Technology, Technocracy Technate, Tech Bros

An interest in technology goes way back in US history. Think of Benjamin Franklin, Robert Fulton, Eli Whitney, Samuel Morse. But, technocracy? It was a movement that became prominent during the 1930s during the Great Depression that proposed replacing democracy and civil servants with scientists and engineers under a regime called ‘technate”. Most government services would be eliminated, even the postal service, highways and the Coast Guard, replaced by efficient private concerns.

Eventually the technocracy movement splintered. One branch veered off into a kind of fascism where members wore identical gray suits and drove identical gray cars. Elon Musk’s Canadian maternal grandfather was a member of the technocracy movement. In 1950 he moved to South Africa because he liked the apartheid system: he appreciated its rejection of the idea of the equality of races. Elon Musk left South Africa for Canada in 1989 and became a tech entrepreneur in the 1990s.

So here we are today: we know Elon Musk by his deeds, and we know something about influences on him.

Source: The New York Times, Opinion Section, article by Jill Lepore, Professor of history and Law at Harvard, 4/6/25