Technocracy (1) - Design and Fabrication

Bohemian Engineers and the Soviet of Technicians

“By the peril to its life, the Nation has been shocked into momentary sanity. Let us while still rational, rationally take to heart the lessons which the War has taught at so staggering a cost… The need of a Supreme National Council of Scientists — supreme over all other National Institutions— to advise and instruct us how best to Live, and how most efficiently to realize our Individual and our National Purpose and Ideals.”

Human Instincts in Reconstruction. An Analysis of Urges and a Suggestion For Their Direction

In University of California Berkeley sits a 19th century building called Smyth House.

Smyth was an English engineer who arrived in America in 1872, making his way across the country and ending up in California. A consultant and a patentor of many inventions including a steam beer fountain, Smyth was not short of opinions.

The First World War had been hell on earth for the young men in the trenches but for Smyth it had enabled a vision of a bright possible future. The industrial production required to win in modern mass warfare had required states to rely on those with the greatest understanding of such production - engineers.

“At the turn of the century engineers constituted a newly emerging professional middle class. The demands of industrial technology expanded the profession’s membership enormously between 1880 and 1920. The number of professionally trained, college-educated engineers increased tenfold in the 1890” - Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941

For Smyth, this had been a long time coming. In his writings he rails against lawyers, economists, parsons, and bankers as irrational and deceitful magicians who distract the people from the true path of knowledge and control.

Smyth dreamed of a world ruled by a Supreme National Council of Scientists - a technocracy. Such a world would be both efficient AND free. It would involve technical experts and workers in the democratic process.

“Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population of this continent. For the first time in human history it will be done as a scientific, technical, engineering problem. There will be no place for Politics or Politicians, Finance or Financiers, Rackets or Racketeers.” - The Technocrat Sept 1937

As the first global, industrial, and mass-mobilized conflict; World War I was a potent fermenter of engineering dreams. Smyth was not alone in his dreams of a more orderly world. Howard Scott, "a kind of Bohemian engineer”, arrived in New York City at the end of the War and formed the Technical Alliance. This group included economist Thorstein Veblen (now famous for his theories of conspicuous consumption); and physicist Richard Tolman (later part of the Manhattan Project). Veblen argued that rather than run by politicians, financiers and other Vested Interests, America should be run by men of science (a group that included economists) - a Soviet of Technicians. As the situation in Soviet Russia declined, this term became a liability rather than an asset.

The Technical Alliance was focused on the management of energy resources but only lasted a couple of years. The Technocrats of the 20s and 30s were obsessed with energy - later suggesting that money be replaced by energy as the fundamental unit of accounting and exchange.

Howard re-emerged in the early 1930s with Technocracy Inc. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression had shown market-based economics and government in a poor light and people were looking for alternatives - including Communism, Fascism - and Technocracy. The Technocrats proposed a self-sufficient North American Technate run by a CEO-like Continental Director. They also proposed abolishing weekends and shifting transportation to waterways (“hydrology”).

In my opinion, the visions of the early Technocrats were as much aesthetic and religious as they were political. The Industrial Age demanded growing numbers of quantitative professionals (esp. engineers) and these men sought outlets for their imaginations and desire for status among the qualitative professionals (lawyers, priests) who had traditionally led the culture. In particular, they sought to challenge the power of bankers and the primary source of that group’s power: money.

The love-hate relationship between engineers and bankers has continued unabated. What else is Bitcoin but the engineers’ revenge? Attempt to tame money to rationalist principles? While banking has been largely colonized by engineers and rocket science PhDs (“quants”), finance remains a matter of “animal spirits” - human nature transformed from flesh first into metal and then into pure information*.

The relationship between engineers and politicians has also remained problematic. Engineers solve problems. Politicians manage predicaments. Engineers optimize. Politicians compromise. Weber describes the vocation of politics as the “slow boring of hard boards”. An engineer would simply replace the board with a more malleable material.

Only a madman would put an engineer in charge of a political system.

“On Oct. 13, 1940, a Regina chiropractor named Joshua Haldeman appeared in city court to face two charges under the Defence of Canada Act. His alleged offence was belonging to Technocracy Incorporated, an organization that had been banned by the Canadian government several months earlier as part of a larger sweep of groups it considered subversive to the war effort… Haldeman was a leader of Technocracy Incorporated in Canada from 1936 to 1941, but eventually became disillusioned with both the organization and the country, and packed up his young family to start life anew in South Africa. In June 1971, Haldeman’s daughter Maeve gave birth to his first grandson. His name is Elon Musk.” - In science we trust

*The Singularity has already happened and its your banking app.