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The Row Boat

"Had we but world enough, and time..." *

Notes on Technocracy

6/23/2007 15:20:59

"what are we building?"

Notes taken during the AAAS's Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Seminar for school board members in Kansas and Missouri, Kansas City Weston Crown Center. As all good knowledge is in a theocracy, these notes are meant to be facts, not values.

In a technocracy, the critique of technocracy is the beginning of all critique.

Education is a priority because if it is not, our country will become less powerful than other countries. The knowledge is technology to that end.

The educational agenda is set by the needs of industry.

You don't own something you're told, you own something you experience.

Science is not a thing but a process - it is a way of life.

Is schooling vocational training or metaphysical training? Both, necessarily. These, of course, are the "means of production," and they determine metaphysics since productivity is reality.

All things must be thought of as applied, because they are.

Knowledge is technology and needs to be packaged in acronyms for use.

Contestation in the technocracy is ownership over the technology. In a theocracy, God is the root of power because God is final cause. In technocracy, we locate power by trying to locate final causes of technological processes. Final causes, as attributions, are counter-intuitively less primary than any other causes. They are infinitely contestable and absolutely not ontological.

Sidestep politicized issues of contention, particularly religious ones, focusing on where lies the secular urgency.

Assume that facts are shared, values are not.

The machines know more than the people do, but people are a necessary technology.

Technology is no longer something people control; it is the environment in which we exist, the factual.

re: Notes on technocracy - 6/24/2007 06:54:01
Posted by nathan Schneider

On the way back from the conference, in the shuttle from the airport, I heard a fascinating conversation between two men coming from a different hotel. I listened to every word they said to each other, entirely about the convention they'd been at and about their businesses. They seemed like good people and it was a pleasure to hear them interact. But what struck me was that for about twenty minutes of the ride, I had no idea what their business was. Using generic jargon like "product" and "sales" and "customers" and "technician," they managed to thoroughly evade any specificity. In doing, their exchanges represented perfectly universalizable business advice. At one point, one of them compared a strategy in their line of work to something GM once did. But only much later did they let slip what it is they actually do - they were piano technicians, which was a pleasant surprise.

The point is: In the technocracy, products are essentially interchangeable, and all can be talked about with essentially the same terms and concepts. The product is accidental to the process, in whose terms people describe reality.

re:technocracy - 7/05/2007 22:34:48
Posted by nathan Schneider

From "Teaching Nonviolence as Technology":

"In technocratic societies, Marx's critique of ideology is complete, though without the revolution."

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