Winner argues that while technology has been central to political thought for some 200 years, the 20th century proliferation of technologies and their integration in everyday life has made technology into a "vast, diverse, ubiquitous totality that stands at the center of our modern culture." This diversity makes the word "technology" so complex as to be meaningless, or at least illegible, with the result that technology itself becomes a rather terrifying black box, appearing to usurp political power and move forward of its own volition. In modernity, the complexity of technology requires a new ruling class, engineers, to interface with it, and an environment conducive to its operations, with which architects and engineers happily comply. Technology also requires a particular social order to fulfill its operational requirements - which is to say that technology creates a particular form of technological politics, where the claim that "man controls technology" looks more irrational than the opposite.
