Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture To Technology - Technocracy

Technocracy

In a technocracy, rather than existing in harmony with a theocratic world-view, tools are central to the "thought-world" of the culture. Postman claims that tools "attack culture… bid to become culture", subordinating existing traditions, politics, and religions. Postman cites the example of the telescope destroying the Judeo-Christian belief that the Earth is the centre of the solar system, bringing about a "collapse…of the moral centre of gravity in the West".

Postman characterises a technocracy as compelled by the "impulse to invent", an ideology first advocated by Francis Bacon in the early 17th Century. He believed that human beings could acquire knowledge about the natural world and use it to "improve the lot of mankind", which led to the idea of invention for its own sake and the idea of progress. According to Postman, this thinking became widespread in Europe from the late 18th Century.

However, a technocratic society remains loosely controlled by social and religious traditions, he clarifies. For instance, he states that the United States remained bound to notions of "holy men and sin, grandmothers and families, regional loyalties and two-thousand-year-old traditions" at the time of its founding.

Postman defines technopoly as a "totalitarian technocracy", which demands the "submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology". Echoing Ellul’s 1964 conceptualisation of technology as autonomous, "self-determinative" independently of human action, and undirected in its growth, technology in a time of Technopoly actively eliminates all other ‘thought-worlds’. Thus, it reduces human life to finding meaning in machines and technique.

This is exemplified, in Postman’s view, by the computer, the "quintessential, incomparable, near-perfect" technology for a technopoly. It establishes sovereignty over all areas of human experience based on the claim that it "'thinks' better than we can".