兰登·温纳：技术物有政治性吗（双语全文） #

English version: Do Artifacts Have Politics?, Winner, L. (1986), The whale and the reactor: a search for limits in an age of high technology. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 19-39.

中文翻译：兰登·温纳：《技术物有政治性吗》（1980） 译者：陈荣钢。保留译者增加的加粗文本，删去注释的原文字词，修改了部分换行以更好地对照原文。使用 DeepL 翻译补足译文整段省略的部分。

NO IDEA is more provocative in controversies about technology and society than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions to efficiency and productivity and their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority. Since ideas of this kind are a persistent and troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention.

在关乎技术和社会的争论中，最引人深思的是“技术物具有政治性”的观点。争论的焦点是，现代物质文化的机器、结构和系统之所以能被准确评判，不仅是因为它们对效率和生产力的贡献，也不仅是因为它们对环境有积极和消极的影响，还因为它们能够体现具体形式的权力和权威。这种观点一直困扰着关于技术意义的讨论，所以应该给予明确关注。

Writing in the early 1960s, Lewis Mumford gave classic statement to one version of the theme, arguing that “from late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.”¹ This thesis stands at the heart of Mumford’s studies of the city, architecture, and history of technics, and mirrors concerns voiced earlier in the works of Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and other nineteenth-century critics of industrialism. During the 1970s, antinuclear and pro-solar energy movements in Europe and the United States adopted a similar notion as the centerpiece of their arguments. According to environmentalist Denis Hayes, “The increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible only in a totalitarian state.” Echoing the views of many proponents of appropriate technology and the soft energy path, Hayes contends that “dispersed solar sources are more compatible than centralized technologies with social equity, freedom and cultural pluralism.” ²

近二十年前，刘易斯·芒福德在《技术与文化》一书中对这个主题提出了一种经典的表述。他认为：“从近东的新石器时代晚期开始，一直到我们今天，两种技术并驾齐驱。一种是专制的技术，另一种是民主的技术，前者以系统为中心，力量巨大，但本质上不稳定，后者以人为中心，相对薄弱，但资源丰富且耐用。”

该论点是芒福德对城市、建筑和技术史研究的核心，也反映了克鲁泡特金、威廉·莫里斯和其他 19 世纪工业制度的批评家表达的关切。最近，欧洲和美国的反核和支持太阳能运动也采用了类似的概念作为他们论点的核心。

因此，环保主义者丹尼斯·海斯得出结论：“核电设施的增建必然导致社会走向独裁主义。安全依赖核电，把核电作为主要的能源来源，可能只有在极权国家才有实现。”海斯赞同那些支持适当技术和软能源道路的人，认为“分散的太阳能资源比集中的技术更符合社会公平、自由和文化多元化”。

An eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political language is by no means the exclusive property of critics of large-scale, high-technology systems. A long lineage of boosters has insisted that the biggest and best that science and industry made available were the best guarantees of democracy, freedom, and social justice. The factory system, automobile, telephone, radio, television, space program, and of course nuclear power have all at one time or another been described as democratizing, liberating forces. David Lillienthal’s T.V.A: Democracy on the March, for example, found this promise in the phosphate fertilizers and electricity that technical progress was bringing to rural Americans during the 1940s.³ Three decades later Daniel Boorstin’s The Republic of Technology extolled television for “its power to disband armies, to cashier presidents, to create a whole new democratic world—democratic in ways never before imagined, even in America.”⁴ Scarcely a new invention comes along that someone doesn’t proclaim it as the salvation of a free society.

绝对不只有高科技系统的批评者才热衷用政治的语言来阐释技术物。在一个悠久的传承中，许多拥护者坚称，科学和工业在最大程度上确保了民主、自由和社会正义，这是科学和工业“最大和最好”的成果。工厂制度、汽车、电话、广播、电视、太空计划——当然还有核能本身，都曾在不同时期被描述为民主化和解放的力量。

例如，在《田纳西河谷管理局：民主在前进》一书中，戴维·利连塔尔发现，在20世纪40年代，技术进步为美国农村人民带来的磷酸盐肥料和电力，这正是上述承诺的体现。在最近的一篇文章《技术理想国》中，丹尼尔·布尔斯廷盛赞了电视“以前所未有、甚至在美国都从未想象过的民主方式解散军队、罢免总统，并创造了全新民主世界的力量”。几乎每出现一个新发明，总有人宣称它是自由社会的救世主。

It is no surprise to learn that technical systems of various kinds are deeply interwoven in the conditions of modern politics. The physical arrangements of industrial production, warfare, communications, and the like have fundamentally changed the exercise of power and the experience of citizenship. But to go beyond this obvious fact and to argue that certain technologies in themselves have political properties seems, at first glance, completely mistaken. We all know that people have politics; things do not. To discover either virtues or evils in aggregates of steel, plastic, transistors, integrated circuits, chemicals, and the like seems just plain wrong, a way of mystifying human artifice and of avoiding the true sources, the human sources of freedom and oppression, justice and injustice. Blaming the hardware appears even more foolish than blaming the victims when it comes to judging conditions of public life.

不难发现，各种技术系统在现代政治状况下与之密切关联。工业生产、战争、通信等方面的物质部署从根本上改变了权力的行使和公民权利的经验。然而，要超越这一显而易见的事实，并主张某些技术本身具有政治属性，乍一看似乎完全错误。

我们都知道，拥有政治观点的是人而非事物。在钢铁、塑料、晶体管、集成电路和化学品中发现美德或邪恶似乎完全错误，这种做法魅化了人类的创造力，并回避了真正根源——自由和压迫、正义和不公正的人类根源。在判断公共生活状况时，指责硬件似乎比指责受害者更愚蠢。

Hence, the stern advice commonly given those who flirt with the notion that technical artifacts have political qualities: What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded. This maxim, which in a number of variations is the central premise of a theory that can be called the social determination of technology, has an obvious wisdom. It serves as a needed corrective to those who focus uncritically upon such things as “the computer and its social impacts” but who fail to look behind technical devices to see the social circumstances of their development, deployment, and use. This view provides an antidote to naive technological determinism—the idea that technology develops as the sole result of an internal dynamic and then, unmediated by any other influence, molds society to fit its patterns. Those who have not recognized the ways in which technologies are shaped by social and economic forces have not gotten very far.

因此，对于那些认为技术物具有政治性的人，通常会给出一条认真的建议——重要的不是技术本身，而是它所嵌入的社会或经济体系。这一格言有多种变体，以它为核心，构成了一套可以称为“技术的社会决定论”的理论，其内涵颇具智慧。

对于那些过分关注“计算机及其社会影响”等议题，却忽视技术背后社会环境、发展、部署与使用的人，这种观点起到了必要的纠正作用。这种观点为天真的技术决定论提供了解药。技术决定论认为，技术发展仅仅是内部动力的结果，并在没有任何其他影响的情况下，塑造社会以适应技术模式。那些未能认识到技术如何受到社会和经济力量塑造的人，往往不能走很远。

But the corrective has its own shortcomings; taken literally, it suggests that technical things do not matter at all. Once one has done the detective work necessary to reveal the social origins—power holders behind a particular instance of technological change—one will have explained everything of importance. This conclusion offers comfort to social scientists. It validates what they had always suspected, namely, that there is nothing distinctive about the study of technology in the first place. Hence, they can return to their standard models of social power—those of interest-group politics, bureaucratic politics, Marxist models of class struggle, and the like—and have everything they need. The social determination of technology is, in this view, essentially no different from the social determination of, say, welfare policy or taxation.

然而，这种纠正也有自身的不足之处。 从字面上理解，它似乎暗示技术物完全不重要。似乎，一旦我们揭示了技术变革的具体实例背后的社会起源（背后的权力持有者），我们就可以解释一切重要的事。这个结论让社会科学家感到快慰，它证实了他们一直心存疑虑的观点——技术研究本身并没有什么特殊之处。如此一来，他们就可以回归到社会权力的标准模型——利益集团政治、官僚政治、马克思主义阶级斗争模型等，那里有他们所需的一切。从这个角度看，技术的社会决定论与福利政策或税收的社会决定论本质上并无不同。

There are, however, good reasons to believe that technology is politically significant in its own right, good reasons why the standard models of social science only go so far in accounting for what is most interesting and troublesome about the subject. Much of modern social and political thought contains recurring statements of what can be called a theory of technological politics, an odd mongrel of notions often crossbred with orthodox liberal, conservative, and socialist philosophies.⁵ The theory of technological politics draws attention to the momentum of large-scale sociotechnical systems, to the response of modern societies to certain technological imperatives, and to the ways human ends are powerfully transformed as they are adapted to technical means. This perspective offers a novel framework of interpretation and explanation for some of the more puzzling patterns that have taken shape in and around the growth of modern material culture. Its starting point is a decision to take technical artifacts seriously. Rather than insist that we immediately reduce everything to the interplay of social forces, the theory of technological politics suggests that we pay attention to the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those characteristics. A necessary complement to, rather than a replacement for, theories of the social determination of technology, this approach identifies certain technologies as political phenomena in their own right. It points us back, to borrow Edmund Husserl’s philosophical injunction, to the things themselves.

然而，在历史学家、哲学家和政治学家眼中，技术在近年来之所以具有特殊的吸引力，是有多方面的原因。标准的社会科学模型在解释技术这一主题中最有趣和最令人费解的方面时，只能解释到一定程度。

我在别处尝试阐述，为何现代社会和政治思想中经常出现某种可以称之为“技术政治理论”的论述，这是一种奇特的杂交观念，往往与正统的自由主义、保守主义和社会主义哲学相交融。

“技术政治理论”关心大型社会技术系统的推动力，关心现代社会对某些技术要求的反应，关心人类目标适应技术手段的种种迹象。通过这一理论，我们得以为现代物质文化发展进程中出现的一些难以解释的模式提供全新的解读和阐释框架。这种观点的一个优点是它认真对待技术物。它建议我们关心技术对象的特征和意义，而不是坚持直接把所有事物归结为社会力量的相互作用。

这种观点是社会技术决定论的必要补充，而不是替代，它将某些技术视为独立的政治现象。借用胡塞尔的哲学教导，这种观点将我们带回到物自身。

In what follows I will outline and illustrate two ways in which artifacts can contain political properties. First are instances in which the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a particular community. Seen in the proper light, examples of this kind are fairly straightforward and easily understood. Second are cases of what can be called “inherently political technologies,” man-made systems that appear to require or to be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships. Arguments about cases of this kind are much more troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By the term “politics” I mean arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements. For my purposes here, the term “technology” is understood to mean all of modern practical artifice, but to avoid confusion I prefer to speak of “technologies” plural, smaller or larger pieces or systems of hardware of a specific kind.⁶ My intention is not to settle any of the issues here once and for all, but to indicate their general dimensions and significance.

接下来我将概述和阐述两种技术物可能具有政治性的方式。第一种是具体技术设备或系统的发明、设计或部署解决具体社群问题的一种方式。如果以正确的方式看待这类例子，则相当简单且容易理解。第二种是所谓本质上具有政治性的技术，人造系统似乎需要与具体类型的政治关系高度兼容。关于这种情况的论证更加麻烦，更加贴近问题的核心。

在这里，“政治”指人类的权力和权威部署以及在这些部署内进行的活动。这里的“技术”被我理解为所有现代实用技艺，但为了避免混淆，我更喜欢称之为技术，也就是具体种类的小型、大型硬件或系统。我的目的不是最终解决这些问题，而是彰显它们的普遍维度和重要性。

ANYONE WHO has traveled the highways of America and has gotten used to the normal height of overpasses may well find something a little odd about some of the bridges over the parkways on Long Island, New York. Many of the overpasses are extraordinarily low, having as little as nine feet of clearance at the curb. Even those who happened to notice this structural peculiarity would not be inclined to attach any special meaning to it. In our accustomed way of looking at things such as roads and bridges, we see the details of form as innocuous and seldom give them a second thought.

在美国高速公路上旅行的人习惯了桥梁的正常高度，可能会发现纽约长岛的一些公园道路上的桥梁有点奇怪。许多立交桥的净高非常低，路缘处甚至只有9英尺的净空。即使是那些注意到这种结构特点的人，也不太可能赋予其特殊的意义。在我们习惯性观察道路和桥梁的方式中，我们将形式的细节视为无害，很少对它们进行深入思考。

It turns out, however, that some two hundred or so low-hanging overpasses on Long Island are there for a reason. They were deliberately designed and built that way by someone who wanted to achieve a particular social effect. Robert Moses, the master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and other public works of the 1920s to the 1970s in New York, built his overpasses according to specifications that would discourage the presence of buses on his parkways. According to evidence provided by Moses’ biographer, Robert A. Caro, the reasons reflect Moses’ social class bias and racial prejudice. Automobile-owning whites of “upper” and “comfortable middle” classes, as he called them, would be free to use the parkways for recreation and commuting. Poor people and blacks, who normally used public transit, were kept off the roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could not handle the overpasses. One consequence was to limit access of racial minorities and low-income groups to Jones Beach, Moses’ widely acclaimed public park. Moses made doubly sure of this result by vetoing a proposed extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach.

然而，事实证明，长岛上大约两百座低悬立交桥是为了达到某种特殊的社会效用而故意设计的。罗伯特·摩西是 20 世纪 20 年代到 70 年代纽约道路、公园、桥梁和其他公共工程的建筑大师，他按照规格建造了这些立交桥，以防止公共汽车出现在他的公园道路上。

罗伯特·A·卡罗在他的摩西传记中提到，这么设计建造反映了摩西的社会阶级偏见和种族偏见。拥有汽车的“上层”和“舒适中产”阶级（他这样称呼他们）白人可以自由地使用公园道路进行娱乐和通勤。通常使用公共交通工具的穷人和黑人被挡在道路之外，因为 12 英尺高的公共汽车无法通过立交桥。结果就是限制少数族裔和低收入群体进入琼斯海滩，那是摩西广受好评的公共公园。摩西否决了将长岛铁路延伸到琼斯海滩的提议，从而使这一结果更加确定。

Robert Moses’ life is a fascinating story in recent U.S. political history. His dealings with mayors, governors, and presidents; his careful manipulation of legislatures, banks, labor unions, the press, and public opinion could be studied by political scientists for years. But the most important and enduring results of his work are his technologies, the vast engineering projects that give New York much of its present form. For generations after Moses’ death and the alliances he forged have fallen apart, his public works, especially the highways and bridges he built to favor the use of the automobile over the development of mass transit, will continue to shape that city. Many of his monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality, a way of engineering relationships among people that, after a time, became just another part of the landscape. As New York planner Lee Koppleman told Caro about the low bridges on Wantagh Parkway, “The old son of a gun had made sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamned parkways.”⁷

作为近代美国政治史上的一隅，罗伯特·摩西斯的一生令人着迷。他与市长、州长和总统交往频密，他精心操控着立法机构、银行、工会、新闻界和舆论，这些都是政治学家可以研究多年的问题。但他最重要和最持久的工作成果是他的技术。那些庞大的工程项目使纽约大体上成为目前的样子。

摩西去世后的几代人间，他建立的联盟已然分崩离析，但他的公共工程，尤其是他为促进汽车使用而不是公共交通发展而建造的高速公路和桥梁，将继续塑造这座城市。他的许多混凝土和钢结构纪念性建筑都体现了系统性的社会不平等，这是一种人与人之间的工程关系，而过了一段时间后，这种关系就变成了景观的另一部分。规划师李·卡波曼说道：“这个老混蛋确保公共汽车永远不能使用他那该死的公园道路。”

Histories of architecture, city planning, and public works contain many examples of physical arrangements with explicit or implicit political purposes. One can point to Baron Haussmann’s broad Parisian thoroughfares, engineered at Louis Napoleon’s direction to prevent any recurrence of street fighting of the kind that took place during the revolution of 1848. Or one can visit any number of grotesque concrete buildings and huge plazas constructed on university campuses in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s to defuse student demonstrations. Studies of industrial machines and instruments also turn up interesting political stories, including some that violate our normal expectations about why technological innovations are made in the first place. If we suppose that new technologies are introduced to achieve increased efficiency, the history of technology shows that we will sometimes be disappointed. Technological change expresses a panoply of human motives, not the least of which is the desire of some to have dominion over others even though it may require an occasional sacrifice of cost savings and some violation of the normal standard of trying to get more from less.

建筑、城市规划和公共工程的历史囊括了许多空间，这些空间包含着要么明确要么隐晦的政治目的。人们可以指着奥斯曼男爵的宽阔巴黎大道说，这是在拿破仑三世的指导下设计的，用来防止 1848 年革命期间发生的那种巷战再次发生。人们可以参观任何怪诞的混凝土建筑和在美国建造的巨大广场，它们建于 60 年代末到 70 年代初的大学校园，用来平息学生示威活动。

对工业机器和仪器的研究也揭示出有趣的政治故事，其中一些故事违反了我们对技术创新最初产生的正常预期。如果我们假设，引入新技术是为了提高效率，那么技术史会让我们略感失望。技术变革表达了人类的一系列动机，其中最重要的动机是一些人想要支配他人的愿望，即使这可能需要偶尔削减一些成本，亦即做一些违背节约成本原则的行为。

One poignant illustration can be found in the history of nineteenth-century industrial mechanization. At Cyrus McCormick’s reaper manufacturing plant in Chicago in the middle 1880s, pneumatic molding machines, a new and largely untested innovation, were added to the foundry at an estimated cost of $500,000. The standard economic interpretation would lead us to expect that this step was taken to modernize the plant and achieve the kind of efficiencies that mechanization brings. But historian Robert Ozanne has put the development in a broader context. At the time, Cyrus McCormick II was engaged in a battle with the National Union of Iron Molders. He saw the addition of the new machines as a way to ‘weed out the bad element among the men," namely, the skilled workers who had organized the union local in Chicago.⁸ The new machines, manned by unskilled laborers, actually produced inferior castings at a higher cost than the earlier process. After three years of use the machines were, in fact, abandoned, but by that time they had served their purpose—the destruction of the union. Thus, the story of these technical developments at the McCormick factory cannot be adequately understood outside the record of workers’ attempts to organize, police repression of the labor movement in Chicago during that period, and the events surrounding the bombing at Haymarket Square. Technological history and U.S. political history were at that moment deeply intertwined.

在 19 世纪工业机械化的历史中可以找到一个令人心酸的例子。19 世纪 80 年代中期，塞勒斯·麦考密克位于芝加哥的收割机制造厂引入了气动式成型机，这是一项全新的、基本上未经检验的创新，估计成本为 50 万美元。

从标准的经济解释角度来看，我们期望这一举措是为了使工厂现代化，并实现机械化带来的效率。但历史学家罗伯特·奥扎纳表示，这一发展必须放在更广泛的背景下来看。

当时，塞勒斯·麦考密克正在与全国铸铁工会做斗争。他认为，增加新机器是“清除人群中的坏分子”的一种方式，也就是那些在芝加哥组织地方工会的技术工人。非技术工人操作新机器，但比起早期的高工艺，这时的成本更高，铸件却更劣。在使用了三年之后，这些机器就被废弃了，但那时它们已经达到了目的——破坏工会。

因此，如果脱离工人组织的成就、脱离当时芝加哥对劳工运动的警察镇压以及“干草市场事件”（译注：Haymarket affair，1886），我们就无法充分理解麦考密克工厂的这些技术发展故事。技术史和美国政治史在那一刻深深地交织在一起。

In the examples of Moses’ low bridges and McCormick’s molding machines, one sees the importance of technical arrangements that precede the use of the things in question. It is obvious that technologies can be used in ways that enhance the power, authority, and privilege of some over others, for example, the use of television to sell a candidate. In our accustomed way of thinking technologies are seen as neutral tools that can be used well or poorly, for good, evil, or something in between. But we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given device might have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed uses. Robert Moses’ bridges, after all, were used to carry automobiles from one point to another; McCormick’s machines were used to make metal castings; both technologies, however, encompassed purposes far beyond their immediate use. If our moral and political language for evaluating technology includes only categories having to do with tools and uses, if it does not include attention to the meaning of the designs and arrangements of our artifacts, then we will be blinded to much that is intellectually and practically crucial.

在摩西的低矮道桥和麦考密克的收割机案例中，人们可以看到技术部署的重要性，这些部署在使用相关技术物之前就已经准备好。显然，技术可以被用于增强某些人对其他人的权力、权威和特权，比如用电视来宣传选举候选人。根据我们习惯的思维方式，技术被视为中立的工具，可以用于好的、坏的或者介于两者之间的目的。但是，我们通常不会停下来探询，某个具体的设备是否可能以这样设计和构建，在它声称的任何用途之前就产生一系列逻辑上和时间上的影响。

毕竟，罗伯特·摩西的桥梁被用来将汽车从一点运送到另一点；麦考密克的机器被用来制造金属铸件。然而，这两种技术都包含了远远超出其直接用途的目的。如果我们评估技术的道德和政治语言仅包括与工具用途有关的范畴，如果它不包括技术物设计和部署的意义，那么我们将忽视许多在思想和实践上至关重要的事。

Because the point is most easily understood in the light of particular intentions embodied in physical form, I have so far offered illustrations that seem almost conspiratorial. But to recognize the political dimensions in the shapes of technology does not require that we look for conscious conspiracies or malicious intentions. The organized movement of handicapped people in the United States during the 1970s pointed out the countless ways in which machines, instruments, and structures of common use—buses, buildings, sidewalks, plumbing fixtures, and so forth—made it impossible for many handicapped persons to move freely about, a condition that systematically excluded them from public life. It is safe to say that designs unsuited for the handicapped arose more from long-standing neglect than from anyone’s active intention. But once the issue was brought to public attention, it became evident that justice required a remedy. A whole range of artifacts have been redesigned and rebuilt to accommodate this minority.

这一点最容易理解，因为物质形式体现了具体的意图。但是，要认识到技术形态中的政治维度，并不需要我们去寻找有意识的阴谋或恶意。70 年代，美国残障人士发起运动，指出公共汽车、建筑物、人行道、水管装置等常用机器、工具和建筑物使许多残障人士无法自由行动，而这种状况系统性地将他们排除在公共生活之外。无疑，不适合残疾人的设计更多源于长期忽视，而不是出于任何人的主动意图。但是现在这个问题已经引起了公众的注意。显然，正义需要一种补救措施。许多技术物现在正在重新设计和重建，以适应这个少数群体。

Indeed, many of the most important examples of technologies that have political consequences are those that transcend the simple categories “intended” and “unintended” altogether. These are instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others. In such cases it is neither correct nor insightful to say, “Someone intended to do somebody else harm.” Rather one must say that the technological deck has been stacked in advance to favor certain social interests and that some people were bound to receive a better hand than others.

事实上，许多具有政治影响的重要技术实例完全超越了“有意”和“无意”的简单范畴。在这些例子中，技术发展进程完全偏向某个特定的方向，以至于它经常产生被某些社会利益视为美妙突破而被其他人视为毁灭性挫败的结果。在这种情况下，说“某人故意伤害他人”既不正确也不明智。相反，我们必须说，技术层面已经提前很长时间被叠加起来，以有利于某些社会利益，而且某些人注定会得到比其他人更多的好处。

The mechanical tomato harvester, a remarkable device perfected by researchers at the University of California from the late 1940s to the present offers an illustrative tale. The machine is able to harvest tomatoes in a single pass through a row, cutting the plants from the ground, shaking the fruit loose, and (in the newest models) sorting the tomatoes electronically into large plastic gondolas that hold up to twenty-five tons of produce headed for canning factories. To accommodate the rough motion of these harvesters in the field, agricultural researchers have bred new varieties of tomatoes that are hardier, sturdier, and less tasty than those previously grown. The harvesters replace the system of handpicking in which crews of farm workers would pass through the fields three or four times, putting ripe tomatoes in lug boxes and saving immature fruit for later harvest.⁹ Studies in California indicate that the use of the machine reduces costs by approximately five to seven dollars per ton as compared to hand harvesting.¹⁰ But the benefits are by no means equally divided in the agricultural economy. In fact, the machine in the garden has in this instance been the occasion for a thorough reshaping of social relationships involved in tomato production in rural California.

番茄机械收割机的例子很能说明问题，它是加州大学研究人员从 20 世纪 40 年代后期至今一直在完善的一种了不起的机器。这种机器能够一次收割一整排番茄，从地上切下植物，将番茄果实摇松。而且，最新型号的番茄收割机可以用电子的方式把收割下来的番茄分装在能盛放 25 顿番茄的货舱里，这些番茄会被拿去做罐头。

为了适应这些“田间工厂”的粗糙动作，农业研究人员培育了新品种的番茄，这些番茄更为坚硬、结实且味道更差。收割机取代了人工采摘系统——过去，农场工人们会穿越田地三、四次，将成熟的番茄放入篮子，将不成熟的果实留待后续收获。加州的研究表明，与人工收割相比，机械收割可将成本降低约每吨 5 到 7 美元。

By virtue of their very size and cost of more than $50,000 each, the machines are compatible only with a highly concentrated form of tomato growing. With the introduction of this new method of harvesting, the number of tomato growers declined from approximately 4,000 in the early 1960s to about 600 in 1973, and yet there was a substantial increase in tons of tomatoes produced. By the late 1970s an estimated 32,000 jobs in the tomato industry had been eliminated as a direct consequence of mechanization.¹¹ Thus, a jump in productivity to the benefit of very large growers has occurred at the sacrifice of other rural agricultural communities.

但在农业经济中，收益绝不是平均分配的。事实上，在这种情况下，田里的机器已经成为彻底重塑了加州农村番茄生产的社会关系。每台收割机的购买成本超过 5 万美元，这些机器只适用于高度集中的番茄种植。这种新收割方法引入之后，番茄种植者的数量从 60 年代初的约 4000 人下降到 1973 年的约 600 人，番茄产量却大幅度增加。到 20 世纪 70 年代末，作为机械化的直接结果，西红柿产业里消失了约 3.2 万个工作岗位。因此，生产力的提高造福了大型种植者，却牺牲了其他农村农业社区。

The University of California’s research on and development of agricultural machines such as the tomato harvester eventually became the subject of a lawsuit filed by attorneys for California Rural Legal Assistance, an organization representing a group of farm workers and other interested parties. The suit charged that university officials are spending tax monies on projects that benefit a handful of private interests to the detriment of farm workers, small farmers, consumers, and rural California generally and asks for a court injunction to stop the practice. The university denied these charges, arguing that to accept them “would require elimination of all research with any potential practical application.”¹²

加州大学关于农业机械（如番茄收割机）的研究和开发目前正面临加州农村法律援助律师提起的诉讼，该组织代表一群农场工人和其他利益相关者。诉讼指控大学官员利用纳税人的钱进行的项目只会让少数人中饱私囊，而损害农民工、小农、消费者以及整个加州农村地区的利益，并要求法院发出禁令以制止此类做法。加州大学对这些指控予以否认，辩称接受这些指控“就需要取消所有具有潜在实际应用价值的研究”。

As far as I know, no one argued that the development of the tomato harvester was the result of a plot. Two students of the controversy, William Friedland and Amy Barton, specifically exonerate the original developers of the machine and the hard tomato from any desire to facilitate economic concentration in that industry.¹³ What we see here instead is an ongoing social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns, patterns that bear the unmistakable stamp of political and economic power. Over many decades agricultural research and development in U.S. land-grant colleges and universities has tended to favor the interests of large agribusiness concerns.¹⁴ It is in the face of such subtly ingrained patterns that opponents of innovations such as the tomato harvester are made to seem “antitechnology” or “antiprogress.” For the harvester is not merely the symbol of a social order that rewards some while punishing others; it is in a true sense an embodiment of that order.

据我所知，没有人认为番茄收割机的开发背后有什么阴谋。威廉·弗里德兰和艾米·巴顿是这一争议的两位研究者，他们明确表示，机器和硬番茄的最初开发者都没有促进番茄产业集中化的意图。

我们在这里看到的是一个持续的社会进程，其中，科学知识、技术发明和企业利润在深深植根的模式中相互加强，这些模式带有政治和经济势力的明显印记。

多年以来，美国资助学院和大学进行农业研究和开发，这种资助往往偏向支持大型农业企业的利益。面对如此微妙的、根深蒂固的模式，像番茄收割机这样的创新反对者被贴上了“反技术”或“反进步”的标签。收割机不仅是奖励某些人、同时惩罚其他人的社会秩序的象征，从某种意义上说，它就是这种秩序的具体体现。

Within a given category of technological change there are, roughly speaking, two kinds of choices that can affect the relative distribution of power, authority, and privilege in a community. Often the crucial decision is a simple “yes or no” choice—are we going to develop and adopt the thing or not? In recent years many local, national, and international disputes about technology have centered on “yes or no” judgments about such things as food additives, pesticides, the building of highways, nuclear reactors, dam projects, and proposed high-tech weapons. The fundamental choice about an antiballistic missile or supersonic transport is whether or not the thing is going to join society as a piece of its operating equipment. Reasons given for and against are frequently as important as those concerning the adoption of an important new law.

在某一类技术变革里，大致有两种选择可能影响到社会权利、权威和特权的相对分配。通常，关键的决策只是一次“是／否”的选择：“我们要开发和采用这项技术吗？”近年来，许多围绕技术展开的地区性、国家和国际争议都集中在食品添加剂、农药、公路建设、核反应堆和水坝项目等事物的“是/否”决断上。反弹道导弹或超音速运输机的根本选择也在于，“这个事物是否将要成为让社会运作的设备之一”。赞成和反对的理由往往与通过一项新法案的理由同等重要。

A second range of choices, equally critical in many instances, has to do with specific features in the design or arrangement of a technical system after the decision to go ahead with it has already been made. Even after a utility company wins permission to build a large electric power line, important controversies can remain with respect to the placement of its route and the design of its towers; even after an organization has decided to institute a system of computers, controversies can still arise with regard to the kinds of components, programs, modes of access, and other specific features the system will include. Once the mechanical tomato harvester had been developed in its basic form, a design alteration of critical social significance—the addition of electronic sorters, for example—changed the character of the machine’s effects upon the balance of wealth and power in California agriculture. Some of the most interesting research on technology and politics at present focuses upon the attempt to demonstrate in a detailed, concrete fashion how seemingly innocuous design features in mass transit systems, water projects, industrial machinery, and other technologies actually mask social choices of profound significance. Historian David Noble has studied two kinds of automated machine tool systems that have different implications for the relative power of management and labor in the industries that might employ them. He has shown that although the basic electronic and mechanical components of the record/playback and numerical control systems are similar, the choice of one design over another has crucial consequences for social struggles on the shop floor. To see the matter solely in terms of cost cutting, efficiency, or the modernization of equipment is to miss a decisive element in the story.¹⁵

第二种选择在许多情况下同样至关重要，它是已决定采用、板上钉钉的技术系统的具体设计或部署。即使公用事业公司获得了建设大型电力线路的许可，线路的位置和塔架设计仍然存在重要的争议。即使某个组织已经决定建立计算机系统，系统将包括的组件、程序、访问方式和其他具体特性仍可能引发争议。机械化番茄收割机的基本形式开发完成后，产生重大社会意义的设计变更（例如添加电子分选器）改变了该机器对加州农业财富和权力平衡的影响。

目前，围绕技术和政治的有趣研究集中在试图以详细、具体的方式展示大众交通系统、水利项目、工业机械和其他技术中看似无害的设计特征，它们实际上掩盖了具有深远意义的社会选择。历史学家大卫·诺布尔现在正在研究两种自动化机床系统，这两种系统对可能使用它们的行业管理层和劳动者产生了不同的权力影响。

他认为，尽管记录/回放和数控系统的基本电子和机械组件相似，但选一种设计而不选另一种设计将严重影响车间的社会斗争。如果仅从降低成本、提高效率或更新设备的角度来看待这个问题，就会忽略这里的一个决定性因素。

From such examples I would offer some general conclusions. These correspond to the interpretation of technologies as “forms of life” presented in the previous chapter, filling in the explicitly political dimensions of that point of view.

The things we call “technologies” are ways of building order in our world. Many technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of ordering human activity. Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time. In the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are situated differently and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness. By far the greatest latitude of choice exists the very first time a particular instrument, system, or technique is introduced. Because choices tend to become strongly fixed in material equipment, economic investment, and social habit, the original flexibility vanishes for all practical purposes once the initial commitments are made. In that sense technological innovations are similar to legislative acts or political foundings that establish a framework for public order that will endure over many generations. For that reason the same careful attention one would give to the rules, roles, and relationships of politics must also be given to such things as the building of highways, the creation of television networks, and the tailoring of seemingly insignificant features on new machines. The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institutions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and semiconductors, nuts and bolts.

从这些例子中，我将提供以下普遍结论。我们称之为“技术”的东西是在我们的世界中建立秩序的方式。许多在日常生活中很重要的技术设备和系统都包含以多种不同方式部署人类活动的潜能。社会选择的技术结构有意无意间影响着人们在很长一段时间内的工作、交流、旅行、消费等方式。在做出结构化决策的过程中，不同的人处于不同的位置，拥有不平等的权力和不平等的意识水平。

到目前为止，选择的最大自由度存在于某种特定工具、系统或技术的首次引入时。选择往往在物质设备、经济投资和社会习惯中变得非常固定，一旦作出初始承诺，原有的灵活性就消失了。因此，技术创新类似于立法行为或政治建构，它们为多代人建立了一个公共秩序框架。

出于这个原因，我们在关注政治规则、角色和关系时所投入的细致关注也应该给予诸如建设高速公路、搭建电视网络、在新机器上进行看似微不足道的特性调整等事宜。在社会中，将人们分裂或团结在一起的问题不仅要在政治体制和实践中解决，而且要在钢铁和混凝土、电线和晶体管、螺母和螺栓中隐晦地解决。

NONE OF the arguments and examples considered thus far addresses a stronger, more troubling claim often made in writings about technology and society—the belief that some technologies are by their very nature political in a specific way. According to this view, the adoption of a given technical system unavoidably brings with it conditions for human relationships that have a distinctive political cast—for example, centralized or decentralized, egalitarian or inegalitarian, repressive or liberating. This is ultimately what is at stake in assertions such as those of Lewis Mumford that two traditions of technology, one authoritarian, the other democratic, exist side by side in Western history. In all the cases cited above the technologies are relatively flexible in design and arrangement and variable in their effects. Although one can recognize a particular result produced in a particular setting, one can also easily imagine how a roughly similar device or system might have been built or situated with very much different political consequences. The idea we must now examine and evaluate is that certain kinds of technology do not allow such flexibility, and that to choose them is to choose unalterably a particular form of political life.

迄今为止思考的论据和例子都没有触及一个更强有力、更困扰的观点——在论述技术和社会的著作中，人们往往认为，某些技术本质上具有某种特定的政治本质。根据这一观点，采用某一技术制度不可避免地为具有明显政治色彩的人际关系创作了条件，比方说，集中或分散，平等或不平等，镇压或解放。

这就是刘易斯·芒福德断言的最终利害所在——他断言，在西方历史上，两种技术传统并存（一种是专制的，另一种是民主的）。在我上面提到的所有案例中，这些技术在设计和部署上都是相对灵活的，影响也是可变的。

虽然我们可以识别出在特定环境下产生的特定结果，但我们也可以轻易地想象出如何构建或部署一个大致类似的设备或系统，而其政治特征却大相径庭。我们现在需要研究和评估的观点是，某些类型的技术不允许这样的灵活性，选择这些技术就是选择这种特定的政治生活形式。

A remarkably forceful statement of one version of this argument appears in Friedrich Engels’ little essay “On Authority” written in 1872. Answering anarchists who believed that authority is an evil that ought to be abolished altogether, Engels launches into a panegyric for authoritarianism, maintaining, among other things, that strong authority is a necessary condition in modern industry. To advance his case in the strongest possible way, he asks his readers to imagine that the revolution has already occurred. “Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth. Supposing, to adopt entirely the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared or will it have only changed its form?”¹⁶

1872年，恩格斯的小论文《论权威》里很好地触及了这个观点。面对那些认为权威是一种应该被彻底废除的“恶”的无政府主义者，恩格斯开始赞美专制主义，主张强有力的权威是现代工业的必要条件。为了推进他的论点，恩格斯要求读者想象革命已经发生：“假设社会革命推翻了现行生产和财富流通的资本家统治。假设土地和劳动工具已成为使用它们的工人的集体财产。那么，权威已经消失了还是只是改变了形式？”

His answer draws upon lessons from three sociotechnical systems of his day, cotton-spinning mills, railways, and ships at sea. He observes that on its way to becoming finished thread, cotton moves through a number of different operations at different locations in the factory. The workers perform a wide variety of tasks, from running the steam engine to carrying the products from one room to another. Because these tasks must be coordinated and because the timing of the work is “fixed by the authority of the steam,” laborers must learn to accept a rigid discipline. They must, according to Engels, work at regular hours and agree to subordinate their individual wills to the persons in charge of factory operations. If they fail to do so, they risk the horrifying possibility that production will come to a grinding halt. Engels pulls no punches. “The automatic machinery of a big factory,” he writes, “is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been.”¹⁷

他的回答借鉴了当时三种社会技术系统的经验——棉纺厂、铁路和海运轮船。他观察到，在棉线被生产成产品的过程中，棉花在工厂的不同地点经历了许多不同的操作。从操作蒸汽机到把产品从一个车间运送到另一个车间，这些任务必须协调，而且任务有时间安排，因此工作是“由蒸汽的权威确定下来”，劳动者必须学会恪守纪律。恩格斯认为，他们必须服从日常工作，并同意将个人意愿服从于工厂运营负责人。如果他们做不到这一点，他们将面临生产停滞的可怕风险。恩格斯毫不留情。他写道：“大工厂的自动化机器比雇佣工人的小资本家专横得多。”

Similar lessons are adduced in Engels’s analysis of the necessary operating conditions for railways and ships at sea. Both require the subordination of workers to an “imperious authority” that sees to it that things run according to plan. Engels finds that far from being an idiosyncrasy of capitalist social organization, relationships of authority and subordination arise “independently of all social organization, [and] are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.” Again, he intends this to be stern advice to the anarchists who, according to Engels, thought it possible simply to eradicate subordination and superordination at a single stroke. All such schemes are nonsense. The roots of unavoidable authoritarianism are, he argues, deeply implanted in the human involvement with science and technology. “If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, insofar as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organization.”¹⁸

恩格斯在分析铁路和[海运轮船]的必要运行条件时也得出了类似的教训。两者都要求工人服从于一个“专横的权威”，以确保事情按计划进行。恩格斯发现，权威和服从的关系远不是资本主义社会组织的特异现象，而是“独立于所有社会组织而产生的东西，（并且）与我们生产和使产品流通的物质条件一起强加给我们。”同样，他打算把这句话当作对无政府主义者的严厉忠告，因为恩格斯认为，无政府主义者以为能够轻而易举消除从属和统属关系。他认为所有这样的计划都是胡说八道。无法避免的专制主义根源深深植根于人类对科学技术的涉猎：

如果人类凭借自己的知识和创造天赋征服了自然的力量，那么自然的力量就会报复人类，只要人类使用自然的力量，它们就会使人类遭受独立于一切社会组织之外的真正专制统治。

Attempts to justify strong authority on the basis of supposedly necessary conditions of technical practice have an ancient history. A pivotal theme in the Republic is Plato’s quest to borrow the authority of technē and employ it by analogy to buttress his argument in favor of authority in the state. Among the illustrations he chooses, like Engels, is that of a ship on the high seas. Because large sailing vessels by their very nature need to be steered with a firm hand, sailors must yield to their captain’s commands; no reasonable person believes that ships can be run democratically. Plato goes on to suggest that governing a state is rather like being captain of a ship or like practicing medicine as a physician. Much the same conditions that require central rule and decisive action in organized technical activity also create this need in government.

以所谓的技术实践之必要条件为基础，来证明强大的权威，这种做法有着悠久的历史。柏拉图《理想国》的一个关键主题就是借用技术权威，通过类比来为他支持的国家权威背书。和恩格斯一样，柏拉图的《理想国》也提到了公海上的船只。大型帆船本质上需要用坚定的舵手，水手必须服从船长的命令。没有一个有理智的人相信这种船可以以民主的方式运转下去。

柏拉图接着表示，治理国家就像船长一样行船，像医生一样行医。在有组织的技术活动中需要中央统治和果断行动，因此在治理中也有这种需要。

In Engels’s argument, and arguments like it, the justification for authority is no longer made by Plato’s classic analogy, but rather directly with reference to technology itself. If the basic case is as compelling as Engels believed it to be, one would expect that as a society adopted increasingly complicated technical systems as its material basis, the prospects for authoritarian ways of life would be greatly enhanced. Central control by knowledgeable people acting at the top of a rigid social hierarchy would seem increasingly prudent. In this respect his stand in “On Authority” appears to be at variance with Karl Marx’s position in Volume I of Capital. Marx tries to show that increasing mechanization will render obsolete the hierarchical division of labor and the relationships of subordination that, in his view, were necessary during the early stages of modern manufacturing. “Modern Industry,” he writes, “sweeps away by technical means the manufacturing division of labor, under which each man is bound hand and foot for life to a single detail operation. At the same time, the capitalistic form of that industry reproduces this same division of labour in a still more monstrous shape; in the factory proper, by converting the workman into a living appendage of the machine.”¹⁹ In Marx’s view the conditions that will eventually dissolve the capitalist division of labor and facilitate proletarian revolution are conditions latent in industrial technology itself. The differences between Marx’s position in Capital and Engels’s in his essay raise an important question for socialism: What, after all, does modern technology make possible or necessary in political life? The theoretical tension we see here mirrors many troubles in the practice of freedom and authority that had muddied the tracks of socialist revolution.

在恩格斯等人的类似论点中，对权威的辩护不再是柏拉图的经典类比，而是直接参照技术本身。如果基本道理果真像恩格斯认为的那样令人信服，人们就会想到，当一个社会采用越来越复杂的技术系统作为其物质基础时，专制生活方式的前景就会大大增强。由知识渊博的人在严格的社会等级制度顶层进行中央控制，这种控制会变得越来越精明。

在此，恩格斯在《论权威》中的立场似乎与卡尔·马克思在《资本论》第一卷中的立场不一致。马克思试图表明，日益增长的机械化将使等级分工和从属关系过时——在他看来，这些关系在现代制造业的早期阶段尚且必要。马克思写道：

现代工业通过技术手段扫清了制造业的分工，使每个人终身被束缚于单一细节操作。同时，资本主义形式的工业以一种更加巨大的形式复制了这种分工，通过将工人转化为机器的活动附属物来实现。

在马克思看来，最终将消解资本主义分工并促进无产阶级革命的条件就是工业技术本身潜藏的条件。马克思在《资本论》中的立场与恩格斯在文章中的立场之间有分歧，也为社会主义提出了一个重要问题——在政治生活中，现代技术究竟使什么成为可能或必需？我们在这里看到的理论张力反映了自由和专制实践中的许多麻烦，这些麻烦使社会主义革命的轨道变得混乱。

Arguments to the effect that technologies are in some sense inherently political have been advanced in a wide variety of contexts, far too many to summarize here. My reading of such notions, however, reveals there are two basic ways of stating the case. One version claims that the adoption of a given technical system actually requires the creation and maintenance of a particular set of social conditions as the operating environment of that system. Engels’s position is of this kind. A similar view is offered by a contemporary writer who holds that “if you accept nuclear power plants, you also accept a techno-scientific-industrial-military elite. Without these people in charge, you could not have nuclear power.”²⁰ In this conception some kinds of technology require their social environments to be structured in a particular way in much the same sense that an automobile requires wheels in order to move. The thing could not exist as an effective operating entity unless certain social as well as material conditions were met. The meaning of “required” here is that of practical (rather than logical) necessity. Thus, Plato thought it a practical necessity that a ship at sea have one captain and an unquestionably obedient crew.

“技术在某种意义上具有固有的政治性”，类似的论点出现在各种各样的背景下，太多了，无法在此总结。然而，我解读这些观点后发现了两种基本的陈述方式。一种说法是，采用一套特定的技术系统就需要创造和维持一套特定的社会条件，作为该系统的运行环境。恩格斯的立场就属于这种情况。某位当代作者也提出了类似的观点，他认为：“如果你接受核电站，你也就接受了一种技术-科学-工业的军事精英制度。没有这些人负责，你就不可能有核电。”

在这种观点中，某些技术需要它们的社会环境以某种特殊的方式结构化，就像汽车需要车轮才能行驶一样。除非满足某些社会和物质条件，否则这个东西不可能成为一个有效的运行实体。这里“需要”的含义是指实际必要性（而不是逻辑必然性）。因此，柏拉图认为，一艘海船有一个船长和一个完全服从的船员，这是一种实际必要性。

A second, somewhat weaker, version of the argument holds that a given kind of technology is strongly compatible with, but does not strictly require, social and political relationships of a particular stripe. Many advocates of solar energy have argued that technologies of that variety are more compatible with a democratic, egalitarian society than energy systems based on coal, oil, and nuclear power; at the same time they do not maintain that anything about solar energy requires democracy. Their case is, briefly, that solar energy is decentralizing in both a technical and political sense: technically speaking, it is vastly more reasonable to build solar systems in a disaggregated, widely distributed manner than in large-scale centralized plants; politically speaking, solar energy accommodates the attempts of individuals and local communities to manage their affairs effectively be cause they are dealing with systems that are more accessible, comprehensible, and controllable than huge centralized sources. In this view solar energy is desirable not only for its economic and environmental benefits, but also for the salutary institutions it is likely to permit in other areas of public life.²¹

（DeepL：）该论点的第二个稍弱的版本认为，特定类型的技术与特定类型的社会和政治关系具有很强的兼容性，但并不严格要求这种关系。许多太阳能的倡导者认为，与基于煤炭、石油和核能的能源系统相比，太阳能技术更符合民主、平等的社会。简而言之，他们的观点是，太阳能在技术和政治意义上都是分散的：从技术角度讲，以分散的、广泛分布的方式建造太阳能系统要比大规模集中式发电厂合理得多；从政治角度讲，太阳能能够满足个人和地方社区有效管理其事务的尝试，因为他们所面对的系统要比巨大的集中式能源更容易接近、理解和控制。因此，太阳能的可取之处不仅在于其经济和环境效益，还在于它有可能在公共生活的其他领域建立有益的制度。

Within both versions of the argument there is a further distinction to be made between conditions that are internal to the workings of a given technical system and those that are external to it. Engels’s thesis concerns internal social relations said to be required within cotton factories and railways, for example; what such relationships mean for the condition of society at large is, for him, a separate question. In contrast, the solar advocate’s belief that solar technologies are compatible with democracy pertains to the way they complement aspects of society removed from the organization of those technologies as such.

（DeepL：）在这两个版本的论证中，还进一步区分了特定技术系统运作的内部条件和外部条件。例如，恩格斯的论点涉及棉纺厂和铁路所需的内部社会关系；对他来说，这种关系对整个社会的状况意味着什么是一个单独的问题。与此相反，太阳能技术倡导者认为太阳能技术与民主是相容的，这与太阳能技术对社会的补充方式有关，而与这些技术的组织本身无关。

There are, then, several different directions that arguments of this kind can follow. Are the social conditions predicated said to be required by, or strongly compatible with, the workings of a given technical system? Are those conditions internal to that system or external to it (or both)? Although writings that address such questions are often unclear about what is being asserted, arguments in this general category are an important part of modern political discourse. They enter into many attempts to explain how changes in social life take place in the wake of technological innovation. More important, they are often used to buttress attempts to justify or criticize proposed courses of action involving new technology. By offering distinctly political reasons for or against the adoption of a particular technology, arguments of this kind stand apart from more commonly employed, more easily quantifiable claims about economic costs and benefits, environmental impacts, and possible risks to public health and safety that technical systems may involve. The issue here does not concern how many jobs will be created, how much income generated, how many pollutants added, or how many cancers produced. Rather, the issue has to do with ways in which choices about technology have important consequences for the form and quality of human associations.

（DeepL：）因此，这类论证可以有几个不同的方向。所预言的社会条件是否是某个技术体系的运作所必须要求的，还是与之密切相容的？

（陈译，下同：）这些条件是该系统内部的还是外部的（或两者）？解决此类问题的著作通常搞不清自己断言的内容，但这种普遍论点在现代政治话语中确实占有重要地位。

在解释技术革新后社会生活如何发生变化的许多尝试中，上述观点都被纳入考量。更重要的是，它们经常被用来支持或批判新技术的行动方案，为采用或反对某项技术提供明显的政治理由，因此这类论点与更常见的、更容易量化的、关于经济成本和效益、环境影响、以及技术系统可能涉及的公共健康和安全风险的主张不同。这里的问题并不关乎创造多少就业机会，创造多少收入，增加多少污染物，产生多少癌症。相反，这个问题与技术选择对人类交往形式和质量产生的重要影响有关。

If we examine social patterns that characterize the environments of technical systems, we find certain devices and systems almost invariably linked to specific ways of organizing power and authority. The important question is: Does this state of affairs derive from an unavoidable social response to intractable properties in the things themselves, or is it instead a pattern imposed independently by a governing body, ruling class, or some other social or cultural institution to further its own purposes?

如果我们审视构成技术系统环境的社会模式，我们会发现某些设备和系统几乎总是与组织权力和权威的特定方式相关联。重要的问题是，这种事态是源于对事物本身难以驾驭的特性的必然社会反应，还是一种由统治机构、统治阶级或其他某些社会或文化机构独立强加的模式，以促进自己的目的？

Taking the most obvious example, the atom bomb is an inherently political artifact. As long as it exists at all, its lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command closed to all influences that might make its workings unpredictable. The internal social system of the bomb must be authoritarian; there is no other way. The state of affairs stands as a practical necessity independent of any larger political system in which the bomb is embedded, independent of the type of regime or character of its rulers. Indeed, democratic states must try to find ways to ensure that the social structures and mentality that characterize the management of nuclear weapons do not “spin off” or “spill over” into the polity as a whole.

举一个最明显的例子，原子弹本质上是一件具有政治性的技术物，只要它存在，它的致命性就要求它由一个集中的、严格等级的指挥链控制，避免一切不可预测的影响。核弹背后的社会制度必须是专制的，必无他法。这种事态是一种实际的需要，独立于任何宏大的政治制度，独立于政权的种类或统治者的秉性。事实上，民主国家必须设法确保核武器辖下的社会结构和心态不会“衍生”或“溢出”到整个政体中。

The bomb is, of course, a special case. The reasons very rigid relationships of authority are necessary in its immediate presence should be clear to anyone. If, however, we look for other instances in which particular varieties of technology are widely perceived to need the maintenance of a special pattern of power and authority, modern technical history contains a wealth of examples.

当然，核弹是一个特例。任何人都应该清楚，核弹要存在下去，就必然需要非常严格的权威关系。然而，我们可以看看其他例子，在那些例子中，特定种类的技术被广泛认为需要维持某种特殊的权力和权威模式——现代技术史充斥着大量这样的例子。

Alfred D. Chandler in The Visible Hand, a monumental study of modern business enterprise, presents impressive documentation to defend the hypothesis that the construction and day-to-day operation of many systems of production, transportation, and communication in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries require the development of particular social form—a large-scale centralized, hierarchical organization administered by highly skilled managers. Typical of Chandler’s reasoning is his analysis of the growth of the railroads.²²

阿尔弗雷德·D·钱德勒在现代商业企业的里程碑研究《看得见的手》中用了不起的文献资料来捍卫 19 世纪和 20 世纪许多生产、运输和通讯系统的建设和日常运作，他假设这些系统需要一种特定的社会形式，一种由高技能管理者管理的大规模集中式、等级制的组织。钱德勒对铁路发展的分析非常典型：

Technology made possible fast, all-weather transportation; but safe, regular, reliable movement of goods and passengers, as well as the continuing maintenance and repair of locomotives, rolling stock, and track, roadbed, stations, roundhouses, and other equipment, required the creation of a sizable administrative organization. It meant the employment of a set of managers to supervise these functional activities over an extensive geographical area; and the appointment of an administrative command of middle and top executives to monitor, evaluate, and coordinate the work of managers responsible for the day-to-day operations.

技术使快速、全天候的运输成为可能，但货物和乘客的安全、常态、可靠的流动，以及机车、车辆、轨道、路基、车站、房屋和其他设备的持续维护和修理，都需要建立一种规模庞大的行政组织。这意味着，要雇用一组管理人员来监督广泛地理区域内的这些职能活动，任命一个由中层和高层管理人员组成的行政指挥部来监督、评估和协调负责日常运营的管理人员的工作。

Throughout his book Chandler points to ways in which technologies used in the production and distribution of electricity, chemicals, and a wide range of industrial goods “demanded” or “required” this form of human association. “Hence, the operational requirements of railroads demanded the creation of the first administrative hierarchies in American business.”²³

钱德勒在整本书中指出，在电力、化学品和各种工业产品的生产和分配中使用的技术“需要”或“要求”这种形式的人类交往：“因此，铁路的运营需要在美国企业中建立一套行政等级制度。”

Were there other conceivable ways of organizing these aggregates of people and apparatus? Chandler shows that a previously dominant social form, the small traditional family firm, simply could not handle the task in most cases. Although he does not speculate further, it is clear that he believes there is, to be realistic, very little latitude in the forms of power and authority appropriate within modern sociotechnical systems. The properties of many modern technologies—oil pipelines and refineries, for example—are such that overwhelmingly impressive economies of scale and speed are possible. If such systems are to work effectively, efficiently, quickly, and safely, certain requirements of internal social organization have to be fulfilled; the material possibilities that modern technologies make available could not be exploited otherwise. Chandler acknowledges that as one compares sociotechnical institutions of different nations, one sees “ways in which cultural attitudes, values, ideologies, political systems, and social structure affect these imperatives.”²⁴ But the weight of argument and empirical evidence in The Visible Hand suggests that any significant departure from the basic pattern would be, at best, highly unlikely.

是否有其他可以想象的方式来组织这些人员和设备的集合体？钱德勒表明，以前占主导地位的社会形式（小型传统家族企业）在大多数情况下根本无法完成这项任务。

尽管他没有进一步推测，但他明显认为，现实点讲，现代社会技术系统中该有的那种权力和权威形式几乎没有自由。许多现代技术（例如石油管道和炼油厂）的特性造就了超大规模和速度的经济。如果这些系统要有效、高效、快速和安全地运行，就必须满足内部社会组织的某些要求，而现代技术提供的物质可能性无法以其他方式加以利用。钱德勒承认，当人们比较不同国家的社会技术制度时，就会看到“文化态度、价值观、意识形态、政治制度和社会结构影响这些必要条件的方式”。

但是，《看得见的手》中的大量论证和经验证据表明，任何对基本模式的重大偏离都是非常不可能的事。

It may be that other conceivable arrangements of power and authority, for example, those of decentralized, democratic worker self-management, could prove capable of administering factories, refineries, communications systems, and railroads as well as or better than the organizations Chandler describes. Evidence from automobile assembly teams in Sweden and worker-managed plants in Yugoslavia and other countries is often presented to salvage these possibilities. Unable to settle controversies over this matter here, I merely point to what I consider to be their bone of contention. The available evidence tends to show that many large, sophisticated technological systems are in fact highly compatible with centralized, hierarchical managerial control. The interesting question, however, has to do with whether or not this pattern is in any sense a requirement of such systems, a question that is not solely empirical. The matter ultimately rests on our judgments about what steps, if any, are practically necessary in the workings of particular kinds of technology and what, if anything, such measures require of the structure of human associations. Was Plato right in saying that a ship at sea needs steering by a decisive hand and that this could only be accomplished by a single captain and an obedient crew? Is Chandler correct in saying that the properties of large-scale systems require centralized, hierarchical managerial control?

也许其他可以想象的权力和权威部署（例如，那些分散的、民主的工人自我管理的安排）可以证明能够管理工厂、炼油厂、通信系统和铁路，甚至比钱德勒描述的组织更好。瑞典的汽车装配队和南斯拉夫及其他国家工人管理工厂的证据经常被用来挽救这些可能性。我不能在这里解决这个问题的争论，而只是指出在我看来他们争论的焦点。

现有的证据大致表明，许多大型的复杂技术系统与集中的、等级化的管理控制高度兼容。然而，有趣的问题是，这种模式在某种意义上是否是这些系统的要求？这个问题并不只是一个经验层面的问题。这个问题最终取决于我们对哪些措施（如果有的话）在特定种类的技术运作中是实际必要的判断，以及这些措施对人类交往结构的要求（如果有的话）。

柏拉图说，海船只需一名果断的船长掌舵，而这只能由一个船长和一个听话的船员来完成，这是否正确？钱德勒说大规模系统的特性需要集中的、分层次的管理控制，这又是否正确？

To answer such questions, we would have to examine in some detail the moral claims of practical necessity (including those advocated in the doctrines of economics) and weigh them against moral claims of other sorts, for example, the notion that it is good for sailors to participate in the command of a ship or that workers have a right to be involved in making and administering decisions in a factory. It is characteristic of societies based on large, complex technological systems, however, that moral reasons other than those of practical necessity appear increasingly obsolete, “idealistic,” and irrelevant. Whatever claims one may wish to make on behalf of liberty, justice, or equality can be immediately neutralized when confronted with arguments to the effect, “Fine, but that’s no way to run a railroad” (or steel mill, or airline, or communication system, and so on). Here we encounter an important quality in modern political discourse and in the way people commonly think about what measures are justified in response to the possibilities technologies make available. In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity—especially the need to maintain crucial technological systems as smoothly working entities—have tended to eclipse other sorts of moral and political reasoning.

要回答这样的问题，我们就必须对实际必要性的道德主张（包括经济学说中倡导的那些）进行一些细致的研究，并将其与其他种类的道德主张进行权衡，比如水手参与船只指挥是不是也可以带来好处，或者工人是不是该有权参与工厂的决策和管理。

然而，基于大型复杂技术系统的社会的特点是，除了那些实际需要的道德理由之外，其他的道德理由显得越来越过时、“理想化”和不相关。无论人们想以自由、公正或平等的名义提出什么主张，但当面对“好吧，但这不是经营铁路（或钢铁厂、航空公司或通信系统等）的方法”的论点时，可能性都会立即消除。

在这里，我们遭遇了现代政治话语中的一个重要性质，人们通常思考哪些措施是合理，以应对技术带来的可能性。在许多情况下，说某些技术本质上具有政治性，是在说某些被广泛接受的实际必要性——特别是维持关键技术系统，让它顺利运作的需要。这种必要性已然掩盖了其他范畴的道德和社会问题。

One attempt to salvage the autonomy of politics from the bind of practical necessity involves the notion that conditions of human association found in the internal workings of technological systems can easily be kept separate from the polity as a whole. Americans have long rested content in the belief that arrangements of power and authority inside industrial corporations, public utilities, and the like have little bearing on public institutions, practices, and ideas at large. That “democracy stops at the factory gates” was taken as a fact of life that had nothing to do with the practice of political freedom. But can the internal politics of technology and the politics of the whole community be so easily separated? A recent study of business leaders in the United States, contemporary exemplars of Chandler’s “visible hand of management,” found them remarkably impatient with such democratic scruples as “one man one vote”. If democracy doesn’t work for the firm, the most critical institution in all of society, American executives ask, how well can it be expected to work for the government of a nation—particularly when that government attempts to interfere with the achievements of the firm? The authors of the report observe that patterns of authority that work effectively in the corporation become for businessmen “the desirable model against which to compare political and economic relationships in the rest of society.”²⁵ While such findings are far from conclusive, they do reflect a sentiment increasingly common in the land: what dilemmas such as the energy crisis require is not a redistribution of wealth or broader public participation but, rather, stronger, centralized public and private management.

若要从实际需要的束缚中拯救政治自主权，就会触及一个观念——在技术系统的内部运作中发现的人类交往条件可以轻容易地与整个政体分开。长期以来，美国人一直满足于这样一种信念，觉得工业公司、公共事业等机构内部的权力和权威部署对整个公共机构、实践和理念影响不大。但技术的内部政治和整个社会的政治能如此轻易地分开吗？

最近对美国商界领袖的一项研究发现，他们对“一人一票”这样的民主非常不耐烦，他们是钱德勒“有形管理之手”的当代典范。如果民主对公司（全社会最重要的机构）不起作用，那么美国的高管们会问，它对一个国家的政府还能起到多大的作用？

该研究的作者观察到，在公司中有效运作的权威模式成为商人“用来比较社会其他政治和经济关系的理想模式”。尽管这些发现远非结论，但它们确实反映了一种在国内日益普遍的情绪。像能源危机这样的困境需要的不是收入再分配或更广泛的公众参与，而是更强有力的集中化公共管理，参见卡特总统对“能源调动部”的提议。

An especially vivid case in which the operational requirements of a technical system might influence the quality of public life is the debates about the risks of nuclear power. As the supply of uranium for nuclear reactors runs out, a proposed alternative fuel is the plutonium generated as a byproduct in reactor cores. Well-known objections to plutonium recycling focus on its unacceptable economic costs, its risks of environmental contamination, and its dangers in regard to the international proliferation of nuclear weapons. Beyond these concerns, however stands another less widely appreciated set of hazards—those that involve the sacrifice of civil liberties. The widespread use of plutonium as a fuel increases the chance that this toxic substance might be stolen by terrorists, organized crime, or other persons. This raises the prospect, and not a trivial one, that extraordinary measures would have to be taken to safeguard plutonium from theft and to recover it should the substance be stolen. Workers in the nuclear industry as well as ordinary citizens outside could well become subject to background security checks, covert surveillance, wiretapping, informers, and even emergency measures under martial law—all justified by the need to safeguard plutonium.

一个特别生动的例子是，技术系统的操作要求可能影响公共生活的质量，现在这个例子在核能风险的辩论中引起了争论。随着用于核反应堆的铀供应耗尽，一种拟议的替代燃料是作为反应堆堆芯副产品生成的钚。众所周知，反对钚回收的理由集中在它不可接受的经济成本、环境污染的风险以及核武器在全球扩散的危险。

然而，除了这些担忧之外，还有另一个不太为人所知的危险，涉及牺牲公民自由的危险。钚被广泛用作燃料，这增加了该有毒物质被恐怖分子、有组织犯罪分子或其他人窃取的可能性。所以我们要提出，未来必须采取非常措施来防止钚被盗，并在物质被盗时将其找回。核工业工人以及外面的普通公民很可能会因此受到背景安全调查、秘密监视、窃听、告密，甚至戒严令下的紧急措施，所有这些都源于保护钚的必要性。

Russell W. Ayres’s study of the legal ramifications of plutonium recycling concludes: “With the passage of time and the increase in the quantity of plutonium in existence will come pressure to eliminate the traditional checks the courts and legislatures place on the activities of the executive and to develop a powerful central authority better able to enforce strict safeguards.” He avers that “once a quantity of plutonium had been stolen, the case for literally turning the country upside down to get it back would be overwhelming.” Ayres anticipates and worries about the kinds of thinking that, I have argued, characterize inherently political technologies. It is still true that in a world in which human beings make and maintain artificial systems nothing is “required” in an absolute sense. Nevertheless, once a course of action is under way, once artifacts such as nuclear power plants have been built and put in operation, the kinds of reasoning that justify the adaptation of social life to technical requirements pop up as spontaneously as flowers in the spring. In Ayres’s words, “Once recycling begins and the risks of plutonium theft become real rather than hypothetical, the case for governmental infringement of protected rights will seem compelling.”²⁶ After a certain point, those who cannot accept the hard requirements and imperatives will be dismissed as dreamers and fools.

拉塞尔·W·艾尔斯对钚回收的法律后果得出研究结论：“随着时间的推移和现有钚数量的增加，将面临取消法院和立法机关对行政和立法机构活动的传统审查压力。进而，发展一个强大的中央机构，能够更好地执行严格的保障措施。”他断言：“一旦一定数量的钚被盗，真正颠覆国家以取回它的理由将压过一切。”艾尔斯预计并担心具有固有政治性的各种技术。

确实，在一个人类制造和维护的、人工系统的世界里，没有什么是绝对意义上的“必需”。然而，一旦采取行动，一旦核电站等技术物建成并投入运行，各种为社会生活适应技术要求辩护的理由就如雨后春笋般冒出来：“一旦钚回收开始，并且钚盗窃的风险成为现实而非假设，政府侵犯受保护权利的案例将显著增加。”在某一节点之后，那些无法接受硬性要求和命令的人将被斥为空想家和傻瓜。

The two varieties of interpretation I have outlined indicate how artifacts can have political qualities. In the first instance we noticed ways in which specific features in the design or arrangement of a device or system could provide a convenient means of establishing patterns of power and authority in a given setting. Technologies of this kind have a range of flexibility in the dimensions of their material form. It is precisely because they are flexible that their consequences for society must be understood with reference to the social actors able to influence which designs and arrangements are chosen. In the second instance we examined ways in which the intractable properties of certain kinds of technology are strongly, perhaps unavoidably, linked to particular institutionalized patterns of power and authority. Here the initial choice about whether or not to adopt something is decisive in regard to its consequences. There are no alternative physical designs or arrangements that would make a significant difference; there are, furthermore, no genuine possibilities for creative intervention by different social systems—capitalist or socialist—that could change the intractability of the entity or significantly alter the quality of its political effects.

我概述的两种阐释表明了技术物如何具有政治性。在第一种阐释中，我们注意到设备或系统的设计或部署具有某些特征，这些特征可以提供一种在既定环境中建立权力和权威模式的捷径。这种技术具有一定材料形式的灵活性。正因它们是灵活的，所以必须参照那些“能够影响选择何种设计和部署”的社会行为者来理解它们对社会的影响。

在第二种阐释下，我们研究了某些技术的棘手特性与特定制度化权力和权威模式密切关联方式（也许是必然的关联）。在这里，“是否采用某技术的最初选择”对“后果”具有决定性意义。没有替代性设计或布置能产生重大差异。此外，不论是资本主义还是社会主义的不同社会制度，都不能进行真正的创造性干预，不能改变这个技术实体的棘手性或显著改变其政治影响。

To know which variety of interpretation is applicable in a given case is often what is at stake in disputes, some of them passionate ones, about the meaning of technology for how we live. I have argued a “both/and” position here, for it seems to me that both kinds of understanding are applicable in different circumstances. Indeed, it can happen that within a particular complex of technology—a system of communication or transportation, for example—some aspects may be flexible in their possibilities for society, while other aspects may be (for better or worse) completely intractable. The two varieties of interpretation I have examined here can overlap and intersect at many points.

要知道“在特定情况下哪种阐释方法适用”，这往往是“技术对我们生活方式意味着什么”的争论焦点，其中一些争论慷慨激昂。在这里，我持“两者兼容”的立场，因为在我看来，这两种理解方式在不同情境下都适用。实际上，在某个特定的技术复合体中（例如通信或交通系统），某些方面可能在社会潜能上具有灵活性，而其他方面可能（无论是好还是坏）完全让人摸不着头脑。我在这里探讨的两种阐释方法在许多地方可以相互重叠和交叉。

These are, of course, issues on which people can disagree. Thus, some proponents of energy from renewable resources now believe they have at last discovered a set of intrinsically democratic, egalitarian, communitarian technologies. In my best estimation, however, the social consequences of building renewable energy systems will surely depend on the specific configurations of both hardware and the social institutions created to bring that energy to us. It may be that we will find ways to turn this silk purse into a sow’s ear. By comparison, advocates of the further development of nuclear power seem to believe that they are working on a rather flexible technology whose adverse social effects can be fixed by changing the design parameters of reactors and nuclear waste disposal systems. For reasons indicated above, I believe them to be dead wrong in that faith. Yes, we may be able to manage some of the “risks” to public health and safety that nuclear power brings. But as society adapts to the more dangerous and apparently indelible features of nuclear power, what will be the long-range toll in human freedom?

当然，这些都是人们可以存在分歧之处。

因此，一些支持可再生资源能源的人现在相信他们终于发现了一套本质上是民主的、平等主义的、社群主义的技术。但据我估计，建设可再生能源系统的社会后果肯定取决于硬件的具体配置和为我们提供能源而创建的社会制度。相比之下，支持进一步发展核能的人似乎认为他们正在研究一种相当灵活的技术，其不利的社会影响可以通过改变反应堆和核废料处理系统的设计参数来解决。

出于上述原因，我认为他们的信仰大错特错。是的，我们或许能够管理核电给公众健康和安全带来的一些“风险”。但是，随着社会适应核能的特征（更危险、更不可抹除），人类自由的长期代价是什么？

My belief that we ought to attend more closely to technical objects themselves is not to say that we can ignore the contexts in which those objects are situated. A ship at sea may well require, as Plato and Engels insisted, a single captain and obedient crew. But a ship out of service, parked at the dock, needs only a caretaker. To understand which technologies and which contexts are important to us, and why, is an enterprise that must involve both the study of specific technical systems and their history as well as a thorough grasp of the concepts and controversies of political theory. In our times people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accommodate technological innovation while at the same time resisting similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds. If for no other reason than that, it is important for us to achieve a clearer view of these matters than has been our habit so far.

我认为，我们应该更密切地关注技术对象本身，并不是说我们可以忽略这些对象所处的环境。正如柏拉图和恩格斯所坚持的那样，海上的船只很可能需要一名船长和听话的船员。但是，停泊在码头的泊船只需要一个看管人。

要了解哪些技术和哪些背景对我们很重要，以及为什么重要——这是一项必须触及具体技术系统及其历史的研究，也是一项帮我们透彻理解政治理论的概念和争议的事业。在我们这个时代，人们往往愿意对他们的生活方式进行剧烈的改变，以便让生活方式与技术创新步调一致，同时他们也会抵制基于政治理由的改变。无论怎么样，我们必须对这些问题有一个更清晰的认识，比我们迄今为止谙熟的理解更清晰。