The Rise of Techno-Autoritarianism (LaFrance)
Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic, janvier 2024
None of this happens without the underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability—that is, the idea that if you can build something new, you must. “In a properly functioning world, I think this should be a project of governments,” Altman told my colleague Ross Andersen last year, referring to OpenAI’s attempts to develop artificial general intelligence. But Altman was going to keep building it himself anyway. Or, as Zuckerberg put it to The New Yorker many years ago: “Isn’t it, like, inevitable that there would be a huge social network of people? … If we didn’t do this someone else would have done it.”
The main dangers of authoritarian technocracy are not at this point political, at least not in the traditional sense. Still, a select few already have authoritarian control, more or less, to establish the digital world’s rules and cultural norms, which can be as potent as political power.
I resisted the notion that regulating the social web was necessary at all, in part because I was not (and am still not) convinced that the government can do so without itself causing harm (the European model of regulation, including laws such as the so-called right to be forgotten, is deeply inconsistent with free-press protections in America, and poses dangers to the public’s right to know). I’d much prefer to see market competition as a force for technological improvement and the betterment of society. But in recent years, it has become clear that regulation is needed, not least because the rise of technocracy proves that Silicon Valley’s leaders simply will not act in the public’s best interest.
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