Beware the Silicon Valley elite: Ayn Rand, Google libertarianism and Indianas religious freedom

That the masters of the tech universe jumped so forcefully into the middle of the Indiana gay rights imbroglio was, as many have noted, a marked change from business as usual in Silicon Valley, where the digerati had previously been reluctant to involve themselves in political issues not directly related to their bottom lines.

As Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of the cloud computing behemoth Salesforce, told the New York Times, Were wading into territory none of us is comfortable in, which is social issues, he said. But it was crystal clear that, by all of us going in together, it was going to be O.K.

Only time will tell, of course, whether this was a harbinger of political activism to come, and, if it is, whether or not thats a good thing. The engineers of Silicon Valley are far from the first of their kind to have been relatively uninterested in the nitty gritty of political engagement.

In the early decades of the 20th century the growing powers of industrialism bestowed upon engineers previously thought of as the guys with greasy overalls whose expertise extended only as far the workshop door a new measure of power and prestige. Academia responded with a massive increase in engineering programs. The number of American engineering graduates increased from 100 a year in 1870 to 4,300 a year in 1914. What had been a trade became a profession.

Meanwhile technological advances were producing growing political, economic and social complexities that politicians seemed increasingly unable to handle. What was needed was better planning and efficiency, which is what technicians did best. A rising chorus of opinion suggested it was time to let the engineers take the helm of the ship of state, and some agreed. One of them was the engineer, editor and manufacturer Henry Goslee Prout, who in 1905 lectured Cornells first class of civil engineering graduates on the enormous responsibility they carried on their shoulders.

My proposition is that the engineer more than all other men will guide humanity forward until we come to some other period of a different kind, Prout said. On the engineer and on those who are making engineers rests a responsibility such as men have never before been called upon to face, for it is a peculiarity of the new epoch that we are conscious of it, that we know what we are doing, which was not true in either of the six preceding epochs, and we have upon us the responsibility of conscious knowledge.

Among the more forceful technocratic voices to emerge during this period was that of the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen. Best known today as the man who coined the phrase conspicuous consumption, Veblen relentlessly attacked the wastefulness of American business. Overproduction and overselling of useless goods were ruining the country, he argued. The solution was to turn policy and administration over to skilled technologists who would exercise systematic control over the economy.

Somehow the ascent of the engineers that Veblen and others envisioned never materialized. Despite their growing professional confidence, they seemed personally reluctant to pursue broader political power. Veblen couldnt conceal his disdain. [B]y settled habit, he fumed, the technicians, the engineers and the industrial experts, are a harmless and docile sort, well fed on the whole, and somewhat placidly content with the full dinner-pail, which the lieutenants of the Vested Interests habitually allow them.

The idea that engineers could successfully run government, even if they wanted to, took a beating with the presidency of Herbert Hoover, the nations first and so far only Engineer in Chief. A further blow to engineering credibility came several decades later when uber-technocrat Robert McNamara unleashed mountains of precision analysis against the pesky guerrilla fighters hiding in the jungles of Vietnam. In 1962 McNamara returned from his first tour of the Asian theater brimming with confidence. Every quantitative measurement we have shows we are winning this war, he said.

Its likely that the hacker mind-set rebellious, but narrowly focused explains why the programming elite of Silicon Valley havent been, heretofore, especially active politically, which isnt to say the technocratic mind-set isnt alive and well there. Googles Eric Schmidt and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen are among those who believe that technology is well on its way to solving all our problems, if only government will get out the way, and government increasingly shows signs of agreeing with them.

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Beware the Silicon Valley elite: Ayn Rand, Google libertarianism and Indianas religious freedom