The Technocratic Lordship

The Technocratic Lordship

By Paolo Falconio

Member of the Honorary Governing Council and lecturer at the Society of International Studies (SEI)

Member of the SEI Faculty in the Master’s programs at Università Ferdinando III, with a specific appointment in the field of Comparative Political Systems.

The concept of Technocratic Lordship can be understood as a form of dominion in which the legitimacy of power is not based on democratic consent nor on tradition, but rather on a fusion between the authority of technical-scientific knowledge and the ownership of public spaces that have become virtual. This paradigm has roots in the history of political thought but takes on peculiar characteristics in the contemporary era, marked by the centrality of digital infrastructures and algorithmic governance.

On a theoretical level, the Platonic root is evident. In the Republic, Plato asserts that only philosophers, who know the Good, are worthy of ruling (Plato, Republic, VI, 484°–487°). Technocratic Lordship adopts this structure, replacing philosophy with applied science, where AI represents the archetype of overcoming human fallibility: political authority legitimizes itself through the presumed guarantee of rationality and justice. This logic, however, excludes citizenship—and potentially humanity—from the deliberative process, reducing politics to knowledge reserved for an epistemic elite. In short, if the Platonic philosopher was the guarantor of the Good, the contemporary technician is the guarantor of efficiency. But whereas Plato envisioned knowledge oriented toward justice, current technocracy seems oriented toward functionality, performance, and prediction. AI becomes the new “philosopher-king,” but without ethics: an impersonal decision-maker who promises impartiality yet risks excluding the human dimension of conflict, doubt, and deliberation.

Max Weber, in his analysis of bureaucracy, identified formal rationality as the constitutive trait of modern power (Economy and Society, 1922). Yet even in this form, administrative efficiency produced what Weber called the stahlhartes Gehäuse, the “iron cage,” in which the individual remains imprisoned. Technocracy emerges as a radicalization of this logic: the new iron cage is replaced by an invisible network of protocols and algorithms. It is no longer the official who decides, but the system that precedes and guides him, in a context where decision-making power is no longer formed in parliaments.

Habermas offers a further critique. In The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and Between Facts and Norms (1992), he emphasizes that democratic legitimacy derives from processes of public deliberation, founded on communication oriented toward mutual understanding. Where technical-administrative power invades the public sphere, what Habermas calls the “colonization of the lifeworld” occurs: instrumental logic replaces rational discussion, reducing citizenship to mere passive usage.

The peculiarity of contemporary Technocratic Lordship is that the decision-maker no longer coincides with the institutional political actor, but with the manager of the digital platform and the apparatuses of the State, which—precisely due to the complexity of democratic state construction (plurality of organs and separation of powers)—risk succumbing in the face of highly centralized powers typical of the private model. It is the owner or administrator of the infrastructure who sets the very conditions of public debate, governing both consensus and dissent.

Consensus is managed through recommendation algorithms and profiling systems that preemptively guide opinions and behaviors, producing a form of adherence that does not arise from confrontation but from the invisible modulation of informational visibility. Dissent, in turn, is not necessarily repressed but neutralized: downgraded in algorithmic rankings, rendered invisible, marginalized, or recoded as unreliable. It may even be channeled into violent protest or revolutionary forms. Thus, we do not witness direct censorship, but a governance of visibility, in which what can circulate in the public space depends on opaque filtering and selection logics.

In this way, Technocratic Lordship does not merely replace political deliberation with technical authority derived from ownership, but redefines the very boundaries of what is sayable and thinkable. It enacts a “meta-political” power (consider the management of the pandemic by digital platforms, or cases of shadow banning): it decides not only what is true or useful, but also which opinions may emerge in the public space and which must be confined to the margins. In other words, it is a form of sovereignty that can be as “soft” as it is “violent,” because it is pervasive and more radical than Hobbes’s Leviathan: it imposes itself through the modulation of informational flows.

In conclusion, Technocratic Lordship represents a radical challenge to contemporary democracy. Technical competence is undoubtedly a necessary condition for addressing the complex problems of global societies, but it cannot replace the principle of legitimacy derived from deliberative and pluralistic confrontation. Yet politics gives way to the new Lordships and transforms citizens into digital subjects, where squares are replaced by social networks and forums, where thought is not only entrusted to the algorithm, but to an algorithm that can be manipulated in an opaque context to influence consensus or dissent through thought made visible and thought consigned to oblivion because filtered from the outset. All this poses a problem for democracy, because spaces of participation are now virtual and dissatisfaction can be opportunely redirected to other issues. Of course, the limits of reality cannot be ignored indefinitely, but the explosion of dissent, if inevitable, will always be governed by the new Lords (the plurality of the digital ecosystem) who remain, in fact, hidden decision-makers. The phenomenon is already underway with an additional risk. These New Lords are represented by Techno-Capitalism and may be more interested in profit than in the legitimacy or safeguarding of the decision-making process. In this vacuum, an implicit delegation to artificial intelligence—deemed more impartial and less fallible in interpreting social demands—could increasingly emerge. This latter scenario is nightmarish, because man and society would be defined by the parameter of what works. But AI, however sophisticated, at least for now, cannot replace politics, because it cannot decide what is just. Thus, an additional filter is created between the decision and the decision-maker. In short, the risk of Technocratic Lordship is that politics loses its deliberative function and becomes a mere space managed by private and public powers (the apparatuses), with the illusion of algorithmic neutrality.

Beyond the most disturbing scenarios, the fundamental question remains the one posed since antiquity: who decides what is just? And who is the decision-maker in a world where consensus is formed through the filter of informational flows?

AI and digital Capitalism are an inescapable future and also bring progress—for example, social progress through better services—but they are phenomena so pervasive that they must be embedded in a logic of power balance and state oversight mechanisms, which today are inadequate precisely because politics struggles to understand the phenomenon, especially given the delay of the European digital landscape, which finds itself naked before a technological horizon divided between China and the United States (just think of the TikTok affair). This is where the challenge of the future lies: not to reject progress, but to govern it to prevent it from becoming a technocratic nightmare, where democratic spaces are distorted and man is reduced to a parameter of efficiency.

This reflection may seem like pure philosophical speculation, but it is much more, because it could represent a transformation in the legitimacy of power. Failing to intervene with corrective measures—perhaps out of mere political opportunism—could prove to be a fatal mistake, because these transformations are never painless and can produce increasingly radical resistant aggregations, potentially culminating in phenomena of ideologically motivated terrorism.

Paolo Falconio

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