Winter is rearing its ugly frostbitten head… The weather is getting colder, the fall leaves are almost all gone, and the chill isn’t just in the air. Now is definitely the proverbial winter of our discontent here in good ole America, whatever that means. I can feel it in the occasional ugly stare, the aggression on the freeway, and in my heart. Winter, winter, winter… It’s the deepest, darkest part of the year, when the human animal needs its most resourceful self to be fully present or all may be lost. At least, that’s how it used to be. Who the hell knows now?
Our technology has come so far and yet so many of us live in the dark ages, in a technologically defunct world, where nothing works the way its supposed to. And isn’t that what technology is all about, making things work better, more efficiently, more quickly, for all those in its possession? But it is certainly true that the best technology on earth is only as good as its user. A tennis racket in the hands of Roger Federer isn’t the same thing as a tennis racket in the hands of Bill Nye, if you take my meaning. But it seems as though some of our best technologies are being handled solely by those rich enough to afford them, who know next to nothing about them in actuality.
The idea of a technocracy solves this problem in my opinion: I wrote a detailed essay about this idea in Grad School many moons ago. Essentially, technocracy is the idea of rule by professionals, by experts, government by experts, rather than elected leaders. Throughout history, this has been tried several times by various countries. It seems, apparently, that it is best served in small doses and for very limited periods of time. They say it can work, that it can fix a host of formidable problems but that it isn’t designed to be a lasting solution but more of a temporary fix. Like a spare tire on a car perhaps.
It almost seems like cheating in a way doesn’t it? Like if you’re having trouble writing an English paper or doing a problem set or a lab or something like that, you go and find a professional author or a mathematician or a professional scientist or something and you say something like: OK, you take over here, this isn’t my area of expertise but you know all about this stuff so uhh… you do it. This is, obviously, against the rules when it comes to schoolwork, passing someone else’s work off as your own. But the rest of the world really does it all the time, isn’t it so? Famous pop musicians who write none of their own music, who lip sync their lyrics?
I’m getting away from winter here, it’s true but bear with me. Essentially, I see technocracy as kind of like a country or government having trouble with their math homework or their English papers or some such nonsense and saying to the kinds of people who know these things best: here, you do it. There was a technocratic movement in America at one time but it died because its main proponent was revealed to be a fraud. According to the Economist: technocracy offers “crowd-sourced solutions to political problems.” This essentially seems to me to be the way entire world is headed: AKA Google. Any problem you have or issue you encounter, ask Google, the all-powerful. Google is crowd-sourced right? I don’t really even know what that word means. Whatever.
The idea to me is that, through governance by experts, the world or our country or any country that decides to use it really, could solve many problems quickly and easily but perhaps learn very little about what it is to govern in the process. Technocracy almost seems like abandoning the idea of good government altogether in some ways…
I think the idea of good government is on my mind because I’ve been a government employee for the last 2.5 years or so and I know how hard my job has been. From a certain point of view… Next to impossible really. I honestly have no idea how I’ve managed to do it for so long and avoid totally cracking up. I think the answer to that may be that I haven’t been expected to do it full time, and that, perhaps, if it were a full time job, I would have gone off the deep end by now. Also, winter is approaching and doing this job in the winter time is very different than doing it in fair weather. One must be outside a lot and always on the move from house to house even when its snowing. In the summer, this is kind of fun. During the winter months, its just… different. Colder, darker, and winterier… lol. That is not a word by the way. Never let anyone including me tell you it is.
What do technocracy and winter have in common? Nothing that I can think of. I will say this: imagine you could hire someone to go through a winter for you while you just spent said winter on some tropical island and then came back at the end of the season. You would never have to chip the ice off your windshield, never have to get snow in your socks, never feel your fingers lose all feeling while you fumble with your keys, never have your car fail to start, never have to shovel yourself out only to lose your parking place on the street a few hours later to one of your neighbors. Someone else would do all this for you. You would retain not a drop of wisdom from the experience of surviving a difficult season, learn nothing about hardship, about what it means to face a challenging situation and come through it unscathed. On the other hand, you wouldn’t have to… well… do any of this stuff. This is kind of how I see technocracy: its like hiring some expert person to take your place at a difficult moment, shutting your eyes, and saying “You do it.”
This is not the whole story, its more complicated than that, I don’t have to tell you. But it’s close: I mean think about it, “Government by experts.” That’s essentially what they call it. Anything done by an expert is something you don’t have to do yourself. This is why I say it feels like cheating in a way. But does it feel like cheating when you ask a question on Amazon to the millions and millions of customers that have come before you? You certainly could never do this when you used to buy something at Walmart or at Stop and Shop or whatever right? The brick and Mortar business model says to the Amazon business model: you can’t do that, its not fair, it’s cheating. The Amazon business model says to the brick and mortar model: yeah, you wish you’d thought of it first.
Anyway, the weather’s getting colder, I’m a little sick, a little ticked off at any and everything, and I have a lot of work to do this month. Wish me luck. Ideas are for the idle I guess.
James' Place in Cyberspace 