Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought

Autonomous Technology is an important book in the history of STS, synthesizing many schools of technological critique from Ellul, to Weber, to Marx, in search of a way to talk about technology that accurately respects its power and its relationship to human society. The problem is that important is not the same as influential, or even particularly good, and I found this book confused on several critical points: what is the nature of autonomy-necessary for authentic human flourishing, or a sign of a system dangerously out of control? Speaking of control, is it a necessary part of governing technology, or a system by which elites can ‘rationally program’ society from the center?

Winner’s original scholarly contribution is mostly rooted in a sense of nostalgia-a nostalgia he writes about in The Whale and the Reactor. It’s a longing for a lost boyhood on the California coast, in a small town of orange orchards and sea breezes. That life sounds beautiful, but far too small to encompass human experience-or even the current human population. Winner proposes “epistemological luddism”, a stance that people only use tools that they understand fully, with a sense of appropriateness and wisdom. Yet the first part is incompatible with any sort of urban, technological, interdependent life, and ‘appropriate’ and ‘wisdom’ are elusive virtues in the simplest of times, let alone in the gales of a technological revolution.