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 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.