Grandfather’s Sons: Technocracy Inc. Vs. American System
Government investment, spurred by necessity and law fare, has driven the successes of Musk and Thiel’s government contracting empire.
“My father always said ‘There’s nothing a Haldeman can’t do.’ And that is what I have always believed, and my siblings too. I have probably shown that to my own children. Now there’s nothing a Musk can’t do.” — Maye Musk, mother to Elon Musk.
In the spirit of full disclosure: I’ve met Elon Musk on a few occasions but we aren’t terribly close. I’m about one or two degrees from him through the PayPal mafia and through many of his employees and investors. Many of them remain close friends.
In this piece we will discuss the following themes:
Technocracy as an ideology against Americanism
New frontiers — Man vs. Nature — and closed frontiers — Man vs. Man (or Man vs. Government).
The legal system kicking down the door of government contracting.
We’ve explored the family ties of the hitherto richest man — Jeff Bezos — previously.
We poked around on his grandfather who raised him. Fourth employee at DARPA. Atomic Energy Commission. You get the idea. Jeff Bezos, the child prodigy, was raised by his grandfather out on farm out in West Texas.
When you learn that Jeff Bezos’s Amazon runs the CIA’s servers it starts to pop into focus. Like grandfather, like grandson. The secrets to the universe are hidden in the family trees.
This is likely true for you, too, if you care to think about it. And if you do, I’d highly recommend the work of Professor Gregory Clark whose A Farewell to Alms (2007) and The Son Also Rises (2014), points to how unlikely intergenerational social change actually is.
This seems odd to us, a nation of settlers and immigrants, but is it really so weird? Many of us don’t know our grandparents all that well. They might have died. Or come from a foreign culture.
Nor are we often tested as they are — Greatest Generation and all that — but it’s my view that a lot of traits skip generations and come into view when you take a look at it from its totality. Only by plumbing the depths of our genealogy might we discover who we are and who we might become. Many of us don’t want to look too closely there.
One day we may well know what is it about our material existence — our DNA — that makes some people successful and some not so much. Maybe we can even treat it with CRISPR. Or through associative mating. The future isn’t a strait jacket. Nor are genetics your fate. No one is born with an expiration date. The vagaries of chance or circumstance have their place.
But genealogy does give an indication of what we might become if given the right opportunities or placed in the right environment — something high agency people tend to do quite often. It is they who are the prime movers. We respect the entrepreneur but he is not a god — though he may often want us to think him that way, so that we mere mortals might never attempt what he has attempted.
No, we do not believe as the technocrats do — that “[t]echnocracy makes one basic postulate: that the phenomena involved in the functional operation of social mechanism are metrical.”
From a family belief over technocracy to a fear of AI’s coming domination I find myself a heretic. Human beings are delightfully weird. That’s what makes us worth having around. I share John Browne’s view that A.I. can only track that which has happened before but life (and living) is a series of things that never happened before, at least for us. Besides, the only AI I know of that’s killing people is the one in Tesla’s cars — and the federal government is investigating.
Yes, I reject cults and cult leaders in all their guises. I believe in the use of technology to empower the good among us and not enslave the weak through their vices. Above all, I believe in American technological excellence to solve world problems. Technology must be made American. Technology titans have responsibilities whether they like it or not.
In any event, let’s now explore the family history of Elon Musk, who recently displaced Bezos as the world’s richest man, and who was just named Time’s Person of the Year.
We can begin with his grandfather, Joe Haldeman, a leader of the technocracy movement. You might argue that Musk is its largest practitioner as others indeed have.
Haldeman is Elon Musk’s American-born Canadian grandfather. He’s also from Musk’s maternal side, the side that Musk is closest to though I can’t find evidence that the two ever met. (Haldeman shared a love of flying with Musk and died tragically in a plane crash.)
Why do we care about Musk’s grandfather? We believe it reflects interestingly upon Elon’s behavior. One of our contentions here is that politics is highly heritable. So, too, is behavior, intelligence, and personality. Examining Musk’s grandfather is a way of understanding him.
Who is Haldeman? He is a chiropractor and a risk taker — in business, in politics, and even in personal safety.
He was even jailed for his political beliefs. In Canada!
Only after Haldeman had essentially recanted views against military service was Haldeman allowed to leave.
Technocracy was rightly understood as a threat to the Canadian body politic. It was government by engineers for engineers. (And that, incidentally, is exactly how Musk describes himself. “I usually describe myself as an engineer. That’s basically what I’ve been doing since I was a kid.”)
You can listen to a rather interesting discussion about technocracy in Canada. I highly recommend it.
Here’s how CBC discusses it.
Technocracy Incorporated was not a political movement – in fact, politicians or members of political parties were not allowed to join. It was founded in New York City in 1933 as an educational and research organization promoting a radical restructuring of political, social and economic life in Canada and the United States, with science as its central operating principle.
There would be no politicians, business people, money or income inequality. Those were all features of what Technocracy called the “price system,” and it would have to go.
There would be no countries called Canada or the United States, either – just one giant continental land mass called the Technate, a techno-utopia run by engineers and other “experts” in their fields. In the Technate, everyone would be well-housed and fed. All material needs would be taken care of, whether you had a job or not.
That may well all sound good but it was too much too early and it’s not that much of a stretch to consider Haldeman as a political refugee who ran to South Africa where his adventurous spirit might take on literal new heights and away from the prying eye of the Canadian authorities. (The Canadian authorities rescinded their ban on technocracy without explanation.)
That Musk should come back to Canada after his American-born grandfather had fled the Great White North gives you a sense of his transnational identity. The Musk clan moves where it’s best for them and their businesses and their ideas.
True to form Musk carries a passport from South Africa, Canada, and America. He dodged the draft in his native South Africa before settling at UPenn and then going to California where he promptly dodged the Golden State’s taxes. He’s only too happy to do business with the Russians (on rocket motors) or the Chinese (on rare earth minerals).
It’s often claimed that tech industry was founded by immigrants — this is, of course, self-serving and a way of justifying the endless parade of Indian H1-B workers they bring over and some of whom may even wind up becoming their tech executives. You wanted technocracy but you got the third world and its indifference to our way of life.
It’s more appropriately founded by opportunists whose lack of loyalty, of rootedness, is precisely what makes modern Silicon Valley so politically problematic.
These are miners, not farmers, and it is striking how many of them come from a family whose origins include the extractive industries. Peter Thiel’s father mined the uranium for the Israeli and South African atomic weapons. Musk’s estrange father is also in the mining industry. Perhaps finished mining the earth they’ve decided to mine human beings? Musk’s Neuralink and Thiel’s Facebook and Palantir make you wonder.
While a certain element of the population could well claim that California is ungovernable it’s striking how few VCs even attempted to fix it aside from a few tweets either and there.
Joe Lonsdale of 8VC moved to Austin while Keith Rabois moved to Miami and Ben Horowitz of Andreeessen Horowitz to Las Vegas. Even noted liberal Chris Sacca lives in Wyoming. All of these locales have no income tax. The more audacious of these types decamp to Puerto Rico where federal taxes are lower still. These “wherever” people telecommute and live independent of place. They cannot defend the city in her hour of need.
Silicon Valley largely eschewed investing in several law enforcement and defense related startups when given the chance. They passed on Othram which is systematically solving all of North America’s rapes and murders, and on Clearview, who had to turn to worse sources of money, in its bid to keep America safe. Umbra, with its superior manufacture of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), found no support despite having later won several billion dollar contracts.
Sure, “governance matters” they say but there are plenty of American states where taxes are not at California’s stratospheric level and where one might make a home.
The classics teach us that the Man who has no need of the city is either a beast or a God. What then is the Man who has no need of the Earth?
Musk, too, moved to Brownsville, Texas, where he can be close to his rockets and preferred method of escape. I confess to having grave doubts about the possibility that rockets will make us interplanetary. I suspect that we will ultimately use a rail gun and fire ourselves out beyond the Heavens.
Unlike some other writers I don’t fetishize taxes as an end upon themselves. Taxes are the price we pay for civilization but the power to tax is also the power to destroy so when you are paying for civilization it’s probably best not to destroy anything. The taxman should “tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
I suppose I would prefer more equality amongst our population but I’m not blind to the realities of life. Some of us really are wildly different. This doesn’t, of course, mean that those wildly different people ought to oppress or even enslave the others.
I am even willing to grant that there may well be citizens who are so necessary to the preservation of our liberty that they might even be made exempt from paying them. We might, in our technofeudal world, describe these sorts as technonobility. But they must be noble. As with all nobles they must be willing to take up their duties in our hour and time of need.
Is such a time of need upon us? And who shall decide? It may well be long past what political philosopher Carl Schmitt called the State of Exception which only the sovereign can truly decide. We all must serve a king. What king does Musk serve?
Starship launches notwithstanding Musk has a need of the Earth and of the largesse of what he calls “the most powerful corporation in the world” — the United States government.
Musk claims he’s a better “capital allocator” than the U.S. government. He may well be but Musk’s future owes much to of first the Department of Energy (Tesla) and later NASA (SpaceX) to allocate capital toward him. What’s less explored is the role that SpaceX played in changing contracting law, especially as concerns the U.S. Air Force.
Now don’t get me wrong I’d much rather have solar panels, electric cars, and rockets than corporate welfare schemes for the defense or oil industry, say, but part of the way to get more companies that provide key functions like SpaceX or Palantir is to understand how they came to be and not simply to idolize their creators.
Changing the calculus for a government worker to award a federal contract to a startup requires careful finesse.
In my estimation many of the Silicon Valley companies ought not to receive any federal monies whatsoever as their capital stack is often foreign.
This creative use of the law — forcing the government to bid and therefore buy your superior product against the lumbering primes — is a strangely under explored area but that’s exactly what Hamish Hume did by invoking the 1994 Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act on behalf of SpaceX and Palantir. Hume forced the bureaucrats to pick the startup by stressing the requirements that the military has to buy from the private sector.
Here’s how Lizette Chapman described it for Bloomberg News.
In the aftermath of taxpayer outrage over the government's purchases of $640 toilet seats and $7,600 coffee makers, legislators crafted stricter spending rules. The law required agencies to purchase items already available. When those items aren't available, agencies should buy them and modify them or change their own requirements to fit what already exists on the market.
Hume won twice and that makes me wonder:
What would happen if there were a concerted and dedicated push to force the government to adopt cheaper, better technology in the national interest?
Such an effort would necessarily make us more Chinese — we’d have a national manufacturing policy but with American characteristics. I suspect this is always the case between great power conflicts. You always become your enemy just as he becomes you.
Who knows. Before long we might even become a government of engineers working for the common good, dedicating their fortunes and their sacred honor as the American founders before them.
Counterintelligence for billionaires
There’s a national interest in moving to a post-oil economy but there’s also a desire to stop that from happening.
You can see John Doerr making the arguments more forcefully in his new book, Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now. Doerr’s a bit boyish even in his optimism but he revealed a surprising fact in his recent interview with Harry Stebbings claiming that Chinese state involvement in solar energy was why Kleiner Perkins’ climate venture fund did poorly.
The offhanded mention by Doerr of a hostile state affecting his portfolio ought to give us pause. Does this happen often? How many companies depend on the good graces of foreign powers? How many domestic billionaires owe their fortunes to foreign powers?
If you are a petrostate you want to stop the coming electrification of the grid at all costs. Indeed if you are a cold, petrostate like say, Russia, you’d want to accelerate global warming. There will be winners and losers from climate change. That seems to be the argument of science fiction author Neal Stephenson’s new novel Terminal Shock where an enterprising billionaire decides to change the climate on his own. Everyone is going to make his calculus.
Friends around Musk tell me of the constant pressure he’s under and how he’s often targeted by spies from petrostates. I’d believe it. A friend of mine — an ex-CIA officer — quickly quit working for Musk because of concerns of how much Musk plays fast and loose with the law. Perhaps this is always the way with the truly daring entrepreneurs. As I said he’s got that risk taking in his blood.
I’m convinced that the whole situation where Musk was dinged by the SEC was actually the Saudis promising to solve Tesla’s financial (and market induced) woes by taking it private and Musk believing them — rather than some artful financial engineering on Musk’s part.
Other pressure campaigns I’m less sure of.
Steve Jurvetson later removed himself from the Tesla board and he did so in a way to keep his dignity. Like a lot of Estonians — Mart Laar’s infamous secret arms deal comes to mind — Jurvetson gets all too close to Israeli spies. In some cases Jurvetson doesn’t even seem to notice, like when he messes about with the Human Rights Foundation which has very weird ties to the Bronfman sisters.
How should we think of Jurvetson and Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s closeness with the Russians? Jurvetson at least had the good sense to distance himself from Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos but not Tim Draper.
Musk, too, doesn’t do as good a job protecting himself from espionage.
He doesn’t want you to look too close at how large funds (and nations, like China) essentially subsidized the development of his company Tesla and how they are preparing to do onto Tesla’s electric vehicles what they did onto Doerr’s solar cell market.
And while Elon has avowed a sort of libertarianism, decrying the Build Back Better law which has plenty of money in it for electric cars, his strategy of calling for all subsidies to be removed is mighty rich after he got his billions from the taxpayer. Maybe Elon should express the gratitude that Bezos has rather than praise the Chinese communists.
Instead he just whines. He complains about how the Biden Administration will only deal with a unionized workforce rather than mention or presumably buy Teslas. That could well be true. Or maybe, just maybe, Elon, the richest man in the world, could pay his workers better and attract the Biden Administration’s attention in much the same way that Wal-Mart has.
A fair minded observer might conclude that what Musk really wants is a monopoly which could justify his empire’s exorbitant stock prices. He wants to rule the energy transition. I don’t blame him. I agree with Thiel — every business secretly wants to be a monopoly — but governments can’t be letting the future belong to one man.
You can explore the frontier but you don’t get to own the town. There’s a lot of money pouring into rocket launches and electric vehicles. Good.
Thanks, Elon, for getting us going. We will take it from here.