Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

“To say that someone should be doing better work because he has an IQ of 134, or that someone is a 7.2 on a sensitivity scale, or that this man’s essay on the rise of capitalism is an A- and that man’s is a C+ would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson. If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the world differently than they did. Our understanding of what is real is different. Which is another way of saying that embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.” 

This passage is part of the author’s explanation of how every technique and technology has an inherent ideology. The first sentence sounds perfectly natural to a modern reader, but he explains how such number and letter valuations were unheard of in the past and would have seemed quite foreign. With each technological tool that we adopt, our worldview shifts a little to accommodate it—and such tools give credence to one view or value over another. Postman argues we need to recognize this in order to properly analyze the effects of technology. 

“This is serious business, which is why we learn nothing when educators ask, Will students learn mathematics better by computers than by textbooks? Or when businessmen ask, Through which medium can we sell more products? Or when preachers ask, Can we reach more people through television than through radio? Or when politicians ask, How effective are messages sent through different media? Such questions have an immediate, practical value to those who ask them, but they are diversionary. They direct our attention away from the serious social, intellectual, and institutional crises that new media foster.” 

This quotation is meant to show that we accept new technology too readily, without any thought. Postman argues that new technology attacks old technology, which puts our institutions at risk. When this happens, we need to ask more than how to use the new technology but whether to use it at all. The rarely asked but vital question is “What is given up by accepting it?”

“The stirrup made it possible to fight on horseback, and this created an awesome new military technology: mounted shock combat. The new form of combat, as Lynn White, Jr., has meticulously detailed, enlarged the importance of the knightly class and changed the nature of feudal society. Landholders found it necessary to secure the services of cavalry for protection. Eventually, the knights seized control of church lands and distributed them to vassals on condition that they stay in the service of the knights. If a pun will be allowed here, the stirrup was in the saddle, and took feudal society where it would not otherwise have gone.”

The main theme of the book is the effect of technology, and Postman uses this as one example of how unpredictable technology is. It often has effects on various aspects of a society that are quite different from strictly that for which it was created. In addition, it cannot be predicted which groups will benefit; there are always winners and losers, but we cannot determine them with any certainty beforehand. In this case, knights were the big winners, which had far-reaching effects on the society in general in the eighth century. 

“Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo put in place the dynamite that would blow up the theology and metaphysics of the medieval world. Newton lit the fuse. In the ensuing explosion, Aristotle’s animism was destroyed, along with almost everything else in his Physics. Scripture lost much of its authority. Theology, once the Queen of the Sciences, was now reduced to the status of Court Jester. Worst of all, the meaning of existence itself became an open question. And how ironic it all was! Whereas men had traditionally looked to Heaven to find authority, purpose, and meaning, the Sleepwalkers (as Arthur Koestler called Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo) looked not to Heaven but to the heavens.” 

This is another example that the author provides of technology creating unintended change, only this upended the entire Western culture at the time. It also shows that the people responsible for the change had no such effects in mind—they were all religious men, loyal to the Church, who had no intention of trying to undermine it. Finally, the passage is an example of the Postman’s writing style, which makes effective use of metaphors and figurative language. 

“Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers—that is to say, as markets.” 

Here the author sums up the importance of the 19th century in the United States. During this period, the country was a technocracy, moving fast toward becoming a Technopoly. Two phenomena mentioned in the passage hastened this: invention for invention’s sake and the rise of such objective factors as standardization and efficiency. (Alfred North Whitehead was a famous mathematician and philosopher.)

“And though it is true that technocratic capitalism created slums and alienation, it is also true that such conditions were perceived as an evil that could and should be eradicated; that is to say, technocracies brought into being an increased respect for the average person, whose potential and even convenience became a matter of compelling political interest and urgent social policy. The nineteenth century saw the extension of public education, laid the foundation of the modern labor union, and led to the rapid diffusion of literacy, especially in America, through the development of public libraries and the increased importance of the general-interest magazine.”

This quotation highlights the fact that technology is neither all good nor all bad. Though it is not a focus of the book, Postman states this at the beginning and reminds the reader here and there throughout. What he describes in this passage is a wealth of benefits that 19th century technocracy brought on. Interestingly, it includes not just methods or equipment but also a different worldview—one in which the common man and woman were valued more than in the past. 

“With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.” 

The book Brave New World is a dystopian novel published in 1932. Postman uses it to describe what Technopoly does when taking over a culture. Technopoly’s insidious effect is simply to make competing cultures irrelevant (here he writes it makes them invisible; elsewhere he states that it trivializes them). Its power is such that it changes the meaning of everything in society until it is the sole culture remaining. 

“There is almost no fact, whether actual or imagined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. We believe because there is no reason not to believe. And I assume that the reader does not need the evidence of my comic excursion into the suburbs of social science to recognize this. Abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.” 

Postman precedes this passage by saying he sometimes plays a joke on friends and colleagues by making up some bizarre study that he claims a famous research institution conducted in a social science field. He notes that the listener inevitably believes him because we have no unifying worldview in which something would not make sense. Everything makes sense because nothing makes sense. That is, anything seems possible because information is both overwhelming (so we can’t possibly know everything) and fragmented (so we each have our little areas of expertise). 

“But the genie that came out of the bottle proclaiming that information was the new god of culture was a deceiver. It solved the problem of information scarcity, the disadvantages of which were obvious. But it gave no warning about the dangers of information glut, the disadvantages of which were not seen so clearly. The long-range result—information chaos—has produced a culture somewhat like the shuffled deck of cards I referred to. And what is strange is that so few have noticed, or if they have noticed fail to recognize the source of their distress.”

This quotation highlights how technology can cause information to overwhelm a society. Technology creates information, and the idea is often accepted that only with greater information can we solve the problems of society. While this is true to a certain extent, no one seems to ask what the trade-off will be and whether more information might bring any disadvantages. Postman is saying that the information glut caused by technology soon overwhelms any other culture, and chaos results from the ensuing lack of cohesion.

“But more than this, telegraphy created the idea of context-free information—that is, the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”

Postman identifies the advent of the telegraph in the 19th century as part of the information revolution that helped move the United States toward a Technopoly. Information could now be disseminated faster, making it harder to control, and produced free of context, causing it to lose meaning. The press took advantage of this in competing to see who could provide information first, beginning a cycle of increasing quantity and speed of information.

“Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs. Those who feel most comfortable in Technopoly are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity’s supreme achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved.” 

This describes the power Technopoly has over a society. It becomes a culture of its own, beating out any competing culture, but is also a kind of belief system. Its adherents find no fault with it; instead they put all their stock in technology as having all the answers. They see it as the epitome of progress. This makes it virtually indestructible once it takes hold.

“What all this means is that even restrained and selective technological medicine becomes very difficult to do, economically undesirable, and possibly professionally catastrophic. The culture itself—its courts, its bureaucracies, its insurance system, the training of doctors, patients’ expectations—is organized to support technological treatments. There are no longer methods of treating illness; there is only one method—the technological one. Medical competence is now defined by the quantity and variety of machinery brought to bear on disease.” 

This comes from a chapter in which Postman uses medical technology as an example of how technology has its own kind of ideology. Once technology of any kind comes into existence, it changes the culture thoroughly in various ways. The author describes this as an ecological change, not an additive one. With medical technology, as tools were invented to use in medicine, they actually changed how medicine was practiced, how other institutions in society developed around it, and even what patients expected.

“Although (or perhaps because) I came to ‘administration’ late in my academic career, I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words ‘The computer shows…’ or ‘The computer has determined…’ It is Technopoly’s equivalent of the sentence ‘It is God’s will,’ and the effect is roughly the same. You will not be surprised to know that I rarely resort to such humbug. But on occasion, when pressed to the wall, I have yielded. No one has as yet replied, ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ Their defenselessness has something Kafkaesque about it. In The Trial, Josef K. is charged with a crime—of what nature, and by whom the charge is made, he does not know. The computer turns too many of us into Josef Ks.”

This passage shows how advanced technology in a Technopoly reduces the agency of people. This happens not necessarily by force but by people freely giving up their agency. Bureaucracies, especially, adopt this as it allows them to present a sense of inevitability: Things are out of their control when the computer indicates something. And people who are told such things accept them. It all has the effect of humans giving ground to machines as Technopoly secures its hold on a culture. 

“We know that doctors who rely entirely on machinery have lost skill in making diagnoses based on observation. We may well wonder what other human skills and traditions are being lost by our immersion in a computer culture. Technopolists do not worry about such things. Those who do are called technological pessimists, Jeremiahs, and worse. I rather think they are imbued with technological modesty, like King Thamus.” 

This comes from the chapter in which Postman discusses the ideology of computers. Technology needs to be seen in the broader context of things. The name he gives this realistic and skeptical stance is “technology modesty.” One of the author’s main points is that people tend to accept technology too readily, but here and in several other places, he reminds the reader that both its advantages and disadvantages need to be considered. One way of examining the latter is by asking what will be lost by adopting a certain technology. 

“Questions, then, are like computers or television or stethoscopes or lie detectors, in that they are mechanisms that give direction to our thoughts, generate new ideas, venerate old ones, expose facts, or hide them. In this chapter, I wish to consider mechanisms that act like machines but are not normally thought of as part of Technopoly’s repertoire. I must call attention to them precisely because they are so often overlooked. For all practical purposes, they may be considered technologies—technologies in disguise, perhaps, but technologies all the same.”

This quotation is from a chapter on “invisible technologies,” techniques and systems we often don’t recognize as technology because they don’t come in the form of machines. They do, however, act the same as machines in manipulating information. Here Postman uses the example of questions. He argues that language has an ideology, just like any technology, but we don’t realize it because it is an integral part of us. Questions can show a language’s ideology most clearly because how they are worded influences the answer—they can even exclude certain answers altogether.

This quotation is from a chapter on “invisible technologies,” techniques and systems we often don’t recognize as technology because they don’t come in the form of machines. They do, however, act the same as machines in manipulating information. Here Postman uses the example of questions. He argues that language has an ideology, just like any technology, but we don’t realize it because it is an integral part of us. Questions can show a language’s ideology most clearly because how they are worded influences the answer—they can even exclude certain answers altogether.

This passage is part of the author’s discussion of the social sciences and his belief that they are not true sciences in the way the natural sciences are. He shows how statistics can be abused to allow specious ideas to be taken as “science.” Intelligence tests are one example of this. Through statistics and manipulated information, researchers have “proved” that one group of people is more intelligent than another. The social sciences, Postman argues, are used to lend scientific authority to such fraudulent claims. 

“If I may make up some figures, let us suppose we read the following: ‘The latest poll indicates that 72 percent of the American public believes we should withdraw economic aid from Nicaragua. Of those who expressed this opinion, 28 percent thought Nicaragua was in central Asia, 18 percent thought it was an island near New Zealand, and 27.4 percent believed that ‘Africans should help themselves,’ obviously confusing Nicaragua with Nigeria. Moreover, of those polled, 61.8 percent did not know that we give economic aid to Nicaragua, and 23 percent did not know what ‘economic aid’ means.’” 

This quotation illustrates Postman’s criticism of polling, another technique given the sheen of “science” and used to create policy. It relies on questions, which he shows can never be objective (see Quotation 16 above). Polling also omits crucial information that would give context to its results. The above hypothetical poll results are Postman’s exaggerated way of showing this.

“In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In Technopoly, it is an insult to call someone a ‘moralizer.’ Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity. Such a program lacks the aura of certain knowledge that only science can provide. It becomes necessary, then, to transform psychology, sociology, and anthropology into ‘sciences,’ in which humanity itself becomes an object, much like plants, planets, or ice cubes.” 

This represents the author’s ultimate criticism of the social sciences: people cannot be equated with objects in the natural sciences. Thus, they cannot be studied in the same way. He writes that moral arguments could be made through narratives and figurative language to provide guidance on how to live one’s life. In a Technopoly, however, the phenomenon of Scientism demands scientific “proof”; hence, the social sciences have co-opted methods from the natural sciences and passed them off as equally valid in their fields. 

“This, then, is what I mean by Scientism. It is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural science to the human world. Scientism is all of these, but something profoundly more. It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called ‘science’ can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like ‘What is life, and when, and why?’ ‘Why is death, and suffering?’ ‘What is right and wrong to do?’ ‘What are good and evil ends?’ ‘How ought we to think and feel and behave?’” 

Here Postman expounds on his theme of the effects of technology by describing the phenomenon he calls “Scientism.” The essential aspect of Scientism is not just the use of scientific methods by the social sciences but the faith in this as a belief system. He writes that people rely on it to provide the answers to life’s biggest questions and as a source of moral guidance. This is the essence of Technopoly, which displaces all traditional sources of moral authority. 

“What this means is that somewhere near the core of Technopoly is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers. Although estimates vary, a conservative guess is that the average American will have seen close to two million television commercials by age sixty-five. If we add to this the number of radio commercials, newspaper and magazine ads, and billboards, the extent of symbol overload and therefore symbol drain is unprecedented in human history.” 

Technopoly trivializes a culture’s symbols through overuse, draining them of significance along with the culture’s narrative, which makes use of the symbols. This is accomplished in the United States through business and the use of national symbols in advertising. Just how many ads the average person sees in a lifetime is given in this stark quotation, showing how such overexposure necessarily causes one to become numb to the symbols’ significance. 

“It is, therefore, time to ask, What story does American education wish to tell now? In a growing Technopoly, what do we believe education is for? The answers are discouraging, and one of them can be inferred from any television commercial urging the young to stay in school. The commercial will either imply or state explicitly that education will help the persevering student to get a good job. And that’s it. Well, not quite. There is also the idea that we educate ourselves to compete with the Japanese or the Germans in an economic struggle to be number one. Neither of these purposes is, to say the least, grand or inspiring.” 

Here Postman reviews the purpose of education. In a Technopoly, he argues, people are concerned with “learning technologies,” or tools involved in making education better and more efficient. However, he writes that we first need to identify what an education is for. The answer that he saw at the time of writing this book was not an encouraging one, as it reduced students to economic actors. He responds by giving his ideas for improving education to include humanistic qualities (see Quotation 25).

“Into this void comes the Technopoly story, with its emphasis on progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost. The Technopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.” 

This sums up Postman’s view of Technopoly, and thus the effects of technology. In such a system, all competing cultures are destroyed and people put their entire faith in a system designed solely for efficiency, economic progress, and yet more technology. The usual symbols and narrative of a culture are made irrelevant as Technopoly replaces a moral system and leaves people in a life void of meaning. 

“A resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control. In short, a technological resistance fighter maintains an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural.”

This is the author’s answer to Technopoly. At the heart of resisting the onslaught of technology is being forever vigilant and aware of the big picture. That is, one should not accept the promises made by technology of effortless progress but rather maintain a certain skepticism. The correct questions must be asked to discern each technology’s ideology and keep it under control.