Digitocracy and palazzism
Technocracy, the Encyclopaedia Garzanti dryly states, is a "political system founded on the management of power by experts and technicians of the various disciplines". It's good to see a concept headless, a pun autological where the instruments (technical, technical) of an asset (κράτος, power) of the latter become the authors and end so to represent it without a subject, dadaisticamente hanging herself. Technocracy is a steering that drives, a shoe that runs, lately a science that speaks. It is the miserable license of progressive misery, of a path ( gressŭs ) that is said to be projected forward ( pro ) without, however, taking the trouble to distinguish the front from the back, the top from the bottom, the technique of Hiroshima from that of Fleming .
The deceptions of the technical government reveal themselves in the silent implications. Since an act cannot take place without an author, whoever pretends that it is up to the pilot to decide the destination of the journey promotes on the one hand the corollary and quadratic fiction of the "automatic pilot" (cit. Mario Draghi, 2013 ) and from there the management of algorithms in to which the human is obsolete, on the other hand it achieves the only plausible objective of hiding the very human fingers that pull the "intelligent" rudder. The technocrat is literally the Turk, the chess robot created in the eighteenth century by Wolfgang von Kempelen to amaze an audience so obtusely confident in the prodigies of technique that they did not suspect that the automaton's arms were actually moved by a real player housed in his inside, under a layer of randomly placed gears. Nothing has really changed since then, except that today the chessboard is the world, the pawns its peoples.
Technocracy is therefore an absconded aristocracy whose optimates do not decree in public fora but move the limbs of a golem who promises himself without passion or sin, scurrying like mice in his dark belly and making himself a screen of the deliberately contradictory and baroque mechanisms of what they call law, economics, science. So it is not difficult to understand that any form of participatory government or even just aimed at satisfying a plurality of needs is not compatible with technocracy. Rather, it is its intended victim, from the very beginning, as are those who hailed in technoscientific progress the main path of the emancipation of the least.
Yet popular representation holds up at least in effigy, it empties but does not fade, certainly to better conceal the moves of the occult chess player by wrapping them in the stamped papers of democracy, or of any other recognized power. It is interesting to observe the ways of this enslavement. The most fitting metaphor is that of "digitization" which indicates both a technology developed in recent decades and an ancient concept of which electronic machines are the most recent tool up to now. The digital (from the English digit , "cipher") extends Galilean mathematical reductionism from natural realities to human and social realities and therefore to everything, being able to represent everything (cf. figures , again "cipher") by ringing numerical sequences ( bytes ). It is the triumph of René Guénon 's "kingdom of quantity" where only what can be measured and priced exists, a kingdom, however, very far from being materialistic, because the number is to the countable as the idea is to the things and of things violates the fundamental property, which is the limit. While numbers can divide and multiply indefinitely, things are blocked below by the indivisibility of their minimal particles (Gr. Άτομοι , "which cannot be cut") and above by their natural scarcity. Thus, digitocracy is first and foremost the proper form of capitalism and finance, which, in order to achieve the unlimited multiplication of monetary profits, link the unlimited exploitation of men and nature, to the point of dispossession.
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Like all innovations, even the electronic declination of the digital habitus is the birth of an old thought that seeks sharper tools to translate into work and announce in things a model destined for men and society. Contemporary digitocracy is reflected in information technology and telematics to draw not only the means, but first the vision and style. Imagine communities as machines to be programmed, blank disks on which to "run" instructions of the legal norm, and public decision makers as omnipotent system administrators who can access all files, even the most critical and delicate ones, to overwrite customs, mentality, rights and constitutions with the magic wand of a "click". Following the example of programming codes, the code of law also becomes imperative and procedural, it only expresses commands ( do , print , read, break … die ) and solves only with obligations, which are ever more dense and suffocating, since it is not possible to conceive of a self-determining machine. If applied to the digital subject, freedom is disvalue, unpredictability, undefined behavior , a "bug" that puts the system at risk and must therefore be repressed upstream by designing closed procedures ( if , then , else , switch …) capable of prevent any possible event, or rather to reduce the variety of possible events by placing them in the grids of IT aids: electronic forms, online portals, apps, digital identities. Under the pretext of reaching out to the human, the digital aspires to itself and distorts it.
The sinking of silicon into the flesh produces wounds and sepsis. Forced into the flat domain of numerism, complexity reacts with exception and disorder, opposing the elegance of the flow charts with the unrepeatability of the characters, biographies and needs of each one. From here, from the obstinacy with which living matter escapes dead algorithms, anger arises which informs the thinking and political action of our days, the eagerness to devise increasingly disproportionate and severe sanctions, the search for undisciplined or even thinking subjects to whom to blame the failure of the program with the aim of isolating and suppressing them, such as the malware that infest your PC. Against the resistance of uses and consciences, the decision-maker-programmer punches the unfaithful machine, shakes it blinded by anger and does not scruple to remove everything that stands between the command and its execution – even the most consolidated, even that until the day before most sacred. Exasperated by the failures, he will finally let himself be tempted by the most radical solution: reformatting, reset, the "big reset", taking care not to leave backups .
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It is striking that even those who deplore the effects of this paradigm accept its approach and thus end up reinforcing it. The master-slave political vision attributes a bulimic and disproportionate role to the planning leadership and thus creates the conviction that nothing can happen except in the "button rooms", in the supreme decision-making forums to which every attention and every effort must therefore be addressed. However, this is a socially and also historically reversed vision. In reality, the political subjects are the projection of the social forces they represent: of these they are the institutional and accessory offshoots, from these they draw weight and power. Believing that a few hundred men with briefcases can change the fate of tens of millions of individuals and that they can do so by discussing, declaiming and writing reams is a hallucination that is reducing government institutions to a small theater of themselves, the first of which victim is the widespread dimension of doing politics, the ability of the polis to imagine and shape itself as a living organism, a civilization. Those who are told that only buildings are worth, that extra Romam nulla salus , renounces to cultivate in society the resources and powers to be transferred to the top and abandons the former to impotence, the latter to the plunder of other powers.
The phenomenology of palazzism is also technical. The concrete repercussions of decisions, taken or missed, are a crude detail that the "informed citizen" dismisses with annoyance. He prefers to write on declarations and voting records, hearings, regulations, clauses, interpretations, amendments, balances, tactics and compromises, corroborated in this by an otherwise inaccessible archive of information and comments offered by the internet. In addition, social media create the illusion of being able to know the "true" personality, the "true" objectives and the secret secrets of those who live in the buildings, increasingly confusing their acts in the tools of gossip and secondhand psychology. All taken by the how and ensnared by the techinicorum of the mass media and parliamentarians, no one cares about the thing , the fruits from which only the tree must be judged. The politics of the technocratic era dies of the technical disguises of the "experts", but also of the technique of itself.
It wasn't always like that. The Christian Democrats dominated the constitutional arc relying on the alliance of the Catholic Church and on a dense network of institutions, initiatives and clients meticulously cultivated on the territory: parishes, religious orders, schools, universities, associations, trade unions (ACLI), missions, etc. In my tiny village, the local party representative placed the young people from the oratory upon completing their studies, gave legal advice, found doctors and hospitals, mediated between banks, entrepreneurs, local administrators and citizens, baptized cooperatives, organized tournaments and concerts, at the occurrence combined marriages. The Communists opened people's houses, mutual societies, ARCI clubs. Not having the numbers and the support to affect Parliament, they left Parliament and organized strikes, marches, occupations, newspapers, associations and aid networks. In the 1970s Dario Fo and others set up the Soccorso Rosso to provide economic and legal support to militants affected by the repression, while the extra-parliamentary left groups directly theorized the need to desert enemy democratic institutions and to contribute to the workers' struggle with others. means, as they did. In 1969 the peripheral Südtiroler Volkspartei obtained a long series of administrative advantages for Alto Adige even with a literally "zerovirgolista" representation (three parliamentarians in the mixed group), having however managed to cultivate a strong base and the diplomatic support of the Austrian government.
Politics, said Rino Formica , is blood and m … da, it is the sum of all forces and all violence, visible and invisible, licit and illicit. If the men with the briefcase (or with the scepter, nothing changes) sever ties with society, they are left alone and their buildings become mousetraps where the antisocial predators of lobbying and covenants feast. It is not necessary here to recall the fate of those who, in every part of the globe, set out to conquer the flagship dreaming of pressing the keys of the digitocrat, only to find their feet chained to the hull and a papier-mâché rudder with which to pretend to be the master of the route. .
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Technocracy, digitocracy and palazzism are epiphenomena of the modern inversion, which since its inception is under the illusion of amending itself by relaunching itself. It is paradoxical but not accidental that the claim to put numbers, science and technical applications on the throne is being consumed in the age less respectful of the scientific method and arithmetic coherence; that the visibility of the "experts" and of the "authoritative" voices is producing a cacophony of approximations, forecasts denied almost in real time, the scrapping of the most elementary acquired notions, emotional shocks and ugly moralistic incursions; in short, that "science in government" is sinking governments and science together. Not otherwise, palazzismo wants to impose itself in the moment of maximum weakness of buildings, the one in which litter of every principle and every hierarchy of law is made, where winners and losers pile up in spite of the vote and electoral speeches evaporate like farts in the wind. It is therefore also the moment in which the anti-people and extraneous forces dominate more blatantly than ever, they are also claimed: "the markets", the technical-scientific committees, the "control rooms", the international agencies, the corporations foreigners, overseas "philanthropists", global movementism. All but the people, all but God. For the writer it is difficult not to see even in these contradictions the attempt of contemporaries to spread a veil of rationality over chaos, to find discipline and meaning in the algorithm and to save the inhumanity of one's own system by taking refuge in the only practicable refuge: the non-human.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/digitocrazia-e-palazzismo on Tue, 29 Jun 2021 04:21:23 PDT.