Controlling the desire for control : machines, institutions and democracy

Abstract

I suggest that we explore our desire for control to explain some central features of the ideological landscape in which we find ourselves and the extent to which that can affect the future of democracy. Machines and institutions have a lot in common, and the way we relate to them does as well. Here, I am following the suggestion by Ezio Di Nucci (2021) that we relate technophobia with political populism. We can establish a parallelism between our attitude towards technology and the crisis of political representation, between popular suspicion when it comes to increasing technological sophistication and the populist desire to recover political control that was supposedly lost in the chain of delegation. Distrust in technology and suspicion regarding technocratic distance are very similar; technology is incomprehensible for human beings, and politics has reached a level of complexity that seems incompatible with popular sovereignty. It is very reasonable to aspire to keeping both technology and politicians under control, but we need to see how to go about it so that we still receive the benefit we expect from both the technology and the politicians we are controlling. We must consider the type of control that will be adequate when we need to deal with sophisticated technologies and what accountability is viable and democratic in complex societies and global frameworks.