In Niel Postman’s “Technopoly,” he describes the transition into a technopoly society from one that was previously a technocracy. He describes a technopoly as a “totalitarian technocracy.” Efficiency is valued over human identity, and far lengths are stretched to maximize scientific as well as technological progress. Meanwhile, he describes the citizens of technocracy as aware that “science and technology did not provide philosophies by which to live. As a result, a technocracy is depicted as a society merely driven and “concerned to invent machinery.”
Aldous Huxley’s novel, “Brave New World,” fully illustrates the concept of a future technocracy. Science no longer revolves around humans for discovery; humans revolve around science instead. As Postman explains, a technocracy includes the “beliefs that the primary goal of human labor and thought is efficiency, that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment” This is seen in “Brave New World” where the smallest amounts of pinpoint precision and measurements produce the largest effects in society. For example, when the D.H.C is explaining the process of incubating future humans, he states that the gametes “have to be kept at thirty-five instead of thirty seven [degrees].” This demonstrates the extent to which calculations play a huge role in a technocracy society.
The domination of machinery further characterizes the technocracy. Work is no longer an individualized process in which each employee constructs their product by hand, but an impersonal one in which a machine routinely manufactures an item with the assistance of a worker. In addition, such workers are merely considered as another face in a vast sea of many. As Postman explains, “although technocracy found no clear space for the human soul, its citizens held to the belief that no increase in material wealth would compensate them for a culture that insulted their self-respect.”
Postman further concludes his chapter by reflecting that “Americans were better prepared to undertake the creation of a Technopoly than anyone else. But its full flowering depended on still another set of conditions…the context in which the American distrust of constraints, the exploitative genius of its captains of industry, the success of technology, and the devaluation of traditional beliefs took on the exaggerated significance that pushed technocracy in America over into Technopoly.” These criteria all fit in the society that Huxley wields in “Brave New World,” therefore further illustrating its totalitarian society.
