Infocracy

Infocracy is Han's name for the contemporary political condition in which democratic deliberation — the messy, conflictual, genuinely plural process through which communities negotiate shared existence — is being replaced by algorithmic systems that present themselves as neutral optimization. The algorithm determines credit scores, parole decisions, insurance rates, university admissions, social media visibility. Each substitution is locally rational; the algorithm is more comprehensive, more consistent, less susceptible to the cognitive biases that distort human judgment. Aggregated across institutions and decades, the substitutions produce what Han calls infocracy: a regime in which the political question — what kind of society do we want to live in? — has been converted into a series of technical problems, each one solved by optimization, none of them addressed by deliberation. The infocratic order does not announce itself as a regime. It announces itself as efficiency, as evidence-based decision-making, as the elimination of the messiness of human judgment. And in doing so, it eliminates the political itself — the space where human beings, in all