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

[Fabio Gadducci]

> On 24/ago/2015, at 22:19, Joris van Zundert <joris.van.zundert at huygens.knaw.nl> wrote:
> 
> 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? 


Dear Joris,

let me just take, unfairly, your closing remark


> 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.


Not necessarily. As far as I understood, Tom was arguing that during the design phase of Unix just purely technological reasons might have occurred. Methodologically, I would look for those as a first answer, and only after I would move forward, to check if they were also “politically informed”, as you say.

As a programmer, if I have to order a list if integers, I will likely use a mergesort algorithm instead of a quicksort one, simply because the former usually performs better. And there are few political/social considerations involved here: just efficiency. :-)

Best, Fabio


> 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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