Technocracy always struck me as weirdly incoherent? If you take the economy, probably the most studied of government policies, it is not 1 number. There are many questions about what priorities ought to be. There is no 'expert' answer for how many starving poor people are a worthy trade off for a GDP point. Even if there was, there is an economist branch that disagrees with any possible position you might take. The question of which experts to listen to almost entirely subsumes the question of what experts say. More than anything it's a branding strategy. "Putting me, a surveillance investor, in charge of international relations is clearly more rational and scientific than putting the other guy in charge."
It coalesced at a time when science was becoming more accessible to the masses, more educated technicians running around engaging in work and trade.
And these technicians were frustrated by bosses who didn't understand the science and technique behind things.
So there was great inefficiency because the bosses hadn't caught up to the technicians in their understanding of the world.
And so the political idea of "put in charge the people who actually understand the problem" caught hold of the technicians, and they were fired up for a period of time and they called it technocracy.
Commenters here are getting confused. There's technocracy, the governance[1]. And Technocracy, the pseudo-cult movement[2]. They quickly evolved into different things with different ideologies. The article is mostly about the latter movement.
Back in the 1980s, I lived in Redlands, California, when the last adherents of this movement were still alive. From my conversations with them, it seemed the movement evolved into a semi-new age cult ala Scientology and the Process Church of the Final Judgement[1] (the original cult, not the one borne later, from the time later Skinny Puppy album). In the end, it felt like an anti-technology movement.
There was significant overlap between Scientology's Dianetics and Technocracy. At that time, they didn't seem to be very technology-inclined or tech-positive.
Nonetheless, despite being in their 80s or 90s, they were still quite devout and had their clothing and automobiles decorated with Technocracy ephemera.
One thing is for sure, whether you like it or not countries that adopt policies that promote tech will outcompete and destroy other countries (metaphorically). You can’t do anything but watch technology take over. It doesn’t care about what you want or prefer.
Not necessarily, it's possible that a country that goes too fast with human augmentation will end up accidentally sterilizing the majority of its population, causing it to fall behind. Like the Asgard in Stargate, who accidentally sterilized themselves through excessive use of cloning.
“ However, the overall track record for technology being revolutionary on its own is poor. For the last 20-some-odd years, technological progress has been reduced to maximizing attention in the form of gimmicks, addiction, and apps nobody needs. It’s hardly the sci-fi future many once wrote about. ”
Ah yes all technological progress like AI, EVs and biotech are all bad because social media bad. Why is this article taken seriously
“AI is a gimmick” this at least explains why the median person finds such vacuous articles insightful. Although I must say - update yourself on ai because it is most definitely not a gimmick
“Like religious millenarianism awaiting the Second Coming, tech elites believe technology alone will usher in a total and complete transformation of society.”
This is the standard view amongst most social theorists and economists. (Of course it’s not technology alone but that’s the prerequisite).
Without agriculture and the Industrial Revolution, say bye bye to your woke policies L G B T Q rights and feminism. Humans simply wont develop mentally while slogging in a farm or being hunter gatherers.
Surprisingly, Thiel has been quite right about this and the general populace whose sole ideology is “rich people bad” have not internalised some fundamental truths of ssociology and economics
This is pretty reductive. There are different systems (even broken ones like the Soviet union managed to build up an army and feed its people) and there are vital and useless technologies.
Thiel is engaged in surveillance (PayPal, Palantir) and takes government money and calls all opponents "The Antichrist". Yes, deranged rich people are bad.
Peter Thiel is the definition of "rich people bad", he's the stereotype of the billionaire who wants to rule over the state because somehow he knows what's best for us.
Ok he’s bad but what has he got wrong? I think he was pretty good at predicting certain things and I find him at least a bit insightful. Without going into good vs bad
Can you name a prediction? Most of your claims in the prior paragraph are retroactive causal explanations of phenomena, "just so" stories per se. Most aspects of Thiel's apparent vision of the future that have come true did so through his direct involvement via money, power, and influence. I see no meaningful evidence of unusual predictive power demonstrated thus far by you or anything else I've heard about. I suppose you could take the line that having power and using it to impose your will on the world is prediction in a sense, but it's certainly an unusual usage of the word
I literally told you that it was technology - agricultural revolution in this case. This made people specialised so that they dind't have to waste time slogging for food which freed their mind up for other mental activities.
Technology did change the world, and technocrats did shape it. This was part of what Burnham called the "managerial revolution". In the 1930s the fascists, communists, and New Dealers all took the reins and governed their societies in new technocratic ways. It has never really changed ever since.
The permanent war economy of the United States never ceased, the constant monetary tweaking by the Federal Reserve never ceased, the "nudge units" and public relations firms that manage opinion never ceased. The television was and is a technocratic tool. The birth control pill, and pharmaceuticals generally, were and are technocratic tools. They are technological means by which to manage populations. As Yuval Harari puts it, the answer to "unnecessary people" is "drugs and computer games".
The main difference between the original technocracy movement, and what actually played out in history, is that the technicians and engineers operating the machinery of population management were never really in charge. They were merely instruments -- means to an end. Aldous Huxley explained the situation in 1958:
"By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."
Today the biggest challenges to the Western technocratic oligarchy are 1) loss of narrative control via the internet, 2) external threats from other great (technocratic) powers, and 3) internal decline and incompetence.
> In the 1930s the fascists, communists, and New Dealers all took the reins and governed their societies in new technocratic ways.
... They are technological means by which to manage populations. As Yuval Harari puts it, the answer to "unnecessary people" is "drugs and computer games".
while "New Deal" have a lot of issues, note that 2 other approaches totally failed. At least for some time we considered them as failed ones. Unfortunately, a bit refreshed for some external appearance they start to be more and more popular again by populistically riding the issues of the "New Deal" approach while we all start to collectively forget why those 2 lost.
It's so wild to believe humanity held such a hopeful political mythos, ever.
And I see such appeal here. To make efficient, to make a government that functions that builds that runs well. Mechanistic sympathy is a key term that sends the engineers heart aflutter; to work together holds great delight. The idea that there might be some shots for mankind at engineering not just a social, as the article highlights, but government itself has some real appeal, one that today seems doomed by mutual "it will will never work" / "it will never happen" anti-willpower.
Reciprocally through, I think many alas agree broadly (beyond Africa) with this the dark assessment of the political offered by Captain Ibrahim Traoré who today announced an end of Democracy, seemingly appointed himself dictator of Burka Faso:
> "The truth is, politics in Africa – or at least what we've experienced in Burkina - is that a real politician is someone who embodies every vice: a liar, a sycophant, a smooth-talker."
I do wish there were a stronger engineering to politics pipeline. Politics being such a money and campaigning game, a game of mass appeal, really ruins so much. Thats both a problem with the electorate, but also a problem with how we've let democracy evolve, how mass media and the courts and our systems themselves have iterated over the years. It would just be so nice to think we could take our living documents, our systems, & spirit them forward to respond to all that become, and hopefully redeem our collaborative search for a better more orderly well functioning state & world.
Maybe we should all fly that Vermillion & Chromium monad flag (the technocracy's flag), at least a bit, in our hearts!
(The Technocracy are also a fantastic somewhat unrelated quasi villain in the White Wolf game Mage, engineers of all manners including social working to end the undue influence of the supernatural on the world, defending and sometimes tyrannizing mankind with science. It's a lovely connection to know both Technocracies bit!)
Why optimize for efficiency though? Why not human flourishing or planetary health, whichever way you wish to define that?
Efficiency sounds to me like an absolutely awful way to run any society as it's what turns individuals into disposable cogs of a machine that needs to be operated smoothly because, well, no obvious reason other than a fetish to see the machine run smoothly, no matter the human cost.
Having met the people that run engineering firms, I’m not sure I want them anywhere near my government either. I’ll take my politicians inept over ruthlessly efficient, any day
I dunno, Common Sense puts forth the idea that government exists to occupy the space where men are evil. It grows and shrinks accordingly. A larger role for government implies more evil, not less.
Expected to read about past and current connections between technocracy and fascism. Was not disappointed.
Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy. And that's something we should be resisting at every opportunity.
> Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy
Several people (maybe all, I do not know for sure) on that list are pretty hard core right wing populists, correct? Isn't that completely at odds with technocracy? Or are you thinking that they are just taking advantage of a populist movement but are themselves technocrats?
They wish primarily to use technology to control government/people more fully. Their current angle is to side with a populist government. But they were making deals with Obama and Biden as well. The only populist in my reckoning is trump, who truly seems to like the power for its own sake and will whip people into a frenzy to get it.
Think it over. No one who leads a populist movement is ever ultimately sincere in his populism. But where, excuse me, where on Earth did you get the idea that any of those guys is a populist?
They are trumpist, because Trump is highly narcissistic and disgusted by _weakness_ in others. They are elitist Nietzschean social darwinists at heart and believe IQ should determine social status.
The populism stuff doesn't mean "We're protecting the little guy from elites who conspire against him." It means "We're protecting ourselves from other elites who conspire against us - but the little guy will still be better off with us as the authoritarian elite."
The key word here is populism. Finding scapegoats (immigrants, woke feminists, lazy unemployed people) to explain away societal ills caused by inequality. Of course tech billionaires prefer blaming the scapegoats to blaming themselves. It serves as a political shield, so that they can continue to hoard wealth and control.
In the 30s, industry leaders aligned themselves with Hitler and Mussolini. They both focused on technology as a means of control. Capitalists also see the benefit of cheap labor and a war economy.
Right wing populism and technocracy are a match made in heaven, because fascism is good for the bottom line.
Technocracy always struck me as weirdly incoherent? If you take the economy, probably the most studied of government policies, it is not 1 number. There are many questions about what priorities ought to be. There is no 'expert' answer for how many starving poor people are a worthy trade off for a GDP point. Even if there was, there is an economist branch that disagrees with any possible position you might take. The question of which experts to listen to almost entirely subsumes the question of what experts say. More than anything it's a branding strategy. "Putting me, a surveillance investor, in charge of international relations is clearly more rational and scientific than putting the other guy in charge."
My theory
It coalesced at a time when science was becoming more accessible to the masses, more educated technicians running around engaging in work and trade.
And these technicians were frustrated by bosses who didn't understand the science and technique behind things.
So there was great inefficiency because the bosses hadn't caught up to the technicians in their understanding of the world.
And so the political idea of "put in charge the people who actually understand the problem" caught hold of the technicians, and they were fired up for a period of time and they called it technocracy.
I first heard about this in an former coworker's (Robin Berjon) talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s878bm15mrk at an IPFS conference
Fascinating
He writes about these things on this blog as well(https://berjon.com/ethicswishing/), and has a forthcoming book on related topics last I heard
Commenters here are getting confused. There's technocracy, the governance[1]. And Technocracy, the pseudo-cult movement[2]. They quickly evolved into different things with different ideologies. The article is mostly about the latter movement.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
Futurism is the same. It's an appealing concept but the actual Futurist movement was basically just fascist.
What's psuedo-cult about it?
Oh neat they're still accepting applications.
thank you for your helpful snark, the commentor couldnt have been asking just out of curiosity because he's evil
Back in the 1980s, I lived in Redlands, California, when the last adherents of this movement were still alive. From my conversations with them, it seemed the movement evolved into a semi-new age cult ala Scientology and the Process Church of the Final Judgement[1] (the original cult, not the one borne later, from the time later Skinny Puppy album). In the end, it felt like an anti-technology movement.
There was significant overlap between Scientology's Dianetics and Technocracy. At that time, they didn't seem to be very technology-inclined or tech-positive.
Nonetheless, despite being in their 80s or 90s, they were still quite devout and had their clothing and automobiles decorated with Technocracy ephemera.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_Church_of_the_Final_Ju...
One thing is for sure, whether you like it or not countries that adopt policies that promote tech will outcompete and destroy other countries (metaphorically). You can’t do anything but watch technology take over. It doesn’t care about what you want or prefer.
Not necessarily, it's possible that a country that goes too fast with human augmentation will end up accidentally sterilizing the majority of its population, causing it to fall behind. Like the Asgard in Stargate, who accidentally sterilized themselves through excessive use of cloning.
Sure this is the exception to prove my rule
This idea seems to come and go all over the world.
It reminds me of the "Científicos" [1] in Mexico during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (early 1900s).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cient%C3%ADfico
Huh. I wonder if any of this was at all part of (or all of) the inspiration for C.O.C.'s EP "Technocracy"[1]?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_(EP)
Lyrics link, to assess by, https://genius.com/Corrosion-of-conformity-technocracy-lyric...
“ However, the overall track record for technology being revolutionary on its own is poor. For the last 20-some-odd years, technological progress has been reduced to maximizing attention in the form of gimmicks, addiction, and apps nobody needs. It’s hardly the sci-fi future many once wrote about. ”
Ah yes all technological progress like AI, EVs and biotech are all bad because social media bad. Why is this article taken seriously
AI is a gimmick and most money goes into distracting Internet and advertising tech.
We can barely reach the moon again.
“AI is a gimmick” this at least explains why the median person finds such vacuous articles insightful. Although I must say - update yourself on ai because it is most definitely not a gimmick
“Like religious millenarianism awaiting the Second Coming, tech elites believe technology alone will usher in a total and complete transformation of society.”
This is the standard view amongst most social theorists and economists. (Of course it’s not technology alone but that’s the prerequisite).
Without agriculture and the Industrial Revolution, say bye bye to your woke policies L G B T Q rights and feminism. Humans simply wont develop mentally while slogging in a farm or being hunter gatherers.
Surprisingly, Thiel has been quite right about this and the general populace whose sole ideology is “rich people bad” have not internalised some fundamental truths of ssociology and economics
This is pretty reductive. There are different systems (even broken ones like the Soviet union managed to build up an army and feed its people) and there are vital and useless technologies.
Thiel is engaged in surveillance (PayPal, Palantir) and takes government money and calls all opponents "The Antichrist". Yes, deranged rich people are bad.
Not sure whether you are addressing my main point
Peter Thiel is the definition of "rich people bad", he's the stereotype of the billionaire who wants to rule over the state because somehow he knows what's best for us.
He's a lunatic.
Ok he’s bad but what has he got wrong? I think he was pretty good at predicting certain things and I find him at least a bit insightful. Without going into good vs bad
>what has he got wrong?
For starters, Greta Thunberg doesn't seem to be the antichrist.
Can you name a prediction? Most of your claims in the prior paragraph are retroactive causal explanations of phenomena, "just so" stories per se. Most aspects of Thiel's apparent vision of the future that have come true did so through his direct involvement via money, power, and influence. I see no meaningful evidence of unusual predictive power demonstrated thus far by you or anything else I've heard about. I suppose you could take the line that having power and using it to impose your will on the world is prediction in a sense, but it's certainly an unusual usage of the word
>Humans simply wont develop mentally while slogging in a farm or being hunter gatherers.
Uh what? How do you think they came up with systems of government, economics, and religion if you characterize them as basically cows on pasture?
I literally told you that it was technology - agricultural revolution in this case. This made people specialised so that they dind't have to waste time slogging for food which freed their mind up for other mental activities.
Hunter gatherer tribes also have religion, culture, and economics, and ideas.
they have shitty versions of all of them
Technology did change the world, and technocrats did shape it. This was part of what Burnham called the "managerial revolution". In the 1930s the fascists, communists, and New Dealers all took the reins and governed their societies in new technocratic ways. It has never really changed ever since.
The permanent war economy of the United States never ceased, the constant monetary tweaking by the Federal Reserve never ceased, the "nudge units" and public relations firms that manage opinion never ceased. The television was and is a technocratic tool. The birth control pill, and pharmaceuticals generally, were and are technocratic tools. They are technological means by which to manage populations. As Yuval Harari puts it, the answer to "unnecessary people" is "drugs and computer games".
The main difference between the original technocracy movement, and what actually played out in history, is that the technicians and engineers operating the machinery of population management were never really in charge. They were merely instruments -- means to an end. Aldous Huxley explained the situation in 1958:
"By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."
Today the biggest challenges to the Western technocratic oligarchy are 1) loss of narrative control via the internet, 2) external threats from other great (technocratic) powers, and 3) internal decline and incompetence.
4) energy and materials scarcity and compounding ecological externalities
this of course affecting not only the Western regimes but technocratic rule everywhere
> In the 1930s the fascists, communists, and New Dealers all took the reins and governed their societies in new technocratic ways. ... They are technological means by which to manage populations. As Yuval Harari puts it, the answer to "unnecessary people" is "drugs and computer games".
while "New Deal" have a lot of issues, note that 2 other approaches totally failed. At least for some time we considered them as failed ones. Unfortunately, a bit refreshed for some external appearance they start to be more and more popular again by populistically riding the issues of the "New Deal" approach while we all start to collectively forget why those 2 lost.
It's so wild to believe humanity held such a hopeful political mythos, ever.
And I see such appeal here. To make efficient, to make a government that functions that builds that runs well. Mechanistic sympathy is a key term that sends the engineers heart aflutter; to work together holds great delight. The idea that there might be some shots for mankind at engineering not just a social, as the article highlights, but government itself has some real appeal, one that today seems doomed by mutual "it will will never work" / "it will never happen" anti-willpower.
Reciprocally through, I think many alas agree broadly (beyond Africa) with this the dark assessment of the political offered by Captain Ibrahim Traoré who today announced an end of Democracy, seemingly appointed himself dictator of Burka Faso:
> "The truth is, politics in Africa – or at least what we've experienced in Burkina - is that a real politician is someone who embodies every vice: a liar, a sycophant, a smooth-talker."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly0zp1xgz3o
I do wish there were a stronger engineering to politics pipeline. Politics being such a money and campaigning game, a game of mass appeal, really ruins so much. Thats both a problem with the electorate, but also a problem with how we've let democracy evolve, how mass media and the courts and our systems themselves have iterated over the years. It would just be so nice to think we could take our living documents, our systems, & spirit them forward to respond to all that become, and hopefully redeem our collaborative search for a better more orderly well functioning state & world.
Maybe we should all fly that Vermillion & Chromium monad flag (the technocracy's flag), at least a bit, in our hearts!
(The Technocracy are also a fantastic somewhat unrelated quasi villain in the White Wolf game Mage, engineers of all manners including social working to end the undue influence of the supernatural on the world, defending and sometimes tyrannizing mankind with science. It's a lovely connection to know both Technocracies bit!)
There's a steady trickle of pretty good technocracy stories, btw. Some good reads, including Marageret Mead, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=technocracy
Why optimize for efficiency though? Why not human flourishing or planetary health, whichever way you wish to define that?
Efficiency sounds to me like an absolutely awful way to run any society as it's what turns individuals into disposable cogs of a machine that needs to be operated smoothly because, well, no obvious reason other than a fetish to see the machine run smoothly, no matter the human cost.
Technocracy, and the doctrine of materialism, sees humans as machines.
Or perhaps not even that. We're just fuel for the machines.
Having met the people that run engineering firms, I’m not sure I want them anywhere near my government either. I’ll take my politicians inept over ruthlessly efficient, any day
You don't want the people that run the engineering firms, no. You might want some of the people that work there.
I dunno, Common Sense puts forth the idea that government exists to occupy the space where men are evil. It grows and shrinks accordingly. A larger role for government implies more evil, not less.
Expected to read about past and current connections between technocracy and fascism. Was not disappointed.
Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy. And that's something we should be resisting at every opportunity.
> Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy
Several people (maybe all, I do not know for sure) on that list are pretty hard core right wing populists, correct? Isn't that completely at odds with technocracy? Or are you thinking that they are just taking advantage of a populist movement but are themselves technocrats?
They wish primarily to use technology to control government/people more fully. Their current angle is to side with a populist government. But they were making deals with Obama and Biden as well. The only populist in my reckoning is trump, who truly seems to like the power for its own sake and will whip people into a frenzy to get it.
Think it over. No one who leads a populist movement is ever ultimately sincere in his populism. But where, excuse me, where on Earth did you get the idea that any of those guys is a populist?
Mostly by who they identify with. I get you, they do not personally seem likely to be populists, but that's the movement they're with.
They are trumpist, because Trump is highly narcissistic and disgusted by _weakness_ in others. They are elitist Nietzschean social darwinists at heart and believe IQ should determine social status.
The populism stuff doesn't mean "We're protecting the little guy from elites who conspire against him." It means "We're protecting ourselves from other elites who conspire against us - but the little guy will still be better off with us as the authoritarian elite."
Did you read tfa?
The key word here is populism. Finding scapegoats (immigrants, woke feminists, lazy unemployed people) to explain away societal ills caused by inequality. Of course tech billionaires prefer blaming the scapegoats to blaming themselves. It serves as a political shield, so that they can continue to hoard wealth and control.
In the 30s, industry leaders aligned themselves with Hitler and Mussolini. They both focused on technology as a means of control. Capitalists also see the benefit of cheap labor and a war economy.
Right wing populism and technocracy are a match made in heaven, because fascism is good for the bottom line.
“Rich people do something so we should reactively go against it” is not the slam dunk you think it is.
You should sit this one out.
If you think those guys did anything you need to lay off their Koolaid.
It certainly doesn't sound like something many people would be into. More like a long trol.