Technopoly

Medium, Meaning and Culture

Introduction

It is often said that the messenger can be more important than the message itself. Through this article, I wish to demonstrate how the medium has an even bigger role to play. As our world evolves technologically at a faster pace than ever before, there are matters to reflect upon. I do not seek to discourage advancement but rather advocate an informed approach.

What is ‘technopoly’

In his book ‘Technopoly: the surrender of culture to technology’, Neil Postman divides the evolution of tech into three stages-

• Tool-using culture: in this stage, the tools used by civilisation have no impact on the culture’s dignity and integrity i.e. complete subservience.

• Technocracy: in this second stage, the society and government orients itself in such a way that all culture must give way to technological progress (owing to its various merits). There is advocated a sort of separation between moral and intellectual values.

• Technopoly: the third, and the current stage according to Postman is a form of technological totalitarianism where a society’s information regulation mechanisms collapse.

Technopoly thus sounds akin to a dystopian science fiction trope, but I must assure the reader that it is much simpler than that.

Cultural AIDS ?

“If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”

The primary phenomenon that acts as a cause-effect feedback loop for the establishment of technopoly is a flood of information detached from context, technopoly supersedes all institutions that serve as bases of knowing “what is beyond belief”. As history moved from a tool using culture, where these institutions were very much intact, to technocracy, when information about mankind and the world was fuelled by the quest for progress, that would bring superstition and suffering to an end.

The role of information is of central interest here, as in a technopoly, information is sought as an end in itself; which can very well be termed to its elevation to a metaphysical status. Since society loses all guards against information, Postman characterises it as a form of ‘cultural AIDS’; or ‘information glut’ i.e. an excess of information but without meaning and control mechanisms. This availability of too much information makes any theory untenable, rendering itself useless in all but name. The consequences…

“When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defences, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures”

Technopoly flourishes in this exact circumstance. The culture seeks authorisation from, finds satisfaction from and takes orders from technology (and not the other way around).

The most dire consequence of this ‘cultural AIDS’ is that cultural and national symbols are rendered impotent, reduced to parodies by the entertainment machinery at the forefront of spreading this ‘information glut’. It is not insult, but irreverence. Postman goes on to call it “a form of cultural rape, sanctioned by an ideology that gives boundless supremacy to technological progress and is indifferent to the unraveling of tradition.”

He presents this as a future frontier in reference to the ‘End of History’:

“To say it in still another way: Francis Fukuyama is wrong. There is another ideological conflict to be fought—between “liberal democracy” as conceived in the eighteenth century, with all its transcendent moral underpinnings, and Technopoly, a twentieth-century thought-world that functions not only without a transcendent narrative to provide moral underpinnings but also without strong social institutions to control the flood of information produced by technology”

The impotence and irreverence of symbols is the death of narrative; without which no culture can survive. It is both a symptom and cause of collapsing socio-cultural institutions. This then leads to widespread nihilism or agnosticism, where the “distinctions of value and value of distinctions” both begin to be questioned. To fill this void comes technopoly, emphasising progress, rights and tech while ignoring limits, duty and costs.

Grieving that the education system based on these values intends to produce “trousered apes” and “urban blockheads”, C.S. Lewis wrote:

“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Byung-Chul Han in ‘Burnout Society’ traces rampant neurological diseases such as ADHD, burnout, BPD etc. to this excess of positivity, or rather in his words, “the violence of positivity”:

“they do not follow from the negativity of what is immunologically foreign, but from an excess of positivity. Therefore, they elude all technologies and techniques that seek to combat what is alien.” Today, generalised communication and surplus information threaten to overwhelm all human defences”

Nietzsche realised the deadly danger this glut posed:

From lack of repose our civilisation is turning into a new barbarism. At no time have the active, that is to say the restless, counted for more. That is why one of the most necessary corrections to the character of mankind that have to be taken in hand is a considerable strengthening of the contemplative element in it. [burnout society pg 15]

Han echoes Lewis’s concern regarding ‘trousered apes’ as thinking becomes calculation and living becomes a mere chore for the brain to plan consequences of. All activity boils down to simple labour and the characteristic modern activation of human capacity ends in moral passivity.

Thus, multiple thinkers resonate anxiety about the inevitable subversion of humanity caused when meaning is replaced by stimulation.

Institutions of Perpetuation

The bureaucracy, an ancient institution of course, is among the foremost entities that form both the frontier and the mechanism of this phenomenon of technopoly. Tocqueville warned that if administration was to get as centralised and obsessively interfere in essentially everything, “then freedom would soon be banished from the New World.”

We then see C.S. Lewis’s stern words on it:

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

The mention of the ‘managerial age’ is of special interest here, and perhaps will be the subject of a full article in the future. For now, it is striking to see that James Burnham in his ‘The Managerial Revolution’ had very similar observations to make on the matter:

“Technocracy is another example of an American variant of the managerial ideologies. Technocracy has not had a very wide direct public influence, but much has been taken over from it both by New Dealism and also by communism and fascism. As a matter of fact, Technocracy’s failure to gain a wide response can be attributed in part to the too-plain and open way in which it expresses the perspective of managerial society. In spite of its failure to distinguish between engineers and managers (not all engineers are managers—many are mere hired hands—and not all managers are engineers) yet the society about which the Technocrats write is quite obviously managerial society, and within it their “Technocrats” are quite obviously the managerial ruling class. The theory is not dressed up enough for major ideological purposes. It fails also in refusing to devote sufficient attention to the problem of power, which so prominently occupies communism and fascism. However, the developed native-American managerial ideologies of the future will doubtless incorporate Technocratic propaganda, for it seems on the whole well adapted to propaganda needs in this country.”

Bureaucracy is designed for, and excels at, dealing with problems of efficiency. But can the same be stated for education, health, law, family, the individual etc.? The glut described earlier paves way for a new unstable cultural ecology where in absence of actual institutions to organise information i.e. “perception and judgment”, bureaucracy along with expertise and technical machinery becomes the primary perpetuating vehicle of technopoly. In the words of C.S. Lewis;

“The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future”

Medium is the Key

Our worldview rests on and is actively directed by the languages we use; making language the backbone of culture itself. The medium of communication thus is the primary space for the creation of our cultural metaphors. There are the expressions that combine and manifest with multitudes of collective experiences and attitudes. The different ways of ‘truth-telling’ emanate from them newer forms of truth, demand a certain kind of specific intelligence to grasp them and obviously enable a new form of content generation.

“every epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development. Since intelligence is primarily defined as one’s capacity to grasp the truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by intelligence is derived from the character of its important forms of communication.”

The above mentioned logic uncovers the staggering impact our communication media- print, audio, internet and so on, have on our conception of our own culture.

The printing press disseminated a wide array of hitherto inaccessible knowledge into mass consumption oriented books- a consequence of which was an education system which standardised which books (knowledge) could be considered educational, and which ones not. Technocratic America, Postman argues, was the “first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.”

[“… as Tocqueville said of America, reason and printing were inseparable. We need not hesitate to claim that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution stands as a monument to the ideological biases of print. It says: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” In these forty-five words we may find the fundamental values of the literate, reasoning mind as fostered by the print revolution: a belief in privacy, individuality, intellectual freedom, open criticism, and community action. […] This is not to say that the Founding Fathers believed information could not be false, misleading, or irrelevant. But they believed that the marketplace of information and ideas was sufficiently ordered so that citizens could make sense of what they read and heard and, through reason, judge its usefulness to their lives”

For most of humanity’s time on earth, our fastest medium of info transition was the fastest vehicle we had. First it was horses, then rail networks and so on. The invention of the telegraph however, introduced a new dimension to this process. It led to a very peculiar idea: information without context. This meant detaching it from the conception that its value was derived from any function it might serve, and transformed it into a commodity. Advanced photography, by democratising image generation, did the same but in visual terms. No longer a supplement, it now became the dominant perspective on reality.

Television, during Postman’s time, was the frontrunner of the communication technology, and is practically an analog of short-form video and text content in our era. The new medium however, as is our central argument in this piece, not an augmented old medium but an entirely new medium itself. This is not about television or the internet as a technology, but as a medium. Just like the previous succession of media, these have shaped our perception of information (the world in general) in peculiar ways. Their structure has created circumstances in which entertainment becomes the supra-stream of all content- political, educational, even religious etc. The value of news is measured by the attention it can garner, and all communication has to affirm to the holy idea of being as entertaining as possible. This extends to our symbols as well, and this is how the narrative dies. Not by blasphemy or draconian suppression; but by media induced indifference. We have amused ourselves to death.

Technopoly, is thus an environment in which the line between information and human purpose ceases to exist. It effectively replaces the idea of human progress with that of technological progress; while humans become not the prime benefactors, but rather mere consumers.

Ideology can be very well understood as the notions we consciously and subconsciously possess that shape our experience of the world. Language, thus, can be thought of as a powerful ideology that forms the substratum of all we think, hear and speak. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the sentences we call questions. This obvious fact is ignored in modern democracies with polling and opinion trends forming the bulk of policy advisory considerations.

“Questions, then, are like computers or television or stethoscopes or lie detectors, in that they are mechanisms that give direction to our thoughts, generate new ideas, venerate old ones, expose facts, or hide them”

Another field that demonstrates the phenomenon of technopoly i.e. no reins on technology in a domain it doesn’t belong, is the world of statistics. A particularly telling case in which, are IQ tests. In his book ‘The Mismeasure of Man’, Stephen Gould points to three problems with the idea of measuring intelligence this way. One, reification: translating an abstract idea/word into an actual thing. Two, ranking: criteria to assign place in a series. Three, a biased understanding of what a ‘fair’ test means numbers have been taken to be the ultimate objective parameter, while the fundamental subjectivity is lost.

Postman finds this naturally absurd:

“After a lifetime of working in the field of intelligence measurement, E. L. Thorndike observed that intelligence tests suffer from three small defects: “Just what they measure is not known; “how far it is proper to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and compute ratios with the measures obtained is not known; just what the measures signify concerning intellect is not known.”2 In other words, those who administer intelligence tests quite literally do not know what they are doing. That is why David McClelland remarked, “Psychologists should be ashamed of themselves for promoting a view of general intelligence that has engendered such a testing program.” Joseph Weizenbaum summed it up by saying, “Few ‘scientific’ concepts have so thoroughly muddled the thinking of both scientists and the general public as that of the ‘intelligence quotient’ or ‘IQ.’ The idea that intelligence can be quantitatively measured along a single linear scale has caused untold harm to our society in general, and to education in particular.”

The above two examples are meant to briefly demonstrate how what we have referred to as technopoly manifests in various forms in everyday tasks, some of them trivial and some nationally important.

At last, we end this section with these lines that very much summarise the spirit of this article:

Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the history of communications knows that every new technology for thinking involves a trade-off. It giveth and taketh away, although not quite in equal measure. Media change does not necessarily result in equilibrium. It sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it is the other way around. We must be careful in praising or condemning because the future may hold surprises for us.

Conclusion

Technopoly does not present itself as an adversary. It does not arrive with declarations or demands. It settles in gradually; through convenience, through efficiency, through what appears to be harmless progress. Soon enough the tools we create begin, almost imperceptibly, to shape the ends for which we use them. The very frameworks through which meaning is recognised and sustained get eroded in the process.

The question, therefore, is not whether technology is simply beneficial or harmful. That formulation is too crude to be useful. What matters is whether a culture retains the ability to judge its technologies; in setting limits, keeping them subordinate to human purposes, and to preserve those institutions that lend coherence to experience. Where this capacity weakens, technology begins to reorganise society itself.

To acknowledge this is not to argue for nostalgia, nor to deny the value of innovation. It is to accept a more demanding responsibility: to resist the quiet reduction of truth to information, of thought to calculation, and of culture to amusement. If the medium shapes the conditions under which we think, then the defence of culture must begin not with our conclusions, but with the forms that make those conclusions possible.

Works Cited

1. Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World. New York: John Day Company, 1941.

2. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.

3. Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

4. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: HarperOne, 2001. (Originally published 1943)

5. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. (Originally published 1985)

6. Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.