The Political Dilemma
What do tomatoes, politics, and social media have in common? A lot. In Langdon Winner’s 1980 paper Do Artifacts Have Politics, Winner recounts the story of the mechanical tomato harvester being introduced to the market in 1940. Intended to increase productivity and lower farming costs, the result was that tomato farming became concentrated around larger farms, decreasing tomato workers from 4,000 to 600 in California. Winner states that “an ongoing process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other… [in a way that is an] unmistakable stamp of political and economic power.” It is in this story of tomatoes that politics is found, but more specifically, it is in the story of technological innovation that politics are found.
In reference to the tomato harvester, Winner writes “… one must say that the technological deck has been stacked long in advance to favor certain social interests, and that some people were bound to receive a better hand than others.” The very political nature of technological advancement transcends time, and what was true in the 1940’s is eerily true today. Right now, social media is a dominant force in communication, news distribution, and opinion sharing. Unlike online forums before the advent of social media which promoted anonymity and focused discussion, social media was different when it was introduced. Social media was an invention in open communities and open discussion.
The open nature of social media has led to the rise of radical mainstream political discussion and news, which in turn has led to the increasing rise in fake news and division. In the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, ex-Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein states: “When we were making the like button, our entire motivation was ‘can we spread positivity and love in the world?’ The idea that fast forward to today and… [that] it could be leading to political polarization was nowhere on our radar.”
Similar to the tomato harvester, the engineers who built social media did not intend to create a political artifact that has deep consequences on society. The social media deck has been stacked in favor of corporate profit and political groups, but at the expense of the users which live in a political society formed from divisive online behavior. Whenever an innovation is introduced, we must all ask the question: could this technology become a story of politics?
