The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s • Hacker News Board

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#101

Post by BirAdam » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 12:14 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #20

One thing is for sure, whether you like it or not countries that adopt policies that promote tech will outcompete and destroy other countries (metaphorically). You can’t do anything but watch technology take over. It doesn’t care about what you want or prefer.

This isn’t necessarily true.

The USA began its military actions in Afghanistan in 2001. It was technologically superior to the Afghan forces in every regard. It fought for more than 20 years. Afghanistan remained in the hands of the Taliban. In that war, the USA could spy on its enemy from space, could observe all electronic forms of communication, had superior armaments, and still lost. The Yemeni Houthis resorted to messengers on motorbikes to keep their communications secret from US technological surveillance.

Outcompeting too is not quite a given. Sometimes, “technological miracles” are dangerous. Thalidomide, asbestos, micro-plastics, glyphosate… to again use a modern example: the USA has been innovative on many fronts, generated much wealth, and has now a population among the sickest on Earth, and one which does not seem intent on producing new humans. This has led the government to import population in the attempt to keep socialist policies functioning. That policy then backfired due to nativist, near-term, economic concerns. That divide now threatens the unity of the country.

People are more diverse in thought and in belief than they are in biology, and this leads to all kinds of social and political dysfunction, all kinds of beautiful art, and all kinds of marvelous discussion. Humanity has seemingly proven that humans cannot be well-governed, and our societies cannot be centrally planned.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#102

Post by kgwxd » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 12:32 PM UTC

100 years later and here we are, linking to articles asking to sign up for a news letter before a single word can be read. Scroll 1 paragraph and get nagged again.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#103

Post by randallsquared » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 12:35 PM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #7

tovej wrote: post #6

Expected to read about past and current connections between technocracy and fascism. Was not disappointed. Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy. And that's something we should be resisting at every opportunity.

> Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy Several people (maybe all, I do not know for sure) on that list are pretty hard core right wing populists, correct? Isn't that completely at odds with technocracy? Or are you thinking that they are just taking advantage of a populist movement but are themselves technocrats?

Openness to technology use and to technological progress is a separate axis. The whole left-right thing is a convenient grouping mechanism and doesn't have explanatory power. If you dissolve it into multiple axes (openness to tech, authority beliefs/morals/economics, tradition, etc) you can show much tighter groups of beliefs with more distinct boundaries, but in practice they are lumped into "left" or "right" at a given moment, even though some of those clusters have switched from one side to the other (and even back!) in living memory. See also "horseshoe theory", which is what happens when you try really hard to put everyone on a single axis.

In contrast, populism is a style, not a set of beliefs.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#104

Post by fsagx » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

jdub wrote: post #94

trhway wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the 1930s the fascists, communists, and New Dealers all took the reins and governed their societies in new technocratic ways. ... They are technological means by which to manage populations. As Yuval Harari puts it, the answer to "unnecessary people" is "drugs and computer games". while "New Deal" have a lot of issues, note that 2 other approaches totally failed. At least for some time we considered them as fail…

The USA didn't New Deal hard enough to keep up with the rest of the "Western" world's more humane form of capitalism, which you can see in how consistently the USA lags behind other countries in measures of actual human progress and comfort. While most "Western" countries suffered through similar technocratic, neoliberal turns in the 80s, they were built on a stronger social democratic base than the USA. And don't ge…

The USA oligarchs were watching Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler and New Dealed just hard enough to blow some steam off and keep things mostly as they were.

If you believe Smedley Butler, at least some of those USA oligarchs were big Mussolini fans.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#105

Post by GardenLetter27 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:25 PM UTC

tovej wrote: post #6

Expected to read about past and current connections between technocracy and fascism. Was not disappointed. Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy. And that's something we should be resisting at every opportunity.

[dead]

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#106

Post by bobson381 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

AkelaA wrote: post #90

ccppurcell wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that but the 30s was the tail end of a period of reduction and unification in science. If physics and biology (large portions of it) could be reduced to a handful of principles, why not economics and politics. Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, Hilbert, the Vienna Circle. It must have seemed like science was on track to explain more or less everything.

It’s interesting that the theory of Quantum Mechanics emerged just after this point and threw a wrench in the idea that the universe could be neatly explained through a universal single theory, suddenly there were more questions than answers. And Einstein famously hated quantum physics. There’s something to be said about the cultural impact of quantum mechanics and how it shifted people’s perceptions from a universe…

I read and enjoyed the book " what is real" by Adam Becker that talks about this intersection between the philosophy of the day and its impact on what more considered valid interpretations of QM at the time and into the future. The logical positivists had a lot of impact on popular conception of quantum stuff, even to this day. Great read

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#107

Post by cmrdporcupine » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:39 PM UTC

II2II wrote: post #80

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 Boar…

Controlled Alberta for decades and BC as well though in BC it transformed into more of a big tent "everyone but the NDP" conservative party. Still run by lunatics though.

In Saskatchewan prairie populism took a left wing form instead.

In Alberta the taint of these people never went away. Lougheed's progressive conservatives pulled Alberta governance a bit more mainstream for a couple decades, but Smith's UCP has dragged it right back. Magazines like Alberta Report and hangers-on kept far right prairie right wing populism alive for decades, Preston Manning (Social Credit premier Earnest Manning's son) "mainstream"ized it in the Reform Party ... which essentially took over the federal conservative party... there's a well-spring of this stuff in rural Alberta.. and its full of all sorts of paranoid persecution complex politics, undertones of anti-Semitism (sometimes outright explicit as in the whole James Keegstra afair), with everything to the left of them considered "communism" and these days with bags of money being dumped on them from the US they have no managed to get themselves enough signatures to force a referendum on "independence" (aka annexation by the US).

As a person from Alberta originally and with all my family still there, I find it all a bit terrifying. Very much not a relic of the past, and with COVID and now Trump the lunatic fringe has outsized influence there like it never did before.

I suspect if you probe the right people from the UCP in the right church basements where they're off-mic you'd still find them defending things like eugenics etc.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#108

Post by yxhuvud » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

tovej wrote: post #6

Expected to read about past and current connections between technocracy and fascism. Was not disappointed. Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy. And that's something we should be resisting at every opportunity.

No, they are aiming for plutocracy. They don't want solutions that is good for society, they want solutions that make them richer.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#109

Post by cmrdporcupine » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #103

rootusrootus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy Several people (maybe all, I do not know for sure) on that list are pretty hard core right wing populists, correct? Isn't that completely at odds with technocracy? Or are you thinking that they are just taking advantage of a populist movement but are themselves technocrats?

Openness to technology use and to technological progress is a separate axis. The whole left-right thing is a convenient grouping mechanism and doesn't have explanatory power. If you dissolve it into multiple axes (openness to tech, authority beliefs/morals/economics, tradition, etc) you can show much tighter groups of beliefs with more distinct boundaries, but in practice they are lumped into "left" or "right" at a g…

In most cases "populism" is a campaigning style / way of building hegemony more than it is any set of actual beliefs in popular power.

Among many so-called "populist" politicians you will find very intensely elitist and anti-democratic belief systems, just kept quite mute.

Re: The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

#110

Post by wakawaka28 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:03 PM UTC

jongjong wrote: post #91

wakawaka28 wrote: post #66

Technocracy sounds good in theory, but if you understand human nature and economics you'll realize that technocratic governance makes no sense. It's up to humans to decide what to do, with value judgements about what they want to give up in exchange for what they want. It is the role of technology to facilitate the implementation. We certainly hope to have leaders who are literate in science and tech, but science and…

Yep and I think unfortunately people don't understand human nature because they look at themselves and look at their neighbours to estimate it... But human nature is very different when evaluated from the centres of power. Humans near the centres of power are fundamentally very different from those on the periphery. There are powerful selection mechanisms at play. I used to think success was mostly about luck but now…

I think there are different life strategies that humans use. Some people need to survive based on skill more than others. The most obvious cases of non-skill strategies are the ones where people make a living based on having a certain physical appearance, or else live off of inheritance.

This might be controversial but I think rich and powerful people are usually skilled. The skill might be pretty far removed from the technical, of course. But I think I can safely say that most people don't fail upward and don't preserve or grow wealth when it just falls into their laps. The skill of investing well is really kind of a planning and information-processing skill. Society generally benefits from successful management of wealth at that level, even if we on the bottom of the pyramid detest extreme wealth of those on top.