Silicon Valley Exercises Its Political Muscle. Should We Be Worried?

Herbert Hoover, Engineer in Chief

That the masters of the tech universe jumped so forcefully into the middle of the Indiana gay rights imbroglio was, as many have noted, a marked change from business as usual in Silicon Valley, where the digerati had previously been reluctant to involve themselves in political issues not directly related to their bottom lines.

As Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of the cloud computing behemoth, Salesforce, told the New York Times, “We’re wading into territory none of us is comfortable in, which is social issues,” he said. “But it was crystal clear that, by all of us going in together, it was going to be OK." 

Only time will tell, of course, whether this turns out to be a harbinger of political activism to come, and, if it is, whether or not that's a good thing. History suggests we need to be careful what we wish for.

The engineers of Silicon Valley are far from the first of their kind to have been relatively disinterested in the nitty gritty of political engagement. In the early decades of the twentieth century the growing powers of industrialism bestowed upon engineers — previously thought of as the guys with greasy overalls whose expertise extended only as far the workshop door — a new measure of power and prestige. Academia responded with a massive increase in engineering programs. The number of American engineering graduates increased from 100 a year in 1870 to 4,300 a year in 1914. What had been a trade became a profession. 

Engineering students, 1890

Engineering students, 1915

Meanwhile technological advances were producing growing political, economic and social complexities that politicians seemed increasingly unable to handle. What was needed was better planning and efficiency, which is what technicians did best. A rising chorus of opinion suggested it was to time to let the engineers take the helm of the ship of state, and some engineers agreed. One of them was the engineer, editor and manufacturer Henry Goslee Prout, who in 1905 reminded Cornell’s first class of civil engineering graduates of the great mission they had taken on.

”My proposition is that the engineer more than all other men will guide humanity forward until we come to some other period of a different kind,” Prout said. “On the engineer and on those who are making engineers rests a responsibility such as men have never before been called upon to face, for it is a peculiarity of the new epoch that we are conscious of it, that we know what we are doing, which was not true in either of the six preceding epochs, and we have upon us the responsibility of conscious knowledge."

Thorstein Veblen

Among the more forceful technocratic voices to emerge during this period was that of the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen. Best known today as the man who coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption," Veblen relentlessly attacked the wastefulness of American business. Overproduction and over-selling of useless goods were ruining the country, he argued. The solution was to turn policy and administration over to "skilled technologists" who would exercise "systematic control" over the economy.

Somehow the ascent of the engineers that Veblen and others envisioned never materialized. Despite their growing professional confidence, they seemed reluctant to pursue broader political power. Veblen was disgusted. "[B]y settled habit," he fumed, "the technicians, the engineers and the industrial experts, are a harmless and docile sort, well fed on the whole, and somewhat placidly content with the 'full dinner-pail,' which the lieutenants of the Vested Interests habitually allow them.”

Robert McNamara

The idea that engineers could successfully run government, even if they wanted to, took a beating with the presidency of Herbert Hoover, the nation’s first and so far only Engineer in Chief. A further blow to engineering credibility came several decades later when uber technocrat Robert McNamara unleashed mountains of precision analysis against the pesky guerrilla fighters hiding in the jungles of Vietnam. In 1962 McNamara returned from his first tour of the Asian theater brimming with confidence. “Every quantitative measurement we have shows we are winning this war,” he said.

It’s likely that the hacker mindset — rebellious, but narrowly focused —  explains why the programming elite of Silicon Valley haven’t been, heretofore, especially active politically, which isn’t to say that faith in technocracy isn’t alive and well there. Google’s Eric Schmidt and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen are among those who believe that technology is quite capable of solving all our problems, if only government will get out the way, and government increasingly shows signs of agreeing with them.

Eric Schmidt, Condoleeza Rice, Jared Cohen

In a February article in the London Review of Books, the historian Jackson Lears described the career trajectory of Jared Cohen, a Condoleezza Rice protégé who stayed on at State under Hillary Clinton. Cohen subsequently co-authored a book with Eric Schmidt (The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business), who hired him to head Google’s “Ideas” division, which Google describes as “a think/do tank that explores how technology can enable people to confront threats in the face of conflict and repression.” Cohen’s career reflects, Lears said, “the new intimacy of Washington and Silicon Valley.” 

It’s hard to know what the offspring of that intimacy will grow up to be. Republicans will be more comfortable than Democrats with the fact that many in Silicon Valley consider Atlas Shrugged the definitive political text. At the same time, the socially progressive inclinations of CEOs who live and work in northern California and Seattle are at odds with the fundamentalist convictions of the heartland.

What’s clear is that we can no longer assume the engineers will be satisfied with serving as the “lieutenants of the Vested Interests.” They are the vested interests.

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(Note: I’m grateful to the historians William Atkin, Edward Layton Jr., Thomas Hughes and Henry Elsner Jr. for information on the technocracy movements of the early 20th century. Also note that an earlier version of this essay was posted on Salon on April 6, 2015.)

©Doug Hill, 2015

Technocracy, Then and Now

A number of prominent news organizations reported recently that "technocrats" have taken over the governments of Greece and Italy. Oddly, those reports failed to define what a technocrat might be. Slate magazine's Forrest Wickman stepped in with an "Explainer" column last Friday that nicely cleared up the issue.  A technocrat, he said, is:

 An expert, not a politician. Technocrats make decisions based on specialized information rather than public opinion. For this reason, they are sometimes called upon when there’s no popular or easy solution to a problem (like, for example, the European debt crisis). The word technocrat derives from the Greek tekhne, meaning skill or craft, and an expert in a field like economics can be as much a technocrat as one in a field more commonly thought to be technological (like robotics).

Technocracy is something I spend some time on in my book, and I'd like to make a few comments about it here. It's a way of thinking that inevitably gains influence as we increase our commitment to technology, especially in turbulent times. And given that an increasing commitment to technology and turbulent times tend to go together, it's a way of thinking that we'll surely be hearing more about in years to come.

To elaborate on Forrest Wickman's definition, technocracy can be described as the conviction that we will all be better off if we operate according to the rational standards of the machine. A given problem can be solved by the systematic application of a set of principles and procedures. Usually those are principles and procedures only experts can fully understand. It's a philosophy of methodology.

Lucas Papademos of Greece and Mario Monti of Italy both have advanced degrees in economics. Papademos has advanced degrees from MIT in physics and electrical engineering as well. As Wickman says, these qualifications implicitly suggest that they can be counted on to apply the necessary remedial measures without being swayed by anything so irrational as politics or popular opinion.  

In the United States we tend to associate technocracy with the Technocracy movement, which enjoyed a brief moment of national prominence in the early 1930s. In that case the connection to technology was slightly (only slightly) more direct. Americans feared that businessmen and politicians had shown themselves incapable of managing the explosive forces of industrial production, forces that were rapidly and radically reshaping the life and economy of the nation. The general feeling, says historian Henry Elsner, Jr., was that "somehow man had unleashed a monster in his midst – The Machine – which had gotten out of control and was threatening to wreck his civilization."[1]

One avenue of reform proposed was populism, which aimed to restore more control to the people. Another was technocracy, which aimed to focus control in the hands of the experts. This is an instance where we find history repeating itself today, with technocrats being asked to take charge by the established power structure in Europe even as the populists of the Occupy Wall Street movement agitate from street level for greater democratic control.

The Technocracy movement of the 1930s proposed that engineers take over as a sort of priesthood of the new industrial state. It wasn't the machine that was destroying society, they said, it was mismanagement of the machine by amateurs. Properly handled by qualified experts, technology would introduce an era of unprecedented plenty and leisure.

Here's how the Technocrats themselves described their qualifications for the job, in one of their pamphlets:

Technocracy's scientific approach to the social problem is unique, and its method is completely new…It speaks the language of science, and recognizes no authority but the facts. In Technocracy we see science banishing waste, unemployment, hunger, and insecurity of income forever…we see science replacing an economy of scarcity with an era of abundance….[And] we see functional competence displacing grotesque and wasteful incompetence, facts displacing guesswork, order displacing disorder, industrial planning displacing industrial chaos."[2]

The Technocracy movement faded quickly for lots of reasons, among them internal dissension, doubts about the credibility of its leaders, and absorption of its reforms by the New Deal. Technocracy was also hindered by a fundamental contradiction: It hoped to gain popular support for an ideology that was inherently elitist. 

Nonetheless, the temptation to rely on the expertise of the technocrat has remained, especially, as mentioned, in turbulent times. One of the more tragic examples to date was Robert S. McNamara's prosecution of the war in Vietnam.   

McNamara was a technocratic visionary whose evangelism on behalf of rationalism and efficiency took him from leadership positions in the Army Air Force's Statistical Control Office and the Ford Motor Company to the U.S. Department of Defense, which he headed under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. A passage from McNamara's 1968 book, The Essence of Security, described his philosophy:

Some critics today worry that our democratic, free societies are being overmanaged. I would argue that the opposite is true. As paradoxical as it may sound, the real threat to democracy comes, not from overmanagement, but from undermanagement. To undermanage reality is not to keep free. It is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality. That force may be unbridled emotion; it may be greed; it may be aggressiveness; it may be hatred; it may be inertia; it may be anything other than reason. But whatever it is, if it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential.[3]

Vietnam showed that, contrary to that philosophy, management by reason does not automatically eliminate the influence of emotion, greed, aggressiveness, hatred, or inertia. McNamara himself learned that lesson well. As he acknowledges in Errol Morris's documentary, The Fog of War, "Rationality will not save us."

Among the foremost advocates of technocratic principles today – in the business of technology, not in politics or in war, as far as I know – are Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google. The company's vice president of global communications and public affairs has called them "ideological technologists."

(Given that Google provides the blog space on which these words are written, my comments here may be seen as lacking the graciousness due one's host.)

Here's how Page, now Google's chief operating officer, explained his management philosophy to the journalist Ken Auletta:

There is a pattern in companies, even in technological companies, that the people who do the work – the engineers, the programmers, the foot soldiers, if you will – typically get rolled over by the management. Typically, the management isn't very technical. I think that's a very bad thing. If you're a programmer or an engineer or a computer scientist, you have someone tell you what to do who is really not very good at what you do, they tell you the wrong things. And you sort of end up building the wrong things; you end up kind of demoralized. You want a culture where the people who are doing the work, the scientists and engineers, are empowered. And that they are managed by people who deeply understand what they are doing. That's not typically the case.[4]

This, of course, reflects the classic technocratic conviction that the only person who can properly run the machine is the person who built it, or who knows how to build it. In today's technological society, that leaves a lot of us out.

 


Notes:

[1] Henry Elsner Jr., The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation (Syracuse University Press, 1967), p. 8-9.
[2] Quoted by Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (U. of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 122.
[3] McNamara's book quoted by Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, originally published 1968) p. 11-12.
[4] Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (Penguin, New York, 2010), p. 227. 

Photo credit: Artist unknown, illustration from Common Ground-Common Sense. 

©Doug Hill, 2012