Technologies encode politics.
🎧 PLUS: The audio version of '"Who are you?" and a question just for you.
Hi there, and welcome back to Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about technology, people, and power. This is the audio version of my latest essay, “Who are you?” Enjoy the dulcet tones of my voice, as I struggle yet again to say ‘pseudonymity’ 🙃
Before you click ‘play,’ I’d like to share a few things:
I want to make the audio essays more interactive. So here’s the plan: if the monthly essay prompts a question for you, email me with it, and I’ll do my best to answer it in the audio essay. Fun, huh?
I want to draw your attention to a new section of Untangled. If you pop over to the homepage, you’ll find a heading that reads ‘Primer.’ I received a lot of positive feedback on the primer I developed for Untangled’s first birthday, so I’ve decided to turn it into an ongoing project. I’ll update it every few months with new themes.
One contender for a new theme? Technologies encode politics. Remember that fun lil’ drawing from “Who are you?” of me in a box contoured by ‘politics’?
Right, as I wrote in the essay,
Classification systems encode moral choices, which shape one’s opportunities in life. Each category “valorizes some point of view and silences another,” write Bowker and Star. When one point of view is silenced, it often becomes the site of contestation — a fight for visibility, voice, and political change. The boundaries of the box aren’t neutral, they’re political.
This isn’t dissimilar to something I wrote in “Crypto is not decentralized” about the ways in which the political values motivating Web 1.0 became codified in the technical protocols of the early internet. In November 2021 I wrote:
The values that shaped Web 1.0 were rooted in the counterculture movements of the 60s and 70s and cyber libertarianism — a philosophy that wanted to prevent government regulation of the Internet. Enthusiasts attempted to encode these ideals into the technical architecture of the web via decentralized protocols. Like TCP/IP, which allows us to anonymously send data across a network without broadcasting it — it's what makes emails work.
See, technologies don’t necessarily encode a ‘left’ or ‘right’ politics but are instead linked to “specific ways of organizing power and authority,” as Langdon Winner writes in “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Winner tells the story of Robert Moses, an infamous urban planner in NY from the 1920s to the 1970s. Moses built the overpasses on Long Island so extraordinarily low to prevent public buses, which were more likely to be used by racial minorities and low-income groups, from visiting Jones Beach State Park. The details of this story have since been challenged, but Winner’s overall point remains: Moses built his politics into the overpasses.
The ways in which technologies encode politics are all around us, but they’re often hard to see. Thousands of New Yorkers drive beneath those overpasses every summer en route to the beach, but I doubt many know their embedded politics.
❓So here’s my question: in what ways do the technologies you interact with each day encode politics? Hit reply and let me know.
Okay, that’s it for now.
Until next time,
Charley