New technologies crystallize preexisting social relations. This is not a natural law as much as a general observation and one with obvious counterpoints. But as a heuristic for science and technology studies it offers ways of dealing with the conundrum formulated by Melvin Kranzberg as his 'first law of technology':
"Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral."
This is why policy and activism is always urgent in response to new technological developments. Because left to their own devices, engineers will more often than not engineer systems that extrude the social dynamics of power, capital, culture and discourse into physical and digital reality.
This is currently the case in the world of policing, where big data and machine learning techniques are being put to the service of attempting to predict future crime. But as Ingrid Burrington writes, "The future of policing, it