Rethinking ‘Inherently Political Technologies’ Through Platform Cooperatives

In his seminal work on the politics of technology, Langdon Winner introduces the notion of “inherently political technologies.” Technologies are inherently political, either by requiring specific social and political conditions to function or by being strongly compatible with such conditions. However, Winner’s definition identifies inherently political technologies only as those that align with or reproduce existing social and political conditions, such as mainstream digital platforms (e.g., Airbnb, UberEats), but overlooks those that actively resist or undermine those conditions, such as cooperative digital platforms (e.g., Fairbnb, CoopCycle). Because of its conceptual limitations, Winner’s definition fails to fully capture the political nature of platform cooperatives in particular, and of radical technologies in general. This paper builds on Winner’s original notion and amends it to include the dimension of resistance to social and political conditions as an additional criterion for technologies to qualify as inherently political, thereby making the concept more relevant to contemporary (digital) technological realities. The paper then applies this revised conceptualization to platform cooperatives and explores its broader theoretical implications.