The economy is booming, but that means little to Joe Sixpack. The technological artifacts themselves are therefore politically neutral. STS takes a 4 th approach the Social Constructionist view. Classist engineer Robert Moses constructs the bridges on Long Island such that low-clearance bridges lead to beaches and parks, preventing poor people from cluttering up his nice areas reserved for the rich. After Moses dies, the bridges are still doing his dirty work impossible to analyze under the technology is neutral view.
Artifacts can have politics.
Power stations built in 1923 in Berlin show strong centralization, but those in London 1923 show strong decentralization different cultural styles. The first voice-recognition software worked better on men than women not due to an individual s sexist agency, but do the structural sexism in the institutions. Giant Cartesian grids for city layouts and Euclidean shapes for buildings captured the semiotics of planning and elimination of disorder. Late 1970s we start postmodern era mainstream cybernetics switches to fractals, neuromimetics, chaos theory, and other analog bottom-up systems. Late 1980s introduced a synthesis of the opposites in cybernetics, just as new age subculture started to introduce a synthesis of opposites in its signifiers.