Technocracy Quotes

In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror.

Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.

I point out to you, Marcus Claire Luyseyal, a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines.

You will never get to see fifty foot statues of warlords and emperors or feel the triumph of conquest. You will never see man live as the ancients dreamed he would, all because a couple of rats tunneled their way into positions of power. They said the past is wrong. They said invaders should have your land. They said its ok to embrace apathy. You are a victim of the technocracy, of an abuse named 'civility'. You have been robbed of a fulfilling earnest life.

Personal qualities today are increasingly marginalized in favor of technocratic, market-driven skills. Instead, finance is the new courage, branding is the new compassion, and coding is the new contemplation.

Take now the clockworks... The clockworks, being genuine and not much to look at, don't generate the drama of an Earth-tilt or a flying saucer, nor do they seem to offer any immediate panacea for humanity's fifty-seven varieties of heartburn. But suppose that you're one of those persons who feels trapped, to some degree, trapped matrimonially, occupationally, eductionally or geographically, or trapped in something larger than all those; trapped in a system, or what you might descrbie as an "incresingly deadening technocracy" or a "theater of paranoia and desperation" or something like that. Now, if you are one of those persons... wouldn't the very knowledge that there are clockworks ticking away behind the wallpaper of civilization, unbeknownst to leaders, organizers and managers (the President included), wouldn't that knowledge, suggesting as it does the possibility of unimaginable alternatives, wouldn't that knowledge be a bubble bath for your heart?

The Transhumanist Party aims to motivate and mobilize both female and male scientists and engineers to take on additional responsibilities as rational politicians. It does not mean replacing democracy with technocracy. It means that our government needs help in making the right policies and investing in science, health, and technology for the improvement of the human condition and the long-term survival of the human race.

a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy. We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.

It is a strange time, my dear. A novel virus haunts our streets. Days feel like weeks, weeks like months. We’re blasted with new news every second— yes and then no and then yes and no, feeding our primal panic to hoard goods and leave shelves breadless, riceless. They tell us the pandemic makes all equal—the poor and very rich— then why are the poor poorer and the rich profiting? It is a strange time, my dear. Army men are marching our streets. They force us to stay inside, threaten and arrest for a walk in the park. They wage small wars against us, but this battle began long ago. The elite technocrats are crowing in their silicone valleys as corporations grow and small businesses fold with mountains of debt— the centre cannot, will not, hold! It is a strange time, my dear. Mainstream media reports the world has never been safer as they terrorise the chambers of our minds. This stress, this anxiety is killing our immunity. But we must do it all for the elderly— or so they say! When have they ever cared for our elders? When have they ever cared for our vulnerable? We go to bed dreaming of toilet paper while they dismantle the world economy. Family businesses go bust all so we can protect the people, but only the people are suffering! At the end of this, those retired will have peanuts for pensions. They are stripping us of everything whilst our eyes are fixed on our screens. And how dare we say it’s a strange time when in seven months we’ll make America great again.

With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.

In this place a mind was at work to negate the image of a free and intact man. It intended to rely on man power in the same way that it had relied on horsepower. It wanted units to be equal and divisable, and for that purpose man had to be destroyed as the horse had already been destroyed.

Totalitarianism and technocracy like to present themselves as the pinnacle of rationality and science.

The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs.

Surreptitiously, reliance on institutional process has replaced dependence on personal good will. The world has lost its humane dimension and reacquired the factual necessity and fatefulness which were characteristic of primitive times. But while the chaos of the barbarian was constantly ordered in the name of mysterious, anthropomorphic gods, today only man’s planning can be given as a reason for the world being as it is. Man has become the plaything of scientists, engineers, and planners.

We wish to break with all aspects of the liberal State: with its welfare and its warfare, its monopoly privileges and its egalitarianism, its repression of victimless crimes whether personal or economic. Only we offer technology without technocracy, growth without pollution, liberty without chaos, law without tyranny, the defense of property rights in one’s person and in one’s material possessions.

Out of this unstable mix of technocracy and national security you have a nostalgia developing for colonialism or religion—atavistic in my opinion, but some people want them back. Sadat is the great example of that: he threw out the Russians, as well as everything else that represented Abdel Nasser, ascendant nationalism, and so forth—and said, “Let the Americans come.” Then you have a new period of what in Arabic is called an infitah—in other words, an opening of the country to a new imperialism: technocratic management, not production but services—tourism, hotels, banking, etc. That’s where we are right now.

If you ask me, technocracy is the way forward. Let he who is capable lead. It won’t do to put responsibility in the hands of the people; they are too emotional, and one cannot steer a country with emotions.

The issue now and during the next decade is access to the center of gravity of the technocracy, the leading universities that not only teach subjects but train you in the social rituals that allow you to belong to the technocracy.

Conspiracy thinking inflates the sizableness of the perceived enemy into infinity so that in the end one can only feel powerless compared to such a giant. In this way, conspiracy thinking also embodies an aspect of self destruction.

It was not the great technocrats of Koenigsberg or Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad: it was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low-grade Russian agricultural workers. The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become, by gradual stages, the race itself.

The prime strategy of the technocracy “is to level life down to a standard of so-called living that technical expertise can cope with—and then, on that false and exclusive basis, to claim an intimidating omnicompetence over us by its monopoly of the experts.

The significance of Brzezinski being at Columbia University is that he was aware of what Technocracy was because that’s where it was developed in the early 1930s. Brzezinski wrote a book called Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. That book foretold the Technetronic era we’re living in today.

Who do you listen to? Who influences your day to day decisions? Many of us are being led & misled away from our own thinking power.

When society as a whole is in the grip of anxiety and the accompanying images of illness and death, those images in themselves become a causal factor.

…science knows no boundary for those to whom it will serve.

The pharaonic era of the country-house technocrats. The dream of an electronic control of things runs up against the traditional stupidity of the masses. Collective demand has never been so elicited, forced or violated as it has in the field of computing. The clash between a philosophical and metaphysical exigency and a present which is no longer in the least philosophical and metaphysical. The clash between a system of representation and a system of simulation. The clash between a thinking of difference and a thinking of indifference. What is the power of indifference? What would an analytics of indifference be like? Torn between a radical indifference and a radical seduction. Postmodemity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination. In terms of periods, it is the end of final evaluations and the movement of transcendence, which are replaced by 'teleonomic' evaluation, in terms of retroaction. Everything is always retroactive, including - and, indeed, particularly including - information. The rest is left to the acceleration of values by technology (sex, body, freedom, knowledge).

If citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives,” Nichols wrote, “they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.

Makers?" said Toby. Jaysir nodded. "We're not loners, you know. There just weren't any on Wallop. We love to get together, we just refuse to engage in social relations that are based on material inequity.

Whatever way we learn, we will find that it is not cogito that is important but that you are a cog. You are a cog in a machine that does not need your cognition. You must merely conform to the coordinated.

It is a curious thought that the earliest description of the steam-engine in antiquity describes its use for the magic opening of the temple doors, when the priests lit the fires on the altars, to deceive the populace into ascribing to a deity what was the work of the engineer. In much the same way today, the almost boundless fecundity of the creative scientific discoveries and inventions of the age are being appropriated for the purpose of the mysterious opening of doors into the holy of holies of the temples of mammon by a hierarchy of imposters and humbugs, whom it is the first task of a sane civilization to expose and clear out.

As we wrapped up our interview, Wood suggested three things to me. First, he suggested I reread Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley in 1933, the same year Technocracy established itself at Columbia University. “In Brave New World, there’s no political structure,” said Wood. “The world is run by the scientists and engineers. The book was a direct attack on Technocracy, so I suggest you reread it to see what things have come to pass, and what might be ahead.

Conformity is the tool of the tyrant. What one chooses to conform to is critical. The Empire now rules by information superhighways to our soul. The Apple a day we have bitten is the Appian Way to make a phoney ‘I’ linked to algorithms of stupor.

Perhaps its time to dumb down our “smart” life. We are being tracked, listened to, data mined, recorded, and so much more without our real knowing or understanding. When are we going to make a stand for our right to privacy? That’s Tremendo Bullship!

Technocracy gave us the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition—whether political or spiritual. Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social organization. Technocracy also speeded up the world. We could get places faster, do things faster, accomplish more in a shorter time. Time, in fact, became an adversary over which technology could triumph. And this meant that there was no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost.

Technocrats live their lives abstractly, even while they are managing their own sphere. For them, all problems are intellectual. You must think constantly, and that thinking makes action possible. Once you have thought, the doing simply follows. Reason leads to language, and the battleground of the technocrat is language. If the language is reshaped, so will be the action. Political correctness, as it’s called, is the manner in which the technocrats as the ascendant class reshaped the world. The tension of the technocracy is between their work in their own fields and the universal principles that they practice. This shows itself most clearly in the way they deal with the declining class, the heavily white, industrial working class. In the thinking of the technocracy, the fundamental cause of oppression is whites who have historically oppressed using race, nationality, and gender. But the technocrats draw a sharp distinction between themselves (predominantly white) who are at least engaged in a struggle to transcend oppression in thought and speech and those whites who continue to practice it. This declining class is plunging economically, but for the technocracy, which embraces a vast range of incomes, that decline is not of the essence. It is their unwillingness to abandon oppression.

Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migration, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

The Age of Affluence represents a daring experiment on the part of elites in maintaining their dominance not by starving and bludgeoning their opposition into submission, but by seducing it into compliance. […] totalitarianism is perfected because its techniques become progressively more subliminal. The distinctive feature of the regime of experts lies in the fact that, while possessing ample power to coerce, it prefers to charm conformity from us […] The prime strategy of the technocracy is to level life down to a standard of so-called living that technical expertise can cope with–and then, on that false and exclusive basis, to claim an intimidating omnicompetence over us by its monopoly of the experts. The business of investing and flourishing treacherous parodies of freedom, joy, and fulfillment becomes an indispensable form of social control under the technocracy.

[The technetronic era] involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control.46

Contrary to the perceptions of many in the counterculture in the 1960s and of many scholars since, the two worlds had a great deal in common. They shared a celebration of intellectual work, of technology, and of collaborative work styles. Both reveled in the economic and technological abundance of post-World War II America. The research laboratories of World War II, and the military-industrial-academic bureaucracies that grew out of them, were far more flexible, entrepreneurial, and individualistic places than many remember today. By the same token, certain elements of the counterculture embraced the ideas, the social practices, and the machines that emerged inside the world of military research even as they vocally attacked cold war bureaucracies. Even as they sought to find new ways to live psychologically and socially integrated lives, some members of the counterculture turned toward the heart of the technocracy itself in search of tools and models for their work.

Once the ruling elite stopped depending on the traditional economy for tax revenues, they no longer needed allies in that world. Even in totalitarian dictatorships, the power elite have to propitiate some domestic constituency. But in these oil-rich Muslim states, they could diverge from the masses of their people culturally without consequence. The people they did need to get along with were the agents of the world economy coming and going from their countries. Thus did “modernization” divide these “developing” societies into a “governing club” and “everyone else.” The governing club was not small. It included the technocracy, which was not a mere group but a whole social class. It also included the ruling elite who, in dynastic countries, were the royal family and its far-flung relatives and in the “republics” the ruling party and its apparatchik. Still, in any of these countries the governing club was a minority of the population as a whole, and the border between the governing classes and the masses grew ever more distinct.

The point was made many times that scientific management benefitted workers not at all, perhaps most clearly by a short statement by John P. Frey, editor of the International Molders Journal and participant in a bipartisan survey of the claims of scientific management, 'If generally applied the craftsmen would pass out of existence, and the workers would become dependent for their existence upon the scanty and insignificant industrial knowledge and experience afforded them by their limited opportunities, regulated by those who in addition to their ownership of machinery, had also acquired possession of craft knowledge and the skilled workers’ methods.

Nicaragua, is one of the most recent examples. So far this spring, fifty-nine American communities have been flattened by tornadoes. Nobody has helped. The Marshall Plan, the Truman Policy, all pumped billions upon billions of dollars into discouraged countries. And now, newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent, war-mongering Americans. Now, I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplanes. Come on now, you, let's hear it! Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar, or the Douglas 10? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all international lines except Russia fly American planes? Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or a woman on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times, and, safely home again. You talk about scandals and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everyone to look at. Even the draft dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They're right here on our streets in Toronto. Most of them, unless they're breaking Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from Ma and Pa at home to spend up here. When the Americans get out of this bind -- as they will

Гитлер раздавлен, варварство — нет. Наоборот, очагов его становится все больше. Смутные дикарские силы бурлят на огромных частях земного шара, угрожая прорваться. Примитивно-сладкие дегенеративные идеи, как заразные вирусы, размножаются и распространяются. Действуют четко разработанные методы, как заражать ими миллионные массы. Развитие науки и техники — кажется, единственное, чем может похвалиться человечество, — приводит, однако, в таком случае лишь к тому, что рабов не гонят, связанных за шею веревками, а везут электровозами в запломбированных вагонах, что можно инъекциями людей превращать в идиотов, а современный варвар убивает не дубиной, но циклоном «Б» или безукоризненным, технически совершенным огнестрельным автоматом. Говорят, что наука надеется выйти из холуйского состояния, в котором она находится сегодня, служа политиканам верой и правдой. Тогда, может быть, появится еще один, «научно-технический» гуманизм — и, уж совсем беспросветное, варварство технократическое? [183]

Our culture of violence is an incubator, where our children are the crop of future techno-warrior killers.

One would think that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the intellectual poverty of technocracy and the primacy of politics over it would be a well-established truth in need of no further defense.

Grosseteste’s disciple at Oxford, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, has gained a wider reputation than his master. He held that all natural phenomena are the results of force acting on matter and that force is invariably subject to natural law. He upheld experimentation, believing that results reached “by argument” should be tested in practice. Bacon was a dreamer; he prophesied the coming of mechanical transport on land and water and in the air, and of a world ruled by a technocracy of supermen-scientists. In the meantime, he suggested “crusades of learning” to the Muslim lands to win the Saracens over to Christianity by impressing them with European knowledge. Bacon was a fascinating figure, but modern writers are inclined to downgrade his scientific achievements in comparison with those of Grosseteste.

Darwinism spawned the eugenics movement; Marxist philosophies led directly to the Communist overthrow in Russia; Fabian socialism was identified with colonialism in southern Africa; the Technocracy movement took off in the 1920s, and so on.

Technocracy will be shown to be thoroughly anti-Christian and completely intolerant of Biblical thought. This has always been the hallmark sign seen in idolatrous religions and practices!

Even if the social order of technocracy threatened the species with nuclear annihilation and the individual young person with psychic fragmentation, the media technologies produced by that order offered the possibility of individual and collective transformation. McLuhan's dual emphases also allowed young people to imagine the local communities they built around these media not simply as communities built around consumption of industrial products, but as model communities for a new society.

THE LAST POINT I want to make is this: populism wins. Not only is populism the classic, all-American response to hierarchy and plutocracy, but it is also the naturally dominant rhetorical element in our political tradition. I make this claim even though the Populists themselves didn’t get what they were after for many decades, even though the labor movement in the thirties never organized the South, even though Martin Luther King never saw the Freedom Budget enacted into law. Still, populism has a power that technocracy and liberal scolding and Trumpist bullshit do not because populism is deep in the grain of the democratic personality. Americans do not defer to their social superiors: we are natural-born egalitarians. Populism is the word that gets at our incurable itch to deflate pretentiousness of every description.

20 In 1932, Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, lawyer and economics professor, respectively, published The Modern Corporation and Private Property, a highly influential study revealing that top executives of America’s giant companies were not even accountable to their own shareholders but operated the companies “in their own interest, and…divert[ed] a portion of the asset fund to their own uses.”21 The only solution, concluded Berle and Means, was to enlarge the power of all groups within the nation who were affected by the large corporation, including employees and consumers. They envisioned the corporate executive of the future as a professional administrator, dispassionately weighing the claims of investors, employees, consumers, and citizens, and allocating benefits accordingly. “[I]t seems almost essential if the corporate system is to survive—that the ‘control’ of the great corporations should develop into a purely neutral technocracy, balancing a variety of claims by various groups in the community and assigning each a portion of the income stream on the basis of public policy rather than private cupidity.

Technocracy was a Depression-era social movement that advocated replacing politicians with scholars, engineers and scientists who might know more about running the economy

Perhaps it's time to dumb down our “smart” life. We are being tracked, listened to, data mined, recorded, and so much more without our real knowing or understanding. When are we going to make a stand for our right to privacy? That’s Tremendo Bullship!

Patrick Wood, author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation,

[The counterculture] looks to me like all we have to hold against the final consolidation of a technocratic totalitarianism in which we shall find ourselves ingeniously adapted to an existence wholly estranged from everything that has ever made the life of man an interesting adventure. “If the resistance of the counter culture fails, I think there will be nothing in store for us but what anti-utopians like Huxley and Orwell have forecast–though I have no doubt that these dismal despotisms will be far more stable and effective than their prophets have foreseen. For they will be equipped with techniques of inner-manipulation as unobtrusively fine as gossamer. Above all, the capacity of our emerging technocratic paradise to denature the imagination by appropriating to itself the whole meaning of Reason, Reality, Progress, and Knowledge will render it impossible for men to give any name to their bothersomely unfulfilled potentialities but that of madness. And for such madness, humanitarian therapies will be generously provided. […] “The question therefore arises: ‘If the technocracy in its grand procession through history is indeed pursuing to the satisfaction of so many such universally ratified values as The Quest for Truth, The Conquest of Nature, The Abundant Society, The Creative Leisure, The Well-Adjusted Life, why not settle back and enjoy the trip?’ “The answer is, I guess, that I find myself unable to see anything at the end of the road we are following with such self-assured momentum but Samuel Beckett’s two sad tramps forever waiting under that wilted tree for their lives to begin. Except that I think the tree isn’t even going to be real, but a plastic counterfeit. In fact, even the tramps may turn out to be automatons . . . though of course there will be great, programmed grins on their faces.

And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy. Experts, too, have an important responsibility in a democracy, and it is one they’ve shirked in recent decades.

UNRRA, whose mandate was to coordinate Allied relief, was viewed as a test case for future patterns of international organizations.3 Designed to prime the liberal economic order and foster democratic governments to preserve a peaceful world order, it was conceived as a vital program not only to save lives but also to safeguard American and British strategic interests. For many of its creators, UNRRA “reflected their faith in the ability to bind compassion and technocracy, to create a muscular, modernized, spirit of progress.”4

Now it seems that the nasty people are those who question the direction of our society, our loss of liberty, our submission to technology and domination of the security, industrial, military and pharmaceutical society (SIMP). We are living in the SIMP society and we are the Simpsons.

Everywhere one can see the supply of soap-opera and extension of that scripted discourse into the political domain. By devoting our attention to the mainstream systems that seem to be miraculously harmonising across national boundaries in a similar fashion without distinctiveness or variation, we give more power to the deadening mono-cultural potency of tech-collectivism.

We are giving power to people we do not know, for purposes we cannot prove, for exercise we cannot control while assuming they must be benign and beneficent without evidence and without scrutinising the circumstances of our blank cheque to them that we signed in the blood from relinquished control of our bodies. Giving the keys to the dungeon to these strangers in suits or jeans and white coats and expecting benevolence not evident in their belief system and rejected as irrelevant thereby, is the greatest common exercise in folly in human history.

It is hard to determine whether the brazen brashness of the bureaucrats or toxic passivity of the public has been more shocking.

They failed to see that globalisation was merely a tactic to prise power from nation states towards international conglomerates. Once the power was siphoned from the people and democratic control was circumvented, the ability to assert global governance without any democratic restraint was available.

When bondage is built with billions of key strokes the death of freedom bit by bit may not be so obvious. The masters hold the keys to chains or networks, to the links and sites fashioned into our consciousness. While we may browse, it is as a domesticated animal.

Unfortunately, people may choose the lesser evil until there are no lesser ones to choose and the power to resist has been lost to a great force comprising accumulations of millions of minute relinquishments and accommodations.

Cybernation, like birth control, can be a double-edged sword. Like artificial reproduction, to envision it in the hands of the hands of the present powers is to envision a nightmare. We need not elaborate. Everyone is familiar with Technocracy, 1984: the increased alienation of the masses, baby factories, increased government efficiency (Big-Brother), and so on. In the hands of the present society there is no doubt that the machine could be used — is being used — to intensify the apparatus of repression and to increase established power.

you are interested in taking a deeper dive into technocracy, we recommend his books Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation and Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order.

Behind the rise of populist politics in recent years is a genuine anguish: many feel thrust aside by the ruthless juggernaut of globalized technocracy. Populisms are often described as a protest against globalization, although they are more properly a protest against the globalization of indifference. At bottom reflect the pain at the loss of roots and community, and a generalized feeling of anguish. Yet, in generating fear and sowing panic, populisms are the exploitation of that popular anguish, not its remedy. The often cruel rhetoric of populist leaders denigrating the ‘other’ in order to defend a national or group identity reveals its spirit. It is a means by which ambitious politicians attain power.

The technocracy has the upper hand against the white working class, although it is a tenuous hand, as can be seen by the election of Donald Trump. But this is merely the opening confrontation. Pressure on the technocracy will build. America is heading toward an institutional crisis in which the competence of the technocracy and the institutions of the federal government will be questioned.

Our culture is being attacked by every major entity taking over our unique communities and reducing us to nothing more than numbers.

In April 2001, a student group called the Progressive Student Labor Movement took over the offices of the university’s president, demanding a living wage for Harvard janitors and food workers. That spring, a daily diversion on the way to class was to see which national figure—Cornel West or Ted Kennedy one day, John Kerry or Robert Reich another—had turned up in the Yard to encourage the protesters. Striding past the protesters and the politicians addressing them, on my way to a “Pizza and Politics” session with a journalist like Matt Bai or a governor like Howard Dean, I did not guess that the students poised to have the greatest near-term impact were not the social justice warriors at the protests […] but a few mostly apolitical geeks who were quietly at work in Kirkland House

Hubbert laid this out in the Technocracy Study Course: Should the fruit flies continue to multiply at their initial compound interest rate, it can be shown by computation that in a relatively few weeks the number would be considerably greater than the capacity of the bottle. This being so, it is a very simple matter to see why there is a definite limit to the number of fruit flies that can live in the bottle. Once the number is reached, the death rate is equal to the birth rate, and population growth ceases. Very little thought and examination of the facts should suffice to convince one that in the case of the production of coal, pig iron, or automobiles, circumstances are not essentially different.

Politicians and economists who argued for perpetual economic growth were deluded, Hubbert said. The population of the United States would hit a maximum “of probably not more than 135,000,000 people” in the 1950s, and after that the nation simply would not contain enough new consumers to need more consumer products. Hoodwinked by the fantasy of continuing growth, the ruling class had lost sight of these basic scientific realities. They were rushing toward inevitable disaster—after which they would be replaced, thank Heaven, by an elite corps of eco-engineering mandarins with the technical know-how to “operate the entire physical equipment of the North American Continent.” In other words, Technocracy.

How does the bird come and go (Sufi Scientist Sonnet, 1300) How does the bird come and go, In and out of this bodily cage! So long as you nourish it with love, Who cares about some mythical fate! Cages are born of dust, In dust cages will wither. Yet you sob in love of cage, Oblivious to the endangered flier! With all knowledge of cosmic building blocks, How come you still cannot put an end to war! With all your high and mighty technocracy, How come children still starve and suffer! I say, put your intellect aside for a change, First unfold a human heart outside the cage. Otherwise, your posterboys of superficiality, Will turn this world into a wreck of cages.

Despite the imagery, Le Corbusier sees himself as a technical genius and demands power in the name of his truths. Technocracy, in this instance, is the belief that the human problem of urban design has a unique solution, which an expert can discover and execute. Deciding such technical matters by politics and bargaining would lead to the wrong solution. As there is a single, true answer to the problem of planning the modern city, no compromises are possible

Unfortunately, wacky ideas have dominated the public dialogue in tech to the point that important conversations about social issues have been drowned out or dismissed for years. Some of the ideas that come out of Silicon Valley include buying islands in New Zealand to prep for doomsday; seasteading, or building islands out of discarded shipping containers to create a new paradise without government or taxes; freezing cadavers so that the deceased's consciousness can be uploaded into a future robot body; creating oversized dirigibles; inventing a meal-replacement powder named after dystopian sci-fi movie Soylent Green; or making cars that fly. These ideas are certainly creative, and it's important to make space in life for dreamers–but it's equally important not to take insane ideas seriously. We should be cautious. Just because someone has made a mathematical breakthrough or made a lot of money, that doesn't mean we should listen to them when they suggest aliens are real or suggest that in the future it will be possible to reanimate people, so we should keep smart people's brains in large freezers like the ones used for frozen vegetables at Costco.

harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge or taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

Instead of seeing sense there is a major tendency to 'make sense.

Machines like objectives and not other perspectives.

Globalisation was a tactic rather than a strategy. The strategy was control and termination of homo sapiens as we know it.

You will not be merely servant or sufferant of the colonial power, you will be the colony itself to be managed, subjugated and controlled.

Conquer your fears once and for all or continue to be conquered forever.

The big question, I jotted down during the long wait at the long wait at the airport, is how to hope and what to hope for. We are citizens of corrupt country, of a corrupt vision. There is such a sense of death and of being buried under the weight of technocracy. How to keep cool and get hold of the essential... and, above all, how to recognize the essential.

People who don’t read science fiction, but who have at least given it a fair shot, often say they’ve found it inhuman, elitist, and escapist. Since its characters, they say, are both conventionalized and extraordinary, all geniuses, space heroes, superhackers, androgynous aliens, it evades what ordinary people really have to deal with in life, and so fails an essential function of fiction. However remote Jane Austen’s England is, the people in it are immediately relevant and revelatory—reading about them we learn about ourselves. Has science fiction anything to offer but escape from ourselves? The cardboard-character syndrome was largely true of early science fiction, but for decades writers have been using the form to explore character and human relationships. I’m one of them. An imagined setting may be the most appropriate in which to work out certain traits and destinies. But it’s also true that a great deal of contemporary fiction isn’t a fiction of character. This end of the century isn’t an age of individuality as the Elizabethan and the Victorian ages were. Our stories, realistic or otherwise, with their unreliable narrators, dissolving points of view, multiple perceptions and perspectives, often don’t have depth of character as their central value. Science fiction, with its tremendous freedom of metaphor, has sent many writers far ahead in this exploration beyond the confines of individuality—Sherpas on the slopes of the postmodern. As for elitism, the problem may be scientism: technological edge mistaken for moral superiority. The imperialism of high technocracy equals the old racist imperialism in its arrogance; to the technophile, people who aren’t in the know/in the net, who don’t have the right artifacts, don’t count. They’re proles, masses, faceless nonentities. Whether it’s fiction or history, the story isn’t about them. The story’s about the kids with the really neat, really expensive toys. So “people” comes to be operationally defined as those who have access to an extremely elaborate fast-growth industrial technology. And “technology” itself is restricted to that type. I have heard a man say perfectly seriously that the Native Americans before the Conquest had no technology. As we know, kiln-fired pottery is a naturally occurring substance, baskets ripen in the summer, and Machu Picchu just grew there. Limiting humanity to the producer-consumers of a complex industrial growth technology is a really weird idea, on a par with defining humanity as Greeks, or Chinese, or the upper-middle-class British. It leaves out a little too much. All fiction, however, has to leave out most people. A fiction interested in complex technology may legitimately leave out the (shall we say) differently technologized, as a fiction about suburban adulteries may ignore the city poor, and a fiction centered on the male psyche may omit women. Such omission may, however, be read as a statement that advantage is superiority, or that the white middle class is the whole society, or that only men are worth writing about. Moral and political statements by omission are legitimated by the consciousness of making them, insofar as the writer’s culture permits that consciousness. It comes down to a matter of taking responsibility. A denial of authorial responsibility, a willed unconsciousness, is elitist, and it does impoverish much of our fiction in every genre, including realism.

Loss of faith in democratic institutions, the turn of these institutions toward a technocracy, creates the opposite of democracy. A key example of this is the European Union, whose bureaucrats seem so totally cut off from the rough world of the people of Europe. The faith of these Brussels politicians and bureaucrats in techniques of management, often techniques of the banking world rather than the world of social development, has created a great deal of anger inside Europe that gave an advantage to the extreme right. The focus on immigration comes alongside the anger at the detachment of the European Union, as well as the racism of Brussels toward the Southern European countries. Racism shapes the heart of the European extreme right. In these circles, the hesitation demanded by Hayek is not followed. The extreme right is quite happy to try to change the world, to socially engineer the world in its own image, which includes a society without immigrants. This is a seam of neofascism that demands a kind of social welfare for certain kinds of people and not for others, based often on ideas of race and belonging, of blood and passports. Democratic institutions are set aside, liberal norms are not honored. The horse of the extreme right gallops right into anger and then stampedes through society.

The character of the Open Conspiracy will now be plainly displayed. It will have become a great world movement as wide-spread and evident as socialism or communism. It will have taken the place of these movements very largely. It will be more than they were, it will be frankly a world religion. This large, loose assimilatory mass of movements, groups, and societies will be definitely and obviously attempting to swallow up the entire population of the world and become the new human community.

Totalitarianism is the belief that human intellect can be the guiding principle in life and society. It aims to create a utopian, artificial society led by technocrats or experts who, based on their technical knowledge, will ensure that the machine of society runs flawlessly. In this view, the individual is completely subordinated to being a cog in the machine of society.

Prime ministers and their offices hate minorities, as do the technocrats – whether public or private sector. Curiously enough, so do most commentators. They are all addicted to the corporatist or Mussolinian idea of efficiency. What this tells us is that the ability to examine pieces of legislation slowly, one by one, is probably even more important today in an era of technocracy; that is, an era when experts are resistant to being examined by generalists. There is now a desperate need to parse the mechanisms of power.

Make no mistake: Sunday’s referendum will mark a defining moment in Greece’s modern history and a decisive turn for Europe’s neoliberal project. The choice is very clear. Five years after the people of Greece first rose up against the anti-democratic imposition of the Troika’s austerity measures, they have finally been given the chance to decide upon their own destiny: either they will vote yes to a lifetime of austerity within the eurozone, or they will roar back at the creditors’ inhumane demands with a proud and resounding “NO!” — thereby opening the way for a thousand yeses to a new, democratic and socially just Europe, freed from the shackles of debt servitude, the noose of a deflationary single currency, and the tyranny of an unaccountable financial technocracy. The stakes have never been higher.

The fateful moment for the Chinese economy, crippled by central planning and collectivized production, was when Deng Xiaoping, China’s long-term leader after Mao’s death, announced that the country would pursue “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which is to say a market economy under an authoritarian technocracy. This was in 1977, as good a year as any for marking the birth of modern China. Deng and his associates undertook a job akin to that of a political bomb squad, laboriously dismantling most of the economic ideology installed by Mao without blowing up political continuity at the same time. That they succeeded is in many ways the single most important political fact of contemporary China.

The paradigm of social media is one that Silicon Valley would like to extend to society at large: a technocracy of benevolent, but total, surveillance. In this kind of society, profits flow to platform owners, not those writing tweets and sharing YouTube videos.

Even the most avid technocrat must occasionally escape from virtual space, and what better place to do it than the kitchen, with all its dangerous knives and delicious aromas?

We know very well how to operate the machines on which our futures depend yet we rarely know how they operate—our knowledge of the internal workings of the machines is almost mystical.

Yet the machines we encounter remain symbols of a vast human confusion and uneasiness that often skulks through the dim corridors of our thoughts about our life conditions. We know very well how to operate the machines on which our futures depend yet we rarely know how they operate—our knowledge of the internal workings of the machines is almost mystical.

And so experts have been the missing link in our understanding of the special interpenetration of man and machine that has made the American Century, peculiarly American. We all know something about machines, but experts know everything—if not about machines, at least about a particular machine. We are thus weighted down by a heavy reliance of experts, with much of our time spent in search of the right expert in whom to place confidence for the repair of our mechanical problems

Of course, the word machine here is being used in its broadest definition, i.e., as the systematic organization of designs for the transmission of power. And since power can be social as well as mechanical it is important to remember that machines can be institutional in addition to being material. For this reason, we speak of political machines as well as the mechanics of government as comfortably as we discuss how many speakers our stereo contains or how many words per minute we can type. But when the persons who design, implement, and repair these machines, social and mechanical, are thought of as social types, this broader definition of machine often vanishes. Somehow the common usage of the word machine in its many modes does not extend into a consideration of the humans behind the machines. Instead, these persons are sequestered into diverse occupational categories: engineer, economist, radiologist, technician or political scientist. Yet, historically there is a sense in which a segment of this diverse collection of experts attained a uniformity of thought and action sufficient to justify a more unified categorization. And, indeed, it is the intention of this work to demonstrate that there were experts who had in common, from the beginning of the American machine age, the desire to sell society on their expertise by providing plans for systematically organized devices for the transmission of power in production and in politics.

The smooth coordination of cooperative labor requires managers to “command in the name of capitalists” Here we find a form of wage labor, but of a special kind

One way to understand ”socialism” as a social goal is in terms of central planning coupled to a socialization of property. This interpretation of socialism is so in tune with the elaboration of coordinator interests and ideology into a position of power in society, the coordinators became society’s planners and managers that we may discover that …we may, in fact, want to equate “central planning” with a coordinator or technocratic rather than a socialist form of economic organization. We would then wish to employ the label socialism only to refer to forms of organization guaranteeing self-management to workers themselves.

Finally, the legitimization of the corporate holding company [1890] established a business structure that lessened the threat of competition by allowing for the elimination of competitors. The merger movement followed and horizontal combinations of productive capability reorganized industry into large blocks of corporate power.

It is capitalism that opened the gates to the Land of Plenty, but capitalism alone cannot sustain it. Progress has become synonymous with economic prosperity, but the twenty-first century will challenge us to find other ways of boosting our quality of life. And while young people in the West have largely come of age in an era of apolitical technocracy, we will have to return to politics again to find a new utopia.

If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feelings of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.