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

[Thomas Haigh]

Thanks Hansen,

 

You are exactly right regarding my argumentative intent. I am sure that design choices within Unix do exert certain kinds of political influence on the world. My point is simply that _within McPherson’s story_ no effort is made to demonstrate that influence. Thus she does not depict Unix as something Winner would recognize as an artifact that “has politics,” merely as something socially (or more accurately culturally) constructed.

 

I share your instinctive reaction that McPherson is trying to make a generic STS-like social construction of technology (SCOT) argument and failing egregiously. However, as per my earlier post, I must concede that this reading only holds from within our disciplinary community. To readers in other disciplines it presumably looks as if she’s making a novel argument supported by exciting critical theory and succeeding. This is perhaps a sign that STS has not been successful in demarcating its turf, to the extent that even humanities scholars issuing manifestos to explore the mutual shaping of code, culture, and politics feel no need to familiarize themselves with our methods, cite our literature, or take seriously our objections. There are many more comp lit and media studies programs than STS programs, and our view of the world is not as widely shared as we would like it to be.

 

Tom

 

From: Members [mailto:members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Hansen Hsu
Sent: Monday, August 24, 2015 6:22 PM
To: Joris van Zundert <joris.van.zundert at huygens.knaw.nl>
Cc: thaigh at computer.org; members at sigcis.org
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Unix Racism: Winner vs. McPherson

 

My take on Tom’s remarks is not necessarily that he meant to say that "Unix has no politics" per se. I think in STS it’s pretty much been shown that political and cultural context shapes design choices. That design choices can have political effects in the large is also not controversial, though whether specific design choices necessarily or inevitably leads to certain effects, or even highly disposes society to lean in certain political directions, as Winner’s nuclear power argument goes, is still up for debate, and as Joris has pointed out, intention does not straightforwardly lead to outcome, especially when user appropriation comes into play. 

 

But I think what Tom is saying is that McPherson neither makes this argument nor has the evidence to support it. Even if Unix’s modular design was somehow influenced by pervasive societal racism (which she hasn’t convincingly shown), does that modular design then have racist political consequences for society? She doesn’t make that argument nor provides any evidence to support such an argument. Tom’s point is that Winner’s argument about how artifacts have politics is about their political effects, in an almost soft-determinist way, whereas McPherson wants to make a social constructivist argument about opening the black box of Unix to show how racial politics shaped its construction, though she isn’t successful in doing so. Winner is not a social constructivist of technology along the lines of Trevor Pinch or Wiebe Bijker, and in his paper “Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty” Winner outlines his disagreements with Pinch and Bijker and the SCOT school. So my interpretation of Tom is that when he’s saying “Unix has no politics,” he’s really saying (and he’s free to disagree with my reading of him) that McPherson doesn’t argue that Unix has politics in Winner’s sense, that a particular technical design has social effects either through its materiality or its strong compatibility with particular institutional or political structures. McPherson wants to make a SCOT argument, but is going about it more like Foucault and painting a fairly broad brush, whereas STS/SCOT scholars really get much deeper into the socio-technical detail, which involves more than just a discourse analysis of marketing materials, technical writing or code but extensive archival research, interviews with the designers, or ethnographic observation of design work. I’m all for McPherson’s larger project, we need to investigate the role race plays in the design and effects of technology, and we need to do it by opening up the black box of things like Unix and showing how technical decisions are not purely technical but also social, cultural, political, ideological. 

 

My problem with McPherson’s piece is that it’s not good STS; she doesn’t succeed in opening the black box as she doesn’t have the empirical evidence to show compelling linkages between modular design and the racial politics of the civil rights era, other than simply waving her hands and saying that we’d be naive to think that it isn’t mere coincidence that the two happened at the same time. Anyone can make any similar (or even contradictory) claim, as Tom pointed out in his original post, and such broad assertions are practically impossible to disprove. Perhaps it’s not fair to apply STS standards of evidence on a scholar from another discipline, but she is trying to reach outside her own discipline to make an STS argument without doing any STS work, and to me that makes it fair game to critique from the standards of STS and social science more broadly. From that perspective she appears as a scholar who has imposed some preconceived theory onto the empirical data and goes through some theoretical contortions to make her evidence support her argument, something that historians and anthropologists are careful to avoid. So although her provocation to scholars to do more to study the imbrication of race and technology is welcome and necessary, unfortunately because her evidence is so poor, it severely damages her credibility and makes it much more difficult for not only engineers and students but other scholars who might otherwise support her larger political project to take her work seriously.

 

It’s for these reasons and the many others Tom has explicated that Winner’s piece is a better pedagogical tool than McPherson’s.

 

On Aug 24, 2015, at 1:19 PM, Joris van Zundert <joris.van.zundert at huygens.knaw.nl <mailto:joris.van.zundert at huygens.knaw.nl> > wrote:

 

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? 

 

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