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.
Not just that but the 30s was the tail end of a period of reduction and unification in science. If physics and biology (large portions of it) could be reduced to a handful of principles, why not economics and politics. Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, Hilbert, the Vienna Circle. It must have seemed like science was on track to explain more or less everything.
It’s interesting that the theory of Quantum Mechanics emerged just after this point and threw a wrench in the idea that the universe could be neatly explained through a universal single theory, suddenly there were more questions than answers. And Einstein famously hated quantum physics.
There’s something to be said about the cultural impact of quantum mechanics and how it shifted people’s perceptions from a universe that could eventually be explained by a set of fairly simple, understandable laws of physics to one that is much more complex, mysterious and contradictory. Suddenly the laws of the universe were defined by randomness and uncertainty, rather than determinism and easily understood logic.
I don't know why it would matter, but Einstein didn't hate quantum mechanics. He literally got his Nobel prize for his role in discovering quantum mechanics. He is one of the earliest people to propose that light exists in quantised packets.
He had some strong opinions around interpretations of quantum physics, but that isn't even a question of science, it's a metaphysical discussion.
While we're at it, Einstein also wasn't a bad student, and he didn't hate mathematics.
Around the same time, Gödel proved the incompleteness theorems and Turing gave us the halting problem. These and the uncertainty principle tell us not only that the universe is somehow statistical and not mechanical, but that there are certain unknowable facts. That's got to be a major psychological blow.
I read and enjoyed the book " what is real" by Adam Becker that talks about this intersection between the philosophy of the day and its impact on what more considered valid interpretations of QM at the time and into the future. The logical positivists had a lot of impact on popular conception of quantum stuff, even to this day. Great read
Economics is very deliberately a pseudo-science. Orthodox economics starts from neoliberal moral beliefs and tries to justify and excuse them.
It's about controlling the narrative, not about modelling consequences.
Example: the way the supply shocks of the oil crises in the 70s and 80s were converted into a "keep wages low and raise interest rates to prevent inflation" narrative, when the rational solution would have been to move the economy away from dependence on oil as soon as possible.
its why in the old days they used to call it "political-economy"... removing the political part does it a big disservice because its now ignoring the biggest influence (politics) on the thing and instead treats it like a machine that just need tooling once in a while.
I don't think so. Ideally, you still have normal people deciding tradeoffs like today, it's just that the reasoning and the suggested solutions to problems have to be scientifically and logically sound.
The submission[0] right next to this one shows why.
Apparently, in the US, you are now a criminal if you fly drones half a mile from ICE vehicles. Some of which may be unmarked and even if marked, how exactly do you verify no ICE vehicle is in a 0.785 square mile radius? Anybody capable of logical thought sees that this is BS.
(Also, anybody who retained primary school knowledge can calculate the area. But ask a person on the street to do it and watch your faith in humanity fall. Ask them to point out the area on a map and estimate how many cars that would be...)
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Even the lawyer who taught intro to law at my uni always said that the people who most often find contradictions in laws are engineers.
The problems always start when somebody takes an ideology too far. So let's figure out what is too far instead of rejecting the whole thing.
Hubris. Is the same mindset that leads to socialism, central planning, social darwinism, etc. The temptation of "theory" without the suffering from pesky reality.
"All phenomena involved in the functional operation of the social mechanism are measurable"
From the article, reminded me that the complexities and nuance of life at the ground level really are lost on some.
Even if you genuinely could measure every single detail of life and the forces that move the economy, no committee of experts could ever hope to reason through the data and make coherent solutions that actually survive reality.
There’s multiple corporations. When you have state level central planning there’s no adversarial check or feedback mechanism. Nothing challenges it to see if it’s actually doing a good job.
Of course this is also a strong argument for antitrust. In some markets today there is basically one corporation or a few that seem more interlocked than competing. That starts to be indistinguishable from Soviet bureaus.
HN is full of left-populists these days and any slightly negative mention of socialism or central planning (their equivalent utopian vision) triggers them.
I think this suggests it's more than just hubris, it's religion. These aren't just ideas, they are belief systems and identities for people. Hence why someone would downvote a benign internet comment like yours.
The steady decline of traditional religions has left people searching for meaning in other ways, and it has manifested in all sorts of bizarre belief systems and behavior over the past 200ish years, technocracy being one of them.
I would equate similar values to people who think socialism and central planning are somehow linked and share the same criticisms. Probably 90% of criticism I hear about socialism is complete and utter nonsense. Co-op businesses are socialist ideals in practice and co-ops have consistently gained market share over the last 80+ years, and it is neither linked to or shares any of the problems as central planning.
Im all for reading criticism about economic models, but it seems like the vast majority of it has nothing to do with anything Marx proposed or idealized and is just translocated hatred of authoritarian policies which is far more often in opposition to Marxist principles than supporting them. Socialist ideaology far more directly supports democratic workplaces and democratic economic decisions than centralized leadership and control.
Well you're criticizing shitty thinkers rightfully w.r.t
to co-ops; they're great, they aren't top-down.
But you're committing the same error. Co-ops are completely compatible with capitalism so holding them up as contrast doesn't make much sense. Show me non-authoritarian Marxism at the scale Marx so confidently predicted.
Marx simply had a flawed understanding of economics and it's time we moved on. We have the data supporting the decision to do so. Usually when a theory makes completely incorrect predictions repeatedly, we abandon it. But apparently marxists know better than everyone. Do they have some secret data set?
Something exists in capitalism so therefore it can't be socialism? And im not going to get into another circular reasoning of "It didn't exist in that form before therefore it is impossible now." At no point have you pointed out anything Marx supported that is a problem other than a generalized brush of everything.
90% of Marxist work is a study of capitalism, much of which we still hold true today, so to me you look like everyone else that blindly dismisses what he said without learning what he even did or said.
I didn't say it wasn't socialism. I said it wasn't a counterexample. As for whether you still think it's worth taking Marx seriously as an economist, I'm guessing you'd laugh at someone citing Smith. Yet one had a better track record than the other. My point was simply that a theory should be judged on its merits, it's predictions, it's actual outcomes.
It seems to be an assemblage of random political ranting (derived from mainstream US politics) instead of addressing anything about the Technocracy movement of the 1930s.
1) Simple copycat - article author is watching predictive history which seems plausible given channels surge in popularity
2) Algo effects
3) Coincidence / think of pink elephant effect
4) An actual coordinated intentional campaign by [insert evildoer with insert evildoer motive here...or even 3 letter agency meaning well but ending up functionally doing same as evildoer]
...the fact that I couldn't tell #4 apart from 1-3 has me a little spooked
I watch his channel regularly mostly for entertainment and to help form my own thoughts and opinions on the subject matter relative to other sources. I do think some of his content is accurate and useful, but a lot of it isn't. I've caught him regurgitating conspiracy threads from reddit in his teachings on more than one occasion. I think he reads those threads and possibly uses AI to design the topics around them along with a dose of some cursory research into those subjects. I'm guessing he got the term "Technate" off of reddit as well, as I've seen it mentioned there.
I'd be a little reluctant to mark his speeches as "conspiracy".
I don't disagree with that on a qualitative level, but predictive history is as the name suggests forward looking. We're by definition up to our eyeballs into speculative territory here, a lot of it may align with conspiracy.
So yeah may land on the same ballpark, but still think "conspiracy" label does the dude a disservice.
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.
Yep and I think unfortunately people don't understand human nature because they look at themselves and look at their neighbours to estimate it... But human nature is very different when evaluated from the centres of power. Humans near the centres of power are fundamentally very different from those on the periphery. There are powerful selection mechanisms at play.
I used to think success was mostly about luck but now I think there are selection mechanisms but they're not selecting for what people think. Selection is not based on skill or hard work.
I think there are different life strategies that humans use. Some people need to survive based on skill more than others. The most obvious cases of non-skill strategies are the ones where people make a living based on having a certain physical appearance, or else live off of inheritance.
This might be controversial but I think rich and powerful people are usually skilled. The skill might be pretty far removed from the technical, of course. But I think I can safely say that most people don't fail upward and don't preserve or grow wealth when it just falls into their laps. The skill of investing well is really kind of a planning and information-processing skill. Society generally benefits from successful management of wealth at that level, even if we on the bottom of the pyramid detest extreme wealth of those on top.
Yep but there are strange undesirable characteristics that are being selected. Some of which we don't fully understand.
For example, it is my personal belief that there is a selection mechanism for high suggestibility (by social media and search algorithms which can monetize it). Basically suggestible people are helped in their careers because they act like a money pipeline which redirects money they 'earn' back to social media companies. Social media companies might be thinking of people as straight money pipes leading outward vs bendable pipes potentially leading back towards themselves. Which kind of pipe would they select to pump money through?
This has a side effect of creating strong social alignment over bad ideas. If you empower suggestible people to make decisions, then whoever is above them can bend them in any direction they want.
Suggestible people follow instructions and (sometimes) take fewer risks. It is simply infeasible to logically convince people of every single thing that they ought to know. I hate to infantilize people in this way, but even the most capable and inquisitive minds among us cannot reasonably investigate everything.
People socially align over a lot of things, not just ideas. They develop shared tastes and preferences.
Even very undesirable characteristics such as sociopathy have a function in society. It is sometimes necessary to emotionally detach oneself from situations to make the right decisions. These are not good for every role, but they are primitive survival mechanisms and still have a useful function in keeping the peace.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The Italian futurists went fascist. There were also Russian Cosmists who were IMO more interesting and didn’t seem fascist. They seemed more intellectual and heavily influenced science fiction. The Italian futurists were just on speed I think.
On the fringe right today there’s people who invoke Russian Cosmism and fascism, which I don’t get because historically they were distinct movements. But the fringe right is extremely incoherent. Fascism itself is also ideologically incoherent, and in that case it’s because fascism tends to be explicitly anti-rational.
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.
I went down that rabbit hole. Apparently, he was a member of the Saskatchewan Social Credit Party. It looks like the party never made inroads in Saskatchewan, but the party controlled Alberta for decades. Then I ran into the following comment in the article:
> If mental illness is on the rise, then the obvious solution is on-demand therapists through an app
That is not the only "solution". Alberta had a Eugenics Board for the entire run of the Social Credit Party. One of the roles of this board was to sterilize people with mental illness. (The board predates the party by about a decade, but was only abolished about a year after they lost power.) While this a couple of leaps from the Technocracy movement, the mere association is rather scary.
Controlled Alberta for decades and BC as well though in BC it transformed into more of a big tent "everyone but the NDP" conservative party. Still run by lunatics though.
In Saskatchewan prairie populism took a left wing form instead.
In Alberta the taint of these people never went away. Lougheed's progressive conservatives pulled Alberta governance a bit more mainstream for a couple decades, but Smith's UCP has dragged it right back. Magazines like Alberta Report and hangers-on kept far right prairie right wing populism alive for decades, Preston Manning (Social Credit premier Earnest Manning's son) "mainstream"ized it in the Reform Party ... which essentially took over the federal conservative party... there's a well-spring of this stuff in rural Alberta.. and its full of all sorts of paranoid persecution complex politics, undertones of anti-Semitism (sometimes outright explicit as in the whole James Keegstra afair), with everything to the left of them considered "communism" and these days with bags of money being dumped on them from the US they have no managed to get themselves enough signatures to force a referendum on "independence" (aka annexation by the US).
As a person from Alberta originally and with all my family still there, I find it all a bit terrifying. Very much not a relic of the past, and with COVID and now Trump the lunatic fringe has outsized influence there like it never did before.
I suspect if you probe the right people from the UCP in the right church basements where they're off-mic you'd still find them defending things like eugenics etc.
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.
Until you manage to eliminate or at least limit competition between groups, efficiency is a very important metric to optimize for lest you get out-competed by others, at the very least reducing the effect of your group, if not resulting in it shrinking or disappearing.
I agree it's not perfect, but I think you are over-dramatizing.
My gut says that planetary healthy would be wildly improved if we worked to build a more efficient society. Having meaning & caring about being a well running world would hopefully give us some grounds to flourish on, pride and effort and will to drive us towards something meaningful, beyond the grab-as-much-money-as-you-can state of things today. A collective future worth caring about.
The article talks about building a social world for people deliberately. It seems like they had some care, wanted to try to improve the social lives of people too. If anything I think the Technocracy people understood somewhat better that these decisions about how we treat people are not instanteous questions: maybe we get more social productivity out of some by treating them like crap & working them to collapse, but then we have decades of them being a social and perhaps economic drain on all society. That short term exploitation is what capital does to people today already! But no scientist worth a salt is going to create such imbalanced wasteful systems!
Efficiency can mean a lot of different things. It depends on what you are trying to make efficient, doesn't it? An efficient society, in my view, would be focused on happiness indexes, on gini coefficients. It would be trying to make our footprint more modest, try to make goods repairiable & sustainable long term. Modern eco-concern today has a lot of overlap with many of the basics here.
I'm speculating a lot. But if you don't want to nibble at this food for thought what other morsels are worth trying? This very much is a case where, again, I find the anti-willpower striking and concerning, the leaping into the negative. Over something strange and weird and a bit fanciful and naive. But at least they were working for something to believe in. At least they had a will to better, one that seems fundamentally resoundingly kind of true, kind of needed: a view that is long term, that focuses on building a maintainable long term running order, that doesn't consume until exhaustion.
I'd characterize it as cybernetic, as observant to & attending to inputs and outputs of systems. And interested in improving the results, by observing how these systems function.
Your characterization feels like one of those seeing-only-evil's that I characterize as an anti-willpower.
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.
Paine also said that society is good. That government is but the necessary to maintain it as it grows.
And I worry that what government we have now is not very effective. Health care in the US is a mess. Building anything has grown vastly more expensive, be it buildings, rail, or ships. We have countless laws protecting corporate IP, lobbyists a gazillion, and corporations regularly court shop to get whatever judicial treatment they desire.
The idea of a government focused on efficiency, that is trying to share and spread intelligence & knowledge & know how, that tried to help make us efficient at housing and food and health care: that feels, well, sort of essential at this point to maintaining what Paine loved & cherished: society.
And giving a nation back some purpose, some meaning: that can help bring us together too, perhaps. A purpose make a world that won't over consume, that has a chance to house & feed & care for itself, for hundreds, thousands, or vastly more years: that feels like such a potential antidote to the poison of reckless abandon & foolery that so many brutal nasty little value-less children have beset upon the world, have dissoluted our empathy & perpetrated mercenary anti-social campaigns against the world with. We need value systems that look forward, that care broadly, and that place a reasoned, scientific view as a pole star, and that seek actions not grandiose for grandiosity sake, but to serve us all, to bring an efficient, livable, social societal world out.
Our scale is perhaps a bit bigger than what Paine could have imagined, our numbers vastly more. I fear the Bowling Alone future only intensifies. I would not throw out Paine, but I do think we ought be open to asking what values our society shows for itself, asking if the values have kept up & are adequate, and we ought be open to assessing how governments might better enable societal values we think we need or perhaps just want to see. Technocracy's suggestion that those who care deeply about how the world works, and already have a life of servant leadership, seems atuned, to me, of being ideal for maintaining a society of fewer ills, and being willing to reduce their own role as we do get more efficient, as our ills and evils receed. While inspiring better.
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.
For some time it worked in Germany and USSR too. Paradigm shifts are natural part of technology development. Somewhat similar to large companies, societies without individual freedom tend to have harder time making through such paradigm shifts, either failing completely or doing it slower and much more inefficiently, and as a result lose to the more efficient societies with individual freedom.
The USA didn't New Deal hard enough to keep up with the rest of the "Western" world's more humane form of capitalism, which you can see in how consistently the USA lags behind other countries in measures of actual human progress and comfort.
While most "Western" countries suffered through similar technocratic, neoliberal turns in the 80s, they were built on a stronger social democratic base than the USA.
And don't get fooled by "horseshoe theory" ignorance: Fascist states were/are authoritarian by definition. Communist states were/are authoritarian by culture.
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..
You can argue that a true meritocracy still wouldn't be ideal (as Young did), but that argument seems irrelevant -- the problem in the real world is that we pretend that we have a meritocracy, but often the person who gets the promotion or whatever isn't actually the best at their job, but is a cousin or fraternity brother of the person in charge -- the old "it isn't what you know, but who you know".
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?
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?
Well, sure. The hammer that happens at times to be in my hand while I'm hanging framed art downstairs is, in an exactly equivalent sense, "the hammer I'm with." I don't care about it, you know? It's just a tool.
Openness to technology use and to technological progress is a separate axis. The whole left-right thing is a convenient grouping mechanism and doesn't have explanatory power. If you dissolve it into multiple axes (openness to tech, authority beliefs/morals/economics, tradition, etc) you can show much tighter groups of beliefs with more distinct boundaries, but in practice they are lumped into "left" or "right" at a given moment, even though some of those clusters have switched from one side to the other (and even back!) in living memory. See also "horseshoe theory", which is what happens when you try really hard to put everyone on a single axis.
In contrast, populism is a style, not a set of beliefs.
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.
Zero of them are right-wing populists. They share absolutely no characteristics or policies with anyone who had ever been called populist before 2015, both when the term was invented (as a description of left-wing people against plutocrats), or when it was later bastardized by plutocrats (as a description of anyone who thought the happiness of the population should have any affect on policy.) There is no resemblance between any position they hold and the positions of the People's Party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populist_Party_(United_States))
> The "Demands" adopted by the Ocala convention called for the abolition of national banks; the establishment of sub-treasuries or depositories in every state, which would make low interest direct loans to farmers and property owners; the increase of money in circulation to not less than $50 per capita; the abolishment of futures of all agricultural and mechanical productions; the introduction of free silver; the prohibition of alien ownership of land, the reclamation of all lands held by railroads and other corporations in excess of what was actually used and needed by them, held for actual settlers only; legislation to ensure that one industry would not be built up at the expense of another; removal of the tariff tax on necessities of life; a graduated income tax; the limitation of all national and state revenues to the necessary expenses of the government economically and honestly administered; strict regulation or ownership of the means of public communication and transportation; and an amendment of the United States Constitution providing for the direct election of United States senators.
People need to stop discussing reality through weird propagandistic brand names that people were literally paid to come up with, and talk specifically about material differences in policy.
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.
The actual problem with technocracy (if done right) is that the work of experts grows increasingly incomprehensible to average men. Even if things work out perfectly, experts can't properly take risks or make a leap of faith in other people's name. (Not to argue our current democratic model is any good at it)
The problem is that there's never any single "correct" solution for any engineering problem let alone social ones, and there's no single axis of "intelligence" or "expertise" that qualifies any single individual or set of individuals to make decisions in the long term on behalf of whole groups of people.
I am not a free market capitalist, I am a socialist; but I also believe in decentralizing decision making because centralized systems run by self-proclaimed people-of-merit always produces bad outcomes in the long run; left or right.
Having to find consensus is messy and difficult but always wins out in the long run.
> there's never any single "correct" solution for any engineering problem let alone social ones
as an aside, in my experience its engineers that love the one-size-fits-all and apply-it-to-everything solutions... or perhaps this is just indicative of working in top-down tech-land idk...
The actual problem with technocracy is that you create a formalized hierarchy of leaders and rabble based on some credential granting authority that the technocrats control.
That's a recipe for disaster. The technocrats define who can be a technocrat, and can design the process to benefit them. The incentives are towards elitist, racist, cronyist policies that would select for sociopathic tendencies.
What's the difference between a technocrat and a bishop in this case?
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.
“ 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
How can some one on hn think AI is a gimmick? I truly don't understand this. You can completely ignore 99% of it that is distasteful to you it seems to me you would still have to come to the conclusion it's not a gimmick. Is alphafold a gimmick? Are boltzmann generators gimmicks? Are improved weather predictions gimmicks? Are diffusion models gimmicks?
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.
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.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
your revealed preference would tell a bit more about this than any book. keep me updated on whether you would like to live in a tribal society's culture or a modern one.
I think the tribal society would be better for mental health. It is how humans evolved to live. You have to be raised in it from birth to collect the skills you need for it though. Not something one can switch to very easily.
Modern society is so far removed from how we adapted as a species. It is no surprise so many struggle with it to varying degrees large and small. Depression and obesity are some examples I'd say of modern life ills. We live in this society where we are sedentary all day and constantly in fight or flight response due to work pressures. We were built to forage and hunt over some 8 miles a day. It is no wonder many of us are still fat and sad in this modern world of supposed abundance.
There are some opinions out there of agriculture being this sort of "wrong turn" of our species (1). Yes we could sustain great numbers, but with agriculture we introduced zoonotic disease vectors. Widespread environmental damage replacing native species with crops, and the ecological disturbance that would result from having such an unbalanced amount of resources at that stage of the food chain, leading to plague numbers of pests, also sources for disease. Our numbers also exploded too but are liable to all sorts of famine and other issues from overshooting these resources when a crop failure might occur, and still having all these mouths to feed. Agriculture enabled fielding large armies and violence on a scale never seen before.
"Today, around 75% of infectious diseases suffered by humans are zoonoses, ones obtained from or more often shared with domestic animals. Some common examples include influenza, the common cold, various parasites like tapeworms and highly infectious diseases that decimated millions of people in the past such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis, typhoid and measles.
In response, natural selection dramatically sculpted the genome of these early farmers. The genes for immunity are over-represented in terms of the evidence for natural selection and most of the changes can be timed to the adoption of farming.
And geneticists have estimated that 85% of the disease-causing gene variants in contemporary human populations arose during the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, or alongside the rise and spread of agriculture."
"Another surprising change seen in the skeletons of early farmers is a smaller skull especially the bones of the face. Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers had larger skulls due to their more mobile and active lifestyle including a diet which required much more chewing.
Smaller faces affected oral health because human teeth didn’t reduce proportionately to the smaller jaw, so dental crowding ensued. This led to increased dental disease along with extra cavities from a starchy diet.
These changes dramatically shaped our attitudes to material goods and wealth. Prestige items became highly sought after as hallmarks of power. And with larger populations came growing social and economic complexity and inequality and, naturally, increasing warfare.
Inequalities of wealth and status cemented the rise of hierarchical societies — first chiefdoms then hereditary lineages which ruled over the rapidly growing human settlements.
Eventually they expanded to form large cities, and then empires, with vast areas of land taken by force with armies under the control of emperors or kings and queens.
This inherited power was the foundation of the "great" civilisations that developed across the ancient world and into the modern era with its colonial legacies that are still very much with us today."
It was a city half in / half out of agriculture though.
No evidence of cultivation, but extensive evidence of cereal / grain processing - surrounded as it was by abundant wild grasses and steppes.
The argument made by some is that processing grain (winnowing, grinding with stone, ovens, etc) induces a fixed "city" life via the not especially portable capital investment.
Certainly an avenue of thought worth investing time in.
I think many of those systems were created by elites who dominated the use of violence and fed off the work of the subordinate classes. Their use of violence was a skill that was crucial for them to learn to be good at but only had to be used intermittently, so they had a relatively large amount of free time to spend on governing and thinking.
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.
Not just that but the 30s was the tail end of a period of reduction and unification in science. If physics and biology (large portions of it) could be reduced to a handful of principles, why not economics and politics. Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, Hilbert, the Vienna Circle. It must have seemed like science was on track to explain more or less everything.
It’s interesting that the theory of Quantum Mechanics emerged just after this point and threw a wrench in the idea that the universe could be neatly explained through a universal single theory, suddenly there were more questions than answers. And Einstein famously hated quantum physics.
There’s something to be said about the cultural impact of quantum mechanics and how it shifted people’s perceptions from a universe that could eventually be explained by a set of fairly simple, understandable laws of physics to one that is much more complex, mysterious and contradictory. Suddenly the laws of the universe were defined by randomness and uncertainty, rather than determinism and easily understood logic.
I don't know why it would matter, but Einstein didn't hate quantum mechanics. He literally got his Nobel prize for his role in discovering quantum mechanics. He is one of the earliest people to propose that light exists in quantised packets.
He had some strong opinions around interpretations of quantum physics, but that isn't even a question of science, it's a metaphysical discussion.
While we're at it, Einstein also wasn't a bad student, and he didn't hate mathematics.
Around the same time, Gödel proved the incompleteness theorems and Turing gave us the halting problem. These and the uncertainty principle tell us not only that the universe is somehow statistical and not mechanical, but that there are certain unknowable facts. That's got to be a major psychological blow.
I read and enjoyed the book " what is real" by Adam Becker that talks about this intersection between the philosophy of the day and its impact on what more considered valid interpretations of QM at the time and into the future. The logical positivists had a lot of impact on popular conception of quantum stuff, even to this day. Great read
It's also the height of real problems being solved relatively simply with technological advances.
Then realized they too didn't understand the complex nature of the world
Sounds like early AI..
One issue with economy as a science is that it's a very soft science at best and just pseudoscience at worst.
Which then kind of defeats the purpose of experts in the sense of technocracy.
As an analogy, you can make a PhD in theology, but that is not proof that God exists.
Economics is very deliberately a pseudo-science. Orthodox economics starts from neoliberal moral beliefs and tries to justify and excuse them.
It's about controlling the narrative, not about modelling consequences.
Example: the way the supply shocks of the oil crises in the 70s and 80s were converted into a "keep wages low and raise interest rates to prevent inflation" narrative, when the rational solution would have been to move the economy away from dependence on oil as soon as possible.
> One issue with economy as a science is that it's a very soft science at best and just pseudoscience at worst.
Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once stated “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.”
There are falsifiable ideas and programs in economics—tax cuts paying for themselves, expansionary austerity, tariffs, etc—that are tried regularly:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansionary_fiscal_contractio...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_the_Trump_administr...
The fact that the results of these experiments are ignored is hardly the fault of the those making correct predictions with correct models.
I don't think so. Ideally, you still have normal people deciding tradeoffs like today, it's just that the reasoning and the suggested solutions to problems have to be scientifically and logically sound.
The submission[0] right next to this one shows why.
Apparently, in the US, you are now a criminal if you fly drones half a mile from ICE vehicles. Some of which may be unmarked and even if marked, how exactly do you verify no ICE vehicle is in a 0.785 square mile radius? Anybody capable of logical thought sees that this is BS.
(Also, anybody who retained primary school knowledge can calculate the area. But ask a person on the street to do it and watch your faith in humanity fall. Ask them to point out the area on a map and estimate how many cars that would be...)
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Even the lawyer who taught intro to law at my uni always said that the people who most often find contradictions in laws are engineers.
The problems always start when somebody takes an ideology too far. So let's figure out what is too far instead of rejecting the whole thing.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633947
Hubris. Is the same mindset that leads to socialism, central planning, social darwinism, etc. The temptation of "theory" without the suffering from pesky reality.
"All phenomena involved in the functional operation of the social mechanism are measurable"
From the article, reminded me that the complexities and nuance of life at the ground level really are lost on some.
Even if you genuinely could measure every single detail of life and the forces that move the economy, no committee of experts could ever hope to reason through the data and make coherent solutions that actually survive reality.
Central planning of some sort is pretty standard in corporations, I'd say.
There’s multiple corporations. When you have state level central planning there’s no adversarial check or feedback mechanism. Nothing challenges it to see if it’s actually doing a good job.
Of course this is also a strong argument for antitrust. In some markets today there is basically one corporation or a few that seem more interlocked than competing. That starts to be indistinguishable from Soviet bureaus.
There are multiple nations and states with feedback mechanism between them (see the cold war, for example).
How ironic that you were downvoted.
HN is full of left-populists these days and any slightly negative mention of socialism or central planning (their equivalent utopian vision) triggers them.
I think this suggests it's more than just hubris, it's religion. These aren't just ideas, they are belief systems and identities for people. Hence why someone would downvote a benign internet comment like yours.
The steady decline of traditional religions has left people searching for meaning in other ways, and it has manifested in all sorts of bizarre belief systems and behavior over the past 200ish years, technocracy being one of them.
I would equate similar values to people who think socialism and central planning are somehow linked and share the same criticisms. Probably 90% of criticism I hear about socialism is complete and utter nonsense. Co-op businesses are socialist ideals in practice and co-ops have consistently gained market share over the last 80+ years, and it is neither linked to or shares any of the problems as central planning.
Im all for reading criticism about economic models, but it seems like the vast majority of it has nothing to do with anything Marx proposed or idealized and is just translocated hatred of authoritarian policies which is far more often in opposition to Marxist principles than supporting them. Socialist ideaology far more directly supports democratic workplaces and democratic economic decisions than centralized leadership and control.
Well you're criticizing shitty thinkers rightfully w.r.t to co-ops; they're great, they aren't top-down. But you're committing the same error. Co-ops are completely compatible with capitalism so holding them up as contrast doesn't make much sense. Show me non-authoritarian Marxism at the scale Marx so confidently predicted.
Marx simply had a flawed understanding of economics and it's time we moved on. We have the data supporting the decision to do so. Usually when a theory makes completely incorrect predictions repeatedly, we abandon it. But apparently marxists know better than everyone. Do they have some secret data set?
Something exists in capitalism so therefore it can't be socialism? And im not going to get into another circular reasoning of "It didn't exist in that form before therefore it is impossible now." At no point have you pointed out anything Marx supported that is a problem other than a generalized brush of everything.
90% of Marxist work is a study of capitalism, much of which we still hold true today, so to me you look like everyone else that blindly dismisses what he said without learning what he even did or said.
I didn't say it wasn't socialism. I said it wasn't a counterexample. As for whether you still think it's worth taking Marx seriously as an economist, I'm guessing you'd laugh at someone citing Smith. Yet one had a better track record than the other. My point was simply that a theory should be judged on its merits, it's predictions, it's actual outcomes.
This comment strikes me as weirdly incoherent.
It seems to be an assemblage of random political ranting (derived from mainstream US politics) instead of addressing anything about the Technocracy movement of the 1930s.
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Weird - that's the 2nd mention of "Technate" I see in 24 hrs - never heard of that before today.
(Other instance was PredictiveHistory youtube here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrmERlHUqBk ).
Guessing that's not a coincidence
Also noticed that… another consequence of convergence of culture due to algorithmic management of attention?
Honestly I have no idea what to make of it.
In my mind it could be:
1) Simple copycat - article author is watching predictive history which seems plausible given channels surge in popularity
2) Algo effects
3) Coincidence / think of pink elephant effect
4) An actual coordinated intentional campaign by [insert evildoer with insert evildoer motive here...or even 3 letter agency meaning well but ending up functionally doing same as evildoer]
...the fact that I couldn't tell #4 apart from 1-3 has me a little spooked
The essay was actually originally published last year, long before that Predictive History video came out
I watch his channel regularly mostly for entertainment and to help form my own thoughts and opinions on the subject matter relative to other sources. I do think some of his content is accurate and useful, but a lot of it isn't. I've caught him regurgitating conspiracy threads from reddit in his teachings on more than one occasion. I think he reads those threads and possibly uses AI to design the topics around them along with a dose of some cursory research into those subjects. I'm guessing he got the term "Technate" off of reddit as well, as I've seen it mentioned there.
EDIT: looks like it might be based off this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement#The_techn...
It's probably influenced by findings after Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin conspiracies started spiking in popularity in recent months
I'd be a little reluctant to mark his speeches as "conspiracy".
I don't disagree with that on a qualitative level, but predictive history is as the name suggests forward looking. We're by definition up to our eyeballs into speculative territory here, a lot of it may align with conspiracy.
So yeah may land on the same ballpark, but still think "conspiracy" label does the dude a disservice.
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.
Yep and I think unfortunately people don't understand human nature because they look at themselves and look at their neighbours to estimate it... But human nature is very different when evaluated from the centres of power. Humans near the centres of power are fundamentally very different from those on the periphery. There are powerful selection mechanisms at play.
I used to think success was mostly about luck but now I think there are selection mechanisms but they're not selecting for what people think. Selection is not based on skill or hard work.
I think there are different life strategies that humans use. Some people need to survive based on skill more than others. The most obvious cases of non-skill strategies are the ones where people make a living based on having a certain physical appearance, or else live off of inheritance.
This might be controversial but I think rich and powerful people are usually skilled. The skill might be pretty far removed from the technical, of course. But I think I can safely say that most people don't fail upward and don't preserve or grow wealth when it just falls into their laps. The skill of investing well is really kind of a planning and information-processing skill. Society generally benefits from successful management of wealth at that level, even if we on the bottom of the pyramid detest extreme wealth of those on top.
Yep but there are strange undesirable characteristics that are being selected. Some of which we don't fully understand.
For example, it is my personal belief that there is a selection mechanism for high suggestibility (by social media and search algorithms which can monetize it). Basically suggestible people are helped in their careers because they act like a money pipeline which redirects money they 'earn' back to social media companies. Social media companies might be thinking of people as straight money pipes leading outward vs bendable pipes potentially leading back towards themselves. Which kind of pipe would they select to pump money through?
This has a side effect of creating strong social alignment over bad ideas. If you empower suggestible people to make decisions, then whoever is above them can bend them in any direction they want.
Suggestible people follow instructions and (sometimes) take fewer risks. It is simply infeasible to logically convince people of every single thing that they ought to know. I hate to infantilize people in this way, but even the most capable and inquisitive minds among us cannot reasonably investigate everything.
People socially align over a lot of things, not just ideas. They develop shared tastes and preferences.
Even very undesirable characteristics such as sociopathy have a function in society. It is sometimes necessary to emotionally detach oneself from situations to make the right decisions. These are not good for every role, but they are primitive survival mechanisms and still have a useful function in keeping the peace.
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
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.
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...
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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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(Department_of_Defen...
USSR at big extent was there too.
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...
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...
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.
The Italian futurists went fascist. There were also Russian Cosmists who were IMO more interesting and didn’t seem fascist. They seemed more intellectual and heavily influenced science fiction. The Italian futurists were just on speed I think.
On the fringe right today there’s people who invoke Russian Cosmism and fascism, which I don’t get because historically they were distinct movements. But the fringe right is extremely incoherent. Fascism itself is also ideologically incoherent, and in that case it’s because fascism tends to be explicitly anti-rational.
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
You may want to read the usernames again, they were replying to themselves.
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.
Musk's grandfather was a leader in the Technocracy Movement and tried to overthrow the Canadian govt before being expelled to South Africa:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman
I went down that rabbit hole. Apparently, he was a member of the Saskatchewan Social Credit Party. It looks like the party never made inroads in Saskatchewan, but the party controlled Alberta for decades. Then I ran into the following comment in the article:
> If mental illness is on the rise, then the obvious solution is on-demand therapists through an app
That is not the only "solution". Alberta had a Eugenics Board for the entire run of the Social Credit Party. One of the roles of this board was to sterilize people with mental illness. (The board predates the party by about a decade, but was only abolished about a year after they lost power.) While this a couple of leaps from the Technocracy movement, the mere association is rather scary.
Controlled Alberta for decades and BC as well though in BC it transformed into more of a big tent "everyone but the NDP" conservative party. Still run by lunatics though.
In Saskatchewan prairie populism took a left wing form instead.
In Alberta the taint of these people never went away. Lougheed's progressive conservatives pulled Alberta governance a bit more mainstream for a couple decades, but Smith's UCP has dragged it right back. Magazines like Alberta Report and hangers-on kept far right prairie right wing populism alive for decades, Preston Manning (Social Credit premier Earnest Manning's son) "mainstream"ized it in the Reform Party ... which essentially took over the federal conservative party... there's a well-spring of this stuff in rural Alberta.. and its full of all sorts of paranoid persecution complex politics, undertones of anti-Semitism (sometimes outright explicit as in the whole James Keegstra afair), with everything to the left of them considered "communism" and these days with bags of money being dumped on them from the US they have no managed to get themselves enough signatures to force a referendum on "independence" (aka annexation by the US).
As a person from Alberta originally and with all my family still there, I find it all a bit terrifying. Very much not a relic of the past, and with COVID and now Trump the lunatic fringe has outsized influence there like it never did before.
I suspect if you probe the right people from the UCP in the right church basements where they're off-mic you'd still find them defending things like eugenics etc.
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...
Yep. Covered this many moons ago. I have a few episodes on this on my youtube.
https://youtu.be/E6yg5Rj9owk
4 weeks is one moon, not many moons.
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.
Until you manage to eliminate or at least limit competition between groups, efficiency is a very important metric to optimize for lest you get out-competed by others, at the very least reducing the effect of your group, if not resulting in it shrinking or disappearing.
I agree it's not perfect, but I think you are over-dramatizing.
My gut says that planetary healthy would be wildly improved if we worked to build a more efficient society. Having meaning & caring about being a well running world would hopefully give us some grounds to flourish on, pride and effort and will to drive us towards something meaningful, beyond the grab-as-much-money-as-you-can state of things today. A collective future worth caring about.
The article talks about building a social world for people deliberately. It seems like they had some care, wanted to try to improve the social lives of people too. If anything I think the Technocracy people understood somewhat better that these decisions about how we treat people are not instanteous questions: maybe we get more social productivity out of some by treating them like crap & working them to collapse, but then we have decades of them being a social and perhaps economic drain on all society. That short term exploitation is what capital does to people today already! But no scientist worth a salt is going to create such imbalanced wasteful systems!
Efficiency can mean a lot of different things. It depends on what you are trying to make efficient, doesn't it? An efficient society, in my view, would be focused on happiness indexes, on gini coefficients. It would be trying to make our footprint more modest, try to make goods repairiable & sustainable long term. Modern eco-concern today has a lot of overlap with many of the basics here.
I'm speculating a lot. But if you don't want to nibble at this food for thought what other morsels are worth trying? This very much is a case where, again, I find the anti-willpower striking and concerning, the leaping into the negative. Over something strange and weird and a bit fanciful and naive. But at least they were working for something to believe in. At least they had a will to better, one that seems fundamentally resoundingly kind of true, kind of needed: a view that is long term, that focuses on building a maintainable long term running order, that doesn't consume until exhaustion.
Efficiency was important in an environment where different civilizations were engaged in what amounts to a death struggle. Do we forget what won WW2?
Technocracy, and the doctrine of materialism, sees humans as machines.
I'd characterize it as cybernetic, as observant to & attending to inputs and outputs of systems. And interested in improving the results, by observing how these systems function.
Your characterization feels like one of those seeing-only-evil's that I characterize as an anti-willpower.
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.
Paine also said that society is good. That government is but the necessary to maintain it as it grows.
And I worry that what government we have now is not very effective. Health care in the US is a mess. Building anything has grown vastly more expensive, be it buildings, rail, or ships. We have countless laws protecting corporate IP, lobbyists a gazillion, and corporations regularly court shop to get whatever judicial treatment they desire.
The idea of a government focused on efficiency, that is trying to share and spread intelligence & knowledge & know how, that tried to help make us efficient at housing and food and health care: that feels, well, sort of essential at this point to maintaining what Paine loved & cherished: society.
And giving a nation back some purpose, some meaning: that can help bring us together too, perhaps. A purpose make a world that won't over consume, that has a chance to house & feed & care for itself, for hundreds, thousands, or vastly more years: that feels like such a potential antidote to the poison of reckless abandon & foolery that so many brutal nasty little value-less children have beset upon the world, have dissoluted our empathy & perpetrated mercenary anti-social campaigns against the world with. We need value systems that look forward, that care broadly, and that place a reasoned, scientific view as a pole star, and that seek actions not grandiose for grandiosity sake, but to serve us all, to bring an efficient, livable, social societal world out.
Our scale is perhaps a bit bigger than what Paine could have imagined, our numbers vastly more. I fear the Bowling Alone future only intensifies. I would not throw out Paine, but I do think we ought be open to asking what values our society shows for itself, asking if the values have kept up & are adequate, and we ought be open to assessing how governments might better enable societal values we think we need or perhaps just want to see. Technocracy's suggestion that those who care deeply about how the world works, and already have a life of servant leadership, seems atuned, to me, of being ideal for maintaining a society of fewer ills, and being willing to reduce their own role as we do get more efficient, as our ills and evils receed. While inspiring better.
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.
Seems to be working fine in China. Bad management happens, and does not refute the idea of management itself. Good management works.
For some time it worked in Germany and USSR too. Paradigm shifts are natural part of technology development. Somewhat similar to large companies, societies without individual freedom tend to have harder time making through such paradigm shifts, either failing completely or doing it slower and much more inefficiently, and as a result lose to the more efficient societies with individual freedom.
I think it's reductive to call China fascist or communist.
What is working in China? Because it certainly isn't communism if that's your point.
The USA didn't New Deal hard enough to keep up with the rest of the "Western" world's more humane form of capitalism, which you can see in how consistently the USA lags behind other countries in measures of actual human progress and comfort.
While most "Western" countries suffered through similar technocratic, neoliberal turns in the 80s, they were built on a stronger social democratic base than the USA.
And don't get fooled by "horseshoe theory" ignorance: Fascist states were/are authoritarian by definition. Communist states were/are authoritarian by culture.
The USA oligarchs were watching Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler and New Dealed just hard enough to blow some steam off and keep things mostly as they were.
If you believe Smedley Butler, at least some of those USA oligarchs were big Mussolini fans.
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..
An interesting critique of the meritocracy/technocracy: The Rise of Meritocracy by Michael Young.
Written in the 50s it's prescient to what has been happening since.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
You can argue that a true meritocracy still wouldn't be ideal (as Young did), but that argument seems irrelevant -- the problem in the real world is that we pretend that we have a meritocracy, but often the person who gets the promotion or whatever isn't actually the best at their job, but is a cousin or fraternity brother of the person in charge -- the old "it isn't what you know, but who you know".
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.
No, they are aiming for plutocracy. They don't want solutions that is good for society, they want solutions that make them richer.
With a side helping of something new, technofeudalism. Both of which are not at all related to technocracy.
> 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?
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.
Well, sure. The hammer that happens at times to be in my hand while I'm hanging framed art downstairs is, in an exactly equivalent sense, "the hammer I'm with." I don't care about it, you know? It's just a tool.
Openness to technology use and to technological progress is a separate axis. The whole left-right thing is a convenient grouping mechanism and doesn't have explanatory power. If you dissolve it into multiple axes (openness to tech, authority beliefs/morals/economics, tradition, etc) you can show much tighter groups of beliefs with more distinct boundaries, but in practice they are lumped into "left" or "right" at a given moment, even though some of those clusters have switched from one side to the other (and even back!) in living memory. See also "horseshoe theory", which is what happens when you try really hard to put everyone on a single axis.
In contrast, populism is a style, not a set of beliefs.
In most cases "populism" is a campaigning style / way of building hegemony more than it is any set of actual beliefs in popular power.
Among many so-called "populist" politicians you will find very intensely elitist and anti-democratic belief systems, just kept quite mute.
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.
Zero of them are right-wing populists. They share absolutely no characteristics or policies with anyone who had ever been called populist before 2015, both when the term was invented (as a description of left-wing people against plutocrats), or when it was later bastardized by plutocrats (as a description of anyone who thought the happiness of the population should have any affect on policy.) There is no resemblance between any position they hold and the positions of the People's Party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populist_Party_(United_States))
> The "Demands" adopted by the Ocala convention called for the abolition of national banks; the establishment of sub-treasuries or depositories in every state, which would make low interest direct loans to farmers and property owners; the increase of money in circulation to not less than $50 per capita; the abolishment of futures of all agricultural and mechanical productions; the introduction of free silver; the prohibition of alien ownership of land, the reclamation of all lands held by railroads and other corporations in excess of what was actually used and needed by them, held for actual settlers only; legislation to ensure that one industry would not be built up at the expense of another; removal of the tariff tax on necessities of life; a graduated income tax; the limitation of all national and state revenues to the necessary expenses of the government economically and honestly administered; strict regulation or ownership of the means of public communication and transportation; and an amendment of the United States Constitution providing for the direct election of United States senators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocala_Demands
People need to stop discussing reality through weird propagandistic brand names that people were literally paid to come up with, and talk specifically about material differences in policy.
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.
You can eat olives without martini.
The actual problem with technocracy (if done right) is that the work of experts grows increasingly incomprehensible to average men. Even if things work out perfectly, experts can't properly take risks or make a leap of faith in other people's name. (Not to argue our current democratic model is any good at it)
The problem is that there's never any single "correct" solution for any engineering problem let alone social ones, and there's no single axis of "intelligence" or "expertise" that qualifies any single individual or set of individuals to make decisions in the long term on behalf of whole groups of people.
I am not a free market capitalist, I am a socialist; but I also believe in decentralizing decision making because centralized systems run by self-proclaimed people-of-merit always produces bad outcomes in the long run; left or right.
Having to find consensus is messy and difficult but always wins out in the long run.
This is fun to watch if only for historic value.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL12574BA6D8566A03&si=SyeE...
>Having to find consensus is messy and difficult but always wins out in the long run.
It is talked about in the very first video. How votes are bought in the current system. Nothing is rooted in facts.
The (global) discussion should be about fixing the problem. How to find the least terrible system rather than point out all solutions are terrible.
The actual problem with technocracy is that you create a formalized hierarchy of leaders and rabble based on some credential granting authority that the technocrats control.
That's a recipe for disaster. The technocrats define who can be a technocrat, and can design the process to benefit them. The incentives are towards elitist, racist, cronyist policies that would select for sociopathic tendencies.
What's the difference between a technocrat and a bishop in this case?
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“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.
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.
“ 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
How can some one on hn think AI is a gimmick? I truly don't understand this. You can completely ignore 99% of it that is distasteful to you it seems to me you would still have to come to the conclusion it's not a gimmick. Is alphafold a gimmick? Are boltzmann generators gimmicks? Are improved weather predictions gimmicks? Are diffusion models gimmicks?
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.
This isn’t necessarily true.
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.
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
It certainly doesn't sound like something many people would be into. More like a long trol.
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“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
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.
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
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.
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
He's right twice a day like any other crackpot. Stop fawning.
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.
>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
I recommend reading "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber & David Wengrow. You might learn something about those "shitty" versions.
your revealed preference would tell a bit more about this than any book. keep me updated on whether you would like to live in a tribal society's culture or a modern one.
I think the tribal society would be better for mental health. It is how humans evolved to live. You have to be raised in it from birth to collect the skills you need for it though. Not something one can switch to very easily.
Modern society is so far removed from how we adapted as a species. It is no surprise so many struggle with it to varying degrees large and small. Depression and obesity are some examples I'd say of modern life ills. We live in this society where we are sedentary all day and constantly in fight or flight response due to work pressures. We were built to forage and hunt over some 8 miles a day. It is no wonder many of us are still fat and sad in this modern world of supposed abundance.
There are some opinions out there of agriculture being this sort of "wrong turn" of our species (1). Yes we could sustain great numbers, but with agriculture we introduced zoonotic disease vectors. Widespread environmental damage replacing native species with crops, and the ecological disturbance that would result from having such an unbalanced amount of resources at that stage of the food chain, leading to plague numbers of pests, also sources for disease. Our numbers also exploded too but are liable to all sorts of famine and other issues from overshooting these resources when a crop failure might occur, and still having all these mouths to feed. Agriculture enabled fielding large armies and violence on a scale never seen before.
"Today, around 75% of infectious diseases suffered by humans are zoonoses, ones obtained from or more often shared with domestic animals. Some common examples include influenza, the common cold, various parasites like tapeworms and highly infectious diseases that decimated millions of people in the past such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis, typhoid and measles.
In response, natural selection dramatically sculpted the genome of these early farmers. The genes for immunity are over-represented in terms of the evidence for natural selection and most of the changes can be timed to the adoption of farming.
And geneticists have estimated that 85% of the disease-causing gene variants in contemporary human populations arose during the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, or alongside the rise and spread of agriculture."
"Another surprising change seen in the skeletons of early farmers is a smaller skull especially the bones of the face. Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers had larger skulls due to their more mobile and active lifestyle including a diet which required much more chewing.
Smaller faces affected oral health because human teeth didn’t reduce proportionately to the smaller jaw, so dental crowding ensued. This led to increased dental disease along with extra cavities from a starchy diet.
These changes dramatically shaped our attitudes to material goods and wealth. Prestige items became highly sought after as hallmarks of power. And with larger populations came growing social and economic complexity and inequality and, naturally, increasing warfare.
Inequalities of wealth and status cemented the rise of hierarchical societies — first chiefdoms then hereditary lineages which ruled over the rapidly growing human settlements.
Eventually they expanded to form large cities, and then empires, with vast areas of land taken by force with armies under the control of emperors or kings and queens.
This inherited power was the foundation of the "great" civilisations that developed across the ancient world and into the modern era with its colonial legacies that are still very much with us today."
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2017/10/was-agricultur...
No they don't, just different.
Cities predated agriculture. Look up Göbekli Tepe -- this is a common misconception and worth correcting yourself on.
It was a city half in / half out of agriculture though.
No evidence of cultivation, but extensive evidence of cereal / grain processing - surrounded as it was by abundant wild grasses and steppes.
The argument made by some is that processing grain (winnowing, grinding with stone, ovens, etc) induces a fixed "city" life via the not especially portable capital investment.
Certainly an avenue of thought worth investing time in.
I think many of those systems were created by elites who dominated the use of violence and fed off the work of the subordinate classes. Their use of violence was a skill that was crucial for them to learn to be good at but only had to be used intermittently, so they had a relatively large amount of free time to spend on governing and thinking.
This explanation is only partial, of course.