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Camouflaged by “Covid-19,” an undeclared global class war was initiated in 2020, aimed at replacing liberal democracy with technocracy, a novel, biodigital form of totalitarianism. The opening campaign involved the largest psychological operation in history, intended to demoralise, disorientate, and debilitate the public. This volume deals with the application of shock and stress, trauma-based mind control, the use of fear and threat, cognitive attack, weaponised deception, and techniques for turning society against itself. This is an open access book.

In recent years politics has seen an increasing role in economic policymaking for a technocracy of experts. How do politicians feel about this and how do they balance their political and ethical aims with economic expertise? Anna Killick offers an in-depth study of how politicians engage with economists and economic opinion. Based on interviews with politicians from the main parties in France, Germany, Denmark, the UK and USA, the book highlights the role economic opinion plays in politics and the tension that can arise between democracy and technocracy. Deferring to the experts is shown to be neither viable nor desirable, and that we should trust politicians to take the lead role in solving economic problems.

We are living in the midst of the greatest public health crisis of our time.Confronting the many challenges of this moment-from the medical to the economic, the social to the political-demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. Bringing together coverage of the unfolding pandemic from the critically acclaimed Boston Review, this collection explores the history and social legacies of pandemics, explores the place of science in popular culture and policy-making, and interrogates the ways in which science and health have been politicized.Thinking in a Pandemic collects the latest arguments from doctors and epidemiologists, philosophers and economists, legal scholars and historians, activists and citizens, as they think not just through this moment but beyond it.While much remains uncertain, our responsibility to public reason is sure. Now, more than ever, we affirm the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a healthier and more just world.Contributors include: Alex de Waal, David S Jones, Stefan Helmreich, Jeremy Greene, Dora Vargha, Jonathan Fuller, Marc Lipsitch, John Ioannidis, Trisha Greenhalgh, Sarah Burgard, Lucie Kalousova, Cailin O'Connoer, James Owen Weatherall, Natalie Dean.

Esta obra, de una manera extraordinaria e inspiradora, nos revela las íntimas conexiones entre el agua, los megaproyectos y las relaciones de poder en la costa ecuatoriana. Con gran capacidad intelectual y precisión investigativa, el autor examina los procesos de diseño e implementación de tres megaobras hídricas. Más allá de quitar la máscara de los juegos de poder burocráticos y neoliberales, la fascinante búsqueda empírica y conceptual nos deja ver las luchas y estrategias sutiles de resistencia social. Las familias marginadas y las comunidades perjudicadas reclaman justicia ambiental y una vida digna. Este magnífico libro es de gran interés para docentes, investigadores y estudiantes de ecología política, geografía crítica, políticas de desarrollo y estudios rurales.

This book represents the first comprehensive study of how technocracy currently challenges representative democracy and asks how technocratic politics undermines democratic legitimacy. How strong is its challenge to democratic institutions?The book offers a solid theory and conceptualization of technocratic politics and the technocratic challenge is analyzed empirically at all levels of the national and supra-national institutions and actors, such as cabinets, parties, the EU, independent bodies, central banks and direct democratic campaigns in a comparative and policy perspective. It takes an in-depth analysis addressing elitism, meritocracy, de-politicization, efficiency, neutrality, reliance on science and distrust toward party politics and ideologies, and their impact when pitched against democratic responsiveness, accountability, citizens'input and pluralist competition. In the current crisis of democracy, this book assesses the effects of the technocratic critique against representative institutions, which are perceived to be unable to deal with complex and global problems. It analyzes demands for competent and responsible policy making in combination with the simultaneous populist resistance to experts. The book will be of key interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, political theory, policy analysis, multi-level governance as well as practitioners working in bureaucracies, media, think-tanks and policy making.

Setting a new benchmark for studies of technocracy, this book shows that a solution to the challenge of populism will depend as much on a technocratic retreat as democratic innovation. Esmark examines the development since the 1980s of a new'post-industrial'technocratic regime and its complicity in the populist backlash against politics and political elites that is visible today. The new technocracy – a combination of network governance, risk management and performance management – has, the author argues, abandoned the overtly anti-democratic sentiments of its industrial predecessor and proclaimed a new partnership with democracy. The rise of populism, however, is a clear sign that the inherent problems of this partnership have been exposed and that technocracy posing as democracy will only serve to exacerbate existing problems.

Technocrats claim to know how to solve the social and economic problems of complex modern societies. But as Jeffrey Friedman argues in Power without Knowledge, there is a fundamental flaw with technocracy: it requires an ability to predict how the people whom technocrats attempt to control will act in response to technocratic policies. However, the mass public's ideas-the ideas that drive their actions-are far too varied and diverse to be reliably predicted. But that is not the only problem. Friedman reminds us that a large part of contemporary mass politics, even populist mass politics, is essentially technocratic too. Members of the general public often assume that they are competent to decide which policies or politicians will be able to solve social and economic problems. Yet these ordinary'citizen-technocrats'typically regard the solutions to social problems as self-evident, such that politics becomes a matter of vetting public officials for their good intentions and strong wills, not their technocratic expertise. Finally, Friedman argues that technocratic experts themselves drastically oversimplify technocratic realities. Economists, for example, theorize that people respond rationally to the incentives they face. This theory is simplistic, but it gives the appearance of being able to predict people's behavior in response to technocratic policy initiatives. If stripped of such gross oversimplications, though, technocrats themselves would be forced to admit that a rational technocracy is nothing more than an impossible dream. Ranging widely over the philosophy of social science, rational choice theory, and empirical political science, Power without Knowledge is a pathbreaking work that upends traditional assumptions about technocracy and politics, forcing us to rethink our assumptions about the legitimacy of modern governance.

Classically, studies of the Japanese government are both tantalizing and frustrating as scholars standing outside of the system draw conclusions from significant events like crises, disasters, and moments of reform. This has led to a sense of mystery as scholars have developed sophisticated competing theories about how the system actually operates often with resigned comments that there is a black curtain (kuromaku) drawn over the system. The primary challenge is gaining access to the actual process of policymaking on a daily basis given the seemingly impenetrable nature of the bureaucracy. This study is unusual as it cracks open the curtain to see the wheels and rotating gears along with those pulling the levers. Specifically, through the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Fellowship program, the only congressionally authorized opportunity allowing American officials to be placed directly inside a foreign government, the reader is given a firsthand account of these machinations. Through their eyes, readers will be introduced to Japan's messy policymaking process in telecommunications regulation, pharmaceutical approvals, diplomatic relations, and much more. This approach also allows the author to refine existing theories of Japan's bureaucratic elite and assess the weak system of control exercised over them by the National Personnel Authority (NPA). This understudied agency is the last vestige of MacArthur's legacy as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan following World War II. Thus, this study ambitiously hopes to lend a realistic glimpse into the only developed, non-western, industrialized democratic state in the world. More boldly, this study intends to lend a greater appreciation of the complex tug-of-war between democracy and technocracy in other national contexts.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the ‘technocratic shift'in ministerial recruitment, measuring its extent and variations over time in fourteen European countries. It addresses the question: who governs in European democratic regimes? Just a few decades ago, the answer would have been straightforward: party-men and (fewer) party-women. More recently, however, and in varying degrees across Europe, a greater proportion of non-politicians or experts have been recruited to government, as exemplified by the 2017 election of Emmanuel Macron to the French Presidency. These experts, frequently labelled “technocrats”, increasingly occupy key executive positions and have emerged as powerful actors in the decision-making process. This edited collection explores the contemporary debates surrounding the relationship between technocracy, democracy and political leadership, and will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in these fields.

Il capitalismo finanziario alimenta il falso dogma della scarsità della moneta e sta diventando sempre più una guida politica assoluta.Oltre a mercificare l'uomo, disgrega e degrada la società in due maniere: le infligge ricorrenti crisi e dissolve le sue basi morali in una logica di competizione individualistica.Con il pretesto di dover assicurare la governance richiesta dagli stessi mercati che hanno destabilizzato la società, essa crea la giustificazione per controllare la vita sociale attraverso nuovi strumenti elettronici e biologici, che tracciano, violano e manipolano l'uomo fin nella sua integrità neurofisiologica.Questa “società gestita” è il risultato dell'applicazione degli strumenti della psicologia aziendale, potenziati con tecniche di manipolazione neurale e biologica.Tale tecnologia ha dato ai governanti non solo un potere di controllo e intervento su tutti noi prima impensabile, ma anche una nuova struttura del potere stesso, delocalizzata e politicamente irresponsabile, in cui l'automazione e la smaterializzazione degli strumenti di governo e di arricchimento hanno privato le persone del potere di contrattazione e della partecipazione ai processi decisionali, relegandole al margine dei circuiti produttivi e decisionali.Ha generato un ordine contrario ai bisogni dell'uomo e della biosfera, un ordine cementato da un catechismo ideologico “politicamente corretto” che criminalizza, censura e inibisce chi ne critica i fondamenti.Siamo piegati dalle crisi incalzanti e dalle loro imposizioni, e così accettiamo che la sopravvivenza del sistema produttivo da cui dipendiamo necessiti di un maggior controllo sociale, di una crescente riduzione delle sicurezze personali, delle relazioni comunitarie e delle libertà.Quando saremo completamente sottomessi, per governarci non sarà più nemmeno necessario concederci i diritti e la dignità basilari.Descrivendo questo minaccioso passaggio epocale, in cui l'Uomo sta rischiando tutto, il libro indica la via di uscita dall'incombente dominio tecnocratico nella stessa insondabile e incoercibile complessità del mondo, della psiche, dell'Essere.L'autoreMarco Della Luna, laureato in diritto e in psicologia, avvocato e saggista, studioso di strumenti di manipolazione sociale, noto conferenziere, partecipa spesso a trasmissioni televisive e radiofoniche, e a importanti eventi a livello nazionale. È prolifico autore di aggiornatissimi testi (libri, instant book, e-book) che hanno non solo spiegato, ma battuto sul tempo le strategie oligarchiche e governative per il controllo sociale e lo sfruttamento della società (Euroschiavi, Neuroschiavi, La moneta copernicana, Cimiteuro, Sbankitalia, Traditori al governo? e altri ancora).

We live in a world of technical systems designed in accordance with technical disciplines and operated by personnel trained in those disciplines. This is a unique form of social organization that largely determines our way of life, but the actions of individuals and social protest still play a role in developing and purposing these rational systems. In Technosystem, Andrew Feenberg builds a theory of both the threats of technocratic modernity and the potential for democratic change.Feenberg draws on the tradition of radical social criticism represented by Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, which recognized the social effects of instrumental rationality but did not advance a convincing alternative to the new forms of domination imposed by rational systems. That is where the fine-grained analyses of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies can contribute. Feenberg uses these approaches to reconcile the claims of rationality with the agency of a public increasingly mobilized to intervene in technically based decisions. The resulting social theory recognizes emerging forms of resistance, such as protests and hacking, as essential expressions of public life in the “rational society.”Combining the most salient insights from critical theory with the empirical findings of STS, Technosystem advances the philosophical debate over the nature and practice of reason in modern society.

This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women. (Harvard Magazine)In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation's inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government's systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation's largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole.Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.

What are the chief challenges posed to contemporary democracy by modern technology, and how can democratic theory best respond to, or at least reflect on, those challenges? Inhabiting the kind of technologically advanced era in which we live, what sources are available within political theory for theoretical insight concerning the problem of democratic engagement with technology? The purpose of this volume is to canvas a broad range of theorists and theoretical traditions in order to address these questions, including Hegel and Marx, Rousseau and John Dewey, Heidegger and Simone Weil, Habermas and Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas. Commentaries on all these important thinkers -- focused on the issue of contemporary technology as posing unique social and political challenges for democratic political life -- yields rich and ambitious resources for theoretical reflection.

Over the past 25 years, Jürgen Habermas has presented what is arguably the most coherent and wide-ranging defence of the project of European unification and of parallel developments towards a politically integrated world society. In developing his key concepts of the transnationalisation of democracy and the constitutionalisation of international law, Habermas offers the main players in the struggles over the fate of the European Union (the politicians, the political parties and the publics of the member states) a way out of the current economic and political crisis, should they choose to follow it. In the title essay Habermas addresses the challenges and threats posed by the current banking and public debt crisis in the Eurozone for European unification. He is harshly critical of the incrementalist, technocratic policies advocated by the German government in particular, which are being imposed at the expense of the populations of the economically weaker, crisis-stricken countries and are undermining solidarity between the member states. He argues that only if the technocratic approach is replaced by a deeper democratization of the European institutions can the European Union fulfil its promise as a model for how rampant market capitalism can once again be brought under political control at the supranational level. This volume reflects the impressive scope of Habermas?s recent writings on European themes, including theoretical treatments of the complex legal and political issues at stake, interventions on current affairs, and reflections on the lives and works of major European philosophers and intellectuals. Together the essays provide eloquent testimony to the enduring relevance of the work of one of the most influential and far-sighted public intellectuals in the world today, and are essential reading for all philosophers, legal scholars and social scientists interested in European and global issues.

Praised by some as islands of efficiency in a sea of unprofessional, politicized and corrupt states, and criticized by others for removing wide areas of policy making from the democratic arena, technocrats have become prominent and controversial actors in Latin American politics. Nonelected state officials with advanced educations from top universities, technocrats achieve considerable autonomy from political and economic actors and exert great influence over their countries'fates. This finding poses an intriguing paradox. These experts lack an independent base of authority, such as popular election, and the tenure enjoyed by professional bureaucrats. What, then, explains the power of technocrats in democratic Latin America? Why do they enjoy and maintain greater policy influence in some areas than in others? Through analysis of economic and health policy in Colombia from 1958 to 2011 and in Peru from 1980 to 2011, Technocracy and Democracy in Latin America answers these and other questions about experts in Latin America.