Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
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Neil Postman — a man capable of inspiring Pink Floyd Bassists to write epically self-indulgent solo albums — wrote this book in 1992. Now most people had never heard of the internet in 1992: Postman — something of a techno refusenik, who died in 2003 — was thinking about television, CDs, but boy does the prescription apply with feeling to our modern times.
In his usual vague attempt to pin down a series of interconnected dark thoughts about the direction of modern business (and, ergo, polite society) JC recently contrived a new label: “data modernism”, defining it as such:
Data modernism
/ˈdeɪtə ˈmɒdənɪzm/ (n.)
The conviction that sufficiently powerful machines running sufficiently sophisticated algorithms over sufficiently large quantities of data can, by themselves, solve the future.
Data modernism is in turn founded on the metaphor of the Turing machine, and tends to the rather desolate robomorphic position that everything in the world — every organism, every complex system, every organised contrivance — is best thought of as some kind of Turing machine.
To express the fatuity of this idea JC came up with what he thought was a rather jolly aphorism, riffing of course on Abraham Maslow:
To a man with a computer, everything looks like a computer.
Being rather pleased with it, and quickly googling to check it really was his own work and no-one had thought of it before, the closest JC got was this, from media theorist Neil Postman, in his 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology:
To a man with a computer, everything looks like data.
That’s a slightly different point, JC thought, but close enough to be worth checking out the book, even though it predated the emergence of the public internet.
And: WOW.