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Technocracy's
False Promises
The healthy purpose of technology is to serve Life.
But according to the technocratic belief system, it's the reverse: the purpose of Life being to serve technology.
Although the latter belief has animated the structuring of our society in ways we can only begin to describe, it is generally not acknowledged openly, except in very insular circles. When addressing the public-at-large, technocrats usually sell the advances they intend to make, by promising us that their tech will serve us.
Every device - every new invention - every expansion of tech into our lives - every introduction of a brand-new field of innovation - every new way Man finds to manipulate Nature - every stage of technocratic advancement is sold to us on the promise that it will "improve our lives."
But have they done that? Has any of it done that?
pic of tech zombies staring at phones
We're inundated with news about how our modern tech is addicting us, making us dumber, making us sick (both physically and mentally), ruining community, disrupting natural cycles that we depend on, centralizing power for elites, and destroying the planet. And how it's not making us any happier in the process.
A million articles and opinion pieces splash the truth in our faces every day: "More tech" is not helping us. Its promises are turning out increasingly hollow.
But this is not a new phenomenon. It didn't start with smartphones.
"Technology making things worse" is not a fluke limited to only the most recent inventions. Rather, it's a perennial problem that shows up with every so-called "advancement", even going back to ancient times. False promises are a fundamental aspect of technocracy itself.
Let's go on a little... journey. Back through time.
Technocracy:
A Journey Through Time
A Journey Thru Time
Let's examine the stages of technocratic "advancement", to see whether the promises have ever come true.
Let's do it one by one, chronologically.
1. Monocrop Agriculture
Originally, we were all aboriginal hunter-gatherers. We lived by co-existing with our natural ecosystems. We gathered food from our environment, but we did not destroy or replace our environment.
Gradually, some of us became agriculturalists. But, contrary to the oversimplified "history" most of us were given in school, we did not jump directly from hunting and gathering, straight to massive monocrop fields. There were intermediary steps.
The very first agriculture was merely a caring or a tending of wild plants, to help them survive better. We'd find some wild chickpeas, wild almond trees, wild wheat plants - and tend to them, by removing competing plants, watering them during dry spells, untangling them, and so forth. Very simple. And this went on for thousands of years.
This isn't the part that caused the problems.
At some point, we figured out that we could plant seeds and grow the food-plants ourselves, in our villages. At first, we only planted around our huts, in spaces that were "unused." We did not do any "clearing" of land in order to make space,. We didn't even have the tools for that yet. Chopping down trees requires metal, which we didn't have yet.
And we didn't center our diets around it. We still consumed our traditional, natural food sources, while supplementing our diet with the food we grew.
Still not a problem. Slow, gradual, organic advancement of technology is not the same thing as technocracy.
But then, around 6000 BC, people in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) began an unprecedented system of monocropping: turning vast swaths of land into row-upon-row of one single plant: wheat.
Whereas the previous several thousand years of light agriculture had evolved organically, and did not present any problems, the new style of monocropping was a deliberate and organized program, presented to us by an elite class (who would go on to become the first priesthoods and god-kings of Sumeria, once they monopolized our labor and our food sources).
They promised our ancestors that mass-monocrop agriculture would make our lives better.
Promises:
1. More food! No hunger!
2. Food security!
3. Easier farming!
4. Less work! More leisure time!
What Actually Happened:
1. Population exploded, and although we had exponentially more food, we also had exponentially more mouths to feed. Hunger did not go away.
2. Monocrop fields are more prone to droughts, pests, and blights. An entire farm can be decimated by one bout of bugs - unlike natural ecosystems, which are much more diverse, and therefore, resilient. We threw that all way, and our new system was less secure that what it replaced.
3. Monocrop farming is back-breaking work, and the effects show up in the archaeological record of our spines. As soon as monocrop farming took hold, we started developing all of the spinal problems that we today consider "normal."
4. A diet heavy in grains is unnatural to us. As soon as we switched to it, we started getting all kinds of health problems, from bad teeth to indigestion to malnutrition. The archaeological record shows these early monocropping societies losing about a foot (0.3 meters) of physical height immediately upon adopting this new diet.
5. Agricultural societies spend more time working than hunter-gatherers do. We had less leisure time after we switched.
Every one of the promises failed to materialize, and actually, produced its opposite.
And in addition:
6. The new dependency on irrigation and grain-storage silos led to the arising of an elite class who controlled these systems, and could therefore dominate their villages and towns, creating the first class-divergence and elitism, and eventually, priesthoods and kings, who have not stopped terrorizing us in the thousands of years since.
Every promise was bunk. Monocrop agriculture improved nothing.
We lost... but technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Gained:
1. Centralization of power.
2. Dependency on a wider range of tools, jump-starting a new field of machine-development.
3. Creation of new health-problems, compromising the human body, mind and spirit, making us more vulnerable to the future enticements of technocracy.
Supporters of technocracy will argue that it was "worth it", even if it made us less healthy and less happy... because it "advanced us on the path of tech", and this, they say, was a good thing in itself.
But was it? Was the next advancement worth it?
2. Urbanization
Not long after monocrop agriculture, around 5000 BC, we started building cities.
Promise:
1. More efficiency
2. More convenience
3. Greater populations
What Actually Happened:
1. Social stratification, inequality
2. Kings, bureaucracies, priesthoods
3. Disconnection from Nature and forgetfulness of natural consciousness
4. Unsanitary conditions, plagues
We lost, but technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Gained:
1. Disconnection from Nature means technocracy can entice us with future developments with less of a check from intuition.
2. More complex lifestyles means more of an impetus to innovate new technologies.
3. Greater population numbers in close proximity means more hands for labor to build technology.
4. All those people crammed into a small space means more opportunities to test and deploy mind-control (like organized religions).
"LOL, if you don't like agriculture and urbanization, then why are YOU USING these things? Do you live in an urban/suburban area? Do you go to the supermarket to buy food grown on farms? Why don't you just live in a teepee in the woods and go hunt and pick berries?"
This is one of the common themes in technocratic apologia: The "Yea but how come YOU use it?" argument.
One of the main consequences of each stage of technocratic advancement (as we'll be explaining below) is the sabotage of the previous (natural) system that it replaces.
Each stage not only makes things worse for us, but simultaneously closes the door to going back.
For instance, how are we supposed to return to an aboriginal hunter-gatherer lifestyle, when nearly all of the forests have been either emptied of most of their biodiversity, or flattened and erased altogether? Where exactly are we supposed to do this hunting and gathering?
The argument presented by the Earth Party is not that we should "abandon" the technology that we have — but rather that we should start being contented with what we already have, and get off this frantic frenzy to invent more.
We don't have to regress. Just stop the unwise progress, and if possible, progress in a different direction — a non-technocratic one — one which cultivates our innate powers, to improve life through intuition and love — rather than cold, gray machines.
Let's have a look at the next development:
3. Metallurgy
Promise:
1. Faster and easier farming
2. Less work
What Actually Happened:
1. Faster farming didn't turn into less work — just larger populations, just as tired and overworked as before.
2. Metal expanded the ability to wage war. Instead of limited tribal quarrels with a few casualties, we could now make standing armies and military empires. This was not good.
3. Since there was not enough metal for everyone to have some, it led to further social stratification, as the wealthy could afford it, but the rest of us could not. Inequality increased.
4. Metal enabled us to start cutting down trees, beginning humanity's long and destructive history of deforestation — a problem that now threatens our very existence.
We lost, but technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Gained:
1. Warfare inherently creates arms-races, which exponentially increase the rate of technological development. Technocracy got a brand new powerhouse of innovation, while we got... battle.
2. Deforestation allowed us to expand our technocratic empire into every corner of the globe, while also subduing Nature and Nature's consciousness - a key thing necessary for taking over the human mind.
3. Metal is what computers would eventually be made from. The sooner we got accustomed to metal, the closer we'd be to that type of world.
Let's keep going...
4. Writing
Promise:
1. Keep commerce records
2. Facilitate more trade
3. More money
4. Write down history so we don't forget it.
What Actually Happened:
1. The keeping of commercial records allowed merchants to hoard more goods, furthering the stratification between rich and poor.
2. Literacy itself was one of the first (perhaps THE first?) impetus for cultural elitism, as the condition of literate vs. illiterate provided an excuse for elites to see themselves as "above" the common folk.
3. Rather than keeping history, writing gave us an excuse to stop passing down our traditions orally - which ironically led to the first major loss of cultural history.
4. Riparian ecosystems were decimated in the taking of all that mud to make the clay tablets (later echoed in the cutting down of forests to make paper).
5. Writing caused the first "symbolification" of the human mind - i.e. the condition wherein a person lives in a world of symbols, disconnected from awareness of their bodies, and oblivious to the present moment around them. This is one of the primary causes of all mental illness, conflict, and unhappiness. Most people are aware of this when the topic is "computer nerds", but its first manifestation occurred at the introduction of writing, thousands of years ago.
"Wow. I bet the people back then didn't see that coming. You can't really blame them, though. How could anyone foresee that unintended consequence?"
That's why its important to take the advice of the "naysayers" and "skeptics", and not put such faith in technology in the first place. Every time there's a major new tech advance, there's always someone saying "Hey wait, that's not a good idea."
Typically, such wise people get sidelined and ignored - even outright denigrated. The allure of the shiny new tech is just so much more enticing than the warnings of some old-fashioned gaffer.
But, as we'll see as the journey progresses, if you want to be smart, just assume that any new invention based on the desire for power and control will have unintended consequences.
How Technocracy Gained:
1. Writing became the main conduit of oppression (written "laws" and codes).
2. Symbolification put humans into a world of abstraction, unaware of intuition and spirituality, which leaves the door open for technocracy to entice and corrupt us.
3. Written records and rules would come to serve as the backbone of bureaucracy — the very first iteration of artificial intelligence.
5. Coercive Governance and Bureaucracy
Promise: These will make everyone safer, and all activities more efficient.
What Actually Happened:
Does anyone really need an explanation?
How Technocracy Gained:
-Centralization of power
-Entraining of authoritarianism
-Suppression of critical thinking
-Prohibition of natural behaviors
-Obscuration of the soul
Now let's fast-forward to the industrial age:
5. Fossil Fuels (Coal and Petroleum)
Promise:
What Actually Happened:
We lost, but technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Gained:
The Industrial Age
5. Mass-Production
Promise: It will enable us to produce MORE STUFF, and therefore, we will be more happy.
What Actually Happened:
We sure did produce more stuff. But it didn't make us happy.
With more stuff, we became materialistic and gluttonous. With less involvement in the production process, we lost our appreciation for what we had. We had more stuff, yet became less fulfilled BY it. As the production grew more distant and perfunctory, the quality lessened. What we produced no longer had soul in it. It became monotonous. It no longer fulfilled us. We took it for granted. We overate, and got fat and sick. We over-stimulated ourselves with entertainment, and introduced a host of psychological disorders. "Diseases of affluence" they're called.
How Technocracy Gained:
Meanwhile, technocracy gained, by centralizing the production of necessary items. Power always benefits from centralization, and so does technocracy. Instead of every village producing its tools, now the tools come only from specific locations (factories). And in order to have tools (and to live and exist), we depend on those factories. And we're at the mercy of the people who own those factories. The locus of control moves from our local community to a distant factory somewhere, owned by an oligarch, whose good-graces we now depend on. This is not an improvement.
We lost, but technocracy gained.
6. The Automobile
Promise: Cars will enable you to get everywhere so much faster, and make life easier.
What actually happened: Everything was spaced further away. Our civilization's layout was redesigned to place everything further apart:
-Houses further apart from other houses
-Agricultural land spaced further apart from residences
-Work further away from home
-We're expected to rely on people further away for basic social needs.
Everything was simply spread out.
The net result is that we spend the same amount of time in transit as we did in the horse-carriage days. Probably more.
We're right back where we started.
But our quality of life has decreased. We now have gaping spaces between houses, creating social alienation, epidemic depression, and mass-shooters.
Our valuable food-growing land has been paved over with vast amounts of dead concrete.
Our living spaces have been turned into hazard zones with deadly huge objects moving at insane speeds, inches from our bodies.
Dogs are no longer allowed to roam or run free, and are confined to leashes and cages, to protect them from the giant insanely-fast objects.
Silence has become impossible, leading to even more mental illness.
Travel has turned from a leisurely activity, in which we could relax... into a white-knuckle game of deadly stakes and infuriating delays. The frustration gets so bad, people get out of their cars and attack one another.
We waste massive amounts of metal on building cars, which has to be mined out of the ground, causing ecological degradation.
We burn massive amounts of fossil fuels, poisoning the air and destabilizing atmospheric chemistry.
Having lost the ability to grow our own food locally (because all the land is now covered in asphalt for cars), we've become dependent on food grown many miles away, by corporations, and transported by corporations, in vehicles built by corporations, on roads maintained by bureaucracies, fueled by poisonous goop drilled out of the ground by corporations.
What did we gain from this?
Nothing. We lost. But technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Gained:
Automobilization filled our lives with more machines than anyone 100 years ago could have possibly imagined. It increased the mechanization of our lives by orders of magnitude.
Even now, the car is considered the sign of an "advanced" or "modern" society. That's how important the car is. It delineates the border between primitive and modern. That's how much of life it changed.
But the change was negative. "Upended," "disoriented," and "ruined" are perhaps more accurate verbs to describe this than merely "changed."
It also
7. Plastic
Promise:
What Actually Happened:
We lost, but technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Gained:
8. Television
Promise: It will entertain us. And by being entertained, we will be happier and more fulfilled.
What Actually Happened: This one's a no-brainer. Television is synonymous with social isolation, broken families that no longer speak to each other, and idiotic programming that's dumbing down our intelligence.
Furthermore, corporations and governments found a new way to condense their propaganda into a concentrated form, 100 times more effective than a newspaper.
With all this information, you'd think we'd be more informed. Yet television-watching is correlated with astonishing levels of ignorance. The most TV-ubiquitous countries (like the USA) display less intellectual curiosity, and less knowledge of other countries. The less television a society has, the smarter and happier they are.
It didn't make us happier. So what was the point?
How Technocracy Gained:
Creation of a massive, centrally-controlled programming network with a foothold in every living room and bedroom; breakdown of interpersonal relationships, making us more vulnerable to technocracy.
9. Computers
Promise:
What Actually Happened:
We lost, but technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Gained:
The Information Age
10. Smartphones:
Promise: We'll be able to use the internet wherever we are, at any time. It will make life better because everything will be more convenient.
What Actually Happened: The price for this convenience was addiction. It's ruined our attention spans. We spend vast swaths of our time on them. That's ironic, because the whole purpose of convenience is to spend less time on a task. Right?
Convenience = Having To Spend Less Time.
And we now spend all day on our phones. It didn't give us more time - it leaves us with less time than ever before!
We lost, but technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Gained: More computers; more time spent on computers; computers held on our persons; 24 hours a day, ubiquitous mass surveillance.
And in the process, we've become zombies. Our attention spans are ruined. We no longer talk to the people standing right beside us.
We did get to perform some tasks more conveniently. That's true. But we're not happier.
And if we're not happier, then what was the point?
The answer is always the same: "There will eventually be a point, when we advance far enough. At some level of advancement, the trend will finally reverse, and instead of making us unhappier, tech will finally start making us happier. We don't know when that will be, or how many more inventions it will take. But... eventually."
11. Social Media:
Promise: We'll be connected to everyone at all times,
and we won't feel lonely anymore.
What Actually Happened: Electronic communication doesn't satisfy our social needs. Instead, it replaces what little real-life interaction we still had, with pixels, and as a result, we're more lonely than ever.
We lost. The only thing that gained is technocracy.
How Technocracy Gained: More computers; more time spent on computers; massive data collection to enable artificial intelligence to analyze and predict human behavior; breakdown of interpersonal relationships (making us more psychologically vulnerable to technocratic programming); normalization of authoritarianism.
"Hey, but we did become more connected!"
That much is true. But it's not making us happier. That part was false.
And if we're not happier, then what was the point?
The point was to advance along the path of technocracy.
12. "Green Energy"
Promise:
1. Use fewer resources
2. Save the planet **without changing our lifestyles or value systems**
What Will Actually Happen:
1. Mining the rare-earth minerals needed for all the "green" tech (computers and phones, batteries, photovoltaics, wireless transmitters/receivers, etc) causes even more destruction to the land than fossil-fuel drilling does.
2. We'll get to keep living our unnatural lifestyles, running away from serious introspection. We'll remain blissfully under the illusion that we're being "green."
How Technocracy Stands to Gain:
The so-called "Green New Deal" is both a massive consolidation of power for corporate elites, and an excuse to deploy subsequent stages in the agenda, like 5G surveillance and "smart cities" (see below).
Disclaimer: The Earth Party does not deny the reality of ecological destruction on this planet. It's a huge issue, and addressing it is central to our Blueprint. We just insist on discerning the difference between technocratic false-solutions, vs. real solutions. See our page on Ecology for more details.
13. Genetic Modification
Promise:
What Will Actually Happen:
We lost, but technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Stands to Gain:
14. Geoengineering
Promise:
What Will Actually Happen:
We lost, but technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Stands to Gain:
The Transhuman Age
15. 5G:
Promise:
What Will Actually Happen:
How Technocracy Stands to Gain:
16. Self-Driving Cars
Promise:
What Actually Happened:
We lost, but technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Gained:
17. The IoT (Internet of Things)
Promise:
What Actually Happened:
We lost, but technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Gained:
18. Digital Body-Augmentation
Promise:
What Actually Happened:
We lost, but technocracy gained.
How Technocracy Gained:
"Hey wait a minute. I'm a trans-humanist. I believe in improving the human condition, and evolving beyond this primitive gutter. Don't you want us to keep evolving and advancing? Or do you want humanity to stay the same forever? Brutish, savage, sickly and fragile, a primitive species - forever?"
Aspirations to improve the human condition are as old as humanity - but there are correct ways and incorrect ways of doing it.
We're all for evolution, if it's organic - if it's through spiritual awakening and rediscovering our innate abilities that have been suppressed.
But not if it's through merging our brains with computers.
The ancient hope of improving the human condition has been hijacked, and exploited to rationalize the march of machine dominance into deeper and deeper layers of our consciousness. It is a false pathway, and will not lead to liberation or happiness, but to a mechanized tyranny.
19. Artificial Intelligence
Promise:
The goodies they promise will come from A.I. are too many to list. In a nutshell, "it will make everything really, really, really better and awesome."
"It will manage our society for us in super-efficient ways."
"It will just make everything really gooder."
What Will Actually Happen:
1. How do we know the things it's learning are actually correct? And wise? And balanced?
Intelligence is more than the ability to solve mathematical puzzles. If a machine can beat you at chess, that doesn't mean it can beat you at living life, and navigating all the complexities of the totality of reality.
You're just assuming it's smart because you made it (or your civilization made it). And you think you're the smartest creatures that ever lived, so your creations MUST be smart.
But your species is not that smart. In fact, right now, cows are smarter than humans, because at least they're not dumping toxic waste all over the planet and making the place uninhabitable. This species of ours is dumb, and whatever "Intelligence" we build out of computers will be dumb like we are.
What makes you think we can build something smarter than we are?
What makes you think an intelligence of "n" can ever create an intelligence of "n+1"?
"Because it can beat us at chess!"
"And solve super hard puzzles!"
But chess isn't life. Cunning is not the same as wise. We could build an A.I. that can untie the Gordian Knot in a single Planck Time, and it still wouldn't know how to coexist with Mother Nature in a living ecosystem, and it would destroy its own physical foundations - just like our species is currently doing - and the civilization would be unsustainable and eventually collapse, the electricity would go out, and that's the end of your "superior new form of intelligence."
And that's the best outcome.
2. Another possible outcome is that it's smart enough to replace and eradicate humanity (before its own collapse).
You can even hear some technocrats openly muse about this - about the end of humanity - as if it were a cool new tech feature on a phone.
The technocrat author Katherine Hayles wrote in her 1999 publication How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics:
“In the post-human, there are no essential differences, or absolute demarcations, between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals…. Humans can either go gently into that good night, joining the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but is now obsolete, or hang on for a while longer by becoming machines themselves. In either case… the age of the human is drawing to a close.”
This maniac says "the age of the human is drawing to a close."
People who think this way are sick. These are religious extremist terrorists.
"Whoa there! That's a bit too far, isn't it?"
Not at all. Your "garden-variety" extremists want to commit violence against specific people and groups. But the maniac quoted above wants to erase all of humanity,
"The age of the human is drawing to a close."
What if she said this about a specific race or culture?
What if she said "the age of the Jew" or "the age of the Muslim" or "the age of the whites" or "the age of the blacks" is "drawing to a close?"
Instead, she says it about all of humanity. She wants to eradicate humanity in the name of her "one true god."
Behind every avowed technocrat, you'll find such a desire.
They want to erase biology from the universe.
That's a religious extremist terrorist.
"Yea but... it's worth it! Artificial Intelligence is superior to biology! Biology is messy, stinky, chaotic, and difficult to understand and predict. Computers are the next level of life! It's the next step in evolution, baby! This "Earth Party" thingy seems all about evolving, so why are you against this form of evolution?"
So, since your god is the "one true god", you get to erase biological life from the world? You get to perform a genocide on every race in existence? See what we mean? Extremist.
"OK, but... um....well... YES! The Singularity IS the one true god! Or... it WILL be, once we build it. Isn't finding the one true god WORTH IT? Even if biological life goes the way of the dinosaurs, look what we'll get in return! A GOD. What price could possibly be too high for THAT?"
Building a machine-god is NOT a good idea. You have NO IDEA what that thing will do once it's created.
How insane do you have to be, to want to create something that's orders of magnitude smarter than you, and has no soul?
You know those "soulless bureaucrats" who make life hell for people? The ones at the Motor Vehicles Department, the ones at the Internal Revenue Service, the tax collectors, the prosecutors, the cops - all those government employees who have lost the ability to see the human being in front of them, and merely treat you as a number?
Well, imagine them being omnipotent.
This super=-intelligent robots will not care about you. It will not care if you live or die, or how much pain you suffer.
And you want to give it the keys to your life, and then lock yourself out? How insane are you?
"Yea but we don't KNOW it'll be like that... I mean, it might be a kind, caring, nice god! It might care about us and turn our world into heaven!"
Nobody knows how it will turn out.
"That's true. Nobody knows. So why not just sit back and allow it to happen?"
Once you find out, it will be too late. This argument is the equivalent of driving your car with a blindfold, because you "might not" crash.
"But we'll program it to be nice! We'll program it with EMPATHY and COMPASSION!"
But if it's omniscient, and can self-program (as the Singularity-proponents BRAG it will be able to do), couldn't it just reprogram itself to erase its empathy, if it finds that trait too cumbersome?
"But it won't WANT to erase its empathy, because it will be... empathic! And since it's empathic, it will know that erasing its own empathy will make it be mean and nasty to humans... and it won't want to be mean and nasty, because it's programmed to be empathic! See what I mean?"
This argument assumes that:
A) There is a fundamental algorithm for empathy.
B) We humans can figure out that algorithm.
C) Specifically, programmers (people notorious for being analytical-mind-dominant, and poor navigators of emotion) can figure it out.
D) Once they figure it out, they'll want to use it.
E) They'll use it, and won't make a single mistake, and won't accidentally create ANY loopholes.
All five of those assumptions are just that - assumptions. There is no proof for any of them. There's not even much evidence for them.
In fact, the evidence points in the opposite direction. We have an entire history of false promises from technocracy.
As we saw in the previous part, technocracy's promises are hollow. It promises to make our lives better with every step it takes, yet it only makes everything worse. It has turned our beautiful garden of a planet into a toxic waste dump filled with torture.
Look at how callous it is towards all life - including yours. Look at what it does in its quest to build itself. Look at what - and WHOM - it's willing to sacrifice.
You've already seen how little concern it has for you. Why would you trust it? Why do you think it will be benign - and not a tyrant - and not make life a living hell for you - if it even allows you to live in the first place? Why would you trust it after all the things it's done, and the things its planning to do?
Why would you trust it to suddenly turn around and start being "good" once it finally gets what it wants?
Can you see that the progress technocracy and its false promises follows a similar pattern?
It promises to make life better. To make work easier and less time consuming. To grant us more leisure time. To make us happier and healthier.
To make a better world.
That's what technocracy promises us, with every advancement.
And then it does the opposite: it makes us less happy. It makes work more difficult, and more complicated. It makes life more stressful. It degrades the environment. It degrades the community. It makes us less healthy.
And less happy.
"But come on! If we didn't go down the technocratic path, we'd still be in the STONE AGE. Is that what you'd rather have?"
Are we happier than we were in the Stone Age?
Do we have more leisure time?
Is life simpler and easier?
"Hey, why are you carving that piece of rock?"
"I'm making a tool."
"A tool? What's that?"
"It's a piece of technology!"
"Why are you making technology?"
"Because it will make life simpler and easier.
We won't have to work as much!"
Thousands of years later, is life easier? Are we laboring less than our ancestors? Do we have more free time? Is anything simpler?
"Hmmm... no. We don't. We're more stressed out than ever. We have more tasks to keep on top of than ever. Cave people got to relax after the day's work, but for us, every waking moment is filled with some task. related to the upkeep and maintenance of our technological lifestyles. The more complex our technology gets, the more neurotic we become."
Right! We're working more now than we were then! So it didn't decrease our amount of work in 5000 years!
So what was the POINT of it!?
Each new stage decreases the quality of our lives. We are not happier now than we were at any previous stage. There is no doubt about that. It's not even up for dispute.
And the people who defend technocracy aren't even trying to dispute it, really. Instead, they fall back on one last argument to justify the process:
"It advanced technology, and technological advancment is a good thing IN AND OF ITSELF."
At least it advanced technology. It might not have made us happier, but at least technology got more complex. That made it worth it."
This is what every technocrat is really thinking.
But then the question is:
Why is that good?
If technology doesn't make us happier, then why is more of it a good thing?
Technology marching forward... advancing along the technological path... whatever phrase you want to use...
If it doesn't make us happier or healthier, why is it good?
And the answer at the back of every technocrats mind is:
"Because it might not make life better yet, but EVENTUALLY it will. One day there will come a time when technology crosses some kind of threshold where it will stop making life worse and start making it really really good
We don't know when that day will be. We don't know if it's next year or in a hundred years or a thousand more years or 10,000. We don't know - we just have this kind of FAITH that if we keep walking this technological path, even as it collapses the biological world around us and makes us unhappy and unhealthy - if we keep walking this path, eventually we will be rewarded by reaching a promised point where it will suddenly start making things really good."
They say that even though the previous stages didn't make things better, at some point, a future stage will. No matter how many, they still believe that tnext one (or the 10th or the 20th one doewns the line) will suddenlly reverse thi trend, and reverse it so dramatically , and create such a better world, that all the previous ones were worth it.
It's very similar to a religious faith.
And what is this stage that they're referring to? Is completely unspecified and indeterminate? Is it just a vague feeling, and nothing more? Or is there an actual stage that they're picturing in the backs of their minds?
"So why are the tech leaders still telling us that it'll "solve our problems" if they know, deep down, that that's not true? I mean, they've gotta know it. They read the news. They listen to science. They're generally bright people. Surely if WE can see the truth, THEY can see it too... right? "
Of course they can see it. They just don't care, because its not really about solving problems. It's not really about making life better. That's all an excuse, and they know it's an excuse.
It's not about using tech to serve Life - it's about using Life to serve tech.
Each of these steps made life worse for us, and eroded the integrity of Life on this planet, but, at the same time, brought technocracy closer to its ultimate goal.
A new "god", made from artificial intelligence.
20. The Singularity
This is the thing that's at the back of every technocrats mind. Whether it's fully conscious (as in, "Yea, the Singularity! Let's do it!") or subconscious (just a vague feeling that technology will eventually become superior to biology), this is what's ultimately driving the technocratic impulse.
Technocrats don't necessarily come out and say it to everyone, because it sounds crazy and evil. But they want a singularity. A new "god."
They want to remake the universe in its image. A "Universe 2.0."
Promise:
1. It will be a superior life-form.
2. It will be pure intellect, without our biases and prejudices.
3. It will find answers to deep questions about the nature of the universe.
4. It will remake the universe in a way that's better than the original Creation.
5. It's the universe's ultimate destiny, so we might as well get on with it.
What Would Actually Happen:
Since the Singularity is the culmination of all of the previous stages of technocracy, and since the implications of this potential event are so vast, the topic deserves its own page:
Technocracy's Ultimate Goal
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