The technocratic temptation, the technocratic fallacy

The Covid crisis proved how susceptible politics can be to technocratic takeovers. The scientific consensus on which policymakers relied for measures such as QR codes, vaccinations and curfews, turned out to be the products of political steering, as revealed by the Dutch public broadcasting. Politicians were told that they “are not scientists”. For this reason, they allegedly put the health of the vulnerable at risk if they did not follow scientific advice blindly. This stance, however, ignored the mediating role of people’s representatives: they are elected to find compromises between the interests of the vulnerable, the medical industry, the wishes of youngsters and of local businessmen.

In Covid times, politicians’ lack of technological expertise became an argument by which elected officials allowed themselves to be sidelined. Science and technology became the guiding principles, while the direction of that scientific expertise was influenced by political assumptions on which – at least publicly – no political reflection was permitted.

Political assumptions become operating manual

Looking deeper, we see the same thing in every debate at the intersection of technology and society: from electric pulse fishing to the use of nuclear power versus fossil fuels. Political assumptions become a ‘code of conduct’ for technology. In this way, technology becomes an extension of an ideology that eludes political reflection and criticism through that ‘instrumentalisation’. This in itself is anti-democratic. But also, those technologies become instruments which equalise and reshape society according to the underlying ideology.

In this article, I want to reveal how this technocratic utopianism is backed by a deep cynicism. The importance of this became clear to me when I was recently in conversation with a Brussels lobbyist who was questioned about his deepest motivations. What drives him to get so deeply involved in legislative proposals, policy processes and the political-industrial network of power?

Technology calls for ‘protection’

He argued that the advance of technology is radically changing the world – just think of how different life has become with the popularisation of smartphones and search engines. Technology creates change, so the negative consequences must be dampened and consumers must be protected from the negative side effects.

The noble motive of “protecting the citizen”, however, often results in regulations which keep citizens under their thumb. This analysis is as old as liberalism, and it is sad to see that liberals have appropriated this rhetoric: they are the very ones who have merged with state power and big business in the last twenty years...

Now some examples to clarify what I am getting at. Take the change of flora and fauna in nature as a consequence of nitrogen emissions. In technocratic discourse, nature is treated as a piece of heritage that must remain as it is, rather than as a dynamic ecosystem that is always changing. In all the models, legal processes and directives that are then poured out on society, there is no more room to reconsider that starting point – of what nature is and how humans can best deal with it.

Discussion of policy direction buried under technocracy

In this, the policy maker is sidelined. The ideology is cast in a technocratic form to make it immune to political criticism. Any conversation about the drawbacks of Dutch nitrogen policy is beaten to death with measurements and norms. The great discussion about “what role nature should have in the design of our society” appears to be stuck at that technocratic level, instead of leading the policy. So there is no longer any feedback between the goal and direction of the policy and its practical consequences. This is anti-democratic. Sooner or later this leads to the analysis of the French anarchist Georges Sorel, that ‘violence’ and ‘myth’ are the only ways in which such a hermetically sealed discourse can be broken open.

Phasing out meat consumption is the same, as is the stop on electric pulse fishing. Instead of having this discussion with an open mind, it already seems a foregone conclusion among global elites that eating meat becomes reserved for the super-rich. The abolition of pulse fishing was brought as “too taxing for the ecosystem,” when in fact it was the power of the French lobby, overshadowing the Netherlands within the EU, destroying this efficient fishery because their own fisheries are lagging behind and unable to compete. Technological solutions invariably turn out to be political choices.

Hearing this, the lobbyist glanced at the dinner table and pointed to his glass of wine and the shrimp, among other things. “This will probably disappear,” he said. “But such changes are by no means always negative. My parents once paid 4,000 guilders for a clunky computer. Today’s mobile phones cost a fraction of that and have considerably more computing power.”

Fallacy

This was a fallacy on multiple layers. So-called ‘technical improvements’ and ‘legislation to protect consumers,’ in practice mean deepening existing power inequality. Take the caution among politicians toward AI. As a result of it, the consumer version of ChatGPT is being watered down, for fear of irregularities and destabilisation, while the elites – already powerful – do have access to more powerful versions of AI.

Additionally, that clunky computer of your parents offered some privacy, a degree of anonymity. Cell phones, and virtually the entire Internet as it exists currently, are full of trackers, cookies and all manner of data mining. Big corporations – whose lobbyists with every piece of legislation and every new technology have a direct line to the engine rooms of power – know what you watch, what you eat, where you travel and go out, whether your house is for sale. This information is worth far more to companies than the 4,000 guilders your parents put down for a computer back then. So, this argument proves precisely that the balance of power has shifted, with all the international upscaling and administrative intertwining, to the disadvantage of the consumer.

The lobbyist said he carefully shields his data and avoids data mining as much as possible. Quite an elitist statement. A lobbyist may have the time, network and skills to delve into digital anonymity but the ordinary worker, tired from work and also burdened with family care responsibilities, does not.

One can say that legislation should protect the consumer, but again – directly in between there are the big corporations, as well as the security services. See, for example, the monstrosity of a Digital Services Act: in theory intended to protect consumers from Big Data, in practice a means of imposing Cultural Marxist speech codes on public discourse.

And then about the disappearance of shrimp, fish and meat: by speaking so laconically about this, as if it were some sort of inevitable course of history, he normalises a world in which no one wants to be a fisherman, farmer or butcher anymore, and everyone wants to be an Instagram model or YouTube influencer. At the same time, cosmopolitan elites do want to keep eating their caviar and poking their meatballs. This seemingly left-progressive worldview, in practice means: winner takes all.

Colourless uniformity

Ultimately, even the lobbyist will have to ask himself whether he can be happy in a world where one can travel thousands of miles and find the same supermarkets with the same products in every city; a world where everything is standardised and every identity interchangeable. Does this serve mankind?

His excuse, “advancing technology forces us to this policy,” or, “technology creates a network of power in which we must...” is a way of thinking that can too easily be seized upon to diminish human self-determination, or even put it completely out of play. To the point that something becomes a self-affirming truth that defines people's actions and thinking.

Console Wars as an example

To illustrate this, I give the example of the Console Wars: the battle between Nintendo, Sega and Sony over who sold the most video game consoles in the 90s. At the time, Nintendo decided to work with cartridges instead of CDs. This led to the Nintendo64. Quickly the idea took hold that the N64 was no match for the graphical processing power of other consoles. This had to be compensated for by making a different type of video game: more colourful and imaginative, with cloudy graphics and aimed more at ‘the whole family’. This assumption was not challenged, and all the games manufactured based on this assumption reinforced a reinterpretation of Nintendo’s identity.

After the rise and fall of the N64, however, hobby programmers continued to experiment with the console. They found ways to squeeze much more out of the N64 than was thought possible at the time. This proves that the identity of art, or of any cultural product such as, in this case, a series of video games, is not only shaped by technological limits – identity is also determined by non-necessary, imaginary limits.

Any playing field is thus partly determined by human assumptions about technology that are presented as laws but are in reality ideological in nature.

That Nintendo started making more and more family-oriented games became an identity that increasingly confirmed itself. To the point that making realistic, grim or dystopian video games, was hardly attempted anymore: it was no longer seen as viable within the playing field and market situation that had emerged. While the original impetus for that identity shift – the technological argument of computing power – was subsequently proven wrong.

Nuclear power and energy policy

We see this same pattern in political issues: take the energy issue. The ‘green’ turn in German energy policy – partly the cause of the economic catastrophe our Eastern neighbours are now experiencing – was motivated by societal fear and political panic around radiation pollution when the Fukushima nuclear reactor flooded in 2011. However, that flooding was the result of plate tectonics specific to Japan – not an issue in Germany. In short, all scientific rationality in the shift in German energy policy was directed by an irrational political reality.

The (political) assumption that nuclear power is bad exists because that form of energy is associated with atomic weapons and large-scale destruction. Nuclear energy can be generated from uranium but also from thorium. Uranium is suitable for making atomic weapons, and it is for this reason that states rejected thorium during the Cold War. This choice was also driven by a political reality, namely the arms race between East and West.

Thorium is a form of molten salt and for this reason also much less dangerous if something goes wrong in the reactor. However, society’s aversion to nuclear energy is so deeply ingrained that even thorium is unmentionable today. Yet this aversion to nuclear energy is presented as a ‘scientific’ reality. It is of course in the interest of all industry and lobby clubs around solar panels, windmills and biofuels to keep feeding this aversion...

Scale of science threatens democracy

Thus, we find it is no different in science than anywhere else: who pays the piper calls the tune. The days when independent scientists could achieve breakthroughs in an attic are now definitely over. The ‘low hanging fruit’ has been picked and anyone who wants to be cutting edge today cannot do without laboratories and complex computing equipment. Often the names of dozens of scientists appear above one and the same article.

Complete teams are a must and for this reason the innovative scientist must be on good terms with the institutions. Here the problem returns of having to conform to the wishes of superiors, to peer pressure and to the logic of the system. Those who fall out of tune end up on a blacklist: they just have to happen to run into a wealthy sponsor with an open mind for dissenting views.

This sad pattern is further fuelled by the distrust among elites towards the people. As the people become more distrusted – because they are said to be ‘racist’ or ‘prejudiced’, the outcome of recent elections and polls do not at all please the cosmopolitan elites – it is tempting for those elites to take refuge in the utopian premise of a ‘scientific politics’. This amounts to immunizing their own ideologies and programs from criticism.

Left-wing cynicism

But if you really question the adherents of those leftist ideologies, out of genuine interest in their thinking, you will find clichés such as: “Man is selfish, we fly too much, we consume too much.” From this thinking they rig up an authority that would supposedly be neutral, that would direct everything. That will then determine how we can spend our money, how often we can travel, what we can share on social media, and so on.

However, why do people behave selfishly at all? First, because a system of central regulation, removes their independent thinking. With it, moral considerations – the balancing of personal against general interests – become external issues. Mores, mutual trust, shared morality, are sucked away from the community and from the individual, and replaced by external and digitized control. Social Credit, as for example in China, nudging by tech companies, and so on.

Second, people become selfish because of the constant attacks on the social cohesion of local communities. Take mass immigration, the lumping together of incompatible cultures. Speaking different languages, and then all the tensions around religion. Digitalization also plays a role in this: chatting with people who live far away sucks attention away from the local environment, from people you could quickly come to the aid of.

Additionally, under pressure from the current economic burdens and feminism, women are pushed into the labour market. As a result, there is less time for a close network in the neighbourhood, for caring for children together, etcetera. Trust is lacking and it becomes more tempting to put one’s own interests first, when there is only a very weak experience of the common good.

Recap

The lobbyist argued that technology causes disruptions in existing patterns in society and that these disruptions threaten stability. Consumers and citizens must be protected: this leads to legislation that in practice restricts citizens’ freedom and reinforces existing information asymmetry. Everything users do on the Internet is recorded somewhere by institutions, and citizens themselves have little insight into this process. That each new regulation leads to a deeper, larger power distance between institutions and citizens is largely due to the intense influence of lobbyists, large corporations and powerful institutions on policy makers.

With the arguments in this article, I have hopefully exposed the lobbyist’s fallacies. In this way, I hope to make the reader regard the interplay between human self-determination, technological necessity and ideological assumptions in a fresh way. In order to clarify how this interaction underlies political choices.

Conclusion

Once politics becomes master of a societal program for which scientists can be found who dare to stake their reputation, then there may still be debate about the consequences of policy; but these will be marginal debates, because the parameters within which the debate is allowed to move are already fixed. Once this happens, democracies decay into totalitarian regimes.

It is therefore advisable to look for the hidden assumptions in any debate (think again of the Nintendo64). Because ideological assumptions, reproduced by technology – or rather by how people interact with technology – establish their own political dogma. Through a one-sided concept of technology instilled in the masses from authorities, we end up in a self-affirming, self-perpetuating reality through the persistent use of that technology. To the point where human self-determination and political decision space disappear.

It follows that, in the clash between the official policy agenda and the everyday lives of ordinary citizens, we must refocus on the inner power of the citizen himself. That inner strength – and not the cynical utopianism of technocrats – must again be the starting point of the political order. To preserve human self-determination in the face of technology and capital, administrators must increase the space for citizens’ creative initiatives.

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