Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

The Jolly Contrarian’s book review service™ →Go uptown Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Book reviews Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

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.

Information glut

In the chapter titled “The Improbable World, Postman talks of “information glut” — this has resonances with Systemantics (paralysis by analysis):

Is it lack of information that keeps these conflicts at fever pitch? Is it lack of information about how to grow food that keeps millions at starvation levels? Is it lack of information that brings soaring crime rates and physical decay to our cities? Is it lack of information that leads to high divorce rates and keeps the beds of mental institutions filled to overflowing?

The fact is, there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information. Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information.

Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before. To the question “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store, and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before.” This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity.

Cui bono?

To whom will the technology give greater power and freedom and whose power and freedom will be reduced by it? I have perhaps made all of this sound like a well-planned conspiracy, as if the winners know all too well what is being won and what lost, but this is not quite how it happens. For one thing, in cultures that have a democratic ethos, relatively weak traditions and a high receptivity to new technologies, everyone is inclined to be enthusiastic about technological change, believing that its benefits will eventually spread evenly among the entire population.

The financialisation of everything

In point of fact, the first instance of grading students’ papers occurred at Cambridge University in 1792 at the suggestion of a tutor named William Farish. No one knows much about William Farish; not more than a handful have ever heard of him. And yet his idea that a quantitative value should be assigned to human thoughts was a major step toward constructing a mathematical concept of reality. If a number can be given to the quality of a thought, then a number can be given to the qualities of mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, intelligence, even sanity itself.

If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the world differently than they did. Our understanding of what is real is different. Which is another way of saying that embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.

Tool users, technocrats and technopolists

Tool-using cultures

The relationship between “tool-using cultures” their tools and their belief systems: the tools are not intruders.

..the main characteristic of all tool-using cultures is that their tools were largely invented to do two things: to solve specific and urgent problems of physical life, such as in the use of waterpower, windmills, and the heavy-wheeled plow; or to serve the symbolic world of art, politics, myth, ritual, and religion, as in the construction of castles and cathedrals and the development of the mechanical clock. In either case, tools did not attack (or, more precisely, were not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced. With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization.

Technocratic societies

The modern technocracies of the West have their roots in the medieval European world, from which there emerged three great inventions: the mechanical clock, which provided a new conception of time; the printing press with movable type, which attacked the epistemology of the oral tradition; and the telescope, which attacked the fundamental propositions of Judeo-Christian theology. Each of these was significant in creating a new relationship between tools and culture.

But it was not Galileo’s intention—neither was it Copernicus’ or Kepler’s—to so disarm their culture. These were medieval men who, like Gutenberg before them, had no wish to damage the spiritual foundations of their world.

See also

• All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
• Data modernism
• The great delamination

Adam Curtis points

• Ayn Rand - selfishness - (but defectors in a game of prisoner’s dilemma) - loss of big idea utopian grand narratives of fascism and communism - administration - Darwin's dangerous idea of the self organising stable system - misled into believing computers were bringing stability when in fact it was Asian economies specifically China trying to counter American boom and bust effects by keeping currencies low, selling goods and buying U.S treasuries with inbound dollars (sidebar and interesting case of distressed debt for equity leveraged buyout!). Metaphor/machine fantasy of nature - Freud’s model of the psyche as a machine. Tansley applied this model of the mind to the whole of the natural World and invented the concept of the ecosystem.

GM Van Dyne’s ecology experiment where he tried to put more and more data into the system but it just didn't work, and it turned out that the former models only worked because the scientists had radically simplified and filtered the data to give them the answers they were looking for.