Darts and Letters Podcast

EP65: Technocracy Now!, pt. 2 (ft. Joy Rohde & Eden Medina)

"Last episode, we looked at the technocrats of the industrial age: Thorstein Veblen, Howard Scott, and the “industrial tinkerers,” as Daniel Bell put it. But Daniel Bell went on to say we were entered a new age — a “post-industrial age” — where a new kind of technocrat would vie for power. They would develop new intellectual technologies that could be codified into complex ways of understanding, predicting, and maybe even controlling global systems.

One such intellectual technology was cybernetics, the darling of mid-century technocrats. It was a theory that proposed you could understand human affairs by understanding certain mathematical relationships in a system, and the nature of how feedbacks circulated in that system. On part #2 of Technocracy Now, we tell stories of cybernetic technocracies."