Natalie Lozano
Technopoly
In Neil Postman’s “Technopoly” he explains how the world will somehow shift into a
place where technology will take over culture life. Knowing basic will be a thing in the past and
technology will do everything for us. Technology has no end really. When a human makes a
new invention others come up with the next invention and it never stops. Postman describes the
difference between technocracy and technopoly. Postman says that “Technocracy gave us the
idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition—whether political or
spiritual. Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social
organization.” In “Brave New World” Huxley created a new god named, Henry Ford, who
created the assembly line. He is apparently the god they worship in the factory. The people there
are all conditioned to believe that Ford is their deity and their superior. They have also
conditioned babies and kids still growing up by having them listening to something in their
sleep.
Fredrick Winslow Taylor argued that faith was a waste of time because it was not related
to science which has proven facts then just belief, like religion. Taylor seems to believe that
“human judgment can’t be trusted because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary
complexity.” Technology will, sooner or later, be associated with everything we do like thinking
and to do everything for us. We will be almost be useless to this world and electronics will take
over. They will be the master and we could end up being there puppets or worse become extinct
because technology would know what to do with us.
There are many similarities between Neil Postman’s “Technopoly” and Huxley’s “Brave
New World." Postman’s description is that technology will outweigh human culture, nature,
religion, tradition, and society as a whole. Huxley writes about how technology as already taken
its toll on a controlled society of a certain group of people. Postman’s novel is more like a theory
about what the world will turn into and Huxley’s novel explains how Postman was right.
