the technate of north america (13. 054)

Given the recent invasion by the United States on the southern limit of this hypothetical map of a continental federation, a sphere of influence, self-sufficient and only requiring minimum trade with outsiders, aligned with the recently published Trump Corollary, the technocracy movement, founded chiefly by engineer Howard Scott after World War I, flourishing in the minds of many as a genuine alternative political ideology, more popular than fascism or communism, up through the Great Depression and the entry of the US in World War II—though suffering many internecine breakups and dogmatists at odds in the steering committees of the various groups and factions under this umbrella, just like Scott’s own falling out with the unionists and the IWW that first fostered his ideas, has again been garnering attention. Understandably with propagandised charts showing US influence stretching from Greenland to the north, through Panama all the way down to Venezuela, people are worried that Trump may make good on his threats of annexation by force, but Technocracy Incorporated, administered by besuited technocrats with legions of working-class followers, including one chiropractor (a suspect pseudo-science itself) from Regina, Joshua Norman Haldeman, the maternal grandfather of Elon Musk (members were required to adopt numbers in place of names, which may have inspired great-grandson XÆ A-12 as well as other notions of Musk’s), was not premised on utopian technology that would make labour superfluous and end scarcity but rather its opposite, suggesting that progress would never outpace population-growth and that the monetary system needed reform—proposing an energy theory of value to replace the price based systems of economy, privileging exchange and property and believed to perpetuate market inefficiencies. Energy input and output would replace fiat currency as a metric of labour and worth, non-fungible rationed allotments distributed to regulate the flow of energy that could not be bartered outside the system—tied to an individual’s productive credit account—and having an expiration date to discourage hoarding and accumulation of capital, as a form of technological feudalism.