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 the usual vague attempt to pin down a series of interconnected dark thoughts about the direction of modern business (and, ergo, polite society) JC contriver a 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 founded on the metaphor of the Turing machine, and tends to the robomorphic position that everything in the world — every organism, every complex system, every organised contrivance — is a kind of Turing machine. To express 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.

Quickly googling to check this really was original and no-one had thought of this before, the closest I 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 was close enough to be worth checking out the book, even though apparently it predated the emergence of the public internet.

And: WOW.

See also

• Data modernism
• The great delamination