Reclaiming Social Engineering for Good

“Social engineering” sounds like something out of a conspiracy thriller, charged with totalitarian control and fringe paranoia. More mundanely, it’s come to be associated with phishing and other scams, in which fraudsters manipulate people into disclosing personal information. Yet the concept is older and more benign: it is the deliberate shaping of human behavior, often at scale.

It predates silicon—and became pervasive, and ungoverned, especially once its practitioners learned to hide it. Authoritarian regimes and more recently scammers and big companies have profited from it. To defend ourselves from bad actors, and to benefit from social engineering’s good side, we need to reclaim the name, and govern it prudently.

The roots of engineering In 1894, Dutch entrepreneur Jacques van Marken urged companies to hire “social engineers” to manage human systems such as insurance, education, and profit sharing for workers as carefully as they did mechanical ones. Fifteen years later, reformer William H. Tolman published Social Engineering, describing how U.S.

industrialists optimized workers’ conditions alongside manufacturing methods. If industrialists could shape steel and electricity on demand, why not society itself? By the 1920s, that confidence had spread.

The architect Le Corbusier declared that dwellings were “machines for living in,” imagining cities as orderly lattices where people moved like parts on a conveyor belt. Civilization would run like a Swiss watch. The idea soon darkened.

Authoritarian regimes pushed it to extremes, promising to fashion “the New Man.” In Nazi Germany, engineer Fritz Todt founded Organization Todt, a vast state engineering enterprise that emerged from the autobahn highway system and later operated concentration camps using slave labor. In the Soviet Union, leaders adopted U.S. scientific management techniques to plan factory-worker movements and classify populations through centralized records, feeding both rapid industrialization drives and the gulag system of forced labor.

The same tools and managerial methods used to build highways and enact five-year plans worked for repression and mass control. By the 1950s, “social engineering” had become a contaminated phrase. The revelations of Nazi and Soviet abuses, along with Cold War critiques of grand social planning turned the term from a progressive slogan into a warning label.

Banishing the words pushed the practice underground, making it harder to recognize when it resurfaced in new forms—such as organizational psychology and systems management that still relied on classification and behavioral influence techniques but under softer, less loaded labels. Social engineering’s more subtle spread In the postwar years, the new social-engineering lexicon included “human factors” and “urban planning,” all promising integration rather than command. As computing advanced, the language shifted again: “customer journey mapping” to track interactions, “user experience” to script them.