Winner's losers

First off, I have to admit that I read an unauthorized version of Langdon Winner's 1995 "Who will be in cyberspace," which I found here. My book is on campus, and I'm 4 miles away, in my pajamas, and my life isn't "virtual" enough yet to give me access to the authorized text without changing out of my pajamas. It ain't gonna happen.

Anyway, Winner provides a reality-checking foil to Dyson, Masuda, and the others. He hits several of the points we had discussed in class, namely that cyberspace is no guarantee of democracy or utopia, and that our progress towards the vanishing point of individuals, physicality, industry, and knowledge as we know it is neither and inexorable nor a god-given teleology:

We can pretend to follow "where the technology is taking us", to social outcomes "determined by market forces", but the fact is that deliberate choices about the relationship between people and new technology are made by someone, somehow, every day.

People shape this world that we see around us; it doee not evolve on its own. Ironically, however, Winner seems to think that there will be some point of no return, that Frankenstein's monster will one day overtake the ambitious doctor:

How people will recreate selfhood when everyone is expendable, could become a more serious issue than even the decline of real wages.

Can everyone really become expendable? I find his argument more persuasive when he claims that power is concentrated in certain segments of the population. The people who are making these important decisions that Winner thinks should be more thoroughly considered are the ones who will likely never be expendable. But by virtue of his position as a professional cultural theorist and relative Luddite, Winner ensures he will live up to his name in this new society.