We use technologies that also use us. Over time, methods are formalised into metrics, metrics are stabilised into categories of meaning, and tools designed to assist begin to define which actions are recognised as valid. What once supported activity becomes background infrastructure. The tools move to the centre. Human experience no longer anchors them; it is organised to fit them. This shift is not accidental. As measurement, optimisation, and legibility take precedence, whatever cannot be translated into those terms loses standing. It does not vanish, but it ceases to influence outcomes. Judgment is displaced by procedural compliance. Action is directed toward what the system can record and compare, because only that is treated as progress.
This is how technocratic tyranny emerges. Not as doctrine or conspiracy, but as infrastructure. Power accumulates around the capacity to measure, model, predict, and enforce compatibility at scale. Politics, economics, and culture reorganise around what can be seen, compared, and scaled. Dissent is reframed as inefficiency or error. Experience persists only as anecdote, disconnected from authority. No intent is required. At scale, systems converge statistically. Technologies that reward particular behaviours increase the frequency of those behaviours. Increased engagement, predictability, throughput, and metric compliance then appear as empirical evidence of success and are used to justify further deployment, expansion, and normalisation of the same technologies. What survives is not what is good or true, but what most effectively reproduces the conditions of its own operation.
None of this is foreign. The reduction of the world into formal categories is native to the Western sensoria. What began as a way of describing reality became logic, engineering, electronics. Technology did not invent this orientation; it externalised it. A cognitive framework became an environment. Artificial intelligence does not introduce a new logic. It intensifies an existing one. Human behaviour is no longer merely assisted by technology. It is shaped to remain compatible with it, not through explicit instruction, but through differences in cost, speed, reward, and visibility. The unease this produces is not irrational. It is the appropriate response to living inside systems that cannot settle or conclude, only rearrange their constraints.
Daedelus Kite 