Notes to: The Technocracy Wiki

Material covered: The Technocracy Wiki

Technate

• "A region over which a technocratic society would operate using thermodynamic energy accounting instead of a price system (money) method. All resources and industry of this land region would be used to provide an abundance of goods and services, within a sustainable ecological context, to its citizens..."
• "A technate cannot simply be set up anywhere like a modern-day country; it has several requirements that must be met in order for it to operate: 
• "There must be sufficient natural resources.
• "There must be an existing industrial and scientific base from which to operate the Technate.
• "There must be a sufficient amount of trained personnel for its operation." 
• "According to Technocracy, Inc., present the North American continent is known to be able to fully meet the basic requirements needed to operate a Technate, although other land areas could attempt it, with varying results, depending on the required conditions of energy conversion." 
• "The plan includes using Canada's rich deposits of minerals and hydro-electric power as a compliment to the United States's industrial and agricultural capacity...The North American Technate would be composed of all of North America, Central America, the Caribbean, parts of South America, and Greenland, encompassing some 30 modern nations (as well as numerous Non-Self-Governing Territories). If the Technate were set up today, it would contain nearly 600 million citizens and its total land area would be over 26 million square km... Its territorial claims would stretch from the North Pole in the north, to the Equator in the south, and from the Caribbean in the east, to the International Date Line in the Pacific Ocean to the west." 

Technocracy

• "The term technocracy denotes a system of government where those who have knowledge, expertise or skills compose the governing body. The term technocrat then denotes a person who either supports or promotes the concept of technocracy or who has membership of a technocratic government." 

Monad

• "The official symbol of Technocracy Incorporated. Its colors are vermilion (red) and the silver color found on the metal chromium, but a red and white version is acceptable for low-cost printing applications..."
• "The two parts of the monad represent balance; specifically, a balance between a nation's production and consumption...The monad can also be viewed as a harmony between humanity (and[/]or nature), and technology." 

Post scarcity

• "Many advocates of the open source model attempt to collaboratively create open-source software programs which are intended to offer similar capabilities to their commercial competitors. Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project which has designed the open-source GNU operating system, and co-founder of the free software movement, has explicitly cited the eventual creation of a post-scarcity society as one of his motivations:
• 'In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counselling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.'" 

Urbanate

• "An Urbanate is an assembly of buildings, or perhaps one large building, in which people would live and work. These places would have all the facilities needed for a community, including schools, hospitals, distribution centres (shops), waste management and recycling, sports centres, and public areas (parks and gardens), and would also have easy access to the surrounding country-side."
• "Technocrats propose that Urbanate buildings be as energy efficient as possible, and be designed with safety in mind, with every building material being completely fireproof and resistant to almost all natural disasters."
• "It is envisioned that Urbanates will be manufactured rather than constructed in the traditional sense. Standardised, prefabricated components will be produced in automated factories and transported to the desired location to be assembled into whatever design is required with a minimum of human labour required." 
• "Getting around in an Urbanate would be inherently easy and efficient, with every kind of major facility placed within walking distance or an easy commute of a housing complex." 
• "Urbanates would be connected via a continent-wide transportation network envisioned by the Technate design..., which would involve a High-speed rail network...linking every Urbanate, the Continental Hydrology (a massive Canal network), and air transport." 
• "Technocrats suppose there will be great environmental benefits to recycling some current cities and adopting Urbanates. Urbanates will take up much less physical space than cities and will not have polluting cars or industries."
• "The term 'Eco-Unit' refers to a sustainable community in which the community handles all food, energy and waste management needed for the community...This has then become the proposed foundation for an urbanate where a number of eco-units would link together to form on[e] urbanate."

Europe Organisation for Sustainability

• "An organisation that promotes Technocracy within Europe as an alternative socioeconomic system for a sustainable future." 

Technocracy Incorporated

• "Technocracy Incorporated aims to establish a zero growth socio-economic science[-]based system, predicated upon conservation and abundance as opposed to scarcity-based economic systems like capitalism or the so[-]called planned economic system...used by Communist states." 
• "The organisation argues that developments in mechanisation have caused a massive shift of employment towards the service sector and that money creation and distribution jobs such as banking, insurance, etc. could be eliminated with the use of energy accounting." 

Energy Accounting

• "A system of resource allocation proposed by Technocracy Incorporated in the U.S.. The system has its basis within the [Thermodynamic] interpretation of economics. All human economic activity requires energy. All this energy can be accounted for when we wish to produce goods or monitor resources. In an energy accounting system, the amount of energy needed to produce an item is counted. Thus, the production capacity can be defined in terms of energy and its relation to available resources. With the sum total of all the energy needed to produce goods known, it is then possible to allocate an equal share of the production capacity to each citizen." 
• "In the original proposal... each citizen would receive paper certificates which... could be used to allocate production capacity to produce goods they desire, within an ecologically sustainable context. In a more modern system, the certificates could be replaced by a computer accounting system where each person's allocation is refer[red] to as energy credits." 

Price system

• "Any economic system whatsoever that effects its distribution of goods and services by means of goods and services having prices and employing any form of debt tokens, or money."

Thermoeconomics

• "Refers to an economic theory resulting from the application [of] the laws of thermodynamics to economics, especially the second law." 
• "As the second law of thermodynamics and information theory have a link we can also see [in] thermoeconomics a statistical physics of economic value." 
• "Thermoeconomics models systems as acquiring low entropy from the environment and forming structure. In economics, these structures are business and products which compete with each other." 
• Check the page for equations. 

Technocracy movement

• "Refers to a social movement that started in the United States of America in the early 20th century and promotes the application of science to society and a rational form of government that provides a sustainable high standard of living for all citizens."
• "Early technocratic organisations formed after the First World War in both Europe and the US; these included Henry Gantt's 'The New Machine' and Veblen's 'Soviet of Technicians.'"