Politics are something of a passion of mine, in particular the more obscure and bizarre forms of government that have been posited from time to time by people who think they know what’s best for mankind. Though traditionally I’ve had a great interest in total government theories (the Corporate State, Fascism and Communism), recently I happened to come upon a couple of books dealing with the subject of Technocracy.
Now, the word “Technocrat” is kind of a common-usage term, normally applied to the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, people at the cutting edge of computers and science. But you may not be aware of the fact that Technocracy was actually proposed, in a very serious way, as a system of total social reorganization for the whole of North America, and at its peak, was very nearly popular enough to get itself off the ground, albeit in a limited way.
The basic idea was that the Technocrats saw human society as a kind of an engineering problem, which could be solved by the application of scientific study and technique. Rather than permitting society to be run by the lowest common denominator, as they believed democracy was doing, the entire population and its future would be placed in the hands of the technical élite, namely scientists, engineers, architects, mechanics, efficency experts, academics, and technical intellectuals generally. The economy would be centrally planned on the basis of an energy-input theory of value, and all citizens compelled to perform labor for the state based upon a government assessment of their aptitudes and capabilites. There was also an unusal obsession with hydrology that I still don’t fully understand, with plans for massive networks of hydroelectric dams and canal systems for continental transport.
All of this would eventually lead to the establishment of a superstate extending from Venezuela to the Arctic Circle, called the North American Technate, wherein all citizens would work for the good of the self-perpetuating scientific-engineering government-society-complex. Beyond that, the plans became distinctly vague. For example, no extensive mention was made of how the Technate would cope with international issues such as defense, trade, population growth and movement, diplomatic relations, and so on, though the implication was that the Technocrats’ emphasis on isolation and self-sufficiency would somehow resolve those issues automatically.
The key point in Technocratic theory was that, probably because of the times (the movement reached its peak in the 1930’s) the price system of Capitalist economics seemed extremely fragile, and the movement’s directing minds predicted the collapse of Capitalism by 1941. When this failed to happen on schedule, even when the date was pushed back to 1948, and then later to “sometime in the 1950’s,” the group’s adherents began to drift away. It also did them no good that they staged numerous marches in their distinctive grey-and-red uniforms during the war years, drawing the inevitable comparison to Fascism and leading to the group’s being banned by the Canadian and American governments between 1941 and 1943. The core directing group of the Technocracy movement still exists, as “Technocracy, Incorporated,” with its headquarters somewhere in Washington State, but the whole thing is kind of a political relic, now, and a particularly wierd one at that.
And yet, I find it to be representative of a particular trend in Western thought that is still alive and well, namely that human beings cannot be left to their own devices, and need to be “consciously controlled,” (a Technocratic term, borrowed from Socialism) in order to force society into a particular shape. It’s representative also of the fact that people’s faith in each other is distinctly limited, and that there is a secret longing in the collective unconscious of the West to have the difficult tasks of the world done for us, even if it means sacrificing our liberty to get it done. And in the 1930’s, when the world seemed so very fragile, and Europe and Russia seemed to be getting so far ahead of us, a group like this, a kinder, gentler form of total government that made itself seem so logical, is hardly surprising to see.
One thing that, of course, is never really meantioned is how the Technocrats would deal with people who didn’t want to go along with their plans, nor how they would go about incorporating 34 sovereign countries into a single continental state. But if history is any guide, camps would be involved, and central Canada is a pretty big place – almost as big as Siberia.
Maybe it’s the insomnia talking, but it seems to me, lately, that a lot of the comics I cut my teeth on back in the proverbial “Old Days” are allowing themselves to go the way of The Hollow Men (if you’ll forgive the cliché), succumbing to the inevitable, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Almost to a one, the cause of this seems to be lack of support (whether real or perceived) from their readers, combined with a general frustration that seems to be a commonplace of all those of truly creative inclinations. And in this, I cannot help but wonder whether I see my own looming destiny.
I draw science fiction comics featuring self-aware robotic tanks (oops, did I just give away a plot point? Aw, who cares, nobody reads this anyway!) so I think I can be forgiven a little serious geekiness. So I’ll come clean – when I color my comics, I run old episodes of Star Trek in the background.
STRIKE: The art is slick and refined, and has been since the early revamp which occurred in 1999. Since then, it has gotten progressively more expressive and colorful, and in its present form is stylized to a degree I really find that I like. There have also been a number of notable story sequences that are truly engaging, two of which I mention above. And with comics being a business, one can’t deny that the commercial success of PvP is admirable, and the strip itself went leaps and bounds towards normalizing webomics as a serious business.
GUTTER: The story, conflict, and character development have become shallow, and the characters themselves, perhaps victims of their own success, have lost a great deal of the three-dimensionality they once had. The comic has become in many ways a Penny Arcade clone (do we really need more than one Penny Arcade?), with web-based snarkiness and tech-geek in-jokes replacing the more interesting storylines. One-off strips are proliferating, many of them with somewhat inexplicable punchlines that read like the “You Had To Be There” jokes I grew up with – and still find boring.
OVER THE LINE: The problem is really that PvP no longer ventures over the line. The strip risks nothing, and so produces a conservative comic in the guise of an edgy one. Sure, it’s popular, and sure, it’s successful, but it’s also just the same as it was a year ago, or more, and at its core has become predictable, a quality which is death to any art form. Just look at the funny pages and you’ll see the same tired tendencies. Being online, in and of itself, is no longer good enough, and PvP is not keeping up.
By now, anyone plugged into the comics trade probably has heard of the brouhaha surrounding the impending change for ComicPress to a “paywall” model. And flames aside, it doesn’t look terribly promising.
It’s impossible, in my opinion, to really get a grip on the webcomics genre without a thorough grounding in Sluggy Freelance. In the strip’s thirteen years online, Pete Abrams has covered all the bases with remarkable aplomb, and yet each new storyline remains fresh and engaging. The comic, in its massiveness, its adventurousness, its tone, and the remarkable blending of really engaging characters with a bizarre and delightfully warped sense of humor, is a true webcomics classic, and little can be added to the genre that Abrams has not already at least partially explored. I consider Sluggy Freelance to be basic reading for anyone wishing to understand webcomics, but be prepared for a major undertaking: a decade’s worth of daily strips await, and getting through it is no small task.
