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The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

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Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#71

Post by analog31 »

simianwords wrote: post #17

“Like religious millenarianism awaiting the Second Coming, tech elites believe technology alone will usher in a total and complete transformation of society.” This is the standard view amongst most social theorists and economists. (Of course it’s not technology alone but that’s the prerequisite). Without agriculture and the Industrial Revolution, say bye bye to your woke policies L G B T Q rights and feminism. Humans…

Without technology, say bye bye to at least 6 billion people. We've turned the earth into a machine for sustaining life. It's clear that we need people who understand how the machine and its parts work, well enough to keep it running.

But those people don't necessarily need to be gods or kings. In fact gods and kings seem to be exquisitely bad at it.

A relative of mine was a senior operator at a nuclear power plant, now retired. He deeply understood how to keep the plant running, and was compensated nicely for it, but he didn't presume to know better than the next person how to keep society running. He didn't aspire to be a king.

"Rich people bad" seems like a straw man. I think there's a fairly widespread perception that letting some people become rich enough to turn themselves into gods or kings is worth reconsidering.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#72

Post by chermi »

recursivecaveat wrote: post #38

Technocracy always struck me as weirdly incoherent? If you take the economy, probably the most studied of government policies, it is not 1 number. There are many questions about what priorities ought to be. There is no 'expert' answer for how many starving poor people are a worthy trade off for a GDP point. Even if there was, there is an economist branch that disagrees with any possible position you might take. The q…

Hubris. Is the same mindset that leads to socialism, central planning, social darwinism, etc. The temptation of "theory" without the suffering from pesky reality.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#73

Post by nurettin »

simianwords wrote: post #29
kingofthehill98 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter Thiel is the definition of "rich people bad", he's the stereotype of the billionaire who wants to rule over the state because somehow he knows what's best for us. He's a lunatic.

Ok he’s bad but what has he got wrong? I think he was pretty good at predicting certain things and I find him at least a bit insightful. Without going into good vs bad

He's right twice a day like any other crackpot. Stop fawning.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#74

Post by achierius »

simianwords wrote: post #41
asdff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Humans simply wont develop mentally while slogging in a farm or being hunter gatherers. Uh what? How do you think they came up with systems of government, economics, and religion if you characterize them as basically cows on pasture?

I literally told you that it was technology - agricultural revolution in this case. This made people specialised so that they dind't have to waste time slogging for food which freed their mind up for other mental activities.

Cities predated agriculture. Look up Göbekli Tepe -- this is a common misconception and worth correcting yourself on.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#75

Post by defrost »

achierius wrote: post #74
simianwords wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally told you that it was technology - agricultural revolution in this case. This made people specialised so that they dind't have to waste time slogging for food which freed their mind up for other mental activities.

Cities predated agriculture. Look up Göbekli Tepe -- this is a common misconception and worth correcting yourself on.

It was a city half in / half out of agriculture though.

No evidence of cultivation, but extensive evidence of cereal / grain processing - surrounded as it was by abundant wild grasses and steppes.

The argument made by some is that processing grain (winnowing, grinding with stone, ovens, etc) induces a fixed "city" life via the not especially portable capital investment.

Certainly an avenue of thought worth investing time in.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#77

Post by hax0ron3 »

asdff wrote: post #35
simianwords wrote: post #17

“Like religious millenarianism awaiting the Second Coming, tech elites believe technology alone will usher in a total and complete transformation of society.” This is the standard view amongst most social theorists and economists. (Of course it’s not technology alone but that’s the prerequisite). Without agriculture and the Industrial Revolution, say bye bye to your woke policies L G B T Q rights and feminism. Humans…

>Humans simply wont develop mentally while slogging in a farm or being hunter gatherers. Uh what? How do you think they came up with systems of government, economics, and religion if you characterize them as basically cows on pasture?

I think many of those systems were created by elites who dominated the use of violence and fed off the work of the subordinate classes. Their use of violence was a skill that was crucial for them to learn to be good at but only had to be used intermittently, so they had a relatively large amount of free time to spend on governing and thinking.

This explanation is only partial, of course.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#78

Post by martin-t »

recursivecaveat wrote: post #38

Technocracy always struck me as weirdly incoherent? If you take the economy, probably the most studied of government policies, it is not 1 number. There are many questions about what priorities ought to be. There is no 'expert' answer for how many starving poor people are a worthy trade off for a GDP point. Even if there was, there is an economist branch that disagrees with any possible position you might take. The q…

I don't think so. Ideally, you still have normal people deciding tradeoffs like today, it's just that the reasoning and the suggested solutions to problems have to be scientifically and logically sound.

The submission[0] right next to this one shows why.

Apparently, in the US, you are now a criminal if you fly drones half a mile from ICE vehicles. Some of which may be unmarked and even if marked, how exactly do you verify no ICE vehicle is in a 0.785 square mile radius? Anybody capable of logical thought sees that this is BS.

(Also, anybody who retained primary school knowledge can calculate the area. But ask a person on the street to do it and watch your faith in humanity fall. Ask them to point out the area on a map and estimate how many cars that would be...)

---

Even the lawyer who taught intro to law at my uni always said that the people who most often find contradictions in laws are engineers.

The problems always start when somebody takes an ideology too far. So let's figure out what is too far instead of rejecting the whole thing.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633947

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#79

Post by c6400sc »

Technocracy rose roughly simultaneously with the Good Government movement of the 1920s. Both were a response to the machine politics and crony capitalism of the gilded age.

The hippie movement was itself somewhat a response to the inroads Technocracy had made in American government, so argued in this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_a_Counter_Cultur...

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#80

Post by II2II »

infinitewars wrote: post #76

Musk's grandfather was a leader in the Technocracy Movement and tried to overthrow the Canadian govt before being expelled to South Africa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman

I went down that rabbit hole. Apparently, he was a member of the Saskatchewan Social Credit Party. It looks like the party never made inroads in Saskatchewan, but the party controlled Alberta for decades. Then I ran into the following comment in the article:

> If mental illness is on the rise, then the obvious solution is on-demand therapists through an app

That is not the only "solution". Alberta had a Eugenics Board for the entire run of the Social Credit Party. One of the roles of this board was to sterilize people with mental illness. (The board predates the party by about a decade, but was only abolished about a year after they lost power.) While this a couple of leaps from the Technocracy movement, the mere association is rather scary.

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