In Technopoly, Neil Postman offers a threefold taxonomy of technological cultures: 1) tool-using cultures; 2) technocracies; and 3) technopolies.

In tool-using cultures, the tools are invented to do two things: solve specific problems of physical life and serve the symbolic world of arts, politics, myth, ritual, and religion. As Postman notes, “With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization. These beliefs, in fact, directed the invention of tools and limited the uses to which they were put.” The key here, for Postman, is the relationship between tools and the reigning belief system or ideology. He explains, “The tools are not intruders. They are integrated into the culture in ways that do not pose significant contradictions to its world-view.”

As a tool-using culture begins to give way to a technocratic one, tools themselves begin to play a “central role in the thought-world of the culture.” As Postman explains,

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.

Postman mentions three inventions—the mechanical clock, the printing press with movable type, and the telescope—as instrumental in bringing about this novel relationship between tools and culture. Though weakened, religious tradition and social custom still exert some waning influence in a technocracy. Or, as Postman puts it, the traditional and the technological “coexist in uneasy tension.”

Described in biological terms, the final phase of this techno-cultural process is technopoly, which Postman defines as “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.” It is where technocracy inevitably tends. Or, as Postman puts it, technopoly is “totalitarian technocracy.” While a technocracy might inadvertently degrade human life as an unfortunate by-product of technological development, technopoly, as a matter of course, pressures human life to “find its meaning in machinery and technique.” To riff on Jesus' words, in a technopoly man was made for technology, not technology for man. Ultimately it is “the deification of technology,” meaning that the culture “seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.”