It seems every subject has its shot at becoming a cultural meta-narrative at some point. In this instance it appears that the idea of a technopoly, as defined by Neil Postman in his book Technopoly, is vying for a shot. Postman defines a technopoly to be “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology”; essentially the point at which mechanical efficiency becomes the basis of human culture. Postman claims that this has become a social trend mainly within America, while the rest of the world still resides in the phase of technocracy, the point at which progress is no longer questioned with moral reasoning, “a society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition and driven by the impulse to invent” to quote Postman once again. While the text is a bit dated in regards to the progress of other countries (it was published in 1992), the general idea of the technopoly still applies in the modern day and age, perhaps even more so now that time has given rise to more technological progress than before the book’s time.
In any case, the idea of a culture based around exceedingly efficient production ties in quite nicely with the central theme of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The society within said book has essentially reformed itself around the teachings of Henry Ford, the production line, and Frederick Winslow Taylor, maximizing human efficiency. In fact, society has literally embraced these two concepts. All of society is designed, starting even pre-embryo, to exceptionally fit into one very specific job and do it at an optimal rate. This teaching is even expanded through copying individuals before embryonic mitosis begins so that, in effect, the individual is not an individual but essentially a replaceable part. This leads directly into the centering on Ford’s assembly line. Society, in Brave New World, has become a literal assembly line. Everything has been reduced to a series of hyper-efficient production and consumption, where even the citizens have become nothing more than cogs in the machine. Essentially, this society has become the epitome of a technopoly, as society has embraced the way of the machine as what drives, controls, and regulates it processes. What I find to be interesting is the differentiation between Huxley’s reasoning for society’s shift and that of Postman’s. Huxley believed that the world shifted solely because power was desired, and this was simply an efficient means to an end. Postman, however believes it to be a natural progression based on evolutions in technology that led to there only being “one sure thing to believe in – technology” (Postman 8).
Simply put, Brave New World is the embodiment of a technopoly, a place where technology now reigns as the supreme standard of measurement. No longer do traditional values exist, and even humans are expected to operate with machine-like precision. Technology has become the meta-narrative, not the pursuit of, but technology itself.
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