# Technocracy Incorporated The membership organization [[Howard Scott]] and M. King Hubbert founded in New York in 1933 to campaign for replacing democratic government, money and the price system with rule by engineers. It is the organized form of the [[Technocracy]] movement, and the group [[Elon Musk]]'s maternal grandfather [[Joshua Haldeman]] helped lead in Canada from 1936 to 1941. ## Lineage [[Frederick Winslow Taylor]]'s [[Scientific Management]] → Henry Gantt's The New Machine (1916) and [[Thorstein Veblen]]'s *The Engineers and the Price System* (1921) → Scott's Technical Alliance (1919–21) → the Columbia energy survey (1931–33) → Technocracy Inc. (1933). Britannica traces the movement's origins to Taylor and names Gantt, Veblen and Scott as the writers who argued "that control of industry should thus be given to engineers." ## The program - **The Technate.** A single engineer-run state covering North America, which Wikipedia describes as "from Panama to the North Pole." There would be no politicians, no business owners and no money. CBC: "There would be no politicians, business people, money or income inequality." - **Energy certificates.** Total energy consumption divided equally among citizens over 25, issued as certificates that expire at the end of each period so nothing can be saved or hoarded. - **Rule by function.** Jill Lepore's 2025 *New York Times* essay reports that the program would "eliminate most government services" and abolish "90 percent of the courts," and that members were known by numbers. - **Look and feel.** Members, men and women, wore tailored grey suits and drove cars painted grey (CBC). In 1941 the group flooded the U.S. with ads of identical grey cars and uniforms, which observers read as fascist styling (Wikipedia). ## Canada and the ban Canada banned the group in 1940 as part of a wartime sweep of organizations considered subversive. Haldeman was arrested in October 1940 under the Defence of Canada Regulations. Details and source discrepancies are on [[Joshua Haldeman]]. ## Why it matters now - **The Musk inheritance.** Haldeman's Technocracy past became a mainstream frame for reading Musk during his 2025 DOGE tenure (see [[DOGE Ecosystem]]). Historian Jill Lepore argued in the *New York Times* (April 4, 2025) that Muskism is recycled technocracy, pairing Haldeman's proposed efficiency agency with DOGE. Lepore is drawing a parallel. There is no documented statement by Musk crediting his grandfather's movement. - **The engineer's claim to rule.** The same argument, that democratic politics is the inefficiency and the people who build things should run things, runs through the tech right's "rule by builders" rhetoric. See [[Technocracy]] (right-wing critiques and embraces), [[Fortress Futurism]] and [[Muskism]], whose authors call late-apartheid South Africa a prototype "reactionary technocracy." ## See Also - [[Howard Scott]] · [[Joshua Haldeman]] · [[Elon Musk]] - [[Technocracy]] · [[Scientific Management]] · [[Frederick Winslow Taylor]] - [[Fortress Futurism]] · [[Muskism]] · [[DOGE Ecosystem]]