Technopoly: Chapters 3 and 4

Well, I finished the book this morning, but will work on hammering out the outlines over the next day or two.

D. From Technocracy to Technopoly
1. The beginning of Technocracy - Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations"
a. justified the transition from small scale, personal, skilled labor to large scale, impersonal, mechanized production
b. Money, not land signified wealth
c. Market would control itself (unseen hand)
2. Notable creations in the history of technocracy - the communication revolution
a. photograph and telegraph - 1830s
b. rotary power printing - 1840s
c. typewriter - 1860s
d. transatlantic cable - 1866
e. telephone - 1876
f. motion pictures and wireless telegraphy - 1895
g. A.N. Whitehead - the greatest invention of the 19th century was the idea of invention itself
3. Individuality on the increase due to the importance of "everyman"
a. "the disease" of work needed to be eliminated (who wants to work?)
b. development of person comes into focus - public school systems, labor unions, libraries, and magazines became important
4. What has technocracy accomplished:
a. gave us progress - looses the bonds of tradition and religion
b. new freedoms and new forms of social organization
c. speeds up the world
d. conquers time in the name of efficiency
5. If efficiency and progress is king, there is no time to look back and remember the past
6. In technocracy, the technological world and traditional world were in tension, but co-existing.
7. In comes Technopoly - a totalitarian technocracy.
a. Technology starts to redefine our understanding of everything - it trumps tradition
b. Possible starting points
i. A. Huxley - Brave New World - points to Henry Ford and Ford Manufacturing
ii. Postman points to Scopes Monkey Trial due to its drama - it pitted new ideas and religion against each other
iii. Postman - Taylor takes principles of scientific management into the railroad and makes it faster, more efficient, and more productive than ever before, and it spreads like wildfire
8. The masters of scientific management were the "robber barons" of Morse, Bell, Edison, Rockefeller, Astor, Ford, and Carnegie - took advantage of technopoly and progress

E. The Improbable World
1. The world as we know it is nearly incomprehensible to us
a. The fallacy of "social science" and technopoly
i. if you say that a study has proven that something outlandish has happened, most people will pause and at least consider it
ii. Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief. (pg 58)
2. Information is the new god of culture - this is a lie
a. very few problems arise from a lack of information
b. technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is more information
c. common school arose to calm the anxieties and confusion of uncontrollable information
i. schools started setting the standard for what information is truly important

After moving through an oration of the change of culture around the increasing speed and amount of information available, Postman closes the chapter on page 70 as follows:

"All of this has called into being a new world. I have referred to it elsewhere as a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, as been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy. We are a culture consuming itself with information, and may of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from the information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms."

In the words of Steve Garber, through the words of others - "Knowledge is power" and "He he knows the most, mourns deepest."

DEW