Everything about The Technocracy Movement totally explained
The
Technocracy movement is a
social movement that started in the
United States during the
1920s and
1930s and advocates a form of society where the
welfare of human beings is optimized by means of
scientific analysis and widespread use of
technology. Today the movement exists as
Technocracy Incorporated, whose members partake in discussion groups and publish quarterly magazines.
History
According to historian William E. Akin, technocracy has its intellectual origins in the progressive engineers of the late 19th century including the works of
Thorsten Veblen, such as "Engineers and the price system" written in 1921.
Scientific management was also a popular concept at this time. Howard Scott stated (History and Purpose of Technocracy.. in External links below) that technocracy wasn't related to the concepts of Scientific management, as Technocrats were not concerned with making
Human toil more efficient, but instead wished to eliminate it in favor of
Automation.
Josiah Willard Gibbs, a mathematician, engineer and chemist, was described by Howard Scott as the "intellectual forefather of technocracy" for his work on energy determinants.
A variety of groups formed after the
First World War concerned with engineering and social theory. These included
Henry Gantt’s "The New Machine" and Thorstein Veblen’s "Soviet of Technicians". These organisations folded after a short time. The "Soviet of Technicians" resulted in a series of lectures which
Howard Scott attended; Scott started the
Technical Alliance in the winter of
1918-
1919. Its members were mostly
scientists and
engineers, and included Veblen. The Alliance started an
Energy Survey of North America, which would give a scientific background from which they developed ideas about a new
social structure. However the Alliance broke up in the 1920s.
William Howard Smyth used the word "technocracy" to describe a government made up of scientists and engineers in the U.S. in 1919. . The view that technical concerns should take precedence developed among engineers such as Smyth based on the early conception of
Industrial democracy which was limited merely to the technical government of
firms. This school of thought amongst engineers eventually produced social institutions arguing for purely technical government of society in the 1930s.
The word Technocracy is also used to describe the works of Thorstein Veblen.
In the winter of 1931,
M. King Hubbert joined the staff of
Columbia University and met Scott. Hubbert, a Geoscientist, would later give his name to the "
Hubbert Peak", otherwise known as
Peak Oil theory.
The new group sought to implement the findings of the Alliance and create a new kind of society based on energy accounting instead of a monetary system (the technocracy Technate design). The group was incorporated in the state of
New York in 1933 as a
non-profit, non-political, non-
sectarian organization. Led by Scott, then director-in-chief or "Chief Engineer", the organization promoted its goals of educating people about the Alliance's ideas via a North American
lecture tour in 1934, gaining support throughout the
depression years. The precedent document of the Technocracy movement is the
Technocracy Study Course.
Organization
The organization has published several magazines throughout its history, including the
The Technocrat,
The Northwest Technocrat and
Technocracy Digest, it currently publishes the
North American Technocrat and the movement still continues after more than 70 years of history (for a more complete list of past publications see here
(External Link
)).
The standard unit for the organization is the chartered Section, consisting of at least fifty members. At Technocracy's height in popularity, many cities contained more than one Section, sometimes as many as a dozen or more. These sections undertook the majority of Technocracy's work, including the research that continued after the Technical Alliance.
The organization receives its funds entirely from dues and donations from its members. Because of the goal of abolishing political controls, membership is open to any citizen of North America, except
politicians.
Technocracy's Continental Headquarters ("CHQ") was originally situated in
New York. It has moved several times through its history, and is currently located in
Ferndale, Washington.
Ideas and goals
The Technocracy movement aims to establish a
zero growth socio-economic system based upon
conservation and
abundance as opposed to
scarcity-based economic systems like
capitalism and the system used by
Communist states. A core conclusion reached by the Technocracy Incorporated is that a
price system, or any system based on scarcity, is an illogical means of distribution in our technologically advanced world. Technocracy Incorporated sees established economic, political, and administrative forms as relics of a traditional past.
Technocrats argue that developments in
mechanization have caused a massive shift of employment towards the
service sector. Technocrats point out that energy accounting isn't
rationing; it's a way to distribute an
abundance and track
demand. Everyone would receive an equal, abundant (for example more than they need), amount of consuming power. Technocrats predict that at today's rates of
energy conversion, no person will rationally be able to use all their energy units.
The Technate
The term
Technate was originated by Technocracy Incorporated to describe the region over which a technocratic society would operate. All resources and industry of this land region would be used to provide an abundance of goods and services to its citizens.
According to technocrats, a Technate can't simply be set up anywhere like a modern-day country; it has several inherent requirements that must be met in order for it to operate.
- There must be sufficient natural resources to create an abundance.
- There must be a pre-existing industrial and scientific base from which to create the Technate.
- There must be a sufficient amount of qualified personnel to operate this infrastructure to provide an abundance.
According to Technocracy Inc., only the
North American continent is currently known to be able to meet these requirements and operate a Technate. That design is called the
North American Technate and it's intended to transform North America into a Technocratic society, with an end to the current
Price system.
The plan includes using
Canada's rich deposits of
minerals and
hydro-electric power as a complement to the United States's
industrial and
agricultural capacity (many of the details of this plan are presented in the Technocracy Study Course).
The North America Technate would be composed of all of
North America,
Central America, the
Caribbean, parts of
South America and
Greenland, encompassing some 30 modern nations (as well as numerous
Non-Self-Governing Territories). If the Technate were set up today, it would contain nearly 600 million citizens and its total
land area would be over 26 million square km (making it the
largest nation on Earth).
Its territorial claims would stretch from the
North Pole in the north to the
Equator in the south and from the Caribbean in the east, to the
International Date Line in the
Pacific Ocean in the west.
Urbanates: A technocratic replacement for cities
Once a technate has been established, Technocracts believe that it should proceed to construct an entirely new form of living environment called
Urbanates. An Urbanate is essentially an assembly of buildings where people live and work. These places would have all the facilities needed for a community, including
schools,
hospitals,
shopping areas,
waste management and
recycling facilities,
sports centres, and
public areas.
Technocrats envision Urbanates to be something akin to resorts, designed to give each citizen the highest standard of living possible. Getting around in an Urbanate would be inherently easy and efficient. Every kind of major facility would be placed within walking distance of a housing complex, eliminating the need for cars.
Urbanates would be connected via a continent-wide transportation network envisioned by Technocracy, which would involve a
High-speed rail network linking every Urbanate, the
Continental Hydrology (a massive
Canal network), and
air transport. These systems would also be connected to the Technate’s
industrial sites for easy transport of goods to consumers, and to all recreational and vacation areas of the continent.
The reason given by Technocracts for all this ambitious restructuring of urban life is that modern
cities are often extremely
poorly planned and built in a haphazard way leading to major inefficiencies,
waste, and large numbers of
social and environmental problems. Technocrats propose that all of the old cities in the technate should be gradually abandoned and "mined" for their resources (though some areas might be preserved for historical reasons). This would involve
recycling resources (for example
steel,
concrete,
glass,
plastics, etc.), which would then go into building the Urbanates, thus reducing the need to extract and process new materials and lessen environmental damage.
Criticisms of the movement
Technocrats themselves would argue that those in power, politicians and boards of corporations, are a form of organized opposition as a Technate design eliminates a Political system and the corporate system also. The movement claims that this opposition has helped spread a negative connotation to the term
technocracy and the ideas associated with it.
Critics make the following claims regarding technocracy:
There is no possible way to eliminate the scarcity of products in the modern world, especially given the large variety that exists today.
The theory that labor time could be drastically reduced at current productivity levels seems extremely suspect given the low unemployment rate in modern Western societies.
- Technocrats, on the other hand, see these societies as inefficient and wasteful, and argue that the unemployment rate isn't an accurate measure of the total number of people working and the amount of work being performed. In the United States, of those of working age, only 65% participate in the economy, while European countries have an even smaller proportion. Moreover, a significant number of employees work in industries such as finance, advertising, and retail. Many of these jobs would disappear after the transition from a monetary economy to a technocracy, meaning that the "adjusted" unemployment rate (a measure excluding such pecuniary jobs) is much higher than indicated.
It may be argued that although perfect scientific management would result in good governance, the limitations of human managers will produce imperfect management, which might be less efficient than other systems like democracy. Poor governance might result from abuse of power, managers' limited knowledge of the system, and internal conflict among decision-makers, for example. Of course, these arguments have never been tested with respect to technocracy per se, as no nation-scale technocracy has been implemented.
Technocracy in fiction and culture
Science fiction writer Howard Waldrop's short story "You Could Go Home Again" postulates an alternate history where a technocratic government came to power in the United States, resulting in many historical differences, including World War II having never happened. However, Waldrop never intended for the story to be an accurate depiction of Technocracy, instead only borrowing elements from it as a backdrop for his story.
The United Federation of Planets in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek franchise bears some similarity to a Technocratic society. Although its economics are rarely discussed in detail, the Federation is almost certainly some form of Post scarcity, moneyless society.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy describes the development of a highly automated society whose economy was based on caloric input/output and had few materials valued based on their scarcity, thus bearing some similarities to Technocratic ideas.
Charles Stross has described science fiction itself as "the fictional agitprop arm of the Technocrat movement" which "carried on marching in lockstep into the radiant future even after Technocracy withered in the 1930s."
In Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers, a technocratic coup attempt is described as having been undertaken but failed in the last days of a destructive global war. Referring to the attempt, a character remarks:
the so-called 'Revolt of the Scientists': let the intelligent men run things and you'll have utopia. It fell flat on its foolish face of course. Because the pursuit of science, despite its social benefits, isn't itself a social virtue; its practitioners can be men so self-centered as to be lacking in social responsibility.
–Major Reid in Starship Troopers, p.143
Satirical treatments
The Technocracy movement was the subject of several satires in the 1930s. A special notable "Technocracy Number" of Judge humor magazine, illustrated by Dr. Seuss, made fun of Technocracy, Inc. and featured satirical rhymes at the expense of Frederick Soddy. In a 1933 Flip the Frog cartoon, Techno-Cracked, Flip builds a robot to work for him and gets a lesson in unintended consequences.
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