[SIGCIS-Members] Unix Racism: Winner vs. McPherson

[Joris van Zundert]

Dear all,

Tom Haigh's answer—though I buy into most of it—still left me with a bit of
a 'but'. Many of my itches were answered in the literature Ella
Taylor-Smith and James Summer, and Tom himself so helpfully pointed out
today. Thanks for that.

My quibble remains with "Unix has no politics" as a generalized statement.
I readily assume that Tom Haigh does not intend absolutism with his remark
that "the technology here is shaped by culture, but it does not have
politics". Nevertheless, I think this is an important point to challenge,
to draw out the politics that is inherent in Unix and any other technology.

Even if Winner's 'Moses' Bridges' and McPherson's articles are more
effective as rhetoric than powerful as proof, they serve to show that
technologies arise in some cultural context (McPherson) and/or some context
of authorization (Winner). These contexts are in any case highly
politicized. Certainly the IT engineering contexts I have witnessed
had/have all the office politics going on that you would expect. Design
choices are influenced by that, even decided on basis of these politics,
both consciously as tacitly. That is not to say UNIX must be racist, just
that design choices in part are politically informed. Thus I would argue
that office politics, institutional politics, and bigger ideologies do
shape IT design and technology in general.

Of course Tom's statement foremost considers the intent and agency of
technology, not its context of development. So I take this to mean that
Unix is not an agent of the possible politics that influenced its
development. Indeed the politicized context that gives rise to a technology
needs not result in a technology imprinting those particular ideas onto
society. They certainly can be intended as such however: Linux (a
descendant of UNIX) is explicitly political, or at least ideological. Of
course, whether intended influence and actual effect match is an entirely
different matter, with 'results vary' as a probable answer.

In any case neither at the design end, nor at the business end of
technology do I see a possibility that technology is without politics. If
there are politics at play in the design phase, then how probable is it
that there would not be—even be they unintended—politics as a result at the
business end?

I think therefore that if we haven't uncovered the politics of UNIX, it's
merely because we haven't figured out how to uncover it, or because we
didn't look hard enough. I still regard code and software as a new form of
literacy, and literacy if anything is political. I would be very surprised
if code and its expressions wouldn't be too.

For me as a humanist trying to apply an STS perspective to some Digital
Humanities case studies in my context this is all excitingly new. Thanks
for a splendid exchange!

All the best
--Joris
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