Do Artefacts Have Political Economy?
Kean Birch, York University
Abstract
Harking back to Langdon Winner’s now classic article, ‘Do artifacts have politics?’, my aim in this paper is to ask a very similar question – namely, do artefacts have political economy? Following Winner and with the same objective in mind, I analyse artefacts 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 (STS) and political economy, which can provide a useful analytical tool to analyse and address the vagaries of contemporary technoscientific capitalism.
Biography
Kean Birch is a Professor at the Department of Science, Technology & Society at York University, Toronto, and the Director of the Institute for Technoscience & Society. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and the Munich Center for Technology & Society, Technical University Munich, Germany. His research focus is on assetization and rentiership in the context of techno-economic change and the digital economy.
Location
STS Seminar Room, NIG, St. II. 6th floor, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna