In multilateral technocracy, the unelected finance expert has emerged as an ideal-type politician, binding each and every part of the system—including fiscal and monetary governance—to strictly-obeyed standards and rules. Technocratic governance, as a political model, can only with great difficulty hold out against the Schmittian lure of the friend-enemy construction exploited by the right-wing populists. Worse, it can, as the Greece-Germany example demonstrates, itself become the vehicle of such a dynamic: financial rules and regulations are then used to “mentally waterboard” (the Guardian) the disobedient country, crossing a line from conditions to sanctions. For all its obsession with protocol, technocratic governance can’t offer its members a spiritual and ideological unity which binds them to unwritten rules of mutual ethics, care, and loyalty. In the end, technocracy is a dream world without anything to dream of.
Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, reported of his confrontations with the Eurogroup that was handling the Greek loans. When Varoufakis tried to present his and Greece’s ideas about austerity and debt restructuring, he was “faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem.”
A set of counterfeit documents, purportedly belonging to the government of Niger, were key. These documents, which suggested that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium in the African country, were faked so badly that CNN said about them that they could not have been produced by a Western intelligence agency.
Concurrently the US and Israel created an advanced digital weapon against Iran that did the exact opposite of “civil society activism.” Stuxnet traversed the web from a set of spoof football domains, delivering its lethal piece of code to the computers controlling Iran’s Natanz nuclear reactor (which was, thankfully, protected by anti-aircraft guns). The last leg of Stuxnet’s journey from the web to the reactor’s control panel was by USB key.
Planetary-scale computation does not discriminate according to intent or content. Its usage does not reveal anything of the like. This lack of discrimination is emphasized in digital tools like Dark Wallet, an anonymized and encrypted “wallet” for the Bitcoin crypto-currency. Dark Wallet takes encryption and privacy as the default zero-point of online and offline existence. Inventions like Dark Wallet, and the even more ambitious system Ethereum, draw on a rigorously objectivized idea of technology as embodied in the block chain, a transaction registry central to Bitcoin which eliminates intermediaries like banks. This disrupts further claims of nation-states, or geopolitics, on the ultimate objective or aim of technology. Dark Wallet’s Amir Taaki defended this principle convincingly, after Dark Wallet became flagged in an ISIS-related blog as a potential instrument for the terrorist caliphate to hide its finances. Taaki explained that, though he didn’t like ISIS, the technology is for everyone.
Lina Attalah, email to the authors, March 8, 2015.
See “Putin answering Peter Lavelle,” RT excerpt.
The OneState is a fictional sovereign entity in Evgeny Zamyatin’s 1928 science-fiction novel, We. It is an all-knowing authoritarian government led by an all-seeing “Benefactor.”
Nadeshda Tolokonnikova, Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj, (London: Verso, 2014), 40.
Nikolai Berdyaev, Truth and Revelation: Prolegomena to the Critique of Revelation (Istina i otkrovenie. Prolegomeny k kritike otkroveniya), trans. R. M. French (New York: Harper and Bros., 1953), 14.