The formation of a Technopoly

                Neil Postman’s Technopoly discusses the transformation of a technocracy into Technopoly and the characteristics which America possessed that allowed this to happen. Postman describes a technocracy as “a society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition and driven by the impulse to invent” (41). This depicts many societies in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, England specifically—being the first—and later America among other nations. The fact that people in these societies were in a pursuit of invention left little room for things such as myth and rituals, although they were still around albeit at risk of “being left behind” (45). This was the main underlying conflict of a technocracy: “tools ought to be [the people’s] servants, not their masters” (48). Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s book The Principles of Scientific Management indicates a shift from a technocracy into Technopoly, expressing that the “primary… goal of human labor and thought is efficiency” (51), signifying the rise of machine over man. The idea of scientific management was expressed (not directly) in Taylor’s piece, attempting to pursue an “increase [in] profits [and] higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions for laborers” (51). This was to be done through making a more efficient industrial setting. Technopoly is specifically described as “a grand reductionism in which human life must find its meaning in machinery and technique” (52). This differs from technocracy greatly in the way that there is no room for Old World values. A technocracy was not a definition of human life but rather a drive to invent, where “science and technology did not provide philosophies by which to live” (47). In contrast Technopoly is what society bases its beliefs around, an alternatives are made “invisible and therefore irrelevant” (48). This is where it relates to Brave New World in a sense that instead of making things negative, immoral, or illegal—such as in 1984—it completely eliminates them from any form of a possibility for a person to believe. This is done by “redefining [our world view] so that our definitions fit its new requirements” making it a “totalitarian technocracy” (48). This expresses how in today’s day and age, society is directed by technology instead of technology complimenting society.