Giorgi Vachnadze, Technology is Politics by Other Means. Reading Gil Duran’s “The Nerd Reich”, The Biopolitics of Artificial Intelligence blog, 25 August 2026
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The Foucauldian Diagram
Start with Clausewitz: war is the continuation of politics by other means. Foucault took this formulation and reversed it in his Society Must Be Defended lectures: politics is the continuation of war by other means. What he meant is that peacetime does not suspend the operations of power — it just makes them less visible. Domination continues, only now dispersed through norms, institutions, infrastructure, the ordinary policing of daily life.
I want to extend that diagram one step further: technology is politics by other means.
This is not a metaphor. It is a description of what is actually happening. When Thiel said in 2010 that technology offers “an incredible alternative to politics,” what he was articulating — with unusual candor — is that technology allows those with sufficient capital and technical capacity to reshape the conditions of collective life without submitting to democratic oversight. To act first and seek legitimacy afterward. To govern without governing, to rule without being seen to rule.
Governance disguises itself as engineering. Power presents itself as efficiency. Political problems are re-described as technical problems and handed off to systems that appear neutral precisely because they are opaque. When an ethico-political question becomes a technical question, it is effectively removed from the domain of public deliberation and handed to whoever controls the apparatus. Instrumental rationality clears the path for elitism, and elitism — when you strip away the productivity rhetoric — is just fascism with better branding.
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