Sunday, October 2, 2011

Technopoly

According to Neil Postman "the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology." (52) He also distinguishes that "Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind." He goes on to say that the United States is a technopoly, which can be kind of scary since it is also compared to Huxley's Brave New World. Postman also explains that a technocracy is "a society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition and driven by the impulse to invent." 
This is seen in Brave New World because the citizens are all working for what they believe is progress, even though they really don't know what it is they are progressing towards. They have been brainwashed by their leaders to work as they do.
In Postman's writing he even talks about how the textile industry let go of "skilled works, replacing them with workers who merely kept the machines operating" (42). Similarly in Huxley's Brave New World, we discovered from the Director of Hatcheries that the D.H.C. was responsible for creating  children. With the various processes that occur within the D.H.C.  there was full control of what these babies would grow up to do. They meddled with genetics in order to predestine what these babies would do and what affect or contribution they would have on society.