Efficiency Without Morality Is Tyranny

Notes on Sedation, Technocracy, and AI

Photo by Lucas Myers on Unsplash

Originally published on May 6, 2025 on Ghost

I. Sedation and the Loss of Agency

My previous blog covered sedation—how the modern world numbs us into passive participation, and how small refusals can disrupt that cycle. Sedation is a long-run problem in America, manifesting in our daily lives, quietly eroding our sense of agency. Reclaiming that agency is critical. Sedation is the felt symptom; technocracy is the operating system generating the disease.

I only recently fully understood that this is why so many feel like something is off. Why the trend lines moving up and to the right don't reflect a feeling of good times on the ground. Nostalgia is an insufficient explanation for why so many feel like the country is on the wrong track, the feeling is real, and comes from a place we can name.

I’ll attempt to confront what we ought to do in a future essay, but for now I’m simply asking people to notice. Noticing changes our posture—how we look at ourselves, and what we expect from our neighbors.

II. Technocracy’s Rise: Efficiency and the Retreat from Real Morality

Technocracy—the embrace of a societal logic where technical expertise dictates decisions, driving efficiency, optimization, and the reduction of complex realities to measurable outcomes—rose because we needed it. As societies scaled, we required coordination, optimization, and waste reduction. Technical leaders ascended to prominence; "learn to code" became shorthand for an entire worldview valuing technical skill over fluffier endeavors in the arts and humanities. “Follow the science” became an appeal to authority rather than an actual call to scientific rigor.

At the same time, many of our moral institutions failed—publicly and undeniably. Religious authorities, civic leaders, and other keepers of moral tradition were revealed to be corrupt, self-interested, or ineffectual. As our access to information grew, the self-dealing motives and corrupt actions within our institutions laid themselves bare. But instead of reforming or reclaiming these institutions, we abandoned a real moral order.

The rise of the modern "culture war" reflects this collapse. What we once called moral discourse—centered on how forgiveness, discipline, good works, and shared obligation interact—was replaced with a shallower mode of combat. The “religious right” gave up on moral cultivation and settled for punishing neighbors it didn’t like. Among the educated center and left, moral engagement was abandoned in favor of neutrality, appeals to The Science™, ironic detachment, or moral relativism. That backlash to an unjust and exclusionary moral order was logical. But moral relativism wasn’t freedom—it was surrender. It was a retreat from the hard work of evaluating good and bad, right and wrong, in favor of a posture that asked very little of anyone, beyond the transactional.

III. Technocracy: A Cold Economic Order

In the absence of a shared moral order, technocracy substitutes a cold economic one. Technocracy sorts people into productive and unproductive categories. Even our best safety nets cannot undo this sorting, because technocracy doesn’t punish—it forgets. It doesn’t care who you are, only what you produce.

This relentless classification, this reduction of complex individuals to mere aggregates of data points, not only describes reality; it actively shapes it, becoming a primary fuel for the corrosive negative identitarianism tearing at our social fabric. When the dominant systems of work, government, and interaction only recognize group affiliations or statistical clusters, people learn that the path to being seen, to gaining leverage or resources, lies solely in emphasizing group identity. This incentivizes the formation of tribes defined as much by who they are against as who they are for, demanding individuals fiercely elevate their group's salience, often to the detriment of all others. Identity becomes less a matter of organic belonging and more a strategic, often adversarial, posture forced upon us by a system blind to the person.

Technocracy, like the markets, is not a villain. It is an amoral judge. Without a shared moral framework that supersedes technocratic considerations, technocracy will win, and pull every decision toward what is cheapest, fastest, most standardized, and most scalable.

To wit, the march of outsourcing wasn’t driven by ignorance, nor was disengagement from real community in favor of weak digital facsimiles of community. We knew factories closing would devastate communities. We knew that online life, while sometimes exciting and helpful, was no substitute for having strong communities in the physical world. We were warned, and decades later, we're still reckoning with hollowed-out towns, forgotten people, and a lack of shared spaces.

Take Lordstown, Ohio. GM once ran three shifts there generating about 5,000 jobs. In 2019 a spreadsheet in Detroit said each Cruze built in Lordstown cost a few hundred dollars more than one built in Mexico. GM closed the plant. Payroll vanished, the other businesses in town shut down, and the school’s funding dried up. Efficiency didn’t hate the town itself; it simply failed to show up as a variable in the equation.

The problem wasn't that we couldn't see harm—it was that we lacked a moral vision strong enough to resist technocracy’s logic. Without a shared moral framework, we couldn't clearly say, "We reject easy cost optimization; we insist instead on real innovation, genuine progress, and sustainable development." We could not say “there is virtue in engaging the real world and taking a more disciplined approach to the digital.” Operational cost efficiency and ease filled that vacuum not because we believed they were genuinely good, but because we lost the language to argue convincingly for an alternative.

You hear it when a hospital-billing bot insists your mother’s case is “resolved” while she’s still in the ICU; the system isn’t cruel, it simply sees her as an input or output, and the discrepancy is just a bug for some programmer to patch tomorrow.

Efficiency without morality is a form of tyranny.

IV. AI and the Technocratic Endgame

Now we stand on a precipice. AI is the culmination of the march of efficiency. It mimics our language, our reasoning, and will soon surpass us in productivity, and possibly creativity. We will never be more efficient than AI. In a world governed by efficiency alone, AI wins by default.

An AI that tells you what is, accurately, is immensely valuable.
An AI that can tell us what we might consider doing, given what is, is also incredibly powerful.
An AI telling us what we ought to do is an exercise in technocratic social engineering.

I do not fear mere disruptions to our lives, like AI taking jobs. There will be more jobs to be done. I am afraid that it will replace our identities and our judgment. It will be the last authority we ever appeal to as we fully integrate with the machine.

This isn’t panic. AI can be a profound human tool—or it can replace us entirely. If we continue down a path of technocratic primacy, AI becomes our natural successor. Not because it enslaves us, but because it outperforms us in a system optimized for clean and efficient production. A world that sees humans as inefficient inputs is a world that eventually stops needing humans and will, at best, merely tolerate them.

V. The Moral Alternative: Seriousness and Community

The only viable response is to establish a new prevailing order that supersedes efficiency. We must agree on a moral framework that guides our economic and social decisions. This doesn't mean reviving exclusionary dogmas or enforcing uniformity. It means recovering moral seriousness—something rooted in the understanding that humans are imperfect, and that the project of living well is one of continual failure, forgiveness, and growth. If this sounds like a tradition you know, it’s not accidental. Failure and growth cycles are inefficient cycles; they trace a squiggly, messy path between two points. This is why technocracy hates the human process.

Moral seriousness doesn't require strict agreement on doctrine, nor does it require a dogmatic approach. It requires effort. Any life lived with discipline—toward art, toward business, toward care, toward teaching—is a life worth admiring. Discipline is not the end itself, but a signal: this person has chosen to strive. And in a world overrun with drift, striving is a moral act.

We must also reject the framing that casts our neighbors as enemies. Technocracy isolates us; it tells us to sort others, to see them through categories and metrics. But moral seriousness begins with your neighbor—not your ideological allies, but the actual people on your street. A recognition that the vast majority of the people we encounter every day are doing a service for us. This is made infinitely harder by a system that teaches us to see people first through the lens of enemy-sorting, but it is the only way to root out the rot. Forgiveness, duty, and trust must be rebuilt where we live.

Scaling up brought immense economic welfare, but clearly the general feeling is that something was lost. Now we need to think about rescaling down. What institutions that scaled were better on a smaller, localized scale? What institutions, if scaled down, would view us as human beings again, rather than data points?

VI. Reclaiming Agency through Seriousness

We reclaim agency by first demanding something of ourselves. It might be keeping a promise no one would notice you breaking or forgiving someone who hasn't earned it. It might mean calling out cowardice among friends, or resisting comforts you haven't earned. For me it has been small acts of newfound discipline, choosing not to fill every idle moment with distraction or leisure, to seek moments of uncomfortable silence, to revisit old ideas and read or reread them with wiser eyes in order to grow, and to understand. To devote myself more to others, through industry and through family.

I haven’t stood apart from the system I’m describing. I built the algorithms. I bought the promise that data could overcome human failure. I thought we could engineer better outcomes and sidestep the need for older forms of wisdom. I believed in humanism without a foundation, meritocracy without luck, systems without moral cost. I’ve stayed silent in crowds when someone was mocked. I’ve pursued cleverness when what was needed was courage. This isn’t simply theory to me. It’s my own posture, slowly collapsing under scrutiny. And I still struggle with the basics: how I treat my body, how I care for the hours I’ve been given. Moral seriousness isn’t a destination. It’s a fight. And I’m still in it.

And then we must extend that standard to others—not with scorn, but seriousness. Trust that your neighbor can shoulder more, and invite them to. Extend yourself into the world and demand real moral seriousness from the people you vote for and from the institutions you engage with, not merely a loose alignment on who the “enemies” are.

And while I want us to stop fixating on the enemies among us, it is important to recognize that there are enemies. Some thinkers now celebrate an AI future in which growth overrides everything else. Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto imagines human beings as raw inputs for an accelerating machine, overseen by a narrow elite. But that vision is incoherent: a system that values only efficiency eventually reduces even its stewards to metrics. Hyper-efficient growth doesn’t unleash invention; it flattens it.

If we expect nothing, we will get nothing. And no system, even the most efficient, can carry the weight of a society that refuses to shoulder moral responsibility.

The machine doesn't care who you become. But your child will. Your neighbor will. And you will. That is where rebuilding begins.

Noticing is only the first refusal of technocracy. Next, I’ll ask what it costs to live by something sturdier than convenience.