If the current state of U.S. geopolitics feels like a fever dream where SimCity meets Boardwalk Empire, you’re not alone. Between talk of annexing Greenland, a renewed obsession with efficiency über alles, and a brief flirtation with a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) helmed by the tech world’s favorite troll-in-chief, it’s tempting to dismiss it all as late-stage carnival politics.
Highlights
- Technocracy Incorporated in the 1930s sought to replace elected governments with engineers and scientists to run a unified North America.
- Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman, was an active supporter of the Canadian technocracy movement during the 1930s and '40s.
- A 1940 political map titled Technate of America visualized the U.S., Canada, Greenland, Central America, and the Caribbean as one.
- Modern U.S. politics echoes technocratic ideals, prioritizing expertise and efficiency over democratic consent and oversight.
- Technocratic governance today risks turning human lives into data points, as seen in military AI use and colonial-style management of Palestinians.
But the shadow guiding these moves isn’t new. It has teeth, history, and an uncomfortable ancestry stretching back to the Great Depression, when a movement attempted to reorganize North America into a single technocratic unit.
And yes, Elon Musk’s grandfather was involved.
Musk and Trump in the Oval Office in 2025. Image credits: The White House
So let’s unpack this tangle of past and present, with rhetorical eye-rolls where appropriate.
The original technocrats: Nerds in gray overalls with a god complex
In the 1930s, amid economic collapse and political chaos, a group calling itself Technocracy Incorporated argued that elected governments were hopelessly inefficient and that engineers and scientists should run society instead. Algorithms, after all, never have ethics problems. Allegedly.
They envisioned merging the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Greenland into a single continental entity called the Technate of America. Borders were irrational. Democracy was inefficient. Expertise would rule.
This was not fringe crankery. The movement attracted thousands of followers, held lectures, published pamphlets, and generated enough concern that the Canadian government banned it in 1940 as a threat to national stability.
Technate of America map (1940). Image credits: Scott, Howard
Technocrats imagined a world where resources were allocated scientifically, human labor was eventually unnecessary, and decisions were made by experts unburdened by democratic input. Engineers as rulers. Scientists as sovereigns. Politicians quietly swept aside.
If that sounds like Silicon Valley’s wet dream, that’s because it basically was.
Joshua Haldeman: The man, the legend, the family reunion
Here’s where it gets awkward. One prominent member of Technocracy’s Canadian branch was Joshua N. Haldeman, the maternal grandfather of Elon Musk. Haldeman was not a passive sympathizer; he was an active supporter whose political work in Saskatchewan aligned closely with technocratic ideals in the 1930s and 1940s.
This isn’t conspiracy or guilt-by-association. It’s documented history. Nobody is arguing Musk is following a family manifesto, but cultural lineages matter. Ideas don’t vanish just because they’re unfashionable; they wait.
Remixing technocracy with starships and Pentagon AI
Fast-forward to 2025, and technocracy has returned with a glow-up. No gray uniforms, no pamphlets—just political rhetoric, tech power, and national security strategy. U.S. politics increasingly resembles a group chat run by a disgruntled systems engineer.
Elon Musk’s worldview consistently elevates technical competence over democratic process. He mocks bureaucracy, disparages regulation, and frames dissent as inefficiency. His companies position themselves not merely as businesses, but as solutions to social order itself: transportation, speech, space, and intelligence.
This matters because Musk is no longer just a private entrepreneur shouting online. He is structurally embedded in the state, even when he theatrically clashes with it or dismantles entire government departments.
This isn’t a personality problem. It’s an ideological one. The belief that society should be run by those who understand systems rather than those accountable to people now sits comfortably at the center of U.S. power. Political decisions are reframed as engineering challenges. Democracy becomes a bottleneck.
Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Norman Haldeman. Image credits: HALDEMAN PAPERS
DOGE, the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency, was less an anomaly than a prototype. Its rhetoric—cutting civil servants, purging “woke” institutions, streamlining governance—echoed technocratic disdain for democratic friction. It was sold as trimming the fat. Historically, that language has never ended well.
Then came the border rhetoric. High-level officials and techno-enthusiasts began floating discussions about Greenland and Canada that uncannily echoed Technocracy’s old “continent as a unit” fantasies—now dressed in petroleum logistics and military strategy instead of scientifically rationed goods.
No maps are being redrawn yet, but the logic is telling. Territories are discussed less as political communities than as strategic systems. Enough to send a cartographer into therapy.
Image credits: Social Security Administration
Grok in the war room
And then there’s Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Musk’s xAI and now embraced by the Pentagon. Officially, this is about removing what defense officials deride as “woke ideological constraints” from military AI.
Grok has already produced problematic outputs, including conspiratorial and extremist language, blamed on internal prompt issues. But when an AI system is explicitly marketed as ideologically unshackled and then integrated into military contexts, neutrality is a fantasy.
This is power without accountability, filtered through privately owned algorithms. A classic technocratic move: replace messy human judgment with algorithmic fiat and call it progress.
Don’t call it technocracy 2.0 (unless you enjoy being wrong).
President Donald Trump speaks with Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and other business leaders at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., last November. Image credits: The White House
No, the U.S. is not about to install a council of engineers in matching jumpsuits. That’s satire. But what is happening is a convergence: a political culture that elevates expertise over consent, a corporate elite that openly disparages governance, and a military embracing AI in ways that minimize scrutiny.
No continental technate has been declared, but the intellectual DNA of governance-by-capability rather than governance-by-consent is increasingly visible.
This logic has precedent. A 1940 political map titled Technate of America, created by Technocracy founder Howard Scott, visualized the U.S., Canada, Greenland, Central America, and the Caribbean folded into a single system managed for “adequate defence and operation.”
John Elon Haldeman with Kaye and Maye, his twin daughters. Maye is Elon Musk’s mother. Image credits: HALDEMAN PAPERS
This blueprint treated the Western Hemisphere as a system to be optimized rather than a collection of sovereign peoples. That logic resonates uncomfortably well in 2026.
Anti-democracy, but make it managerial
Zoom out further and the pattern sharpens. Democratic institutions are framed as nuisances. Civil servants as dead weight. Oversight as obstruction. Protest as inefficiency.
The proposed cure is always the same: streamline, centralize, control.
In the 1930s, technocrats argued that borders interfered with rational resource distribution. Today, borders are logistical problems to be solved. Same logic. New language.
This logic isn’t confined to North America. It appears elsewhere too, most starkly in the ideology often described as the “Greater Israel” project—not as a single policy, but as a governing framework that treats borders as technical obstacles rather than political agreements.
A ‘hands off Greenland’ protest in Copenhagen, Denmark. Image credits: Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Territorial control is justified through security optimization, demographic management, and strategic depth. For Palestinians, this technocratic governance is a lived reality: military law, biometric surveillance, permit regimes, and algorithmic risk assessments governing movement, water, housing, and survival.
This is technocracy at its most dangerous: when colonial expansion merges with technical management, and when violence is laundered through dashboards and code. Human lives become variables.
Same move. Different map.