Technocracy further narrows politics to the domain of ‘experts’. Decisions are framed as technical problems for specialists to solve, not issues requiring collective judgement. That strips the public of agency.
Replies
The result is a system that performs democracy, elections still happen, institutions remain, but the citizen’s role is reduced to passive consent or reaction. Democratic participation becomes hollow, procedural, or symbolic.
jul 23, 2025, 7:53 am • 146 18 • view
Democracy was always a bourgeoisie delusion that favored property owners over everyone else
jul 23, 2025, 9:28 am • 0 0 • view
Democracy cargo cults.
jul 23, 2025, 7:55 am • 1 0 • view
In that vacuum, people lose faith. They turn to spectacle, strongmen, or conspiracies to make sense of a system that no longer hears them. The shell of democracy remains, but the substance is gone, replaced by disillusionment and disinformation.
jul 23, 2025, 7:53 am • 140 20 • view
Now do elite kompromat, do elite kompromat, do elite kompromatttttttt
jul 23, 2025, 7:54 am • 0 0 • view
This is the hollowing out: democracy without voice, governance without participation, legitimacy without trust.
jul 23, 2025, 7:54 am • 125 13 • view
📌
jul 23, 2025, 8:08 am • 0 0 • view
Good questions; I’m not claiming the pre-neoliberal era was a democratic ideal, but neoliberal meritocratic technocracy didn’t just weaken institutions, it hollowed out the conditions for democratic participation, including the role of counterpublics. bsky.app/profile/ande...
jul 23, 2025, 8:13 am • 75 7 • view
The democratic project has always relied on more than formal elections. Counterpublics, organised groups outside dominant power, play a vital role in expanding rights, challenging elites, and reshaping what democracy even means.
jul 23, 2025, 8:13 am • 82 13 • view
No this is what happens when you allow unregulated social media run by actual Nazis, oligarchs and the Chinese state. All of whom seek to destabilise democracies by promoting racial hatred and hiding truth.
jul 23, 2025, 8:46 am • 2 0 • view
That's part of it, but if we ignore the political and social systems that takes place within then we're going to constantly fail to deal with the deeper problems.
jul 23, 2025, 8:51 am • 5 0 • view
Yes, but the lesson of Biden's presidency is social media vibes matter far more than objective truth. Fixing the system doesn't help when the vibes insist it is still broken. So if we don't fix social media we are doomed to fail whatever.
jul 23, 2025, 9:18 am • 0 0 • view
I'd argue the reason the "vibes" have so much power is because the underlying systems have lost public legitimacy. The form remains, but the substance is hollow.
jul 23, 2025, 9:24 am • 4 0 • view
No it is social media, most people don't pay any attention to the underlying systems. Which is why people reported the economy was doing badly while simultaneously saying they were better off personally.
jul 23, 2025, 9:44 am • 0 0 • view
Fixing social media is necessary, but if we don’t also fix the political, institutional, and civic structures it reflects and distorts, we’re just tuning the amplifier. The noise will persist if the signal, the system itself, is broken.
jul 23, 2025, 9:25 am • 5 0 • view
In the postwar period, despite many exclusions, unions, grassroots movements, radical media, and activist communities forced democratic expansion. They didn’t just protest, they produced knowledge, exerted pressure, and built legitimacy from below.
jul 23, 2025, 8:14 am • 75 13 • view
Neoliberalism weakened these spaces: – Unions lost power – Local organising was defunded – Radical media became unsustainable – Protest was reframed as disruption – Collective identity was replaced with consumer identity
jul 23, 2025, 8:14 am • 87 18 • view
I would really hesitate to characteristic the current period as low on identity politics and deprived of radical media (whatever that means). If anything, it's quite the opposite.
jul 23, 2025, 8:17 am • 0 0 • view
We’re not short on visible identity discourse or oppositional media content. But that’s exactly the issue: visibility has replaced structure, and expression has replaced organising. We have identity performance, but far fewer identity-based movements capable of strategic leverage.
jul 23, 2025, 8:24 am • 9 1 • view
I disagree: most data suggest identities (in particular gender and national ones, but not only) are increasingly fundamental drivers of politics. Two large bodies of literature - one on GAL-TAN and one on Affective Polarization- illustrate this to great detail. 1/2
jul 23, 2025, 8:36 am • 0 0 • view
Organizing dependent on government funds was never about liberation anyway!!
jul 23, 2025, 9:37 am • 0 0 • view
Social media simulates some of the surface features of counterpublics, it gives people visibility, voice, and connection. But that’s not the same as organised contestation with strategic power and sustained pressure.
jul 23, 2025, 8:15 am • 67 9 • view
What we get instead is performance without leverage, expression without structure, and visibility without impact. The algorithm rewards what spreads, not what builds. Anger circulates, but nothing changes.
jul 23, 2025, 8:15 am • 74 12 • view
That really made me think that the recent success of extremist parties may be due to them being perceived by many as "the true expression of the people", opposed to those moderate technocrats. In any case, said parties play heavily on that perception.
jul 23, 2025, 9:09 am • 0 0 • view
Simulated participation provides epistemic cover for technocratic systems: it suggests democracy is alive because people are speaking, but without collective organisation, strategic pressure, or deliberative space, it becomes spectacle, not a challenge to power.
jul 23, 2025, 8:17 am • 62 11 • view
The neoliberal approach regards rules either as hindrance or as self-ruling, as if they don't need to be enforced by an outside force. It's like thinking about architecture without stairs, toilets and the way people move inside or to it. Of course these topics are not what a building is about but >
jul 23, 2025, 4:39 pm • 0 0 • view
if you willingly don't think about them funny things happen. I like the institutional approach by Douglass C. North. It adds institutions aka norms and rules (that restrain actions) and transaction costs to classic liberal economy. This approach helps to explain why some countries are rich/poor.
jul 23, 2025, 4:43 pm • 0 0 • view