In science we trust | CBC News

‘You are not welcome among us’

This idea was not new. Plato believed society functioned best when it was run by experts. Technocracy’s focus on engineers was rooted in the conviction that there was a technological fix to almost all of society’s problems.

Today, the idea that governments are too slow, too inefficient, too lacking in expertise to solve hard problems is widely shared among the engineers and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley.

This libertarian impulse has always been part of the ethos of Silicon Valley. One of its first and most forceful expressions came in 1995, when tech pioneer John Perry Barlow delivered his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,” the Declaration began. “I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

Silicon Valley’s attitude towards government has become more accommodating since Barlow delivered his declaration, both out of choice and necessity. But there remains a conviction that, left to their own devices, tech companies are better able to solve problems in areas like transportation, education and health care, where decades of government regulation have put a break on innovation.

“There’s a lack of focus on efficiency,” lamented former Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt on a panel about government and technology in 2019. “The reason there’s no innovation in government is there’s no bonuses for innovation. In fact, if you take a risk … and it fails, your career is over.”

A system “where problems can be identified through evidence, facts, reason, rather than ideological beliefs … I think that a lot of people find that appealing.”

This is the kind of overblown rhetoric we’ve come to expect from engineers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, and their insistence that governments should step aside in favour of true problem-solvers is clearly self-serving. But the idea that we should be looking to experts rather than politicians for solutions to massively complex problems like a deadly pandemic or a climate emergency is gaining traction everywhere.

“The idea of an apolitical world is appealing more and more to people,” argues Eri Bertsou, a senior researcher at the University of Zurich and co-editor of a 2020 book called The Technocratic Challenge to Government.

“People are tired, and they are put off by the commotion and the disagreement of representative politics,” Bertsou said. “So it’s this appeal of an efficient machine-like system … where problems can be identified through evidence, facts, reason, rather than ideological beliefs. I think that a lot of people find that appealing.”

Bertsou has been studying the rise of “technocratic” governments around the world, especially in Europe. In February 2021, Mario Draghi, an economist and former president of the European Central Bank who had never held political office, was named Italian prime minister to help manage the country’s post-pandemic economic recovery.

Draghi is a “technocrat,” chosen for the specific experience he brings to the job. Italians are fond of technocrats, especially when times are tough, and Draghi is the fourth technocrat prime minister there since 1993. You can also find cabinet-level technocrats in Greece, France and Lebanon, among other countries. But none of them would be embraced by Technocracy, because they are still operating within the price system, still treating “symptoms,” not the disease.

While the number of technocrats in government is on the rise, so, too, is the number of populist politicians who wear their lack of expertise like a badge of honour.

During the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, U.S. President Donald Trump mocked his opponent, Joe Biden, for saying he would “listen to the scientists” when it came to managing COVID-19. “If I listened totally to the scientists,” Trump proclaimed, “we’d have a country right now that would be in a massive depression.”

But there’s been a price for not listening to the experts. Countries run by populist leaders of various shades – particularly the U.S., Brazil and the U.K. – have recorded among the highest COVID-19 death rates.

For longtime Technocracy Incorporated supporters like Ed Blechschmidt, the idea that anyone would question the science around the pandemic, or anything else, is mystifying.

“You can’t argue with science and technology,” he insisted. “Science exists and scientific fact is fact. You can’t have a political position about it. You have to recognize it and implement science.”

But as we’ve discovered during the pandemic, science can sometimes speak with many voices, and by definition, representative democracy requires a constant balancing act among competing interests. Governments have to listen to the scientists ― but also to business people, parents and others.

Bertsou believes that by insisting on finding the one correct solution to every problem, Technocracy has presented a false dichotomy. “There is not one type of scientific knowledge, and no one way of governing social problems.”

Technocracy Incorporated began nearly a hundred years ago by seeking answers to two important questions: Why on a continent so rich in natural resources, energy and industrial capacity, were so many people suffering? And how could democracy, with all its obvious imperfections, continue to function effectively in a world where science and technology played an ever more dominant role?

Technocracy’s answers to both those questions were bold, radical, overly complicated and wildly impractical. Today, no one is talking about a North American Technate or a 16-hour work week or replacing money with energy certificates. But it would be wrong to dismiss Technocracy Incorporated as just another failed utopian scheme – not while the answers to those two questions remains so elusive.