| Chapter 1: | Converting Consumers: The Conceptual Dependence of Controversial Artifacts |
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Aramis is the story of France’s failed attempt to create a rapid personal transit (PRT) system that would have combined the workings of a regular railway train with the personal service of a taxi. Separate train “cars” would pick up passengers on demand. Each train car would monitor its own speed and distance; thus the cars would be physically separate from each other. Each would find the most efficient route for its passengers, bypassing train stations as needed. This method of transportation was designed for people living in the suburbs, where stations are typically smaller and served less frequently by conventional trains.
Several sophisticated technological systems would coordinate intercar linkages. The project spanned almost two decades, from the 1970s into the 1980s, before it was dissolved—hence the “death of Aramis.” Latour attributes the death of Aramis to a lack of human sponsors (or, in the parlance of SCOT, a relevant social group).
While Latour pioneered the concept of nonhumans as social actors with their own agency, his analysis of the Aramis project pleads for human intervention in the early stages of technological development. Latour subscribes to Basalla’s notion that things have inherent momentum, except that for Latour diffusion is contingent on nonaction by users to “open the black box.” Basalla argues for a form of material inertia—a compulsion of artifacts to diversify49—whereas Latour never separates material agency from the network in which an artifact resides.