Howard Scott

Techies Have Been Trying to Replace Politicians for Decades They want to replace politicians with engineers and our modern financial system with one backed by the laws of science. They dream of a world without scarcity, where the miracles of technology can easily meet the needs of everyone in the nation. No, we're not talking about today's Bitcoin-hawking Silicon Valley techno-utopians. We're talking about Technocracy Inc., an organization founded in 1931 to promote the ideas of a man named Howard Scott. Scott saw government and industry as wasteful and unfair. He believed that a new economy run by engineers would be more efficient and equitable. His core idea was that what he called the "price system"—essentially the capitalist economy and the fiat currencies it uses—should be replaced with a new economic system based on how much energy it takes to produce specific goods. Under Scott's plan, engineers would run a new continent-wide government called the Technate and optimize the use of energy to assure abundance. Though little known today, the organization boasted over half a million members in California alone at its peak in the 1930s and `40s. Members painted their cars "Official Technocracy Gray," wore a uniform consisting of a gray double-breasted suits, and saluted Scott when they encountered him in person. At their most extreme, some members replaced their names with numbers, such as "1x1809x56," according to an essay published on, of all places, the US Social Security Administration website. In 1946, its members organized a massive motorcade, driving from Los Angeles to Vancouver, Canada, to get the word out about the movement. The organization chronicled the journey in a short film (see above). Into the Future The motorcade was perhaps the organization's biggest spectacle, but its peak is often said to have been reached in 1932, after the New York Harold Tribune published an expose revealing that Scott had, at best, exaggerated his credentials as an engineer and had been fired from at least two World War I construction projects for lack of productivity. Soon after, Scott's Energy Survey of North America, an ambitious project backed by Columbia University to document precisely how much energy the nation's industries required for production, stalled. Others point to the end of the Great Depression, which made radical reform less appealing, as another reason for Technocracy Inc.'s decline. And during World War II, the group may have smelled a bit too much like the Fascism that Americans were fighting abroad. Whatever the reasons for its fall from the public eye, the organization still exists today, 35 years after Scott's death. It would be an exaggeration to say that modern Silicon Valley is self-consciously carrying on the legacy of Howard Scott and Technocracy Inc. itself. But it's hard not to hear echoes of his ideas today when tech moguls propose floating city-states and pitch idealistic high-tech solutions as answers to deep-seated social issues such as homelessness. The group influenced inventor and utopian thinker Buckminster Fuller, whose ideas in turn shaped the thinking of Steward Brand, the founder of the *Whole Earth Catalog—*the DIY tome that shaped the early personal computing and networked computing era and the thinking of everyone from Steve Jobs to the founders of WIRED. #ENTERPRISE#HISTORY