Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

Stunning and original work. The author Neil Postman sets the tone at the outset that this is no ordinary work. His interpretation of Plato's Myth of Thamus and Theus is one of the wisest and perhaps most penetrating openings I've ever read. This sets up a lucid description of the interplay between man, religion, and machine thru time dating all way back to ancient Greeks. Although he overplays his hand a bit when discussing what he perceives as technology's totalitarian grip on society, more broadly his argument has merit, explanatory insight, and predictive value. (Overplayed for example that "Technopoly" completely robs us of history, when in fact the data boom it can be argued is creating a clearer record of it.) But this is a minor criticism, as overall his critiques and insights are spot-on ... it's almost as if he's viewing the world from a 4th dimension the rest of us can't see...or more superstitiously, he's clairvoyant. From this he raises important challenges to the Information Age ethos that insufficient information is the assumed source of major problems, for example from this passage: "You need only ask yourself, What is the problem in the Middle East, or South Africa, or Northern Ireland? Is it lack of information that keeps these conflicts at fever pitch? Is it lack of information about how to grow food that keeps millions at starvation levels? Is it lack of information that brings soaring crime rates and physical decay to our cities? Is it lack of information that leads to high divorce rates and keeps the beds of mental institutions filled to overflowing?" He provides a clear rebuke to the notion that social science is superior to literary tradition in understanding human behavior. It's ultimately about the age of old challenge of converting qualitative information into quantitative information, so it be made into a form to make generalized observations about large populations and bespoke ones about its individuals. Postman clearly reasons that abstraction and generalization that are made to seem irrefutable by attaching the qualifier "science" to "social" clearly do much more harm than good. This book goes to dark places, and perhaps "dark" is the best word to describe its overall tone. At times I found myself reading it not because I wanted to, but because I had to. But with an inspiring final chapter on how to counter the negative consequences of what he calls "Technopoly", and uplifting commentary on mankind derived from the classic "Ascent of Man", it ends on a liberating note. Again I'm not saying it's a perfect work either ... I wonder for example how Postman would view advances in AI nearly 30 years since publish date at being more "human-like". He seems to assume that people will always be more morally responsible than machines. But with all the strife in the world can we rely on human judgement and action, versus a machine that be programmed to behave within strict guidelines? He also makes his own presumed unchallengable "leap of faith" that life without meaning is essentially the worse kind. Something that a zen Buddhist could launch a serious challenge to, as in destructiveness of "gaining" notions. My own criticisms aside, this remains one of the most fundamentally important works I've ever read. It's also very topical and an important reality-check with all the hype-selling these days in tech (some of it most certainly legit, some most certainly not).

The late Neil Postman’s book, Technopoly, is a sobering assessment of a technologically obsessed American culture. The fact that the book was presciently published in 1992, long before the Internet became ubiquitous, is alarming. Don’t be fooled though, Postman isn’t a pure Luddite and this isn’t a book that is anti-technology. Perhaps the best way of putting it is that Postman harbors a sense of digital ambivalence. Like Postman, I don’t necessarily condemn the technologies themselves per se, although I certainly share some of his concerns. Technology can complement human values or it can desecrate them. It all depends on its application. So how did American culture become a Technopoly? According to Postman, a technological history of a society can be broken into three phases: tool-using, technocracy, and Technopoly. In a tool-using culture, technology is used merely as a physical tool (think utensils), where as in a technocracy the tools “play a central role in the thought world of the culture”. In a Technopoly, then, the culture can only be understood through the tools. Technopoly can thus be thought of as a “totalitarian technocracy”. At the time this book was published Postman claimed that United States was the only Technopoly in existence (I suspect he would revise that statement today if he were still alive). A Technopoly is a society that thinks that knowledge can only be had through numbers and thus, it is a society that puts an obsessive focus on trying to quantify life and puts excessive trust in experts. It’s also a society that believes that management is a science. I suspect Postman, if he were still alive, would agree with me that it’s the soft technologies that are the most insidious. You know, things like IQ tests, SATs, standardized forms, taxonomies, and opinion polls. The idea of trying to quantify things like mercy, love, hate, beauty, or creativity simply wouldn’t make sense to the likes of Galileo, Shakespeare, or Thomas Jefferson, according to Postman. Yet, this is exactly what many of our platonified social scientists try to do today. He goes on to say that, “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.” Or as Marshall McLuhan succinctly put it: “The medium is the message.” So where did this obsessive focus on quantifying begin? Postman traces its history back to the first instance of grading students’ papers (quantitatively), which occurred at Cambridge University in 1792, thanks to the suggestion of a tutor named William Farish. Farish’s idea of applying a quantitative value to human thought was crucial to those who believed we could construct a mathematical concept of reality. So what beliefs emerge in the technological onslaught? Here’s one passage that resonated with me. These include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts. Another modern side effect of Technopoly is information overload and I think it’s fair to say that Postman was disgusted by our obsession with information and statistics. There are statistics and studies that support almost any belief, no matter how nonsensical. Personally, I think Nassim Taleb put it well: “To bankrupt a fool, give him information.” Postman stretches a popular adage to drive home this point himself. “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and therefore, “to a man with a computer, everything looks like data.” Postman reminds us, however, that not all information is created equal. He writes: “Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems.” For example, consider the following noise that I’ve made up, but could easily be recited on ESPN: 77% of all Superbowl games have at least one field goal scored within the last seven minutes and 27 seconds of the third quarter. Even if this were true, does it really tell us anything useful? If one has an opinion they want verified, they can easily go on the Web and find “statistics” to support their belief. Sadly, there seems to be not only a market for useless information on the Web today, but for harmful information too. A Technopoly, according to Postman, also promotes the idea that education is a means to an end, instead of being an end in itself. He laments the fact that education is now meant to merely train people for employment instead of instilling a purpose and human values in them. Ultimately, reading this book reminded me that those who don’t learn how to use technology will be used by it.

Neil Postman was a media theorist deeply aligned against technology's incursion on culture. His 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, a landmark work that put him on the map as a "Luddite," warned that television would erode at our ability to take things seriously (was he wrong?). Postman begins with "The Judgment of Thamus," a tale from Greek literature that highlights the dangers of treating technology either as a savior or a curse (unqualified). This type of introduction gave me an unrealistic expectation for the rest of the book, since it is in this chapter that the author is at his most moderate. From this point on, the pitchforks come out. Postman sees societies in three degrees of technology saturation: tools, technocracy, and technopoly. A tool-using society is completely the master of its technology, and produces/uses it merely to solve immediate physical problems. It is important to note that tools are also subservient to religion, art, and all other aspects of culture. Culture defines the tools, and not vice versa. Technocracy, the intermediate stage on Postman's scale, is the point at which tools start to become prevalent to the degree that they position themselves in the "thought-world" of culture. The dynamics of social interactions, religious exercises, art, et cetera shift to reflect changes in the technological world. While society is driven by the need to invent, it is still governed (loosely) by pre-existing values. Technopoly, the endgame of technological incursion, is the point when every aspect of our culture ultimately bends the knee to technology. It becomes the central, defining idol of the way our minds work. Machines govern our lives, and we achieve the Thoreauian stage of becoming the "tools of our tools." Our existence becomes meaningless. Though he cites specific examples of technological innovations, Postman's book is elemental and is made to be relevant in all time periods. He makes his humanist worldview clear, calling us to an existence that transcends technology. While many of Postman's concerns are legitimate (perhaps justified by our increasing independence on mobile technology), he doesn't seem willing to accept that societal trends could still drive adoption, in a tech-saturated culture. I think of the Segway, an amazing technology that society rejected because of how awkward they look. In a Postman technopoly, a Segway would simply change how we define graceful transportation.

It is difficult, if not impossible, stray too far into the literature of contemporary cultural criticism without running headlong into a Neil Postman reference…typically brief, often coated with a benign diplomacy that betrays nothing useful, and sometimes with a tone of sighing obligation. It seems that, like Stanley Fish, Neil Postman is one of that breed of intellectual that takes an almost excessive delight in raining on OTHER people's parades. I'll admit, as a scholar in my own small right, I felt a bit uncomfortable reading a scholar who…well, deeply questioned whether or not our culture even really understood what "scholarship" really was. (Just read his thoughts on social "science" and the value of "statistics," and you'll understand that last sentence.) But Postman is not some sociology prof-reject out to right some past tenure-interview-gone-terribly-awry. The project of "Technology" is at once more basic and more profound. Honestly, I found the argument of the book incredibly simple and easy-to-follow: The relationship of humanity to its technologies has passed through two complete evolutionary stages: from tool-using to technocracy and has now entered a third phase that is the title of the book. The issue here is not the development of specific technologies (note the lowercase "t") but a shift in the positioning of Technology (note the capital "T") in relationship to other domains of knowledge. No longer content to coexist with, say, other realms of truth-telling like Religion and Tradition, Technology now threatens to overtake them. As Postman writes: "Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself…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" (p. 48). Technopoly is, he summarizes, "totalitarian technocracy." To put his point in more theological terms that I can better grasp, modern Western societies (especially the USA) now have more faith in the promise of Technology than they do in the promise of Humanity. (Faith in the promise of Divinity began its slow fade with the rise of the Enlightenment, but that is a digression from the topic at hand.) The balance has subtly shifted from optimism that WE (Humanity) could shape Technology to meet OUR ends to a new kind of optimism that Technology could rescue/save US from the frightening ends to which we have put it. So, in the Technopolist world, the answer to, say, the threat of nuclear holocaust is—in fact, MUST be—a technological one. Bigger bombs, better defense systems, satellites with lasers…you get the point, I hope. Postman is not out to destroy Technology; he doesn't promote some impossible return to a pre-technological age. Rather, he wants to break Technology's DOMINATION over other ways and realms of human knowing. Postman simply tries to illuminate Technopoly's slow creep. Ever so subtly, Technology has become the Master and Humanity has assumed the role of servant. Truth is reduced to Data; Wisdom is misidentified as Information. And anything that does not easily convert to a "data-stream" format—any Truth that cannot be spit out as a number in a data table—becomes useless. What makes the effects of Technopoly so insidious is both their subtlety and their pervasiveness. This kind of thinking is literally everywhere, from dating websites that match users based on some system of personality "profiling" to educational assessment strategies that focus on "data-driven decision-making processes" (if I had a dollar for every time I heard THAT phrase at an accreditation conference). And in a Technopoly, the educator doesn't even think to ask: "Why should data be what drives educational decisions?" What a person earns after completing a college degree actually tells you very little about whether or not they are an "educated" person; it's simply a good way for the government to track their ROI on student grants & loans programs, a classically Technopolist concern. I suppose it feels a bit overblown to describe a book as "revolutionary." And perhaps you will think Postman's work ISN'T that, after all. But it is the closest I'VE come to a "revolutionary" read in the past few years. Postman's problem is not that his observations are off-base; his problem is that they are prophetic…observations that will "take on" meaning and significance as the decades pass. And, unfortunately, as with the observations of most prophets, I fear their truth will recognized by most in society at a point too late to matter.

There is much to learn from this important book. Over the last two hundred years, both science & technology have rapidly & irrevocably changed the face of the earth. In the postindustrial world, we've banished infectious diseases from our midst (at least temporarily), have instituted public health & sanitation measures, and have made creature comfort a part of everyman's lifestyle. Yet, there is profound and widespread concern regarding exactly where technological innovation is taking us, what this mysterious journey will cost us in terms of a sustainable and palatable ecosystem, and exactly who (if anyone) is driving this huge and anonymous innovative juggernaut. This book deals provocatively with this issue; i.e. the promulgation of a culture in which science and technology have come to assume the pivotal role in our society. Sociologist Max Weber warned almost 100 years ago of an alarming tendency in western civilization to displace our tradition-based religious cultural ethos with a dangerously superficial "faux" rationality in which all decisions and all measures would come to be made more and more exclusively by scientific and logical means. Yet science by its very nature cannot answer questions dealing with values, advising us as to what is right, or good, or best. It can only speak to us in terms of effective and efficient means to achieve such cultural values and social ends. It is this tension between a human-oriented cultural ethos, on the one hand, and scientific progress through technological innovation not so oriented on the other that is Mr. Postman's real subject. Mr. Postman understands that science and technology are both our friends and our antagonists, and as our amigo the Unabomber has pointed out, what technical innovation introduces as "voluntary and optional" soon becomes "compulsory and obligatory", as did the introduction of automobiles and traffic regulation. In this fashion, by flooding our social, economic, and political environment with items and objects that drive the nature of society as much as enhance it (can anyone now doubt that the introduction of personal computers poses such a double-bind?), we are radically changing the nature of our society and its culture without benefit of any guiding values, precepts, or notions as to what is best for our people and our community other than to allow frenzied competition between technological rivals to see who can unlease the latest/neatest technological innovation to make our lives easier or entertain us more cleverly. Our direction in terms of progress seems to be random, at best, and Postman argues most persuasively that there are hidden dangers to our freedoms, our prosperity, and even our awareness that result from this surrender to the indifferent impulses of technological innovation. We best recognize this indifference and the dangers it poses for a free and open society. As author Sales Kirkpatrick notes in his wonderful book "Rebels Against the Future", "technology is never neutral"; it carries out its exclusively rational and logical intent to its conclusion. Yet often the fact that this conclusion is not necessarily in the public interest or consistent with the long-term goals and aspirations of our culture seems somehow irrelevant. Yet it is anything but irrelevant; it is central to the question as to how critically important decisions regarding our future and well-being are to be made, and on what basis. Will we have a society in which such decisions are made through open debate in a public forum, or one in which the decisions are made for us, based on market projections, what can be sold and distributed, researched based on its sales potential in anonymous test tubes and clinical labs, where the latest in scientific certainty is readied for pandemic public introduction? Time is growing short and we must soon decide. This is a fascinating, provocative, and important book. Read it!

Cultural critic Neil Postman goes after what he calls technolopy which is essentially a "self-justifying, self-perpetuating system wherein technology of every kind is cheerfully granted sovereingty over social institutions and national life." Postman is not by any means an luddite but he wants us to be aware of how technology has shaped our society,and epistemology. Often not for the better in many respects. We live in a society that does not use machines but is more and more used by them. It shapes our world view. Postman attempts to trace it's effect on us from the beginning. Overall he does a fine a job. Although a easy read many of the topics require closer scrutiny and thinking. Which is good, he wants you to think about whats happening not just accept what he has to say. In one chapter he roasts the medical industry's infatuation with new technology while the doctors neglect their patients. Patients invariably are reduced to slabs of meat on a assembly line. He makes the salient point that information is not understanding, which is usually ignored by most promoters of technopoly. Another chapter deals with 'scientism' which is science distorted into a intolerant fundamentalist belief system and its effects on our society. This chapter is his most humorous as he disects some the masters of the obvious(Dilbert like scientists who think they have discovered something profound but what most people on the street already know)Like people are afraid of death and that open minded people tend to be open minded. That's right Ph.d's have done studies to prove these notions! Perhaps a better title for this chapter would have been "the marching morons of science." The last chapter deals on how to resist technology in our daily lives. Which he sums ups in several points(not all of them are listed in this review). Though it's not enough in my opinion, considering technolopy's corrosive influence on people and cultures throughout the world. Things need to be addressed at the nation policy level if anything is to be really changed. * who do not regard the aged as irrelevant * who admire technological ingenuity but do not think it represents the highest form of human achievement. * who are at least, suspicious of the idea of progress, and who do not confuse information with understanding. * who have freed themselves from the belief in the magical power of numbers, do not regard calculations as an adequate substitute for judgement or as synonym for truth. The book is a good starting point to informing oneself on the minuses of technology. Though dated much of his observations are still relevant and a good antidote to high tech mavens like Kelly, Moravec and their ilk. Another good book is David Ehrenfeld's "Beginning Again" written from a profession biologist POV. Or better yet, get Wendell Berry's tract "Life is a miracle" which a rather thorough disection of technolopy's epistemology and what lies beneath it's pretty public facade.

Neil Postman was, apparently, a big deal. Upon starting his 1992 book Technopoly I learned that he had died in 2003, which makes the negative parts of this review feel vaguely like I'm speaking ill of the dead. Sorry, Mr. Postman. Anyway, Technopoly takes the idea behind Aldous Huxley's dystopic novel Brave New World very seriously. Unlike 1984, Huxley's novel imagined a world where we are ruined by what we love, not what we fear. (This idea crops up again in Scott Westerfeld's novel Uglies to some extent--Huxley was also apparently a big deal.) What did everyone love in 1992? Technology. Postman fears that as cultures embrace technology more and more readily, they would lose something of themselves. Specifically, in an era that Postman coincidentally calls "Technopoly," people will begin to depend on technology for everything. Problems will be created to be fixed with technology. Faced with an information glut, people will revere data sorting software despite its ostensibly doing nothing of actual use. I don't know if Postman would agree with me here, but Technopoly seems to be about how to deal with (and resist) a world where computers are becoming more human while humans become more tied to machines than ever before. While this book was interesting, and likely important, I couldn't take it completely seriously. Postman's use of self-made terms like "technocracy" and "technopoly" made it impossible for me to read the text seriously. Postman's moralistic warnings against technology's dangers also seemed very close to a doomsday scenario. And somewhat one sided. An entire chapter is dedicated to medical technology. It details the dangers of a technological medial profession: more surgeries and relying on machines for diagnosis. But he almost completely ignores the technological miracles like incubators, which almost exclusively save lives. This one-sided look at technology would be fine, if Postman had not started his book with a drawnout summary of a story about an Egyptian king named Thamus who was famous for looking at a matter from all sides. There is value Technopoly, particularly when Postman warns of the information glut inherent to a Technopoly culture where computers are so dedicated to producing data. And yet, being in school to become an information professional, I can't help but think we're still smarter than computers. We create all of this information, but there are still discerning information-controllers like teachers and librarians who will maintain the order. Maybe one day the doomsday Postman seemed to be anticipating in this book will come to pass. But I don't think it will be today or even tomorrow.

It's amazing how prescient Postman was in his critique of the negative effects of technology. This book has much to say to our current situation, most especially the rapid incorporation of large language model AI.