It never occurred to me before today to understand a technocracy as rule by (or under) technic (or technik or technicity, depending on translation) as conceived by Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology.
I prefer the term technicity. Technicity is the enworldment within which all things are understood, first and foremost, as means to ends. “What is it for?” is the compulsive next question, following “What is it?” It is the root of the industrial faith, and the true source of our misery under capitalism, and even more under various anti-capitalisms.
Trapped within the hollow, arid, robotically hostile strain we call corporate life, the technicity-bound rebel can dream nothing better than socialism. But socialism is a dream of technicity itself, guaranteeing the same miseries of capitalism, but in even purer form, without the vestigial consolations of pre-industrial life that have been smuggled into capitalism through liberal protections of the private sphere.
To sloganize:
- The enemy is neither capitalism nor socialism, but their common faith, technicity.
- Fundamentalism is what happens when the objects of religion are uprooted from their proper soil and planted in the sand of technicity.
- Those trapped in technicity can only perceive, conceive, intuit and imagine inside the narrow limits of technicity. When the technicity-possessed say religion, they can mean only fundamentalism. When they dream escape from their misery, they dream leaps out of technicic pans into technicic fires.
- It is trivially easy to swap out belief content within the same technic faith. Fundamentalist Christians can dump out their religious beliefs and replace them with Progressivist ones without much deep adjustment or change in life experience. But religious conversion is not essentially about beliefs. It is about the substratum that makes beliefs intelligible and persuasive (or sheer nonsense), the substratum of faith. You cannot stay in technicity and understand religious existence.
- “A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.” — Wittgenstein