We are not yet in a full or complete expertocracy. That form of government is still in competition with the oligarchy, currently also gaining strength, and the old capitalism system, in which the parliament or Congress is supposed to hold ultimate power, withers.
Congress isn’t entirely ornamental, but it is becoming so. Here are some for instances that you already know. Congress has, on paper, the power to declare war. Do they? Or do the Experts in the Executive do it? Congress has, on paper, the power to tax and spend. It seems they do. Yet Congresscreatures largely farm out the laws they write to Experts—-mainly lobbyists in the employ of oligarchs.
Congress is not yet powerless. Some small laws created in the traditional way, designed for the good of the old system, slip by. But these are decreasing. Too many of their laws now are mere guidelines, tasking some “agency” to create the actual de facto laws. These agencies are staffed by Experts.
Voting is still a thing, but limited. The left certainly becomes hersterical about voting, such as insisting people can vote illegally. This mean elections still matter to some extent. Not in the same sense and force as, say, a century ago, but they can make small differences, especially at smaller levels of governance.
Yet it is all fading.
The expertocracy gains in strength. Here today is one small proof of this. The call for formalizing the governing role of what we used to call monopolies. Bloomberg says “Give Amazon and Facebook a Seat at the United Nations“.
(All of this, including ellipses, is original.)
It’s getting harder to distinguish brands from nation-states.
The resemblance is not simply semiotics:
logos (flags), anthems (jingles), taglines (mottoes), mission statements (constitutions), founder stories (official histories), terms and conditions (legal codes)
… structures:
customers (citizens), shareholders (legislators), boards of directors (executives), chairmen (monarchs), CEOs (presidents), and oversight boards (judges) …or even size, though the comparisons are startling:
The call is what is important. To say that these large entities, resembling as they do (more on this presently) small countries, creating de facto laws and enforcing them, should be treated as other governing bodies is to acknowledge the expertocracy, and in part the oligarchy.
Corporations are not strictly oligarchies, even if they are monopolies, because they are woke. That they are woke shows it is not capitalists in charge of these entities, but Experts in marriage with oligarchs. I won’t repeat all the reasons why this is so. For that, read “Why Corporations are Woke.”
These corporations, while wielding substantial power, are still subject to the rule of Experts as the rest of us. Old style capitalists, in days long gone, had vastly more freedom to do what they wanted, and to buy Congressional votes. New style Expert-led companies, even if owned by oligarchs, are often forced to bow to their own employees’ demands, demands which are fomented by Experts.
Now for the resources these entities control:
Walmart Inc. employs roughly the population of Botswana; Microsoft Corp.’s market cap is greater than Brazil’s GDP; FedEx Corp. has five times more planes than Air India Ltd.
That’s a lot of muscle. Then this recognition:
If this all sounds a tad whimsical — comparing gadflies to goliaths — it may be because of the cultural dominance of the “Westphalian system,” under which the global balance of power has been envisioned, since 1648, as a mosaic of centrally controlled and culturally unified nation-states, each wielding a monopoly of force inside mutually recognized borders.
The Expertocracy, thanks to English and academia, is world-spanning. Papers are written still in other languages, but make no mark unless recast in English. And it is universities that staff both old-style governments and woke corporations. Borders are a hindrance, which is why the expertocracy views them with disdain. They also make little sense, while this slogan does: “Knowledge has no borders.” Of course, Expert definition of knowledge differs from the logical.
Anyway, then came the gift of the coronadoom, in which the true power of Experts became apparent.
More novel was how nation-states turned to private companies to solve the unprecedented challenge of contact-tracing entire populations.
In May 2020, Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google set aside their rivalry to launch an “exposure notification” API, available to official public health bodies via iOS and Android. By September 2021, more than 40 countries (and 25 U.S. states) had plugged into this API — including initially resistant nations like England, Finland, Germany and Norway.
Significantly, many of the independent state-led solutions — notably Singapore’s BlueTrace, Israel’s HaMagen and France’s TousAntiCovid — were still obliged to interact with Google and Apple, if only to use their app store protocols to get their technology onto their citizen’s phones.
These entities are not in complete control: I do not claim that. But the Experts in these entities have substantial power. Using de facto laws, they can and do purge their enemies, including sitting presidents.
They can’t do everything. They can’t start or wage wars. But they can direct the flow of much political activity, including war mongering.
I don’t think anybody knows how this will all shake out in fifty year’s time. But if I had to guess, something resembling the New World Order, something much more, but not entirely, global will result.
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“Give Amazon and Facebook a Seat at the United Nations“.
Good God. My daughter and I were saying just yesterday, “Well, at least Google doesn’t have people with guns who can show up at our door to force their will on us.”
Granted, Google gets the US government to do its bidding just fine, but a seat at the UN (and presumably subsequent influence on the dispatching of “Peacekeepers”) is a whole ‘nother level.
There are numerous science fiction properties where huge corporations gain then wield more power than national governments.
I always thought it was a neat idea, but unrealistic, like anti-gravity or hyperdrives. I guess I should’ve realized the evil megacorp was more grounded in reality, based as it is on human nature and not techno-magic.
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So they want a world like the setting for the Shadowrun RPG, except without all the cool elves and dragons?
Great.
Sorry, but you lost me with the acronym API. I don’t know why people persist in using them, it only makes it more difficult to read something. They are akin to jargon. At the very least an acronym should be spelled out before subsequent use. I think some feel clever by using them.
The actual ideas of the Expert-laws come from ambitious young people (students) in consulting firms who have never been confronted with the consequences of their authorial inventions. And the parliamentarians have no idea how they should / can defend public criticism of the trainees’ papers, because for that they again need the “advice” of the students and their superiors.
The Constitution is dead
https://frederickrsmith.substack.com/p/the-constitution-clarified
Do none of you read history????? This is NOT the New World Order. That is stupid. One of the STUPIEST things I hear all the time. This is the Old World Order we had for centuries. Good heavens, people are becoming drooling idiots of the 15 century. Get a grip.
(Cloudbuster: Google does not have employees with the will to use a weapon. Nor does anyone else, it seems.)
WE ARE AND THIS TIME IS THE ANOMALY.
Douglas. It’s a quotation. I am not free to change it.
Douglas
API – application programming interface
You could get that from the context … but API (Associated Press International?) really wasn’t the point
Sheri
This is NOT the New World Order. That is stupid. One of the STUPIEST things I hear all the time. This is the Old World Order we had for centuries.
Yep!
People compare this to 1984 … it is and it is not
It’s Catch-22
It’s Cat’s Cradle
It’s Slapstick
It’s Slaughterhouse Five
It’s Lord of the Flies
…
Waaay too much Vonnegut up there, some one come up with more
Cat’s Cradle is more applicable to global warming
Slapstick had its China Flu although in its case the Chinese had miniaturized all their people and the rest of the world were breathing them in as truly Chinese Flew.
Slaughterhouse Five doesn’t really fit
Don Quixote, USA?
awildgoose
The elves and dragons are the worst part of shadowrun tbh
Read history? Does no one even read science fiction anymore? This is basically Blade Runner!
I always envisioned a time where tanks and peacekeeping mercenary forces on the ground marched emblazoned with the logos of Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
This is why the Church taught subsidiarity and monarchs were tasked with breaking the shit up of corporations growing too large. But as usual the prestige and benefits always means they do, everything from Standard oil to the Dutch East India Trading Company and so on.
But the technocrats have something else. The others had to find and produce useful products and commodities. But we rarely see Nestle having the pull on the general public these technocrats do.
Someday we’ll have to pull a Dune and destroy the internet and AI and general computers.
Also I wouldn’t be so fooled that the corps were completely different from big gov to start with, considering all the funding and projects that originated them all. I suspect intelligence services built them up all along. Zuckerberg is just a face. I believe Bezos was actual intelligence, much like one Mr. Epstein. Government is often their biggest customer. The shelves with products and instagram family photos is just a lucrative side business to fund the behind the scenes work of logistics and satellites and spying and tracking and public psy-ops.
Perhaps China knows what is up…
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/chinas-satellite-crusher-space-pearl-harbor-coming
Worth reading…
Julian Assange on what Google really is…
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
>”It’s getting harder to distinguish brands from nation-states.”
OK, this is clown-world thinking. Harder? For whom? An assumption asserted as a “given,” as a fact. This is gaslighting propaganda.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with Briggs’ premise that an emerging expertocracy has plans “for us.” This propaganda is of the same vein that leads from “2 weeks to flatten the curve” to vaccine mandates for 5-11 year olds. The result is that far too many sentient folks support the draconian simply because they went with the flow, joined the crowd, and became the mob telling you what you must do.
GP-
I’ve read Gibson.
The Rasta space-station in Neuromancer is as bad.
Heard about this today. Here’s the news straight from the World Economic Forum itself (not the analysis of it I heard, which may or may not be accurate):
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/first-movers-coalition-cop26-joe-biden/
This will be launched TODAY (it’s supposed to be at noon Central European Time… which I guess means it’s already happened — the full list of companies was to be announced then). John Kerry, our “Special Presidential Envoy for Climate,” is in charge. From the WEF web page:
‘”The United States and World Economic Forum are launching the First Movers Coalition…[which] is starting with more than two dozen of the world’s largest and most innovative companies. The Coalition represents eight major sectors that comprise 30% of global emissions that we now are dealing with,” President Biden said during a speech to COP26 on Tuesday. “These companies will be critical partners in pushing for viable alternatives to decarbonize these industrial sectors and more,” he added. ‘
Johnno
Not Blade Runner (nor “Do Android Politicos Dream of Electric Sheeple”)
You are thinking of Rollerball
I thank Johnno for his link to Assange re Google and the State Department, and add another link, one that perhaps adds something to Bruce Charlton’s observation in a Comment from a previous post that there seems to be a ‘pull’ to these things, beyond what we can see, that draws everything into ever-tightening circles. While I would never discount the influence of the Devil, it is also true that he’s in the details.
For example: in today’s global economy, companies that make things experience a powerful pull to outsource everything they do, eliminate all employees who want to actually make things and know how to do that, and fairly rapidly find themselves essentially wholly owned subsidiaries of financial concerns. Companies in industries the world over have emptied themselves (or been emptied), and now exist only to be in charge of the company logo.
This is a longish article, but once you read it, you’ll never forget it:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/
Companies that make nothing at all, except (possibly) money, owned essentially by money, and run by people who find nothing askance in that. Johnno’s link adds: run by people who are adept at moving smoothly, almost without friction, between things that used to be (that we liked to be) somewhat oppositional: governments, companies, money, academia.
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Sheri: Mark Steyn frequently points out the major difference between the tyrannical norms of history – that you are referring to – and the current time. The historical tyrants did not have modern panopticon-State technology. As Steyn says, “they had to send pantalooned emissaries galloping around to your place” to force you do do something. Now they can target millions of people with regulatory denial of the means to participate in normal work and trade to survive, on the basis of already knowing everything about you and everyone else you might interact with. Of course it requires mass compliance, much as superstitious idiots en mass in the Dark Ages complied with witch-hunting hysterias and so on. But there is a whole new level possible now, and the scope can be global.
It’s time we reject the Edward Jenner and other myths.
Jenner did not do any randomized control trials! He did not know anything about Vitamin D and recent studies show us very clearly that serum vitamin D levels are negatively correlated with Covid-19 hospitalization and mortallity.
I think the milkmaids were getting plenty of Vitamin D from drinking fresh milk and cowpox had nothing to do with their resistance to smallpox.
Prove me wrong!
I am an iconclast!
“I believe Bezos was actual intelligence,”
Not sure if he is directly, but his family has deep DARPA links…so quite likely (certainly “intel adjacent” at least). I don’t think most of these giant tech Oligarch “entrepreneurs” are really what they are portrayed as being – the whole bootstrap, up from nothing, just a nerd in the garage or college dorm who got lucky with a genius idea myth, etc.
Elon Musk might be the most phony of all (precisely because he pretends to be some kind of semi-rogue/based “man of the people” with fanboys who salivate at his every Tweet, no matter how cryptic, mindless, or obfuscatory. And more than the others, both his companies are heavily dependent on government subsidies and contracts – indeed really exist only because of them. SpaceX is basically just NASA outsourced to a nominally “private” company, and Tesla would have long ago been bankrupt without “green energy” subsidies).
“Does no one even read science fiction anymore? This is basically Blade Runner!”
Welcome to your Brave New Fahrenheit 1984 Vendetta Runner.
That should cover it – all the worst of:
Brave New World
Fahrenheit 451
1984
V for Vendetta
Blade Runner
(Psst! These dystopian novels were supposed to be warnings, not instructions!)
We should have all been very concerned when Google drooped “Don’t be evil” from it’s mission statement – clearly there is more profit in being evil than fighting it.