The Rise of the Digital Technocracy conference was hosted by Jagiellonian University. Founded on 12 May 1364 by the Polish King Casimir the Great, Jagiellonian University is the oldest higher-education institution in Poland and one of the oldest in Europe. It is the alma mater of such world-renowned alumni as Nicolaus
Copernicus and Pope John Paul II.
The Rise of the Digital Technocracy conference was organized by Jagiellonian University's Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora. The primary exigence addressed during the conference concerns the connections between the emergence of an elite public-private "superclass" and the rise of a political-economic system called "technocracy." The conference examined the technocratic implications of how the emerging public-private "power elite," which is connected and unified through an array of transnational institutions, is now in possession of unprecedentedly vast economic resources and, thereby, sociopolitical influence both within the United States of America and across the globe. At the same time, the conference aimed to develop a fuller theoretical and empirical account of technocracy as a system of post-democratic governance and population management steered not by elected politicians, but by "disinterested" experts, such as scientists and engineers, who command and control political-economies through surveillance-oriented digital communications infrastructures.
The Rise of the Digital Technocracy conference also aimed to served as a basis for the development of a community of researchers and scholars committed to raising the level of public awareness concerning the political-economic convergence of globalist oligarchs and technocratic cyberneticians.
At The Rise of the Digital Technocracy conference, John Klyczek gave a presentation titled Brave New World Order: Aldous Huxley's Scientific Aristocracy and the Global Technocrats of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This presentation examines how Aldous Huxley's non-fiction writings advocated for an intellectual aristocracy that could wield the industrialism of corporate fascism and the centralized planning of communist statecraft to leverage the techne of eugenics and psychology in order to establish a hi-tech version of the proto-utopia in Plato's Republic. Building on the research of such scholars as Christopher Hitches, David Bradshaw, Robert S. Baker, Joanne Woiak, and Brad Congdon, this presentation explicates a new historicist reading of Brave New World that synthesizes close textual analyses of the novel with intertextual analyses of Huxley's personal letters and non-fiction essays. Drawing parallels between Plato's Philosopher Kings, Huxley's World Controllers, and the technocrats of the Great Reset, the presentation highlights how technocracy in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an extension of the aristocracy, or "government of the best," idealized in Plato's Republic. The presentation also highlights parallels across the proto-eugenics of Plato's Republic; the industrial eugenic engineering in Aldous Huxley's fictional World State; the global eugenics programs that were propagated by Aldous's brother Julian Huxley as a United Nations Director-General; and the neo-eugenic transhumanism advanced by the technocratic ambitions of World Economic Forum globalists, such as Klaus Schwab and Yuval Noah
The Rise of the Digital Technocracy conference also included presentations from Matthew B. Crawford, who a Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture; Martin Libicki, who is RAND Corporation analyst and the Keyser Chair of Cybersecurity Studies at the United States Naval War College; David Lyon, who is the former Director of the Surveillance Studies Center at Queen's University in Ontario; Garry Robson, who is a Professor of Sociology at Jagiellonian University's Institute for American Studies; Iurie Roşca, who has served as the Deputy Speaker of Moldovan Parliament and the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Moldova; Alesia Rudnik, who is a lecturer at European Humanities University in Lithuania and a Director of the Center for New Ideas; Blażej Sajduk, who is a Deputy Head of Jagiellonian University's Center for Quantitative Research in Political Science; and Alex Thomson, who is a former British intelligence officer of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) of the United Kingdom.
Klyczek presented his research as part of Panel Session 4 of the conference. Titled "Dystopias," Panel Session 4 included two other scholars: Michael Schaefer, who is a librarian at Washington University of St. Louis; and Patrick Vaughan, who is the award-winning biographer of former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and a Professor of History and Literature at Jagiellonian University's Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora. Klyczek also chaired Panel Session 3, "China in the Vanguard of Technocracy," which included presentations from Emilie Swajnoch, who is a research assistant at the University of Silesia in Katowice; Tanguy Struye de Swielande, who is a Professor of International Relations at Université Catholique de Louvain; and Luka Nikolic, who teaches at Charles University in Prague.
