Do Artefacts Have Politics?
Communication, ethics, pluriverse and prefigurative urbanism
Evaluation (ethics)
Communication and dissemination of your work + ethics for the built environment
Treat communication as a political act shaping how knowledge circulates; engage with consent, representation and harm in research on the built environment.
The pluriverse and prefigurative urbanism
Challenge universalist assumptions in planning; introduce pluriversal and prefigurative practices that enact alternative futures in the present.
Artefacts, infrastructures and power (Winner, Moses)
Show how design choices embed authority, agency and visibility; revisit Robert Moses’s parkways, hostile architecture and anti-homeless design as spatial politics (via Robert Caro).
Identify politics embedded in design and infrastructure; navigate ethical dilemmas in built-environment research; engage alternative epistemologies.
Materials
Original text by Roberto Rocco. Newspaper articles linked to their publishers.
Individual. Submit on Brightspace before the next session. Counts towards In-class exercises (10%).
[Slides for the three blocks of this session]
Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136.
have politics?
A bridge does not vote. A solar panel is not a democrat. Yet designed things make some actions easy, others difficult and some practically impossible. They decide who gets access, who carries risk, who is seen and who is in control. This page asks how that happens, and how you can show it in your own research.
Objects don’t have politics, but they make politics.
“In controversies about technology and society, there is no idea more provocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and productivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority.”
Langdon Winner, “Do artifacts have politics?”, Daedalus, 1980, p. 121 (Winner, 1980).Credo elvem etiam vivere. +
Latin for “I believe Elvis is still alive.” A small joke about beliefs that survive every piece of evidence. Keep it in mind for section 7, on rumours and conspiracy theories.Take a side, then open it to find the argument you must answer.
Yes +
Your strongest point: A bridge can be built so that some people cannot use it. If that exclusion was chosen, the concrete carries the choice for decades, long after the people who made it are gone.
Now answer this: A bridge has no intentions. If it excludes people, who chose that, and could you prove it? Section 4 shows how hard the proof can be.
No +
Your strongest point: Only people and institutions can be racist. Blaming an object lets the people who designed, funded and approved it off the hook.
Now answer this: If the bridge keeps excluding people after its makers have died, where does the exclusion live now? A staircase shuts out many wheelchair users without anyone intending it.
Technology does not rule us. Nor is it innocent.
Before we can ask how artefacts make politics, we need two terms. Each one names a mistake.
Technology develops by its own logic and then moulds society. Society simply adapts.
Technology is only the product of social interests. Name the designers and owners, and nothing more needs explaining.
Institutions, markets, laws and conflicts shape what is designed. Once built, the design then reorganises later choices and relationships (Pinch & Bijker, 1984; Winner, 1980).
Which view does each claim take?
“The internet made people more polarised.”
○ Technological determinism
Yes. The technology is treated as an independent force that moulds society. Section 7 shows that the evidence is more complicated.
○ Social determinism
Not quite. Nothing here says society shaped the internet. The claim runs from the technology to society.
○ Socio-technical view
Not quite. A socio-technical account would ask which platforms, which business models, which users and which political conflicts were involved.
“A bridge is just concrete. Only the people who built it matter.”
○ Technological determinism
Not quite. This claim gives the object no role at all.
○ Social determinism
Yes. The artefact is treated as a passive result of social interests. Once you have named its owners, there is supposedly nothing more to explain.
○ Socio-technical view
Not quite. A socio-technical account would also ask what the concrete keeps doing after its makers have gone.
“Car-based suburbs were built by policy and money, and now they make driving feel unavoidable.”
○ Technological determinism
Not quite. The technology did not develop on its own. Policy and finance shaped it.
○ Social determinism
Not quite. The claim also gives the built suburb an effect of its own.
○ Socio-technical view
Yes. Society shaped the artefact, and the artefact now shapes later choices. This is the account this page defends.
This is why wicked problems cannot be solved by technology alone, and also why technology is never a decorative afterthought. We look at actors, institutions and artefacts together.
Design is not magic
Some modernist architects and planners believed that the right spatial form would reform society. Provide rational housing, separate functions, bring in light and air, and a new social order would follow. They were answering real problems: overcrowding, disease and housing shortages. But the more authoritarian, high-modernist versions overestimated what form could do, and underestimated local knowledge, conflict and unequal power (Scott, 1998). Brasília is the classic case study (Holston, 1989).
The lesson is not that space has no effects. It is that space never acts alone. A design works through property, institutions, money, maintenance, culture, and the ways people accept, resist or change it.
We are used to having a somewhat “magical relationship” with design in architectural schools.
A drawing is presented, and community, safety or inclusion is expected to appear, as if the arrow between cause and effect needed no explanation. A serious proposal names its mechanisms.
Try it: what would you need to know?
“This square will encourage encounter.”Find the mechanism +
“This housing will be affordable.”Find the mechanism +
“This park will make the neighbourhood safer.”Find the mechanism +
“This bike lane will make the city sustainable.”Find the mechanism +
Winner makes two different claims
Langdon Winner calls his approach a theory of technological politics. Read his article with these two claims in mind (Winner, 1980, pp. 123–135).
The design of a device or system can settle a question in a community. It distributes power, privilege or access. The same technology could have been arranged differently.
Some technologies require, or are strongly compatible with, particular forms of organisation and authority.
“Require” or “compatible with”: why does the difference matter?Open the answer +
Claim 1 or claim 2?
Low bridges over a parkway keep buses out.
○ Claim 1 · Arrangement
Yes. The arrangement of the artefact settles who can use the road. Any society could build higher bridges.
○ Claim 2 · Inherently political
Not quite. Nothing about a bridge requires a particular political order. The politics is in how this one was arranged.
A nuclear weapon needs secure custody, secrecy and a tight chain of command.
○ Claim 1 · Arrangement
Not quite. This is not about how one weapon was arranged. Any nuclear weapon brings these demands.
○ Claim 2 · Inherently political
Yes. Winner’s strongest example. The technology itself demands a particular form of authority (Winner, 1980).
A bench with armrests every 60 cm stops people from lying down.
○ Claim 1 · Arrangement
Yes. The same bench could have been designed without them. The choice settles who can rest there.
○ Claim 2 · Inherently political
Not quite. Benches in general do not demand any form of authority. This one was arranged to exclude.
A national electricity grid needs central coordination to keep supply and demand in balance.
○ Claim 1 · Arrangement
Not quite. This is about what the whole system needs to run, not about one design choice.
○ Claim 2 · Inherently political
Yes, at least partly: grids need coordination. But notice the second question: does that mean one authority, or can coordination be shared? Keep this for section 6.
Fascist regimes used monumental symmetry and ceremonial space to stage the leader above the crowd. But empires, republics, courts and democracies have also used classical columns and grand axes. Washington’s neoclassical buildings can evoke Greek civic ideals, Roman imperial power, or both. Style is not a reliable ideological fingerprint. The politics lies in who commissioned it, who can enter, who is policed there and how the public reads it.
A feature that enables or encourages certain actions. A wide step invites sitting; a spike forbids it. Affordances shape conduct, but they do not mechanically determine it.
Paris, 1853–1870: were Haussmann’s boulevards built to stop the barricades?Open the answer +
Robert Moses with a model of his proposed Battery Bridge, 1939. The bridge was never built. Photo: C. M. Stieglitz, New York World-Telegram & Sun. Library of Congress, cph.3c36079, via Wikimedia Commons. No known copyright restrictions.
Who was Robert Moses?
If you are not familiar with this guy, you’d better be. From the 1920s until 1968, Robert Moses shaped New York City and New York State more than any elected mayor or governor. He never won an election. Instead he held appointed posts, often several at once: among them New York City parks commissioner and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (Caro, 1974).
Through them he controlled roads, bridges, parks, beaches and urban renewal. His projects opened the region to motorists, displaced entire neighbourhoods, many of them home to low-income, Black and Puerto Rican residents, and gave the car a lasting advantage over public transport (Caro, 1974; Ballon & Jackson, 2007).
How can an unelected official become so powerful?Open the answer +
Did Moses ever try to win an election?Open the answer +
One more detail from his biographyOpen the answer +
Jane Jacobs against the master builder
Jane Jacobs was a writer and activist living in Greenwich Village. She showed that apparently “technical” traffic schemes destroyed streets, local economies and organised communities. She helped lead the fight against Moses’s plans to run a road through Washington Square Park and to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Both schemes were eventually abandoned.
Moses dismissed his opponents as “a bunch of mothers”: a gendered insult meant to treat residents’ knowledge as amateur obstruction. In practice, the “mothers” understood the city rather better than the master builder, as Jacobs later showed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Caro, 1974; Jacobs, 1961).
Two ways of seeing the city
Open each question to compare them. These are simplified positions, to help you think; read Caro (1974) and Jacobs (1961) for the full picture.
Who knows the city?+
What is a street for?+
What is an old, poor neighbourhood?+
How should we plan?+
Look at the photo again. What is Jacobs holding?Open the answer +
Is Jacobs beyond criticism?Open the answer +
Take a side, then open it to find the argument you must answer.
Agree +
Your strongest point: He used unelected power to bulldoze neighbourhoods, and his biographer documents openly racist views and decisions (Caro, 1974). The people who paid were the poorest.
Now answer this: Millions still use his parks, pools, beaches, bridges and playgrounds every day. Some historians argue that New York would have been worse off without them (Ballon & Jackson, 2007). Can a villain build so much public good?
Disagree +
Your strongest point: He built public works on a scale nobody else managed, many of them for ordinary people who had no country houses and no beaches.
Now answer this: Public for whom? If the benefits went mainly to car owners and the costs to displaced tenants, is “he built a lot” a defence at all?
The “racist bridges” on trial
Winner’s most famous example concerns the bridges over the parkways to Long Island’s beaches. It is a wonderful story. Is it true? Follow the evidence step by step.
1 · The story+
In The Power Broker, Robert Caro reported that Moses had the parkway bridges built too low for buses, to keep poorer, disproportionately Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers away from Jones Beach. Caro’s source was Sidney Shapiro, a close associate of Moses and chief engineer of the Long Island State Park Commission. Langdon Winner turned the story into his most famous example (Caro, 1974; Winner, 1980).
2 · The quote+
Shapiro told Caro: “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up” (Caro, 1974, as cited in Campanella, 2017). This is the core of the argument: a rule can be reversed, concrete lasts.
3 · The doubts+
Other scholars questioned the evidence (Joerges, 1999; Woolgar & Cooper, 1999). All early American parkways banned commercial traffic, trucks and buses included, so the bridges were not needed to keep buses off. Buses reached Jones Beach by other routes. And Moses planned bus drop-off zones at Jacob Riis Park, his other big seaside park (Campanella, 2017).
4 · The measurements+
Campanella checked a state database of bridge clearances. The Southern State bridges really are lower than those on comparable parkways (see the chart). Shapiro may have been right about the intention, even if buses had other ways to reach the beach.
In 2017 the historian Thomas Campanella compared the original bridges on Moses’s Southern State Parkway with those on three earlier Westchester parkways. Which road had the lowest average clearance?
○ Bronx River Parkway
No. Its bridges average 115.6 inches, lower than the other Westchester roads, but not the lowest.
○ Southern State Parkway
Yes. The Moses parkway averages 107.6 inches eastbound, against 121.6 on the Hutchinson and 123.2 on the Saw Mill. Four of its structures are under eight feet; the three Westchester roads have one between them (Campanella, 2017).
○ They were all about the same
No. The difference is more than a foot compared with the Saw Mill River Parkway.
Average clearance of the original bridges and overpasses: 20 on the Southern State (eastbound) and 20 across the three Westchester parkways. Data: Campanella (2017), from New York State Department of Transportation records. Metric conversions ours.
Now judge each claim
Moses’s bridges on the Southern State are lower than on comparable earlier parkways.
○ Well supported
Yes. Campanella measured them against a state database.
○ Plausible but contested
Not quite. This one has been measured.
○ Unsupported rumour
Not quite. The measurements are published.
Moses ordered the bridges low to keep Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers off Long Island’s beaches.
○ Well supported
Not quite. The evidence is one associate’s testimony plus lower bridges. It is plausible, but not proven.
○ Plausible but contested
Yes. The testimony and the measurements fit, but buses were banned anyway and had other routes. You can claim it is plausible, and say why it is contested.
○ Unsupported rumour
Not quite. There is real evidence for it, not just rumour.
Moses’s transport system as a whole favoured car owners over people who relied on public transport.
○ Well supported
Yes. This is well documented across his roads, bridges and parks (Caro, 1974; Ballon & Jackson, 2007). It does not depend on one bridge.
○ Plausible but contested
Not quite. This broader claim has much stronger support than the bridge story.
○ Unsupported rumour
Not quite.
The methodological lesson. The dispute does not make the example useless. It changes what it teaches. A memorable story must not carry more weight than its evidence can bear. The politics is found in the arrangement as a whole, not in one evil bridge acting alone.
So much for a “city for all”.
Spikes, divided benches and other deterrents do not solve homelessness. They move unhoused people elsewhere, and make exclusion look like a small technical detail (Petty, 2016).
Rules built into things
The philosopher Bruno Latour offers a simple way to see how objects take part in action without having intentions. A sign asks drivers to slow down; a speed bump makes them. Part of the work of enforcing a rule has been delegated to the object (Latour, 1992). Agency here means the capacity to change what others can do. It does not mean consciousness. The engineer, the authority and the political system that chose the device remain accountable.
What rule has been handed to a speed bump?Open the rule +
What rule has been handed to a metro turnstile?Open the rule +
What rule has been handed to an automatic door closer?Open the rule +
What rule has been handed to armrests every 60 cm on a bench?Open the rule +
What rule has been handed to metal studs on a low wall?Open the rule +
Hostile or “defensive” architecture makes the mechanism very clear. The spikes outside a London block of flats caused a public outcry in 2014 (Petty, 2016). Read the two articles reproduced in the booklet: a first-person account by someone who had slept rough, and an overview of how hostile design spreads.
Hostile design is aimed at homeless people. Who else does it hit?Open the answer +
Why do cities choose spikes instead of housing?Open the answer +
A useful question for your fieldworkOpen the answer +
Take a side, then open it to find the argument you must answer.
Agree +
Your strongest point: Winner discusses Plato’s image of the ship at sea. In a storm, navigation needs clear, fast commands and a crew that obeys. Some technical systems work the same way.
Now answer this: Who appoints the captain, which laws govern the voyage and does the crew have rights? Technical coordination in an emergency does not settle political legitimacy.
Disagree +
Your strongest point: “Practical necessity” is often a convenient way to end a democratic argument. Ask what really must be centralised, for how long, and under whose oversight.
Now answer this: Some operations do need a clear hierarchy while they run: an operating theatre, an air-traffic tower, a reactor control room. Where exactly do you draw the line?
The Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, New Mexico, 16 July 1945. Three weeks later, atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August). Photo: United States Department of Energy, from the film Trinity and Beyond, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
The bomb, the reactor and the solar panel
“The atom bomb is an inherently political artifact. As long as it exists at all, its lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command closed to all influences that might make its workings unpredictable.”
Langdon Winner, 1980, p. 131.
Nuclear power raises related but different questions. A weapon is designed for destruction, a reactor for energy. Do not bundle them together. Compare three energy artefacts: what does each one require in order to work?
The atomic bombDesigned for destruction.What does it require? +
Secure custody, restricted information, intelligence services and a tightly controlled chain of command, for as long as the weapon exists (Winner, 1980).
How strong is the constraint? Very strong. Winner treats it as inherently political.
A nuclear power plantDesigned for energy.What does it require? +
Specialised knowledge, strict safety systems, security, regulation, and care for radioactive waste over timescales far longer than any company or government has existed.
How strong is the constraint? Strong pressures for expertise, hierarchy and central coordination. They can be governed democratically, but they cannot be wished away.
Rooftop and community solarDesigned for energy, close to where it is used.What does it require? +
Very little central control to run a single panel. But grids, tariffs, credit, land, mineral supply chains and regulation decide who benefits (Burke & Stephens, 2017).
How strong is the constraint? Weak. The technology opens possibilities; institutions distribute them.
Does nuclear power automatically produce an authoritarian state?Open the answer +
Booklet question 3: what may solar panels produce in terms of internal political relationships?Open the answer +
Does the algorithm rule democracy?
The 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma gave a powerful popular warning (Orlowski, 2020). A documentary is a starting point for inquiry, not the final evidence. First, two terms.
In the narrow sense, a sequence of instructions for performing a task.
Much more than one equation: code, training data, predicted preferences, interface design, moderation rules, advertising incentives and company decisions about what counts as success (Gillespie, 2014). Calling all of this “the algorithm” makes a human institution sound like the weather.
Bias enters through data, categories, goals and the setting in which a system is used (Noble, 2018; Selbst et al., 2019). Feeds are optimised for what a company chooses to measure: clicks, viewing time, shares. Now test your intuitions against the research.
In 2015, researchers studied what limited Facebook users’ exposure to news from the other political side. What mattered more?
○ The ranking algorithm
Not quite. The algorithm did reduce exposure somewhat, but less than users’ own choices.
○ Users’ own choices of friends and clicks
Yes. In that early study, individual choices limited exposure to cross-cutting news more than the ranking did (Bakshy, Messing & Adamic, 2015).
During the 2020 US election, an experiment reduced the like-minded content in thousands of users’ Facebook feeds. Did polarisation fall?
○ Yes, clearly
No. That is the intuitive answer, but not what the study found.
○ No measurable change
Yes. Users saw much more like-minded than cross-cutting content, but reducing it did not measurably reduce polarisation during the study period (Nyhan et al., 2023; González-Bailón et al., 2023).
If people are shown opposing views on social media, do they become more moderate?
○ Yes, that is how bubbles burst
Not necessarily. One experiment found the opposite.
○ Not necessarily. It can even harden positions
Yes. On Twitter, paid exposure to opposing views made some participants more extreme, especially Republicans (Bail et al., 2018).
So are platforms harmless? No. They organise attention, reward some kinds of communication, collect data and allow manipulation on an enormous scale. But their effects emerge together with party systems, media, identities and existing conflicts. The attempt to overturn the 2020 US election and the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 showed both institutional resistance and deep democratic fragility (Select Committee, 2022).
Take a side, then open it to find the argument you must answer.
Agree +
Your strongest point: The business model rewards outrage and allows targeted political manipulation at a scale no newspaper ever had. Read the Guardian’s 2020 editorial.
Now answer this: If removing like-minded content did not reduce polarisation, is the platform the cause, or an amplifier of conflicts that already exist?
Disagree +
Your strongest point: The research does not support the simple story of passive users trapped in sealed bubbles. Platforms also help people organise, protest and report abuses.
Now answer this: “Not the only cause” is not the same as “harmless”. Who designs the feed, who profits, and who can hold them to account?
The great European witch hunts took place mainly in the early modern period, not simply “the Middle Ages”. Women and men were tried within legal, religious and political institutions that made accusations of witchcraft deadly (Levack, 2016). Witches, in the supernatural sense, do not exist. Institutions able to kill alleged witches certainly did. Nazi propaganda spread the antisemitic lie that Jews secretly controlled states, finance and war (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2026), but Nazism also needed economic crisis, elite collaboration, authoritarian organisation and state violence (Evans, 2003).
Digital platforms did not invent prejudice or propaganda. They changed its speed, reach, targeting and visibility. That makes the architecture of attention a political question.
How cities lock choices in
Henri Lefebvre described the city as a collective work, an oeuvre, produced through social relations rather than delivered as a finished object (Lefebvre, 1996). Yet once streets, plots, buildings and infrastructure are built, they make some choices cheap and others costly. Open the cycle:
1Roads are built for cars +
Public money goes into highways and parking.
2Destinations spread out +
Shops, schools and jobs move to where land is cheap and parking easy.
3Driving becomes necessary +
Walking and public transport no longer reach the new destinations.
4Demand for more roads grows +
Congestion is used to justify the next road.
Earlier decisions shape the costs and possibilities of later ones. This is not spatial determinism: people can still change course, but it becomes more expensive the longer they wait.
Do Los Angeles and Amsterdam make people vote differently?Open the answer +
Booklet bonus: how can spaces determine political relationships, if they do?Open the answer +
Space is socially produced, but not by a society in which everyone holds the same pen.
Run an artefact audit
Pick one artefact or space in your project area: a bench, a gate, a bus stop, a flood wall, a parking scheme, a solar park. Work through these questions in a group. They turn a provocative slogan into a method of inquiry.
1Who designed, financed and authorised it?+
Find the client, the funder, the designer and the permit. Planning records, council minutes and project websites are good sources.
2Which actions does it make easier, harder or impossible?+
Observe on site at different times of day. Photograph the object, but not identifiable people without consent.
3Who receives the benefits, and who carries the costs or risks?+
Compare groups: residents and visitors, owners and renters, drivers and pedestrians, people with and without disabilities.
4Which institutions, skills and forms of authority does it need to operate?+
Who maintains it, who controls it, who can switch it off? How strong is the constraint: does it require these, or is it just compatible with them?
5Can affected people contest, repair or redesign it?+
Is there a procedure, a complaints route, a participatory process? Has anyone tried? What happened?
6What can you honestly claim?+
Sort your findings: well supported, plausible but contested, or unsupported. Remember the bridges.
Questions
Try to give short answers, discussed in a group. Upload your document to “Assignments” in Brightspace. The stars show how hard each question is.
Why does it sound a bit off to say that objects have politics?
What are examples of spatial expressions of political ideologies?
What may solar panels produce in terms of internal political relationships?
How does Facebook undermine democracy? In your opinion, does it simultaneously help democracy?
You get our undying admiration for answering: how can spaces determine political relationships, if so?
Cogito, ergo doleo. +
Latin for “I think, therefore I suffer.” A twist on Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” Thinking about the politics of things can hurt a little. It is worth it.The texts behind this session
Other sources cited on this page: Andreou, A. (2015, 18 February). Anti-homeless spikes: ‘Sleeping rough opened my eyes to the city’s barbed cruelty’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/defensive-architecture-keeps-poverty-undeen-and-makes-us-more-hostile · Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L. A. (2015). Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science, 348(6239), 1130–1132. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa1160 · Ballon, H., & Jackson, K. T. (Eds.). (2007). Robert Moses and the modern city. W. W. Norton. · Bocchialini, M. (2019, 30 March). The growth of hostile architecture. A-Id. https://a-id.org/the-growth-of-hostile-architecture-how-developments-in-urban-design-are-exacerbating-social-injustice/ · Caro, R. A. (1974). The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York. Knopf. · Evans, R. J. (2003). The coming of the Third Reich. Allen Lane. · Gillespie, T. (2014). The relevance of algorithms. In Media technologies (pp. 167–194). MIT Press. · González-Bailón, S., et al. (2023). Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook. Science, 381(6656), 392–398. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ade7138 · Harvey, D. (2003). Paris, capital of modernity. Routledge. · Holston, J. (1989). The modernist city. University of Chicago Press. · Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. Random House. · Latour, B. (1992). Where are the missing masses? In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping technology/building society (pp. 225–258). MIT Press. · Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writings on cities. Blackwell. · Levack, B. P. (2016). The witch-hunt in early modern Europe (4th ed.). Routledge. · Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression. NYU Press. · Orlowski, J. (Director). (2020). The social dilemma [Film]. Exposure Labs. · Paccoud, A. M. (2012). A politics of regulation [Doctoral dissertation, LSE]. https://etheses.lse.ac.uk/1043/ · Rodden, J. A. (2019). Why cities lose. Basic Books. · Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state. Yale University Press. · Selbst, A. D., et al. (2019). Fairness and abstraction in sociotechnical systems. FAT* ’19 (pp. 59–68). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287598 · Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. (2022). Final report. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-J6-REPORT · The Guardian. (2020, 5 July). The Guardian view on Facebook and democracy: Real and present danger [Editorial]. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/05/the-guardian-view-on-facebook-and-democracy-real-and-present-danger · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (2026). An antisemitic conspiracy: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion · Zukin, S. (2010). Naked city: The death and life of authentic urban places. Oxford University Press. Accessed on: 29 September 2026.