Part of Langdon Winner's essay, "Artifacts/Ideas and Political Culture" focuses on technology's impact on freedom. According to Winner, our society often rushed to embrace technological advances which are antithetical to many of our deeply-held beliefs about freedom and liberty. New technologies allow employers to monitor their employees' productivity more closely than ever before. In addition to reducing workers' privacy, these monitoring systems can actually lead to lower quality in the work done. One example given in the essay is the case of Maevon Garrett, a telephone operator in Baltimore. One day, Garrett was called into her supervisor's office and abruptly fired. The reason for her termination was a new computer system that monitored the number of calls taken by each operator in a given time. According to the computer system, Garrett was taking fewer calls per hour than most other operators, and was thus not as efficient as they were. Garrett protested, explaining that the reason she took fewer calls was that she often received calls from lonely people who simply needed someone to talk to. Garrett refused to hang up on these people just to meet an arbitrary standard of efficiency. If Garrett had submitted to the efficiency standard, then her work would have lost some of its humanity. She would have been little better than the machine that was watching her.

Winner points out that employer monitoring has been steadily increasing in recent years, and has appeared in some unusual places. He gives another example-this time, one that has absolutely nothing to do with computers. In the American Southwest, farm workers till the ground with short-handled hoes. The length of the handles forces the workers to bend over or kneel to use the hoes. However, if a worker is digging in the ground, it makes more sense to use a tool that allows the worker to stand up. The reason for the short handle is that when workers are forced to bend over to do their jobs, the foreman can easily look across the field and see who is working and who is not. If a worker is standing up, then he must not be working, and the foreman can apply discipline. Thus, the comfort of the workers has been sacrificed so that the employers can more easily monitor the workers.

Winner goes on to say that there are many instances of technologies that erode freedom in the name of efficiency-often without anyone realizing it. This could be because people simply don't examine the possible ramifications of new technological advances. People think only of how they can use a new device-not how it affects them. The possible restrictions on their freedom that can result from a new technology simply don't occur to them.

Winner suggests that when new technologies are developed, people should look at not just the immediate benefits, but the larger political and social ramifications. If our society does this, he says, we can avoid having our freedom worn away even more by new conveniences.