- TECHNOCRACY NEWS & TRENDS - SPARTACUS VIA ICENI - MAR 31, 2023 -
As I wrote in The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism, the mechanistic view of the world, including humans, will end with the abolishment of man and not his deliverance. It is a worldview underpinned by Scientism, or the worship of science. Indeed, humanity faces the final battle.⁃ TN Editor
Fair warning. This is going to be very cynical. Even more than my usual level of cynicism, in fact. If you’re not into that, I totally understand, but in light of recent developments, some things simply have to be said, no matter how insensitive they are.
After my last conversation with ChatGPT, the overall scope of the problems we face became clearer. These problems are deep and systemic, and they go far, far beyond any one virus or vaccine.
Technocracy is, at its core, the notion that political problems should have technological solutions. The original technocracy movement as conceived by Howard Scott did not regard itself as a political movement of any sort. They wanted to abolish politicians and, by extension, politics.
Every conceivable political problem was one of mere engineering to them. Human desires weren’t a part of the equation at all. Plastic grocery bags choking waterways? Force people to use biodegradable paper ones and stop handing out plastic bags at stores. People riding on the steps on streetcars? Don’t fine the errant riders, just remove the steps so there’s nothing to stand on. People speeding and driving drunk? Electronically govern the top speed of their vehicles, and make their steering wheel breathalyze them before they can turn the key in the ignition.
Immediate and obvious parallels to Nudge Theory and other social-cybernetic schemes can be drawn. In many ways, the core tenets of technocratic ideology are already a widely accepted component of our politics, if the constant parade of “experts” on television and their embrace of scientism are any indication.
The technocratic perspective basically regards people and their societal relations as machines with discrete inputs and outputs. It disregards basic things like values, personal tastes, delight and disgust, and normativity. From the view of a technocrat, what people want doesn’t matter. What they physically need does. As a result, technocracy is a deeply paternalistic worldview; it presents human beings as flawed biological robots that require the constant intervention of a purely rational and benevolent caretaker figure.
In this view, human civilization has many different intractable problems that arise, generally speaking, from human biology. From the allegedly impartial perspective of a technocrat, human beings are aggressive, violent, wasteful, prejudicial, paranoid, greedy, close-minded chimpanzees who suffer from a curse of occasional brilliance and whose reach generally exceeds their grasp. From this point of view, every conceivable flaw possessed by human beings can and should be permanently cured by the application of technology.
We already see plenty of examples of this now, in a primitive form. Boredom and ennui? Just play some video games, or watch Netflix. Depressed? Unfulfilled? Down another Xanax, it’ll be okay. The thing about these interventions, however, is that they are temporary and distinct from us. Any addict can, one day, simply stop consuming their drug of choice. Someone who has been prescribed pills for one of any number of modernity-induced mental illnesses can quit taking them at any time. They’re not an intrinsic part of their bodies.
Once you start reengineering human beings and our germlines directly in order to improve society, however, you can never quite return back to the natural baseline. Those are permanent changes. They can’t just be magically switched off and tossed aside. There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. Furthermore, if we do end up going down that route, then humans are guaranteed to go extinct in very short order.
Human beings have one imperative above all others, and that is to survive and perpetuate our genes. We share that in common with all other animals, with one caveat. We do something that no other species does. We romanticize it. Our history is full of stories of pioneers braving the wilds and settling and starting communities, or of soldiers returning home to their sweethearts. One might say that the central human quest is all about creating a legacy and being remembered by history.
This endeavor has no particular meaning. The universe doesn’t care if you’re forgotten. It’s cold and empty out there, and Earth is just one rock among many, and there is no guarantee that any of our descendants will be breathing in a hundred million years. In fact, in a little over half a billion years, most plant species on Earth will be dead due to the end of C3 photosynthesis. All those folks whining about there being too much CO2 in the atmosphere will suddenly wish there was a whole lot more of it. Oh wait, scratch that. They’ll be lonely skeletons buried over a mile underground.
The final fate of mankind as yet remains undecided. However, if everything were to stay the way it is at present, then our eventual doom is absolutely guaranteed. That is to say, we will eventually evolve into a completely different species. This will happen sometime over the course of the next million years or so. Without us taking direct control of the human genome and forcing ourselves to stay the same, this will inevitably happen, even if we don’t want it to, simply as a consequence of entirely natural and unavoidable mutations, natural selection, and genetic drift.
How attached are you to your humanity? I’m going to guess that you’re pretty attached to it. If you weren’t, then you wouldn’t be reading this. My overarching goal is the preservation of humankind and our emancipation from the grip of overreaching technocrats.
If we allow the technocrats to succeed, then human beings won’t last a thousand years. We won’t even last a hundred. We’ll be replaced by something completely different.
The Singularity
A decade ago, noted singularitarian and transhumanist Ray Kurzweil posted this song by Miracles of Modern Science on his blog, Kurzweilai.net: