The Rise of Vetocracy
‘In the technocracy, nothing is any longer small or simple or readily apparent to the non-technical man’, wrote Roszak. ‘Instead, the scale and intricacy of all human activities – political, economic, cultural – transcends the competence of the amateurish citizen and inexorably demands the attention of specially trained experts’. Technocrats might ... See more
And the institutions we have built to operate that economy, to safeguard ourselves, protect our homes, care for and educate our families, have all grown into large and powerful pieces of social machinery which suddenly seem not so much protective as actually threatening.
Stafford Beer • Designing Freedom (The CBC Massey Lectures)
As long as governance is reducible to economics, it will be difficult to prevent the feedback loops between wealth and power from spiraling into plutocratic outcomes.
Nathan Schneider • Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life
Whether we’re talking about a smart finance grid, biohacking, drone warfare, space colonization, or universal basic income, technosolutions are too commonly informed by the values inherent in technology itself: exponential growth, automation over human intervention, forward momentum, platformization, and a disregard for existing conditions on the g
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