The Crisis of Technos

Capitalism and technology have come to depend on each other. Life and the world are filled with endless forms of circles, cycles, and circuits. Many of them arising organically over centuries, enduring with strength and resilience, and reciprocating as though they had a tacit will of their own.
An example would be the relationship between society and the individual; individuals contribute not just their numbers to society, but also their actions, speech, and creativity. Together, those qualities give a society its distinctive culture, custom, and order. Yet at the same time, these individuals can only emerge from a society, one which gives them the cuisine they enjoy, the language they speak, and the relations they share. In fact, it is doubtful that any of us social beings can truly live a healthy life without being part of a society.
The relationship between technology and Capitalism—a word which has become synonymous with Liberalism and free-marketeer ideology—is not such a cycle. It is, by contrast, one of those cycles of a more novel, man-made variety. These artificial cycles can accelerate and spin out of control, inflate as bubbles and burst, or feed on themselves like the Ouroboros, self-consuming and shrinking out of existence. They are more fragile than they appear, and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life—those who live within them have only an illusion of security, which disintegrates along with the cycle when it can no longer adapt.

So, where does one begin in the task of describing this mutual relationship between technology and Capitalism? The most immediately apparent aspect of this relationship is the dependency of technology on Capitalism. Technology depends on the Capitalist free-market because competition nominally generates innovation, as well as the fact that it acts as a source to finance for its new innovations. This is a straightforward chain of causality. However, whilst it is less obvious, and involves a longer causal chain, the dependence of Capitalism on technology is nonetheless equally real.
So what is the nature of that second dependence? Well, let’s begin with a simple claim: the free market needs growth in order to justify its right to freedom. The free-market depends on technology as a means for perpetual growth, since this perpetual growth justifies the inviolability of the market’s right to freedom, compelling society and the state to take a back seat to the market and its whims. This compulsion arises from the abundance innovation has bestowed on society over recent centuries, specifically in light of the belief that any interference in the market could be detrimental to the possibilities of innovation.
Some form of market mechanism has always been a vital component of virtually every society and economic system throughout history. However almost every one of these societies recognised the marketplace as being inherently subordinate to its will. Each of them recognised their own right to intervene in the market.

Such societies existed before the era of agricultural abundance, when the world was governed by the old Malthusian rules. The Malthusian world was one of slow linear growth, where one man’s gain would often mean another man’s loss, and the market was strictly constrained by access to resources. Those who accumulated wealth through purely mercantile and economic skill were frequently extorted by those who wielded the sword. They in turn often acted as agents for redistribution, being compelled to display largesse and to patronise others to bolster their social position. Debt cancellation, forms of economic reset, and prohibition of usury were well known practices in the pre-modern era.
It is only with the advent of technological growth that society saw the star of the market rise over the politics of the state. Only growth could have permitted the ledger and abacus to be raised above the throne and sceptre. For with post-scarcity, the old dynamics of the Malthusian game were made irrelevant. It was now possible for one man to make a million, while others could still make ten.
In light of this, not only was society’s right over the marketplace eliminated, it was totally inverted. It has now become the state’s duty to protect and uphold the free-market. The state does so because the free market brings about the growth needed to satiate its population. Thus technological innovation is the source of the state’s prosperity and competitive edge over other states. The resulting ideal is one akin to Thatcher’s Night-watchman State—that ideal being the minimisation of the state, its existence only being justified insofar as it can protect and facilitate the free-market.

Meanwhile, the market’s relentless ability to concentrate the world’s wealth into the hands of a few select oligarchs continues unabated. For those who benefit disproportionately from this state of affairs, and who naturally wish for things to remain this way, it is their imperative to continually display proof of technology’s progress. To this end, they must propagate the cult of Technos, the church of I Fucking Love Science!
Since the dynamic is in essence a mission to maintain the supremacy of the market over true political power, it is also unsurprising that one part of this mission has now manifested in an inherently anti-democratic crusade. This crusade particularly targets the right of nations to determine their own ways of life. Thus, we are faced with a strange inversion of history; revolutionary brotherhoods and armies once fought across Europe to bring Liberalism to her nations, so that her peoples might have democracy. Now we find a coalition of wealthy elites and activists, of well-oiled and bankrolled complexes of NGOs and media conglomerates who are now fighting the tides of democracy so that they might keep Liberalism.
Of course, it can never be said that it is democracy which needs to be “managed”—that would be too direct an admission, one that would suggest the underlying contradiction of the oligarchic-technocratic ideology. Thus, technocracy often appropriates the label of “democracy” for itself. When a political candidate, whom the oligarchs dislike, wins an election through effective campaigning, it is seen as “spreading misinformation”, and every action that populist undertakes is “undermining democracy”. When a liberal oligarch-favoured group wins through media manipulation (read as technocratic social management) it is a “clever little plot that saved democracy!” By extension, and more insidiously, the capitalist classes also seek to keep power by construing their populist opposition as “unscientific”. To them, the populists are demagogues rallying those ignorant masses who really need to be “scientifically managed” for their own good.

So what does the Covid-19 pandemic have to do with any of this?

It is not enough that technology does all these things outlined above—namely growth, a justification for the free market, the liberal bourgeoisie’s position in that market, and a way for them to justify their “management” of society. Technos must go further than this. Technos must grant deliverance from all ills. Technos has grown up in the era of secularism, and the great problem of this era is that while God might have died, our need for Him has not. It is into this vacuum that the Cult of Technos has gladly stepped, hoisted high on its acolytes’ shoulders, the experts, the scientists, the nerds. Technos is omniscient, omnipotent, and soon, omnipresent.
However, there is only one great difficulty for our new cult. The old God was mysterious and unknowable in His ways, and for this reason, at least on paper, we could accept it when He did not let things go our way. Technos does not have this luxury. The old God was unknowable, but the new God is borne of Science, a God whose name is knowledge. To question Technos and what it knows is to question what we know, to acknowledge its limits would be to confess our own.

This is the scenario in which the pandemic has arrived, and for the technocratic-liberal system, the stakes could not be higher.
Technos may indeed be a pseudo-religion, used to justify, mystify, and mask our current state of being ruled and exploited in a terminally volatile system administered by pencil-necks. Yet nevertheless, the majority of us accepted it and most still do accept it. We crave the state of salvation we believe it will confer. 
But even the promise of this abundance is beginning to lose currency. In economics, the increasing inequality of wealth ownership means that what growth and prosperity there is flows into the hands of a few—in short, seeing that the rich get richer, while the many are increasingly at their mercy. In our minds, the once-optimistic visions of the future seem to increasingly diminish. Our hope for increasing prosperity improved by innovation rings more hollow every day. The lauding and celebration by nerds at Musk’s newest rocket gimmick seem ever more contrived and desperate. It’s trite and cliché, but it’s always worth reiterating—we expected flying cars, and instead we get smartphones that just short-circuit our attention spans with hypomanic tiktok feeds.
So with the arrival of this new germ, Technos is given both a challenge and an opportunity. Medicine! Curing disease! One of Technos’ most original achievements, and perhaps still one of its greatest. Technos may have slowed down in its old age, but surely it will be able to cure and eradicate this disease in no time at all, just like old times! The save-the-day narrative of Technos, implanted in our heads from so many countless movies and documentaries will be played out in real life! (You know the narrative: problem arises, usually the end-of-humanity threatening kind, the scientists sit down and put their eggheads together, sweat and argue, pull an all-nighter, and then in the morning some new fact, invention, plan, or deus ex machina is created which saves the day).

Many others have researched and written on the fundamental problems with trying to “conclusively” end the pandemic, the impossibility of the “zero-covid” approach, and the relative non-lethality of the virus. In short, it appears that eliminating covid is no more possible than eliminating the common cold, or driving the common rat or cockroach to extinction. It is beyond our power, it is beyond Technos’ power, neither we nor it are omnipotent.
Yet for this very reason, Technos must still go through the motions and give us the ostensible appearance of having solved the “crisis”. Technos must make displays of its miraculous power to maintain its place on its pedestal, and optimally it would do this in line with the above-mentioned movie narratives instilled in our heads. 
If it fails to do this, and arguably as it currently fails to do so, a whole swathe of questions and doubts about the mandate of techno-capitalism will begin opening up. If we see that Technos cannot even conclusively defeat one type of virus, then not only will our growing doubts over innovation-slowdown be compounded, but in some sense we will be forced to confront our own mortality and vulnerability as human beings. In this way, an entire paradigm will shift, and arguably it is underway already.
This is in many ways strikingly similar to how the Soviet Union had its collapse accelerated by the Chernobyl disaster. Here Marx’s overused quote reliably comes to mind, that all great historic events occur “first as tragedy, then as farce”, for Soviet technocracy ended with a bang, while Neoliberalism’s technocracy looks set to die with a whimper.
Different nations will tie up the crisis differently. The clever countries will most likely quietly phase out restrictions and behave as though their lockdown over-reactions never happened. Other less intelligent nations, our own sadly included, will endlessly roll in and out of lockdown, chasing the rainbow of zero-covid they will never catch, most likely until they can roll the current crisis into a new one, or until they decide to do what the clever countries did. Neoliberalism’s pathetic version of Chernobyl will slowly fizzle and sputter out, like damp kindling on a rainy day.

This being said, the reader must remember that even if the Religion of Science  and Technos face an imminent crisis of faith, such crises take a long time to play out. To go even further, crisis now appears to be the main technique with which technocracy will seek to preserve itself. In dissident circles, there are mutterings that the covid crisis will soon be replaced by the greater “Climate Crisis”. To be clear, there is no denying that human beings are inflicting enormous damage on our ecology, yet the way in which neoliberalism will seek to confront this will be to reinforce the position of the technocratic-capitalist system. Thus electricity plants running on fossil fuels will be shut down, but energy intensive data centres will still be built. There will be an acute shortage of lithium starting next year, but electric vehicles with lithium batteries will be the sustainable transport alternative. The Irish have excessive carbon footprints, yet Ireland should import four million more migrants, etc.

In conclusion, we see that technocracy is a fundamental pillar of the neoliberal order. Economic growth is a prerequisite to market freedom, and technological innovation is the only seemingly inexhaustible source of economic growth. When technological innovation confers not just economic growth, but great abundance and prosperity, this justification for market freedom becomes an imperative for the state and society. A combination of factors, such as class interests and an underfed spiritual appetite on the part of modern humanity, push this imperative even further. The right of that market must be clothed and exalted. That exaltation comes in the form of belief in the cult of technos. 
Covid has now given the cult of technos its first crisis of faith, the first break in its self-confidence; a slow realisation that one small virus is beyond the grasp of its technique. The collective realisation will be slow, but it will happen, and another idol of certitude may slowly emerge from the fallout. That idol might be the worship of Mother Gaia amidst the climate crisis, or the body of the oppressed minority in the pursuit of racial justice, or possibly an icon of homo technos, of the transhuman whose augmented being places him beyond the realm of worldly suffering. Neoliberalism is already toying with these idols, eyeing up and gauging each one, contemplating their utility and compatibility with the existing state of affairs. If there is to be a challenger to this occultic force, then that challenger would do well to ensure that a lifeline is laid out for those who grow disillusioned by the charade and wish to defect.