When most people think of technology, they think about the visible parts—the iPods and aircraft, skyscrapers and power plants—but all technologies, to some degree or another, are enmeshed in what Langdon Winner calls ‘regimes,’” he said. “The environmental requirements and effects (mobile telephones require coltan, a ‘conflict mineral’ that costs lives as well as treasure), the political aspects (from AK-47s to nuclear weapons), the institutions that emerge or are destroyed (think of climate change or epidemiology), and the social arrangements that the technologies necessitate or strengthen or weaken. Surely there will be great benefits when the designers of technologies and those who finance them have some understanding of the potential effects of the tools they create on the physical, social, and mental environments.
