Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

Postman begins with a parable from Plato’s Phaedrus, in which King Thamus of Egypt opines on the invention of writing. The inventor who presents it to him finds it wonderful, espousing all its supposed benefits. Thamus, however, counters each of these with the harmful effects writing will have; he sees it as all negative. The truth, Postman, argues is in the middle: all technologies have some good and some bad aspects.

The author then explains the effects of a new technology. First, it changes how we view things by redefining words already in use, giving us a different perspective of them. For example, with the introduction of writing, the word “wisdom” changed to mean something more like “knowledge.” In addition, those with “competence in the use of a new technology become an elite group that are granted undeserved authority and prestige by those who have no such competence” (9), creating winners and losers. However, it’s impossible to predict which group will be favored because we never know the actual effects of a certain technology until it begins working in society.

Another effect of new technologies is that they compete with older technologies for the way in which their users interact with and engage in the world. Postman calls this an “ecological” change. Put another way, society is not simply the same society with a new technology added to it but instead becomes an entirely different society. Thus, technology cannot be limited or contained. An example is the use of computers in school. The question, he asserts, is not how they might aid in learning but how they might change the idea of school and education altogether. He concludes that “something has happened in America that is strange and dangerous, and there is only a dull and even stupid awareness of what it is—in part because it has no name. I call it Technopoly” (20).

In this chapter, Postman discusses the progression of technology by dividing cultures into three types: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and Technopolies. All societies consisted of the first until the 17th century, but today this type is rare and considered primitive. In it, tools have two limited purposes: to solve a specific physical problem or method of doing something (like a plow) or to serve as a symbol in a realm such as art or religion (like a temple). Tools, then, are subservient to tradition. This is not to say that they can never challenge cultural beliefs, but they generally are put to use in service to them.

In a technocracy, “[t]ools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture” (28). In this setting, they are central to the culture and way of thinking. The classic example of this in the Western world is the invention of the telescope. It ended up challenging the supremacy of religion by proving that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe. The author reminds us that attacking the church was not the intention of either the inventor of the telescope or the scientists who used it to prove the order of the universe. On the contrary, Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were religious and kept their faith throughout their lives. In that sense, they, along with Descartes and Newton “laid the foundation for the emergence of technocracies, but they themselves were men of tool-using cultures” (35).

Francis Bacon, Postman states, was the first person to espouse technocracy. He equated science with progress, arguing that its purpose was the improvement and happiness of humankind; he identified four things that have prevented humans from progressing and gaining an advantage over nature and suggested that humans use technology to engineer their surroundings. The author argues that it took another 150 years after Bacon’s death (i.e., until the latter half of the 19th century) for European culture to fully adopt the thinking of a technocracy.

This chapter deals with the rise of technocracy and its transition to Technopoly. The author notes several possible dates in the late 18th century for when technocracy had taken hold, but all are essentially arbitrary. It’s certain, he writes, that it existed by 1780, when Richard Arkwright, who created the factory system, had 20 cotton mills running. The 19th century was when it exploded in scope and in speed. Postman writes, “We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance” (42). It’s no coincidence that the 19th century was also a period when many utopian societies were established, as technocracy exacted a heavy human toll. The effects of technology were complex, involving good and bad aspects, as the author writes in Chapter 1.

Yet technocracy did not destroy all older traditions. It was still too new to alter entirely the worldview people held, and they relied on the old social structures and philosophies to deal with the vast changes technocracy brought about. This change in worldview happened when the United States became a Technopoly. Again, an attempt to pinpoint a date is arbitrary, but Postman selects 1910. In a court case that year, railroads applied for a rate increase to offset higher wages their workers had won. They lost because it was argued that efficiency alone should offset the workers’ pay increase—and this focus on efficiency marked a shift in thinking. Frederick Taylor’s seminal book The Principles of Scientific Management was published the following year. Postman writes that for a number of reasons, America was the ideal breeding ground for Technopoly, and is the only culture that is one [at the time of the book’s writing in 1992].