The Philosophy of Technology
The Highway That Banned Buses (And What It Tells Us About Every Tool We Build)
The bridges on Long Island's parkways were built too low for buses — and some historians believe that was entirely the point.
The Idea
We tend to think of technology as neutral — a hammer doesn't care who swings it, a road doesn't favour one traveller over another. But this intuition breaks down the moment you look closely at how things are actually designed. The philosopher Langdon Winner made this argument in his 1980 essay 'Do Artifacts Have Politics?' and it remains one of the most quietly radical ideas in the philosophy of technology. His claim: the values, assumptions, and power structures of their creators get baked into tools, systems, and infrastructures — often invisibly, often permanently. This isn't just about bad actors hiding intentions in blueprints. Sometimes bias enters through assumption — a designer who never imagines a user unlike themselves. Sometimes it enters through convenience — an algorithm optimised for engagement that, as a side effect, rewards outrage. Sometimes it enters through what is simply left out — a voice recognition system trained almost entirely on male voices, which then struggles with women's speech. The deeper point is epistemological: we tend to evaluate technology by asking 'does it work?' when the more important question is 'for whom does it work, and at whose expense?' A technology can be highly efficient and quietly exclusionary at the same time. Efficiency and fairness are not the same axis. Recognising that tools are never just tools — that they embody choices about who matters — is the first move toward thinking about technology honestly.
In the World
Robert Moses was the most powerful urban planner in twentieth-century New York. Over decades, he shaped the city's roads, parks, and bridges with an authority that few elected officials could match. He built the parkways connecting the city to Long Island's beaches — beautiful, sweeping roads lined with trees. He also, according to biographer Robert Caro and later the urban theorist Winner, specified that the bridges crossing those parkways be built with clearances of around nine feet. Standard city buses required at least twelve. The result: the beaches were accessible by car, but not by public transit. At a time when car ownership was predominantly white and wealthy, and bus ridership was predominantly Black and poor, the design effectively segregated leisure space without a single law being written. Moses never had to post a sign. The infrastructure did the work quietly, and durably — those bridges stood for decades. Historians debate how intentional this was; some architectural historians have pushed back on the claim. But that ambiguity is almost the point. You don't need malice for a technology to carry values — you need only for its designers to make choices while imagining a particular kind of user. The beach was 'open to everyone.' The infrastructure told a different story. And once concrete is poured, it is very hard to argue with.
Why It Matters
Once you see this, you cannot unsee it. The question 'does this technology have values?' stops being abstract and starts being something you can apply to almost anything you encounter: the default settings on a new device, the layout of an app's privacy controls, the way a city's cycling infrastructure ends abruptly at the edge of a wealthier neighbourhood. This framing also changes how we think about accountability. If tools are neutral, then harm is always a misuse — someone using the hammer wrong. But if tools embed values, then creators bear responsibility for the choices encoded in design, not just the choices made at the moment of deployment. That has real implications for how we regulate platforms, who gets a seat in design processes, and which questions get asked before something ships rather than after. For your own life, it's worth developing the habit of asking: who was imagined when this was built? That question doesn't require cynicism — sometimes the answer is genuinely 'everyone, thoughtfully.' But asking it honestly, regularly, is one of the more useful cognitive tools available for navigating a world increasingly shaped by systems whose assumptions are rarely made visible.
A Question to Ponder
Think of a piece of technology you use every day — what kind of person does it seem to have been designed for, and how does that shape your experience of using it?
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