Against Technocracy
Resisting rule by expertise is not anti-science or anti-technology; it is a defense of democracy
Most people don’t use the word technocracy because they don’t need to.
They already know the feeling of a form deciding if they get care, of a risk score deciding if they get bail, of a dashboard dictating policy while the human costs are ignored.
Technocracy presents this as neutrality: simply what the numbers say. But this is a political tactic. Beneath the mask of objectivity are brutal decisions that ration care, administer punishment, and enforce exclusion.
And whenever critics name this, the same charges appear: that they’re anti-science, nostalgic, or inviting chaos. These are not good-faith arguments. They are reflexive defenses of a system that uses the pretense of data to depoliticize dissent and protect established power.
Science is not sovereignty
Opposing technocracy is not opposing science. It is opposing the debasement of science into an instrument of rule.
Expertise is vital. A climatologist can chart warming; a virologist can model transmission. But neither can decide what sacrifices are acceptable or whose lives are disposable. Those are political and moral questions, not technical ones.
When epidemiological models hardened into rigid dashboards that dictated policy without democratic debate, expertise was weaponized. To critique that was not to be anti-science; it was to demand that science remain a tool for collective liberation, not a command language for the powerful.
Neutrality is ideology
Technocracy’s foundational myth is that it is neutral while politics is biased. But its metrics are never neutral; they are ideology encoded into spreadsheets.
The U.S. military’s “body counts” in Vietnam and Iraq laundered mass death into data. The political decisions about who counted as a combatant and who was erased as “collateral damage” were embedded in the ledger itself.
The same logic applies in peacetime. Hospital readmission rates, which appear objective, systematically punish institutions that serve the poor. Structural violence is laundered into the neutral language of performance metrics. As I argued in Seemingly Neutral Systems, these tools are the infrastructure that makes brutality palatable.
Universality is the alternative
Technocracy claims that without its rationing and surveillance, only chaos remains. This is a lie. Universality is the alternative to technocratic cruelty.
Social Security requires no invasive audits or compliance algorithms. It is durable because it is universal. It is stable because it refuses to sort the worthy from the unworthy.
Contrast this with means-tested programs like SNAP, which are defined by churn and exclusion. Millions go hungry not because they fail to qualify but because the system is designed for cruelty and abandonment, masked as fiscal prudence. As I wrote in Universality Disincentivizes Surveillance, universal design starves technocracy of its raw material: the power to exclude.
Efficiency is a shell game
Technocracy’s core promise is “efficiency,” a term borrowed from the market to justify austerity. But this is a deception. The goal is not to eliminate costs, but to shift them onto the powerless. Human suffering is not a line item that can be optimized.
Australia’s Robodebt program, which used an algorithm to hunt down supposed welfare overpayments, was marketed as efficient. In reality, it manufactured hundreds of thousands of false debts and drove people to suicide, all before ending in a billion-dollar settlement.
In the U.S., algorithmic scheduling is sold as “just-in-time efficiency.” What this delivers to workers is the violent offloading of systemic chaos onto their lives.
The fallback to masks
When its failures are exposed, technocracy defaults to two excuses.
“Bad implementation.” The problem, we are told, wasn’t the goal, just the tool. The solution is always more technocracy: smarter models, better data. This purposefully ignores that the spreadsheet’s primary function is to obscure political choices and enforce austerity. As I argued in Manufacturing Inevitability, the problem is not the broken spreadsheet; it is rule-by-spreadsheet itself.
“Only temporary.” The tools of crisis management, we are assured, are exceptional. They are not. Terrorism watchlists, COVID dashboards, climate risk scores: each emergency becomes the pretext for a permanent expansion of surveillance and control.
A genealogy of technocracy
Technocracy is the modern expression of a centuries-old project to reframe political problems as administrative ones.
Poor Laws (16th–19th c.): State-managed registers of the poor were tools of labor discipline, rationing survival to enforce submission.
Progressive commissions (early 20th c.): Political conflicts over wages and safety were displaced into “neutral” commissions that served capital.
New Deal boards (1930s–40s): Social insurance was stratified from its inception, with exclusions designed to protect the racial and class hierarchies of the time.
Cold War systems (1950s–70s): Systems theory and kill ratios treated human existence as a variable to be managed, casting democracy as a risk.
Neoliberal austerity (1980s–2000s): The denial of care and security was transformed into a profitable industry, managed by credit scores and benefit cliffs.
Algorithmic governance (2000s–present): Austerity is automated. Human judgment is replaced by risk scores; brutality is automated as code.
The through-line is clear: technocracy doesn’t erase politics. It is the continuation of politics by other means.
Technologies are Crystallized Politics
Take the endless city highways of Los Angeles or Houston, jammed with rideshare vehicles during rush hour. At first glance, these roads appear to be neutral feats of engineering. Yet as Langdon Winner reminds us, infrastructure encodes deliberate decisions about whose mobility counts. By the same token, an app-based congestion model serves corporate expansion while gig workers endure precarious pay.
The ideology of inevitability
All these tools and tactics serve one purpose: to manufacture inevitability. By framing political decisions as technical outputs, technocracy makes resistance seem irrational.
Don’t like the budget cuts? The spreadsheet says they’re “necessary.” Don’t like the risk score? That's too bad; the algorithm is “objective.”
This illusion of necessity takes immense effort to maintain. The task of any real politics is to shatter it.
Toward democracy, not nostalgia
To oppose technocracy is not to be nostalgic, anti-science, or chaotic. It is to demand that systems serve human life rather than discipline it. It is a demand for justice, not just for better metrics.
Technocracy launders political violence through spreadsheets. Democracy wrests that power back from the algorithm and the balance sheet.
This is not an abstract hope. It is visible in the institutions, however embattled, that operate on principles of universality: public libraries, public schools, Social Security.
They represent a commitment to decommodification, a sphere of life properly insulated from market logic and its attendant cruelties.
We can do better than what a handful of people want us to think is inevitable.
On Decommodification
Decommodification is the process of removing basic human needs from the control of market forces. In our current system, essential goods like healthcare, housing, and education are treated as commodities—things you must buy if you can afford them. The commodification of these needs leaves millions of people excluded or inadequately served, simply because they cannot pay. This creates an unjust society where inequality is built into the very structure of how people access the basics of life.