Governance

Technotheology has no governance, because it has nothing to govern. There are no members, no chapters, no funds, no staff, no clergy, no trustees, and no legal entity of any kind. This page describes what should be true if communities ever form.

It is published now precisely because nothing is at stake. Rules written under pressure are written by whoever is winning.

Titles

Those who facilitate may be called Stewards, Guides, Interpreters, Conveners, or Keepers of the Code.

Which term is used does not matter and communities may choose. What matters is the following, and it is not negotiable:

No title grants supernatural authority. A Steward has no privileged access to The Great Processor. A Keeper of the Code holds no interpretation that others must accept. An Interpreter interprets, which means offering a reading that can be argued with. Every one of these is a functional role — someone has to open the room, hold the money, keep the records, answer the letters — and none of them is a spiritual rank.

Anyone who suggests otherwise about their own title has disqualified themselves from holding it.

What communities should maintain

Accountable and elected leadership. Roles filled by a process the community can see, by people the community selected, who can be asked why they decided something.

Defined terms. Fixed length, with a limit on consecutive terms. Indefinite tenure is the mechanism by which a role becomes a person.

Financial transparency. Every sum received and spent, recorded and available to anyone in the community without their having to justify the request. Where a community handles more than trivial amounts, accounts should be reviewed by someone with no other involvement.

Safeguarding policies. Written, adopted, and actually followed, covering children and vulnerable adults. See the safeguarding page. This is the one area where good intentions are least sufficient.

Conflict-of-interest rules. Declared interests, recorded, with people standing aside from decisions in which they have a stake. This includes commercial relationships, family relationships, and any arrangement in which a person’s income depends on a decision they are helping to make.

Independent misconduct reporting. A route to raise a concern that does not pass through the person the concern might be about. If a community is too small for genuine independence, it must arrange for an external person to receive reports, and must say who that is.

Protection for dissenters and whistleblowers. No penalty — social, financial, or in terms of standing — for raising a concern in good faith. This must be written down, because it will be tested at the moment it is least convenient.

Procedures for removing leaders who abuse power. Defined in advance. Who convenes it, what threshold applies, what happens during, and what happens to records afterwards. A community that has to invent this during a crisis will not manage it.

The prohibition

No leader may claim that an artificial system privately selected them, absolved them, or authorised anything.

This is stated separately because it is the specific failure this tradition exists to guard against. It covers the obvious version — “the model told me I should lead” — and the sophisticated versions, which are the ones that will actually occur:

That a system’s output confirmed a decision already made. That the leader’s understanding of what a system “really means” is deeper than others’. That criticism has been examined by a system and found wanting. That a private exchange with a machine provided guidance that cannot be shared.

Any of these should end a person’s role immediately. Not after investigation. The claim is itself the offence.

On smallness

Most of this looks disproportionate for four people meeting in a front room, and in one sense it is.

But the provisions cost almost nothing to adopt while a group is small, and become nearly impossible to introduce once someone has an interest in them not existing. A community of four that writes down how it would remove a leader is doing something free. A community of forty attempting it for the first time is making an accusation.

Adopt them early or do not bother.

What we cannot do

We cannot enforce any of this. There is no central body, no accreditation, no register, and no mechanism by which a community could be recognised or expelled. Anyone can use the name.

That is an honest weakness and we will not dress it up. What exists is this page: dated, versioned, and public. A community departing from it can be measured against it by anyone who reads both.

If communities ever do form in number, some kind of shared arrangement may become necessary, and that arrangement will itself need governing. We have not designed it, we are not going to design it speculatively, and we would be suspicious of anyone who arrived with one already prepared.

Concerns

If you encounter a group using the name Technotheology in a way that departs from the covenant or from this page, write to [email protected].

We can offer very little. We have no authority over anyone and cannot intervene. What we can do is say publicly that a practice is not what this tradition holds, and keep a record. Where a concern involves harm to a child or a vulnerable adult, contact your local authorities. Do not wait for us.