Only a Dadaist could enjoy the news headlines these days. Rachel Reeves faces accusations of lying about the national finances to justify raising taxes to buy votes, which she has done by penalising those trying to save for their own retirement. Her efforts have also set the graduate loan repayment threshold on track to converge with national minimum wage. The same government has also seen fit to cancel a popular commuter service on the nationalised London to Manchester line, only to admit the train will still run — just without passengers.
Every week is like this. Perhaps we should be used to it by now: the weirdness began in earnest six years ago, when the first Covid cases were reported in Wuhan, China. In short order, this triggered the worldwide lockdowns that forced everyone online, with economies in freefall and cultures into a pervasive state of low-level derangement.
Some of that first and loudest wave of Covid-era internet derangement seized upon the World Economic Foundation’s “Great Reset” programme. The influential Davos talking-shop attracts an elite circle of businesspeople, financiers and their hangers-on (including in Labour), and has long been a bête noire for radicals across the political compass. The patrician “Great Reset” proposal to treat the pandemic as a social-engineering opportunity rapidly became a byword for every imaginable flavour of conspiracy.
The programme’s proponents, not least the Blofeld-esque WEF founder, German economist Klaus Schwab, celebrated it as an exciting new dawn for humanity. What was it really? And were the conspiracists right? As is often the way, the answer is: literally, no, but poetically: not far off.
The Great Reset called for coordinated global action by governments to “revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions”. On the face of it, that sounds utopian; but it proved, to say the least, unpopular. Why? Well, the WEF’s own website acknowledges that, to work, a Great Reset would call for a “level of cooperation and ambition” that “is unprecedented”, requiring “stronger and more effective governments” along with “private-sector engagement every step of the way”.
And if Covid taught us anything, it’s that competence of this sort is not guaranteed. Quite the contrary: for most, the experience was both of a spike in high-tech control measures, such as drone surveillance and digital tracking, and a concurrent plunge in the quality of basic stuff, such as road surfaces or waiting times for a driving test or a GP appointment. Nor have things improved since. Labour may have been elected to restore competence after a string of hopeless Tory leaders, but even now the stories of state ineptitude come thick and fast, wreathed each time in a fog of cover-up and sometimes outright lying. We spend millions on fish discos and bat tunnels, while nothing gets built. There’s that Avanti train. And so much more!
In the last year the number of prisoners released early by mistake has run into the hundreds, including very high-profile offenders such as the Epping sex attacker. The Home Office was recently forced to admit having lost track of 53,000 asylum seekers. The military emailed a spreadsheet of Afghan collaborators to half the planet, then tried to hide it by smuggling the list members into Britain under a super-injunction. I doubt the WEF actually are lizards in human suits or whatever. But given the manifest incompetence of our leadership class, the WEF haters are surely right to resist any further power-grabs (such as, for example, the recent return of Blair’s cherished digital ID scheme). Who in their right mind would entrust the kind of sensitive high-tech work envisaged by a “Great Reset” to the sort of clowns who make mistakes of this kind? They can’t even lie and manipulate effectively: their propaganda efforts and secretive “misinformation units” keep being spotted and denounced, only to resurface again with the next round of cock-up and cover-up.
But why is it like this? Why is everything now run by numpties? Nothing is ever monocausal, but the media theorist Marshall McLuhan might have argued that it’s not just falling birth rates, or MPs’ low pay (though this doubtless doesn’t help). It’s also the way our technologies are changing us. McLuhan argued, all the way back in the Sixties, that the objectivity, logical thinking, and technical wizardry that gave us the modern age was in important ways a byproduct of widespread print literacy. And this age had already been superseded by electricity.
McLuhan claimed that this exit from the print to the electric age was driving a decline in rationality and technical competence, and return to tribalism and magical thinking. And perhaps we can point to the first use of “dumbing down” by Hollywood executives in the Thirties, to describe adjusting a film’s content for less intelligent people. Or we could note that especially beginning in the Sixties, when McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy, electronic media were indeed competing ever more vigorously with books for public attention. Against this, though, international IQ scores went on rising over the 20th century. So for all that Starmer admits he doesn’t read, or at least doesn’t read novels, there is surely more to our now woefully thin political talent pool than just electric media dumbing everyone down.
More recently, though, commentators have begun to warn that another factor accelerating this “more” may be the shift to digital reading. As Nicholas Carr warned in 2005, this activates the brain in ways quite different to reading things in print, with the effects including the degrading of concentration. And this, others argue, is driving our having apparently passed peak IQ in the early 21st century. Perhaps the culprit is our distracting smartphones, or — increasingly — the use of AI. (Labour MPs have been accused of reading out ChatGPT-generated speeches.)
So what does it mean for our technocratic overlords if the world is getting dumber? The strongest argument in favour of technocracy was always that modern states are too complex to be managed by elected non-specialists, and should be left in the hands of super-competent experts. But what if the technocrats are also doomscrolling, and it’s making them stupider too?
If so, you might expect to see (for example) tribal thinking and emotional logic coming to infect even technocracy, resulting in large-scale, top-down social engineering programmes that don’t work as expected, or at all. Imagine. In response, then, you might also see supporters of such programmes beginning to question their value. You might, in fact, see even such high-profile figures breaking ranks as Nicole Shanahan, ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin and erstwhile powerhouse philanthropist.
In an interview this week, Shanahan lifted the lid on the clique of Silicon Valley “tech wives” whose money was, in her words, “used to set the groundwork” for “The Great Reset”. Shanahan no longer considers this a good use of philanthropic money. She admits: “I really believed I was giving black communities a chance to rise up out of oppression”. Now, though, she’s reviewed how those grants are performing and has concluded in fact “the problems of the community have gotten worse”. But nor can we hold out hope that the Right will save us from motivated reasoning, corruption or numpties. Remember literally everything the Tories ever did, in their 14 years in power. Are there really enough ultra-competent Reform-aligned people out there to form a government, should Farage win next time? I hope so; but I worry.
“There aren’t enough technocrats who are as detached, ethical, and competent as the Great Reset would have needed for it work as intended.”
The central problem with the “Great Reset” was essentially the same as Reform’s, but on an even greater scale: the fact that there aren’t enough technocrats who are as detached, ethical, and competent as such a programme would have needed for it work as intended. So does this mean the end of technocracy? Perhaps; but that should raise two cheers, at the most. It’s true that Schwab has left the WEF, and quit shilling the Great Reset. Indeed, the circumstances of his departure make him a vivid illustration of precisely that central problem. Schwab didn’t just retire; he resigned, following whistleblower allegations that he embezzled money, manipulated WEF reports, and booked “private massages” in hotel rooms.
Now, he’s launching something called the “Schwab Academy” from what appears to be a garden shed. He’s also published a new book, titled Thriving and Leading in the Intelligent Age. But when you map the shift from “Great Reset” to “Intelligent Age” onto Shanahan’s loss of faith in top-down social engineering, something worrying emerges: a sense that the technocrats have given up on the public, and are now quietly building an ark.
For the unspoken small print to Schwab’s “Intelligent Age” is how we define “intelligence”. Schwab tends to oscillate between the human and machine kind, as if these needn’t be distinguished sharply from one another. And were this right, we might say: a new “intelligent age” in public life would make a nice change, so bring it on. But Emily Bender and Alex Hanna have recently argued that this isn’t right. So-called “Artificial Intelligence” is a con: it is not, and will never be, intelligent in the human sense. It’s far more accurately described not as “intelligence” but “automation”.
And one of the side-effects of automation is de-skilling. The more shoe factories, for example, the fewer skilled cobblers. So if AI automates at least some aspects of thought, it follows that in embracing it we’ll de-skill ourselves. I suspect that Schwab sees this, and is carefully leaving it unstated, on the basis that the much smaller group of people he considers worth trying to save already know. He and his buddies are just planning for their own survival in a future of universal post-literacy.
The real vibe shift, then, may not be a swing Left, or Right, at all. Rather, I suspect it’s a swing within the class that endorsed the first Great Reset, away from even trying to make things better for everyone. Silicon Valley’s “tech wives mafia” has fallen out of love with progressive social engineering, for the simple reason that it doesn’t work. We can likewise expect the utopian justification for other tech-authoritarian policies to fall by the wayside too. The last great wealth transfer happened in the name of “flattening the curve”, drowning small businesses as Amazon boomed. Perhaps the next won’t even bother with a justification.
The real Great Reset, then, was always the post-literate collapse in intelligence. It’s already rendered large-scale technocracy unworkable. Now, the class that not so long ago dreamed of a global transformation are retreating to their bunkers instead, sometimes literally. The rest of us had better hold onto our loved ones; there is no one else coming to save us.
