In September 2025, President Trump held a dinner with over two dozen leaders from Silicon Valley. Easily one of the wealthiest gatherings ever held in the White House, the guest list included tech CEOs, venture capitalists, and administration officials. The topic of the dinner was investment and state alignment, as every individual present jockeyed for Trump’s approval. Government contracts and less regulatory oversight were the prizes for those companies which promised the most funds. Mark Zuckerberg, when asked, abruptly made up an investment number to get in Trump’s good graces, “600 billion dollars.” Only to be caught on a hot mic moments later saying, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with.”1
There has never before been such a close association between tech capital and the American state. Previously less MAGA-friendly, tech industry leaders have virtually all turned toward Trump since his 2024 victory, eager to gain favors and position themselves as kingmakers in the market. In the global race for AI dominance, the Trump administration views Silicon Valley as an extension of itself, from Palantir working openly with the US military for surveillance and defense systems to OpenAI seeking government aid guarantees on its debt.
Buoyed by previously unthinkable stock valuations, tech capital and political power have formed a symbiotic relationship. It is an arrangement that has been in the works for some time.
As Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, argued in his book The Technological Republic (2025), for too long has it been “taboo” in Silicon Valley to openly want to affect politics. The only lasting future for the United States, he says outright, is the merging of tech and the state. Karp cites the Manhattan Project as a precedent, a model that is now to be applied to virtually every lever of power.
While Karp and other technocrats like him may not know it themselves, this idea has deep roots in American political culture, going back a century. Technocracy, or “rule by technical experts,” once had a strong, cult-like following in the United States. In the throes of the Great Depression, a mass movement for technocracy quickly became the “most discussed topic in America.”2 Elon Musk’s grandfather was once even part of its Canadian branch. The movement was among the first to organize itself around the idea that technology, not workers or nations, is the main revolutionary agent of history. The ultimate aim was to establish an anti-democratic state run by a board of technical experts.
The Origins of Technocracy
At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was going through the pains of its industrial transformation. Cities were booming in population, and politics was rife with discord over what would become of American life. New ideas began to circulate over who would helm this path forward. Some were moved by the plight of workers, while others found a cause in battling corruption. But above all, this generation desired reform. They were loosely called the Progressive movement. As one of its leaders, Herbert Croly, argued, now was the time for a “New Nationalism.” Yet few agreed on what the nation’s needs exactly were.
A growing subset of Progressives found their cause within science and technology. Because it had made the Industrial Revolution possible, it was easy to assume its experts should also lead. These Progressives believed society was growing too complex to be left to insular self-interest and politics. Intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, Walter Weyl, Louis Brandeis, Charles McCarthy, and Frederic Howe put forward arguments that any future administration of experts needed a clear separation from politics.3
This was the seed of what would later become technocratic thinking: the idea of a state of appointed experts. Yet, it was not only politics that was increasingly viewed with suspicion. Businessmen, too, were becoming suspect because of their narrow interests. This argument was most famously made by economist Thorstein Veblen, who was a leading influence on the early technocrats. Although initially more sympathetic to industrial workers, by the 1910s Veblen shifted toward a belief in rule by engineers. A critic of capitalism himself, he viewed business managers as incapable of understanding the system they were handling.4 They were poorly educated in the “industrial arts,” and distorted what should be industrial society’s priorities. These “ignorant businessmen with an eye single to maximum profits” had to be replaced by a new class of people, the technicians.5
By 1919, Veblen began publishing a series of magazine essays that would be compiled in The Engineers and the Price System (1921). A “soviet of technicians” had to be established where engineers, not workers, would take over from the capitalists, he argued. This new philosophy would be given a name that year—“technocracy”—and then give rise to a short-lived organization named the Technical Alliance. Veblen was one of its founding members and its intellectual anchor.
The ideological coordinates of these early days of technocracy were confused. The Technical Alliance brought together a group of very different individuals, united only by the belief that technology now dominated social progress. The alliance worked on research with the radical left-wing union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but many of its members remained non-committed politically. While fellow travelers of left causes, there was no focus on the proletariat, class struggle, or workplace organizing. Their only point of agreement was that capitalism was inefficient and holding back industrial society’s potential.
Headquartered in the New School in New York City, where Veblen was a faculty member, the alliance effectively had no strategy for power. It was merely an organizing committee with a variety of titled members from different industries: chemist, educator, physicist, architect, forester, statistician, and so on—an embryo, Veblen argued, of a future “soviet of technicians” that was in the process of proving itself. Their main focus was simply research papers, as they produced reports on waste in the American capitalist system.
However, Veblen himself was in poor health and in no position to lead. Incubating in the Technical Alliance was the future face of the technocracy movement, Howard Scott, who would take Veblen’s ideas and transform them into a mass movement by the 1930s. His career would play out like something out of a melodrama: a parabolic rise, sudden fame and delusions of grandeur, and finally a speedy decline into irrelevance.
Scott himself was something of an eccentric with an air of mystery about him. In fact, he had few scientific credentials. He hid his past, and was known for exploding angrily when asked about it.6 But what he lacked in qualifications, he had in charisma, sheer will, and a domineering presence. Unlike Veblen, who was more rational, Scott was caught up in the dream of technocracy as if it were his personal religion and north star. He stylized himself a “bohemian engineer,” an adventurer and flaneur, preaching technocracy to all who would listen in Greenwich Village, as if it would someday be possible to create a new Garden of Eden.7
By 1920, Scott was already leaning into a polemical style that would define his rise. In “The Scourge of Politics in a Land of Manna”, an article published that year in the IWW periodical, he demeans politics as centered on petty emotion and subjective reality. If only, he speculated, there could be “a political party based, not upon theory but upon actual facts, the situation would not be such a hopeless one.”8
The Rise (and Fall) of the Original Technocracy Movement
While the Technical Alliance did produce some preliminary work on capitalist waste, it disbanded by 1921. Amid the economic boom of the 1920s, the group failed to resonate with the public and politicians. There was little need for rule by technicians as long as capitalism continued to boom. The popularity of technocracy only returned with the bust of 1929.
The Great Depression gave the technocrats another opening. In the early 1930s, Scott met geophysicist Marion King Hubbert, who pushed him to reestablish the old Technical Alliance. At the time, Hubbert was working at Columbia University. The group reconvened with the blessing of mechanical engineer Walter Rautenstrauch, the founder of the university’s Department of Industrial Engineering. Columbia later denied any connection to the group, but their early press releases were all done through university channels.9
The new organization, called the Committee on Technocracy, took up where the Technical Alliance left off by producing research reports on capitalist waste. Except this time, the excitement spread to the papers. By August 1932, the group was receiving hundreds of eager letters from universities, economists, labor organizations, and civic leaders.10 Scott became an overnight celebrity, dining with industrialists, bankers, newspaper editors, and future New Deal administrators.
The reports summarized by Scott generated intense public interest. The New York Times in particular helped elevate the profile of the technocrats. In one piece, the Times reported that the committee had convincingly made its case that the system would collapse unless the energy expended by production was radically redistributed. By the end of 1932, the hype reached something of a frenzy. “The gospel of Technocracy is spreading throughout schools, universities, and churches,” published one newspaper.11 Wall Street was said to be following with “intense and worried interest,” and it was said that even the Vatican was closely monitoring developments.12 As the editor of Harper’s, Frederick Lewis Allen, wrote, Scott “was now pursued by interviewers ready to hang upon his lightest word.”13
Part of the appeal of technocracy was that it was viewed as a genuinely American idea. As The Nation reported in September, 1932, “neither socialism, communism, nor fascism is equipped to do this job in a society as highly technical as America today.”14 The editors argued that technocracy was a revolutionary philosophy uniquely made by and for America. This imbued the movement with nationalistic fervor, since it was believed that its adoption would also establish the United States as the leader of scientific progress.
However, by the start of 1933 the situation already began to deteriorate. In January of that year, the Committee on Technocracy split over infighting, and Scott formed his own group, Technocracy Incorporated. Scott himself was also growing more apocalyptic in his messaging. In Harper’s magazine_,_ Scott wrote of a looming catastrophe. “A crisis in the history of American civilization is at hand. The nation stands at the threshold of what is simultaneously opportunity and disaster… are we going to set about it before it is too late?”15
But what exactly it was became suspect. Amid criticism, the amicable relationship between the New York Times and the technocracy movement broke down. Scott was facing intense pressure for his lack of credentials and so-called “consultancy,” derided as a “crackpot,” and reporters wrote that his “cult” was “now on the wane.”16 Retrospectives on the movement’s decline have linked the fall to Scott’s disastrous radio address to critics in late January, 1933.
As the New York Times reported, four hundred of New York’s elites—capitalists, bankers, economists, and artists—came to hear Scott defend himself at Hotel Pierre in New York City.17 Rather than silence his detractors, Scott simply asserted, “we don’t have to answer our critics: time will tell.”18 As one writer spoke of a year later, the delivery was anti-climactic and ultimately the movement’s deathblow. It was “a jumble of unfinished and half-baked sentences. It was all over.”19
The ideas, however, persisted. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has argued that it remained thereafter as a “California cult.”20 The movement reinvented itself as a mass organization with fascist-adjacent aesthetics. Its supporters wore gray-toned clothing, drove matching gray cars, and gave militaristic Roman salutes. Pamphlets like Technocracy Digest began to circulate, with local chapters springing up across the country. Its followers were openly antagonistic toward the state, which in turn banned them in Canada in 1940.
Although press interest fell to a new low by the late 1930s, the movement itself still boasted hundreds of thousands of members. Rather than scientists and engineers, however, artists and writers were drawn to Scott’s dream of technocracy. Hugo Gernsback—who coined the term “science fiction”—wrote for the movement’s journal in 1933. And writer Ray Bradbury affirmed that technocracy was “all the hopes and dreams of science fiction.”21 Yet, it had little to do with science by this point. Scott increasingly relied on spectacle to draw attention, with large rallies held at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. With the outbreak of World War II, he attempted to integrate his followers into the war effort with diminishing success.
By the succeeding decade, the movement had all but vanished. As historian Henry Elsner, Jr. recounts, one comedy film from the 1950s included a punchline about how it had all been forgotten. “Daddy, what’s a technocracy?” asked a young girl, to laughter from the audience. It was a little detail to show that the film took place in 1932, during the peak of technocracy hysteria, a craze that was now like a lost fever dream.22
Core Beliefs
In its official channels, Technocracy Incorporated defined itself as “science applied to the social order.” This would become its slogan in the 1930s. For Scott, the philosophy behind it was simple: “Engineers and mechanics created this civilization, so they will eventually dominate it.”23
Yet the technocracy movement was always scattered politically, and even its slogan was open-ended. Its ideology was all over the map. Technocracy Incorporated organized mass rallies while appealing to individual reason. It was imperialistic, and believed its “Technate” should rule over all of North, Central, and parts of South America along with the Caribbean. Fiercely anti-capitalist, it sought to replace money with energy vouchers and production quotas. Howard Scott himself liked to lean into the ideological confusion. “As far as technocracy's ideas are concerned,” he joked, “we’re so far left that we make communism look bourgeois.”24
When speaking of history and ideas, there is always a temptation to go deeper and deeper into the historical record to find some precise origin. Sociologist Daniel Bell, for example, has argued that the first technocrat proper was Henri de Saint-Simon, with his rational religion of humanity. But while the ideology of technocracy can be traced to the nineteenth century, the idea was made real by the modern Industrial Revolution. Only then did technocracy have any semblance of a movement rooted in material reality. Veblen is therefore the closest to technocracy’s ideological founding father.
If technocracy could be identified with a single idea, it is the belief that society can and should be counted, measured, and directed mathematically. As the ABC of Technocracy (1933) argues, “the working of our great social machine is susceptible to measurement.” A later video produced by the movement put it more ominously: “All phenomena involved in the functional operation of a social mechanism are measurable.”25
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.
In 2009, tech venture capitalist Peter Thiel outlined his new belief on politics in an op-ed for the Cato Institute. He still called himself a libertarian, but wrote that he no longer believed democracy and freedom to be compatible.29 Politics, he argued, had failed in providing new horizons. Instead, Thiel was convinced that tech entrepreneurs now had to escape politics. They had to get away from the “unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’” To put it differently: he had come to the conclusion that actual people were in the way of the technological future.
For Thiel, technology was in a deadly race with politics. This, in his view, had suffocated innovation and led to widespread stagnation. He speculated that the future may depend on “the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom.” This would be the only way to make the world safe again for capitalism.
Thiel’s thoughts would go on to be instructive for tech elites over a decade later. Many of his allies now occupy top positions within politics and Silicon Valley, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, neoreactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin, and even the current vice president, JD Vance. In Thiel’s worldview, technological progress is simply too important to be left to democratic society. His beliefs echo the technocrats of almost a century ago, who viewed themselves as in the wings, ready to take over when democracy collapsed. As their 1933 statement read, “technocracy stands ready with a plan to salvage American civilization, if and when democracy… can no longer cope with the inherent disruptive forces.”30
However, unlike the movement of old, twenty-first century technocrats do not wish to replace capitalism. Instead, they see themselves as the chosen elite destined to save and steer it. And within this belief, strangely enough, even capitalist competition itself is viewed with suspicion. In a 2014 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Thiel calls economists’ obsession with competition a “relic of history.”31 Monopolies drive progress, he argues, and they are a natural consequence of the accumulation of capital. This is his self-described “idée fixe”—an endpoint he is “obsessed with”—and he co-hosted an event with Altman on the subject in 2014. The reverence toward monopolies closely resembles the old technocracy movement’s desire for top-down centralization of industry.
Such ideas have been taken to their logical conclusion by “Dark Enlightenment” thinkers, especially Curtis Yarvin. A techno-monarchist, Yarvin is a believer in transforming the state into a corporation led by a CEO-like monarch with a court of (presumably) Silicon Valley aristocrats. Yarvin is close to Thiel, calling him “fully enlightened” on this question.32 As a nod of agreement, Yarvin’s start-up was also funded by Thiel’s VC firm. The “Dark Enlightenment” circle includes fellow travelers like billionaire Marc Andreessen. In 2023, he argued in his venture capital firm’s manifesto that concerns over inequality, environmental degradation, and social atomization are the complaints of “decels” (decelerationists), who are irrationally against technological progress.33
Such elitist, anti-democratic, and monopolist views circulate within a complex web of ideologies that animate Silicon Valley. They loosely fall under the umbrella term of “Rationalism,” but also overlap with AI accelerationism and effective altruism (EA). EA found its voice on message boards like LessWrong, where users shared utilitarian solutions to long-tail civilizational risks. In what would be the movement’s deathblow, EA’s most famous proponent, crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, viewed his embezzlement of customer funds as preventing long-term “risks.” He rationalized that saving his over-leveraged venture capitalist firm with others’ money, without their permission, was socially optimal.
This self-inflicted wound to EA ultimately exposed the limitations of Rationalism generally. As Omar Hernandez observed in “Capitalism, Rationality, and Steven Pinker”, the Rationality community is the philosophical ecosystem of twenty-first-century technocrats.34 What binds them together is the goal of “removing cognitive biases,” as if parsing through bad code in the social body, done through quantitative assessments of the world. This quantitative view of the social world persists among tech elites. It is their main leverage for accruing power: the endless collection of personal data. On this basis, they lobby the state to argue that they alone possess the toolkit for social prediction. Some companies are shamelessly open about pushing this case—like Palantir, whose name is taken from an all-seeing orb that can predict the future in Lord of the Rings_._ The dream of today’s technocrats is coached in the same language as almost a century ago: that all social processes are measurable and can therefore be efficiently optimized and predicted.
Among all tech companies, Palantir has used this leverage most effectively. It represents the leading strategy for power nowadays among tech elites, namely integration with the state through data sharing and lucrative contracts. Palantir now provides data for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), intelligence for lethal force on the Ukrainian battlefield, machine learning for the Department of Defense, and citizen databases for the IRS and other government agencies, among other functions. As an integral part of the American state, it is one of the few contractors immune to the Trump administration’s cost-cutting. Alex Karp, its CEO, justifies his company’s mission in explicitly Americanist terms, arguing that the fusing of state power with Palantir and other tech giants is necessary to—as Co-Founder Joe Lonsdale put it—“save Western civilization.” Other companies, like OpenAI, Meta, and Google, have taken cues from his strategy of state alignment. In December 2025, the US Department of War announced that it will be integrating with Google’s Gemini AI platform.35
But not all technocrats are pleased by this statist turn. Elon Musk, for one, tried to enter politics and then left abruptly without achieving any of his hyperbolic cost-cutting promises. He now believes only AI can save America.36 Others take an equally cynical view, and echo Thiel’s original concern that politics is incompatible with technological progress. The proposed alternative path forward is instead to exit and build power on the margins, ready to swallow a weakened American state when the time comes. This case was first made by tech investor Balaji S. Srinivasan in a 2013 speech at startup accelerator Y Combinator. America was “outdated and obsolescent” like Microsoft, he argued, and it was time for Silicon Valley to secede.37 The speech won roaring applause from the audience.
More recently, Srinivasan has been proselytizing a new belief that he likens to “tech Zionism.”38 Tech elites had to exit democracy and settle sovereign territories of their own. These peripheral islands of tech utopianism would in time unite, eventually accruing enough capital and power to challenge the nation-state. They would oversee a new tribe of loyal citizens dressed in matching gray. “If you see another gray on the street… you do a nod. You’re a fellow gray.”39
This aesthetic choice, it must be said, is ridiculously on the nose: gray was also the color palette of the 1930s technocracy movement. Srinivasan’s ideas could easily be ignored if he was a pariah in the tech world, but he is not; the book explaining his worldview, The Network State: How to Start a New Country (2022) is quite popular. Andreessen has praised Srinivasan, in Rationalist terms, saying he “has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met.”40
Technocracy today may have different strains of thought, but they ultimately converge on a pseudo-religious millenarian view of the world. What they disagree on is how to best achieve it. Given that technology is again being put forward as the sole mover of history, it is unsurprising that its wealthy beneficiaries view themselves as the rightful heirs of the coming social transformation. The belief is not so far removed from Howard Scott’s—who argued that “engineers and mechanics created this civilization, so they will eventually dominate it.” So, too, do today’s technocrats view themselves as the creators of this current civilization, and hence see it as their right to dominate it.
Twenty-first-century tech elites may not even know of the old technocracy movement, but have revived many of its ideas. Gone are the pomp and spectacle of rallies, however, since popular persuasion is no longer needed. Equally missing are the critiques of capitalism, since capital accumulation now benefits the new technocrats. Instead, we are left with pure technocratic technique, organizing numbers and data, to give substance to the old dream. Whatever its fantasies, they are nonetheless still tied to economic realities, and will live only so long as tech stocks soar.
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