The Technocratic Unconscious
From Energy Certificates to Universal High Income: A Political-Economic Genealogy
A note for regular readers (and watchers of my podcasts): "sociotechnical & cybernetic organism" recurs below as an analytic frame I've been developing across earlier essays on this Substack.
The ideological genealogy of Elon Musk’s proposed “Universal High Income” remains conspicuously underexamined in contemporary discourse. Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman, served as a principal organizer of Technocracy Incorporated’s Canadian operations during the 1930s — a techno-rationalist movement that sought to abolish the price system entirely, replacing monetary exchange with energy certificates: universally distributed allotments calibrated to continental energy production, allocated to every citizen irrespective of employment status, and administered by a technocratic governing body of engineers — a so-called Technate — entirely insulated from democratic politics and market mechanisms.
The movement’s trajectory in Canada was abruptly curtailed when the federal government banned Technocracy Inc. at the outset of the Second World War under the Defence of Canada Regulations, citing its opposition to conscription and perceived subversive character, including its authoritarian, anti-democratic structure. The group's public posture was anti-communist and framed as patriotic, though Technocracy's uniformed organization, stylized salutes, and opposition to parliamentary democracy drew contemporary comparisons to fascism — comparisons later reinforced by Haldeman's son-in-law Errol Musk, who claimed in 2024 that Haldeman had sympathized with Nazi Germany during the war. Subsequently, he redirected his political energies toward the leadership of the Social Credit Party in Saskatchewan — a parallel reform tradition premised on monetary dividends and the redistribution of credit to citizens as a function of aggregate social productivity, which itself faced accusations of antisemitic conspiracy theories in certain organizational circles.
