Winner asked the question "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" (1986). His primary example is taken from the construction of infrastructure in the city of New York, where city planner Robert Moses decided to build bridge overpasses between New York City and Long Island that were too low in height to allow buses to pass through. From his racist and classist perspective, people unable to afford cars were not welcome in Long Island, a rich suburban area, and he built this politics directly into the infrastructure of the roads and transportation systems. What sort of politics will our artifacts have? Will it be possible to include in our systems the possibility for compassion, ethics, and globally responsible thinking?
Technically, many of the problems of social informatics appear as an overwhelming list of differences: heterogeneous representations, incompatible data sources, or the constantly changing contextual meaning of information across dispersed groups are just some examples. Politically, the problem of dealing with differences is one of preserving the primacy and sovereignty of individual experiences without creating regimes of coercion. Be aware that it is impossible to separate the technical from the political, which clearly means recognizing the macroimplications of research as it is taken up and used to build sociotechnical systems for use in the real world.