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:
Finished Heavyweights tonight (though it was a slog)…glad to see I’m not alone in discerning a connection between Ben Stiller’s characters in Heavyweights and Dodgeball.
Joe Biden is setting old people back so much…
Matthew Crawford, writing in The Hedgehog Review on how LLMs (i.e., large language models such as ChatGPT) are just the latest iteration of a process of “self-erasure,” in which we decline the task of being human and opt instead to be assimilated to larger and larger impersonal forces.
LLMs are a particularly interesting example of this trend, though, because our use of language is a distinctly human enterprise. It is through articulating that we understand the significance of things, events, and even ourselves. As Crawford notes, “we ‘self-articulate’ as part of the lifelong process of bringing ourselves more fully into view‚ how I stand, the particular shape that various universal goods have taken in my own biography, and in my aspirations.” Listen to how he puts it,
LLMs are built on enormous data sets—essentially, all language that is machine-scrapable from the Internet. They are tasked with answering the question, “given the previous string of words, what word is most likely to occur next?” They thus represent what the philosopher Talbot Brewer recently referred to as “the statistical center of gravity” of all language (and I am following Brewer’s lead in viewing LLMs through the lens of Taylor’s account of language). Or rather, all language that is on the Internet. This includes the great literature of the past, of course. But it includes a whole lot more of the present: marketing-speak, what passes for journalism, the blather produced by all who suffer from PowerPoint brain. But put aside the impoverished quality of the language that these LLMs are being trained on. If we accept that the challenge of articulating life in the first person, as it unfolds, is central to human beings, then to allow an AI to do this on our behalf suggests self-erasure of the human.