Technocracy, Technopoly, or Technopolis?
As I reorient myself to society after my long trip, I see a lot changed while I was away. I see a new world order emerging. But, what is this?
Bold writers on Medium and other platforms continue to report on elements of the change unfolding before our eyes. Some attempt to interpret the present through the eyes of the past, and they warn readers that if we don’t take a stand against the forces intent on oppressing us, we will end up like our ancestors did.
Others attempt to make huge cognitive leaps to a global totalitarian end game that results in the enslavement of humanity to digital IDs, CDBCs, social credit scores, transhumanism, and/or an AI-managed existence in the metaverse.
And others still, like my mother once did, interpret these changes in the context of a spiritual awakening-in-progress for humanity and forces of darkness that, for some reason, want to stop us from waking up.
What if all of these forces at play are a part of what’s happening on Earth?
This article is not a treatise on conspiracy theories. I’m trying to understand what this new social order is, how it is intended to function, and the structure of human consciousness behind it. My time away taught me that until I understand the consciousness behind what I’m seeing, I won’t understand what I’m seeing.
And I have to understand it. My mission requires me to navigate this new social order for at least 40 years into the future.
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My research and analysis revealed three interrelated ideas that I want to explore here:
- Technocracy
- Technopoly
- Technopolis
1. Technocracy
As I read articles here and elsewhere, one word comes up over and over again. Technocracy.
From Wikipedia: “Technocracy is a form of government in which the decision-makers are selected based on their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge. Technocracy follows largely in the tradition of other meritocracy theories and assumes full state control over political and economic issues.”
It’s worth noting that technocracy concept is not new. Wikipedia credits William Henry Smyth with coining the term in 1919 and Howard Scott with founding a technocracy movement in the 1930s. As always, there are various interpretations of the meaning. Read the Wikipedia article to learn more about the history, precursors, characteristics, critiques, and more.
From what I’ve read on Medium, technocracy a word that tends to polarize those who write about it. I’m not going to attempt to recap anyone else’s work here. If you want to deep-dive into the topic, search the word “technocracy” on this platform.
My level one analysis below breaks it down in terms my simple mind can understand. What are the components of a technocracy?
Technology
The premise of a technocracy is a technologically advanced society that requires a new form of government to manage the effective uses of current and future technologies.
Government
Like an aristocracy or an oligarchy, a technocracy is governed by those few who can organize the elite individuals who possess the right knowledge, qualifications, relationships, and/or financial assets required to make decisions about the socioeconomic roadmap. Their decisions govern society.
Society
Citizens are the subjects of those decisions. They are hired to build the systems and to help enforce them in a popular consumerist culture. Using the technical architecture and tools invented and governed by the elite, technicians work alongside intelligent systems like AI and robotics to implement and automate the decisions. Algorithms parse the data to monitor and control the production and distribution of goods, transportation, and social benefits.
Citizen participation in society requires a technological interface and permission from the governing systems. If a citizen disobeys the automated decisions or threatens the social order, they’re penalized or simply denied access. Also known as “cancelled.”
Culture
The distribution of digital information defines the culture in a technocracy. The media celebrates all forms of individual expression, fosters polarization between groups of like-minded individuals with differing expressions, and punishes transgressions against the automated decisions. This results in perpetual shock and trauma to the human psyche that degrades or incapacitates higher functions like sovereign decision-making and spiritual consciousness.
Consciousness
“What is the matrix? Control.” The famous words of Morpheus in The Matrix appear to say it all. They suggest the consciousness behind a technocracy is control. Why is control so important? Because it’s a dangerous world. Resources are scarce. There’s not enough for everybody.
I am not safe. A very human core issue.
The zeitgeist focuses on control. It’s a factor for sure. However, I think danger is the ruling consciousness of a technocracy. The social order and its media channels perpetually reinforce that the world is a dangerous place. As a citizen, I’m told over and over that I am not safe, until I feel I am not safe. If I’m not safe, then I need protection. And the technocracy promises to provide it, in exchange for my unquestioned obedience.
And — walking in the shoes of an elite technocrat for a moment — the bottom line is, to keep myself safe in a dangerous world, I need to take more than my fair share. And I need protection from the citizens who will be pissed off when they figure out I’m taking more. First priority: make sure I get dibs on whatever I need and want. Second priority: build technology that will take care of protecting me and doling out what’s left among the citizens. I’ll get the smartest and most ambitious citizens to work for me by giving them a larger share of what’s left. Those who can’t, don’t, or won’t participate in building ever-more effective systems of wealth-building and protection for me will get just enough to survive. As long as they behave. Resistance or opposition will not be tolerated.
If I’m right about the consciousness behind technocracy, what will our global government look like 40 years from now?
2. Technopoly
In the process of learning about technocracy, I discovered two related words. The first is technopoly. Wiktionary defines the noun as “the cultural state of mind that assumes technology is always positive and of value.”
Circa 1992, Neil Postman authored Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Postman classifies three types of cultures: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. Our ancestors lived in tool-using cultures where inherited royalty was a normal part of the social order. The author suggests America became an technocracy in the 19th century, through inventions such as the steam engine and mechanized factories. Technocratic capitalism “transformed the face of material civilization” by enabling us to do more and travel farther in less time.
However, this technocracy did not erase the tool-using culture that had developed over centuries. Thus, the bulk of the book explored how we would move from technocracy to technopoly, a culture that elevates “information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity.” A world where “”social science” is a vigorous ally of Technopoly and must therefore be regarded with a hostile eye.” To quote Neil Postman, “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.” At the time he wrote the book, Postman postulated that America was already a young Technopoly and that Japan and several European countries were striving to become Technopolies as well.
Here we are, 30+ years later. This sounds more and more like the world I live in today. We have an advanced global cloud infrastructure and orbiting satellite network that makes a perpetually growing body of information available to consumers 24x7x365 via devices connected to the internet and cellular networks. Looks to me like social media networks and businesses of all kinds, hyper-powered by information and AI, apply social science to their data to orchestrate consumerism and the very perception of reality itself.
If this is where we are now, what will our culture look like 40 years from now?
3. Technopolis
The second word related to technocracy has been used in various contexts. For the purposes of this article, I will use what my research revealed as the most meaningful origin of the word in the context of a technocratic socioeconomic order.
Circa 1986, Sheridan Tatsuno authored The Technopolis Strategy: Japan, High Technology, and the Control of the 21st Century. Tatsuno surveys how Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) sought to clone Silicon Valley’s success in California, USA with the Technopolis Concept; an ambitious plan to intentionally build globally-competitive high technology cities by synthesizing an R&D Strategy that incorporated Creative Technologies, an Innovation Strategy inspired by Silicon Valley, and a Regional Development Strategy that led to the Garden City Concept.
In addition, as illustrated on the last page of the book and covered in Chapter 11, “Whither America,” the USA map of The New Silicon Valleys highlights over four dozen areas in 1986 that, in our present time, have become major technology centers and hubs for global business.
Nearly 40 years later, one cannot deny Japan’s success with this strategy. The country remains a global technology leader despite fierce competition from other developed economies. Other countries have adopted similar models and developed their unique variations. The Technopolis Concept shows the power of centralized planning and how it takes decades and perseverance through setbacks to fully realize a vision of such magnitude and scope.
If the simplified definition of a technopolis is a planned metropolitan area that synthesizes technological innovation and regional development strategies with the Garden City Concept, I want to know what that means in the existential threat of climate change culture we all live in today.
In 2024, we have a number of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) unified with public-private partnerships to set forth a new vision for a high technology future. In this new vision, the R&D focus appears to be AI, robotics, and alternative energy solutions. The new innovation strategy pits all the New Silicon Valleys around the world against each other to use AI for innovation. And the new garden city movement looks like the 15-minute city concept powered by alternative energy. Sure looks to me like a new technopolis strategy for reducing our carbon footprint.
If this is the new technopolis strategy, what will our cities look like 40 years from now?
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Three big ideas. Three big questions. Join me next time as I go deeper into the structure of conscious behind technocracy, technopoly, and technopolis. Danger.
Council-in-training is a fictional character from a forthcoming novel series by Author Jeffrey Griffith.
