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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I found this comment very insightful - and it's interesting to see that it is downvoted even if there are zero replies trying to make some counter arguments..
Or the "Whiz Kids" that Robert McNamara brought into the DoD in the 1960s who were supposed to win the war in Vietnam through game theory and other applications of science and technology.
Like OGAS[1] - a unified economic management system. The idea was simple yet technocratically rational: if the system has enough sensors and effectors on society then it can reach a maximum of satisfaction for the society as a whole (with the given set of common resources).
“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.
Where are you getting this opinion from? Because the vast number of matriarchal hunter-gatherer societies throughout history would disagree with you. Those "woke" policies existed prior to the agricultural and industrial revolutions and were stamped out by the "mentally developed" societal and economic systems that we invented along the way.
I'm not sure where you're getting your "fundamental truths" from, but as the fields of sociology and economics don't actually have anything of the sort it'd be worthwhile to expand your reading list and adding some history in there for good measure.
Without technology, say bye bye to at least 6 billion people. We've turned the earth into a machine for sustaining life. It's clear that we need people who understand how the machine and its parts work, well enough to keep it running.
But those people don't necessarily need to be gods or kings. In fact gods and kings seem to be exquisitely bad at it.
A relative of mine was a senior operator at a nuclear power plant, now retired. He deeply understood how to keep the plant running, and was compensated nicely for it, but he didn't presume to know better than the next person how to keep society running. He didn't aspire to be a king.
"Rich people bad" seems like a straw man. I think there's a fairly widespread perception that letting some people become rich enough to turn themselves into gods or kings is worth reconsidering.
People are not born without rights, it takes a society or group to take them away. Who do you think opresses women and those in minority groups? Societies didn't evolve to be enlightened, they evolved into discriminatory systems. Those systems get torn a little bit down, built back up, asymmetricaly across societies, constantly and probably forever.
Just gander across our current collection of societies and marvel at how diverse those systems are, even in high tech societies.
“ 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
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.
The USA began its military actions in Afghanistan in 2001. It was technologically superior to the Afghan forces in every regard. It fought for more than 20 years. Afghanistan remained in the hands of the Taliban. In that war, the USA could spy on its enemy from space, could observe all electronic forms of communication, had superior armaments, and still lost. The Yemeni Houthis resorted to messengers on motorbikes to keep their communications secret from US technological surveillance.
Outcompeting too is not quite a given. Sometimes, “technological miracles” are dangerous. Thalidomide, asbestos, micro-plastics, glyphosate… to again use a modern example: the USA has been innovative on many fronts, generated much wealth, and has now a population among the sickest on Earth, and one which does not seem intent on producing new humans. This has led the government to import population in the attempt to keep socialist policies functioning. That policy then backfired due to nativist, near-term, economic concerns. That divide now threatens the unity of the country.
People are more diverse in thought and in belief than they are in biology, and this leads to all kinds of social and political dysfunction, all kinds of beautiful art, and all kinds of marvelous discussion. Humanity has seemingly proven that humans cannot be well-governed, and our societies cannot be centrally planned.
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.
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."
Technocracy sounds good in theory, but if you understand human nature and economics you'll realize that technocratic governance makes no sense. It's up to humans to decide what to do, with value judgements about what they want to give up in exchange for what they want. It is the role of technology to facilitate the implementation. We certainly hope to have leaders who are literate in science and tech, but science and tech are not a value system.
Technocracy rose roughly simultaneously with the Good Government movement of the 1920s. Both were a response to the machine politics and crony capitalism of the gilded age.
100 years later and here we are, linking to articles asking to sign up for a news letter before a single word can be read. Scroll 1 paragraph and get nagged again.
The article spends a lot of time on criticising technocratic ideas of tech capitalists, who haven’t actually achieved anything in the political sphere so far, and doesn’t even mention China where quite a few of strikingly similar ideas are being implemented under the guise of a Marxist/Jinpingist system with modern characteristics.
43 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 62.7 ms ] thread[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_(EP)
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
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...
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.
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.
this of course affecting not only the Western regimes but technocratic rule everywhere
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 reminds me of the "Científicos" [1] in Mexico during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (early 1900s).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cient%C3%ADfico
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(Department_of_Defen...
Like OGAS[1] - a unified economic management system. The idea was simple yet technocratically rational: if the system has enough sensors and effectors on society then it can reach a maximum of satisfaction for the society as a whole (with the given set of common resources).
[1]https://museum.dataart.com/short-stories/ogas-the-red-bit-sy...
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
Thiel is engaged in surveillance (PayPal, Palantir) and takes government money and calls all opponents "The Antichrist". Yes, deranged rich people are bad.
He's a lunatic.
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'm not sure where you're getting your "fundamental truths" from, but as the fields of sociology and economics don't actually have anything of the sort it'd be worthwhile to expand your reading list and adding some history in there for good measure.
But those people don't necessarily need to be gods or kings. In fact gods and kings seem to be exquisitely bad at it.
A relative of mine was a senior operator at a nuclear power plant, now retired. He deeply understood how to keep the plant running, and was compensated nicely for it, but he didn't presume to know better than the next person how to keep society running. He didn't aspire to be a king.
"Rich people bad" seems like a straw man. I think there's a fairly widespread perception that letting some people become rich enough to turn themselves into gods or kings is worth reconsidering.
Just gander across our current collection of societies and marvel at how diverse those systems are, even in high tech societies.
Ah yes all technological progress like AI, EVs and biotech are all bad because social media bad. Why is this article taken seriously
We can barely reach the moon again.
The USA began its military actions in Afghanistan in 2001. It was technologically superior to the Afghan forces in every regard. It fought for more than 20 years. Afghanistan remained in the hands of the Taliban. In that war, the USA could spy on its enemy from space, could observe all electronic forms of communication, had superior armaments, and still lost. The Yemeni Houthis resorted to messengers on motorbikes to keep their communications secret from US technological surveillance.
Outcompeting too is not quite a given. Sometimes, “technological miracles” are dangerous. Thalidomide, asbestos, micro-plastics, glyphosate… to again use a modern example: the USA has been innovative on many fronts, generated much wealth, and has now a population among the sickest on Earth, and one which does not seem intent on producing new humans. This has led the government to import population in the attempt to keep socialist policies functioning. That policy then backfired due to nativist, near-term, economic concerns. That divide now threatens the unity of the country.
People are more diverse in thought and in belief than they are in biology, and this leads to all kinds of social and political dysfunction, all kinds of beautiful art, and all kinds of marvelous discussion. Humanity has seemingly proven that humans cannot be well-governed, and our societies cannot be centrally planned.
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
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
(Other instance was PredictiveHistory youtube here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrmERlHUqBk ).
Guessing that's not a coincidence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman
The hippie movement was itself somewhat a response to the inroads Technocracy had made in American government, so argued in this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_a_Counter_Cultur...
https://youtu.be/E6yg5Rj9owk
Written in the 50s it's prescient to what has been happening since.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy