“Nonetheless, we are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. We might call such people technophiles. They gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future.”
“Thamus knows that the uses made of any technology are largely determined by the structure of the technology itself – that is, that its functions follow from its form. This is why Thamus is concerned not with what people will write; he is concerned that people will write.”
“Once the technology is admitted, it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do.”
“Technology imperiously commandeers our most important terminology. It redefines freedom, truth, intelligence, fact, wisdom, memory, history – all the words we live by. And it does not pause to tell us. And we do not pause to ask.”
“Those who cultivate competence in the use of a new technology become an elite group that are granted undeserved authority and prestige by those who have no such competence.”
“It is to be expected that the winners will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about computer technology. That is the way of winners, and so they sometimes tell the losers that with personal computers the average person can balance a checkbook more neatly, keep better track of the recipes, and make more logical shopping lists. They also tell them that their lives will be conducted more efficiently. But discreetly they neglect to say from whose point of view the efficiency is warranted or what might be its costs. Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the wondrous feats of computers, almost all of which have only marginal relevance to the quality of the losers’ lives but which are nonetheless impressive. Eventually, the losers succumb, in part because they believe, as Thamus prophesied, that the specialized knowledge of the masters of a new technology is a form of wisdom.”
“Embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.”
“To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. And to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number.”
“A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.”
“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.”
“In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.” [mechanical clock & time; printing press & oral tradition; telescope & J-C theology]
“Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton laid the foundation for the emergence of technocracies, but they themselves were men of tool-using cultures.”
“The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress.”
“Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself. … It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.”
“Frederick Taylor’s book The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, contains the first explicit and formal outline of the assumptions of the thought-world of Technopoly. These include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.”
“Why did Technopoly — the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology — find fertile ground on American soil? 1. the American character. 2. the genius and audacity of American capitalists. 3. the success of twentieth-century technology in providing Americans with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance. 4. old sources of belief came under siege.”Why did Technopoly — the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology — find fertile ground on American soil? 1. the American character. 2. the genius and audacity of American capitalists. 3. the success of twentieth-century technology in providing Americans with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance. 4. old sources of belief came under siege.”
“The thrust of a century of scholarship had the effect of making us lose confidence in our belief systems and therefore in ourselves. Amid the conceptual debris, there remained one sure thing to believe in — technology. Whatever else may be denied or compromised, it is clear that airplanes do fly, antibiotics do cure, radios do speak, and, as we know now, computers do calculate and never make mistakes — only faulty humans do.”
“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.”
“To live in a world in which there were no random events — in which everything was, in theory, comprehensible; in which every act of nature was infused with meaning — is an irreplaceable gift of theology. … with the emergence of technocracies moral and intellectual coherence began to unravel.”
“The genie that came out of the bottle proclaiming that information was the new god of culture was a deceiver. It solved the problem of information scarcity, the disadvantages of which were obvious. But it gave no warning about the dangers of information glut, the disadvantages of which were not seen so clearly.”
“Schools became technocracy’s first secular bureaucracies, structures for legitimizing some parts of the flow of information and discrediting other parts. Schools were, in short, a means of governing the ecology of information.”
“Technopoly is a form of cultural AIDS, which I here use as an acronym for Anti-Information Deficiency Syndrome. This is why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words “A study has shown…” or “Scientists now tell us that…” More important, it is why in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no culture coherence.”
“technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.”
“The telegraph removed space as an inevitable constraint on the movement of information, and, for the first time, transportation and communication were disengaged from each other.”
“Telegraphy created the idea of context-free information — that is, the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action.”
“Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems.”
“Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.”
“All theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification. The rule of law is an oversimplification. A curriculum is an oversimplification. So is a family’s conception of a child. That is the function of theories — to oversimplify, and thus to assist believers in organizing, weighting, and excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories. Their weakness is that precisely because they oversimplify, they are vulnerable to attack by new information. When there is too much information to sustain any theory, information becomes essentially meaningless.”
“This is still another way to defining Technopoly. The term is aptly used for a culture whose available theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable information in the moral domain.”
“Religious tradition serves as a mechanism for the regulation and valuation of information. When religion loses much or all of its binding power—if it is reduced to mere rhetorical ash—then confusion inevitably follows about what to attend to and how to assign it significance.”
“It is an open question whether or not “liberal democracy” in its present form can provide a thought-world of sufficient moral substance to sustain meaningful lives.”
“In principle a bureaucracy is simply a coordinated series of techniques for reducing the amount of information that requires processing. … In attempting to make the most rational use of information, bureaucracy ignores all information and ideas that do not contribute to efficiency. … Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them. More important, it defines what our problems are—and they are always, in the bureaucratic view, problems of efficiency.”
“I assume I do not need to convince the reader that there are no experts — there can be no experts — in child-rearing and lovemaking and friend-making. All of this is a figment of the Technopolist’s imagination, made plausible by the use of technical machinery, without which the expert would be totally disarmed and exposed as an intruder and an ignoramus.”
“In Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. … The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity.”In Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. … The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity.”
“The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines—thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near-perfect machine for Technopoly. It subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it “thinks” better than we can.”
“A bureaucrat armed with a computer is an unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear.”
“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,” and the effect is roughly the same.”
“Our most serious problems are not technical, nor do they arise from inadequate information.”
“Technopoly also encourages insensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new ones. It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them.”
“We may well wonder what other human skills and traditions are being lost by our immersion in a computer culture. Technopolists do not worry about such things. Those who do are called technological pessimists, Jeremiahs, and worse.”
“In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.”
“An opinion is not a momentary thing but a process of thinking, shaped by the continuous acquisition of knowledge and the activity of questioning, discussion, and debate. A question may “invite” an opinion, but it also may modify and recast it; we might better say that people do not exactly “have” opinions but are, rather, involved in “opinioning.””
“One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.”
“In a Technopoly, we tend to believe that only through the autonomy of techniques (and machinery) can we achieve our goals.”
“Management is an important example of how an “invisible technology” works subversively but powerfully to create a new way of doing things, a classic instance of the tail wagging the dog.”
“In a culture in which the machine, with its impersonal and endlessly repeatable operations, is a controlling metaphor and considered to be the instrument of progress, subjectivity is profoundly unacceptable.”
“By calling into question the truth of such accounts in one realm, science undermined the whole edifice of belief in sacred stories and ultimately swept away with it the source to which most humans had looked for moral authority. It is not too much to say, I think, that the desacralized world has been searching for an alternative source of moral authority ever since.”
“In Technopoly, the trivialization of significant cultural symbols is largely conducted by commercial enterprise. This occurs not because corporate America is greedy but because the adoration of technology preempts the adoration of anything else.””
“The elevation of one god requires the demotion of another. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” applies as well to a technological divinity as any other.”
“Tradition is, in fact, nothing but the acknowledgment of the authority of symbols and the relevance of the narratives that gave birth to them. With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating consequences of Technopoly’s power.”
“The Technopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advantage. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.”
“No one is an expert on how to live a life. I can, however, offer a Talmudic-like principle that seems to me an effective guide for those who wish to defend themselves against the worst effects of the American Technopoly. It is this: You must try to be a loving resistance fighter.”
“In short, a technological resistance fighter maintains an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural.”
“History is not merely one subject among many that may be taught; every subject has a history, including biology, physics, mathematics, literature, music, and art. … To teach, for example, what we know about biology today without also teaching what we once knew, or thought we knew, is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product. It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know.”
“The history of subjects teaches connections; it teaches that the world is not created anew each day, that everyone stands on someone else’s shoulders.”
“The products of the popular arts are amply provided by the culture itself. The schools must make available the products of classical art forms precisely because they are not so available and because they demand a different order of sensibility and response.”