In Chapter three of Neil Postman’s Technopoly, Postman describes the shift from technocracy to the present day technopoly. The origins of Technocracy began in the late seventeenth century with James Watts’ invention of the steam engine. This invention led to the sprout of machinery in which lives would be facilitated. With its continuous growth, technocracy became a movement in which “society loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition [was] driven by the impulse to invent”. Since then humanity’s focus has been to create other machinery in which humans would benefit. Similarly to this concept of technocracy, the invention of the assembly line by Henry Ford led the people in Brave New World to improve their ways of living. Eventually in Brave New World this exponential growth in technology did not become simply a goal to facilitate lives however to become more efficient in an easier way similarly to what Frederick W. Taylor claims in his book called The Principles of Scientific Management. This concept in today’s world is also known as a Technopoly.
Both the concept of technopoly and Brave New World have origins in which machines become the ultimate source of power. Although technocracy does not quite have a clear date it recognizes that at a specific time all technology has been on a constant increase. In Brave New World on the other hand, the beginnings are marked by “BF” meaning Before Ford and “AF” meaning After Ford. In both of these similar worlds there are also those who don’t bow down to these emerging ways of living. Both Luddites William Blake and Matthew Arnold warned the world of “mankind’s greatest menace” and the “‘dark satanic mills’ which [strip] men of their souls” similarly to John in Brave New World who warned people about the negativities of soma consumption, “Don’t take that horrible stuff. It’s poison, it’s poison.” Of course those others who do not see the faultiness of the emergence of a technopoly simply “make [it] invisible and therefore irrelevant.” How does this occur? In a world of technopoly one has no time for thoughts such as shown in Brave new world were all humans are made to be efficient in order to exterminate the thought process. The thoughts become invisible by “redefining what people mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy by intelligence so that [ones] definitions fit its new requirements”
Both Postman’s and Huxley’s views of the world are very similar in many ways. Eventually in both of these worlds, the way of living is significantly and blindly changed by technology.
