Since the publication of Winner’s influential article in 1980, the idea that artifacts have politics has remained a dominant theme in STS and the philosophy of technology. Yet despite exploring the political nature of artifacts from a variety of different perspectives, little of this work has paid attention to the activity of maintenance. In this presentation my goal will be to demonstrate how the neglect of maintenance has obscured important dimensions of the political nature of artifacts, by casting them as stable features artifacts come to possess through design, rather than as ongoing processes that continue throughout the lives of artifacts. In order to illustrate how attending to maintenance reveals the inherently temporal nature of the politics of artifacts, I’ll focus upon the maintenance history of a well-known artifact: the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. My goal will be to illustrate how the maintenance history of the bridge is also at the same time a political history. In order to do so, I’ll detail how since construction was completed in 1937, the bridge has undergone a wide variety of different changes in response to the changing social environment in which the bridge exists. After detailing reasons why maintenance should be understood as the central mechanism through which such changes occur, I’ll turn my attention to the political processes underlying such changes. In contrast to accounts in the philosophy of technology which depict breakdown and failure as objective states of an artifact, I’ll demonstrate how, whether or not the bridge requires alteration in the form of repair or rehabilitation, is an inherently subjective question that depends on values. Yet whose values take precedence in shaping the evolution of artifacts depends on questions of power. In the final sections of this presentation, I’ll illustrate how these processes are revealed in the maintenance histories of artifacts by charting the political debates underlying the transformations of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Mark Thomas Young is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, Classics History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. His research covers two fields; the Philosophy of Technology, where he focuses on practices of maintenance and the use of automating technologies and the History and Philosophy of Science, where he explores instruments, craft practices and tacit knowledge in the early modern period. He is founder and chair of the “Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology” special interest group at the Society of Philosophy of Technology and together with Mark Coeckelbergh, editor of Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology: Keeping Things Going (Routledge 2024).