The Tories, predictably enough, have contracted technophilia. At a speech — to which I had been asked to respond — at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) on Thursday George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, spoke of “recasting the political settlement for the digital age”.

At one level the speech was sound enough. Osborne defined three “pillars” that would support the new settlement. The first was equality of access to information. This raises expectations and disperses power. The government, said Osborne, should respond by, for example, providing a website like the one in America that gives people direct access to all state contracts, grants and programmes.

The second pillar was social networks. Websites such as MySpace connect people instantly and globally. Government should use such systems. And, finally, an “open source”, bottom-up approach should be adopted. This involves allowing people to contribute ideas via interactive systems. It also involves cutting government IT costs by using open-source software — the free Linux operating system, for example, rather than Windows.

“This is not about being antiMicrosoft,” said Osborne. I don’t think Bill Gates will see it that way. He also said he now uses the open-source web browser Firefox instead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, a revelation that, in a room at least partially full of geeks, was like saying he’d figured out how to connect his printer.

But the pillars — well, yes to all three but . . . Osborne also spoke about two exciting meetings. He had, he said, “flown all the way to Los Angeles” to meet Tom Anderson, co-founder of MySpace. And Osborne said that Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, had asked him how long the runway at Bournemouth was when he flew in to meet the Tories. Not only that, he actually piloted his own private jet.

This is distinctly callow. Osborne might well be the next chancellor of the exchequer, for God’s sake, they should be excited to meet him. But why was he so excited? Because he’s caught technophilia, and it is at this point that the speech falls apart.

Technophilia has two symptoms. The first is the crass assumption that certain technological advances are good in themselves. This is nonsense. Human affairs are what physicists would call “background dependent”: they rise or fall in a certain context. For example, give the North Koreans advanced missile technology and they’ll use it to deliver a nuke; give this technology to Mexico and it won’t.

The second symptom is the delusion that anybody not suffering from technophilia is a Luddite. This is deeply pernicious in that it encloses technophiles in a deluded, paranoid bubble. Inside the bubble any questioning of means and ends is simply swept aside as Luddite nonsense. In the worst cases this delusion renders technophiles profoundly ignorant.

Osborne’s case doesn’t seem quite that bad, though I am not so sure. In my response I stated the obvious — that babbling on about wonderful torrents of information is meaningless. Politics will still require people of wisdom and judgment to sort the torrents and people will need a very rigorous education before they even look at a screen. This generation of technophiles had that education; their successors may not.

My point was that, in a sense, politicians shouldn’t be getting excited about technology, they should be getting down to the much more boring work of preparing for its impact. This does not make headlines, but it is all that matters. Above all, technology should not be seen as autonomous. It is utterly background dependent and though we may not be able to control the technology we can do something about the background. That is what governments are for.

Osborne scoffed at my argument and suggested I had advocated an “Athenian elders” approach to government. This form of argument, like the charge of Luddism, is like accusing somebody of being fascist because they support some controls on immigration. It is a cheap smear.

This, I at once thought, is like shooting fish in a barrel. I asked the audience if any agreed with this assessment of what I had said. Four — probably Osborne’s family, friends or staffers — put their hands up. Later Osborne admitted to me what had really upset him had been my complaints about the professionalisation of politics.

Professionalisation — the way politics is now perceived as a climb up a greasy career pole rather than the application of wisdom for the common good — is a crucial aspect of technophilia. Careerists like technology because it allows them to make the right upbeat noises about future prospects. The wise, having more respect for history, know that managing the future demands the distinctly downbeat work of avoiding failure. Wisdom, for example, would have seen the National Health Service computer project for what it was — an invitation to inevitable, costly and catastrophic failure.

But Osborne is right to say that new technology is transforming politics and society. Connectivity in all its forms is a growing elephant in the room of all public discourse. It is leading to, in many different areas, a loss of control. Advertisers, for example, are in deep trouble as people either screen out ads or compare and contrast products and prices on a global scale. Politicians, meanwhile, are confronted by an aggressively clued-up electorate able to organise dissent at the click of a mouse. Look at the fiasco of the Downing Street “consultation” on road pricing.

That fiasco points to the most urgent problem of all — how to apply wisdom amid this babble of enraged voices. At the RSA there was much talk of “deliberative” democracy. This is a tricky word. It seems to imply that with one comfortable-sounding bound, the technophiles are free. But deliberative must mean somebody is applying wisdom to the process, applying cultural norms, doing the spadework on the background. Somebody, in short, must be standing outside the technophile bubble and passing judgments. That somebody may well be all of us. But it should, at least, be the next chancellor of the exchequer.

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