Technocracy

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I’ve spent my adult life in dread of it. These guys are awaiting it like hyperchristians awaiting the second coming. Or so it would appear. Actually, I didn’t spend a lot of time at their site because it’s so unreadable. One would think that techoidolators would at least make a passable attempt at using technology to promote their point of view. Oh well.

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4 Comments

  1. Murdoc
    December 31, 2003 at 5:14 am

    What’s so unreadable about it? I can read it just fine. Sounds like a poor excuse for passing on an idea.

  2. Harold
    December 31, 2003 at 10:25 am

    WRT unreadable, I find the background and font colors produce a nasty headache. Ia lso find them high on rhetoric and low on content.

    Their content, however, is not terribly new. Since Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, numerous economists and others have sought to replace the perceived nasty mess of human politics with a purportedly scientific approach. Heck, if we stretch “science” to mean reason generally, Plato can get credit for the first proposal to dump messy old democracy with a “rational” system based on the science of the day (read “The Republic.”)

    Fictional examples likewise abound, as both Utopias (Well’s _Things to Come_, Heinlien’s _Beyond This Horizon_) and dystopia’s (Huxley’s _Brave New World_).

    If you crave a real life example of technocracy and it’s real-world pitfalls, consider the history of the IAB and the transformation of IANA to ICANN.

    The basic fallacy, from my perspective, is that human politics can somehow have all the irrationality pressed out of it and that proper solutions for a better world (however defined) have one “right” answer which is discoverable through reason.

    Harold

  3. John
    December 31, 2003 at 11:49 am

    Thanks, Harold. Right on the money.

    As to my general critique of the technopolistic/technocratic mindset, I pretty much presented it in my novel Acts of the Apostles, available for free a mere two clicks away. So I don’t think I need to rehash this. . .

  4. christianhauck
    January 7, 2004 at 6:02 am

    John

    I really like acts of .. (but I like cheap complex devices even more).

    However, it’s not for free. Yes, I does not cost money to download it. But it does cost time to read, it costs curiosity and thinking time, absorptive capacity, it might even change your perspective … all of that quite rare these days.

    About technocrats: living in a delusion that their particular point of view is unbiased. Monistic believers in a single truth. Did not get that science is all about criticising everything and everyone constantly.

    Christian (working in a Basel pharmaceutical company, not Hoff-Zeigy, but Nov-artis = San-Ciba though!)

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