Intelligent Uses of Engineering and the Legitimacy of State Power

The destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11 not only brought terrorism to the forefront of politics, but also made visible the political significance of engineering. The targeting of a skyscraper and use of commercial airplanes for the attack were frightening because they displayed not just political rage, but an unexpected intelligence. Osama Bin Laden raised the scary specter of a terrorist engineer. Scholars in Science and Technology Studies have argued before that hybrids and built environments could be tools of power, but the significance of these analyses became newly evident on 9/11.