James Routley

Reminder: Next AI Satsang Tuesday, Dec 9 at 9 Eastern https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/0_QIM_HiShKbX3To2JnVCQ

The Rise of Governance

The word governance sounds bureaucratic, even anesthetic—but it’s suddenly everywhere: AI governance, software governance, data governance, DAO governance, platform governance.

Politics hasn’t disappeared. It’s just migrated—from the _polis_ to the organization.

Community gardens, corporations, blockchains, and Discord servers: each now has its own political reality.

All Science Fiction Films Are Dystopian Because…

In so many sci-fi worlds, we see spectacular displays of political force—

Consider the archive:

Minority Report → predictive policing, pre-crime enforcement
RoboCop → corporate capture and automated force
Gattaca → genetic stratification and bureaucratic gatekeeping
Blade Runner → age enforcement and policing of rebel replicants

These worlds are drenched in surveillance, enforcement, and optimized violence.

In technological societies, science fiction shows that power is expressed through enforcement rather than deliberation.

From Lawmaking to Policing

Here’s my working theory:

As technology saturates everyday life—as Jacques Ellul observed in The Technological Society—techniques control other techniques; we no longer live within laws in the classical sense.

The law is now the algorithm.

We spend our days policing rules we didn’t write, can’t read, and often don’t realize we agreed to—

Governance has become a massive, distributed enforcement engine.

Metrics-as-Reality

This transformation is entangled with what I can only call the Business-Intelligencification of the world—the reduction of life to metrics:

Clicks per minute.

We now inhabit a recursive loop:

1 → We gather enormous datasets (“the more the merrier”).

First, we build a numerical simulacrum.

Humans still “sign off,” but we’re mostly rubber-stamping decisions that algorithms have already made.

Governance, Politics, and Optimization

Operations Research is the science of optimal decision-making in complex systems.

Classical political theory asked who rules:

the people → democracy
the elite → aristocracy
the wealthy → oligarchy
the one → monarchy

But contemporary politics is defined by what we optimize:

biopolitics → optimizing populations
necropolitics → optimizing exclusion and disposability
ecopolitics → optimizing ecological survivability
capitalism → optimizing profit

Every governance system chooses a variable, builds an optimization function,

Show me what you optimize, and I’ll show you the politics you produce.

The Necromantic Roots of Lawmaking

At the end of Plato’s Laws, the legislators are told to enter the cemetery before dawn

Lawmaking was never just rational design. It includes forces we inherit but do not choose.

And our modern systems are no different.

We still consult the dead— but the “ancestors” are now datasets, archives, logs,

The necromancy never stopped.

Down at the crossroads

If governance is no longer about legislating for democratic subjects—