"Technocracy was one of the stranger political subcultures of the last century. Its members wore drab grey uniforms and drove grey cars in motorcades. They wanted to abolish money, pay everyone in energy certificates and run North America as a single machine.

Its language is turning up again with AI: compute as the new currency, a "compute budget" for everyone on Earth, investment released one gigawatt at a time. What's different now is who holds the budget. It sits with a handful of tech companies, which together spend more a year on infrastructure than any military except America's.

This essay is a tour of a century of engineers trying to run society (for better, and mostly worse)"