Brady Bowman logo Brady Bowman

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.”

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.

Tim Keller:

Some churches hold to orthodox doctrines but with imbalances and a lack of proper emphasis. Many ministries spend more time defending the faith than propagating it. Or they may give an inordinate amount of energy and attention to matters such as prophecy or spiritual gifts or creation and evolution. A church may become enamored with the mechanics of ministry and church organization. There are innumerable reasons that critical doctrines of grace and justification and conversion, though strongly held, are kept “on the shelf.” They are not preached and communicated in such a way that connects to people’s lives. People see the doctrines—yet they do not see them. It is possible to get an “A” grade on a doctrinal test and describe accurately the doctrines of our salvation, yet be blind to their true implications and power. In this sense, there are plenty of orthodox churches in which the gospel must be rediscovered and then brought home and applied to people’s hearts. When this happens, nominal Christians get converted, lethargic and weak Christians become empowered, and nonbelievers are attracted to the newly beautified Christian congregation.