This paper draws upon the traditions of social construction of technology and actor–network theory, in an attempt to show that just as these approaches have been used to expose the contingent nature of ‘technical’ change, they can also be adapted to show the contingency of the ‘social’ aspects of technology, such as redundancy and technological unemployment, which have in recent years assumed an almost unassailable sense of inevitability. This process is begun when technology is viewed as a social network. Then, focusing on the production phase in the life cycle of a technical system, it is argued here that the jettisoning of both people and technical resources from the network may get presented as part of technology’s ‘natural’ trajectory, but is often part of the (socio-technical) ‘heterogenous engineering’ necessary for the stabilization of that technology, and consequently need not be seen as inevitable.