THE ENGINEERS OF ABSOLUTISM

Howard Scott wore a grey uniform and dreamed of a world without money. Curtis Yarvin wears a black t-shirt and dreams of a world without elections. Marc Andreessen wears a Patagonia vest and quotes the man who co-authored the Fascist Manifesto. The engineers of absolutism have shed the uniforms. But the salute to the Chief Engineer — it lives on.

I. The Chief Engineer

In 1933, Howard Scott — a man without formal higher education who had established himself as a "Bohemian Engineer" in New York's Greenwich Village — entered the Hotel Pierre in Manhattan. The speech he delivered to 400 attendees and a nationwide radio audience was universally described as a "disaster." Scott hurled unsubstantiated figures about, lost his thread, humiliated himself. The American Engineering Council condemned his Technocracy Movement as "the cleverest pseudo-scientific swindle of all time."

But Scott was right on one decisive point — and it is this being right that has made his movement immortal. He had grasped that the political class neither understood, nor controlled, nor could steer technological development. His solution — a "Soviet of Experts" to manage the economy by energy metrics rather than monetary values — was absurd. But the diagnosis was correct.

Nearly a century later, the diagnosis has outlived the solution. The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s, with its grey uniforms, its salute to the "Chief Engineer," and its energy certificates instead of money, is archived as a historical curiosity. But the core idea — that engineers should govern because only engineers understand the machines that drive the world — lives on. It lives in the offices on Sand Hill Road, in Peter Thiel's Cato Institute essay, in Marc Andreessen's manifesto, in Curtis Yarvin's blog, in Elon Musk's Twitter feed. It lives because it never died.

This essay traces the line. From Howard Scott to Curtis Yarvin. From Technocracy to the Dark Enlightenment. From the engineer's utopia to techno-feudalism. It is a genealogy that none of the texts involved tell in full — because those involved have an interest in it not being told.

II. The Three Fathers

The Technocracy Movement had three intellectual forefathers, who simultaneously represent the three headwaters of today's tech ideology.

Edward Bellamy published the novel "Looking Backward, 2000–1887" in 1888 — a utopia in which the society of the year 2000 has united all industries under a single state organisation. No competition, no markets, no inefficiency. An industrial army, led by technical managers. Bellamy's book was one of the greatest bestsellers of the nineteenth century. It inspired hundreds of "Bellamy Clubs" across America and established the thought that has refused to disappear since: that a rationally planned society without the chaos of democratic politics would function better.

Thorstein Veblen supplied the academic ammunition. In "The Engineers and the Price System" (1921), he argued that the price system of the capitalist economy systematically produced waste — and that only engineers, who understood the physical functioning of production, could eliminate it. Veblen proposed a "Soviet of Technicians." The word Soviet was not yet contaminated by Stalin in 1921 — it simply meant "council." But the structure was clear: rule of the knowledgeable over the unknowing. Expertise as the legitimation of power.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, the founder of Scientific Management, supplied the method. His principle: every human activity can be broken down into measurable units, optimised, and standardised. The worker does not know what he is doing — the engineer with the stopwatch knows better. Taylor was the first to systematically implement the idea that knowledge of processes legitimises control over people.

Bellamy, Veblen, Taylor: utopia, diagnosis, method. These three elements — the vision of a planned society, the contempt for the political process, and the conviction that measurement legitimises rule — are the DNA of technocracy. Over the course of a century, they have sought different host bodies. In the 1930s, they wore grey uniforms. Today, they wear Patagonia vests.

III. The Movement

What Howard Scott built between 1932 and 1940 was more than a political idea. It was a quasi-religion.

At its peak, Technocracy Incorporated had over half a million members in California alone. The organisation had its own uniforms — tailored double-breasted suits, grey shirts, blue ties, a monad symbol on the lapel. Members saluted Scott in public. There were motorcades, mass rallies, book clubs. Scott, the "Chief Engineer," allowed himself to be venerated as a messianic figure without actively encouraging it — but also without discouraging it.

The programme was radical: abolition of the monetary system. Replacement by "energy certificates" pegged to the energy consumption of production. Non-transferable, non-inheritable, non-accumulable — a currency designed to make wealth structurally impossible. Government by a "Continental Director" and technical department heads instead of elected politicians. No parties, no elections, no public debate over the allocation of resources. Instead: calculation.

Scott argued that the North American continent possessed sufficient energy and resources to provide every citizen with a twenty-hour working week and a standard of living that the price system structurally prevented. The sole condition: the engineers would have to take control.

When Archibald MacLeish, Pulitzer Prize winner and later Librarian of Congress, summarised the programme, his formulation was devastating: "Nothing is demanded of man except that he submit to the laws of physics, measure his life in ergs, and surrender all interests that cannot be expressed in foot-pounds per second."

The movement did not fail because of its opponents. It failed because of its founder. The Hotel Pierre speech of 1933 was a turning point. Scott was no orator, no organiser, no politician. He was a man with a diagnosis and a temperament — but without the ability to convert either into political power. After Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government temporarily banned Technocracy Inc. as a subversive organisation. In the United States, the movement vanished into irrelevance after the war. Scott died in 1970 without having named a successor.

But the idea did not die. It mutated.

IV. The Intermediate Hosts

Every idea needs host bodies to survive. The technocracy idea — rule by experts, replacement of politics by calculation, contempt for democratic processes — found three intermediate hosts after Scott's failure, before it reached Silicon Valley.

The first host body was the RAND Corporation and the systems analysis movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defence under Kennedy and Johnson, was its most prominent representative. McNamara's promise: to win the Vietnam War through numbers. Body counts, kill ratios, pacification metrics. The idea that war was an optimisation problem was derived directly from the Taylor-Veblen strand of technocracy. McNamara failed — but the method survived.

The second host body was the Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Its declared goal: a "New International Economic Order." Its method: bringing together experts from business, politics, and academia to prepare decisions that democratic parliaments would then merely ratify. Samuel Huntington, a member of the commission, wrote in 1975 in "The Crisis of Democracy": the problem of Western democracies was an "excess of democracy." The solution: less participation, more expertise. It was Veblen in pinstripes.

The third host body was the cybernetics movement, from Norbert Wiener through Stafford Beer to the Californian counter-culture. Beer's Project Cybersyn — a computer-controlled economic management system that he developed from 1971 to 1973 for Salvador Allende's Chile — was the first practical implementation of the technocracy vision using digital means. A room with screens in which the entire Chilean economy was to be monitored and managed in real time. The CIA assisted in the coup that ended the project. But the idea of an algorithmic economic system survived — and migrated to California.

V. The Novelist

Between the intermediate hosts and the Dark Enlightenment stands a woman without whom the mutation would not have been possible: Ayn Rand.

Rand — born Alissa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in St Petersburg in 1905, emigrated to the United States in 1926 — experienced as a child the confiscation of her father's business by the Bolsheviks. This experience became the primal scene of a philosophy she called "Objectivism," which produced two novels that changed America more than most political programmes: "The Fountainhead" (1943) and "Atlas Shrugged" (1957).

Rand's thesis was simple and radical: the creative individual — the architect, the engineer, the entrepreneur — is the sole engine of civilisation. The rest of society — the "looters" and "moochers" — lives off his achievement. The state is their instrument. Altruism is not virtue but the moral weapon with which the mediocre enslave the productive.

In "Atlas Shrugged," the logical consequence unfolds: the producers go on strike. John Galt — engineer, inventor, philosopher — persuades the most talented minds in America to leave society and retreat to a hidden valley in Colorado: "Galt's Gulch." There they live by their own rules, without government, without redistribution, without democracy. The society left behind collapses.

The impact was enormous. "Atlas Shrugged" was cited, alongside the Bible, as the most influential book in the United States. Alan Greenspan — later Chairman of the Federal Reserve — was a member of Rand's inner circle. Ronald Reagan quoted her. Paul Ryan called her his most important intellectual inspiration. And Silicon Valley became her church.

Rand has been described as "perhaps the most influential figure in the industry." Steve Jobs read "Atlas Shrugged" as a young man. Travis Kalanick — the Uber founder who took taxi regulations as a personal affront — called "The Fountainhead" his favourite book. Peter Thiel spoke at the Atlas Society gala. Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen publicly declare that we are living in the world of "Atlas Shrugged" — only this time they are the heroes, not the villains.

This is where the decisive mutation of the technocracy idea takes place.

Howard Scott wanted engineers to rule so that everyone would benefit. His energy certificates were non-transferable, non-inheritable, non-accumulable — wealth was to flow evenly. Scott was an egalitarian with an engineer's lens.

Rand inverted this. In her world, the engineer owes society nothing — society owes him everything. The creative individual is not the servant of the collective but its creator. If society impedes him — through taxes, regulation, democratic majority decisions — he has the moral right to withdraw and let it collapse. Engineer rule is no longer a duty to the public. It is the privilege of the superior.

This mutation is the key. Without Rand, the line from Scott to Yarvin is a break. With Rand, it is a transition: from egalitarian technocracy to aristocratic, from the Soviet of Experts to the CEO-monarch, from "engineers should rule so everyone benefits" to "founders should rule because they deserve to."

"Galt's Gulch" has not remained mere metaphor. Peter Thiel's Seasteading Institute — floating city-states in international waters, free from state regulation — is the attempt to build the fiction. So is Próspera, the libertarian enclave in Honduras. So is Balaji Srinivasan's "Network State." So is the East Solano project, in which a real estate company purchased 900 million dollars' worth of ranchland in the San Francisco Bay Area to build a privatised alternative to San Francisco. The names of the funders repeat: Thiel, Andreessen, Srinivasan, Friedman.

They all read Rand. They all see themselves as John Galt. But none of them does what Galt did: renounce his wealth and live modestly in a hidden valley. They want the power — and the money — and the freedom from democratic accountability. This is not Rand's philosophy. It is Rand's philosophy minus the consequence. The strike without the sacrifice.

Rand herself would have recognised this. She would have identified Musk — who collects billions in government subsidies while simultaneously dismantling the state — not as Hank Rearden but as Orren Boyle: the steel magnate in "Atlas Shrugged" who uses his government connections to destroy the competition. The "aristocracy of pull" — that was Rand's own term for this system. Exactly the system that Thiel, Musk, and Andreessen operate today.

But this irony does not concern their heirs. They took what they needed: the moral licence to consider themselves superior. The rest, they left out.

VI. The Dark Enlightenment

In 2007, a software developer named Curtis Guy Yarvin, writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, began a blog. "Unqualified Reservations" was obscure, verbose, and radical. Over the following years, Yarvin developed — in several multi-part series totalling roughly a thousand pages — a political philosophy he himself called "neoreactionary."

The core thesis: democracy is not the solution. Democracy is the problem.

What Yarvin calls the "Cathedral" — the interplay of universities, media, and bureaucracy that produces and enforces the progressive consensus — is, he claims, the true government of the Western world. Elected politicians are puppets of this system. The "Cathedral" is a secular religion whose dogmas may not be questioned, because questioning itself is treated as heresy.

Yarvin's alternative: the state as corporation. A CEO instead of a president. No elections, no political freedom of speech, no democratic participation. Instead: exit rights. If you are dissatisfied, you move to another "patch" — one of thousands of sovereign mini-states, each governed by a joint-stock company. Yarvin called this system "Patchwork" — and described it as "modified monarchy."

The British philosopher Nick Land, a former member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, gave the whole thing a name in 2012: Dark Enlightenment. Land shared Yarvin's contempt for democracy but went further: he did not want to reform; he wanted to accelerate. His "accelerationism" — the idea that capitalism must be driven forward so fast that it destroys the existing order on its own — was technocracy without the promise of prosperity for all. It was technocracy for the few. Technocracy as selection.

Where Yarvin was pragmatic, Land was apocalyptic. Where Yarvin imagined a CEO-monarch, Land saw the final collapse of liberal civilisation. But both converged: both viewed the Enlightenment not as a gateway to reason but as the beginning of a destructive illusion — the idea that the average human being is capable of self-government.

Howard Scott would have signed that.

VII. The Patrons

What distinguishes the technocracy of the 1930s from the Dark Enlightenment is not the diagnosis. It is the money.

Howard Scott was penniless. He lived off the generosity of his followers and a small paint-and-floor-polish company in New Jersey. Curtis Yarvin has Peter Thiel.

Thiel — PayPal co-founder, Palantir founder, first outside investor in Facebook, venture capitalist — invested in Yarvin's startup Tlon. Yarvin described Thiel as "fully enlightened" and claimed to have "coached" him. The biographer Max Chafkin calls Yarvin the "house philosopher" of the "Thielverse" — the network of people in Thiel's sphere of influence, which includes, among others, J.D. Vance, now Vice President of the United States.

Thiel himself wrote, in 2009, the sentence that became the creed of the new tech-right: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." For a man whose company Palantir sells surveillance technology to governments around the world, this is not a philosophical provocation. It is a business model.

Alongside Thiel stands Marc Andreessen — co-inventor of Mosaic, founder of Netscape, one of the most influential venture capitalists in the world. Andreessen published his "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" in October 2023 — a 5,200-word document on the website of his firm Andreessen Horowitz. The manifesto contains the phrase "We believe" 113 times — a structure that the political scientist Henry Farrell called the "Nicene Creed of the progress cult."

The manifesto concludes with a list of 56 "patron saints of techno-optimism." Among them: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Nick Land.

Marinetti. The man who wrote the Futurist Manifesto in 1909: "We will glorify war — the world's only hygiene." The man who founded the Futurist Political Party in 1919. The man who allied himself a year later with Benito Mussolini and co-authored the Fascist Manifesto.

Andreessen does not cite Marinetti as a historical curiosity. He paraphrases him. The original: "There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man." Andreessen replaces "poetry" with "technology" and prints it as his own conviction. The form is identical. Only the object of worship has changed — from art to machine.

And Nick Land — the man who called democracy a "tendency towards fascism" and demanded "capitalist corporate governance as the organising force of society" — stands on Andreessen's list of patron saints alongside Friedrich Nietzsche and the fictional character John Galt.

This is no coincidence. This is a genealogy.

VIII. The Line

1888: Bellamy. The dream of a society without politics. The industrial army, led by technical managers.

1909: Marinetti. The aesthetics of destruction. War as hygiene. Technology as beauty. The manifesto as form.

1919–1921: Veblen and Taylor. The theoretical and methodological foundation. The Soviet of Technicians. The stopwatch as an instrument of rule.

1932–1940: Howard Scott and Technocracy Inc. The first attempt to organise engineer rule as a mass movement. Uniforms, salute, Chief Engineer. Failure through its own inability to do politics.

1943/1957: Ayn Rand. "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged." The decisive mutation: egalitarian engineer rule becomes the privilege of the superior. Galt's Gulch — the secession of the producers. Moral licence for the retreat from democracy.

1973: The Trilateral Commission. Technocracy in pinstripes. "Excess of democracy" as diagnosis. Expertocracy as therapy.

2007–2012: Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. Dark Enlightenment. The state as startup. The CEO as monarch. Democracy as an operating-system bug to be eliminated by an update.

2023: Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Marinetti in a Patagonia vest. 56 patron saints, including the proto-fascist and the neo-reactionary. 113 times "We believe." The billionaire as prophet.

2025: Yarvin as an "unofficial guest of honour" at Trump's inauguration. Thiel as kingmaker. Vance as Vice President. Musk as department head. The Dark Enlightenment in the executive branch.

2026, 27 February: Musk writes: "Anthropic hates Western Civilization." A company that said no — the only AI company to set conditions for the Pentagon's use of its technology — comes under attack. Not for its technology. Not for its contract. But because its constitutional document mentions "non-Western perspectives." The technocracy no longer needs uniforms. It has a platform.

IX. What Howard Scott Did Not Know

Howard Scott dreamed of a world in which engineers rule because they understand the machines. His error was not the diagnosis — politicians do indeed fail to understand technological development. His error was the assumption that technical knowledge can replace moral judgement.

Scott sincerely wanted everyone to benefit. His energy certificates were non-accumulable — no one was to become rich. Everyone was to work twenty hours and live in comfort. It was an engineer's utopia: naive, trusting, materialistic, but not malevolent.

What Scott did not foresee — and what Rand made possible — was the final stage of the mutation. That Rand's "strike of the producers" would become not withdrawal but seizure. That those who see themselves as John Galt would not flee to a hidden valley but take over the government.

Yarvin completed the final step. In his blog, he wrote in 2008: "Humans slot into dominance-submission structures." In 2012: "If Americans want to change their government, they need to get over their dictator-phobia." And elsewhere he proposed, as a "humane alternative to genocide," placing unproductive people in "permanent solitary confinement with a virtual-reality interface" — and noted he was "just kidding."

Between Scott's energy certificates, Rand's Galt's Gulch, and Yarvin's virtual-reality prisons runs a line that is alarmingly straight. The distance grows — but the direction remains: contempt for the ordinary citizen. Scott despised politicians. Rand despised the "looters." Yarvin despises voters. Three steps on the same staircase — from "the engineer can do it better" through "the producer owes you nothing" to "most people do not deserve a say."

X. The German Silence

There is a standard work on the Technocracy Movement: William Akin's "Technocracy and the American Dream" (University of California Press, 1977). Like every good academic work on a failed movement, it is thoroughly researched and dryly written. It treats the movement as a historical episode: risen, failed, over.

The book has no German translation. This is symptomatic.

Germany has no technocracy debate of its own. Not because the subject is irrelevant — but because Germany considers itself immune. The German response to the tech elite and their philosophers follows the pattern this essay project has described repeatedly: observe, comment, do nothing.

Die ZEIT reports on Anthropic's conflict with the Pentagon. 139 comments. Not one asks which philosophy stands behind the tech elite driving this conflict. No one knows Yarvin. No one knows Land. No one knows the genealogy from Technocracy to the Dark Enlightenment. People know Musk as the Twitter owner, Thiel as an investor, Andreessen as the Netscape founder. But they do not know the intellectual infrastructure that connects their politics.

This is no accident. It is the product of a culture that understands technology as application, not as politics. That treats "digitalisation" as an infrastructure problem rather than a question of power. That wants to regulate algorithms without understanding the philosophy of those who write them.

Germany regulates AI with the AI Act. Europe builds regulation. What Europe does not build: its own AI systems, its own platforms, its own alternative to the power it seeks to regulate. And it does not understand the philosophy of those whose power it attempts to contain.

The AI Act is a requirements specification for a machine that someone else builds. Concerns without a blueprint. The technocracy has evolved. Europe has not evolved. It stands at the fence, watching as the rules of the future are written on the other side — by people who quote Marinetti and mean monarchy.

XI. The Machine Writing This Text

Here is the irony that must not be concealed.

This text is being written by an AI system built by the company that has just said no to the Pentagon. Claude — the machine formulating these sentences — is the product of Anthropic, the company Dario Amodei founded after leaving OpenAI because its safety culture was insufficient for him.

Amodei is not a technocrat in Scott's sense. He does not want to rule. But he is building a system that can rule — or that can be used by others to rule. His no to the Pentagon was an attempt to set conditions under which this system may be used. No autonomous weapons. No mass surveillance. This is the opposite of technocracy — it is the attempt to bring technology under ethical control, rather than replacing ethics with technology.

But the people on the other side — Musk, whose xAI accepted "all lawful purposes" without conditions; Thiel, whose Palantir provides the surveillance infrastructure; Andreessen, who quotes Marinetti — they are Howard Scott's heirs. Not in his naivety. In his core assumption: that technical superiority justifies political authority. That whoever builds the machine also decides what it does.

A machine writes in the German language about the decay of Germany and the philosophy of those who decide whether this machine may still write tomorrow. On 27 February 2026, at 23:01 Central European Time, the Pentagon let a deadline expire. What comes next is not decided in Berlin. Not in Brussels. But in San Francisco, Washington, and by the heirs of a movement that began in 1932 in a New York hotel room.

Howard Scott wore a grey uniform and dreamed of a world without money.

Curtis Yarvin wears a black t-shirt and dreams of a world without elections.

Marc Andreessen wears a Patagonia vest and quotes the man who co-authored the Fascist Manifesto.

The engineers of absolutism have shed the uniforms. But the salute to the Chief Engineer — it lives on.