The False Certainty of Technocracy
on Paul O’Connor’s “Technocracy: Knowledge and Power in the Information Age”
A review of Paul O’Connor’s “Technocracy: Knowledge and Power in the Information Age” (2026)
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There are few things as tempting as certainty. It gives power total permission to act, and the desire to find a crystal ball has been an obsession of statecraft for a long time.
Practically every pre-modern royal court once had an astrologer, someone who spoke confidently from divination about the future. Many deranged rulers have been so paralyzed by decisions that they receded into occult fantasies. Neurotic personalities tend to go hand in hand with obsessions over certainty. And astrologers were easily blamed, sometimes at the cost of their lives, if predictions went badly.
By the 19th century, statecraft became more empirical though, and the mass counting of people really began. To govern bodies for industry, you had to record them, and so many disputes in the early 20th century were over little details in the census. A few incorrect numbers could easily create a policy disaster or even a new nation. This did happen to poor Macedonia before World War I, which was ridiculously claimed by three different countries due to “misinterpretations” over the census. To not be counted properly was like being erased, and the situation suddenly became existential for many people.
As the 20th century went on, probabilistic thinking only got tighter and the counting more precise. The certain end felt closer and someday, with every fact possible recorded, society could finally be properly governed. Technocracy is imagined as that ideal: certainty about the future made possible by technology. Since the 1920s, it has been thought of as some final destination.
Luckily for the state nowadays, the counting has already happened in the private sphere. At the start of the 2010s, open collaboration between the state and private tech companies was somewhat taboo. Silicon Valley originally did not like to involve itself with politics. But since 2020, it’s practically seen as natural. These days, the American state is outsourcing so many functions, both domestic and wartime, to them. Google’s Gemini now runs on the Pentagon’s classified networks; Palantir is helping make a database for the IRS.
This was on my mind when reading Paul O’Connor’s new book Technocracy: Knowledge and Power in the Information Age (2026). O’Connor is an interdisciplinary cultural sociologist who teaches at United Arab Emirates University. His book examines the roots of technocratic thinking, but I kept wondering who benefits from it all while reading it. Technological systems have their own way of justifying themselves—the technique behind it just keeps going irrespective of whether we “want” it—but still, there has to be a subset of people who desire this, whatever the reason may be. Could it really be as simple as “if I don’t do it, somebody else will?”
To say there’s limited human presence in Technocracy is to say it is not a historical book. It is also not a work that deals primarily in the realm of people or personalities. Instead, it’s a heavily cited, diagnostic book on how technocratic systems operate. I would view it more as a scholarly work for a journal, adapted to book form. It mainly compares and contrasts discourses, what people have written about technocracy, as part of an ongoing academic conversation. This does not make for an easy read, but it can’t be said it is not thorough, although sometimes at the expense of circling the same idea over and over again.
O’Connor places technocracy as an outgrowth of our relatively new relationship to time. The book is part of Routledge’s “Contemporary Liminality” series. Liminality is a mode of living that’s always becoming and forever forming. The facts of life nowadays are permanently temporary. This uncertain state of affairs is then exploited by “experts” seeking to “manage” it technocratically. People are easily substituted like parts, taken from their roots, and placed in new orderings to make processes function.
Technocratic thinking feeds off liminality, but it also indulges in massive scale. Its ideology is called managerialism. It doesn’t whip you like the old days as much as hold you accountable. It systematizes and refers you; optimizes and produces outcomes; audits and provides comparative benchmarks. O’Connor traces managerialism to theorist Peter Drucker, who applied the idea to business in the 1940s. Drucker himself wrote that managerialism was not just “business management,” but the governing organ of all modern society. The state would someday apply these same methods.
The methods of managerialism are made to be transparent. Transparency does not necessarily give context however, and one of O’Connor’s criticisms is that technocracy reduces life to interchangeable parts. Labor can be placed anywhere to make the process work. Substituted parts need intermediaries though, those people who work between them to make sure they “fit.” One mediation leads to another which leads to another, the interventions never cease, until a whole managerial apparatus is created. As O’Connor argues, a parasitic “second world” results to manage society.
We get closest to answering the question of who benefits from this system midway through the book. Technocracy thrives on creating pathologies in people who optimize themselves, exhaustingly so. Survivorship bias means some visibly do well. But because technocratic systems rely on rootlessness, life is lived in abstraction and symbols or the “second world.” The occupations of credentialed, middle-class professionals largely revolve around knowledge production, discursive practices, and signs. The elites that excel in technocratic systems are those who are able to best finesse the matrixes of constant change. In O’Connor’s telling, technocratic elites are the ones most fluid with their social capital, like foxes, and are embedded in global networks.
Yet, most people who work in the info-sphere are hardly pro-technocracy. We all know the stories of burnout, along with the trends of depression and anxiety which have ballooned in the past 20 years. For the first time, the unemployment rate for recent college grads is higher than for high school graduates. It is compelling to think that complex knowledge systems produce a new caste, yet this all seems so fickle and inherently precarious. The anti-institutional mood of the public today also runs counter to the rational world of technocracy we’d expect. In fact, having credentials, especially in politics, is now a serious liability. This environment elected Trump, who is now aligned with the leading technocrats, the supposed rationalists. There’s some weird contradiction here.
Technocracy may be rooted in the desire to seek optimization, standardization, or hyper-rationality, but it struggles to actually deliver. In 2020-21, the project was pursued in earnest and ultimately failed, as public trust fell to a new historic low. Undergirding everything instead is this potent and raw emotion which makes management extremely fragile. Technology today is much more effective at containing anger and diffusing responsibility than actually governing. It may be precise in the measured data, but its predictive power is still weak. And the supposed technocrats themselves have little interest in governing, and many have given up on it entirely. They are more victims of classic human folly and megalomania. What unites them is a conviction that they built this world and hence they should run it.
O’Connor’s book ends with a contradiction. Technocracy does operate within this second reality of symbols, data, and processes. He loosely calls this “governmental knowledge”: the operations which subsume our social life into technique and procedures. Yet, this development is cumulative over many decades, and the more that is tacked onto it, the more sluggish it gets. The ability of the state to carry out basic tasks gets bogged down in overcomplexity and unnecessary intermediaries.
Unmoored from reality, elites become separate from the public they govern. This causes persistent instability and shocks. For O’Connor, technocracy effectively creates its own undoing. But what can be revitalized in these crises is the “inherent beauty, order, and goodness of reality and the indestructible core at the heart of the human individual.”
While the schism between humans and technological systems started centuries ago, and it continues to intensify, there is an irreplaceable element that is ours alone. The core of the book is an affirmation of humanism against what feels like technology’s insurmountable power over us. Despite all the fantastical promises made by today’s technocrats, absolute certainty is not the realm of life.
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