Do artefacts have ambivalence? Moses’ bridges, Winner’s bridges and other urban legends

It is a routine teaching day. The advanced level course in science and technology studies (S&TS) is holding its fourth weekly class of the semester. The students dutifully indulge the professor in his incantation of one of the iconic case studies of the field: Langdon Winner’s well-known analysis of Moses’ bridges. Winner claims that the bridges built by Moses on Long Island are an example of a technology which has political qualities: by this he means that the bridges were designed (consciously or unconsciously) to have a particular social effect.