Technocracy viewed its dream as a form of social engineering with society like a biological organism that can be behaviorally conditioned. In a mockup of the technocratic state, Technocracy Incorporated dedicated an entire department to “social relations.” Every facet of society was to be quantified, processed, and optimized for efficiency. Each citizen would be surveilled in their habits to ensure the smooth processing for the greater industrial organization. A new seven-day work week was proposed to allow for non-stop production.
From this principle, a vision of technocratic government emerged. First, all industries would be centralized into a few large-scale enterprises owned by the state. Each would be administrated by a board of technical experts. Second, the state would be exclusively bureaucratic and non-democratic. Third, each citizen would be granted a universal basic income based on production quotas. Fourth, prices and money would be phased out and replaced by energy vouchers. And last, all politics and parties would be abolished. There would be no officials other than those experts who lead industry.
Yet, how it would actually get to governing was hardly clear. Despite being deeply elitist, Technocracy Incorporated adopted a mass character. Scott peddled in fantasies, and so he imbued the movement with a folk-like ethos through popular rallies, local chapters, and pamphleteering. Because politics in the 1930s was populist and mass-led, technocrats understood the pull of the crowd. They were also competing with the New Deal. Yet, under the surface, technocrats understood their system was more about creating a new priestly class of experts than anything representative. These technicians were to lead society because they were biologically superior. As one 1937 essay in Technocracy Digest put it, “upon biologic fact, theories of democracy go to pieces.”26
The writer Harold Loeb summarized the core belief behind technocracy as follows: “Technology is the revolutionary agent of our period.”27 In a time of intense class and national conflicts, the technocrats of the 1930s did not view workers or nations as holding the future. They fashioned themselves as revolutionaries working in the interests of a different subject: technological progress. And like all revolutionary movements, they had a deep messianic belief that only they possessed the capabilities to save society from coming destruction.
In truth, the technocrats had overestimated the power of science and industry in their time. Technological systems were not developed enough then to measure and direct society mathematically. Nor did the original movement possess the expertise to even pursue this dream, because few actual engineers and scientists filled its ranks. But today, the appeal of technocracy finds itself in a different world. We are incessantly surveilled, quantified, and made malleable through our behaviors online.
Technocrats no longer need to persuade the masses to enact their vision. Owning the lion’s share of the world’s capital and influence, they can effectively work in silence and act as if beholden to no one. In the twenty-first century, core ideas of technocracy’s old dream have been revived and given new life.
Technocracy Today
In the twenty-first century, the definition of technocracy has expanded well beyond the scope of the short-lived 1930s movement. It has been used to describe the EU’s European Commission, China, Singapore, and Italy during the COVID pandemic. In everyday conversation, “technocrat” is often used as a catch-all term for “non-political expert.”
Given historically low institutional trust, the appointment of non-political experts has become a common strategy by political parties to repair their image. Political scientist Sheri Berman has argued that, in times of popular anger, few would make the case for oligarchy. Rule by an unelected technocracy, however, is a less offensive stand-in.28 Appealing to technocrats provides the state with an attractive means of shoring up legitimacy during crisis. The Trump administration’s recent “Gaza peace plan,” for example, is rife with technocratic language—stipulating that the territory will be governed under the “temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee.”
But while definitions of technocracy today cast a wide net, the original idea is finding a second life in Silicon Valley. It is among the tech elite that technocracy takes on actual, ideological substance that echos the movement of old.
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