The organisers of the first international The Rise of the Digital Technocracy conference to be held on 28-29 September 2023, warmly invite you to attend and participate in it. We are making an effort to place our university at the forefront of ‘technocracy studies’, and the event will focus on two interconnected themes which we feel need to be better understood as a matter of urgency.
The first of these is the rise to prominence of an elite public-private ‘superclass’ which is connected and unified through an array of transnational political and economic institutions. This group, or network, is now in possession of unprecedentedly vast economic resources and, which follows, political and economic power and influence, both within the U.S. and at the global scale.
Secondly, the conference will aim to develop a fuller (theoretical and empirical) account than has yet been offered of the potential rise of a system called technocracy; a baseline, working conception of this is of a programme for post-democratic computational governance and population management, steered not by elected, professional or even national politicians but by ‘disinterested’ experts such as data scientists, as utilized by the actors mentioned above. At the practical level this involves, of course, the extension of an increasingly sophisticated and powerful surveillance-and-control oriented digital communications infrastructure based on the real-world application of Big Data and algorithms.
We have a broad international array of scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds participating in the conference, from world-leading experts like Professor David Lyon and widely read commentators like Matthew B. Crawford to PhD candidates developing innovative, cutting edge work in relevant areas of interest.
We hope very much that this event will appeal to you, and look forward to seeing and engaging with all interested parties who come along. For further details, please go to the event website at https://digitaltechnocracy.uj.edu.pl/.
Best regards,
Dr hab. Łukasz Kamieński, prof. UJ
Dr hab. Garry Robson, prof. UJ
Dr hab. Łukasz Wordliczek, prof. UJ