Authur C. Clarke

Literature Review of Technopoly 

The third literature review is of the book Technopoly by Neil Postman. This book looks at the cultures of the planet and how they have been changed by technology.  Also looks at what Technology does to established norms and what may our altered culture, cities and lives may look like in the near future if we surrender to this phenomena, technopoly.

In the books introduction the author tells an interesting story of how we personify technology as we do with a friend. Giving technology such qualities simply because it brings advantages to our personal lives,  

“In fact most people believe that technology is a staunch friend. It makes life easier, cleaner, longer.   Can anyone ask more of a friend?   Second because of its lengthy intimate and inevitable relationship with culture, technology does not invite a close examination of its own consequences..”

This very ideal of blind friendship and lack of scepticism to technology is explained in the first chapter with the example an ancient Egyptian anecdote, The Judgement of Thamus.

“To be tools of our tools”

Theuth, the Egyptian god of invention presents to Thamus the written tool of script. 

The god assumes the king will be impressed and claiming it’s the greatest invention devised yet.   However Thamus’ reply to the inventior god is an unflattering warning.

‘men will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful, they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources.

Thamus points out to the god his inventions (technology) have a problematic counteraction.

The Thamus allegory is essentially a primer to Postman’s argument, that technology negates a traditional aspect to provide addition befits in a Faustian bargain.  A bargain hidden by our affection to technology.   Postman’s warning of this bargain and our urge to befriend technology can easily be crossed over to  the message  in Childhood’s End, technology having a price. 

The Overlords proving a utopian technology in order to improve the world but also remove an aspect of our lives to for fill their secretive agenda.

‘For it is inescapable that very culture must negotiate with technology whether it does so intelligently or not.  A bargain is struck where technology giveth and technology taketh away.  

The chapter then explores the two sides our society takes in the bargain of technopoly;  Themusian skepticism and its opposite, Technophiles.  Postman explains each side and how it reacts to the trade offs that technological change. Technophiles welcome it,  justifying that any side affect is no more detrimental than the problem technology will solve. The Themusian skeptic is vigilant and doubtful technology will solve our problem without relinquishing our control.

The chapter concludes the argument that regardless of  ‘for’ or ‘against’ the phenomena of technopoly, eventually inflicts certain change.

Stating Sigmund Freud remarks, ‘our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.’   

Postman links the Freuds observation to Thamus warning.  ‘That technology imperiously commands our most important terminology. It redefines freedom, truth intelligence, fact, wisdom, memory, history.’

Postman also states,  ’To whom will the technology give greater power and freedom? And whose power and freedom will be reduced by it?’

He poses the question, is this technological change a conspiracy to our culture?

‘A culture conspiring against itself, the native optimism from tech is exploited by entrepreneurs. -They infuse the population with hope. For they know that it is economically unwise to reveal the price to be paid for technological change. The most unpredictable changes are the ideological ones.’

These very affects of technoploy are witnessed in the novel Childhood’s End. The story introduces characters who argue the ‘for’ or ‘against’ toward Overlord alien technoloy.   

The story progresses, showing the Faustian bargain we inevitably sign.  Resulting in the bias towards technology and the blinding to the machiavellian means of the Overlords.  

This is the part where my research question forces the most, the surrender of our free will and control.

Finally the King Midas touch, our most prised possessions changes and are no longer in our control. In the story this is the reflected in the children of the planet evolving and not needing us anymore. Their parents no longer controlling them. Intern the human race no longer having control over its evolutionary destiny. 

The next chapter, From Tools to Technocracy, explains journey and origins towards technopoly.   It examines two stages culture has traveled through; tool using cultures and technocracy, their origins and cultural operandi before reaching the state of technopoly. 

‘Embedded in every tool is an idealogical bias’ Postman, 1993

The chapter begins with an explanation of ‘Tool using culture’.  Which is, a cultural institution with tools invented to do two things; solve specific urgent problems in physical life. eg. windmill or heavy wheel plow. The second is serve the symbolic world or art politics religion and ritual. 

‘Tools did not attack the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced.’

Following the explanation of tool using cultures, Postman discusses how this state of low-tech culture transitioned into technocracy. This cultural transformation transits through unsurprisingly a technological faustian bargains.  

Modern technocracies have their origins beginning in the medieval European world, where three great inventions emerged; the mechanical clock, the printing press and the telescope.

Postman’s example in the invention of the mechanical clock shows exactly how a technology had unintended runaway effect for its forbears control over their culture.   Time keeping wasn’t anything new, sundials and water clocks existed as far back as Ancient Egypt and Ancient Iraq. However they didn’t undermine their tool based cultures unlike the mechanical clock. 

The mechanical clock originates back to the Benedictine monasteries of the twelfth century.  They were situated in towers with a series bells that rung chronologically due to an early verge escapement system of wheels and gears be wound twice a day.

Although it lacked the precise mechanics of a pendulum, its purpose in signifying periods of ritual through a day with the bells was functional and accurate.   These clockmakers were so good at their craft that by the 14th-century, Peter Lightfoot a monk of Glastonbury, built one of the oldest clocks  still in existence and workable to this day.  Unbeknownst to the Catholic Church, theses clocks conceived a technological evolve into pendulum cloaks, and would be responsible for a cornerstone in scientific measurement.  This precise measurement laid the foundation for technocracy.   This technology shifted the power dynamic of time from religion to the commercial markets.  The life of the workman and merchant was now regulated. 

Stated in Lewis Mumford’s quote ‘The mechanical Clock’, “made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours and a standardised product.’

Postman concludes this cultural transition with,  “The Paradox, the surprise and wonder are that the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; it ended as the technology of the greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money.  In the eternal struggle between God and Mammon, the clock quite unpredictably favoured the later.”

From such faustian bargains with technology sprang technocracy; essentially tools that didn’t integrate with their culture but attack and change it. They now bid to become the cultural.  Fundamentally the technologies and their creators struggled for or shared control over the culture it presided in.  

The main chapters there after expand on how technocracy develops further and gives way to technopoly.   The development of technocracy is summarised with examples of Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter and Newton’s publication of Principia Mathematica.

However Postman notes the full potential of technocracy wasn’t revealed until Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum. These writings introduced an empirical, inductive approach, known as the scientific method and thus becoming the foundation of modern scientific inquiry.

Postman deducts from a particular passage in Novum Organum, that Bacon is aware of the virtues and concessions technology will wrought upon his culture.  

Unlike his predecessors, he knowingly makes a faustian bargain with technology, risking control to bring forth modernity to man.  This culminates in the the age of enlightenment of scientific revolution.   

By 1850 Bacon’s ideas as well as Adam Smith’s concepts of mechanised production from Wealth of Nations was in full effect. The machine tooled industry was developed to the point where machines made machines.

“Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself.

we has learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invented things receded in importance.” 

Technocracy doesn’t transit into technopoly until the early nineteen hundreds and only in the United States. There is no specific date given, although Postman references the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 by Frederick W. Taylor. 

This example is the first assumption of the thought-world into Technopoly.

Taylor’s writings were a blueprint of labour management governed by scientific principles. Where technology judged what’s best for our labour productivity, instead of our human judgement. 

“Technocracy does not have as its aim a grand reductionism in which human life must find its meaning in machinery and technique. Technopoly does.”

In the chapter Broken Defences, Postman gives the basic discerption of technopoly when at its most zenith; “is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that culture seeks its authorisation in technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order.”

Basically Postman refers to technopoly, as a totalitarian form of technocracy.  When culture has to seek authorisation from technology it means human individuals seek it too. We are ordered by what scientism and techie deem is correct thus we have surrendered our choice and are no longer in control.

In the following chapter The Ideology of Machines Postman gives an example of technopoly in full effect. Postman’s example is the first computer virus event and how we gave a human epithet to the phenomena. A definition abnormal yet fitting, that  it spawned a culture and persona for computers.

‘Prehaps the most chilling case of how deeply our language is absorbing the machine as human metaphor began on November 4, 1988, when the computers around the ARPANET network became sluggish, filled with extraneous data, and the clogged completely.  The problem spread fairly quickly to six thousand computers across the United States and overseas.’   

Later technicians would discover a self contained program specifically designed to disable computers had attached itself to other programs, this is better known as a ‘worm’

However the incorrect term ‘virus’ stuck because of mass media reporting the event using the more catchy ‘human connected’ familiar term.

This gave way to ‘infected’, ‘virulent, contagious and quarantine’ being associated with computer technology. All previously natural and human characteristics.

Postman signifies this language given to inanimate technology is not just a picturesque anthropomorphism but profound shift in our perception in the relationship between humans and technology. Postman hinds that the major factor in that relationship is control.

Control is surrendered when we see and associate a technology like the computer has responsibility.

“Computers make mistakes or get tired or become ill. Why blame people? ..this line of thinking an ‘agentic shift’ ..the process whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from themselves to a more abstract agent. When this happens we have relinquished control.” 

“I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept  explanations that begin with the words “The computer shows… or The computer has determined.” It is Technopoly’s equivalent of the sentence, “It is God’s will.”

With that quoye postman circles back and reveals the faustian bargain made in a technopoly. A dystopian future, where we no longer are masters of our fate and our culture is chosen for us. Technopoly is the overlord.

This literature review has paved a basis of research and ideas I can pursue into the design and development of telling a the cautionary tell to technologies control through a Childhoods End adaptation.  It also raises three fundamental questions in relation to my project. 

Why this technopoly important to the research question?

How is technopoly related to the story of Childhood’s End?

Are the Overlords a characterisation of technopoly?