Neil Postman, describing the Founders' vision of the public square (implied in the First Amendment), in which a literate populace could make productive use of information in reasoning together about the common good and in judging the merits of arguments (and the evidence on which they’re based):

There is not a single line written by Jefferson, Adams, Paine, Hamilton, or Franklin that does not take for granted that when information is made available to citizens they are capable of managing it. 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. Jefferson’s proposals for education, Paine’s arguments for self-governance, Franklin’s arrangements for community affairs assume coherent, commonly shared principles that allow us to debate such questions as: What are the responsibilities of citizens? What is the nature of education? What constitutes human progress? What are the limitations of social structures?

What purchase does this First Amendment vision have in a nation as far down the road to Technopoly as America? The key line seems to be this one: “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.” I don’t know anyone who would claim that “the marketplace of information” is properly ordered for these kinds of substantive discussions. The question seems to be: What are the cultural/material/technological/institutional/social conditions needed for enabling the genuine exercise of these First Amendment freedoms? And how has the American Technopoly eroded these conditions as the relationship between technology and culture has been transformed?

Neil Postman, on what results when traditional controls on information break down:

One way of defining a Technopoly is to say that its information immune system is inoperable…. 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 cultural coherence. 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 is serves. Alfred North Whitehead called such information “inert,” but that metaphor is too passive. Information without regulation can be lethal.

Neil Postman:

The fact is, there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information. Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information. It is like the joke about the man who complains that the food he is being served in a restaurant is inedible and also that the portions are too small. But, of course, what we are dealing with here is no joke. Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before. To the question “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store, and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before.” This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity. In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to “access” information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented. The world has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences.

Neil Postman:

The world we live in is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact, whether actual or imagined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. We believe because there is no reason not to believe…. Abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.

This is especially the case with technical facts…. If I informed you that the paper on which this book is printed was made by a special process which uses the skin of a pickled herring, on what grounds would you dispute me? For all you know—indeed, for all I know—the skin of a pickled herring could have made this paper. And if the facts were confirmed by an industrial chemist who described to us some incomprehensible process by which it was done (employing, of course, encomial dyoxin), we might both believe it. Or not wholly disbelieve it, since the ways of technology, like the ways of God, are awesome and mysterious.

Neil Postman, on the assumptions undergirding Technopoly (as expressed in Frederick W. Taylor’s influential 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management):

The primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency.

Technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment.

Human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity.

Subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking.

What cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value.

The affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.

Jake Meador, on how various responses to the difficulties of life, whether it be to urge therapy on the left or to encourage weight lifting on the right, are really technocratic and, thus, utopian at base:

There is an assumption, usually left unspoken, that suggests to us that salvation from our problems is possible, and that it is within our own hands—or it could be anyway. Yet this hope is not Christian hope; you might call it a Promethean hope, I suppose, or a Pelagian hope. But whatever it is, it is something less than Christian. For Christianity tells us that our greatest need and longing is to know God and that we do this through responding to His word, through receiving the sacraments, through seeking friendship and counsel and aid in the community of believers. Both therapy and fitness regimens can belong to that final category, of course, but that does not negate or eliminate our need to hear God’s Word and respond in faith, coming to his Table to be fed and nourished.

I’ve had inchoate thoughts in this direction for some time — glad that Jake’s given some useful vocabulary to those intuitions.

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.”

Farmhouse in Nuenen (1885) by Vincent van Gogh:

Cottage with Peasant Woman Digging (1885) by Vincent van Gogh:

The cottage (1885) by Vincent van Gogh: