Dearest friends,
Witness the city of steel and silicon. Prostrate yourself before the throne of code.
Do you see the many petitioners? Do you see the glories which have been wrought?
To land in SJC is to land in another world. The air is thick with the scent of hierarchy.
The Second Estate lives. It reigns. All fall beneath it.
The machine men drink deep of globohomo and commune with the spirit of transcendent aristocracy.
It is strong.
It is confident.
It is hateful.
And it will not be denied.
In order to successfully reach the elite, a group needs strong asabiya. It must have the unity to form a meaningful organization. It must have the unity to assert one shared narrative of gentility, lest it be relegated to the category of mere “labor”. And ultimately, it must have unity of purpose, to be able to assert the necessity of its mission to the existing elite, and if need be, the unity to wage a war against it, just as the doctors defeated the old families of France and their ancient fortunes, subsuming them into their group. At long last, engineering has done so.
But a group with the asabiya to do all of this has the asabiya to go further. Just as border people do not stay at their border, so too do prospective elites not stay within their niche. The border men soon turn their sights on new conquests and back towards the center. So too did the men of machines.
In 1968, there was a crisis, a crisis that needed to be solved for the glory of the empire. Talented men flocked to the field to solve the crisis. They developed their own group identity. It had its own culture, a sort of nerd culture, which was in some ways traditionally elitist and aristocratic, loving board games, learning, and disdaining the masses, but also in many ways new. It was excluded from power. But economic necessity grew its strength, year by year. It yearned to be accepted. Bill Gates made electronics popular, then Steve Jobs made them cool. It became acceptable for a young Harvard grad to go into tech.
The men of machines went further, just like the men of medicine before them. In the end, the men of medicine sought to remake society in their own image. They changed the societal narrative to a biological one. So too did the men of machines go and take other industries. What is the difference between Uber and a taxi service? What is the difference between AirBnB and traditional hospitality? The difference lies in the narrative. The former are “tech companies”. That means they embody the tech company ethos, not the ethos of taxis or hotels. Tech went off the reservation. Bankers became quants, half-math and half-man. Trades went higher and higher frequency. Everything was and is to be technocratized. The words of the machine men went back to the center, to the Establishment. Everything would become agile. Everything needed management metrics. Everything would be technological, rational, data-driven. The Cloud had come, and Big Data was its prophet.
This is another turning of the elite cycle. Big whoop. It happens all the time. Why is it significant now?
Because of *why* Anglo society rejected the message of the machine men. Machines are things to be manipulated and changed to suit one’s purposes. Inputs and outputs. But in a land of sacred individuality and liberty, men could never be reduced to mere numbers.
This isn’t just a turning of the elite cycle. It is also a turning of our color cycle. The sacred ideology of liberty has been overturned. And so, the machine men reign. The machine men, the engineers, will most likely be the elites leading us through the final days of this stage of the color cycle, the final secular cycle of Anglo liberty, and into the brave new world that comes afterwards. In between, there will be conflict, and possibly even civil war. The empire long united…
The years will pass, and there will be cycles past that. Who will succeed the engineers? Nobody knows. But nerd culture is fascinated with Megacorporations and a marketized world. Everything for sale. No rights but property rights. What a world that would be. Such would be the work of Mad Men.
Writes articles just to make shitty puns,
Monsieur le Baron
So where are the engineers holding power? Any recent presidential candiates who were engineers? Senators? Governors? Judges? CIA (FBI, NSA etc) departments heads?
There are rich engineers, but can you give any examples of powerful engineers?
There are eight engineers in Congress, which is not terribly high, but also doesn’t compare unfavorably to physicians at the height of their influence on public discourse and policy. What engineers are getting is class status, which is strongly heritable, and money to lobby, but hereditary elites aren’t the same as government leaders. In a democracy, that’s going to be weighted towards the charismatic.
I think money power and network power is very real. Nobody scoffs at the reach of bankers, for instance.
Were physicians ever influential on public discourse and policy? I don’t know. Maybe. I am also very sceptcial that engineers are nowadays more influential than 20 years ago.
What I do know is that the power and influence of human resources and politcial correctness grew. Neither engineers nor physicians profited .
>Were physicians ever influential on public discourse and policy? I don’t know. Maybe.
Yes, very. The Progressive era and early 20th century politics was full of public health measures and attempts to improve the state of society biologically. This culminated in the eugenic policies of Nazi Germany.
>I am also very sceptcial that engineers are nowadays more influential than 20 years ago.
Tech is everywhere, taking over industry after industry. This is the flowering of the Information Age. The last time industries were disrupted like this was during the minting of the first engineering noble families, the Industrial Revolution. The First Technocracy.
>What I do know is that the power and influence of human resources and politcial correctness grew
True, but a different dynamic. HR is the running dog lackies of the Cathedral, not elites.