Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman

Here, I collect my highlights from the book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology” by Neil Postman. I want to note that the arguments we hear today about ‘harmful’ AI are not new. I’m not saying Neil Postman’s ideas were entirely original, but if you’re interested in seeing how many of these debates were already taking place in the early 1990s, this book is worth a look.

The “agreemeter” below shows how I responded to different ideas throughout the book.

Highlights

I didn’t tag each highlight with my reaction. The agreemeter above shows my overall responses; I shared the passages below for their insight.

Critiques of Technology

• The uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living. Technology, in sum, is both friend and enemy.
• Once a technology is admitted, it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do. Our task is to understand what that design is—that is to say, when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.
• Radical technologies create new definitions of old terms, and that this process takes place without our being fully conscious of it. … The telegraph and the penny press changed what we once meant by “information.” Television changes what we once meant by the terms “political debate,” “news,” and “public opinion.” The computer changes “information” once again. Writing changed what we once meant by “truth” and “law.”
• Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological… One significant change generates total change.
• New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.
• The relationship between information and the mechanisms for its control is fairly simple to describe: Technology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mechanisms are needed to cope with new information. When additional control mechanisms are themselves technical, they in turn further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.
• Computer technology has served to strengthen Technopoly’s hold, to make people believe that technological innovation is synonymous with human progress.
• We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation.
• The computer is almost all process. There are, for example, no “great computerers,” as there are great writers, painters, or musicians.

Historical Perspectives

• Thamus and Theuth: Thamus says “Those who acquire it (writing) 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. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”
• Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. (Technophiles)
• (Quoting Freud) If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice… And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?
• Both Plato and Aristotle scorned the “base mechanic arts,” probably in the belief that nobility of mind was not enhanced by efforts to increase efficiency or productivity.
• Copernicus published only one scientific work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, the first completed copy arriving from the printer only a few hours before his death, at the age of seventy, on May 24, 1543. He had delayed publishing his heliocentric theory for thirty years, largely because he believed it to be unsound, not because he feared retribution from the church.
• Kepler was dissatisfied with his discovery of the elliptical orbits of planets, believing that an ellipse had nothing to recommend it in the eyes of God.
• Bacon wondered if flesh might not be preserved in snow, as it is in salt. The two decided to find out at once. They bought a hen, removed its innards, and stuffed the body with snow. Poor Bacon never learned the result of his experiment, because he fell immediately ill from the cold, most probably with bronchitis, and died three days later.
• The clock had its origin in the Benedictine monasteries of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries… But what the monks did not foresee was that the clock is a means not merely of keeping track of the hours but also of synchronizing and controlling the actions of men.
• After all, the zero is a sign that affects values of numerals wherever it occurs but has no value in itself. It is a sign about signs… To the abacists, it was a bizarre idea to have a sign marking “nothing,” and I fear that I would have sided with the abacists.
• Francis Galton – As he told us, he classified “the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent.” He then proved statistically that London had the most beautiful girls, Aberdeen the ugliest…

Information & Meaning

• In the Middle Ages, people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.
• There are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information.
• Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information.
• Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves.
• Where people are dying of starvation, it does not occur because of inadequate information. If families break up, children are mistreated, crime terrorizes a city, education is impotent, it does not happen because of inadequate information.
• Norbert Wiener warned about lack of modesty when he remarked that, if digital computers had been in common use before the atomic bomb was invented, people would have said that the bomb could not have been invented without computers. But it was.
• Sir Bernard expresses concern that “literal-minded, narrowly focused computerized research is proving antithetical to the free exercise of that happy faculty known as serendipity.
• There is no such thing as “intelligence.” It is a word, not a thing, and a word of a very high order of abstraction.
• Milgram’s experiment does not confirm or falsify any theory that might be said to postulate a law of human nature… documenting the behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture.
• Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.

Education & Human Purpose

• On the other hand and in the long run, television may bring a gradual end to the careers of schoolteachers, since school was an invention of the printing press and must stand or fall on the issue of how much importance the printed word has.
• In point of fact, the first instance of grading students’ papers occurred at Cambridge University in 1792 at the suggestion of a tutor named William Farish….
• Our psychologists, sociologists, and educators find it quite impossible to do their work without numbers… our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers.
• In Technopoly, we improve the education of our youth by improving what are called “learning technologies.”
• It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses “Skills.” In other words, a technocrat’s ideal.
• Some people would have us stress love of country as a unifying principle in education. Experience has shown, however, that this invariably translates into love of government.
• I am referring to the idea that to become educated means to become aware of the origins and growth of knowledge… Robert Maynard Hutchins’ “Great Conversation.”
• For to know about your roots is not merely to know where your grandfather came from and what he had to endure. It is also to know where your ideas come from and why you happen to believe them.
• A student who does not know at least one history is in no position to evaluate others…