The current pandemic has thrown a glaring light on something I’ve observed at work, but only dimly understood, for half of my career. Something I now know is profoundly damaging but still largely invisible. I spent twenty years teaching English and another twenty using it to earn a living, as an author and consultant for a large number of different businesses and organisations, all connected with education and most with technology.

Statistics and their graphical representation have come to dominate the political decision-making Covid19 forced onto scores of hapless political leaders worldwide. In an attempt to justify what were always entirely human decisions, scientists and politicians have relied on machines. The dramatic rebellion of the machines so familiar from movies like 'Terminator' or '2001 A Space Odyssey' wasn’t violent or overnight. It was slow and steady. It’s taken decades but it’s been every bit as relentless as Hal or an army of single-minded androids carrying firearms, and the way in which billions of human lives have been at best marginalised and at worst wrecked, or even lost, is a tribute to the clinical efficiency those machines have exhibited.

This is the rot at the heart of all technocratic behaviour. A naïve belief that numbers tell their own story. They don’t. They can’t. Ever.

Anyone who made the effort to consider the plethora of statistics on parade, the numbers of deaths due to Covid19; numbers of deaths in care homes; numbers of ventilators; face masks, viral tests, antibody tests, clinical gowns and especially how those numbers compare between nations, will understand that any stories the numbers tell derive not from the numbers themselves, but from the desires and goals of the scientists and politicians. If this truth hadn’t hit home, then the flood of questions that enveloped and then drowned the government adviser and epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, when he broke lockdown rules to visit his lover, will have done the job.

It’s as though around twenty years ago, when Silicon Valley fever first took hold, a company had created a machine that really could generate fluent English prose at the click of a mouse - and we believed all the stories it told.

When I moved from the classroom to work in the educational technology world I was quickly and frequently confronted with this dilemma although I had the loosest of grips on it. Businesses would design and sell solutions to educational problems that they themselves invented, every step of the way justifying the process on the basis of implacable numbers, and the opportunity to sell more technology.

The entire world of school improvement and educational reform is rooted in the technocratic belief that numbers tell their own story. A belief that naïve politicians eagerly bought into because it gave them a graph to point to, a tangible, colourful image of their personal and party success. In the UK schools were given grades by the schools inspectorate Ofsted, based on the numbers of exams their pupils passed, as though it was the school that was directly responsible for the numbers and not a machine that was merely toying with them before someone else told the story about the school that suited their personal or political agenda.

Children were placed into groups they didn’t really belong to in any meaningful sense on the basis of the story the numbers told. So, some had special educational needs and were immediately labelled SEN, others were tagged NEETs (not in education, employment or training) while others were just branded disadvantaged, or most recently, ‘pupil premium’. In every case, the only value to accrue was it provided the means for technology businesses to sell machines and for politicians to point to graphs to indicate their success; the real children, like unwonted film extras, never making an appearance in their own story.

I’ve no doubt the same profoundly damaging relationship between technology and politics has had equally reductive and crippling effects on every area of our cultural life you care to name, it’s just my personal experience has come from education.

Technocratic thinking reduces everything to numbers before any decision is made. If you manufacture computing technology it makes sense that you would use your own products to drive and support your business. The problem started when those same businesses stopped just encouraging others to adopt the same behaviour and started demanding everyone do it because the numbers always told the truth.

‘The machines can tell the truth’ turned into: ‘only the machines can tell the truth.’

The pandemic has given them a golden opportunity to ramp up this message. While politicians are stage front either relishing the attention or taking all the flack, global technology businesses are busy offstage redesigning the world in their own, dystopian image.

New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has set up a new panel led by the ex CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, to do exactly this for New York post pandemic. He has also invited the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation amongst others, to design “a smarter education system”. Tech giants are lining themselves up for what looks like a glut of commercial opportunities generated from the pandemic fallout. The irony is truly terrible. Those who empowered the rebellious machines now get to benefit most from the ensuing chaos.

Meanwhile almost every global thinktank and influential NGO you care to mention: UNESCO, The World Bank, the OECD, Unicef and the WHO have positioned themselves to take advantage of the disruption caused by the pandemic by forming visionary partnerships with some of the tech giants. UNESCO has set up a Global Education Coalition, what it calls a ‘multi-sector partnership to provide appropriate distance education for all learners.’ A coalition that embraces a number of major technology businesses including: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, KPMG, Weidong, Coursera, Zoom, Khan Academy, Moodle and code.org. These are some of the biggest players in the educational technology world.

In an article for an online magazine called Quartz, Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director of education commented: “All the red tape that keeps things away is gone and people are looking for solutions that in the past they did not want to see. … Real change takes place in deep crisis. You will not stop the momentum that will build.”

Schleicher epitomises the technocratic mindset. Not long ago a graph he had presented at a major event in London was shared online by arguably the UK’s most influential educational organisation, The Education Endowment Foundation. It purported to show the “Differences in educational resources between advantaged and disadvantaged schools” across 70 nations. The numbers would of course, tell the story. Only in this case the graph was unintelligible. I spent some time trying to interpret it, after all that’s part of my job, but having failed, I contacted an expert educational researcher in my network who found it baffling enough to ask a colleague of theirs, who was equally at a loss. A straw poll admittedly of three…experts.

So prevalent is the technocratic lie, so complete the machines’ victory, someone who whole nations listen to when it comes to education can point to a colourful nothing on a slide, and not an eyebrow nor objection gets raised.

While schools and teachers around the globe battle with the harsh realities of how to continue to educate the young while keeping them socially distant from each other, these remote organisations and businesses are busy selling the same technocratic lie they have always sold, only this time in the process they may well render schools and teachers obsolete. Quite what that means for our culture and society is a story I for one, am not prepared to sit around the campfire waiting to hear.