Engineers and the New Technocracy

How should engineers think about the Silicon Valley takeover of DC?

You may have noticed that throughout the year, and especially since I rebranded this newsletter, that the content has been steadily acquiring increasing engineering vibes. Even when I’m discussing culture, politics, economics, or philosophy, I increasingly and consciously reach for engineering motifs, metaphors, and frames, and inject literal engineering ideas and examples into my writing when I can, even when they might seem superfluous or contrived. I’ve always done this to some extent, but now I’m leaning into this tendency, and self-consciously trying to push the approach to the limit. It’s a new style of writing for me to some degree, and the awkwardness probably shows, but it feels right. A newsletter called contraptions should probably be contraptioney.

So, since this is a deliberately engineered move, I thought I’d share my thinking around it explicitly.

One driver is that I’m increasingly finding inspiration for my writing in the engineering world, rather than in the broader cultural environment. This includes both my own amateurish tinkering and not-quite-so-amateurish tech-sector consulting, as well as ongoing reading about the history and contemporary practice of engineering, including threads in stories that are not obviously about engineering. For instance, did you know that the history of Venice — a bunny trail I’m currently down and may write about — is as much an engineering story as it is a political, religious, or economic story?

Another driver is that increasingly, I don’t feel like “translating” ideas or thoughts from my native engineering idiom, to a lay “non-technical” idiom. I’ve come to believe this is a bad practice that reinforces a false dichotomy. We are an engineering species, homo faber, even if some are better at it than others, and/or have learned to speak specialized engineering languages. We can simplify ideas and avoid overly specialized languages without distorting things into a “non-technical” idiom that our species, with its intuitive engineering proclivities, does not actually require. To talk in “non-technical” ways (or worse, only listen in “non-technical” ways), far from being an assertion of a more authentic humanity, is to dehumanize yourself by denying an essential aspect of your nature. A cognitive equivalent of cutting off your opposable thumbs to prove your humanity.

I mean, how much further do we need to get from our prehistoric evolutionary environment before we acknowledge collectively that as a species, we are engineers? To Mars? To radically genetically engineered blue skin? To terraforming capabilities?

So I don’t want to choose between “speaking to engineers” vs. “speaking to non-engineers,” anymore. These two pseudo-species of humanity are an artifact of a false dichotomy. I want to speak and listen to the engineer in every human. Even the ones who furiously reject that part of the shared human DNA that likes to poke, pry, tinker, push buttons to see what happens, and yes, occasionally blow things up for fun. So the engineers in the headline and in the subtitle question actually refers to all humans.

Equally, I’ve never liked qualifying anything I say (implicitly or explicitly, apologetically or non-apologetically) with “speaking as an engineer.” We are all engineers now, living in an extremely engineered environment that is radically unlike our ancient evolutionary environment. We can only ever speak and listen at all as engineers, even if you’re not willing to embrace that identity.

So this isn’t a version of the everybody should learn to program normative position. It’s more of a description: everybody is already a programmer, and has been since the first prehistoric primate picked up a stick to whack something with.

In this newsletter, you and I, we speak as descendants of that first primate who decided to pick up a stick to whack something.

But even as I find engineering to be an increasingly universal and inspiring class of behaviors, and engineer to be an inescapable and essential identity I want to thrust at all humans whether they want it or not, at the same time, I find “technology” increasingly un-inspiring, and even actively dispiriting as a concept.

What’s the distinction, and why am I making it?