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This chapter argues that institutionalist accounts of punishment, crime, and inequality should look to the thinning of political ideologies and its institutional implications. It explores the claim according to which thin ideologies such as populism, technocracy and plebiscitarianism, have institutional ambitions and tend to incentivise reforms that favour executive discretion and a politics of disintermediation. This claim is illustrated by reference to Italy both during and after the Eurozone crisis. Italy functions as a starting point for a broader discussion of how ideologies might change institutions, and therefore the penal incentives that follow from particular institutional configurations. The chapter argues that institutional changes rooted in thin ideologies may have long-term effects on punishment by incentivising a more adversarial and retaliatory approach to conflict – and thence to crime and deviance – and dis-incentivising a more negotiated and reintegrative approach to conflict, including the type of interpersonal conflict represented by crime and deviance.

The introduction provides a starting definition of technocracy as a form of government based on a vision of politics as a form of (post-) industrial management, technological progressivism, social engineering, scientism and the politics of depoliticization. The transition from industrial technocracy to the anti-bureaucratic and pro-democratic form of new technocracy is introduced and situated in relation to key debates. Also includes an overview of the book.

This chapter looks at whether the World Trade Organization (WTO) really is a “technocracy” through the lens of “trade-environment” issues, focusing on the Shrimp-Turtle case. It begins with an overview of the democratic deficit critique as it applies to the WTO. It then turns to describing the deliberative features of two of the three principal functions of the WTO-dispute settlement, and what has been called the “missing middle” between the negotiation of treaties and dispute settlement. The fourth section is devoted to an analysis of the Shrimp-Turtle case. The chapter concludes with an assessment of how “technocratic” the WTO really is. It argues that it is not dominated by a “trade elite” to the extent that critics have charged, but the impact of environmental activists does not necessarily make it a more deliberatively democratic institution.

Chapter Four traces the doctrinalization of moral countersubversion—a key step in operationalizing moral panic. In high-level forums on security and development, specific anxieties—about youthful behavior, global decadence, new media technology, and women in the workplace—became categorical pillars of national security strategy. Drawing on the records of students, professors, administrators, and government experts, I excavate the development of such strategy at the Escola Superior de Guerra. The most prestigious of Brazilian military think-tanks, the ESG enjoyed an international reputation and epitomized Atlantic militaries’ attempts to combine Cold War technocracy and counterinsurgency. Here, at the heart—or perhaps the brain—of security planning, what I call a “moral technocracy” legitimated the conceptual slippage of “degeneracy” into “subversion” and the rationalization of bio-, psycho-, and sociological narratives of national viability. Thanks to this moral technocracy, pseudo-scientific and governmental authority made the sexuality and morality of middle-class young people (a demographic fraught with anxiety for authoritarian developmentalists) a central Cold War battleground. This process, insistent on certain conflations that may seem unlikely, occurred via a species of intellectual myopia: a closed-circuit repetition and re-citation of ideas.

This chapter focuses on Ray Bradbury's fanzine Futuria Fantasia, in which he championed the Technocracy movement based on the premise that if the technological infrastructure were more efficient, then everyone's life would be better. It discusses Bradbury's editorship of Futuria Fantasia, the second issue of which reflected his emerging editorial insight; it contained essays written by Henry Hasse and Henry Kuttner. It suggests that, in soliciting the Hasse and Kuttner contributions, Bradbury was initiating a debate on the state of writing in the science fiction field. The second issue also featured two stories by Hannes Bok, whose illustrations graced all of the fanzine's covers, as well as Bradbury's anonymous story “The Pendulum” and a poem entitled “Satan's Mistress.” The chapter concludes with an assessment of Bradbury's problems with the production of Futuria Fantasia, culminating in its demise after the fourth issue, which carried Bradbury's story “The Piper,” his first solo sale to the genre prozines.

This chapter traces how Westinghouse Electric Corporation appropriated the civic custom of the time capsule as a public relations strategy to bolster public faith in science, technology, and technocracy in Depression-era America. Although its Time Capsule, sealed at the New York World’s Fair in 1940, is often celebrated as prototype, this chapter traces the technocratic agenda back to three earlier projects, each targeting distant millennia: an agrarian populist’s “Pyramid” which began construction in Arkansas in 1925; an anthropologist and pastor’s “Records for Future Ages,” deposited in two Denver mausoleums in the early 1930s; and Oglethorpe University’s “Crypt of Civilization,” assembled in an Atlanta suburb in the late 1930s. Insofar as they expressed fear of civilization’s imminent collapse, these three projects diverged from Westinghouse’s. Yet, they anticipated it in their conviction that scientific experts could ultimately rescue society (in particular, by applying eugenicist racial principles); their unequivocal devotion to technology, including new media; their depersonalized conception of posterity; and their nationalist claim to represent American “civilization” in microcosm, which resulted in the elision of marginalized struggles and voices. Drawing on critiques in contemporaneous science fiction and proposals for more meaningful repositories, the chapter exposes the limits of such microcosmic, long-range projects.

This chapter examines animation’s fascination with the robot, a figure that has obvious reflexive links to animation’s typical anthropomorphic characters—the various mice, cats, dogs, and ducks that were the usual stars of early cartoons. The robot is also a figure that had an especially popular resonance throughout the pre-war period, as is evidenced by its appearance in a variety of popular culture venues, including vaudeville acts, World’s Fairs, and feature films. What makes this figure particularly significant in its ability to embody the culture’s conflicted attitudes toward science and technology—attitudes that were also being worked out within literary SF. The animated films, the chapter suggests, typically juxtapose the culture’s faith in a technological utopia, within which robots play a key role, with contemporary concerns about the relationship between technology and labor, thereby qualifying the modernist embrace of the technology.

This chapter offers a formal definition of the concept of technopopulism. We begin by surveying the various ways in which this concept has already been employed in the existing academic literature. Since we identify several layers of confusion in this domain, we propose to systematize it by defining technopopulism as an organizing logic of electoral competition based on the combination of populist and technocratic discursive tropes and modes of political organization. To clarify what we mean by this, we first explain what we take an organizing logic of electoral competition to be. We then offer formal definitions of the two main modes of political action that characterize the technopopulist political logic; i.e. populism and technocracy. Finally, we contrast the technopopulist political logic with what we take to be its main historical antecedent and contemporary rival; that is what we call the ideological political logic.