Technology and Autocracy

Tyler Cowen writes,

the governance technologies and strategies of authoritarian regimes have become much more efficient.

I’m not sure that this holds in general. Venezuela?

I am willing to speculate that right now autocrats have a comparative advantage at staying in power. That is, in a Martin Gurri world, where the public is in revolt in many places (Italy, Germany, the U.S., Iran, various countries in Latin America), it is easier for an official to remain in power if he has the tools to suppress the most challenging forms of opposition.

5 thoughts on “Technology and Autocracy

  1. He’s taking about Asian technocracy, not banana republic despots. Sometimes it’s official authoritarianism (China). Sometimes it’s soft authoritarianism (Singapore).

    Sometimes the democratic west seems more authoritarian then the authoritarians (deep state, EU). Sometimes authoritarianism has a non government source (twitter mobs).

    The big question is whether Asian technocracy will beat out whatever we call the western democracy. And will that be a good or bad thing.

  2. the governance technologies and strategies of authoritarian regimes have become much more efficient.

    Wouldn’t China be the most obvious example here? Looking at China it seems the system that the government working with the largest companies would have the most impact of autocracy. (Of course we have to see what happens in China when the a major recession happens. And it will happen although I predict a Japan 1990s one.) And viewing Trump, he has been most successful getting most private companies to support him since his election. (The anti-Bobo stuff is exaggerated and exit polls showed Trump won a slight majority of high income voters.) However, Trump wants high praise not power so he usually learns his boundaries.

    In terms of technology and autocratic tendencies, in the free developed world most of the increase of security has come from the private sector not the public sector. Again think about how private sectors servers have your licence plate recorded somewhere. (Think of any decent size commercial real estate parking lot you have visited the last 24 months.)

    And look at the decrease use of cash in the economy. I believe this is 95%+ private sectors moving this direction (stores have less crime with less cash transactions, etc.) but a cashless society gives the government a lot of opportunity to track your transactions. I still say the coming Manafort trial is going to eye opening on how well the private/public sector can track a person’s finances.

  3. Cowen is right and it holds in general. “Governance technologies” include application of new information technologies capabilities for various regime purposes.

    It’s not just about surveillance, but cheap and comprehensive surveillance is a big part of it, for any government with the will to actually use the information and capabilities.

    And as with other uses of IT, there has been a complete revolution in these scale and affordability of these capabilities that has caused a qualitative change in the power of various governance strategies. The anticipated prompt arrival and emergence and use of better “AI” to mine and learn from panopticon-level data collection may be the coup de grace that settles the matter for good.

    Even complete basket-case countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and North Korea are now able to afford and use these technologies effectively.

    One data point: Coups used to be much more common events. This isn’t just for old African-style coups in very undeveloped countries, “Capture the presidential palace the the big transmission antenna and you get the country.” It includes much more elaborate military coups in more sophisticated and developed countries.

    And many of these coup attempts were successful, and indeed the idea of a potential military coup being a kind of incentive that kept certain political regimes from getting too insane or out of control with regards to ideology or collapse in public welfare was a conventional part of political science. (Yes, the situation was somewhat different in the Cold War when the US or Soviets or Chinese or others would intervene and help coups where it was in their interests, not just in the fight, but in the prospect of having a Big Brother buddy on the international scene to recognize and support ones new regime and avoid international isolation which could make any junta dead effectively dead on arrival. But while the international situation and tendency to intervene in this way has changed, regime-stabilizing technology has changed much more.)

    The reasons successful coup attempts have all but gone extinct even in countries where everything is going to hell is because of powerful surveillance and recording of all electronic communications and other counterintelligence tools, techniques, and best practices (to include, e.g., monitoring travel and opportunities for face-to-face meetings trying to evade eavesdropping.) It’s just not possible to coordinate to conspire without leaving the kind of trail that will get everybody detected or caught pretty quickly, and with information assurance techniques it’s too hard to cover that up or prevent the boss from finding out (not to mention that the vast majority of potential conspirators just aren’t sufficiently technologically sophisticated and also tend to be quick careless and reckless in many ways. Frequent use of non-regime methods and devices to contact other agents of the state by itself raises red flags.)

    Many of the ancient problems of regime stability derive from having to rely on a long chain of human beings who may be disloyal, corrupt, lazy, forgetful, etc. and to rely on yet another chain of human beings in a security apparatus to try and detect and prevent moves against the crown. This gives rise to all kinds of problems that are hard to solve without a massive apparatus and no small dose of terror. The bottom line is that most of that has been automated, which makes all kinds of formerly invisible and inscrutible human activity ‘legible’, and IT tools are perfectly suited to bureaucratic processing and are like the ultimate force multipliers enabling just a few security agents to keep everyone’s heads down.

    China in particular seems absolutely determined to use these technologies to keep tabs on any possible threat to The Party’s hold on power and agenda with regards to all sorts of social conditions and control over behaviots and opinions. That’s because they have more or less secured a hold on power against all threats except for the loose end of high-status, elite progressive opinions mostly coming from America and the West, which undermine the perception of the legitimacy of their regime, which can no longer expect to be able to rely indefinitely on rapid economic growth as a source of public acquiescence.

    So, in addition to older and cruder methods such as state control over media and firewalling off unwanted foreign influences – enabled by new technological capabilties undreamt of even a generation ago in terms of mass population monitoring and management – they can come up with things like their “social credit system” and the Internet Water Army and 50 Cent Party, etc. to manipulate perceptions of consensus and provide false social proof leading to, if not false consciousness, an engineered distortion in social consciousness.

    My take on Gurri is that his timeline for analysis was peculiar and special. The arrival of the internet and certain IT capabilities took governments – indeed all society – by surprise, and that shock opened up a short window of opportunity for all kinds of unexpected expressions and coordinations which could temporarily overcome previously established and mature systems of control. Gurri say a lot of surprising, new, and dramatic events and instead of just explaining it as a temporary ‘internet dreamtime’, he jumped to the conclusion, “This is how things will be from now on,” which I think is more attractive to certain kinds of events and policy analysts – it tempts with the lure of getting ahead of the curve on the latest hotness, of being sought after as a great prognosticator and explainer (cf. Roubini and the GFC.)

    But unlike with regime stability, the script is not one of permanent qualitative change. Instead, it follows the Star Wars plotline of “A New Hope” and one which is inevitably followed by “The Empire Strikes Back.” It was only a matter of time before governments around the world – autoctatic and otherwise – adapted and evolved new coping mechanisms – legal and technological – to deal with the new media and communications environment.

    And now, the empire has struck back, and its upper hand continues to strengthen.

    • Excellent comment as indeed all of your comments are. I suspect the Empire in the US is a triumvirate alliance of legacy media, social media hegemons, and the Democratic Party, that will usher in a new era of one party rule, unfettered bureaucracy, thought crime policing, and radical restrictions on individual liberties. It is very hard not to be pessimistic about the future of the US.

  4. Another tough one. The null position is that the new devices make everyone more efficient, institutiones and secessionists. Key technology platforms, like fintech, make the future cloudy.

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