Re-reading Technopoly

Technopoly by Neil Postman, published in 1993

“Can language models be too big? asked the researchers Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell in their famous Stochastic Parrots paper about LLMs, back in 2021. Technopoly is Neil Postman’s answer to that question, despite it beoing written back in the mid-nineties.

Postman is best known for his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, about the impact of television on society. Postman passed away in 2003, one year before Facebook was released, and two years before YouTube. This was probably for the best, as social media and video sharing services like Instagram and TikTok would have horrified him, being the natural evolution of the trends he was writing about in the 1980s.

The rise of LLMs inspired me to recently re-read Technopoly. In what Postman calls technopoly, technological progress becomes the singular value that society pursues. A technopoly treats access to information as an intrinsic good: more is always better. As a consequence, it values removing barriers to the collection and transmission of information; Postman uses the example of the development of the telegraph as a technology that eliminated distance as an information constraint.

The collection and transmission of information is central to Postman’s view of technology, the book focuses entirely on such technologies, such as writing, the stethoscope, the telescope, and the computer; he would have been very comfortable with our convention of referring to software-based companies as tech companies. Consider Google’s stated mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This statement makes for an excellent summary of the value system of technopoly. In a technopoly, the solutions to our problems can always be found by collecting and distributing more information.

More broadly, Postman notes that the worldview of technopoly is captured in Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management:

the primary goal of work is efficiencytechnical calculation is always to be preferred over human judgment, which is not trustworthysubjectivity is the enemy of clarity of thoughtwhat cannot be measured can be safely ignored, because it either does not exist, or it has no value

I was familiar with Taylor’s notion of scientific management before, but it was almost physically painful for me to see its values laid out explicitly like this, because it describes the wall that I so frequently crash into when I try to advocate for a resilience engineering perspective on how to think about incidents and reliability. Apparently, I am an apostate in the Church of Technopoly.

Postman was concerned about the harms that can result from treating more information as an unconditional good. He worried about information for its own sake, divorced of human purpose and stripped of its constraints, context, and history. Facebook ran headlong into the dangers of unconstrained information transmission when its platform was leveraged in Myanmar to promote violence. In her memoir Careless People, former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams documents how Facebook as an organization was fundamentally unable to deal with the negative consequences of the platform that they had constructed. Wynn-Williams focuses on the moral failures of the executive leadership of Facebook, hence the name of the book. But Postman would also indict technopoly itself, the value system that Facebook was built on, with its claims that disseminating information is always good. In a technopoly, reducing obstacles to information access is always a good thing.

Technopoly as a book is weakest in its critique of social science. Postman identifies social scientists as a class of priests in a technopoly, the experts who worship technopoly’s gods of efficiency, precision, and objectivity. His general view of social science research results are that they are all either obviously true or absurdly false, where the false ones are believed because they come from science. I think Postman falls into the same trap as the late computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra in discounting the value of social science, both in Duncan Watts’s sense of Everything is Obvious: Once you Know the Answer and in the value of good social science protecting us from bad social science. I say this as someone who draws from social science research every day when I examine an incident. Given Postman’s role as a cultural critic, I suspect that there’s some “hey, you’re on my turf!” going on here.

Postman was concerned that technopoly is utterly uninterested in human purpose or a coherent worldview. And he’s right that social science is silent on both matters. But his identification of social scientists as technopoly’s priests hasn’t borne out. Social science certainly has its problems, with the replication crisis in psychology being a glaring example. But that’s a crisis that undermines faith in psychology research, whereas Postman was worried about people putting too much trust in the outcomes of psychology research. I’ll note that the first author of the Stochastic Parrots paper, Emily Bender, is a linguistics professor. In today’s technopoloy, there are social scientists that are pushing back on the idea that more information is always better.

Overall, the book stands up well, and is even more relevant today than when it was originally published, thirty-odd years ago. While Postman did not foresee the development of LLMs, he recognized that maximizing the amount of accessible information will not be the benefit to mankind that that its proponents claim. That we so rarely hear this position advocated is a testament to his claim that we are, indeed, living in a technopoly.