From the classroom windows, you can see the university fields. When the lawnmower passes by, four or five times a year, making a loud "parrapapapapa" noise, an act of aggression occurs in the fields that cannot be perceived from up there. The machine cuts the delicate leaf rosettes of the bee orchid.

After several attacks over the years, the bee orchid has built an astonishing shield: two retirees. They are ecologists, and they mark the plants (ophrys apifera) with long sticks so they won’t be cut down.

The bee orchid is a wild orchid, a rare remnant of the surrounding flora that blooms now, from April to July. If left to grow, it disguises itself as a bee to attract real bees and thus pollinate itself. The relationship between the plant and the bee is highly sophisticated, of great interest from a biological perspective. A plant and a bee, nature deceiving nature, nature putting nature to work. This wisdom, millions of years old, is rooted in the university fields, but the subcontracted gardening company cuts and punishes the bee orchids. Of course, the gardeners have nothing against these plants. Since they must keep the fields tidy and the budget is tight, they do what is cheaper and quicker, exactly as society dictates.

The two retirees plant long sticks in the field. They are visible to everyone, marked with red ribbons. Even so, when I asked around, few people said they had noticed them, because we don’t see what we don’t understand. The people that walk around the University still don’t realize that these sticks are there to hinder the machine. Some call it a “fight.” To me, it feels more like poetry, because of the metaphorical and evocative power of pointing out the flowers with sticks to protect them from machines.

BODIES IN THE GEARS

In this sense, I especially remember one painful experience I had at the University of Berkeley in California: the moment when the iconic “anti-machine” café lost its way. Student activist Mario Savio, in his memorable speech on December 2, 1964, surrounded by university students, shouted from the plaza in front of the café:

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!"

Sixty years later, right there, a poorly-paid, unaware student-worker served me machine-made coffee in a plastic cup. It made me incredibly angry. Those sacred words deserve better. How could they allow a coffee machine to take over that sacred place? I can't think of a more effective way to trample the anti-machine movement than putting it at the service of a coffee machine.

In that university field, Savio represented himself as a bee orchid, subjected to the machine. He gave his speech a Luddite tone: we are people, we are against the machines! Even so, if we interpret him correctly, his criticism wasn’t against "technology" itself but against authoritarian capitalism. Metaphorically, he called authoritarian capitalism “the machine.” The students of the 1960s mobilized against autocracy, against the transformation of the university into a business, and against bureaucratization, commodification, and the violation of rights. The machine was the authoritarian logic that determined everything.

Sixty years have passed since then, and the machine still mows the grass cheaply and quickly to keep our fields tidy. Sixty years have passed, and in all this time, authoritarian capitalism has evolved into technological neoliberalism, driven by the need to do everything cheaper and faster.

TECHNOLOGICAL REPUBLIC

Alex Karp, owner of the tech company Palantir and an icon of technological neoliberalism, believes in technological determinism: Technology moves forward and drags people behind it. They use something like a motto: technology doesn’t kill; not adapting to technology kills. This is the new technocratic movement: the "tech bros," almost all men, billionaires, and even more radical than the technocrats of the 20th century: adapt (to technology) or die.

The evolution of technological development has changed how we understand technocracy. Nowadays, the 19th and 20th-century technocracy criticized by Weber and Habermas seems almost quaint: turning political decisions into 'technical' ones, the state administration making all important decisions without leaving real political options to the citizens. Politics becomes a show, and democracy a mere legitimizing mechanism. Today, that old bureaucratic technocracy would almost be comforting.

These new liberal technocrats have arrived after that ‘classic’ technocratization of liberal democracies. They are scarier; they want revenge. Ideologically, they are libertarians, embracing "solutionism" and hard power, believing that technology can solve even the toughest problems. Once they got the keys to the White House, they immediately began replacing government agency staff with software. Elon Musk’s "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) is an example. From the traditional Government-Company technocratic model, we have moved to the Government Machine model, where all government decisions are automated through artificial intelligence and the streamlining of the most advanced software. Machines will decide what to do in every field because they know more than people, because they think better than people. It’s the most efficient way.

To understand this kind of extreme technocracy, Alex Karp’s book Technological Republic is very enlightening. Karp accuses Silicon Valley of using its privileged location to develop frivolous devices and apps, like Zynga games or Groupon coupons, weakening Western states and society at large. He even says empathy has weakened the West, with a brutal honesty. He calls for facing this weakening trend by combining technology with hard power: “Our technology is for protecting countries and killing people,” he stated recently in an interview. The gigantic machines they design dream of governing society in the name of maximum efficiency, the only way to compete with China's machinery and maintain Western supremacy.

BODIES IN THE GEARS OR GEARS IN THE BODY

Mario Savio or Alex Karp? Throwing our bodies into the machine’s gears is no longer a realistic option. It wasn’t back in Savio’s day, and it’s even less so now, when the gears are so deeply integrated into our bodies. However, giving political agency to the machine, as Karp proposes, is democratic suicide. Karp wants to technologize government: "AI-powered automation for every decision," so that states have to buy Palantir’s software, as these companies live off public money. They want the biggest defense contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense to stay on top of the world. They are techno-oligarchs; they have no interest in democracy. What they support is a technological republic, not a democratic republic.

For or against technology? It’s as foolish to prejudge the question morally as it is to ignore the political and economic dimensions involved. The key is to change the questions: What do we want? What are our interests?

HUMANS HAVE NOT YET INVENTED A TECHNOLOGY MORE ADVANCED THAN THE BEE ORCHID

In Karp’s technological republic, there are no Basque people, because in his ideology of maximum efficiency, the Euskal Herria project and the effort to revive the Basque language cannot be justified. Technological choices are not neutral. The enormous political and economic consequences of technological opportunities show us that in these opportunities, we are gambling with our future, our freedom, our democracy, and the well-being of our people.

Soon, the lawnmower won’t even need a gardener to do its job. Will this be positive for those of us who are bee orchids? Will big data decide whether protecting bee orchids is worth the effort? And if so, what will it decide? It will depend on the technological decisions we make. Otherwise, those of us who are orchids will have to start looking for our own retirees.