classic essay “Do artifacts have politics?,” my aim in this article is to ask a very similar question—namely, do artifacts have political economy? Following Winner and with the same objective in mind, I analyze artifacts that: (1) have been designed in ways that embed particular political economies; or (2) are compatible with particular political economies. I illustrate the former using Winner's own example of Robert Moses and the design of bridges in New York City. For the latter, I illustrate a strong and weak version of the compatibility claim, with the strong version characterized by the adoption of both a particular technology and political economy while the weak version is characterized by the adaptation of the social context to a particular technology and political economy. I use the example of advertising technology (“adtech”) and generative artificial intelligence respectively to illustrate these two versions. I frame this discussion within an approach I define as constructivist political economy sitting at the interface of science and technology studies and political economy, which can provide a useful analytical tool to analyze and address the vagaries of contemporary technoscientific capitalism.