Yay! Techno party!

Not only have the people not been consulted, sending for the technocrats is openly praised as a mechanism for avoiding consultation, whether by referendum or a general election. Instead, "governments of national unity" - a euphemism for something like one-party state - are sworn in as though there's a war on. There's not a war on. Nor has society collapsed, not even in Greece. It's just a common-or-garden economic crisis, no worse than that which British democracy sailed through in the late 1970s. 

Top blogging from the Heresiarch on the rise of technocracy at the expense of democracy. What worries me about the new governing class (apart from the little matters of legitimacy and accountability, or total lack thereof), is the basis on which these people have been appointed. Mario Monti, for example, is a former adviser to Goldman Sachs and Coca Cola and a.'convinced free marketeer with close connections to the European and global policy-making elite'.

Yes, he was an an advisor the Goldman Sachs the company that 'helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules' and best mates with the European and global policy-making elites (you know, the ones who were in charge of the Eurozone and were totally unprepared for the global financial crisis in 2008). All very cozy. He sounds more like part of the problem than part of the solution to me.

I do believe that there are people with exceptional talent, intellect and technical skills who can change the world for the better. I just don't believe that it's this bunch of conventional insiders.

If you want to put some faith in experts as saviours, you'd be better off following the scientists at Wellcome Trust's Sanger Institute, who've been studying how the malaria parasite infiltrates red blood cells and may have pointed the way to an effective vaccine against a disease that kills about a million people every year, most of them children under five.

Or Neil Gershenfeld of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, prophet of what might just be the next industrial revolution and 'a bottom up culture of distributed innovation'.Techno utopianism, maybe, but unlike the EU version of rule by technocrats, at least some of his dream might come true and could potentially put a lot people in control of their own lives, rather than reducing them to the status of voicless serfs, toiling to preserve a broken system.