The energy was palpable that day as hundreds of people pushed into the hotel ballroom. Many wearing grey coveralls, smiling, hopeful and showing the conviction of their vision. The Chief Engineer was speaking that morning. The world was about to become a better place. It was 1933 in California.

Nearly a century later, this time with hoodies and t-shirts with slogans, people similarly poured into a hotel ballroom. the Head of Engineering for one of the larger AI companies was about to speak. The world was about to become a better place.

That first effervescent event in 1933 was for the Technocracy movement. The one in the early 2020’s was the e/acc (Effective Accelerationist) movement. Both times, these movements held their deepest convictions that anyone who questions the plan simply doesn’t understand technology, physics. So the names may change, but the pattern hasn’t.

This is an essay looking at the evolution of the Technocracy ideals to today’s e/acc movement. It is not so much to criticise them as to help people understand this movement and also why, ultimately, e/acc will fail just Technocracy did. Not because of their ideology (that doesn’t help) but because of the broader invisible hand of culture and the realities of being human.

The Technocracy Movement

This movement started around 1919, after WWI by Howard Scott, an American born in 1890. By 1931, with some others, he’d formed Technocracy Inc., which was created to promote his ideas of a society run by engineers as he considered a society run by government and industry as wasteful. Boiled down, Technocrats thought the idea of money was a bit silly, and that energy was a much better form of fiat. More measurable and understandable, more concrete.

Are you picking up some inklings of cryptocurrencies, blockchain and modern day technofeudalism here? There’s a reason for that.

The ideas of technocracy received a fair bit of attention in the USA and Canada in the early 1930s as the markets collapsed and the Great Depression began to take hold. So one can understand that in a time of desperation of massive social change, such ideas might seem ideal. They proposed society should be run by scientists, engineers and business people, that partisan politics was pointless. A society run by technical experts was much preferable, more rational, more productive.

The technocracy movement created grey uniforms, an official salute to the Chief Engineer Howard Scott, its own lexicon and icons, calling its adherents Technates and employing the Monad, a tai-chi like symbol. They published articles in newspapers and created propaganda material. In the end, this all only served to alienate the public. By 1933 the movement had essentially collapsed and was resigned to the dustbin of history.

The Effective Accelerationist Movement

Fast forward to today and the uniforms are hoodies and the symbol is e/acc, often found being used on X (Twitter) handles and other social media. They too have their own lexicon. Those opposed to its ideology are considered “doomers” and “decels”. They have their own manifesto, which Henry Farell, a political scientist at John Hopkins University called a “Nicene creed for the cult of progress.” Perhaps apt.

Farell’s view is based partly on how many times Andreeson, in his now famous (infamous?) manifesto used the words “I believe” 113 times, similar to the same use of these words in the original liturgy of the Christian text.

The most notable faces of this movement today are Marc Andreeson a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, among a few others. This movement believes unrestricted technological progress (especially driven by AI), is the best solution for human problems such as poverty, war and climate change.

There is some degree of organising for the e/acc movement, but is fairly loose with various factions and not a cohesive ideology, but nonetheless highly influential in American politics given the money behind it’s prophets. Andreeson has even referenced the technocracy ideologies and views in his writings.

Andreessen lists the “patron saints” of this e/acc techno-optimism, and they include Nick Land, one of the chief architects of modern “accelerationism” who is better known as championing the anti-democratic Dark Enlightenment movement. Andreessen also calls out Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as one of his patron saints. Marinetti is not only the author of the Futurist Manifesto from 1909, but also one of the architects of Italian fascism.

Similar to the Technocracy movements idea of forming a “Technate” bringing together the USA, Canada and Mexico, today’s e/acc billionaires are trying to build small city states, based on the e/acc manifesto. They’re not doing that well, but points for trying.

Whey the e/acc Movement Will Fail

While today’s e/acc technocrats are highly influential and exceedingly wealthy, the movement is unlikely to grow and survive over the longer term. And the ultimate reason for their rejection will be culture.

Their spearhead technology for their idea of a techno-utopia is Artificial Intelligence (AI), but that is already facing pushback in societies around the world. In 2025, 43% of Americans believed that AI is more likely to harm them than help according to a Pew study. To fuel the rise of AI, massive data centres are needed. But they are being rejected in American towns for their use of fragile water resources, hunger for energy that’s increasingly being put on rate payers and the negative effects on peoples mental and physical health who live close to these data centres.

Those running, if you will, this e/acc movement are societal elites. Super wealthy and by broader society seen as aloof and disconnected from the realities of most people trying to put food on the table. The public is not invited into their rituals and thus can only watch, skeptically, from the outside.

None of those leading the e/acc movement have made much, if any, attempt to engage with broader society. They’re absolute in their ideology and have little regard for the general public. This has never gone very well for elites taking this approach in history. Their assumption conflates exchange with value. Assuming that what benefits capital benefits humanity. The technocracy movement made the same mistake. One might be tempted to call them a cult, but they don’t really fit that description, it’s more of a movement.

The e/acc movement is also very one dimensional in its thinking, seeing the world as linear when it’s very much non-linear. That everything humans do can be reduced to code. That’s culture on a diet. The sneering at “doomers” and “decels” doesn’t help either. It eliminates any form of discourse about choice and agency. Societies don’t tend to like this very much.

The e/acc movement is creating myths that the rest of society doesn’t want to believe. Societies rise starting with myths that become stories that become narratives that a large group of people buy into. Hence we have countries. So far, the e/acc movement has created a lot of myths and they’re not turning into stories because broader society doesn’t really care for them.

The technocracy movement of the 1930s, despite enormous popular attention during the Depression, collapsed because:

1. It required ordinary people to cede agency to an engineering elite
2. It treated humans as optimization problems rather than meaning- making beings
3. It developed cult-like features that alienated the broader public
4. It couldn’t answer basic questions about human values and purpose

E/acc is repeating every single one of these errors, with the added complication that its intellectual lineage includes explicitly anti-democratic and even proto-fascist thinkers.

Today’s moral panic over AI and technology’s role in society, regulatory and legal pushbacks, data centre protests, these aren’t irrational resistance to progress, they’re a cultural immune response to a mind virus it doesn’t like.

Culture isn’t the obstacle to technological progress. Culture is the evolutionary system that determines which technologies get integrated and which get rejected. E/acc faces cultural structural barriers not because people are irrational, but because culture has learned, across millennia and many societal shifts, to recognize when “progress” means ordinary people ceding agency to technical elites who promise salvation.