Jeremy Crampton has responded in a very interesting way to my comment that ‘the political is always technical’. I made that comment in my remarks to the ArcticNet conference last week – a summary and the audio recording are here. Here’s the key paragraph he is responding to:

One of the previous presenters had made the claim that there was nothing political about some of the techniques. While I made the comment that we could say that there is always a politics to the technical, I was most interested in turning his claim around, rather than disagreeing with it: suggesting that the political is always technical. I’ve made this claim before in relation to territory as a political technology, as dependent on all sorts of techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain.

Jeremy’s post is interesting on several levels. The first is that he sees this response as a…