Technologies of all kinds, as artifacts and systems themselves, are often described as neutral entities, incapable of exerting any significant effects unless they have been graced with the human touch. Social influences are certainly strong factors to political leniencies of technology; however, to say that technology is indefinitely neutral is an uncritical and unrealistic claim. As Langdon Winner identifies in his writing, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, some technologies are “designed to produce a set of consequences prior to [their] professed uses” (Winner 125). They can embody specific forms of power and authority (121), with the potential to be both democratizing and destructive. An early technological …show more content…
The logistical system is an expression of Gestell, nihilating parts of the human experience that are of no account other than those of exploitive means, such as work identity, satisfaction, and legibility (101). Thoughts and feelings are disruptive and valueless to a machinic system; efficiency of circulating commodities is prioritized. With a never-ending cycle of technical solutions to technical problems, both Winner and Bernes attempt to provide systemic approaches. Winner suggests something similar to Heidegger’s free relationship to technology, in which one must understand technologies and the contexts they are situated in (Winner 135). Bernes, on the other hand, believes that one should use counter-logistics to examine logistics itself. Instead of imagining mastery from the standpoint of global totality (Bernes 105) and perfection, one must “fight battles successively rather than all at once” (105). Ultimately, analyses on the logistical system provide a backdrop for other problematic systems with unexamined political inheritances, such as the Internet, the Amazon warehouse, and so on. With scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforcing dominant asymmetries, the logistical system fits into a larger political, social, and economic enframing, and like all its components, it should be examined with a critical