Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

WORKING

Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York City: Vintage-Knopf, 1992; and subsequently (1993).[1]

Against technopoly as totaltarian technocracy, against scientism, against much of the modern worldview descending from Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Francis Bacon. Rev. Stuart Weir, The Nation 31 Aug./7 Sept. 1992: 216-17, upon whom we depend for this part of the citation. Technopoly has been discussed on line more recently, e.g., as of April 2025, in an article in Wikipedia here,[2] and as a main part of a New Yorker column here,[3], and debated on-line here.[4]

From Cal Newport's New Yorker article linked above ("It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly: As technology accelerates, we need to stop accepting the bad consequences along with the good ones," December 18, 2023).

The big surprise in Postman’s book is that, according to him, we no longer live in a technocratic era. We now inhabit what he calls technopoly. In this third technological age, Postman argues, the fight between invention and traditional values has been resolved, with the former emerging as the clear winner. The result is the “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.” Innovation and increased efficiency become the unchallenged mechanisms of progress, while any doubts about the imperative to accommodate the shiny and new are marginalized. “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,” Postman writes. “It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.” Technopoly, he concludes, “is totalitarian technocracy.”

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See for technocracy and the issues pointed at in the titles Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941, and Technocracy: Technological Social Design.

Note very well the discussion of bureaucracy in chapter 5 ("The Broken Defenses")[5] and for us very important imagery in the assertion that "Technical machinery is essential to both the bureaucrat and the expert and may be regarded as a third mechanism of information control. I do not have in mind such hard technologies as the computer, which must, in any case be treated separately, since it embodies all that technopoly stands for ..." (quoting from audio book, ch. 5, some 32 minutes into the chapter). Dunn and Erlich discussed large, encompassing machines as occasional SF "objective correlatives" (in our sense, not directly that of T.S. Eliot) of bureaucracy.

Note also for Frederick Winslow Taylor, time/motion studies, and "Scientific Management."

RDE, Title, 28Aug19; 6Ap25 f.