Technocratic depoliticization: The future is no longer attractive

Climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian war in Ukraine – at least three major crises with unforeseeable long-term consequences are challenging global politics. And not just her. Societies are groaning under pressure that might have to be described differently than before.

At least that’s what Philipp Staab, Professor of the Sociology of the Future of Work at the Humboldt University in Berlin, thinks. Three years ago he published a well-regarded book on “Digital Capitalism”. At the center of his new considerations is a term that initially sounds spectacularly unspectacular: “adaptation”. He would like to see it as the “leitmotif of the next society”.

Much of this soberly conceived book makes immediate sense. For example, that Ulrich Beck’s model of the “risk society”, which will soon be 40 years old, captures reality less and less well when the risks have become so great that nobody can insure them any longer, and the predictability of negative events is neither suitable for reassurance nor for protection .

According to Staab, even Beck’s comparatively optimistic concept of a “reflexive modernity” in which the subjects are involved in civil society led to “a subpolitically clogged democracy”.

Two diagnoses form the axes of his argument. In a world threatened by war, pandemics, climate catastrophes, and shortages of energy and resources, the subjects have to move away from claims to self-realization. It is no longer “self-development” but “self-preservation” that is on the agenda. Another observation relates to the changed relationship to temporality and progress.

Future as a blank slate

For liberalism, the future was a kind of blank slate awaiting human inscriptions. For socialism it was the place of the utopia to be realized. The arrow of time in conservative thinking points to the past anyway. Financial capitalism, with its shifts to the future, which has taken the place of economic growth guaranteed by commodity trade, has in some ways already consumed the future before it has happened.

This leads to a persistently unstable situation, as has been evident since the financial crisis of 2007 at the latest. The future is no longer attractive. It’s more about preserving the present and being able to extend it into the future. This is how you could outline the awareness of the Fridays for Future movement, i.e. the generation elite who, according to Staab, will probably be in charge in the future.

Basically, it’s about how highly complex societies can stabilize themselves without restricting the freedom of individuals beyond what is necessary. It is obvious that they are being reduced, not only by the adaptation to changed conditions that is necessary according to Staab, but above all by the physical limits of the planet.

Adaptation is repression

“Adjustment forces‘Adaptation is repression’,” the author is well aware of. Nevertheless, he also sees a possible gain in freedom or at least a form of relief in the renunciation of growth and progress: “Because the adaptive society also promises a dampening of late modern self-realization excessive demands and enables the subject to come to terms with the conditions considered inescapable by refuses the modern illusion of heroic world formation.”

Remarkably, Staab uses narrative interviews with members of “systemically relevant” professions to describe how individual and collective adaptation can become an “experimental and transformative practice”.

Most would like politics to simply guarantee the framework conditions under which doctors, nurses, police officers and teachers, for example, can do their work. No one is interested in more democracy or wants to sit on political committees themselves. Reliable free time without further requirements is more important, Staab summarizes the approximately 70 non-representative interviews.

In the Covid-19 pandemic he rightly discovers a “dress rehearsal for future adaptation crises”. He is absolutely right when he remarks: “Adaptation policy (…) is, to a large extent, infrastructure policy.” And no one can provide better information about this sector than the professions that have recently been recognized as “systemically relevant”. And yet the empiricism serves as a somewhat dubious sleight of hand.

Cautious criticism of democracy

All threads of his argument lead to a state he calls “protective technocracy”. In connection with the interviews, he even speaks of a “technocratic longing” or even a “longing for technocratic depoliticization”. Even if he deliberately negotiates “criticism of democracy” “cautiously”, in the end he pays too little attention to the fact that the already outdated concept of technocracy, as the rule of expertise, is not allowed to fraternize with technological rule without further ado.

The idea of ​​a “digital superintelligence” that regulates itself got a boost from Corona. With Benjamin Bratton, he is considering “a planetary control structure based on digital technology, but also on biotechnology, whose cybernetic character is expressed in the ability to immediately convert simulation-based knowledge into appropriate social policy.” But what about the political legitimacy of this structure?

At the latest since the disenchantment of Elon Musk’s technological empire, which was probably completed with the takeover of Twitter, such mind games are out of the question. The planetary threat probably needs planetary answers, that is the logical dilemma of climate change taken seriously. It cannot be resolved. Even if things might go faster without politics, even if democratic processes are cumbersome: one should be damned if, of all things, in view of this dilemma, we speak of “depoliticization”.

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