Technocracy Quotes

“Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

“Surreptitiously, reliance on institutional process has replaced dependence on personal good will. The world has lost its humane dimension and reacquired the factual necessity and fatefulness which were characteristic of primitive times. But while the chaos of the barbarian was constantly ordered in the name of mysterious, anthropomorphic gods, today only man’s planning can be given as a reason for the world being as it is. Man has become the plaything of scientists, engineers, and planners.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“In this place a mind was at work to negate the image of a free and intact man. It intended to rely on man power in the same way that it had relied on horsepower. It wanted units to be equal and divisable, and for that purpose man had to be destroyed as the horse had already been destroyed.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees

“Conspiracy thinking inflates the sizableness of the perceived enemy into infinity so that in the end one can only feel powerless compared to such a giant. In this way, conspiracy thinking also embodies an aspect of self destruction.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The pharaonic era of the country-house technocrats. The dream of an electronic control of things runs up against the traditional stupidity of the masses. Collective demand has never been so elicited, forced or violated as it has in the field of computing. The clash between a philosophical and metaphysical exigency and a present which is no longer in the least philosophical and metaphysical.
The clash between a system of representation and a system of simulation. The clash between a thinking of difference and a thinking of indifference. What is the power of indifference? What would an analytics of indifference be like? Torn between a radical indifference and a radical seduction.

Postmodemity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination. In terms of periods, it is the end of final evaluations and the movement of transcendence, which are replaced by 'teleonomic' evaluation, in terms of retroaction. Everything is always retroactive, including - and, indeed, particularly including - information. The rest is left to the acceleration of values by technology (sex, body, freedom, knowledge).”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migration, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

“Totalitarianism and technocracy like to present themselves as the pinnacle of rationality and science.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Whatever way we learn, we will find that it is not cogito that is important but that you are a cog. You are a cog in a machine that does not need your cognition. You must merely conform to the coordinated.”
― James Tunney, TechBondAge: Slavery of the Human Spirit

“Conformity is the tool of the tyrant. What one chooses to conform to is critical. The Empire now rules by information superhighways to our soul. The Apple a day we have bitten is the Appian Way to make a phoney ‘I’ linked to algorithms of stupor.”
― James Tunney, TechBondAge: Slavery of the Human Spirit

“When society as a whole is in the grip of anxiety and the accompanying images of illness and death, those images in themselves become a causal factor.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The character of the Open Conspiracy will now be plainly displayed. It will have become a great world movement as wide-spread and evident as socialism or communism. It will have taken the place of these movements very largely. It will be more than they were, it will be frankly a world religion. This large, loose assimilatory mass of movements, groups, and societies will be definitely and obviously attempting to swallow up the entire population of the world and become the new human community.”
― H.G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy: What Are We To Do With Our Lives?

“It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fichte laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. But in his day this was an unattainable ideal: what he regarded as the best system in existence produced Karl Marx. In future such failures are not likely to occur where there is dictatorship.
Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.


– Bertrand Russell; The Impact of Science on Society; 1953”
― Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society

“Unfortunately, wacky ideas have dominated the public dialogue in tech to the point that important conversations about social issues have been drowned out or dismissed for years. Some of the ideas that come out of Silicon Valley include buying islands in New Zealand to prep for doomsday; seasteading, or building islands out of discarded shipping containers to create a new paradise without government or taxes; freezing cadavers so that the deceased's consciousness can be uploaded into a future robot body; creating oversized dirigibles; inventing a meal-replacement powder named after dystopian sci-fi movie Soylent Green; or making cars that fly. These ideas are certainly creative, and it's important to make space in life for dreamers–but it's equally important not to take insane ideas seriously. We should be cautious. Just because someone has made a mathematical breakthrough or made a lot of money, that doesn't mean we should listen to them when they suggest aliens are real or suggest that in the future it will be possible to reanimate people, so we should keep smart people's brains in large freezers like the ones used for frozen vegetables at Costco.”
― Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World

“Instead of seeing sense there is a major tendency to 'make sense.”
― James Tunney, Empire of Scientism: The Dispiriting Conspiracy and Inevitable Tyranny of Scientocracy

“Machines like objectives and not other perspectives.”
― James Tunney, Empire of Scientism: The Dispiriting Conspiracy and Inevitable Tyranny of Scientocracy

“Globalisation was a tactic rather than a strategy. The strategy was control and termination of homo sapiens as we know it.”
― James Tunney, Empire of Scientism: The Dispiriting Conspiracy and Inevitable Tyranny of Scientocracy

“You will not be merely servant or sufferant of the colonial power, you will be the colony itself to be managed, subjugated and controlled.”
― James Tunney, Empire of Scientism: The Dispiriting Conspiracy and Inevitable Tyranny of Scientocracy

“Conquer your fears once and for all or continue to be conquered forever.”
― James Tunney, Empire of Scientism: The Dispiriting Conspiracy and Inevitable Tyranny of Scientocracy

“Now it seems that the nasty people are those who question the direction of our society, our loss of liberty, our submission to technology and domination of the security, industrial, military and pharmaceutical society (SIMP). We are living in the SIMP society and we are the Simpsons.”
― James Tunney, TechBondAge: Slavery of the Human Spirit

“Everywhere one can see the supply of soap-opera and extension of that scripted discourse into the political domain. By devoting our attention to the mainstream systems that seem to be miraculously harmonising across national boundaries in a similar fashion without distinctiveness or variation, we give more power to the deadening mono-cultural potency of tech-collectivism.”
― James Tunney, TechBondAge: Slavery of the Human Spirit

“We are giving power to people we do not know, for purposes we cannot prove, for exercise we cannot control while assuming they must be benign and beneficent without evidence and without scrutinising the circumstances of our blank cheque to them that we signed in the blood from relinquished control of our bodies. Giving the keys to the dungeon to these strangers in suits or jeans and white coats and expecting benevolence not evident in their belief system and rejected as irrelevant thereby, is the greatest common exercise in folly in human history.”
― James Tunney, TechBondAge: Slavery of the Human Spirit

“It is hard to determine whether the brazen brashness of the bureaucrats or toxic passivity of the public has been more shocking.”
― James Tunney, TechBondAge: Slavery of the Human Spirit

“They failed to see that globalisation was merely a tactic to prise power from nation states towards international conglomerates. Once the power was siphoned from the people and democratic control was circumvented, the ability to assert global governance without any democratic restraint was available.”
― James Tunney, TechBondAge: Slavery of the Human Spirit

“When bondage is built with billions of key strokes the death of freedom bit by bit may not be so obvious. The masters hold the keys to chains or networks, to the links and sites fashioned into our consciousness. While we may browse, it is as a domesticated animal.”
― James Tunney, TechBondAge: Slavery of the Human Spirit

“Unfortunately, people may choose the lesser evil until there are no lesser ones to choose and the power to resist has been lost to a great force comprising accumulations of millions of minute relinquishments and accommodations.”
― James Tunney, TechBondAge: Slavery of the Human Spirit

“Our culture is being attacked by every major entity taking over our unique communities and reducing us to nothing more than numbers.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner

“Totalitarianism is the belief that human intellect can be the guiding principle in life and society. It aims to create a utopian, artificial society led by technocrats or experts who, based on their technical knowledge, will ensure that the machine of society runs flawlessly. In this view, the individual is completely subordinated to being a cog in the machine of society.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Technology, it must be recognized, is not a solitary track of advancement. It is not a prefigured path which manifests in time, nor a hard-coded progression in which technologies unlock over time with sufficient resources and research. Each technology has an explicit purpose, operating conditions and set of skills that make certain human activities possible or more convenient. Technological progress is thus open-ended.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work

“Whereas the received Law of revelation emboldens the Jewish mystic, the true materialist substitutes for Torah practical law or technology—technique, τέχνη. This positions the materialist over the cosmos, not as a member of the cosmos. Materialism always masks an underlying existentialism, and existentialism contains the inevitable character of process and arbitration. This finds the cosmos in need of fixing, in need of work, and for intelligence to act upon it and master it to that end: the divine coming into itself through work. The goal of existentialism, then, is work: as wages are compensation for toil, writ large is the universal tragedy whose last act, its redemption—its “payday”—is yet to come. Where our everyday work finds its necessity is in the cosmic Work whereby the ultimate meaning, the Sublime and the Divine, enters into the world once humanity organizes its rampant chaos.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work

“La ciencia es más que un cuerpo de conocimiento, es una manera de pensar.
Tengo un presagio de la época de mis hijos o mis nietos, cuando Estados Unidos sea una economía de servicios e información; cuando casi todas las principales industrias manufactureras se hayan ido a otros países; cuando los increíbles poderes tecnológicos estén en manos de muy pocos, y nadie que represente el interés público pueda si quiera comprender los problemas; cuando la gente haya perdido la capacidad de establecer sus propias agendas o cuestionar sabiamente a los que tienen autoridad; cuando, abrazados a nuestras bolas de cristal y consultando nerviosamente nuestros horóscopos, con nuestras facultades críticas en declive, incapaces de distinguir entre lo que se siente bien y lo que es verdad, nos deslicemos de vuelta, casi sin darnos cuenta, en la superstición y la oscuridad. La caída en la estupidez de Norteamérica se hace evidente principalmente en la lenta decadencia del contenido de los medios de comunicación, de enorme influencia, las cuñas de sonido de treinta segundos (ahora reducidas a diez o menos), la programación de nivel ínfimo, las crédulas presentaciones de pseudociencia y superstición, pero sobre todo en una especie de celebración de la ignorancia.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark