<div dir="ltr"><div>Dear all,<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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? <br><br>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.<br><br>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! <br><br>All the best<br></div>--Joris<br><br></div>