Do Tools Have Their Own Politics?

It would of course be strange to say that a hammer is right-wing or left-wing. We do not speak of the authoritarianism of a kettle or the liberal leanings of a bicycle. The phrase “the politics of tools” may therefore sound exaggerated, even slightly comic, when first heard. We take politics to be the business of people who speak, decide and build power, while objects appear to be silent helpers in our hands. Yet if we look at daily life with a little care, we notice that tools do not merely carry out our commands. While widening our room to move they also draw its limits, making some relations easier and others unnecessary or impossible.

A turnstile gives a metal answer to the question “who may pass?” A camera ties the answer to “who may watch?” to a particular centre. A street arranged solely for cars places no explicit prohibition on the person walking, yet makes their presence there harder. If a piece of software has no “object” button, the system tells us that objection is not a thinkable behaviour. Objects deliver no speeches; but they build the stage of our behaviour. Their politics, too, usually works right here, in the comfort of invisibility.

When decisions turn into concrete and code

A law can be changed, an administrator dismissed, a decision opened to debate. But once a preference is buried in a bridge, a road, a building or a software infrastructure, it takes on a more stubborn character. Once a city has grown around the car, saying “let us now choose public transport” is not enough on its own. The distances between home and work, the location of shopping centres and the structure of streets reproduce the old preference every day. When all the operations of an institution are tied to a particular piece of software, that software’s categories become the institution’s reality. A need with no place on the form gradually falls outside the system.

Technical design therefore does not merely implement an existing decision; it carries it into the future. A decision taken today by a few people in a meeting can, tomorrow, resemble an unchangeable order encountered by thousands. Moreover, even if the decision’s author disappears, the design keeps working. The sentence “that’s how the system is” makes a political preference of the past look like a natural necessity in the present. This is the strength of concrete and code: they make the contestable ordinary.

Central tools, central power

Some technologies can work only under large-scale organisation, specialised staff and tight supervision. In such a structure the technical operation and the form of governance converge. If keeping the system running requires decisions to be gathered at the centre, that technology does not merely produce a service; it produces hierarchy as well. As it becomes harder for users to understand, repair or modify it, the distance between the expert and the ordinary person grows. “Those who know” decide; the rest comply with the results.

By contrast, small-scale, open, repairable and locally governable tools can support other relations. A neighbourhood network, a community-run energy system or software whose source code can be read is not democratic by itself; such structures can also produce inequality internally. But at least they keep the possibility of intervention and participation open. The structure of a tool does not by itself determine the fate of power, yet it influences which forms of power will be easier to establish.

“That’s how it was designed” is not an excuse

In daily life we usually meet design as though it were a natural event. If an application will not close our account, if a public system works only in a particular browser, if the device we bought cannot be opened by an independent repairer, we are told “there is nothing to be done.” Yet all of these are choices that were made. Someone found continued subscription preferable to an easy exit, buying a new product preferable to repair, a closed system preferable to an open standard. Technical justifications may be real; but which justification is given priority is again a political and economic decision.

We need not leap to the easy conclusion that “behind every design lies bad intent.” Designers too usually work within deadlines, budgets, employer pressure and existing infrastructure. But an absence of bad intent does not mean the outcome is neutral. A system built with good intentions can still exclude people, automate discrimination or reduce the user’s say. Looking at outcomes matters more than hunting for culprits.

Small buttons, large behaviours

The politics of digital tools sometimes appears in very small details. A platform can make the share button large and the report button invisible. Reaching privacy settings may take seven steps while posting publicly happens with a single tap. On a shopping site buying may be easy and returning exhausting. Each of these tells the user which behaviour is desired without issuing any explicit command. Design here works as a kind of silent legislation.

Moreover these rules do not affect everyone equally. Older people, disabled people, those on slow connections, speakers of other languages and those with limited access to new technology may meet more obstacles in the same system. “The same interface for everyone,” though presented as equality, can be exclusionary when it ignores real-world inequalities. Even when a tool claims to take no side, through the “normal user” it assumes it places some at the centre and others at the margin.

Seeing politics in objects

Accepting that tools have their own politics does not abolish human responsibility. On the contrary, it widens responsibility’s field. It makes us look not only at the person using a technology but also at whoever designed it, financed it, at the institution that bought it, at whoever set the legal framework and at whoever prevents it from being changed. We see the gap in the sentence “guns don’t kill people, people do”: human action matters, but the tool changes the speed, the distance, the reversibility and the consequences of that action.

Tools may not go to the ballot box, found parties or issue manifestos. Yet they can become silent decisions that determine along which paths life will flow. When we meet a new technology it is therefore not enough to ask “what is it for?” We should also ask: what kind of living-together is it inviting us into, whose decision does it make permanent, and how open does it leave the possibility of living otherwise? Politics sometimes begins not at a parliamentary rostrum but in the default settings of a device we carry in our pocket.