Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

by Neil Postman

early nineteenth century. “The American lives in a land of wonders,” he wrote; “everything around him is in constant movement, and every movement seems an advance. Consequently, in his mind the idea of newness is closely linked with that of improvement. Nowhere does he see any limit placed by nature to human endeavor; in his eyes something that does not exist is just something that has not been tried.”

Second, and inextricably related to the first, is the genius and audacity of American capitalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men who were quicker and more focused than those of other nations in exploiting the economic possibilities of new technologies.

Their greatest achievement was in convincing their countrymen that the future need have no connection to the past.

Third, the success of twentieth-century technology in providing Americans with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance was so obvious and promising that there seemed no reason to look for any other sources of fulfillment or creativity or

As the spectacular triumphs of technology mounted, something else was happening: old sources of belief came

under siege. Nietzsche announced that God was dead. Darwin didn’t go as far but did make it clear that, if we were children of God, we had come to be so through a much longer and less dignified route than we had imagined, and that in the process we had picked up some strange and unseemly relatives.

And Einstein and his colleagues told us that there were no absolute means of judging anything in any case, that everything was relative.

I don"t think that Einstein said this.

by H. L. Mencken fifty years ago, when he said that there is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe

In the Middle Ages, people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.

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.

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The belief system of a tool-using culture is rather like a brand-new deck of cards. Whether it is a culture of technological simplicity or sophistication, there always exists a more or less comprehensive, ordered world-view, resting on

a set of metaphysical or theological assumptions. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design of the universe, but they have no doubt that there is such a design, and their priests and shamans are well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not wholly rational, at least coherent.

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.

The printing press began that age in the early sixteenth century.1

innovations being the use of Arabic numerals to number pages. (The first known example of such pagination is Johann Froben’s first edition of Erasmus’ New Testament, printed in 1516.)

but here I must note that most of the methods by which technocracies have hoped to keep information from running amok are now dysfunctional.

The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.2

information that rejected the necessity of interconnectedness, proceeded without context, argued for instancy against historical continuity, and offered fascination in place of complexity and coherence.

It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress.

We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed

It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures

may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.

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.

The fact that information does none of these things—but quite the opposite—seems to change few opinions, for such unwavering beliefs are an inevitable product of the structure of Technopoly. In particular, Technopoly flourishes when the defenses against information break down.

is to say it is what happens to society when the defenses against information glut have broken down. It is

admission. Take as a simple example a court of law. Almost all rules for the presentation of evidence and for the conduct of those who participate in a trial are designed to limit the amount of information that is allowed entry into the system. In our system, a judge disallows “hearsay” or personal opinion as evidence except under strictly controlled circumstances, spectators are forbidden to express their feelings, a defendant’s previous convictions may not be mentioned, juries are not allowed to hear arguments over the admissibility of evidence—these are instances of information control.

The clearest symptom of the breakdown of the curriculum is found in the concept of “cultural literacy,” which has been put forward as an organizing principle and has attracted the serious attention of many educators.

The point to be stressed here is that any educational institution, if it is to function well in the management of information, must have a theory about its purpose and meaning, must have the means to give clear expression to its theory, and must do so, to a large extent, by excluding information.

society. The family became, as Christopher Lasch calls it, a haven in a heartless world.

am not prepared to argue here that the theory was correct, but to the accusation that it was an oversimplification I would reply that all theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification.

curriculum is an oversimplification. So is a family’s conception of a child. That is the function of theories—to oversimplify, and thus to assist believers in organizing, weighting, and excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories. Their weakness is that precisely because they oversimplify, they are vulnerable to attack by new information. When there is too much information to sustain any theory, information becomes essentially meaningless.

They manage information through the creation of myths and stories that express theories about fundamental questions: why are we here, where have we come from, and where are we headed? I have already alluded to the comprehensive theological narrative of the medieval European world and how its great explanatory power contributed to a sense of well-being and coherence.

The Bible gives manifold instructions on what one must do and must not do, as well as guidance on what language to avoid (on pain of committing blasphemy), what ideas to avoid (on pain of committing heresy), what symbols to avoid (on pain of committing idolatry).

Bible’s claim to explain the origins and structure of nature. The Bible’s authority in defining and

categorizing moral behavior was also weakened.

With apologies to Rabbi Hillel, who expressed it more profoundly and in the time it takes to stand on one leg, the theory is as follows: There is one God, who created the universe and all that is in it.

To borrow from Hillel: That is the theory. All the rest is commentary.

Undeniably, fewer and fewer people are bound in any serious way to Biblical or other religious traditions as a source of compelling attention and authority, the result of which is that they make no moral decisions, only practical ones. This is still another way of defining Technopoly. The term is aptly used for a culture whose available theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable information in the moral domain.

The first is bureaucracy, which James Beniger in The Control Revolution ranks as “foremost among all technological solutions to the crisis of control.”

In a chilling paragraph, Tocqueville warned about them taking hold in the United States: I have previously made the distinction between two types of centralization, calling one governmental and the other administrative. Only the first exists in America, the second being almost unknown. If the directing power in American society had both these means of government at its disposal and combined the right to command with the faculty and habit to perform everything itself, if having established the general principles of the government, it entered into the details of their application, and having regulated the great interests of the country, it came down to consider even individual interest, then freedom would soon be banished from the New World.5

But bureaucracy has no intellectual, political, or moral theory—except for its implicit assumption that efficiency is the principal aim of all social institutions and that other goals are essentially less worthy, if not irrelevant.

As the word’s history suggests, a bureaucrat is little else than a glorified counter.

The word “bureaucrat” has come to mean a

person who by training, commitment, and even temperament is indifferent to both the content and the totality of a human problem.

Eichmann’s answer is probably given five thousand times a day in America alone: I have no responsibility for the human consequences of my decisions.

I am only responsible for the

efficiency of my part of the bureaucracy, which must be maint...

Eichmann, it must also be noted, was an expert. And expertise is a second important technical means by which Technopoly striv...

First, Technopoly’s experts tend to be ignorant about any matter not directly related to their specialized area. The average psychotherapist, for example, barely has even superficial knowledge of literature, philosophy, social history, art, religion, and biology, and is not expected to have such knowledge. Second, like bureaucracy itself (with which an expert may or may not be connected), Technopoly’s experts claim dominion not only over technical matters but also over social, psychological, and moral affairs.