Winner is at his best as an artful social critic. In three essays, he asks the important questions about appropriate technology, decentralization and computers that one is embarrassed to ask for fear of being too elementary: Is appropriate technology really appropriate? Do decentralists really know what they mean by decentralization? Are the expansive claims of those who see computers as introducing a more participatory, freer society grossly overblown?
All this is done with an impressive erudition. One learns, for example, that Lewis Mumford, in the early 1960s, was first to insist that some technologies were compatible with free political structures, others were not; that Marx and Engels introduced the idea of technology as a "Form of Life;" that Robert Moses actually built the overpasses on the parkways around New York City so low that passenger cars but not buses could traverse them, and thus the undesirable poor (who at the ...
