Technocracy is a (thus far) fictional form of government which appears in the “Call To Power” turn-based strategy games. This notional state, however, is far older. The game’s designers have almost certainly read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and have lavishly furnished their own dystopian future vision with many of his concepts. To whit:

In game terms, such social conditions are conducive to exponential industrial output, presumably as the proletariat no longer have to be negotiated with. Oddly enough, for such a sinister governmental model, the drawbacks are relatively negligible; pollution is relative prevalent; but not dangerously so. I can only guess that the designers hoped the players would come to terms with the moral implications of such a society (this is, after all, a game were players can choose to engage in the slave trade, or to become fascist dictators).

Unlike Brave New World, there is little intellectual subtlety here. Of the three major theoretical future governments: Virtual Democracy*, Ecotopia and Technocracy, the latter is without doubt the “bad guy”. The genius of Huxley’s work lies in the question it ultimately puts to the reader: “Do you want to live like this?”. In the case of Technocracy, it is a question not even worth asking.

*In spite of the somewhat misleading name, Virtual Democracy is model in which every state decision is taken on a “one man, one vote” system. As a result, society immediately becomes a pacifistic, egalitarian wonderland of freethinking and scientific discovery. Marvellous.