Technocra-wait what?

This week, as the blinding white reflections from the snow bring wholesome, natural light into my apartment, I delved deeper into Fischer and ideas about the relationship(s) between average citizens, experts, the government, democracy, and eventually the environment. What I heard while reading these chapters were echos of ideas from Neil Postman’s Technopoly
as well as ideas from a book we read in Prophecy and Apocalypse (which then further spurred ideas about the future such as Xanadu and hypertextuality). But first I want to talk about what a technocracy is and a brief (and probably not-justice-giving) summary of what Postman means by technopoly.

So start with, a helpful definition from our BFF Google:

What I find really cool is the usage chart Google also gives us for it:

What’s with the spike in the 1930s? Well after a quick glance at what Wikipedia has to say about it, ((yes, I know, it is not a terribly reliable source (although that could be argued considering the community based source of knowledge) it is a good place to go for starters) I also hope you didn’t get lost in my parenthetical statements, maybe I should be more anthropological and switch to footnotes)) it picked up speed during that time under the definition of “government by technical decision making.” How it got to this definition today I am unsure but it is no doubt tangled up with positivism, modernism, and postmodernism.

For Postman, the United States is the ultimate Technopoly in which technical calculation is valued as superior to human judgement and information becomes stripped of context, which allows for truly dangerous uses. A fairly useful summary of his book can be found here. Where I find overlap but not direct reference is in Fischer’s discussion of these same ideas. He actually sites an author named Dewey in 1927 who (would be considered a history of the future) proposed an ideal world with democracy in which the relationship between the common people and the expert is one of discussion and debate. The experts become teachers so that the common folk can understand and they in turn vote and make decisions based off of the accessible information. This would be in contrast to the debates today that frequently use jargon and lofty language that only specialists and those inculcated in that particular discipline can even begin to understand.

In this case I am especially thinking of physicists and chemists and the like in charge of nuclear power plants. These trusted experts are the ones who insisted (and still insist) that nuclear power is completely safe. The government officials in turn take their word for it because they are the experts and disperse the information to the citizens of Japan. Then, when disaster did strike on 3/11, people did not respond fast enough and resulted in the myriad of destruction. Not that destruction would have been avoided completely but it could have mitigated with a more nuanced understanding of the dangers of nuclear power that the experts did not want people to know.

Something else that comes up in Dewey’s idealization of the future is the lack of dialogue between citizens and government officials. Or I guess rather, what I see as a lack of dialogue. As everyone knows the presidential debate now is a joke, given 30 seconds to banter back and forth between opponents. Given only enough time to spew off some pre-pepped slogan or counter attack that has absolutely nothing to do with the topic that they actually supposed to be “debating”. And it’s not all that surprising given the format of the debate. “The medium is the message” and quite frankly the medium says that serious matters that are integral to people's daily lives doesn’t deserve more than a few minutes of airtime because talking about these issues seriously on a national scale doesn’t get enough viewers and doesn’t make enough money. Now I understand that I am generalizing but thinking back to what presidential debates used to be with hours and hours of back and forth giving the opportunity to the candidates to fully explain and elucidate their views on an issue. So anyway, fast forward to today and poof it’s gone. And then people are surprised or mad when the president didn’t deliver on all these promises that no one even bothered to ask him how he actually intended to execute.

So then, Fischer says it is no surprise that we turn to experts when we feel that government officials are not delivering for us. He touches on and reminds us that positivism is very much alive today despite the claims that is not. He uses the example of sociology that students are taught to make hypotheses and test them using statistical analysis even though many professionals in that field default to more qualitative methods instead. This reminds me of “The Crisis” in Anthropology in the 1980s with structuralism being torn to shreds because it was too deterministic and simplified and Geertz emerging with his ideas of  symbolic anthropology and trying to portray reality (or entelechy) in prose. But it is still the scientific method that is the golden standard in our day and age. Through this method expertise is neutral and objective, derived from real science, good! science and there would never ever be any political or self-interested “pollutions” on the outcome of the results or the framing and implications of what all of the numbers mean. Of course we know that this is not the case, they are also instruments for political ends.

Do you have the data? What about the data? Data data data, context-less data

Along with this there is the notion that advancements in technology are inherently good for everyone. For Fischer, these people “conflate morality with instrumental rationality”, finding a solution and just plugging it into different social contexts. Much like our reports by the World Bank and the development plans created in Honduras, in Lesotho, is it not surprising to us that this is problematic when the information is divorced from context and then used to make these kinds of decisions.

At any rate. the -cracy part of this whole deal really comes through when order to really participate on the political market you have to have experts. There are coalitions formed of experts and politicians so that they can get the information that they need to bargain with. In turn, politicians could almost be seen as puppets of the experts because without them, they would be powerless when the issues that we face today require even more and more specialized knowledge that the specialists are not willing to make accessible to the average Joe.

(This then takes me on to thoughts about should everyone even be allowed to vote? There have been arguments against democracy for a variety of reasons. What about legalism in ancient China? It was assumed that the emperor knew what was best for his constituents and implemented it through strict punishments and rewards, the analogy of a baby used. A baby is in pain and cries when it is for example, given a booster shot, it doesn’t understand that the pain being inflicted upon it is really for its own good in the long run so it is up to the adult to insure that it receives it. Much in the same way the emperor was to govern his people.)

I have ended up on a train it seems with multiple destinations and it ended up off the tracks somewhere. There were so many other issues that Chapter 1 of Fischer’s brought up that I will have to save for a future week. I especially want to tie some of these ideas back into documentaries that I have been watching about the events in the Japan and what various people (real, live individuals) have to say about the matter.