Technocracy Can't Work

The western world produced the vast majority of technological innovation in recent centuries, and free and open societies of the 20th century were much better at it than the more controlled, hierarchical societies of prior eras. You can look at the background of actual innovators--people who developed technology, not business people--of the 20th century to see why. It's a pretty random assortment of backgrounds. There are famous genius aristocrat innovators, but there's no real difference in intelligence by class, so by definition there are countless more middle class or working class geniuses.

Consequently, there is no way a top-down oligarchy is capable of carrying out or directing that collective invention. The brainpower of continents of random people working in their garages and building small businesses dwarfs the neo-communist establishment apparatchiks by many orders of magnitude. There's no way to centrally direct all those people to any useful end.

There's no "break-away" elite society that's going to be a technological marvel. I think this idea is wholly a product of sci-fi. That "elite" society would live off the vapors of the scientific and engineering productivity of the free world for a generation, but then will spiral down into a medieval condition very rapidly. Governments can and do coerce people on a grand scale--take North Korea as an example--but then you just end up with a dead end nation that is looted by gangsters until its slave people starve.

So if resources, like oil, are really a limiting factor in the growth of our civilization, then there's no path forward via technology and forced conservation and planning. I wrote about this in several posts about the 10 kilowatt lifestyle.

Our current economy is a sort of a low fidelity model of the natural world. Money is a false resource like water or sunlight is in nature. A free and open society is analogous to the entire productivity of a whole ecosytem, like a forest. The ecosystem uses every available ounce of water and sunlight. It's overall productivity of life and calories is way higher than a farm of equal size.

Central planning is a low fidelity model of farming. The central planners try to harvest specific activities. It just doesn't work because they're too stupid for the task. Even if they had a team of super genius 200 IQ savants it won't work. If they try to augment all those genius planners with "AI" and big data it'll fail faster.

Low tech is humanity's future. Low tech isn't no tech, it's "nature" tech.