Engineer's Disease* Writ Large (Which We're All Now Suffering From)
February 26, 2025 11:59 PM   Subscribe

Silicon Valley's Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions [ungated] - "The tech 'canon' of books and ideas over-indexes on great men and celebrates small teams that changed the world."
Mightn’t everything be better if visionary engineers had their way, replacing all the messy, squalid compromises of politics with radical innovation and purpose-engineered efficient systems?

One book on the list argues this and more. James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual[1] cheered on the dynamic, wealth-creating individuals who would use cyberspace to exit corrupt democracies, with their “constituencies of losers,” and create their own political order. When the book, originally published in 1997, was reissued in 2020, Thiel wrote the preface.

Under this simplifying grand narrative, the federal state was at best another inefficient industry that was ripe for disruption. At worst, national government and representative democracy were impediments that needed to be swept away, as Davidson and Rees-Mogg had argued. From there, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump to even more extreme ideas that, while not formally in the canon, have come to define the tech right.

In 2013, Balaji Srinivasan, a homegrown intellectual and entrepreneur, gave a Y Combinator speech arguing that Silicon Valley had to escape or subvert the control of the East Coast “Paper Belt,” which deployed government bureaucracy to stifle innovation. He was quickly offered a job by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin argued that all government employees should be “retired” and entrepreneurs should become monarchs. Yarvin was plucked from blogging obscurity by Thiel and is now interviewed by publications like the New York Times and cited as an influence by JD Vance.

[...]

Seeing Like a State[2,3,4], properly understood, is a warning not just to bureaucrats but to social engineers writ large. From Scott’s broader perspective, AI is not a solution, but a swift way to make the problem worse. It will replace the gross simplifications of bureaucracy with incomprehensible abstractions that have been filtered through the “hidden layers”[5] of artificial neurons that allow it to work. DOGE’s artificial-intelligence-fueled vision of government is a vision from Franz Kafka, not Friedrich Hayek.

DOGE’s attempt to remake government in the image of Silicon Valley will not be the apotheosis of the engineering ideal that Musk hopes for. Even some sympathetic Silicon Valley elites, including Graham, are visibly nervous that it will end in calamity. It may become an object lesson in the importance of all the questions that should be asked by the canon but are not.

Canons create miniature universes of discourse, which emphasize some values and choices while de-emphasizing or even concealing others. So what does the Silicon Valley canon sideline or leave out? In short, a respect for pluralism[6] and a suspicion of grand projects, both of which used to be quite common among technologists.
  • Curtis Yarvin on the End of American Democracy - "The once-fringe writer has long argued for an American monarchy. His ideas have found an audience in the incoming administration and Silicon Valley."[7]
  • Elon Musk Is Grabbing Headlines, but This Man May Be Even More Dangerous [ungated] - "OMB director Russell Vought isn't as flashy as Musk. But it's his vision of destroying the federal government that's being put into effect."
  • Trump's Project 2025 agenda caps decades-long resistance to 20th century progressive reform - "Project 2025 does so with particular detail and urgency, hoping to galvanize dramatic change before the midterm elections in 2026. As its foreword warns: 'Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right.' The standard for a transformational '100 days' – a much-used reference point for evaluating an administration – belongs to the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt... Whatever populist trappings the second Trump administration may possess, the bottom line of the conservative cultural and political agenda in 2025 is to dismantle what is left of the New Deal or the Great Society, and to defend unfettered 'free enterprise' against critics and alternatives."
  • The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure - "According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year."
  • The Top 10% - "The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks in this country. They also own 84% of the private businesses, 44% of real estate and two-thirds of overall wealth. These numbers have all increased since 1989 as well — total wealth (60.8% to 67.3%), stocks (81.7% to 87.2%), private businesses (78.4% to 84.4%) and real estate (38.2% to 43.9%). According to The Wall Street Journal, the top 10% also accounts for 50% of all consumer spending. Three decades ago the top 10% made up 36% of spending."
Palantir's Call to Arms Is Also a Sales Pitch - "The Technological Republic, a new book from Palantir CEO Alex Karp, proposes a dark and dismal future."
It’s a major complaint of the authors of The Technological Republic (Crown Currency, Feb. 18) that people today shrink from saying what they think. Too many of us, they insist, give mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy answers when asked. We have become uncomfortable with making moral and aesthetic judgments, they say.

I agree, and I’m going to break the taboos. The Technological Republic is a terrible book: badly written, tedious, and — when they can be gleaned in between the jargon, clichés and repetitions — full of bad ideas, ranging from the merely dubious to the execrable and disturbing. This book is dismal on the level of both form and content. It heralds a dark and depressing future.
also btw...
How humanity lost control - "The guru who made the most progress in building management cybernetics was the counterculture-era management consultant Stafford Beer, whose book Brain of the Firm explored how bureaucracies can be reformed so that the internal flow of information between deciders and decided-upon is kept in balance. Without that, a system will not remain viable and useful to humanity over time."[8,9]
How can we be at least 15 times richer than our pre-industrial Agrarian Age predecessors, and yet so unhappy? One explanation is that we are not wired for it: nothing in our heritage or evolutionary past prepared us to deal with a society of more than 150 people. To operate our increasingly complex technologies and advance our prosperity, we somehow must coordinate among more than eight billion people.

We therefore have built massive societal machines comprising market economies, government and corporate bureaucracies, national and sub-national polities, cultural ideologies, and more. Yet we struggle to fine-tune these institutions, because we simply do not understand them. We are left with a globe-spanning network of profoundly alien leviathans that boss us around and make us unhappy, even as they make us fabulously rich compared to previous generations.

...the best way to reform organizations so that they do not become unaccountability machines is to revive the post-World War II quasi-discipline of management cybernetics. Pioneered by the computer scientist Norbert Wiener and the political scientist Herbert Simon, the approach was named for the Greek word kybernētikos: “good at steering a boat.”

The guru who made the most progress in building management cybernetics was the counterculture-era management consultant Stafford Beer, whose book Brain of the Firm explored how bureaucracies can be reformed so that the internal flow of information between deciders and decided-upon is kept in balance. Without that, a system will not remain viable and useful to humanity over time.

Reviewing The Unaccountability Machine in the Financial Times, Felix Martin describes Davies’ approach as “a kind of psychoanalysis for non-human intelligences, with Stafford Beer as Sigmund Freud.” I could not have said it better. Our social world is no longer confined to our families, our neighbors, our co-workers, and those with whom we directly interact via networks of affection, antipathy, barter and exchange, small-scale planning, and arm-twisting. Instead, more and more of what we do is driven by an extremely complex assembly of vast interlocking social and technological mechanisms that we have made but do not understand.

If the challenge of modernity is to figure out a better way to work and think together as a global community of more than eight billion people, how can we improve our understanding, and thus our control?
---
*previously :P
posted by kliuless (30 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
oh and...
Musk at Trump's First Cabinet Meeting: U.S. Will Go Bankrupt Without DOGE
posted by kliuless at 12:34 AM on February 27


I'm about a third of the way into The Sovereign Individual and kind of wish I had read it when it came out. I hope in retrospect I would have been sharp enough to puncture the ridiculousness of it all, but I kind of doubt it. Now it seems as if we have wildly overshot, with "all" of their clever predictions coming "true" and yet the car carrying sleek right-thinking low-tax micro ai-driven sea-steading strong-man-theory singularity-prepper statesmen turns out to be full of [dangerous] clowns.
posted by chavenet at 12:51 AM on February 27 [2 favorites]


otoh...
-Tesla Feels the Wrath of Anti-Elon Musk Backlash
-Tesla Sales Decline in California With Model 3 Plunging 36%
-Tesla sales tumble across Europe as Elon Musk's brand changes from cars to politics
-Tesla sales almost halved in Europe last month and were surpassed by a Chinese rival
-Tesla car sales in China fall 11.5% as competition intensifies
-Tesla's departure from reality, in one chart [viz. cf.]
posted by kliuless at 1:01 AM on February 27 [9 favorites]


Musk doesn't need Tesla anymore... he's probably skimming millions (dare we say billions?) from the government while also using X to shakedown companies.
posted by kokaku at 3:11 AM on February 27 [10 favorites]


is it really engineers disease, or an explicit power grab? engineers disease is giving these fascists way too much credit.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 3:11 AM on February 27 [16 favorites]


why not both? there's definitely a mindset of oversimplification and binary thinking that shows up repeatedly with them. not all of those suffering from Engineers Diseaze are fascists tho. a lot of them are just clueless and arrogant and maybe more prone to finding the fascists appealing.
posted by kokaku at 3:13 AM on February 27 [4 favorites]


Love hearing about someone reading Seeing Like a State as an instruction manual. But I think this bit is wrong: "It will replace the gross simplifications of bureaucracy with incomprehensible abstractions that have been filtered through the 'hidden layers' of artificial neurons that allow it to work."

"Hidden" was probably a bad choice of words. As we (as consumers, as citizens) begin to realize how many neural networks are at play in our lives, "hidden" takes on a sinister undertone, but it shouldn't. It just means the layers between input and output. They're "hidden" because they're not the parts you see and interact with directly, but they're not covering up some eldritch evil or anything.

But let's be real, bureaucracy has hidden layers too. Our every interaction with the government hints at a machinery we can never see or touch. It's too big, too complex, and nobody knows how it all fits together. It's one of those parts of our world that is totally unaccountable to democratic sentiment. The whole problem with DOGE (well, one of the problems) is that these guys don't care about how it works. They're Mr. Burns doing brain surgery with an ice-cream scoop. But if we were an altruistic band of socialists taking over the government, we'd run into the same problem. "Why don't we just--" and everything collapses.
posted by mittens at 3:40 AM on February 27 [2 favorites]


Calling it Engineer's Disease is funny because tech guys are not engineers. If they went to college, they studied computer science or management information systems, not engineering. Not a single PE certification among them. They don't know how to actually build a damn thing that's useful, just apps like Illegal Taxi or Fake Hotel. (::old man shouts at cloud::)
posted by hydropsyche at 3:54 AM on February 27 [43 favorites]


Elon Musk is not an engineer.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:26 AM on February 27 [20 favorites]


I'm glad there's finally an article contrasting the tech scenes in Silly Valley versus Camberville, because it really is a thing that you can't not see if you;'ve been to both places.
posted by ocschwar at 4:32 AM on February 27 [1 favorite]


is it really engineers disease, or an explicit power grab?

It isn't. The people we're talking about are tech adjacent and loaded with money, but that does not make them engineers.
posted by ocschwar at 4:33 AM on February 27 [1 favorite]


Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I don't recognize many books on that reading list so maybe I'm wrong, but my brain started singing "One of these things is not like the other."
posted by kitcat at 4:34 AM on February 27 [3 favorites]


Yup. And you'd think Pirsig's book would be a decent antidote to the rest of the reading list, but I doubt anyone reading it as part of this canon is reading it very closely.
posted by ocschwar at 5:07 AM on February 27 [4 favorites]


I am shockingly upset by that reading list and I can't put it out of my mind. Will the world have no more of those most beloved male programmers who know everything, will be the best mentor you ever had, are generally very kind and thoughtful and who liked to read, like, Robert Heinlein and Douglas Adams?

(Yes there is also a similar breed of now-older woman in tech and I adore her too)
posted by kitcat at 6:02 AM on February 27 [3 favorites]


For a lot more in depth research on this topic, I highly recommend Gil Duran's The Nerd Reich newsletter and website about tech authoritarianism, billionaire extremism, the Network State and the meta politics of California. posted by rambling wanderlust at 7:24 AM on February 27 [6 favorites]


(neo)reactionary modernism?*
The idea of a state run by a master engineering class — walled in from public disapproval or market forces, charged with rearming the nation and leading a revitalized “collective” nationalist project — might lead to some discomfiting parallels that the authors would be careful to disown. In fact, what they are proposing is the ideology that historian Jeffrey Herf called “reactionary modernism,” which he saw emerging from the Weimar period: “They called for a revolution from the Right that would restore the primacy of politics and the state over economics and the market, and thereby restore the ties between romanticism and rearmament in Germany.”

There is almost nothing in the reactionary modernist program that can’t be found in Karp and Zamiska. The nostalgia for lost national greatness, the disdain for markets and effete consumerism in favor of state direction and industrial production, the romantic fixation on technologically advanced armaments, the near-deification of the engineer as the spiritual leadership class of this dark Utopia — it’s all there. One would think the authors would shy away from the inevitable comparisons, but they walk right up to them instead.
posted by kliuless at 7:26 AM on February 27 [3 favorites]


> I highly recommend Gil Duran's The Nerd Reich newsletter

thanks, i've read/heard duran before -- and the 'nerd reich' -- but didn't know about that.
posted by kliuless at 7:47 AM on February 27


I think Douglas Adams nailed it. Some guy in a shack with a cat should be in charge. Maybe the cat.
posted by skippyhacker at 7:51 AM on February 27 [6 favorites]


Maybe twenty-four unrecognized saints; or possibly their cats.

In the skein of no-true-engineers, somewhere in the oughts the people around me who were becoming techbros no longer knew about uncomputability or even big-O and its threats. Total faith that anything was solvable with enough “compute”.


In hindsight I wonder if any of them had once known and then forgot. Belief, salary, etc.
posted by clew at 8:51 AM on February 27 [2 favorites]


Mod note: Added USPolitics tag
posted by loup (staff) at 9:08 AM on February 27


Techbrocrats.
posted by biffa at 9:21 AM on February 27


Necrobrats.
posted by clew at 9:34 AM on February 27 [2 favorites]


One of society's greatest mistakes was treating programmers as if they were smart about anything besides programming.

It was probably also a mistake to treat programmers as if they were smart about programming, but that's kind of a separate issue.
posted by mhum at 10:13 AM on February 27 [11 favorites]


He’d been provoked when the writer and technologist Jasmine Sun asked why James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, an anarchist denunciation of grand structures of government, had become a “Silicon Valley bookshelf fixture.”

I've been meaning to read Seeing Like a State for a while now, but I'd not been aware it was anything like a denunciation. I figured it was akin to Dictator's Handbook, which is much higher up on my list (courtesy of CGP Grey). A fintech blogs I've read discussing banking regulations cite it, and so I assumed it was descriptive rather than proscriptive. But skimming its Wikipedia page, the subtitle--"How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed "--suggests differently. Further skimming suggests a fairly standard libertarian argument, with a framing that standardized reporting ("legibility") erodes important facts about local conditions.

Which sounds like a typical argument for US style federalism but so often in politics what is said doesn't match what is meant, so I'll accept the received wisdom and prioritize accordingly.

FWIW, the actual reading list. AFAICT, 0 of them are posted to FanFare, but also 0 of them were published after fanfare launched so maybe I shouldn't be too surprised?
posted by pwnguin at 10:33 AM on February 27


One of society's greatest mistakes was treating programmers as if they were smart about anything besides programming.

Programmers are well paid and generally college graduates, and 'society' takes the desires of the wealthy college graduates above all others - actual engineers are included in this subset. Programmers are just the current boogeyman of a process that has been happening for at least 50 years. Bankers, financiers, etc are the earlier version.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:18 PM on February 27


But skimming its Wikipedia page, the subtitle--"How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed "--suggests differently. Further skimming suggests a fairly standard libertarian argument, with a framing that standardized reporting ("legibility") erodes important facts about local conditions.

I didn't take much libertarianism from my reading of Seeing Like A State (and never even considered it as a libertarian resource, most people I know who bothered to read it are progressives). It's a cautionary tale of the impact of trying to force nuanced local context into some form that can be understood by a distant overseer. The fact that SV people think it is an argument against the state but somehow not an argument against their own surveillance capitalism is absurd; my personal theory is that almost none of them actually read the book (because while parts of it are interesting, it's also very long and gets quite boring). It would be a shame if people gave up on the book entirely because these idiots are misunderstanding it.
posted by ch1x0r at 3:35 PM on February 27 [4 favorites]


A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

From the song IGY (International Geophysical Year), on the 1982 album The Nightfly, by Donald Fagen.
posted by Pouteria at 4:01 PM on February 27 [3 favorites]


Yeah, Scott is an anarchist and his book is all about how people with power want to make the terrain look like the map in their head, and wreck the terrain in the process. I'm entirely confident that Scott would point to the ongoing destruction of our bureaucracy as exactly the kind of scheme that fails, because the bureaucracy has spent decades evolving, fixing edge cases, etc. to make legislators' half-baked schemes actually work. However awful and cumbersome that bureaucracy may be, it can't be turned off and back on any more than a forest can.

Musk and the Project 2025 authors are fully aware of that, of course.
posted by McBearclaw at 4:02 PM on February 27 [2 favorites]


Well... maybe not Musk.
posted by McBearclaw at 4:07 PM on February 27 [1 favorite]


All moribundly convergent SF ideologies on Collinson's list. I am reminded of Moorcock's 1977 "Starship Stormtroopers":

If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkein or Richard Adams.
posted by meehawl at 11:19 AM on March 11


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